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PappaPatat

244 karma · joined December 29, 2016

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PappaPatat··on Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
Thank you so much for the possibility. I grew up with scanners and am truly reminiscing while listening on these intercepts.

Here in Europe there is close to no police still using analog and listening to air traffic control or couriers just does not cut it for me.

Bought the app, hope you'll be able to keep this up.

PappaPatat··on A collection of videos of police brutality
TIL the expression "the Volkswagen strategy" and I love it.

Thanks, I'll be using that.

PappaPatat··on It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
The Old Reader works like a champ.

I went the same route as you did, and have the same attitude towards sites that do not provide a RSS feed: they drop of my radar.

PappaPatat··on ChromeGalvanizer – Harden your browser against extension backdoors and exploits
> Using Chrome Galvanizer, you can protect yourself from attacks like this by specifying specific sites that one or all of your extensions can no longer access. For the MEGA case, if users had created a policy restricting access for the MEGA extension to access amazon.com, live.com, github.com, google.com, myetherwallet.com, mymonero.com, and idex.market then they'd be protected from the attack.

You might as well turn off the internet for some.

PappaPatat··on The faded beauty of abandoned cars across Europe and the US
> But they always seem to take a shortcut and put a modern engine/driveline in it.

YMMV. For me that is not a shortcut (although it is a lot less valuable) but a prerequisite. I will like modern technology and I like old style.

PappaPatat··on Ask HN: I've saved up $80k USD. What should I do with it?
What about: nothing, just accumulate more, stach it and one day a need or opportunity will arise.

Might not be a popular opinion since we all are expected to optimize everything but 50 years in and this non strategy has made my financial live rather dull, which I like.

PappaPatat··on Love Bug worm's creator tracked down to repair shop in Manila
I would like to say thank you to him, since it opened a huge budget and mandate for my security team at the time.

No more draining discussion if AV needed to be installed on particular systems, the right to wipe any employees desk or laptop in case of "issues", create outbound firewall rules (yes those where new, and yes it saved a lot of damage 3 years later when Slammer hit, but that's another story) and budget to install "monitoring services" on whatever we'd like.

The total data loss was limited, the costs of employees not being able to work was a lot worst.

PappaPatat··on Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
I was born in one, lived long in a second and now am home in a third country.

In all three languages I feel confident, can tell jokes, understand and have tested level C2 (https://www.efset.org/cefr/).

Still, every once in a while, I "have this feeling" my proficiency is subpar. Still I learn new expressions and grammar twists that I was now aware about before.

What helps me getting more certain and better in the word craft of the local language is asking locals to correct me and ask them to explain words and constructs that seem strange or unknown to me.

PappaPatat··on An average family in Tokyo can own a new house for $850/month
> A house around 30 years old is worthless

Living in a city which city center was (re-) build between the 16th and 17th century, the 30 years till worthless puzzles me.

Even the house I live in is over 100 years old and in excellent condition.

Why do houses loose their value so rapidly in Tokyo?

PappaPatat··on Things I wished more developers knew about databases
THE thing I wished more developers knew about databases: they are badass when it comes to data manipulation.

Stop sucking all data and manipulate it in your language of choice. Tell you DBA what you want done and let her do it for you.

Really, DB's may look like they are the special needs kid in the chain, but they're magnificent powerhouses when it comes to 90% of what you are trying to do to data.

PappaPatat··on Netflix now supports TLS 1.3
I was under the impression you actually can via exactly one browser: Microsoft Edge.
PappaPatat··on The Infection That’s Silently Killing Coronavirus Patients
It is really interesting since this is one of these parameters one can check easily and cheap (OXI meters are around 100 euro). And they're still available ATM.
PappaPatat··on Is BGP Safe Yet?
Ah Adrian! Yes his SCION is quite impressive and has plenty of cool features, but if it will ever outgrow the “future internet” technology phase remains to be seen.

I (other account) once submitted their work to HN to see what real smart people thought about it, but it got 0 traction.

PappaPatat··on Honeypot as a Service
This submission is a better honeypot than the software link it points to. It has not been updated (latest blog entry 19/02/2018, latest code release Jul 30 2018).

Honeypots are high maintenance, or easy detectable.

Better example (disclaimer, I might have had something to do with this when it was being developed) is the DT Honeypot initiative.

Website: https://sicherheitstacho.eu/start/main

Code (Deutsche Telekom AG Honeypot Project on 01 Apr 2019): https://dtag-dev-sec.github.io/

PappaPatat··on Ask HN: In the current crisis is starting freelancing doable?
I say (from experience) during hard times is the best time to start.

You will not be lured into massive fixed costs and start with the absolute minimum and required, which you can scale up when your business start flying.

As long as you start tight, you will stand a good change.

PappaPatat··on New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
> I was sort of tempted to pursue this.

For me the exact opposite. 15 years ago I removed any and all reverence to my history of COBOL because I was suddenly actively being contacted for COBOL coding jobs.

