mysteriousllama

Tasker for Android can help notify you if this is happening to you.

From the documentation I've gathered stingray devices appear to impersonate a cell tower with a stronger signal than the real one in order to get the device to associate. This means that stingray devices likely have their own cell ID so as not to trample the real one. If it didn't, it'd be a jammer not an interception device.

A simple PoC Tasker script (I wish it had an actual text-based language..): Add a new state, "Cell Near", Scan and pick the tower with highest signal. Invert the action. Tie it to a Notification task.

Whenever your phone associates with anything other than that tower you will get a notification. If you're good with Tasker it can be expanded to use GPS/Expected-tower pairs and alert you if something strange is going on.

Yes, someone should write an app for the general public. Maybe even see if the EFF can help promote it!

I remember picking up an Omni magazine when I was a prepubescent tadpole. The cover had this amazing art that caught my eye. Guess who had drawn it?

Only later did I read it and become fascinated with science. Guess what I do now?

It's amazing how much this man did for the world through his work. Very influential to many people in many ways.

He will be missed.

I suppose this is as good a place to ask as any. I can't be the only one in this boat!

I currently use an ancient Droid2 because it has a hardware keyboard with most of the characters I need for programming and SSH sessions. It's really starting to show it's age and I would like to upgrade.

No newer phones come with keyboards. The default software keyboard does not have the needed characters. Third party soft keyboards have the correct characters, but it takes a massive amount of screen space to display them in a usable manner.

So I ask you hackernews: What phone setup do you use for SSH during long commutes and such? Are there any decent external hardware keyboards that integrate well with particular models? How about Phablets that have the extra screen space for a proper soft keyboard?

My apologies. Being unfamiliar with UK law I mistakenly made the assumption that the blacklisting is legally required.

However it might as well be. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation#Blac... it is in effect on 90%+ of UK ISPs and there is significant pressure on ISPs to implement this technology.

The answer may surprise you.

We all know the UK has internet blacklists managed by various agencies such as the IWF[1]. These blacklists are highly granular and allow blocking of individual HTTP resources.

Virgin is intercepting your DNS traffic and putting you through a proxy to Google. In this way they can block individual pages and images on Google without denying you access to the entire site.

UK ISPs are being forced by the law to filter certain content. Doing it in the manner detailed above angers their customers less. It also leads to interesting situations for site owners. If a site has even a single URL on the blacklist the entire UK will appear to be coming from a small set of proxy IP addresses.

[1] https://www.iwf.org.uk/

To add to this: Cache and cache invalidation.

Without proper caching and a good invalidation strategy your databases will get pounded. Use redis and memcache to cache everything possible. Don't even connect to the database unless you have to. Ensure that you can invalidate any cache entry easily and keep things atomic so you do not run in to race conditions. Use locking to ensure that when the cache expires the database does not get a dog-pile with multiple copies of the same query. You'd think the query-cache in your database of choice may be just as efficient but trust me, it is not even close. You can also cache higher-level objects than just simple queries.

Depending on your reliability requirements you may even consider treating your cache as writeback and doing batched database writes in the background. These are generally more efficient than individual writes due to a variety of factors.

I've worked on several top-2oo ranking sites and this has always been one of the main go-to strategies for scaling. Databases suck - Avoid querying them.

I do wish they would tell us if EMET[1] is an effective mitigation for this vulnerability or not. Considering it involves memory corruption it's likely.. But finding out the hard way would be no fun.

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2458544

What you are describing is autoconf, not make. Make by itself is actually a very handy tool for performing tasks that have a dependency graph.

Autoconf.. Well, I can't disagree. It's a hack built on top of a hack and should probably be rethought. Once autoconf is done generating Makefiles, make itself is generally trouble-free.

http://freecode.com/articles/stop-the-autoconf-insanity-why-...

Has anyone else pondered what would happen if knowledgeable people were to help Australians perform a civil protest in the form of a resource consumption attack?

Even with data caps in place I'm sure one could perform quite a few requests/second continuously for an entire month.

Multiply that by (hundreds of?) thousands of protesters and the logging system could be overwhelmed. Especially considering such a system would likely be badly implemented by the lowest bidder.

Even if it were not overwhelmed, the requests could be tailored to trigger as many false-positives as possible.

Working at non-vaporware startups is hard. Very hard. Bootstrapping one is even harder.

Long hours, little time for family. After a big push I'll be entirely strung out and exhausted, staring at a wall mumbling random thoughts like someone who suffers from dementia. It's miserable.

And rewarding in so many ways. My personal favorite is that at the end of the day I get to say 'Look at what I built! Millions of people are using it!'.. Nothing beats that feeling.

I'm not young anymore. I've done more startups than most. I'll eventually be taken as a joke no matter how up to date my skill-set is. But for now.. This is what I love. Some people are just built for it.

It's really horrible that happened to this guy. It's not really AirBNB's fault but I am happy to hear they are helping him out regardless.

Letting someone into your home should be a rather big deal. Just because some website vouches for a person doesn't mean you shouldn't do some checking up of your own.

It's sort of like Craigslist. Beware and assess the risks carefully!

Boxcrypter uses EncFS. Combined with the vulnerabilities discussed in this audit, this is pretty bad.

Is parsing lines of plaintext really so hard that people would want to change a well established protocol to json? I fail to see the benefit here.

My solution to cloud storage has always been encryption. TrueCrypt, Boxcryptor, gpg with a frontend, etc.

If your files are properly encrypted you can safely store them anywhere you like, using whatever technology that best fits your usage scenario.

I read this a few weeks ago and it was pretty eye-opening. It really goes into the economics and underhanded ways that are used to move traffic cheaply.

Even if you're just a buyer of transit this is worth a read as it can help you negotiate better rates and make sure you're getting the service you paid for.