computator

Do you have a recommended list of the about:config changes to get optimal security and privacy?

It's not it. I tested it. Waiting several minutes after clearing everything in Firefox doesn't make it forget. But shutting down the browser and restarting allows you to try again.

How is this site maintaining state? It's age restricted, so if you enter an age less than 21 or 18 years or something, it'll block you and continue blocking you even if you clear cookies, cache, history, offline website data, and literally everything that Firefox allows you to clear. Interestingly, however, it'll let you try again if you quit and restart the browser.

> garbage disposal ... encourages people to put through food waste

That's like saying bicycles encourage people to ride bicycles. It's supposed to encourage it. That's the literal purpose of a garbage disposal unit: "a device that shreds food waste into pieces small enough—generally less than 2 mm (0.079 in) in diameter—to pass through plumbing."[1]

> Some people create blockages for the entire stack or more

I don't know how that could happen since if you put something into a garbage disposal unit that can't be shredded to tiny particles, then it's the garbage disposal unit itself that will get clogged, not the pipes or drains. Whatever gets through the garbage disposal unit is going to be less than 2mm in size, and generally much smaller and liquified. If you're referring to oil or grease buildup in pipes, that is irrelevant to the use of a garbage disposal unit since people can and do pour oil or grease down the drain whether they have a garbage disposal unit or not.

In my opinion, a garbage disposal unit is an under-appreciated and supremely useful kitchen appliance, and extremely environmentally friendly (see the brief Wikipedia explanation[2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_disposal_unit

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_disposal_unit#Rational...

> the combustion engine and hybrid cars are surprisingly reliable

The OP brings up an interesting contradiction: appliances have become less reliable but cars have become more reliable. Cars have become worse in some of the same areas as appliances, like the use of touch screens instead of physical controls, but cars have nevertheless become more mechanically reliable. What would explain this opposite trend?

"FBI wiretap transcripts" sound like very private conversations, probably including innocent people and innocent topics. Just because they had a court order for the wiretap doesn't mean the conversations are now public record. So they are exempt, but then it's still private and not something that you should be taking home.

> prosecutor already had access to them

I don't think that argument works. The same could be said for a software engineer. He had access to the source code, so why can't he keep a copy of it?

The site[1] claims that every time you log into a Google property, like Gmail for example, Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you, and that means that Google Chrome can track everything you do.

Does every Hacker News Chrome user know this? Are you OK with it?

Do the millions of non-technical Chrome users know this? Would they be OK with it if they knew?

As far as I know, Firefox doesn't do this. At least I hope so.

[1] Under the heading "Google Chrome Browser Login Scam"

Whether or not they are copies is irrelevant(*). Are software engineers normally allowed to keep copies of the proprietary source code of their employer after they leave the company? Do accountants normally keep copies of the financial records of their employer? Is it standard practice for doctors to store medical records of hospital patients in their basement?

(*) If he kept the only copy, that's even worse since a new prosecutor wouldn't have access to the old records if they wanted to pursue a new prosecution or if there was an appeal to an old case.

> Former federal prosecutor John Franke led me down the staircase to the basement of his suburban Milwaukee home, stopping at a stash of bankers boxes. “They sat in storage in different houses for the last, what is it, 40 years?” he said. Franke peered inside one of the boxes, which was filled with court documents, FBI wiretap transcripts, notebooks and other files from the years he spent working to win convictions against Balistrieri and his associates.

It’s surprising to hear that the prosecutor was permitted to keep all these documents for himself. No explanation is given in the article about whether this is legal.

What is the rationale of promising to not reapply? If a company is hiring again 6 months after some layoffs, what would be wrong will rehiring an ex-employee who was one of those laid off, assuming they are the best candidate for the new job opening?

> every decision to change the spelling of your language should be the result of international comities

Your use of comiti reminds me of this "joke" that committees often make things much worse:

'Committee' was the spelling decided upon by the first Komiti.

