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brandontreb

Re:Using the power of the sun to roast green chile on Monday August 22, 2022 @06:59PM (#32558393)
Oh man, I wish I had enough karma to downvote this comment! (I’m in NM ;))
Re:Two Charged in SIM Swapping, Vishing Scams on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @07:53PM (#24985732)
Ahh, this is a great tip. I’ll have to double check now.

Thanks.

Re:Two Charged in SIM Swapping, Vishing Scams on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:16PM (#24984079)
It's crazy that companies are still using SMS for 2FA. TOTP solves this problem is a much more elegant way and is immune to such attacks.
Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media on Sunday August 09, 2020 @07:35PM (#24103871)
I'm assuming you are talking about ARGOS tags (more sophisticated tag that actually transmits GPS (last comment was talking about pet tags (which are RFID)), but it's FAR from microscope / injectable via needle. I get it, people's lack of understanding about technology is what fuels the conspiracy theories. They don't realize that no company NEEDS to track them as they have already traded all of that information away years ago.

I have some close friends that subscribe to such theories and no amount of tech discussion will convince them otherwise.

People will believe what they want :/

Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media on Sunday August 09, 2020 @04:33PM (#24102634)
That's a 'dumb` RFID chip. I don't think folks are too concerned with offline chips that require close proximity scanning (for power). RFID also doesn't 'track' dogs. They contain information about the dog to get them back to their owner. The info is static and contains NO location data.
Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media on Sunday August 09, 2020 @04:00PM (#24102387)
I can't understand the 'microchip in vaccines' issue. You mean to tell me that my iPhone can't last a full day on a battery charge, however we have microscopic tech capable of tracking location data and relaying it somewhere and doesn't need charging once injected into the body?

I'll take my microchip in space grey please.

Re:iPhones are hard to use on Monday October 22, 2018 @09:29PM (#18280094)
That title font is hard to read.
Re:This blog has moved on Thursday September 27, 2018 @07:37PM (#18089823)
And he didn’t even provide an affiliate link! I’m impressed.
Re:Ask HN: How do you find freelance work? on Thursday March 22, 2018 @06:17PM (#16653222)
We have a mix of employees / contractors but usually hover around 9-10.

As far as asking questions, it’s about the long game. I aim to build relationships with people and establish myself/my team as an authority on software dev.

Almost none of my meetings are “sales” meetings, in fact we never do advertising at all. All leads come from people who eventually want work or refer their colleagues. Some meetings pan out and others don’t.

Re:Ask HN: How do you find freelance work? on Thursday March 22, 2018 @03:58PM (#16652142)
"I don't have a ton of networking skills"

Work on this. I have built my consultancy over the past 6 years and it started with me doing freelance and now we do over $1m/year in revenue.

I attribute the majority of success to networking. Here are some of the things I did early on (and still continue to some extent).

1. Local meetups. Great place to show off, hear about leads, etc...

2. Find influencers / networkers in your area and buy them coffee. Ask tons of questions and end with "Who else do you think I should be talking to?"

3. Build stuff - I decided I wanted our team to be known locally for doing crypto dev, so I just started building cool stuff and showing it off at the local dev meetups. Now we have tons of crypt contracts!

Whatever you do, come at it with the attitude of wanting to contribute to the community using your gifts/skills. The work will follow.

Best of luck!

So, code updates from the server doesn't matter as we can hook all of the audio recording APIs at a system level. Their _only_ defense IMHO is to NOT do it on Jailbroken devices. You are right, it's super easy to detect jailbroken devices.
Interesting. So you are suggesting they may have already considered this and may have some defensive programming around it?
See my response to the other comment about them using private APIS. Basically, we would have to try and guess which APIs they were accessing under the hood.

But you are right, this would def be a considerable effort for someone not in the jailbreaking space. I would love to hack it up, but unfortunately haven't dabbled in JB dev since 2011.

That's why I posted the comment to HN. In hopes it might inspire someone in that space to build it. Might also be worth jumping in the theos IRC channel. For someone with the toolchain already set up and a jailbroken iOS device, the code is actually pretty trivial.

It is, however when building a mobile substrate tweak, you have visibility / access to the headers of every single system class. One could theoretically hook into any number of audio recording mechanisms (assuming they knew where to look ;) )
I did quite a bit of Jailbreak/tweak dev in the past, and I was curious if you could just hook into AVAudioRecorder and show an alert any time it was invoked.

So, I did this sort of thing years ago when I wrote a tweak for the InPulse smartwatch (later became Pebble) https://github.com/brandontreb/inPulseNotifier .I was able to hook into the system messaging, forward it to a custom bluetooth stack (sending it to the watch) and forward the message up the stack to be displayed by the system.

It would stand to reason that the same sort of process would be effective for catching Facebook invoking audio recording. Once you hook into the AVAudioRecorder's interface, you could theoretically observe the following:

1. Open the Audio Recorder app and hit Record - An alert should show to prove your tweak is working.

2. Open the Facebook app. If you receive a similar alert at some point, you could at least prove that FB is invoking the audio recorder at some point without the user's expressed permission.

Am I crazy or could this test actually work?

Re:Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer? on Monday February 01, 2016 @12:30PM (#11013337)
This must be a common joke amongst programmers. We often joke that we should all become potato farmers. Being outside, watching things grow, working with something physical. I totally get the appeal.
Re:Becoming A Software Consultant: My Backstory on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @06:25PM (#7180935)
I have that exact same regret.
Re:Becoming A Software Consultant: My Backstory on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @04:57PM (#7180524)
Make sure to subscribe, that post will be in my upcoming series :)
Re:Becoming A Software Consultant: My Backstory on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @04:56PM (#7180520)
I believe that it played a huge role. Although, I feel that you could still start a successful iOS blog today, you would have to bust your butt to even come close to sites like http://www.raywenderlich.com. Believe me, I've tried on my blog a while ago, but it's extremely hard to keep up a relevant and popular iOS tutorial site, especially with how fast Apple is moving.

That's not to say that you can't grab a piece of that market. When I was blogging there were only a few thousand iOS developers, now there are hundreds of thousands. So there is more demand.

Re:Becoming A Software Consultant: My Backstory on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @04:52PM (#7180496)
Great question. Yes, you can be fired for just about anything. Companies also love to give you very few reasons as it lowers their risk of a lawsuit. (i.e. if you say "You are fired because of your lack of professional dress". I could argue that it's part of my religion to wear sandals and tank tops and sue. It's a very tricky area.

I will say I got a 2 week severance package though.

Re:Becoming A Software Consultant: My Backstory on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:01PM (#7179539)
Thanks for posting the link. I would have put it up, but Hacker News penalized me last time I linked in the comments of my own post.
Re:Becoming A Software Consultant: My Backstory on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:00PM (#7179533)
I love this and it's precisely why I wrote this post. I just looked at what others were doing and realized "These guys are no smarter or riskier than I am. The only difference is, they just did it".

Thanks for the comment.

Re:How To Hire Outsourced Developers on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @01:31PM (#7065113)
I totally agree.

I generally solve this issue by paying the developer for the programming challenge. Usually, it's something that benefits the project that I'm working on. Then, if I hire them, it's a pretty easy transition.

So what if I find a bad dev or two and lose a bit of money. The good devs way more than make up for the investment in the bad ones.

Re:What I Learned In My First Year Of iOS Consulting on Tuesday January 07, 2014 @01:54PM (#7019053)
Weird this article fell like a stone from #2 to 20 in seconds. Crazy
Re:What I Learned In My First Year Of iOS Consulting on Tuesday January 07, 2014 @01:38PM (#7018919)
Congrats and good luck!

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