HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

alfongj

113 karma · joined June 16, 2013

submissionscomments
alfongj··on 700M users and Premium
> Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none.

> Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day.

User experience is, well, subjective to the user. For tech savvy, primarily desktop users, Telegram and Discord can be great choices.

This is however probably not true for the majority of the population.

alfongj··on 700M users and Premium
WhatsApp got there faster with no ads either
alfongj··on Meta 'most reluctant' to work with government: Home Affairs
Narrative violation
alfongj··on Study: Better sleep habits lead to better college grades (2019)
There's so many possible confounding effects that it's hard to take this at face value.
alfongj··on Facebook will count one person as two on its platform
This is the right answer. Matching user data without consent is becoming fairly risky from a data regulation standpoint, as well as user perception.
alfongj··on How WhatsApp enables multi-device capability
Right, but that doesn't compromise the security of the service necessarily.

Users can catch a malicious server injecting incorrect keys by looking at security notifications and comparing security codes. This is part of the Signal protocol.

This may be tedious but only needs to be done in the event of phone keys getting reset (a once in a year event?), as all companion device keys are automatically verified with signatures provided from an account owner's primary (phone) device

Source: https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp_Security_Whitepap...

alfongj··on How WhatsApp enables multi-device capability
What's your concern?
alfongj··on Watchy: Open-source E-Paper Watch with ESP32
I got mine two days ago
alfongj··on Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers
Please point to a single source from Apple claiming their mission is privacy.
alfongj··on Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon
WhatsApp group chats are end to end encrypted too. You must be thinking of... Telegram, where only secret 1:1 chats are end to end encrypted
alfongj··on Show HN: Userbase – Auth and E2E encrypted storage in a few lines of code
Would e2ee really be guaranteed if a user sets an 8 char password? Because if so an attacker with control of the server could brute forcedly decrypt the encryption key, and in turn all DB contents for a user, no?

Apologies if this is covered somewhere in the docs, but I couldn’t find it.

alfongj··on Oversight Board accepts case on Trump's indefinite suspension from Facebook
Check your biases.

https://oversightboard.com/meet-the-board/

alfongj··on Fitbit is now officially part of Google
I love my Fitbit hardware but loathe their apps. After 5 years or so, they still suck at data synchronization.

I hope Google fixes this

alfongj··on Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948742
alfongj··on Uncaptcha2: Defeat ReCaptcha with Google Speech2Text
From what I can read on the twit and GitHub, the researcher hasn't proven this works at scale.

The point of recaptcha is blocking "captcha farms" or automated bots from abusively creating accounts, buying tickets, etc.

The author hasn't demonstrated that this attack is effective in those scenarios. The only thing he has shown is a very convoluted way for a human to solve a recaptcha (harder for 99.9% of humans than the standard recaptcha experience)

That would explain why Google didn't care about them publishing this.

alfongj··on After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?
Apple has ads. Have you read their ToS / privacy policy?
alfongj··on Firebase expands to become a unified app platform
Hi dmitriz! Yes. We have it (currently in iOS and Web, soon on Android), and we're eager to get feedback and work to improve it!

If you try it out, ping me at alfongj at google dot com and let me know what you think!

alfongj··on The Kotlin Language: 1.0 Beta Is Here
I'd say the syntax is halfway in between Java and Scala. That makes it much more approachable for Java developers (you can learn the basics in an afternoon), but also less flexible than Scala sometimes.
alfongj··on Demystifying Apple Pay (sec. Analysis on Apple Pay and Touch ID)
This is a translation of an original talk in Spanish from the security congress RootedCon. If you understand Spanish, do watch the spanish version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZoDKsxPM08

TL;DW: He proves how with a jailbroken device you can extract feature points of fingerprints stored in the Secure Element, or override Touch ID sec. completely (as an example, he unlocks a device with his nose)

alfongj··on So you still don´t know AngularJS?
And just before anyone points it out, I know that Node JS, Backbone, Coffee Script and Angular have little to do with each another.

I did the comparison with them just to put in perspective what is the popularity and growth of Angular, in comparison to other Javascript related things you might know better.