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rand49an

202 karma · joined April 9, 2020

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rand49an··on Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
Primarily these types of software's are used for safeguarding purposes. For alerting teaching staff about children who are being abused, bullied or at risk of self harm etc.

I think a better lesson would be here that if you use an account that's not managed by you, it may be used to install software that you disagree with. This is a good lesson for using IT in the workplace. OP shouldn't expect his son's school provided account to maintain privacy when he's using it, because schools have statutory responsibilities to look after the safety of their students.

rand49an··on How we secure Monzo's banking platform
Didn't ever have that trouble but I have been repeatedly turned down for a joint account while both me and my partner have good records with credit, high earners and no worrying financial history.

Switched to Starling instead and created one instantly.

rand49an··on Ask HN: How do you cope with possible nuclear threat?
> The message is keep your imperial ambitions to non-NATO countries.

That is kind of the point, to make the cost of an attack against a NATO country very high.

rand49an··on Ask HN: How do you cope with possible nuclear threat?
He may be dying already or he may have another irrational reason to do it. Not saying it's likely but it can't be ruled out.
rand49an··on Chernobyl power plant captured by Russian forces
They didn't have the codes to use the nukes though so it changes the balance of power somewhat.
rand49an··on Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
An MOT is a bad example because they don't do any maintenance at all. An MOT is essentially a safety certificate to make sure you aren't driving around in a car that's due to fall apart and injure yourself and others. How you attain that certificate (by ongoing maintenance) doesn't matter.
rand49an··on Why are young people having so little sex? (2018)
Because they all live with their parents still. Moving out is more expensive than it used to be and peoples expectations are different.
rand49an··on Tell HN: 1Password shares passwords you don't want shared
I would assume that the most likely issue you would face is malware running on your own computer that captures the master key or sends passwords back to an attacker. Not someone gaining access to the encrypted password vault and then cracking it - unless you have a very week key.
rand49an··on Please make a dumb car
I feel like that is a cost decision. Instead of making the whole centre of the wheel a button you assign it to some capacitive button on the side.

But I agree, that second video is insane.

rand49an··on Don't forget Microsoft
To be fair, the authentication for Microsoft is far more complex than any other comparable system. They have to deal with their own Microsoft accounts (Outlook, Live, Hotmail...), federated domains (via ADFS or third parties) and domains hosted in 365 too - Some of those being synced passwords from AD, some of those using pass through authentication from local servers...

Google just has to deal with accounts with Gmail domains and third party domains that they host.

rand49an··on UK schools receive 300k CO2 monitors in gov initiative to reduce COVID19 spread
I've visited a lot of new UK schools over the last few years and fixed CO2 monitors are in almost every classroom everywhere I visit, even pre COVID. I assume it's a DfE requirement now.
rand49an··on Catching Native Apps
Spotify, at least on Windows uses something other than Electron as far as I can tell.
rand49an··on Colors in movies and TV: What happened to them?
I couldn't disagree with that more. The 'MCU' Marvel films seem to be filled with massive fights between two effectively invincible forces with no consequences. Added to that all the characters in many of the scenes are completely CGI so they don't carry any visual weight to them.

Compared to Sam Raimi's Spiderman films, which has a lot of less CGI and smaller set pieces in general but the fight scenes look more impactful because of it.

rand49an··on Dell and HPE switches come with 'American Megatrands' stickers
Weird. A few weeks ago I turned up to a site that wasn't working after a power cut. They had two S5200's configured in a stack as core switches. Both had lost their firmware and we could only access the BIOS on them. All attempts to install/upgrade the firmware was a bust. Both had to be RMA'd and two days later we installed the replacements and 1 of those had the same issue.
rand49an··on Tesla’s high-beam assist feature surprised by Swedish moose
Are they though the only one available though? Both Mercedes and Volvo (Via the Polestar 2) seem to have pretty decent options that match most of Tesla's features and seem more polished and better built. They won't drive themselves but Tesla's don't seem to do a great job of that either.
rand49an··on Pixel prevented me from calling 911
The issue here is that Android has failed to exclude emergency calls from being routed to a VoIP provider. If it wasn't MS Teams causing this issue it could well have been another registered VoIP provider on that phone.
rand49an··on To make progress on climate change, we must move past doomsday scenarios
Apart from those were well understood problems with relatively simple solutions unlike climate change which at current pace will change the face of the planet in the next 50 years.
rand49an··on New emails released in the McDonald’s ice cream machine lawsuit
UK Dominos is damn good and very consistent between stores too.
rand49an··on Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
Didn't their own research show that it made 13% of teenage girls who use the platform seriously depressed?
rand49an··on The IPv4 Cleanup Project
Because it implies that it is the single reason that people don't host their own sites anymore, when in reality people don't because it is generally too difficult, expensive, unreliable and redundant to do so.

Almost nobody wants to host their own social media or messenger site and if you did your friends wouldn't use it too.

Besides, anyone who currently wants to do so can get a cheap VPS for dollars a month.

rand49an··on WhatsApp end-to-end encrypted backups security assessment
Just anecdotally Signal seems to be far less reliable when delivering messages and I've had a few crashes with the Android app.

Another very small thing, but it irks me slightly - the chat bubbles are rounded too much.

rand49an··on It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere
So because removing fossil fuels will be difficult to do, we shouldn't try and we should instead bury our head in the sand about the very real problems that lay ahead of us?
rand49an··on Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook Pro
Explorer is pretty stable if you don't have any shell add-ins loaded.
rand49an··on Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
If my experience with smart motorways is anything to go by they seem to increase brake waves because there are often times that speeds get reduced significantly for arbitrary reasons that not everyone chooses to follow. You then get larger closing speeds which causes people to slam on the brakes.

Additionally the removal of hard shoulders is just dangerous.

rand49an··on What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
The UK test and trace program cost £37 billion, which was handed solely over to a company that has a long history of delivering projects poorly. By all good measures it wasn't effective in tracking COVID or preventing cases. In my opinion the government were rightly attacked over this issue.
rand49an··on OVH is down along with its status page
We don't know the ages of the people involved with this incident, so this just comes off as gatekeeping.
rand49an··on World food prices hit 10-year peak – FAO
Quite a cherry pick. Waitrose is a high end supermarket where as Tesco is not. It's why you can only find them in the richest towns in the country.

Having eaten both 85p ready meals and £4+ ones, the products are clearly not the same either.

rand49an··on Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
I think it's more a point that it's a currency that it is effectively impossible for anyone to change the supply more than it doesn't need to be bailed out.
rand49an··on EU plans to force OEMs to use a common charger for all phones
USB-C can supply up to 100W, so there's no reason it can't be used for the bulk of those use cases too.
rand49an··on How I re–over-engineered my home network for privacy and security
All enterprise gear should allow you to have multiple SSIDs on different or dynamic VLANs. You won't have that issue on Meraki, Ruckus, Cisco or Aruba gear.

It's worth noting though that more than 3 SSIDs brings with it radio overhead which can degrade performance of your wireless network.

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