Hacker News Reader

aljoneson WikiLeaks offers $20,000 for information on former DNC staffer's murder

It is disappointing to see simple statements of facts down voted.

aljoneson Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

"good artists copy, great artists steal"

This quote is meant to make you think about the differences between stealing and copying ideas. It isn't literal. It doesn't even make sense literally. Stealing means you make it yours. It is no longer theirs. How do you do that with an idea? You make it so much better that people forget about the previous idea you took.

aljoneson D4 – Declarative Data-Driven Documents

Well its actually function calls that look like markup language. Which is why you can write the function calls yourself if you hate it.

aljoneson U.F.C. Sells Itself for $4B

So about 2 NBA teams.

aljoneson DNS: Basic Concepts (2013)

"Email is so important to the functioning of the Internet that it gets its own record type."

Well that is one way of looking at it. Probably the appropriate way if you're teaching, but if you want to be critical then it reeks of poor design for a particular service to get special treatment by a fundamental part of the internet. It isn't that MX records aren't needed. They just shouldn't only be useful for email.

aljoneson A First Look at America's Supergun

Is there more to your question than is my math right?

aljoneson Apple is now run by a guy who is more like John Sculley than Steve Jobs

But there are 3 types of Apple Watch and 3 types of MacBooks.

aljoneson Elon Musk Supports His Business Empire with Unusual Financial Moves

They are. That isn't the actual goal, but a side effect. What they do is ensure the supply of oil to America.

aljoneson Elon Musk Supports His Business Empire with Unusual Financial Moves

Please point out where this discussion about oil subsidies became restricted to American oil companies.

aljoneson Elon Musk Supports His Business Empire with Unusual Financial Moves

Half the population doesn't pay gas taxes? You're aware that they do. That was a silly thing to say. Gas taxes may be trivial to the portion of the population that pays most of the income taxes, but I doubt the bottom half thinks of them that way.

You need to show what portion of the road cost is paid for by income taxes before you can claim the rest.

I don't understand why you brought any of this up. A subsidy is a subsidy no matter who pays.

aljoneson Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

Current deficit is actually about 500 billion per year.

aljoneson Apple rolls out a new App Store developer site

Yeah. https://youtu.be/TVJ4VnN6YPY?t=3422

aljoneson Clever reforms can reduce the power of NIMBYs and cut housing costs

You shouldn't be concerned about unanimity. You should be concerned if it is true or not.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgXjY3cWIAAVfCM.jpg:large

Unfortunately we can't run experiments on this question. Every city is unique, and people tend to think very special.

aljoneson Every shot Kobe Bryant ever took

I've never seen Jordan accused of taking a pay cut before. The lockout was because of his huge salary. I don't even think there was a salary cap then...

aljoneson Every shot Kobe Bryant ever took

Which I find to be a pretty weird idea. The list of players that played their best while playing with Kobe is long and varied.

aljoneson Apple Jumps on the WebRTC Bandwagon

Probably never happening. The protocol became a moving target because of patent suits, and made to rely upon Apple servers to a much greater extent.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pate...

http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/04/apple-ordered-to-pay-625m-t...

aljoneson JavaScript libraries should be written in TypeScript

Babel is highly configurable and relatively easy to write plugins for.

aljoneson Apple gets smacked by $450M e-book price-fixing fine

Actually there are not. Reasonable people have been disagreeing about this all along.

aljoneson Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

So that you're vulnerable to a whistleblower?

aljoneson Mark Zuckerberg Backs Apple in Its Refusal to Unlock iPhone

This is not true. Such tools exist, but are not what Apple used. They just extracted data. It wasn't encrypted so that was all they needed to do.

aljoneson Mark Zuckerberg Backs Apple in Its Refusal to Unlock iPhone

Indeed, people who valued their security highly, like terrorists, would still have security, but the common person would not.

aljoneson Mark Zuckerberg Backs Apple in Its Refusal to Unlock iPhone

And they wouldn't just ask Apple.

aljoneson Mark Zuckerberg Backs Apple in Its Refusal to Unlock iPhone

The order came from a public court. According to an article in the nytimes Apple asked the FBI to keep it secret.

aljoneson Mark Zuckerberg Backs Apple in Its Refusal to Unlock iPhone

The order explicitly requires the cracking tool to not be written to flash.

Just as easy? Maybe if you ignore the effort to create it and secure it. I really can't believe writing secure software is being trivialized in the comments here.

aljoneson Mark Zuckerberg Backs Apple in Its Refusal to Unlock iPhone

Now wait. If the passcode is complex then it is secure, which is a very typical requirement for security.

aljoneson Mark Zuckerberg Backs Apple in Its Refusal to Unlock iPhone

but it wasn't a brute force attack those 70 times so how is it the same thing?

aljoneson Mark Zuckerberg Backs Apple in Its Refusal to Unlock iPhone

Apple has explicitly stated they can do what is asked at every opportunity.

You ever been responsible for writing secure software? It isn't easy. Locking it down to a single device is in principle possible. No one wants to be responsible for really doing it though if they can avoid it. Especially not when it is obvious this is not a one time thing. Not at all. You think every device manufacturer can do it without error too? There will be a lot of secret cracking tools if this gets started.

aljoneson Answers to your questions about Apple and security

That is generally what is meant by new. People always object whenever any software is described as new and it is ridiculous. It isn't just software where we don't start from scratch and yet still call things new. iPhone's themselves are a good example, but the examples are everywhere.

If you think this request doesn't represent significant work then I question your ability to estimate such things. Just making a version of iOS that runs without being written to disk and is never written to disk, as specifically requested, would be a significant task. Being sufficiently satisfied that your code restricting it to a single device is correct and not exploitable is not something I would care to be responsible for ever. I can't believe people keep trivializing it. Defense in depth is generally considered necessary. Removing all the locks but Apple's signing key and calling that just as secure is foolish.

The master key analogy is sound if it is referring to the technique rather than the specific software. Does anyone believe this will only ever be done once, or that it will always be done correctly every time, including every other manufacturer? Surely we can agree there is some risk here.

They said no and explained what they did instead of unlocking. Seems so obvious that you must want to argue about the definition of unlock? Really?

I do not know how Apple could more clearly state that they could make this tool. How could you come away with an inaccurate impression?

aljoneson Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

This is why we invented links. Something can be posted on twitter without twitter being the primary source.

aljoneson Ten years ago they beat MIT. Today, it's complicated (2014)

Why do you have such little sympathy?