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aselzer

168 karma · joined March 9, 2014

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aselzer··on HTML5 Canvas Fingerprinter
Are you 9B6288AF? (1/41051)

I am also using FF Developer Edition on Arch Linux.

It says Firefox on Linux to me.

aselzer··on Remote code execution in Asus router firmware
There is also an OpenWRT version: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-n56u

But it doesn't seem very well supported since 2012.

aselzer··on Google Analytics, Casualty of Spam
The target audience for these sites are obviously people who want more traffic and want to make money with their sites.

Bigger sites couldn't be targeted cost-effectively because they would have to make a lot more noise for themselves to even show up in the analytics reports. Also, the people reading the reports are more likely professional and aware of those techniques.

Their algorithm is probably not so advanced, so they just shoot lots of requests to any site they can find. Luckily for them, most sites are small and unsuccessful.

aselzer··on Google Analytics, Casualty of Spam
It seems like they are targeting smaller sites desperate for traffic. They are trying to make the owners monitoring (Google) analytics look at their own site offering "SEO", "marketing", "social optimizations" and similar services that are probably as shady as their way of "contacting" the owners of low-traffic sites.

I have a site with less than 200 "visits" per month. 20% of traffic apparently comes from the site semalt.semalt.com. 10% comes from this site: buttons-for-website.com. Another 6% is from this one: make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com

aselzer··on Connecting an external video card to a notebook
Apple should grab that opportunity. They probably have enough power to pressurize Intel into allowing this (at least on their computers).

Imagine an apple-manufactured external graphics card that you can carry around and plug into your MacBook Air/Pro.

It could boost sales pretty significantly. I know quite a few people who did not buy a MacBook just because games don't run well enough, and went for another brand that fits their needs in this area (the bigger MacBooks are more expensive, and their advantage to competitors disappears).

aselzer··on Apple’s next major Mac revealed: the radically new 12-inch MacBook Air
Apple is introducing a pretty big gap between their MacBook Pro line and the new MacBook Air if this is true.

The current MacBook Air 13" has 1.08kg while the current 13" MacBook Pro has 1.57kg. That's a pretty big difference if you carry a laptop almost all the time.

For me, losing both USB ports, the SD slot, and having to carry a USB adapter and converter would be just inconvenient.

If they really removed the SD slot, why wouldn't they instead replace it with a MicroSD slot? It seems like microSDs are very popular right now, have become insanely cheap, and fit into every camera with a normal SD slot through adapters.

Why would they drop the thunderbolt port? Again, if this is correct, Apple could of course be working on a Chromecast-esque thing you can carry around and put into the HDMI slot of the TV, connecting to it over 802.11ac WiFi or so.

No charging port? Ok, maybe Apple is developing a high-power wireless charging technique, but I have my doubts. Possibly the port is just on the back.

Eliminating all bezels on the sides of the keyboard for all models of the new MacBook Air (only one model, the 12" one) seems exaggerated. I would much rather have a slightly bigger MBA with some bezels (it is also comfortable to rest the hands on them) and a decent battery (the current MBA's is great).

My preferred solution would be for them to keep the current 13" MacBook Air, give it a retina display, USB 3.1, and maybe upgrade the processor.

aselzer··on How My Mom Got Hacked
Also, wouldn't it be possible to recover the files on most filesystems, assuming the disk is too not full?

The program has to encrypt them, unlink the files, and save the encrypted files / archive. If the filesystem needs more space later, it writes over those (discarded) files, right? Everything else would increase disk wear and decrease performance.

Edit: of course excluding SSDs with TRIM/discard enabled.

aselzer··on Freedom in your computer and in the net [video]
When clicking on the download button on his video, there is only a webm video and an opus sound file.

For all the other talks there are also mp4 videos and mp3 audio files.

aselzer··on Freedom in your computer and in the net [video]
It's nice of them that his video is a webm, while the others are mp4s. E.g. try inspecting the <video> on this one: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6430_-_de_-_...
aselzer··on India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin
In that way it is related, but it is not in the same category as the other sites listed. It is a tool that can be used to spread spam, propaganda, and possibly automate entry of data into inflexible systems.

If governments can justify censoring access to a program like this for those reasons, then I am worried.

aselzer··on Two-year-old Nexus 4 issue status changed to obsolete
I didn't mean to imply that OnePlus was the one to blame. Cyanogen, inc. did not act in a fair way while selling something that was mainly a success due to an open source community.

OnePlus (or Micromax) actually very recently announced a replacement for Cyanogenmod 11S: https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/rom-official-5-0-android-...

