Hacker News Reader

bluekingon Oculus will sell a Quest 2 headset that doesn't need Facebook for an extra $500

I'm saying that their automated tools can't tell the difference between 'normal' and 'fake' use. And the fact that I'm still using my dummy account is proof

bluekingon Oculus will sell a Quest 2 headset that doesn't need Facebook for an extra $500

I don't think that's true. They don't have time to police billions of facebook accounts for 'normal' behavior. I'll friend a few random people. In the super unlikely worst case I'm out $300 but probably so is FB. It's in their interests to collect data and sell it under the fake name I gave. Only if I explicitly state to them the name is fake do they lose out. They don't ask and I won't tell and the advertisers will purchase shit. Win, win, win.

bluekingon Oculus will sell a Quest 2 headset that doesn't need Facebook for an extra $500

I created an email alias on my domain to start the FB account. Works fine, not banned. If they get data to sell, probably they don't care. I can run credit card payments on the store as well.

bluekingon Oculus will sell a Quest 2 headset that doesn't need Facebook for an extra $500

Funny I just setup my Quest 2 today. Made a fresh facebook account with a new email and chose a fake name and birthday. Breaking the FB ToS is NOT a crime. Why would anyone pay an extra $500, and then $180/yr when the worst that can happen is the $300 headset gets bricked/banned? This is a stupidity tax.

bluekingon iPhone 6

No - lets decide if we want to give this company more of our money before comparing features. They are absolutely using planned obsolescence and the non exchangeable batteries across their product lines and removal of dimm sockets are a clear signal. You don't own the product, or control the data you put on it. You appear to purchase but in reality - you effectively rent. Apple designs are pretty, but not made to last. And while they like to hand you the 'license' of security, the backdoors and icloud breaches and PRISM participation show that is not backed by any real substance. Jokes on the user.

bluekingon iPhone 6

The New York Times published the article from a Harvard Professor. Link in the original comment, as is the paper revealing the backdoors.

Here is the PRISM slide showing the timing of Apples participation, exactly one year after SJ passed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...

It's not FUD I'm stating a set of facts here. It is what it is.

bluekingon iPhone 6

Wouldn't buy the iwatch or the new iphone, and I have been a Apple longterm user. Like the motorola 360 better, round design is a huge win and again Apple are last to market with a inferior product. The iphone's main feature for me was that it was more secure than android phones. But after the celebrity icloud hacks and the iphone backdoors that were revealed (then denied by Apple) I have had enough - Apple products have lost premium status in my eyes. Other than that my nexus 5 had all these features at $350 unlocked last year - including NFC payments. It also doesn't help that my $3000 retina macbook dies after a few months of use bc of bad ram, and now I need a new logic board. Planned obsolescence is a huge problem with Apple. They were caught out slowing the older versions of their phones right before the release of the new ones by analyzing google search data, and this unserviceable expendable model they are pushing just won't fly anymore. Don't tell me laptops without dimm sockets and exchangeable batteries are a necessary design compromise for slimmer devices. Thats total bullshit. My iphone 4s ground to a halt right at the release of the iphone 5. It had become comically slow - a product I would never have bought if it had been presented that way in store. Apple is the worlds largest computer manufacturer and they don't need to pull underhanded tricks like that. It says a lot to me that Apple joined PRISM one year after SJ passed. Right there on the NSA slides.

https://pentest.com/ios_backdoors_attack_points_surveillance...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/upshot/hold-the-phone-a-bi...

Yes the article from the Times has a different opinion, but I wanted to share the slides mostly, as I cant find the original paper by Laura Trucco. His theory is that its the ios release that slows the phone, no denying that they are slowed. But leaving the phone functional should be the first priority. Any developer who tested ios 6 on the iphone 4 and approved it should have been shot.

bluekingon Scots, What the Heck?

