Hacker News Reader

jdthomason A Look at Embedded WiFi Development Boards

Nice summary.

I recently picked up an ESP8266 for a project, but yet to start farting around with it. Excited to find some spare time.

jdthomason Shred Video (YC S15) Turns Hours of Video into a Montage in Seconds

Hmm. Really needs a way to save and resume editing a "shred" I was in the middle of selecting some different portions of a bunch of videos and accidentally quit. Seems like an app with potential though.

jdthomason The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

Sort of related to this post; I recently read Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima [0]. I was not expecting much from the book, but it turned out to be FANTASTIC, would highly recommend if you have any interest in nuclear accidents or nuclear energy in general; I learned a lot from reading it.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1605986801/

edit: formatting

jdthomason Wi-Fi and Neighborhood Conflicts: An Algorithm to Keep the Peace

Interesting, glanced through your paper. How do you find real devices behave at constrained channel widths (<20Mhz in 2.4, <40Mhz in 5)? I have a feeling those are not well tested scenarios :)

jdthomason Wi-Fi and Neighborhood Conflicts: An Algorithm to Keep the Peace

Hmm, I have not read his paper, but based on the article's mention of "divided into 13 channels" this is clearly speaking of the 2.4Ghz spectrum. Rather than try to distribute that evenly, you are FAR better off upgrading your AP and switching to a 5Ghz channel. First, there are far more potential channels in 5Ghz. Second, they are wider bandwidth (40Mhz, 80Mhz if 80211ac). And third, 5Ghz does not propagate through walls as well (a _feature_ when you have neighbors also using the spectrum).

My other thoughts: if he is using 8 channels instead of the standard 3 (1,6,11) then there will be some overlap; 80211 devices tends to better handle in-channel interference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

jdthomason iOS 8 randomises the MAC address while scanning for WiFi networks

This only occurs for 'hidden' networks. If you do not have any hidden networks in your known network list than you will not be broadcasting SSIDs. This is yet another reason to avoid setting your AP to hidden.

jdthomason A software engineer's website

I stuck with lynx for the longest time. Somewhere around 2007 the web became COMPLETELY unusable, even on the subset of sites I would visit. Sad times we're living in. :)

jdthomason Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID

On iOS 7 you have to explicitly trust a computer from the device before data is allowed over USB; before that it is in a charge only mode. To trust a computer you must unlock the device.

jdthomason Apple’s Fingerprint ID May Mean You Can’t ‘Take the Fifth’

I think cbhl's point is perfectly valid, in the presentation of the feature, Apple states that about half of people leave their phones w/o a PIN. Touch ID is for these people and in general will make unauthorized access to iPhones more difficult.

Touch ID is optional, if a user feels particularly concerned, about legal implications of this, it is perfectly valid to revert to a passcode. I am glad that this article/discussion exists though, it is good to know what risks may exists using new security systems.

[Edited to add: just read somewhere else that after 48 hours of inactivity or a reboot, user must re-enter passcode before fingerprint will unlock the device. This would seem to protect from the case stated in the article.]

jdthomason Code & Conquer: A War Game for Coders

Cool. Reminds me a bit of http://aichallenge.org/ which was TONS of fun.

jdthomason Bunny.py: A WiFi darknet that hides its traffic in the noise of 802.11

802.11w adds encrypted management frames, but in practice this tends not to be a huge issue and not many vendors implement it yet.

jdthomason Apple’s Q1 2013: Revenue Up 17.7% to $54.5B, $13.1B In Profit

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0001193125130...

Dividend perhaps?

edit: I suppose that doesn't come out of operating expenses

jdthomason Aaron Swartz commits suicide

This is awful news.

I haven't been in touch with Aaron for several years, but I had a brief encounter with him in 2008. I was between jobs and decided to help out with his watchdog.net project of the time. He was always incredibly kinda and once tracked down my number and called to check that I was OK after I was unexpectedly offline for a several days.

Great guy; will be missed.

jdthomason China's mini Apple takes slice of smartphone pie

"Xiaomi has already sold 300,000 of its latest phone model, launched in October."

It doesn't even look like the phone sold well; it sold out, but not well. Numbers like that will not be concerning to Apple, HTC, Samsung, et. al.

jdthomason Windows 8 store apps pass 20,000 mark, almost 18,000 are free

I was thinking the same thing. The key to a vibrant app ecosystem is making profit for developers. Possibly these apps are making ad money, but yet to be seen.

jdthomason 4G: Bad coverage, crap battery life - but at least it's really expensive (UK)

Maybe for an individual user "3g" is sufficient, but my understanding is that it is a poor use of spectrum. One big motivator to move to LTE will be in congested areas where everyone simply cannot be served sufficient bandwidth with the legacy technology.

jdthomason UI/UX and Subjectivity

I don't know ... Some UI/UX is subjective.

For instance, my willingness to put up with an initial learning curve vs working with an "intuitive" interface. You may call these "design decisions" and that a well designed UI/UX could be a part of any point on that spectrum, but they are design decisions made by the people in charge of UI/UX and impact the final UI/UX.

