Hacker News Reader

msumpteron FCC Proposes Changing Comment System After WSJ Found Thousands of Fakes

I may be cynical but when I read they want a new system to create 'safeguards against abusive conduct', I really think they mean they want a system to suppress the sudden influx of actual public opinions (similar to that of the rush of traffic Last Week Tonight referred during their segment on Net Neutrality) and not flood out the machine driven comments supporting their decisions.

msumpteron Shutting Down the BGP Hijack Factory

If you look up the BGP routes for a Bitcanal IP address (185.215.113.235) on HE's looking glass (https://lg.he.net/) it does not appear any routes are present. I believe HE's BGP page may still be out of date, or the peers are present but not active.

msumpteron Shutting Down the BGP Hijack Factory

According to a post by Job on nanog they have been known to submitted false or fabricated IRR information to RADB and RIPE: http://seclists.org/nanog/2018/Jun/379

At the end of the day, BGP is a very trusting protocol and it requires keeping the neighborhood clean and clear. IMO providers should be filtering prefixes their clients shouldn't be announcing (al la BCP38) but keeping up on the various IP blocks being shifted around is a paperwork nightmare I'm sure.

msumpteron Shutting Down the BGP Hijack Factory

I'm getting a servfail when attempting to resolve their domain, according to DomainTools[1] the IP for the site was 185.215.113.235 announced from AS42229.

The ASN was mentioned in the article as being listed by Spamhaus ASN Droplist but wasn't mentioned earlier as one of the targeted ASNs.

Edit: reviewed the ASN more and it is the Ebony Horizon mentioned in the article, and it is only peered to BitCanal's primary AS197426, which is subsequently being de-peered, so I'd say that is the main reason bitcanal.com is down :) 1: http://whois.domaintools.com/bitcanal.com

msumpteron Cost of hosting the Meta Discourse forum on AWS

Another vote for XenForo, my previous employer ran several forums all using vBulletin. IMO the direction of vBulletin 5 was a big miss, and like other commenters have said, the core product manager/developer of vBulletin 3 & 4 left to start XenForo. There was some significant legal drama with the current owner of vBulletin suing XenForo for infringement & theft intellectual property. Those all have been dismissed in favor of XenForo (all from memory, probably worthwhile to search this out just in case).

I've seen some enthusiasm around Discourse but for users who are used to the look & feel of a traditional discussion forum or the workflow of vBulletin, it can be very jarring. I believe there was a decent community split when Ubuntu tried to retire their legacy vBulletin forum in favor of Discourse; I think they are still running both side by side with almost different groups using them. XenForo is a more natural progression from vBulletin and would be my platform of choice.

msumpteron Lawyers Send Mobile Ads To Phones In ER Waiting Rooms

I had a former sales person who worked for the Berry company (who produced the Yellow Pages) tell me the two biggest buyers of listings/ads were doctors and lawyers. So not surprised lawyers may be willing to overspend a bit compared to how much those very prominent ads for lawyers were in phone books (think rear cover or side binding). I assume they still spend quite a bit on the Yellow pages since that may be all that is available to you while you sit in jail and need legal council.

msumpteron Huawei will stop providing bootloader unlocking for all new devices

And I guess I bought my last Huawei device!

It's crazy that they just began sponsoring XDA and then make that kind of move, XDA is now running a regular Q&A with their CEO every Friday, I predict none of the 10 questions they select will have to do with bootloader unlocking, like people on XDA would care about such a thing...

msumpteron Announcing Microsoft's Own Content Delivery Network

> In addition to launching access to our native global network, we're also launching a public preview of use-your-own SSL certificate, enabling customers to customize and self-maintain their own certificate and create a CDN solution perfectly fitted to their needs.

Any bets how long till Let's Encrypt functionality/automation is built out by a community project?

msumpteron Tech conferences moving north as Trump policies turn off attendees

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I think we didn't fully appreciate how much the 'social' aspect of the show was more important than the 'education' we provided. We de-epmhesized the after show social hours and other parties, and instead focused on marketing the education factor, and gradually the fun left the show along with the people. But that's my personal opinion.

msumpteron Tech conferences moving north as Trump policies turn off attendees

IMO the conference market has taken a hit in general prior to the Trump administration. For the previous several years, attendance and sponsorships were trending down, it seemed like most companies budgets were being pulled from onsite training to virtual and sponsoring companies wanted to focus on their own niche mini show around their products only. We had a healthy percent of international attendees that came in every year, I can only imagine with sentiment being customs/immigration is getting worse for travelers, that would discourage attendees from coming in.