Come on Scotland STAND UP !!!!!!! Go Scotland !!!

bluekingon Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1

Another PR stunt Google ? No that wont work.

bluekingon PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments

LMAO. Of course it was. I'm not answering your snotty questions. Google it. :)

bluekingon PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments

Because they know once bitcoin starts getting accepted nobody is going to put up with their ridiculous system of rules or give them a cut out of every transaction. And its tax free too. They just became irrelevant. Makes me wish I believed in a deity so I could give thanks :) Holy shit Paypal were a awful service. Customer service was like a colonoscopy. Ferreting out information with that suspicious tone. A million arbitrary limits and hoops to jump though. They got away with that because they were the only game in town. Not anymore.

They are looking for a life raft. Thats what coinbase move is about... appeasing their shareholders. But heres the thing about coinbase.... nobody needs them either.

bluekingon PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments

Bitcoin was created to get rid of the likes of Paypal.

bluekingon The FBI Says How It ‘Legally’ Pinpointed Silk Road’s Server

Bullshit.

bluekingon New York Police Officers to Begin Wearing Body Cameras in Pilot Program

This is a nightmare and we need to fight it tooth and nail.

Those aren't just cameras, they are networked to a facial recognition database (thanks facebook), which is cross referenced with criminal records and commercial profiles built from your every online purchase, gmail and facebook post.

This is what you can expect after the police get this as socially accepted

1. Facial recognition and additional suspicion of anyone walking down the street with a criminal record.

2. During an encounter with a officer micro facial expressions, speech patterns, eye movement and heart rate will be analyzed at high speed by AI to assess reasonable suspicion, to detect deception and emotional state and to direct the line of questioning in real time. The kind of technology the Gestapo could only dream of.

3. Body language of everyone in view will be analyzed for suspicion as they pass by.

4. These AIs will analyze anything you say in real time for factual accuracy against a huge database of personal information (half of which comes from your phone) and for context based on your commercial profile.

The implications here are that these databases represent a power shift and will redline demographics and make living in society with a record far more unpleasant than it is now. You can get a felony for forgetting your bus ticket. This effects everyone.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/189259-real-time-emotion-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVwBXr_nU9Q

http://mic.com/articles/30975/how-the-nypd-is-using-your-fac...

bluekingon Building My Own Home Router

Ah selinux, the NSAs contribution to the linux kernel.

bluekingon Building My Own Home Router

I never said AMD silicon wasn't backdoored. Its a solid bet that it is. I don't trust either, but having a intel chipset and processor together on a edge router sounds like a bad idea to me.

bluekingon Building My Own Home Router

I don't agree. The biggest American semiconductor company. Backdoor guaranteed.

bluekingon Building My Own Home Router

They promised new designs that just never appeared, or came too late to be competitive. I remember being very happy with my 4801 units. I could run OpenBSD with OpenVPN and asterisk. Neato back then. I had a crypto phone system in 2007 complete with IAXYs (remember those ?)

But running Atom on a router is a big turn off and Coreboot is a major win for PCengines in the new climate.

The PCengines design is a lot slicker. Its lightweight and appropriate for the demographic. IMO the current Soekris product line shows that they don't really have strong concept of who their customer is. My impression is oversized, underpowered with too many ethernet ports and a 10 year old case design. Not on my desk. And if we are talking about the server room, well for that kind of money I will buy a Sun coolthreads server and drop OpenBSD on that. A t1000 goes for what $80 now ? Atom is just so bland. Its mcdonalds.

bluekingon Building My Own Home Router

Well if you really care about security you should run OpenBSD not linux. And it installs secure by default. Just grab the book of pf and write out your firewall rules.

bluekingon Building My Own Home Router

Meh, Soekris was so 2006. Their designs are IMO a bit tacky. And since they use Atom and intel network chipsets, the question needs to be asked... do we trust intel hardware anymore ? I agree intel nics are a bit more reliable.

bluekingon Building My Own Home Router

1 APU.1D4 system board 4GB USD155.00 USD155.00 8471.5000 TW 235g 1 Enclosure 3 LAN, alu, USB USD8.70 USD8.70 8473.3000 CN 241g 1 SSD M-Sata 16GB MLC Phison USD22.00 USD22.00 8523.5100 TW 10g 1 Compex WLE200NX miniPCI express card USD18.70 USD18.70 8517.7000 CN 10g Shipping + handling USD42.40 Total USD246.80 496g

Assuming 4GB RAM, SSD, Wifi N, enclosure... oops add $5 for the AC adapter.

bluekingon First US appeals court hears argument to shut down NSA database

What a complete load of bullshit for the cameras.

