dkarras
dkarras on Hacker News
why not zip the entire internet to 1MB so everyone can have a copy? because it is not possible - we don't know if it is possible. I mean we know it is impossible, but we don't know if it is possible to do it with acceptable quality loss.
>No, you did something fake to avoid doing what you were asked to do.
Yes, that is what plausible deniability is.
>But there are very effective ways to find hidden encrypted volumes on devices. And then you’ll be asked to decrypt those too, and then what?
I emphasized "done right". If existence of hidden encryption can be proven, then you don't have plausible deniability. Something has gone wrong.
My point was: OP claimed plausible deniability does not apply in legal cases which is a weird take. If you can have plausible deniability, then it can save you legally. This does not only apply to tech of course, but encryption was the subject here. In all cases though, if your situation is not "plausible" (due to broken tech, backdoors, poor OPSEC in tech, and / or damning other evidence in other cases as well) then you don't have plauisble deniability by definition.
Having ways of definitively detecting hidden encrypted volumes might be the norm today, might be impossible tomorrow. Then you will have plausible deniability and it will work legally as far as that piece of "evidence" is concerned.
It absolutely offers some legal protection. If it is implemented correctly, no legal framework for it is required. Government forces you to enter your password. You comply and enter "a" password. The device shows contents. You did what you were asked to do. If there is no way for the government to prove that you entered a decoy password that shows decoy contents, you are in the clear. Done correctly (in device and OPSEC) government can't prove you entered your decoy password so you can't be held in contempt. And that is the entire point. It is not like asking the government to give your "plausible deniability" rights. It is about not potentially incriminating yourself against people that abuse the system to force you to incriminate yourself.
Kind of that. I'm not USA based. In my country you can do it through gov. insurance which is a lot of bureaucracy that I can't handle. Will go through the private route (fast) and pay out of nose. This to help my anxious mind and learn through the experiences of others.
Posted by
dkarras on Friday December 05, 2025 @01:54AM
from the ask-hn dept.
I'm a developer in my 40s considering getting diagnosed and medicated for (predominantly inattentive) ADHD for the first time. I've built a career around working with my brain rather than against it - freelancing and consulting where I could choose projects that interested me, constantly switching stacks / languages / domains to stay engaged, and developing an acute sensitivity to maintainable...
Private court system? How does it work? Regular court system works because the government has the threat of violence, has the muscle and rights to hunt, capture and detain. if "private court" rules against me and I refuse to obey, how will they make me obey? There is no "or else" embedded in it so it will be useless.
You can create e-mail addresses for single use, even temporary ones.
Someone might think: surely seeing ads targeted for them instead of random ads must be useful / beneficial for the user!
I don't understand this. Copyright law does not prevent people from sharing their information freely. It gives the option for "rent seekers" to do their thing. Enforcing your rights for return is optional for people that don't want to do it. I'm not talking about right-to-repair here, but the idea of copyright in general.
A lot of information is generated by taking some financial risk with the hopes of creating something of value and recouping that investment + some profit. Copyright makes that kind of venture possible. It doesn't prevent altruistic souls from putting in the same effort without any expectation of return. We always had this, by default. Copyright framework allows pursuit, generation and dissemination of huge swaths of valuable information that would otherwise not exist.
the point is, if your economic model cannot survive / adapt to the environment it is living in, is it viable? Cuba froze itself in time decades ago, is it just the embargoes? Why do they need capitalist trade to go a single step forward?
your antivirus is arguably a malware itself. you don't need to give a 3rd party your entire internet browsing content to have a secure computer.
did you read the article? author says you get approval from Apple for your use case then it is kosher.
easy, don't be near civilians / family when you are on duty.
Hamas / Hezbullah use civilians as human shields for their cause and cry wolf when they are harmed.
If you are a member of a terrorist organisation, someone is probably looking for you or your kind. They want to kill you on sight. Why would you then subject innocents to danger by being close with them while you are also a target?
Do terrorists deserve a "family break" where they are untouchable?
Siding with the losing side at any cost is a terrible heuristic.
If there are civilian / innocent casualties, that is sad, but if the target blends into the public life willingly as a defense mechanism that means it is a risk they are actively willing to take. Send your anger towards them for doing so.
you're not the target. advertisements work. the people managing ads are very meticulous about their spend vs. return. if you are seeing an ad of something for any noticeable duration of time, that means it works. by that I mean they get positive return from showing the world their ad. if it generates negative returns, it will be pulled pretty quickly. they are humans just like you and me, we don't like losing money.
also one should always be skeptical about the extent they believe they are not influenced by ads. that runs pretty deep. you say you instinctively don't trust it. but when the time comes to buy something, you won't automatically steer yourself towards a product that you have never heard before just because you have not seen an ad for it. having some names in your mind, even them showing up when you do research creates influence.
spent a lot of time trying to troubleshoot why vscode can't access extension marketplace as I just installed a new computer and am trying to bring in my profile but getting XHR errors, and devtools showing CORS errors... after an hour+ of trying to get it to connect, finally figured the services are down.
oh ok. is running things in server really necessary though? it sounds like an enormous cost even if you are mildly popular.