It is why I become frustrated using a many GUI programs when all I really want is to write a damn awk script :)

jdthomason Actual OIS performance: Lumia 920 against iPhone 5, Galaxy S III, HTC One X

I wish they shot something with motion in low light... From pictures my friends post online, my biggest complaint about most point and shoot (and phone) cameras in low light is not digital noise, but motion blur. I would prefer manufactures to bump the gain and take faster exposures.

jdthomason English is heavily left-handed

It would be more interesting to check ngrames to see how frequently you must hit a key on the same hand twice. Qwerty was designed to prevent jamming typewriters, IIRC.

jdthomason How I cracked my neighbor's WiFi password without breaking a sweat

1. The attack is to brute force the shared secret (password). This can be done offline because by capturing the exchange you have the ANonce and SNonce and all other information required to generate the same key -- except the shared secret. Try lots of passwords and check if you generate the same PTK as the two stations do.

2. Encrypted with what? This is the key exchange stage that is attacked here.

802.11w adds signing to management frames which eliminates the deauth attack -- makes it harder to capture the EAPOL frames. Also, IIRC, WPA2-enterprise would not be susceptible to this sort of attack; you've pre-shared a key rather than a (short) password for generating one.

edit: spelling

jdthomason No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web

Completely agree, just to add a few of my points...

Designers are also ruining the web because they are removing choice in how I view content.

HTML pages used to be designed such that they were a standard markup language. Thus I could change the settings of my browser if I preferred a dark background with light text. Now in the land of everything is a DIV and CSS is used to recreate the markup language, this is no longer possible -- at least not in a generic way. Not to mention it breaks browsing in a completely cross platform way (lynx, small screened devices, screen readers, etc.); you designer, will always forget at least one. And don't get me started on sites that do not load the content without javascript.

My preference would be that designers accepted the constraints of HTML. They are more than welcome to use CSS to offer my browser suggestions to how it should be rendered, but as the viewer, the final choice would be to me. If you MUST make the layout fit some exact format, switch to PDF (or similar) and don't pretend to be HTML.

I kind of feel like in the '90s, we screwed ourselves by having ugly defaults in the browsers. If no-CSS HTML files rendered more beautifully, maybe we would've avoided this mess.

jdthomason ESR on Facebook

This is true, but you would expect that "hacker employees" would make their products compatible with "hacker users."

My thoughts when reading Zuckerberg's letter (and I admit I only scanned it) were: 1. "Wow, this surprises me, but I actually agree with what he is saying." followed immediately by 2. "Waaaaaaait just one minute. Facebook -- externally at least -- embodies none of this!"

They have closed down what could be open. They are helping to ruin the internet by making walled gardens acceptable and the norm.

jdthomason Plan 9: The way the future was

The HUGE advantage of "everything is a file" is that if you make a tool that works on one "thing" and then want to use it on another "thing" it is quit possible that it will just work. For instance, on OSX, one of the things I sorely miss is the sysfs from Linux. Sure, OSX has the ioreg, but I cannot use the tools I am used to (find, grep, cat, echo, sed, awk, ...).

To put it in terms the web programmers can understand, it is like REST, you have a GET (read), and a POST (write), and I suppose a DELETE (unlink), and with that you can implement all you need. Everything fits into a very few syscalls (open, read, write, close).

jdthomason United States Postal Service tries to compete with Google using fear

If the USPS wants more usage, rather than marketing, they need to "innovate" just a tad. There is a value-add service that I really wish the USPS would provide. It is very simple too...

I would like an abstraction layer for my address. I am still fairly young and move semi-frequently -- every few years. I want a static address that I can give to my bank, DMV, anything that needs to mail me things. This address will auto-forward to my current living address. Thus I will not have to update all my services when I move. It might also be nice to have multiple addresses forwarded to the same location as well; my address and my current roommates.

The format of this address could follow PO box style, or they could even invent something new (blah@physical.usps.com).

This is something that I think would be easy for the USPS to provide (mail is routed electronically, and I am basically just asking for a lookup table). This would be more difficult for "competitors" UPS/FedEx/DHL to provide, and just might bring more use to the USPS. So why hasn't the USPS done it?

jdthomason SecondMarket CEO: Forget Facebook, the IPO market is dying

Exactly! This feels like a "scam" to skirt the rules of the SEC.

> “The IPO market is dying,” he said. “You see companies achieving robust valuations on the private market but being treated poorly when they go public.” (We’re looking at you, Groupon and Zynga.)

Zynga and Groupon were "treated poorly" because their numbers showed that they were NO WHERE NEAR as profitable as they wanted us to believe when they were private (and secrete). I suspect Facebook, also has highly inflated valuation in these "second markets" where information is scarce.

jdthomason Alexis Ohanian vs NBC - Debating SOPA

I tend to disagree with the entire argument that it is OK because it is only going to target foreign sites.

The internet tends to be (or should be) borderless. What if the next Google or Facebook doesn't come from Silicon valley but instead from India? How do we already feel when foreign governments are blocking the current Google and Facebook?

jdthomason Eric Schmidt: We Don't Talk About Occupy Wall Street In The Valley

> You can get a five bedroom, three-bathroom house in the southernmost part of San Jose for less than $500,000 -- about one-third the price it would cost in Mountain View.

Seems like by considering a 500k house inexpensive reinforces the point that we are in a 'bubble' in Silicon Valley.

jdthomason SOPA vote is now December 21

Gah! At lest the 10th major site I've run into recently that does this (including google groups). If you want to forward me to a mobile version of your site, at least drop me at the content I was trying to find.

jdthomason HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source

Problem isn't so much kernel level drivers, but user space. Or undocumented proprietary APIs to firmware. I suspect it is not a problem for most components. Most phones are just recombinations of the same components. The problem areas would be the radios and possibly the graphics.

Check the tear downs of the HTC Sensation and the HP TouchPad .. virtually the same device inside. ;)