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bpchaps

2,178 karma · joined December 27, 2014

https://mchap.io
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bpchaps··on Gitlab ‘rethinking’ third-party telemetry
It was more than an announcement. They cutoff access to gitlab and broke automated workflows. It shows that they don't know their customer base that well if they were willing to do that. Surely they knew they'd break automated workflows?

So, either they don't care that they broke those workflows when they made this change, or they didn't know that the workflow breakage would be bad. Both are shitty and implies a lack of understanding of their core user base. So, sending customer reps out like they are now screams to me that gitlab really only cares about presentation.

bpchaps··on Gitlab ‘rethinking’ third-party telemetry
My questions come from the fact that you, and others from Gitlab, are coming out of the woodwork in groups in response to public negativity and trying to play it cool, eg "wanna".

At least to me, it feels hollow, just like your response right now. It makes me think that Gitlab knew that there was going to be a backlash, and only sent your team out to mitigate damages. "There is no such thing as bad publicity" sort of deal.

If Amazon did the same thing you were doing right now, everyone would be up in arms.

bpchaps··on Gitlab ‘rethinking’ third-party telemetry
Ah. Is that any different from a "Fulfillment Center Ambassador"?
bpchaps··on Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
I used to work at Bank of America as a level 2 app analyst back when they first started building Quartz. At the time, it was advertised internally as a system to be used for reporting, and so it had lots of built-in functionality to connect to databases, etc. Pretty neat.

That said.

The method of encoding production database credentials was rot-13. No joke. In the Quartz interface, you could double click on a starred-out set of credentials, and it would run rot-13 on it and display the password. This was for FX, rates, credit card, mortgage, etc etc etc. Having access to this cloud system gave effective access into all of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.

They probably save a lot of their money by using very, very bad practices.

Still only the second worst security fail I've seen.

bpchaps··on ‘Mike’s Candyshop’: Behind the Overdose Death of Colin Kroll
You okay?
bpchaps··on Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World
That's my understanding, yes.
bpchaps··on Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World
A few years back I was mugged in Chicago at a busy intersection very close to a train station. Being the FOIA nerd I am, I submitted a FOIA request for the footage of the spot I was mugged at. It came back saying that no footage exists. Probing the investigator, I was told that the camera rotates randomly, and wasn't pointed in my direction. It's very difficult for me to think of Chicago's surveillance with any sort of charity, when they can't even do a single major intersection.

Fun fact: Chicago's city hall has a retention period of zero days on its cameras. Go figure.

bpchaps··on The Gravitational-Wave “Revolution” Is Underway
Thank you - this is exactly what I was trying to explain!
bpchaps··on The Gravitational-Wave “Revolution” Is Underway
Edited for pedantry. :)
bpchaps··on Google Fi Unlimited Plan
Google fi user here: when they throttle in areas with weak cell signal, the throttling is aggressive and internet practically doesn't work. It's very frustrating. "Throttling" isn't the right word.. maybe "crippling" is better.
bpchaps··on The Gravitational-Wave “Revolution” Is Underway
Gravity propagates at the speed of light.

So, imagine you have a massive celestial body floating out in space, with a large gravitational field. Its gravitational field is always propagating. Now, take that celestial body, and make it completely and instantaneously disappear. There's now a gravitational differential between the now-gone body, and its previously propagated gravity field. You should be able to detect that if you're close, say through tidal differences.

Very similar happens with black holes colliding, except the gravity differential comes from the two black holes oscillating near each other, close to the speed of light.

Edit: this obviously isn't exactly how this works, since it makes a lot of assumptions, such as the ability to instantaneously remove something. So, don't think of this as how "things actually work", but as a model to help build your intuition.

bpchaps··on Ask HN: Are you ok?
Need a degree for both of those.
bpchaps··on Show HN: Discover and listen to artists performing in your city this week
What's wrong with honest feedback against clearly outrageous marketing? Serious question. Not trying to troll.
bpchaps··on Ask HN: Are you ok?
Ah sorry. That does sounds relaxing, even in jest.

