Hacker News Reader

ShinyCyrilon Why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl

Physical media (especially in the film space) remains sometimes the only option if you don't want to compromise on quality. Sadly you have to compromise in other ways: unskippable trailers/copyright warnings for example.

I do worry that Bluray is just becoming more niche and the studios/distributors will do away with it in favour of their own streaming platforms.

I apologise for the self-promotion, but I started https://www.dvd.club for this very reason, hoping to find a like-minded community of physical media enthusiasts, willing to share their collections with each other.

ShinyCyrilon MozillaSocial

Hmm can you elaborate on that?

> Thunderbird is now part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation

Are you saying that it technically lives under the Mozilla umbrella but they take a completely hands-off approach?

ShinyCyrilon MozillaSocial

Is that not what Thunderbird is (amongst other things)?

ShinyCyrilon Zoom improvements requested by music schools

Seems this is just for voice channels — SSTV channels have a bandwidth of 6MHz for example.

ShinyCyrilon Zoom improvements requested by music schools

I'm not a ham, but wouldn't bandwidth be an issue? I was under the impression that channel widths in the amateur bands were pretty narrow (<10kHz). Though I don't know if that applies to all bands, or just HF.

ShinyCyrilon Ask HN: What are you working on?

I've been thinking about doing something in this space. What are the regulatory requirements (if any) for something like this (i.e. offering investing advice, but without direct management of a user's assets)?

ShinyCyrilon Ask HN: What's the road to micropayments being a first-class citizen of the web?

Continuing here, since my OP was too long:

From my reading, it seems like Taler and the Lightning Network are the two most promising solutions. Taler seems to be very well-suited to micropayments, but is lacking adoption from banking institutions, which would be required for people to actually use it. Not to mention that there would need to be a standardised way to request that your bank exchange some of your balance for tokens to be deposited into your Taler wallet. Given that banks in the US still seem to lack a widely-adopted API like the European Open Banking initiative, this seems a long way off still. The Lightning Network seems promising, but I can't picture how the exchange of fiat / Bitcoin would work. Perhaps there may be a number of companies like Strike competing, with browsers giving the user a choice of which service to use, in the same way a user currently selects their search engine.

ShinyCyrilon Disaster.radio: a disaster-resilient communications network powered by the sun

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, that's the kind of thing, but understandably it also looks limited to Cisco employees.

ShinyCyrilon Disaster.radio: a disaster-resilient communications network powered by the sun

Without meaning to hijack this thread: does anyone know of any volunteering opportunities deploying / maintaining communication networks for disaster relief? Ericsson Response (https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/sustainability-and-corp...) is a group doing exactly what I'm after, but seems to be internal-only.

ShinyCyrilon Ask HN: Amazon stonewalling me after they closed my account – how to resolve?

Yep I'm in contact with someone at the company – hopefully they might be able to help.

ShinyCyrilon Ask HN: Amazon stonewalling me after they closed my account – how to resolve?

I did try, but have yet to hear anything from them.

ShinyCyrilon Tiptoeing Through the Tundra (2019)

If you enjoyed reading this account, Bikepacking.com has a wonderful collection of trip summaries (as well as a nice bi-annual print edition).

I have the utmost respect for people that set out on ultra-endurance trips like this. I love going on multi-day adventures by bike, but I definitely couldn’t hack being so far away from civilisation / help and being utterly dependent on your equipment and your own drive. Props to those that have what it takes.

ShinyCyrilon Apple’s New iPad Pro Ads Were Shot and Made Entirely on the iPad Pro [video]

An interesting example of this is an episode of DigitalRev's Cheap Camera Challenge, whereby the filmmaker Phillip Bloom was tasked with producing a short film using a Barbie with an integrated 240p camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VS3C183G8g.

ShinyCyrilon Show HN: Remote Job Rocks – The simplest remote job board on the web

Surely the 'allows remote' column is redundant?

ShinyCyrilon Ask HN: What's the Hacker News for different industries?

I started producing a list a while ago, although it never really got off the ground.

Feel free to submit a PR if you like: https://github.com/mikeanthonywild/hacker-news-for-x.

ShinyCyrilon Sony’s A7 III is a $2,000 full-frame mirrorless camera

You don't need a x3 there since most cameras use a single monochrome sensor with a colour filter array on top – the debayering process can happen offline.

