phantom_oracle

The title is misleading and covers more than just "Windows exports".

I hope HN is not developing a propaganda problem like every other news/social site.

This will make the rounds because it has appeared on a large news agency and will be amplified louder than Joe Blog could do on his/her own, but this isn't a novel or shocking news.

You don't need to look very far to see how shady the internet gets. Go to any mainstream news website that runs ads and you will see those scam 3rd-party ads(they used to promote bitcoin ads a few years ago until the mainstream outrage) you wouldn't click on in a million years.

Now I'm not saying those ads are connected to broader malware, but if you start there you will uncover these shady operators(I discovered this when I did a little digging on a streaming website that provided content I could not obtain from the 32nd streaming service that I have to pay $10 a month to watch - and the amazing fact is that the same scammy ads you see on majornews.com is no different to the scammy ones you will see on torrentxyz.com).

These articles don't address the critical aspect of WHY.

Why are these conspiracy theories about 5G being spread?

If the why involves geopolitics and economics, you just have to look at who has the most to lose from this, factoring in that China is now the cheapest option for this tech(not sure if they are the leaders, but certainly will be the cheapest with a state-funded subsidy).

HN being a critical thinking community, it is fair to postulate theories from an economic perspective. I don't think anybody will try to sell "long-life milk powder" during such discourse.

If this is targeting carriers then the only way around it is to not carry a mobile surveillance device anymore.

Based on past incidents by 3-letter agencies using it to stalk ex-lovers[1], nobody should want this kind of surveillance at all.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...

For those looking to wean yourself off the negative news cycle, switch your consumption from the main news to the fluff content about TV and celebrities.

As you slowly become indifferent to which celebrity farted on which day, it becomes easier to care less about the news in general.

CF appears to be looking at the UA-agent and deciding to block based on that.

I'm guessing it's very basic checking because deep browser-fingerprinting is supposed to against the law in some countries (I stand to correction on this statement).

I'm not personally a fan of CF because of the amount of data they can potentially obtain(or do), but there's a lot of crap out there and their firewall is robust enough to protect Johns Cowboy store from contributing to some dudes Monero mining botnet.

The odd thing about SMS 2FA is the amount of critical services that rely on it as the only method of extra protection.

You want your: bank, utility provider, entity-that-has-lots-of-personal-data-on-you to offer other secure options.

This might be a costing issue though. When your customers number in the millions, your call center is probably handling thousands of "im locked out" issues per day and these need to be handled in x-minutes. Other security options might cause the time meant to handle these scenarios to increase and SMS is generally 'simple' compared to them.

I mentioned in my last comment about this being outright corruption by the Americans involved.

Now it is time to mention the 1 positive that the USA has that other countries(visibly) don't:

> The willingness and ability to sue as a collective

.org is a domain used by everyone from Wikipedia, UN, Debian and your national dog shelter.

Private Equity cares only about one thing: making money. Anybody with a toe in the finance world knows that these are the same people that will do "hostile takeovers" to strip companies of their assets, pile on debt and push out a sale.

A class-action lawsuit targeting the PE firm(or parties involved in the sale of .org) and then pushing your State Attorneys to investigate these corrupt individuals at a personal level will have the desired effect that appeals to the moral high-ground won't.

As difficult as it will be for Americans to accept, this whole scenario:

- ICANN lifting price-caps on .org - Connection between private equity firm and owners of .org - Sale of the .org to private equity firm

Reeks of corruption.

It made me question my decision to purchase future .org domains. I considered it a stable alternative to .com with a larger option of available "premium" names.

There's a bittersweet irony with this story. They were recently pushing ads claiming that "Ain't no hacker can steal your online life. (If you use VPN)."

The ad has since been deleted :D

The psychology behind what hackers say in these high-profile attacks is far more interesting than the account takeover itself.

Some of them say racist things or speak about Hitler because they know it will attract far more attention than say: posting a link to some shady website to spread malware.

I always reference [1] when I see sensationalist headlines that end in questions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

At the time of writing, it has only implicitly been mentioned in the comments here about the security risks this OS might have.

We know that Google has a very close relationship to the US government w.r.t surveillance.

Apple claims to be "fighting" it, whether as PR or genuine.

Huawei on the other hand is deeply intertwined with the Chinese government and their policies should give an indication that backdoors and total surveillance will be passed into the OS.

I don't see this OS succeeding beyond China though. US companies still dominate the app market outside China. No WhatsApp = no thanks; to the majority of the developing world.

I don't mean to be critical of the other startups coming out of YC 2019, but some of the problems they are solving are so niche that they don't even register beyond metropolitan cities like San Francisco.

This is a difficult problem to solve because we've heard 100s of times about how hiring is broken.

The problem also scales beyond software engineering jobs because shitty hiring processes exist across most industries.

I hope you guys succeed, just so that you can show the world that hiring doesn't need to be the shitty (and sometimes elitist) process it has become.

Excluding the personal attacks, which dilute what would have been a good alternative look at Facebook, I suggest everyone interested in this topic to look at the other parts that make up the click-fraud industry:

- Clickfarms in China that have shady people using some automation and thousands of smartphones to perform fake clicks for the Chinese ad market

- Pied Piper style farms with people in poor countries sitting all day creating accounts (it was exaggerated in the series)

- The ad giants constant "battle" with click-fraud

- Shady tactics used by smaller app/websites to get people to accidentally click on ads

I wouldn't personally denounce all online advertising though. It has its place the same way print media advertising does. It's market-value is questionable though (which is derived from questionable "effectiveness" sales pitches we're told about online advertising)

The cycle of these SV companies is interesting. They start off with a bang and become "darlings" in the initial stages, then they reach mass-market appeal, attempt to monetize (some of them do so in the most unethical ways) and start to become loathed by the very people who touted them in the beginning.