It's fun to spell out 7 the different meanings you can get:

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. Tom saw it happen and he's the one who said she stole my wallet.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. You're making up something I never said.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. Maybe I suspected her, but I never actually said it.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. Someone stole it, but I don't know who it was.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. She took it, but for safekeeping after I forgot it at the restaurant.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. I did see her steal a wallet, but it wasn't mine.

- I didn't say she stole my wallet. She stole my money but left the wallet exactly where it was.

It's a great example of how written speech doesn't capture all the nuance of spoken words. Well, italics helps, but hearing it makes a bigger impact.

> drive to hospital instead of calling for ambulance

When some hospitals reach their capacity, they'll instruct ambulances to go to another hospital, which could be a worse hospital or much further away. If you're able to drive yourself or get someone to drive you, you can go to the closer/better hospital, and it's my understanding that they cannot turn you away if it's an emergency.

> On June 21 or so every year, Earth’s North Pole reaches its greatest tilt toward the sun. When that happens, the sun’s path across the sky takes it the highest above the horizon all year, making for the longest days of the year and giving the sun maximal time to heat the ground. We associate this time of year with warmth and sunshine.

The duration of daylight can't be the complete explanation for why summers are warmer because otherwise the North Pole and Scandinavia, having super long days, should be hot during summer. He forgot to mention that the angle of the suns rays, depending on where you are, is also a factor for the warmth, right?

Now that I'm thinking about it, which is really the bigger factor in having a warmer climate: your angle to the sun (your latitude) or the duration of the day? (I realize that they are connected, but I'm trying to imagine separating them.)

The headline in the Daily Mirror in the article says, "Mystery of Woman Novelist's Disappearance", which tells me that she was much less famous in 1926 than she is today. Any headline about her today would have used her name (just as the feature article and the Hacker News title did).

That fact that Apple blended iMessages, SMS text messages, and email into an extremely confusing mess may also be the reason for so many security issues related to iMessage. Perhaps not directly responsible for this particular NGO exploit, but I find iMessage's logic and behavior bewildering at times.

For example: If you stop using WhatsApp for example, nothing bad happens if you try to send messages another way. But if you stop using iMessage, then you can no longer send a normal SMS to someone with whom you've communicated before using iMessage. The Messages app will tell you, "You must enable iMessage to send this message", even if it's an SMS text message to a normal phone number! Why shouldn't that work?

To be able to again send SMS text messages to someone you used to talk with is to disable iMessage of course, then sign out of Facetime (who could imagine that as a necessary step?), sign out of iCloud, reboot the iPhone, and wait some minutes to hours to days until you are "deregistered" from iMessage. I'm talking about the same phone with the same SIM chip. The problem can become much worse if you've switched phones or SIM card.

The source code for iMessage must be a nightmare having integrated SMS and email and a new messaging system all together.

Another nightmare is trying to use an Apple TV with a captive portal.

I travel with my Apple TV so I don't have to enter my Netflix or whatever credentials into someone else's TV. Also, Apple TV has a much nicer UI than most smart TVs. However, no Apple TV model has a browser, so there's no way to directly log into a captive portal such as those used in a hotel.

My workaround is to set the MAC on my travel router to be the same as the Apple TV, then log in to the hotel's captive portal through the travel router. Once that's done, the hotel will remember that MAC address (the Apple TV's wifi address) and the Apple TV will not need any further authentication.

The travel router I use is a TP-Link TL-WR902AC. It has a horrible UI, but if you persist, it can be made to do a lot of unusual things you might need for travel or conferences.

And to address the problem you're having: At least once or twice when I couldn't connect to a captive portal using my Debian laptop, I was able to connect through the travel router (though I never figured out what the specific problem was).

> probably DeviceCheck, which gives you 2 bits to store “fraud” related flags

Does resetting your iPhone (Erase All Content and Settings) clear out data like that?

Does doing a restore from backup put that data back on your iPhone?

> Goodbye useless SEO spam, advertisement hell. We hated your guts.

That sounds great, but are you sure that there won't be legions of LLMs generating SEO spam and advertisement hell in warfare with the LLMs that do search?