This is theater. They have absolutely no intention of ever shutting down the NSA, or restricting them, or deleting one single file in their database... the one that's so huge they had to put it in the desert.

http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/sites/default/files/Greenp...

bluekingon Building My Own Home Router

These are the best SBC routers on the market. It used to be between Soekris and pcengines, but Soekris dropped the ball.

and the enclosures are also very nice too

http://pcengines.ch/apu.htm http://pcengines.ch/case1d2u.htm

It uses coreboot, which you can recompile from source to be reasonably sure no BIOS backdoors, and it also has a hard firmware flash write jumper (thanks to me)... to make sure your recompiled BIOS doesn't get overwritten remotely when a vulnerability is found in your OS (easy with coreboot if you leave the .config in the firmware image which is the default). I suggest you run the latest OpenBSD, and add the NEUG USB RNG. This is a dream machine. 64bit 1ghz dual core... up to 4 gigs of ram,low power, great great design, two PCIe card slots, gig eth. The best. And I have tried everything.

Building your own PC tower as a firewall, well been there. Its not the way. Fun project sure, but wasteful and inefficient.

There are a few really good cheap routers that can run OpenWRT amazingly fast ie.

http://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-TL-WR841N-Wireless-Router-300M...

If you

1. add the packet shaping module and fill in your modems speed

2. replace the routers /etc/hosts file to block all internet advertising inc youtube ads with this ;

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

and 3. change the DNS to googles 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Then you have the ultimate home router setup. But if you want secure / vpn / tor bridge etc then you need to go to the above mentioned with OpenBSD and be careful to buy a compatible wifi PCIe card.

bluekingon Google's end-to-end key distribution proposal

http://www.ibtimes.com/bill-gates-bashes-project-loon-google...

bluekingon Google's end-to-end key distribution proposal

Data collection isn't for advertising exclusively. It builds profiles that can be sold to third parties who will use that information to redline demographics. For instance health insurance companies and banks.

bluekingon Mailvelope – OpenPGP Encryption for Webmail

Only useful if it supports tokens such as the openpgp smartcard to store the private key. Otherwise its just security theatre.

Try gpgtools with a openpgp smartcard. Its easily the most user friendly experience going for token based PGP, and supports 4096 bit RSA keys.

bluekingon Google's end-to-end key distribution proposal

Android was designed to leak as much information about the user as possible all the time, even to third parties. Spy satellites have less invasive software.

bluekingon Google's end-to-end key distribution proposal

Go look at the slides. The NSA isn't lying in its own internal documents. Of course google is in on it. Do you get how huge this infrastructure is ? Its a massive engineering effort to manage that kind of information flow.

What has happened here is google has got scared. Because without trusting users all their business models fall apart. So they are lying. Its that simple.

bluekingon Google's end-to-end key distribution proposal

The do no evil line is bullshit. This is not a benevolent company by any standard. The services are not free, you are just paying in a different currency.

Here is more on loon and look further up for links to the PRISM slides and documentation showing the companies involved including google were compensated financially by the NSA. The evidence is damning.

http://m.slashdot.org/story/194413

Look the bottom line here is these guys betrayed us. They are traitors, and we need to cut them out of our future.

bluekingon Google's end-to-end key distribution proposal

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ceo-larry-page-issues-sta...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...

http://gizmodo.com/confirmed-nsa-paid-google-microsoft-other...

They are lying through their teeth. As you should know skj, being a google employee.