I somehow still don't understand how they will be able to include Google Apps without being a member of the Open Handset Alliance when shipping an almost exact fork of Android.(http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...)

aselzer··on Two-year-old Nexus 4 issue status changed to obsolete
Sadly it looks like OnePlus is moving away from Cyanogenmod (search Google News for `oneplus cyanogen`). Also the OnePlus One never had the fully open source version of Cyanogenmod 11. It uses a version called 11s (https://cyngn.com/products/oneplusone/) with many proprietary features.

However, they will surely continue making phones at that price on which the pure version of Cyanogenmod can be installed.

Xiaomi seems very promising since they also make phones at that price point with similar specs, and Cyanogenmod ROMs are in development. I know it might be hard to get them in the US, but in Europe they can even be ordered from Amazon.

aselzer··on India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin
Most of them are too general for this. I just suspect they were being inconsistent. Look at the trailing `/` in the URLs. Probably they copy-pasted without much thought.
aselzer··on India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin
If it is a DNS block it wouldn't make much sense to write the full URLs.
aselzer··on India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin
This one is interesting: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phorkie/

According to the list it has been specifically blocked. It appears to be a pastebin clone written in PHP.

Almost all of them are pastebin-like sites.

http://atnsoft.com/atnsoft.com/textpaster/ seems very unrelated.

My assumption would have been that a government crawler stumbled upon some messages it didn't like and the sites they were on ended up on the list, but the two sites above would unlikely be affected by this.

Archive.org was probably affected because they mirrored some content of any of them.

aselzer··on Show HN: Startup Fighter
The /#/guesses page made Chrome eat 100% CPU on one core :) Might want to truncate it.
aselzer··on Show HN: An interactive comparison chart of the 300 most popular smartphones
Something seems wrong with the price of the Nexus 6. It doesn't cost $1150. It is at 600€ on Amazon.de, which is about 740 USD.

This seems like someone is trying to resell the phone at profit while supply is low.

The phone is justifiably getting bad reviews at this price, but Google and Motorola would probably not like this. Why is this possible on Amazon?

aselzer··on [dead]
For some reason he also mentions this later in the article, somehow contradicting his first statement.

> Yes, without any license, your code defaults to falling under copyright law.

> In that case, legally speaking no one can reproduce, distribute, or create

> derivative works from your work. You may or may not want that. In any case,

> that's only the theory. In practice you'd find defending your rights to be

> difficult.

I am sure defending your rights in this case is no problem, assuming you have enough money. If you don't have enough power to enforce them, the same thing could probably be said about using licenses as well.

aselzer··on Use your iDevice as an extra display for your Mac
The line "An additional display increases productivity by up to 48%." is particularily funny.

I wonder how they "measured" this. A Macbook Air 11" + extra display is quite different from a Macbook Pro 15" + extra display.

aselzer··on In Wayzata, Minnesota, a school spies on its students
I was accused of "destroying" about 20 laptops (didn't boot) in 8th grade, because some other kids called me a "hacker". Later I realized that the system administrators of the school had probably broken the bootloaders or partitions and were incapable of fixing it, so they blamed it on "hackers".

All computers are full of surveillance software (Apple Remote Desktop), and there is a person constantly monitoring them (in the library and in classrooms).

The internet can only be accessed through a firewall blocking content that really shouldn't be blocked. Pages like nmap.org are blocked under the phrase "hacking". Minecraft and any pages related to games (like wikis), or even slightly related, possibly completely unrelated, were blocked for for the reason "games", as if that would have stopped people from bringing them on a USB drive. At some point I had a school project about Minecraft and was told to research. I could, but that was because of my SSH socks proxy.

It's sad that Google gets set to "safe mode" and deactivates HTTPS when accessing it from a specific IP address on the will of schools. However, that's great for WiFi sniffing and practicing the use of Ettercap.

Don't ever accept a school-provided device without removing whatever OS or ROM there is on it and flashing/installing something new.

Great choice of Arch Linux tethered to the phone (me too).

aselzer··on Introducing the Photon
This seems like a version of the Tessel[0] that isn't as overpriced[1].

[0] https://tessel.io/

[1] https://shop.trycelery.com/page/tec

aselzer··on Badassify your terminal and shell
I copy this into the boring terminal and run it: https://gist.github.com/AlexanderSelzer/ba487126454672a6596d

There's no zsh or iTerm2, but it is much easier to read. I guess it would be possible to make something that downloads the binaries, sets them up temporarily and opens them.

aselzer··on The new archive.org
Wow, this is due to them including more than 50 or so base64 encoded inline images.

They should really change this. The page took more than 8s to load (with cached images).

aselzer··on Analyze Your HN Posts with Watson User Modeling
Did this with Twitter: twurl "/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?count=200" | jq -r ".[] | .text" | pbcopy

paste it into http://watson-um-demo.mybluemix.net/demo

87% Openness, 5% Agreeableness, that's funny.

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