Just as an aside: Sci-fi seems to have one superintelligence (one Skynet) fighting humankind. If superintelligence emerges, I think it's likely that we'll have thousands, millions, or billions of superintelligences fighting each other, each with its own agenda.

It's intriguing that medical care is always the worst kind of service, by far, in every country in the developed world, compared to every other kind of product or service we depend on. Compare it to food, electricity, gasoline, clothing, water, cell service, haircuts, transportation, movies. If you're not in a rural location, you can buy food or a restaurant meal 24-hours a day in less than an hour. There's complex infrastructure and supply chains around food production, but it works, and works fast. But you can't start most medical treatment without waiting days, weeks, or even months. In lots of places you can't even see a family physician or primary care doctor without waiting days.

Why is it? It is because medical care is more "personalized" and less of a commodity? Because it's heavily controlled by government? Is it the liability (medical people can get sued for a lot more than a bad haircut)? Due to much higher expectations of what is acceptable medical care compared to, say, food?

It doesn't seem obvious to me why the economics of medical care should be so different than everything else we use and depend on.

> 80/20 rule: 20% of customers were responsible for 80% of revenues

> Sometimes you will see a 90/10 relationship or a 75/25 split.

It's funny that his examples add up to a nice round 100, but it doesn't have to. The number of customers and percentage of revenue are two independent measures, and they don't have to sum to 100. You could have 20% of customers giving 99% of revenue (a 99/20 relationship) or 10% of customers giving 60% of revenue (a 60/10 split). I assume the author is well aware of this, but likes his examples to sound like the well-known 80/20.

A bunch of people are commenting here on how much of their karma comes from submissions and how much from commenting. But they are not treated equivalently for karma. Submissions give significantly less karma than comments. 100 points for a submission is worth less than 100 points for a comment.

May I ask what's the rationale for writing 01996 rather than 1996? I've seen this before but I haven't seen an explanation of the advantage of it.

Because of energy waste or some other reason?

Considering that this idea has been around forever and that it isn’t nearly as expensive[1] as you might initially assume, I wonder why it isn’t a standard feature of most homes in cold climates.

[1] “A snow melting system that heats the tire tracks only for a 10’x20’ driveway, is $2,346.” Paraphrased from https://www.floorheatingsystemsinc.com/snow-melting-system-c...

But then many people would first buy the gift card to get the 5% or whatever discount, then buy the item they were going to buy anyway.

Now that I think about it, I think a gift card has to be priced at exactly a 1:1 price. (You can't price it higher because people will find that to be outrageous.)

And the converse from The Simpsons: “gift card: just like cash but more limited”

Some very insightful and thought-provoking comments are under the above downvoted parent comment. I wonder what the Hacker News algorithm does with threads that have a downvoted parent but with highly upvoted replies? Does it push the thread down or keep it high? In either case, I've often thought that this was small flaw with threaded discussions (though I don't know a solution): There should be a way to maintain visibility or priority for great comments that are buried in downvoted threads.

> Equifax is now receiving records every pay period from 2.5 million companies. Information in the reports comes from employers and payroll processors.

But why do employers and payroll processors give any data to Equifax? I can understand that credit card issuers, and mortgage and auto lenders want to know the credit worthiness of people they'll give credit to, and those types of businesses are likely required to share their own customers' info if they want to participate. But what benefit does the typical employer get by talking with Equifax at all? And why wouldn't an employer demand that their payroll processor not share anything with Equifax? (Their executives and founders presumably want some privacy for themselves.)

I'm going out on a limb here and try to guess the reason: Is it because typical employees want their employer to share the info so they'll be seen as having income and therefore it's easier for them to get credit cards and mortgages and auto loans? And if this is the reason, how did this situation arise; did some employees petition their company to share info? Or did the company think it was doing a favor for its employees by giving them an employment history on Equifax?

Do these "This Does Not Exist" sites do live image generation (they are so fast), or do they generate the images slowly over days and weeks and show us images from a cache?