Hacker News Reader

ssklashon PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

Exactly. He spoke about the problems with capitalism and advocated for socialism as a way to achieve equality. This very important aspect of his politics is always conveniently forgotten, and especially when coming from CEOs and other beneficiaries of capital.

ssklashon A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

David Graeber?

ssklashon Jeff Beck Dead at 78

Longer an active musician than his Yardbirds peers, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, and no less innovative than Page and far more than Clapton, in my opinion. Page is still my favorite of the 3, but I have still a lot left to listen to of Beck, and this might be the push I need to do it.

ssklashon The Moratorium on US Medical School Enrollment from 1980 to 2005 (2008)

I think the problem is not that they didn't recognize this fact, but that they intentionally ignored it in order to maintain an artificial scarcity of physicians, thereby ensuring higher wages.

ssklashon Cognitive ability is a powerful predictor of political tolerance

I think you've nailed exactly why most people who "believe" in flat earth theories do so. They get some sort of emotional benefit from it that is not being met otherwise, which in my experience is a sense of community, belonging, or purpose.

ssklashon 'Nobody Wants to Work Anymore' Meme Cites Real Newspaper Articles

I would try carrying that though to its logical conclusion. Healthy people who don't want to work (aka don't have value, as work == value) shouldn't be given money. Money is needed to survive. Therefore it is okay if the person does not survive? Or rephrased as, if you don't work, you should not live?

I hope that's not really how you feel, but it seems like the clear logical conclusion to that kind of thinking.

ssklashon Google Details Tools of Commercial Spyware Vendor Variston

It's the primary source and much more detailed, so I think it would be.

I'm curious about the company that seems to have built the frameworks, and they didn't seem to speculate or include much information about who they are and if they are a legitimate company or some sort of shell.

ssklashon New two-factor authenticator: Commodore 64

This seems like a classic case of perfect being the enemy of good. TOTP is so much better than SMS codes, and they are still very widely used.

ssklashon What if we talked about over-60s’ screen time as we talk about young people’s?

I honestly can't tell if this is serious or satire.

ssklashon Defending Privacy in Crypto

I think the point of this case is far less about privacy and crypto, but the fact that the US government sanctioned an entire piece of software. People use the software for privacy, and the government sanctioned it because it was being used for illegal things, but the fact that they can unilaterally sanction a piece of software is scary. Imagine if they sanctioned Tor Browser or Signal, both of which are used for privacy and can be used for illegal activity.

ssklashon The Twitter whistleblower story is worse than you think

> “…according to expert quantification and analysis in January 2022, over half of Twitter’s 8,000-person staff was authorized to access the live production environment and sensitive user data. Twitter lacked the ability to know who accessed systems or data or what they did with it in much of their environment.”

Half of any company having access to prod is insane, but half of a giant like Twitter is unimaginable to me. It really explains how compromising single employees seems so effective there.

ssklashon Syncthing Anywhere with Tailscale

It allowed me to use a separate Wireguard tunnel with a VPN. I found that Tailscale wouldn't let me do that.

ssklashon Syncthing Anywhere with Tailscale

I switched to https://netbird.io/ for this exact reason.

ssklashon Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?

This is a fantastic comment. And it perfectly answers why the idea of "having nothing to hide" is so dangerous. Everyone will one day have something worth hiding, and probably not something illegal at all.

ssklashon Review of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

I think the entire point of the article was a discussion of the systemic incentives of capitalism and especially private ownership of what turned into a public service, so I don't see how you can say there was zero reflection.

ssklashon Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

Fair in the sense OP is using it is in the moral sense, not the economic sense. Paying someone tens of millions of dollars when the lowest paid workers in that company make ten bucks an hour may be "fair" in the economic sense, in that it's what the market will bear, but I don't think it is any way fair in a moral sense.

I think too often people let the "morals" of the market replace actual human morals, and assume that because the market is "free" or essentially some uncontrollable algorithm, anything it does is moral by human standards. It's easy to throw your hands up and say "oh, well that's just what the market will bear" and assume all moral responsibility has been accounted for. But I disagree.

ssklashon Ask HN: Can the US fix regulatory capture?