msumpteron Tech conferences moving north as Trump policies turn off attendees

Worked previously for a company owning many trade shows/events and we purposefully moved the shows to various destination cities to encourage the tourism aspect, a new city every year was tough so we repeated cities eventually. We never ventured into moving an existing US based show out of country, when we did international shows they were always stood up as separate. But considering the political climate today, it really isn't a surprise to move one north of the boarder.

msumpteron PrivacyGuide: Towards an Implementation of EU GDPR on Privacy Policy Evaluation

And I think the fact they have to respect the requests regardless of where the European individual is today (eg in the US at time of posting but still a French national). I think enough companies are aware they don’t want to blanket blacklist all requests from Europe along with the mix of EU visitors, it makes it impossible to decern what rules applies where. I wonder if we’ll start to see US based users claim they are European to attempt to remove references, how would a tech company decern between legit and illegit requests (asking for proof of ID creates yet another potential storage of EU data). I suspect most companies won’t vet the requests and just comply or risk the potential huge fines

msumpteron You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

I've used similar phonetic algos in Excel to deduplicate CRM data during corporate acquisitions, it always seemed like the source data was hopelessly duplicated, but running a few of theses algos against the data, and then providing the 'best guesses' to the sales team to then do the final massaging of which accounts are truly duplicate or should be left alone.

Soundex is very simple but works well, calculating a strings Jaro–Winkler distance also helped.

msumpteron Robot Assembles Ikea Furniture

We furnished our small satellite office in Seattle from IKEA, and putting the supplied alan keys into a drill chuck saved our wrists from hours of torture.

msumpteron Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison

And that's why I moved over to MMC based Pi clones (specifically the Rock64), I am overly tired of SD cards mysteriously corrupting themselves. As of yet, I haven't had an MMC go upside down, but that's certainly far from guaranteed as well.

msumpteron Transparent ceramics made with aluminum

I believe the story was the person who invented transparent aluminum was the man they approached and just gave him the idea sooner (or maybe this is how he always came up with it, timelines can be funny)

msumpteron SpaceX's Falcon Heavy center booster lacked ignition fluid to re-light engines

I believe the two boosters were previously flown and were of an older block/generation (block 3 and 4 if memory serves me) where they are focusing on block 5 as the final revision and all future Falcon rockets would be this same standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Block_5

msumpteron Designing Distributed Systems E-Book

Lead nurturing.. Or how Cal from the 40 Year Old Virgin puts it: You've gotta wait till the seed grows into a plant. Then you've gotta f* the plant.

msumpteron Designing Distributed Systems E-Book

A direct link[0] to the PDF in case someone doesn't want to fill out the form: https://azure.microsoft.com/mediahandler/files/resourcefiles...

[0] - Always subject to change of course

msumpteron CloudFlair: Bypassing CloudFlare using Internet-wide scan data

Are you looking to make this feature available to only the paid tier or also to the free tier? Wasn't certain based on the blog posting, but most of the time you'll say if a feature is enterprise only, etc.

Currently on the free tier for my personal projects and would love to play with this on my personal k8s cluster.

msumpteron Uber’s Secret Tool for Keeping the Cops in the Dark

So prior to the next warrant served to Uber authorities will sever all communication lines ran into the suite right?

msumpteron Wi-Fi startup Eero lays off 30 employees

I think the wifi captive portal feature requires a constantly running controller, other than that I only start a local controller for changes.

msumpteron AWS Cloud9 – Cloud Developer Environments

There are also a few docker based installation options for self-hosting too. I created one as well to run the container as my local user to not muck with file permissions https://github.com/msumpter/docker-cloud9-ide

msumpteron Equihax

Dunno why, but just surprised that Kim K's credit score with Equifax is 643. Unrelated, sorry.

msumpteron The Equifax breach may be the worst leak of personal info ever

Glad filings are being made already, I wonder if it will be possible for someone to also seek relief/guidance for individuals checking to see if they were breached on trustedidpremier.com and may be inadvertently waiving their rights to class action suits and instead being forced into individual arbitration.

Based on the fact their privacy policy and terms of service were just updated on Sep 6, this seems pretty blatant. Browserwrapped agreements haven't held up in most cases, but having the arbitration clause at the very beginning seems to be point of the entire thing. Pushing a notice 41 days after a breach (just in time for the 45 day requirement in most states) and directing individuals to check if they are impacted all while tricking them into waiving rights. Seems deceptive to me.

msumpteron Cybersecurity Incident Involving Consumer Information

Also just tried to pull a credit report for Equifax via annualcreditreport.com and received a messages a condition exists at this time not allowing my report to be pulled and instead gave me mailing instructions.