What is the limiting factor there? I don't understand. I assumed these programming languages were working in a browser (wrapped into wasm or some other VM) so everything was client side. Is that not the case? Are they running the language kernels in their servers? I don't understand what the "cost" here is.
how does being backed by something big in China makes it less scammy?
not eager to defend Sam as I think he is shady (maybe necessary for a successful CEO? don't know) but the Scarlett Johansson story was just speculation because she knew that she was asked to act, then the news spun it in a way favorable to clicks. I don't think the voice resembles her at all, and it turns out that they auditioned multiple voice actors and used a real voice actor for the voice. IIRC OpenAI also says that the selection of the voice actress was done before any correspondence with Scarlett Johansson, which can easily be corroborated. Sure, had she accepted the voice acting role it would be an additional news-worthy push for the tech, but given what we know and what was revealed I don't think there was any foul play in that regard.
Trusthworthy has two meanings here. I trust that Apple does have no intention to look into my private data. I think they'd rather have no way of getting into it while providing the services as that minimizes their liability. In that sense they are trustworthy. But you might not trust them to be secure enough to store that data. Or maybe it has nothing to do with Apple, maybe you don't want your keychain in the "cloud" ever. I trust Apple does not intend to be nefarious, I don't trust (the security of) any "cloud" to store sensitive data. Those are not conflicting positions to be in.
Yeah, my initial response was: this is wrong on so many levels, and I love that it is out there for public to see
100 art points.
It is not just about marketing though. There is this belief, especially among fledgling indies that if they make a game that they think is good, and if they are able to market it well, it will be a success, even a hit.
A hit in gamedev is not easier than creating a hit in the music industry really. Even the veteran composers are not able to replicate (or even achieve) creating a hit. Possibility of success depends on many factors which change constantly, and success hinges on your ability to "read the room" which is the sound palette and the persona (for the artist that "performs" the music) millions of people are likely to find interesting at any point in time.
If you are a beginner composer creating a hit, it is an extreme fluke. Same is with gamedev. Your passion project most probably is not the thing most people want at this point in time. No amount of marketing will solve that problem. Your efforts at marketing are doomed to have negative ROI. Maybe you are a year too late? A decade too late? Maybe a couple years too early? Maybe what you think is fun is not really fun in the general sense and will never be?
I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing. In the same vein, I'd struggle to find a hit game that succeeded because of marketing. No amount of marketing effort can beat thousands of people finding what you do interesting and sharing their opinion in person, on social media, youtube etc. If you have pockets as deep as Coca Cola, you may influence the culture through your marketing efforts, influence what "should" be popular - but if you are not that, you need to be an expert at reading culture of your target audience and cater to that. When you do that, "marketing" will be a walk in the park. Or else, even if you spend enormous efforts in marketing, it will only generate negative ROI.
unless I am very mistaken, that is the default behavior. youtube won't show any ads on the videos you post unless you put them there. so you need to be eligible for monetization (have videos that people watch, proven by some metric), and you need to enable it, and you need to explicitly post ads on your videos to generate revenue for yourself (and youtube)
just make a utility function! don't see what the fuss is about. the original API choice is arguably not great, but haphazardly adding multiple ways to do the same thing does not improve the API either.
macOS asks you to give permission for an application to read your clipboard. do other operating systems not have that?
is oai image generation any different than the microsoft copilot provides for free? I thought they were the same.
>I wouldn't say these anti-cheat tools that come with Valorant or LoL are from dubious origins.
You are talking about Vanguard, developed by Riot which is owned by Tencent which is a Chinese company? China has demonstrated enough grip on companies over the years that anything China can directly influence is dubious. China can decide to do something with the installations and has the power to do it in secret. It is significantly harder in western democracies. The relationship between the state and the private enterprises is entirely different.
Valve's VAC is not in the same league with Vanguard from a technical point of view (it is not even kernel based if I'm not mistaken). I would not let that slide either if it was though.
Except for his own businesses and work, he refuses to understand or acknowledge that everything is composed of sequences of tradeoffs and they are that way for a reason. His schtick is painting things black and white instead and telling "they are out to get you, play you for fools, that is why things are the way they are, the world is being unfair to you! but you are clever and you won't fall into that trap!" - that elicits an emotional response from some and converts to views and clicks. Maybe that is not his schtick, but how he genuinely sees the world, that I don't know. It was the same when he had a couple thousand subscribers, and the same today, he is very consistent.
transformers / attention is very robust against typos as they take the entire context into account just like we do. launch any free LLM and ask them questions with typos that you would notice and auto-correct and you'll see that the models just don't care and understand them. actually they are so resilient that they understand very garbled text without breaking a sweat.
Very similar story. Never managed to memorize multiplication table. Can do it, but it vanishes. By that I mean the "tricky" pairs but I don't know what is tricky about them. Been programming computers for close to 30 years, do lots of math but multiplication table is still tricky to me.
Been playing guitar for 20+ years, can't memorize the note names on some frets.
Studied music in college, I still need to count lines sometimes when reading sheet music, besides some reference points I can't seem to memorize the locations of notes on the staff.
Not like I have a general memorization problem. I am good with human languages, programming languages. Have very good working memory etc. But some things just stump me.