Although I had a great time, as a starting coder, with COBOL jobs (transcoding COBOL to C at the time), I know one thing: ever ever again will I utter one like of COBOL code.

There are still people making very decent money doing it, but the lockin to one particular source of work just does not sound like what I could bare.

PappaPatat··on Bug bounty platforms buy researcher silence, violate labor laws, critics say
> Bug bounty programs are not supposed to replace you other security activities, but it's a way for you to have additional source of vulnerabilities.

Exactly the way we position our own Bug Bounty Program. Where the pentesters can be hired to also confirm things done well, the hunters are only paid for failures they found.

In our case there is an added bonus with the Bug Bounty Program: we've come to REALLY apriciate the technical level of reports. Since they only get paid for triagable findings, the details we get reported are so much better then what we used to get from our pentesters. Of course we now require the same quality of reporting from them.

What also helps is that the pentesters are motivated more to deliver higher quality findings since they are aware the service will enter the Bug Bounty Program after their findings are resolved.

Again, BBP should NOT replace your other security activities, they are an additional source with possible unforeseen benefits.

PappaPatat··on When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?
This. There are many possible scenarios how to end the shutdown, not one is back to normal on Monday.
PappaPatat··on How the government prints and distributes money [video]
Some dude ranting about "how the system works" where "you are all slaves" and "they get free money" does not help anyone but the youtuber who's collecting views.
PappaPatat··on How the government prints and distributes money [video]
Never seen such crap on this site.
PappaPatat··on Israeli doctor in Italy: We no longer help those over 60
> are you in Switzerland

Yes. And as said: this is preparation. When the infection doubling rates do not go down (nicely displayed here: https://interaktiv.tagesanzeiger.ch/2020/covid-19-ausbruch-i...) from about 2.7 to > 3 days, it will come.

PappaPatat··on Israeli doctor in Italy: We no longer help those over 60
Where factually correct, the numbers are... smallish:

"Two hospitals in Basel and one in Jura, in northwestern Switzerland, said they would each take two French patients after the Alsace authorities sent out a distress call for help. The French region has been particularly badly hit following contagion among a large church service last month.

Hospitals in Germany are also providing help along with the Swiss hospitals that say they are providing help in the spirit of solidarity and international cooperation."

Understandably so, since the rush is just hitting Switzerland itself.

We're even preparing for a complete lockdown, I (this weekend) received an official document that allows me to travel between my home address and work.

PappaPatat··on New research shows social distancing a must to beat Covid-19
> She said that "social distancing" is a medical technical term that doesn't translate super well to the public.

Which is 100% the opposite of what I in my daily life observe: everyone, young & old, private & work, calls it social distancing.

It addresses the issue better too, then the "proposed" physical distancing. When you pass people physically the (need and) possibility to keep that 2 meters is often impossible where as while socialising it very much is.

PappaPatat··on Shadowserver, the web’s bot containment unit, needs help
cough legal reasons cough
PappaPatat··on GitHub blocked me and all my libraries
It is in the linked article.

"So, the reason for the abrupt ban of all my public repos turned out to be just a random comment I’ve left on GitHub jokingly calling a guy a prick."

"Only that I’m more used to GitHub so I’ve posted a (now deleted) issue rather than a tweet. The issue was titled “You’re a [funny-word]” where [funny-word] was a set of latin characters reminding a transliterated Russian half-offensive word for “gay”, while not being equal to that specific word."

PappaPatat··on Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
Very anecdotal, but here is my take:

For the place I worked at (large international company) it was a G*d send opportunity. All the slack that had been build up in the past by "cost reducing" management suddenly had a billable cost position that nobody questioned.

Of course there where some actual Y2K issue solved in code and calculations, but by large the significant part of the budget was spend on new shiny stuff, to get changes approved and compensate workers for bonuses missed in the previous years.

We had a blast doing it, and the biggest let down while following the year roll over from the dateline and seeing nothing like the expected and predicted rolling blackouts.

PappaPatat··on Show HN: Epidemic Simulator
And let people who are not Deceased People but Cured People be counted as Healthy People again.

Or can one never be counted as Healthy People once one has been Sick People?

PappaPatat··on SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
18 years ago I ran it for months in the off hours on all the companies servers in one datacenter (about 500 which was quite a lot at that time). Fun times.

Impressive that they survived for so long!

PappaPatat··on The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
Can you give some pointers as to what data / sources / criteria would make for a more fair representation?
PappaPatat··on I Worked for a Criminal Organization
My first sale of my selfwritten software (about 35 years ago) was for a car driving instructor. The initial sales conversations where difficult. I thought they did not see the advantages of having their planning & bookkeeping in a computer...

How wrong I was. It was their "creative bookkeeping" that worried them. When I offered to make that all possible ('zapping' as it is called now), they loved it. Based on their referrals I sold it many times over.

Come next customer / market: bookshops. Guess what the most important selling argument was, besides easy cataloging, inventory, searching, website publishing and reporting? Right: zapping.

Thought me an important rule: do not underestimate what your customer is NOT telling you.

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