Hacker News Reader

amper5andon The Milkman Model Returns, This Time for Shampoo and Haagen-Dazs

My mechanic gets his motor oil in an oil drum to which he attaches a hand pump to dispense it.

amper5andon The Quest for Room-Temperature Superconductors

Most MR units these days use liquid helium not liquid nitrogen. And there is at least one cryogen free unit on the market right now, though it’s definitely not the kind (open, 0.5T) you’d use to replace most hospital magnets.

amper5andon Password Cracking AES-256 DMGs and Epic Self-Pwnage

I created http://passguardian.com for this sort of situation. You can use it to split a password into a certain number cryptographic shares, setting a threshold on the number of shares that should be necessary to reconstruct the password. Store the shares in different locations/with different people, and use only if needed to reconstruct the original password.

amper5andon To Keep Passwords Safe from Hackers, Just Break Them into Bits

As I linked further down, this is probably based on Adi Shamir's (of RSA) threshold sharing scheme [1] [2]. Essentially, this approach splits any "secret" into n parts, requiring that k of them are necessary to reconstruct the original secret.

It relies on the fact that k points are necessary to reconstruct a k-1 order polynomial. So if you hand out n points, with n > k, then any k of these points can be used to reconstruct the polynomial, whose y-intercept is the "secret". The coefficients of the polynomial are random.

There are other [3] sharing schemes, and for the trivial k = n case, Shamir's scheme is probably overkill.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

[2, PDF] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.80....

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing

UPDATE: Here are some links to RSA's "Distributed Credential Protection" offering [4] and the white paper [5] describing it.

[4] http://www.emc.com/security/rsa-distributed-credential-prote...

[5, PDF] http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h11013-r...

amper5andon To Keep Passwords Safe from Hackers, Just Break Them into Bits

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

by Adi Shamir, the "S" in RSA

amper5andon Megabad: A quick look at the state of Mega’s encryption

JavaScript security is really the best way to go for this type of service. At some point there needs to be a trade-off between the application goals and maximum theoretical security.

Chrome has native crypto.getRandomValues() and Safari's Math.random() was changed to use Arc4 PRNG back in 2008. I'm not sure if it has been updated to account for the flaws in the first bytes of Arc4, but if it has then this is cryptographically strong.

I don't know where Firefox and the other browsers stand on CSPRNGs, but as more and more implement crypto.getRandomValues(), this will improve services relying on client-side crypto.

amper5andon Redactor - javascript (jQuery) WYSIWYG editor

There's no caveat. It says "Redactor распространяется бесплатно по лицензии MIT или GPL, на ваш выбор." which literally means "Redactor is distributed freely under the MIT or GPL licenses - it's your choice."

Edit: This goes to the lack of English docs, not to your misunderstanding I'm sure.

amper5andon TextBelt is a free API for outgoing SMS

+1 for GV. What's cool is that there are libraries in many languages to allow you to use it in creative ways:

* java: http://code.google.com/p/google-voice-java/

* C++: https://github.com/mastermind202/GoogleVoice

* C#: http://code.google.com/p/sharp-voice/

* obj-C: https://bitbucket.org/joeygibson/gvoice/wiki/Home

* Python: http://code.google.com/p/pygooglevoice/

* PHP: http://code.google.com/p/phpgooglevoice/

* javascript (node.js): https://github.com/amper5and/node-google-voice

I dont know how many of those are still maintained. Disclaimer: I am the author of node-google-voice, which is still maintained.

amper5andon Agile Diagnosis (YC S11) Launches: Helping Doctors With Diagnosis

Another critical aspect is to target the tech-savvy younger generation of students and residents, which Agile is doing with their recent offer of free lifetime access for participating medical schools. Almost all of us are using tools like Uptodate on a daily basis on the floors. Agile's algorithmic presentation of the same information makes a compelling case to use their product. Early adoption by trainees can lead to future paradigm shifts in the whole industry.