Hacker News Reader

jluxenbergon Buy An Ad, Own a Browser Botnet

Your browser isn't the problem, it's the hundreds of thousands of others that are using the default configuration and have no such protection.

jluxenbergon US Attorney General Holder: We Won't Torture or Kill Snowden

Snowden is charged [1] with:

  * 18 USC 641 - Theft of government property 
  * 18 USC 793(d) - Unauthorized communication of national defense information
  * 18 USC 798(a)(3) - Willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person

None carry the death penalty. All carry a prison sentence of "not more than ten years."

[1] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/world/us-vs-edwar...

[EDIT formatting]

jluxenbergon Iranian Hackers Post Images Over JFK Airport From UAV That Was Hijacked In March

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment

jluxenbergon [dead]

If your life is not awesome, make it so. You are the only one who can do it; no one else can do it for you.

Congrats! Your next move will be the right one.

jluxenbergon Automating Card Games Using OpenCV and Python

It's already the law in Nevada; NRS 465.075 "Use or possession of device to obtain advantage at playing game in licensed gaming establishment"

http://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-465.html#NRS465Sec075

jluxenbergon 22k more signatures needed on the Snowden pardon petition

The DNS entry for petitions.whitehouse.gov disappeared for a bit.

jluxenbergon 22k more signatures needed on the Snowden pardon petition

Hmm, it's back now.

jluxenbergon 22k more signatures needed on the Snowden pardon petition

Well this is awfully suspicious

  $ dig @8.8.8.8 petitions.whitehouse.gov

  ; <<>> DiG 9.6-ESV-R4-P3 <<>> @8.8.8.8 petitions.whitehouse.gov
  ; (1 server found)
  ;; global options: +cmd
  ;; Got answer:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 39404
  ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;petitions.whitehouse.gov.	IN	A

  ;; Query time: 500 msec
  ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
  ;; WHEN: Sat Jun 15 18:05:23 2013
  ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 42

jluxenbergon Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped

Communism may or may not be incompatible with the US constitution. A surveillance state is _certainly_ incompatible with the constitution and threatens our civil liberties.

Having not lived during the Cold War nor studied it, I don't have a perspective on what that is like. But I find it difficult to understand the idea that a political ideology like Communism ought to be "illegal."

jluxenbergon Warrant Canary

Instead of a news headline, they could use an entry in the Bitcoin ledger to prove that the canary is current (http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-is-public-ledg...)

EDIT: Actually, they could simply include the hash of a recent block in the blockchain.

jluxenbergon Principality of Hutt River

Interesting hack: "Casley styled himself His Majesty Prince Leonard I of Hutt to take advantage of the British Treason Act 1495; that a self-proclaimed monarch could not be guilty of any offence against the rightful ruler, and that anyone who interfered with that monarch's duties could be charged with treason"

jluxenbergon NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes

I wonder if that would be possible today with people being so connected. You can't disappear Americans without people noticing.

jluxenbergon New York Times silently edits its "lost all credibility" line

Typically any edit to a published piece, no matter how small, will have some kind of annotation indicating it was edited.

jluxenbergon The house I was born in sold for $4000

Homeowners of HN: how do you justify tying up a large percentage of your net worth in a home?

jluxenbergon Florida shortened yellow lights to increase red light camera revenue [video]

Predictable consequence of red light cameras. Most of the revenue (over 50% in Kissimmee, FL [1]) goes to the vendor!

[1] http://www.kissimmee.org/index.aspx?page=636

jluxenbergon Aaron Greenspan sues Facebook, Sequoia, Andreesen, YC, others

Some context:

(1) Think Computer Corporation built FaceCash (https://www.facecash.com/) a mobile payment solution

(2) Aaron Greenspan is Think's President and CEO

Maybe he's trying to get these companies to lobby against "money transmitter" regulation.

jluxenbergon DBX

Am I the only one who thought DBX was Dropbox's new ticker symbol? :)

jluxenbergon Why SICP Matters

Amaozn's got it for $46.55 (and it's eligible for Prime shipping) and MIT has it for $50; maybe I'm missing something?

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Prog...

jluxenbergon Year Five

I'm surprised that more companies don't pay (the employees they want to keep) what their "flawless market value" would be

The only company I'm aware of that does this (paying "flawless market value") is Netflix.

jluxenbergon It Can’t All Be True

So Tim Cook's response to media predictions about the build can be reduced to two words; "no comment"

jluxenbergon Bitcoins Are Digital Collectibles, Not Real Money

Transactions on the blockchain actually occur in "satoshi," (currently) the smallest divisible unit of a Bitcoin.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#What_do_I_call_the_various_de...

jluxenbergon GitHub availability this week

"16 of these repositories were private, and for seven minutes from 8:19 AM to 8:26 AM PDT on Tuesday, Sept 11th, were accessible to people outside of the repository's list of collaborators or team members"

ouch!

jluxenbergon Get Exec to Volunteer for Charity on your Behalf

FYI: Exec appears to be invite-only right now, but if you sign up via the "give to charity page" you can get an account.

jluxenbergon Ouya Approaches $5 Million In Backing, Attracts 5x Goal (So Far)

From the founder's description of the console:

"Let’s open this sucker up!...We’re handing the reins over to the developer with only one condition: at least some gameplay has to be free."

They aim to produce an open platform for TV gaming that puts requirements on how games are distributed. What?! Doesn't sound "free" to me.

jluxenbergon How SR-71 Blackbird Designers Overcame Canonical Jet Engine Limitations

Neat anecdote about the SR-71's speed from a former pilot http://www.jumbojoke.com/the_king_of_speed.html

(couldn't find a better link; this is an excerpt from Sled Driver: Flying the World's Fastest Jet by Brian Schul)

jluxenbergon Bye Bye Craigslist

Just sent a mail to {craig,jim}@craigslist.org. Not sure if it will help but if they hear enough noise about it, maybe they'll change their stance.

jluxenbergon Cascading errors caused AWS to go down

"Those customers with affected instances or volumes that were running in multi-Availability Zone configurations avoided meaningful disruption to their applications"

"Meaningful disruption" is a bit of a weasel word; Amazon's own EBS API was down for almost two hours[1] despite being designed to use multiple AZs

[1] "the EBS-related EC2 API calls were impaired from 8:57PM PDT until 10:40PM PDT ... The EC2 and EBS APIs are implemented on multi-Availability Zone replicated datastores"

Guess the moral of the story is, if you require high availability then you must test your system in the face of an availability zone outage.

jluxenbergon Docking standard for the International Space Station

I think this is the protocol that Dragon is following on the current mission:

http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/design_lib/SSP50235.ISSvehicle...

jluxenbergon Live: SpaceX Dragon docking with ISS

Where did you find a link to this?

jluxenbergon Live: SpaceX Dragon docking with ISS

4:12AM CT according to the NASA broadcast