Hacker News Reader

sernon Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

The GPS military signal is protected by virtue of being CDMA-modulated by a long, pseudorandom sequence (the output of a keyed, secret PRNG). Because of the spread-spectrum nature of CDMA, it would be impractical to record the signal without having the key in the first place. And if you did have the key, why go through the trouble of recording and replaying the signal when you could directly spoof it?

sernon Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

The encrypted GPS service doesn't use RSA.

sernon Nokia Maps 3D (WebGL)

It's based on C3 Technologies' product, which was unfortunately acquired by Apple, so don't count on Nokia's contract being extended. It uses a custom aerial camera system and photogrammetry toolchain to create 3D data with minimal human intervention.

Australian company Nearmap started with exactly the same goals and have a similar product (custom aerial photography system with automated processing), but they don't seem to have figured the 3D photogrammetry part out yet.

sernon NFC will tell you when a Rolex is fake

Barcodes can be copied visually, whereas chips can be made difficult to clone.

sernon Pushing the Limits of Amazon S3 Upload Performance

http://www.asperasoft.com/en/misc_content/default_1/Aspera_S...

Pretty expensive though.

sernon Pushing the Limits of Amazon S3 Upload Performance

I'm pretty sure UDT does congestion control.

sernon Pushing the Limits of Amazon S3 Upload Performance

uTorrent's UDP congestion control algorithm (LEDBAT) goes further than playing nice with TCP. Unlike TCP, which only responds to packet loss, LEDBAT also responds to delay. This makes it yield remarkably quickly to anything else that might use the link.

sernon Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief.

Not UK, but relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_SOCOG_2000

sernon Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief.

This is a civil rights issue, as evidenced by existing case law in Australia: in 2000, the Sydney Olympics organisers were fined $20,000 for discrimination on the basis that their website was not accessible to the visually impaired.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_SOCOG_2000 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/31.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/49.html

sernon Coming soon: make your phone your wallet

According to the FAQ, the card is being emulated on the device's secure element. My guess is that the Google Wallet program was preloaded only on the Sprint Nexus S's secure element.

I fully expect a future version to do the security-critical stuff on a remote server, which would allow the application to work without a secure element but with a slower transaction time.

sernon Google Modifies HTTP, Makes Chrome 50% Faster

App Engine already does.

sernon The ad that uses YouTube brilliantly

This brings back memories of an old educational program for the BBC Micro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9QmQ98RuB0

sernon Poll: Which CDN do you use?

I've been using CloudFront for a while but now I'm evaluating Microsoft's Azure CDN. It seems to be a good service so I'm not sure why they're not promoting it on their website.

You have to use Azure Storage, which isn't that much of a problem because the whole service is very similar to Amazon's offering - I was just able to modify existing S3 code. The pricing is also about the same, but what Azure CDN has over CloudFront is a greater number of edge locations, most notably in Australia and South America. I'm really happy with their Asia/Australia performance.

Interestingly, the Azure CDN servers claim to run "EdgePrism", like LimeLight, although they seem to be hosted by Microsoft themselves.

sernon Ask HN: where do you get your SSL certificates?

StartCom - their "domain validated" certificates (which other CAs charge for) are free: http://www.startssl.com/

sernon James Gosling leaves Oracle

Yes. Off the top of my head, IBM invented hard disks, relational databases and RISC. They definitely aren't as innovative now as they were thirty years ago, but at least they have more to show than Oracle does.

sernon Get Your Fucking Feet Off The Table

I like to be comfortable and lying down is comfortable, but I don't take my bed in and lie down during a meeting. I like farting but I don't do it in people's faces. Wanking feels good too but I don't do it at work.

Do you really not see how abhorrent it is to be inconsiderate of other people? It may not be passive-aggressive but it's certainly rude.

sernon Stupid American Website Owners

"A comprehensive address verification system" does not take a few hours to make. In another comment on this thread I posted a link to an amazingly detailed address format database and I'm quite sure it took longer than that to make.

I think this would be an awesome open source project!

sernon Stupid American Website Owners

Was looking through my history and found this: http://i18napis.appspot.com/address

It's not clear who owns it, though, so don't just go and use it. My point is that it's worth spending the time (and maybe money) to find one of these databases to make your international customers happy.

sernon [dead]

"NS" in the Server header, by the way, stands for NetScaler.

sernon IE9 to be GPU-accelerated

No they don't. Core Graphics still works mainly on the CPU. Only compositing is GPU-accelerated by default. (CG actually has an option to put window backing stores in video memory, called QuartzGL, but even though it's been there since 10.4 it's still not the default - pretty much only Preview uses it.)

sernon Google ‘99.9 Percent’ Sure to Shut Down in China

I was thinking they could play an active role in smuggling information into China, for instance.

sernon Google ‘99.9 Percent’ Sure to Shut Down in China

If Google quits, they will no longer be subject to Chinese law, which will open up all sorts of possibilities.

sernon XeTeX: A modern LaTeX with proper OpenType and Unicode support

The difference is that pepperoni pizza looks good.

sernon The Cities on Google Maps Changed Again This Week. Why?

I think the most likely explanation is that Google uses a stochastic algorithm to position labels on the map, similar to how Graphviz neato/fdp does vertices (using a force-directed algorithm).

sernon Apple stepping up pressure on music labels to snub Amazon

Steve Jobs is just going senile

sernon You Say NPR, But On Twitter We Say n.pr - Inside NPR.org Blog

It might seem like Twitter's length limit is due to SMS but it's actually not.

Twitter's limit is 140 Unicode characters, which is subtly different from SMS's limit of 140 bytes (160 7-bit characters or 70 UTF-16 characters).

sernon Ogg objections

Just because their authors say that doesn't mean that it's true. Worse still, no corporation is willing to perform a patent search because such an activity could open a liability should it be discovered that something they already use is covered by a patent they previously were unaware of.

The fact is that it is extremely difficult to implement any multimedia application without running afoul of a patent. Rational developers will pick the safest option, and that is to license the MPEG patents, which (I believe) also offers submarine patent protection in that the MPEG-LA would be solely liable for not finding them earlier should trouble arise.

The good news is that these patents are not enforceable worldwide, and the first of them should start expiring (if they haven't already) within the next few years.

sernon Wil Shipley on Apple's Patent Enforcement

You can register ("patent") a design.

sernon Analysis: Apple turns the flamethrower on Android

That patent is on NeXTSTEP's NSDistributedNotificationCenter [1], which admittedly might actually be enforceable (I'm not sure of any prior art in this regard).

That said, after reading the claims of a lot of the other patents Apple is citing it is apparent that they are complete rubbish, for example [2] (the observer pattern applied to a desktop environment), [3] (generic proxy objects for IPC/RPC - Smalltalk/CORBA did it), and [4] (WTF???????).

1. http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/C...

2. http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=zIwLAAAAEBAJ

3. http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=7d4aAAAAEBAJ

4. http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=HrobAAAAEBAJ

sernon Analysis: Apple turns the flamethrower on Android

I quite doubt Apple's going to attack Google directly. Their weird App Store rejections and now the HTC lawsuit (read, not Google) indicate that Apple prefers a passive-aggressive stance.

If Apple sues Google, Google will stop paying Apple for Safari search ad revenue and make iPhone users hate Apple by blocking Maps and YouTube and breaking iPhone Mail's Gmail button. I'm sure Apple wouldn't want that.