It seems to me that to do something like this, you'd need the people who stand to benefit most financially to regulate against their own financial interests. The public interest should come first, but it rarely seems to.

ssklashon Misperceptions of the opponent fringe and miscalibration of political contempt

> democrats moved far left

I have to wonder if you know what far left means outside of the US. Because even the furthest left of the Democratic party is barely left-leaning in Europe and most other democracies.

ssklashon A Simple Hash for Perlin Noise

This same hash is often used in Windows malware to avoid using the names of functions that are commonly used for malicious purposes, like `WriteProcessMemory`.

ssklashon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://www.solomonsklash.io/

I do offensive cybersecurity.

ssklashon FORCEDENTRY: Sandbox Escape

This. The "weird machine" they built in the original exploit is the single most impressive exploit I've ever seen.

ssklashon Purism Launches Librem SIMple: A Cellular Service That Protects Digital Privacy

I do wish they provided more information on the network infrastructure. As far as I know they must be an MVNO, but they don't say who they use.

ssklashon Famous Navy UFO video was camera glare, evidence suggests

I think they must be wrong, since I have it on good evidence from my deeply-religious and conspiracy-minded family that the shadow groups are _US based_.

But seriously, I assume all these types of people have this sort of localized, my-version-is-the-right-version theories, since they do the exact same thing with their religion.

ssklashon Famous Navy UFO video was camera glare, evidence suggests

I think you hit on the key part of conspiracy thinking. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that many of the most conspiracy minded are also extremely religious, in the US anyway. I don't know anything about conspiracy thinking in the context of Islam or Hinduism, for example.

It seems like the tendency to accept a higher power in control of your life and the world leads to believing in other earthly powers being able to exert vast control over the world.

ssklashon U.S. eliminates human controls requirement for fully automated vehicles

Think of all the attention you could monetize with a captive audience in a self-driving car. I fully expect it to be exploited by ad companies. And subsequently by hackers.

ssklashon uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

I agree 100%. If your company can't survive without exploiting human psychology and contributing to a surveillance infrastructure and monetization scheme, good. Companies survived for centuries without internet ads, tracking, targeting, etc. Just because you can take advantage of technological methods and mental vulnerabilities to pimp your product without the consent of the target, doesn't mean you should.

ssklashon Big tech makes a big bet: Offices are still the future

The internet is a waste of an invention if we can use it to not commute, eliminate all the attendant ills of commuting, spend all day in an office, etc., but we don't use it that way because middle managers can't have butts in seats or whatever other lame excuses they come up with to maintain their grip on the lives of workers. We have remote surgery for chrissakes! Tech workers and many others can all get along just fine remotely, with in-office as on option for those who choose it.

ssklashon Be anonymous

I think the point about most people not choosing anonymity at all is a bit misleading. It assumes that these people are making a reason, informed choice, and going ahead and living the way they do. I don't think that's the case.

Most "normal" people, and even many tech people, don't know what companies like Google and Facebook are capable of. If you showed someone exactly what information of theirs was collected, for how long, the predictions they could make with it,and god knows what else is being done with it, I think many people would change their behavior. But they don't know, and this is not an accident.

Most people do not even know what the business model of Facebook and Google are. If you ask, they'd probably say something like "oh they're an email company" or "they help me share photos of my grand kids" or god-forbid, they're "helping connect people connect". Both are surveillance-based, personal information-driven ad companies. That's it. No amount of Google X or Android or Gmail or Libra or FB Live or any other program will change what their business is. And they will never, ever admit to this.

ssklashon Impacts of lack of sleep

Did you ever used to wake up groggy? I feel like that's been a constant for me since forever.

ssklashon North Korea hacked him, so he took down its internet

NK was specifically targeting prominent security researchers, with fake accounts and blogs, then trying to get the researchers to open a backdoored Visual Studio project. They were absolutely personally targeting people, and I don't doubt he was one of them.