Let's compile a list:

- Facebook

- Twitter

- LinkedIn

- Quora

- Medium

(You can add to it to see how far we go)

The authors complaints are valid, but fails to acknowledge that besides Medium, so many great(and not so great) conversations happen on platforms that are now locked behind login gardens. It was fine back in the day to just create a throwaway FaceTwit account but now they demand mobile numbers too.

Pre social media, how did people discover great content? You can go as far back to the 90s or very early 00s as a time reference

After a certain amount of time I've stopped caring or even wanting to express any "moral outrage" at this situation. The users of Facebook have been given enough reminders to vote with their feet and move to other platforms that are more privacy-friendly.

If they choose not to and they are expecting a bunch of governments to address their problems, that is a pointless exercise also.

The network effect cannot be so powerful that the 5-10 people you frequently engage with online can't all move with you to other platforms.

Googles draconian algorithms aside, there are legitimate security concerns with "security alert" messages.

Here are some of them:

1. The likelihood of you clicking and opening such an email is higher than regular emails

2. Phishers and scammers know this (point 1 above)

3. Malicious content is embedded in such emails

4. It is very effective, even against tech-savvy individuals

Maybe someone familiar with securities law can chime in here.

Isn't this something similar to insider trading?

They provide a service that is supposed to improve some aspect of a business, then they can internally do predictions on how successful they think their services will benefit/harm the firm and then make a bet either for or against that firm.

> The small number of humans available to review contested claims means that people who fall afoul of machine error, sloppiness and criminal mischief are often unable to get a fair hearing or justice.

This is possibly one of the key points in this report. Google is synonymous with their blackbox/magic "AI".

These systems become remarkably interesting to game (their ad platform has been subject to fraud, but on a different layer). I wonder how many levels of "AI" they think they can automate before they realize that it's probably not possible.

For some good news though, there was a story a little while ago for some educational platform that noped out of YouTube and migrated to self-hosted.

I'm going to go against the grain that is advocating for "keyboards are better" and say that maybe the touchscreen can be a gateway to a more efficient method of rendering text to a screen vs. a keyboard.

Keyboards suck and cause your hands to be in an unnatural position for a long time.

I don't quite understand why people are sad or disappointed about this acquisition. You should be extremely elated about it. You know why?

Github was never an Open Source product itself but sat on top of the Open Source community and used that "goodwill" to license and sell its proprietary software.

Now that another proprietary software-maker has acquired this company, maybe we can all finally adopt the principle that:

> Open Source software needs Open Source tools

> There is a secondary benefit that I’ve addressed in the post nonparticipation in that I also no longer share those intimate details of myself to startups and third parties who are pressured to monetize that data. By going unquantified I’m in complete alignment with nonparticipation in toxic adTech driven panopticon of surveillance capitalism

I wonder what epiphany the author had to start/change his opinion on the ad-driven model.

No Linux support?

The reference point for gaining employment is that dude who wrote Homebrew and got rejected by Google for being unable to "invert a binary tree on a whiteboard" [1]

Unfortunately with this and many other articles I've read on HN over the years, the common theme is that decent/good programmers are not making it past HR.

Everyone that wants to work in tech should instead navigate through the meetup/social space and build up a decent network for this kind of thing.

Anecdotally, at 1 interview I went for, I knew the hiring manager and our "interview" was a 15 minute casual chat. That's it.

[1] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

HN really needs a sticky feature for comments concerning security patches and other updates that can bork your machine.

In this case, someone who dreams in hardware, breathes ASM and talks in bytes, needs to clearly inform the community here concerning these questions:

- SHOULD THIS MICROCODE UPDATE BE PERFORMED SEPARATELY FROM RUNNING: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade ?

- WHAT IS THE IDEAL/BEST WAY TO PERFORM THIS MICROCODE UPDATE?

For anybody that needs a replacement that is OSS and can monitor dependencies for updates, there is this:

https://libraries.io/

Disclosure: I have no interests (direct/indirect) of any sort in libraries.io

A couple of things to point out:

- They say they are doing away with location-specific factors in the formula. However, their formula still uses Numbeo to calculate cost-of-living based on your locality (which is location-specific)

- They seem to be transparently "hiding" (an oxymoron I know) the fact that their new formula is stripping away 2 major benefits:

   - Removing 3% Loyalty Raise
   
   - The Salary Choice Option Now Phases out at 4 Years ("In fact, in May of 2016, we stopped offering this choice.")

I actually mentioned this company in my comment about the Basecamp salary adjustments [1]

I'm going to agree with StavrosK on this and say that these formulas are pointless at best (and probably just a means to give HR/finance/marketing some extra work).

Living in SF/NY/London is expensive, but the tradeoffs for living in these areas is the high demand for technical skills and networking (tradeoffs in a professional sense).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16051062

It definitely makes sense to not hire for a certain period to see how this salary bump impacts the company as a whole.

Anecdotal mention: https://open.buffer.com/layoffs-and-moving-forward/

Fast Hiring at that salary level is probably why SV startups burn through money so quickly.

I doubt they will see major performance boosts with the salary increase. If they don't, it indicates the team is already working optimally OR salary increases don't always translate to increased performance. If they do, do they then start asking themselves why performance was so average (relatively)?