Hacker News Reader

imrooton FCC Temporary Waiver Permits Higher Symbol Rate Data for Hurricane Ida Traffic

I'm not going to say that it doesn't happen, but, honestly, most of the folks who I've met in my journey with Amateur radio are folks who are truly excited about RF and who want to share their knowledge in the hobby to others.

imrooton Launch HN: Govly (YC S21) – Making it easier to sell to the U.S. government

FEDRAMP compliance isn’t cheap, and it’s not really something startups have the wherewithal of handling until they are a midsized company.

imrooton Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

https://towardsdatascience.com/black-box-attacks-on-perceptu...

I mean, who's to say that my hash is actually what they think it is...

...and if it's not uploaded to iCloud for someone to manually review what the image is, is that going to be enough to get a search warrant for my phone?

"AUSA SOMEONE: But, Your Honor, The Defendant's phone has an image that matched a hash of a CSAM picture!"

"DEFENDANT: I'm not going to give you my phone's password."

"THE COURT: Bonk: Stay in jail for contempt."

I understand why they're doing it. I don't agree with it. At all, and I say that as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

imrooton The rise of never-ending job interviews

Redhat: This one was for you. From the moment I applied through a recruiter until I got an offer letter was about 13 months.

In that time, I had already started my new job -- I didn't actually take the role at RedHat, but, I was able to use their offer letter as leverage to increase my salary.

I've worked for YC companies, I've worked for large companies. The larger companies seem to be a little bit easier to get into: my only interview at Luxottica was literally someone asking me about some retail experience I had about 20 years ago and some very basic Linux questions (retail technical architect position), but, I've had YC companies have a multi-month long interview process where I've been told after 10 or 11 interviews that they thought I was "Too senior for the role," which, just kinda blew my mind.

The whole process is broken, but, there's not really a good solution to fix it.

imrooton Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence from gunshot-detecting AI

Cincy PD disables alerts for ShotSpotter on the 4th of July and disables it during baseball/football games downtown because the pyro from the games causes false alarms.

imrooton QR Codes Are Here to Stay. So Is the Tracking They Allow

BestBuy's been doing this since 2010:

https://retailgeek.com/best-buy-deploys-qr-codes-to-enhance-...

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

imrooton What’s it like hauling nuclear weapons across the country?

The only high risk areas are where you start, and where you finish, because those are known positions. Everything else can be variable....and nobody is any the wiser, because the only thing that's really different is that the trucks have zero DOT/MC numbers on the side and they have GSA plates on the truck/trailer....and I highly doubt that they stop at Weigh stations along the way. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyjQb3oJi80 -- this is a video of how the military transports warheads around: I'd assume many of the same types of transports are similar in nature between the NNSA and the DOD.

imrooton My business might have 32 days before it's shut down by NYC [video]

I think it's LEADS:

Law Enforcement Agencies Data System

In Ohio, it's operated by the Ohio State Highway Patrol. I know that Chicago has their own LEADS implementation. Wouldn't surprise me if NYC has their own.

As a pawn shop owner, I have to submit the same records.

imrooton I made 50k calls to explore the telephone network

I did the same thing -- wardialed the free-to-dial extensions in the small town that I grew up in.

The next day, someone from the gas company knocked on my parents door because apparently my war-dialer (who worked during the day when I was at school) knocked offline their monitoring system.

Now-a-days, I'm sure I'd be hauled off to jail instead of a polite request to keep the 13 year old away from the phones for a bit.

imrooton The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

My biggest complaint about the ReMarkable is the lack of any meaningful business management tools -- I love using it, but, I need to be able to limit sharing, specify a specific SMTP service to use for sharing pdf files, remotely wipe a device, enforce a password on the device before storing and sharing notes from a sensitive meeting amongst my team.

Outside of that edge case, I love it and it's indispensable and I use it at least 3 times a day for meetings and other to-do lists for myself.

imrooton Sunsetting Secret Santa and Reddit Gifts

They hired the staff/volunteers from the original reddit gift exchange app to work on integrating it into reddit core, then (assuming here), laid them off and killed the project.

imrooton Peloton to invest $400M to build its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Ohio

I thought this was up in Troy Township (Wood County), not in Troy (the city, in Miami county).

imrooton Waymo AV Freaked Out by Traffic Cones, Blocks Traffic, Evades Support Vehicles

There is a standard for the various road conditions that are out there -- the MUTCD ("Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices") -- and there's a fairly large chapter on temporary lane closure/construction zones.

This setup wasn't completely MUTCD compliant, but, there are also some states with their own, state-specific editions of the MUTCD.

imrooton I refused to become an FBI informant, the government put me on the no fly list

I've had similar experiences, though, not with FBI, with DHS at DEFCON, to the point where I've been handed DHS business cards prior to hopping on flights out of Las Vegas on my way home, and them calling me on my personal (non-work-published) cell phone a few days later.

imrooton Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

I carry both a reMarkable and a Rocketbook with me -- the e-ink tablet makes taking notes super easy, but, the rocketbook is great for sketching and coming up with arch drawings and the like.

I can quickly turn the RocketBook sketches into pdfs and send them to the reMarkable for further processing...but, I love the flexibility between the two, and honestly, the reMarkable fits in the pocket off my RocketBook...so it's not difficult to carry both.