ShinyCyrilon Key Reinstallation Attacks – Breaking WPA2 by Forcing Nonce Reuse

Fortunately most access points will be fine, but those performing client functions (eg repeaters) will need updating.

ShinyCyrilon Key Reinstallation Attacks – Breaking WPA2 by Forcing Nonce Reuse

Does anyone know if Apple release security fixes for Airport? I know it isn’t actively developed, but you’d hope they’d release critical security fixes as they still sell them.

ShinyCyrilon Safari no longer supported by Spotify

Netflix HTML5 player refuses to run on older CPUs in Safari. I have a 2009 Mac Pro with a copy of Firefox installed just so I can watch Netflix.

ShinyCyrilon Ask HN: Competitor lifted app concept and name and filed trademark

Thanks for pointing this out - I couldn't figure out how to navigate Twitter to sort by date. If I was being paranoid I would have said that they picked up on an ad campaign we put out in 2015 to garner interest, however I suspect it is much more likely that the apps started around the same time and both happened to converge on the name Chowder (which is a fairly obvious choice for a food-app).

While I do think it's still fishy that they recently added some features which bare a great deal of resemblance to ours, that is a separate, unrelated issue.

As our app has been available for longer, I would hope that would be sufficient to at least protect ourselves in an infringement case - however rebranding might just be the most straight-forward option at this stage.

ShinyCyrilon How enthusiasts designed a powerful desktop PC with an ARM processor

Does anyone know any ARM SoCs which can run without binary blobs? I'm looking for something with a fast serial video interface, H.264 decoder and a SATA or PCIe controller. So far I'm looking at the Allwinner A20 and the i.MX6 - however the latter doesn't have enough bandwidth on the video interfaces to drive a high-resolution display.

The RK3399 mentioned in the article looks great, however it seems like at the very least, the Mali GPU requires a binary blob (not sure about some of the other peripherals).

ShinyCyrilon Ask HN: What project can I start in my free time to make some side-cash?

Playing the stock market is just one facet of investing, and a widely-discouraged one at that (e.g. market timing). Long-term investments favour index trackers so that you can gain from the performance of the market as a whole.

ShinyCyrilon A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

Do you really think the person you are replying to doesn't know that already? I think you can take it as given that most people here know the difference between MHz and mHz and are perfectly capable of realising it is a typo.

ShinyCyrilon Facebook Has No First Amendment Right to Send Unauthorized Texts, Says Court

I noticed something similar when I was travelling in either Hong Kong or Thailand. The network operators in that country offered free access to Facebook and so when accessing mbasic... it would ask you if you wanted to use Facebook for free, and if not then it would forcefully redirect you to the regular Facebook interface - no option to use the lightweight one.

ShinyCyrilon Twitter Activist Security

I'm glad they included something about mental health. There was an interesting post on /r/privacy the other day of someone with burnout from the paranoia of government surveillance [1]. I browse /r/privacy from time to time and am worried by the threat models that many people on there have. I don't know the reasons for their threat model, but I suspect a large number of people don't have any solid reason for such a rigorous model other than paranoia. The cognitive load of maintaining privacy at that level must just be overwhelming.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5qfpb6/im_exhauste...

ShinyCyrilon Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

Obviously I'd avoid it for commercial editing, but I've had good success running Lightroom 5 under Wine.

ShinyCyrilon PS4 hack: Fail0verflow demonstrate Linux and Steam running on Firmware 4.05

According to this analyst, revenue from PC games passed that of consoles this year.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/pc-games-have-surpassed-...

ShinyCyrilon I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

How we collect data

Our system collects torrent files in two ways: parsing torrent sites and listening DHT network. We have more than 500.000 torrents which where classified and which are using now for collecting peer sharing facts (up to 700.000.000 daily). We don't guarantee we can show ALL peer sharing facts:

Single IP address could be assigned to multiple users. It depends on user's ISP. For example mobile operators often used this schema.

- IP address could be dynamic. In such case it changes every

- time user connects to the Internet or periodically.

- User could donwload torrent which we don't have

ShinyCyrilon U.S. government begins asking foreign travelers about social media

FWIW, I was in Thailand a few weeks ago (no visa, it was a relatively short trip) - I did not see this question on the immigration form.