I'm trying to get out of for-profit tech and into the non-profit space to do data/FOIA/investigative work. It's still "tech work" at the end of the day, but without the deep dread of making rich dudes richer.

bpchaps··on Ask HN: Are you ok?
This isn't my experience with just a single job. This is my experience in the perspective of a sysadmin/SRE/devops "track". Maybe it's different for programmers, but the overall spirit of my post happens at most of the places I've worked at.
bpchaps··on Ask HN: Are you ok?
No need to be patronizing.
bpchaps··on Ask HN: Are you ok?
This field fucking sucks.

I'm tired of being on call 24/7/365.

I'm tired of having to explain why plaintext passwords are bad.

I'm tired of being taken advantage of for being a generalist.

I'm tired of ex-google asshole bosses with massive egos.

I'm tired of carrying a laptop with me "just in case".

I'm tired of the constantly shifting "popular" technologies.

I'm tired of spending weekends indoors studying for work, instead of work giving time to learn.

I'm tired of pretending to find conferences on monitoring systems exciting.

I'm tired of my coworkers and bosses being high at work.

I'm tired of JIRA.

I'm tired of consultants telling us how we're using JIRA wrong.

I'm tired of the politics behind technical decisions.

I'm tired of having to learn another DSL.

It all feels unreal. Can't wait to get out of this field.

bpchaps··on You Can Now Tell Facebook to Delete Its Internal Record of Your Face
Does this count for backups, too?
bpchaps··on A database of Facebook users’ phone numbers found online
You're suggesting that Facebook is 100% accurate in determining whether a name is real, or a pseudonym.

Imagine this: someone is on Facebook and wants to hide their identity for some reason. Best examples I can think of right now is teachers who don't want their profiles accessible to their students (because high schoolers can be little shits). Or someone trying to create a new life after domestic abuse. It makes full sense that they wouldn't want to give their full name so that they can't be found. Facebook isn't good enough in real name detection to get it right 100%. How could they?

With this sort of dump, a domestic abuser can much, much more easily find the person they abused, when that person was previously under a pseudonym.

This is just a small example. It gets much more complicated when considering how many millions of phone number:Facebook IDs were released.

bpchaps··on A database of Facebook users’ phone numbers found online
Troll post? This would either imply that Facebook has 100% valid identity checks or that 100% of people are honest about their identity.
bpchaps··on A database of Facebook users’ phone numbers found online
Yes, you can get tons of personally identifiable information from things like public records laws and such. That's irrelevant, though. This is a phone number tied to a facebook account, not just their name.

A major difference here is the ability - at scale - to associate people with their facebook accounts. There are people who do not want to be associated with by their facebook account, and reasonably so. Not sure why you don't think that wouldn't be a big deal.

bpchaps··on Supermicro server BMCs left exposed to remote attack by any USB device
They're very good at creating a public image.
bpchaps··on Supermicro server BMCs left exposed to remote attack by any USB device
Named in a sibling post.
bpchaps··on Supermicro server BMCs left exposed to remote attack by any USB device
Eh, screw it. It was Rackspace. I worked there, and was told this by a senior member of the infrastructure staff in a one on one. It was was fixed before I got there. They still have similarly bad security flubs.
bpchaps··on Supermicro server BMCs left exposed to remote attack by any USB device
There's a major, major hosting company whose server IPMIs all had an internet IP and used a default password for an unreasonably long time. I'm honestly not sure how this company is still around.
bpchaps··on Generating natural-sounding synthetic speech using brain activity
This is super cool! Does anyone have any insight into whether this sort of muscle-movement based vocalization has been done in the past?
bpchaps··on Presidio: Customizable data protection and PII data anonymization service
Yeah, seriously. Are email addresses even regular to the extent that a regex would work 100% of the time?
bpchaps··on Palantir CEO: Silicon Valley Shouldn't Dictate US Policy
Flagging this. This post has been advertised on Twitter non-stop. This is very clearly written as a PR piece, and it won't go away.
bpchaps··on Presidio: Customizable data protection and PII data anonymization service
Serious question - is there anything fundamentally wrong with using regex here?
bpchaps··on Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs (2017)
I often manage thousands of servers. This is not a viable option for me.
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