The more that I use reMarkable, the more I fall in love with it, but, I wish I could find a way to make my own templates.

imrooton Radio users reminded not to use radios in crimes

Except in Kentucky (in a motor vehicle), unless you're a ham:

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id...

When I chatted with a SRO about this when programming the schools radios a few years ago, I was told that he didn't know anyone other than the State Police to issue citations for that law, and it would only be a 'secondary' offense (if you were pulled over for speeding, and they saw the scanner, then you'd likely get a citation, but, they wouldn't pull you over if you had an antenna on your car).

imrooton Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

I use taskwarrior and time warrior for keeping track of my tasks and the amount of time that I’m doing, and have task warrior set up so that it’s the first thing I see when I log into my home server.

I do use khal and sync it with my google calendar. I haven’t figured out multi-calendar sync just yet (work/personal/wife), but, it’s on my list.

imrooton Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

I'm a Radio Astronomy Enthusiast.

I was at Big Ear the weekend before it was tore down, and it was what really prompted me to get into Radio Astronomy. It's what prompted me to visit Arecibo in the late 90's -- there wasn't much of a visitor's center, but, I was still able to get a tour by someone who was working that day.

I tried to get into OSU's Electrical Engineering Program (my mentor went there, and I had made a lot of friends through him), but, my military service made it impossible for me to find a path forward at OSU, and managed to go to a small private school's engineering school instead.

Radio Astronomy (and, broadcast/ham radio) really helped me shape my engineering prowess to who I am today.

imrooton Airbnb S-1

"We have incurred net losses in each year since inception, and we may not be able to achieve profitability."

At least they're honest about it!

imrooton Airbnb S-1

Most gift card companies are set up in Utah, where the gift card laws are much more lenient.

imrooton Slingbox Discontinued Announcement and FAQ

The original slingboxes (Circa 2008/2009) ran locally, and could be exposed on your networks if you did the setup.

In 2013/2014, they changed the way that it was handled.

I have 4 Slingboxes -- one in Miami, one in Kentucky, one in Cincinnati, and one as a "backup," -- and am really kinda bummed by this decision.

imrooton Big Ass Fan’s Clean Air System

The first time my mom flew out of LEX, she saw the "big ass fan" in the airport terminal and was so thrilled with the name and how she felt the fan working she bought one for her patio.

I've heard that they're a really good company to work for in LEX (between them and RJ Corman; some of the best non-technology places to work in central KY).

imrooton Mutt 2.0 Release Notes

I use weeslack for my Slack integration, and still live just about 100% in the terminal.

imrooton Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

This "one guy," if you will, is responsible for a majority of the ansible galaxy modules that are out there.

Far from a bad actor just utilizing CPU time for pet projects, Jeff's code is probably in use in a large majority of companies that use Ansible, mine included.

imrooton The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

The Serverless revolution has stalled...because it takes a long time for that service to start up, as it's so infrequently used.

I'll see myself out.

imrooton ExamSoft's remote bar exam sparks privacy and facial recognition concerns

I interviewed at an online proctor company, and I discovered that the build of chrome that they used tracked my eyes, tracked my mouse movements, and tracked my searches as I sat in their conference room and took some bullshit personality test.

I had a decent offer, but, still turned them down. Just wasn't interested in helping something like that succeed

imrooton Is anybody still using Windows 95?

I remember using WordPerfect on VAX/VMS (on a decterm, no less), and I recall them having some flavor of Unix based binary, but, I can't find references to either out there anymore.

imrooton The FBI is secretly using Sabre as a global travel surveillance tool

The travel industry (esp the airlines) are moving to puzzle piece style integrations -- I know that Hilton Uses Sabre for incoming GDS reservations, but, uses salesforce internally for managing a lot of the guest interactions (including bookings and customer support): AA (as mentioned previously in this thread) uses multiple commercial systems, and Marriott uses a mixture of FOSSE, MARSA (there might be an H in there, but, it's been a while since I've been at MI) that talk to their backend microservices for their .com system.

MI picked up a LOT of technical debt and a LOT of security bugs when transitioning SPG programs and properties into MI's portfolio (thankfully, I was off of that project at that point in time).

I don't think this is the case where the FBI or other conglomerates have direct SQL-style access into their systems, but, more-so where FBI has retired or plans internally to pull data from systems when requested: When it's hard as hell for employees with the proper need-to-know for their application to pull up data in a meaningful fashion, you know that it's next to impossible for Law Enforcement to have a nice little dashboard where they can just type "Ian Wilson" and get a list of every place I've ever stayed ever (unless they're working with VISA: that's something that I kinda expect, tho).

imrooton YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

I built something like this, but, only for commercials, using RTL-SDR dongles and intel NUC's.

I never did figure out a way to monetize it, but, the thought was to that if you were pepsi, you could be alerted for coke's new commercials on a per-market or per-station basis, depending on how you wanted to pay for it.

I ended up turning the hardware into my P25 decoder for Hamilton County (currently running at https://cvgscan.iwdo.xyz ), but, I would kinda love to get back into that space again.

imrooton How Google Meet's noise cancellation works

One of the things I picked up from HN a few months ago was bettering my remote setup -- I picked up a HDMI capture card for my mirrorless camera, and bought a few lights to brighten up my office, and then I purchased a cardioid microphone and a pop filter.

The difference is night and day based on some of the recordings I've heard.