News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

seabee

Re:Scooters are taking cars off the road, a survey says on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:49PM (#18323090)
Bicycles aren't legal on UK pavements either. If you're forced onto the road there isn't any benefit to an e-scooter vs an e-bike.
Re:Climate change and the 75% problem on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @11:47AM (#18240183)
About 30x worse: https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-poten...

As far as carbon neutrality goes, you’re drawing a conclusion about the value based only on the first derivative. If you hold livestock numbers constant (they’re increasing, alas, but let’s not worry about that yet) then there will be a rough equilibrium. However, the gas is in the atmosphere for some time until it gets fixed back into the soil, and continues to have a warming effect in the meantime.

Any carbon tax has to punish emissions. Net zero emissions isn’t enough anymore.

Re:How the City of London invented offshore banking on Sunday September 09, 2018 @05:41AM (#17945142)
It’s both. I know banking and insurance companies that offered relocations last year, but IMO that’s to save effort hiring for the EU offices rather than moving existing jobs. Moving an entire department isn’t practical.
Re:DNS over TLS – Thoughts and Implementation on Sunday September 09, 2018 @05:30AM (#17945114)
The majority of the Internet is MITMed nowadays.
Re:DNS over TLS – Thoughts and Implementation on Sunday September 09, 2018 @05:24AM (#17945096)
Practical forgery attacks against an arbitrary client are hard, but configuring a public WiFi AP to intercept your favourite repeating-digit DNS server is trivial. Lots of people use public WiFi!

In such a scenario a VPN is a more secure answer than DNS-over-TLS, but this isn’t a realistic answer for the average user. It has to be something that is free and easy to enable.

Re:Mistakes C/C++ Devs make writing Go on Sunday September 09, 2018 @04:55AM (#17945014)
The two most common scenarios in my 3 years of experience are fan-in and first-error (executing stuff for their side effects only). It’s easy to mess up the latter, but golang.org/x/sync/errgroup is usually what you want.
yet
Up to a point; obsolescence happens by games requiring graphics APIs that didn't exist 5 years ago.
The difference is a real-sounding name like Harry Potter (or Michael Bolton: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_BaMx_n2_hM) attracts comments rather than suspicion.
Re:Toward Go 2 on Thursday July 13, 2017 @07:28PM (#14766173)
Regarding the leap second bug, I suspect this is an example of perfect being the enemy of the good.

It appeared to me that the golang devs believed so strongly in the superiority of leap second smearing that waiting for everyone to adopt it was better than compromising their API or the implementation of time.Time.

Shouldn't possessing surveillance tools be a fundamental human right in this hypothetical scenario?
Re:Epoll is fundamentally broken on Sunday February 26, 2017 @05:21PM (#13740347)
The most generous interpretation is that it can work - if you're careful, and if you're using a kernel from 2016.

While I trust the author to do this (thankfully, as he's my coworker) there is a lot of Linux software that doesn't, even assuming it was updated in the last year and you're running something vaguely bleeding edge (not Debian).

Re:Donald Trump Is Elected President on Wednesday November 09, 2016 @05:36PM (#12915460)
Re:Everybody gets WebSockets on Thursday May 05, 2016 @01:52PM (#11638280)
That won't work if the origin firewall allows only CloudFlare IP ranges.
Re:Hidden latency in the Linux network stack on Thursday April 07, 2016 @02:12PM (#11449319)
The hash is used to find listening sockets. Source port doesn't help you there.

Destination IP is a reasonable addition to the hash function, however.

Re:Hidden latency in the Linux network stack on Thursday April 07, 2016 @02:08PM (#11449286)
There is only one listener bound to star, instead of 16k listeners for every IP. Thus, the hash bucket mapping to port 53 has only one entry instead of 16k.

It works out the same for the application: 1 fd or 16k fds doesn't really matter if you're using epoll, and that single fd can accept connections to any of those 16k IP addresses.

True in a monopoly situation, but if you have competition and they can automate like you, there will be a race to the bottom.
Re:The Trouble with CloudFlare on Saturday April 02, 2016 @04:42AM (#11410772)
It remains an issue for the origin server if the DDoS targets uncacheable content.
Re:The Trouble with Tor on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @10:31AM (#11389504)
Unfortunately, it won't work.

1. It's a charity tax; you have to convince people to incur the cost of Tor (i.e. CAPTCHAs everywhere) for activities that don't require Tor.

2. You can't neutralise a poison by diluting it.

Firstly, from the operators' POV, if there's a widespread agreement that people use Tor even though they don't need to, then they know voluntary users can be pressured not to use Tor through sheer inconvenience. Even if you wanted to boycott a service that blocked Tor, it's notoriously hard to make good on that threat unless you wield a lot of power or annoyed a very large number of people. So the consequences are minor.

Secondly, the percentage of malicious Tor traffic is a red herring. What operators care about is the origins of malicious traffic. If 50% of your attacks come from one particular country (or Tor) and the cost of losing that traffic is less than the cost of that malicious traffic, there is a real incentive to block that traffic. Combined with the first point, the cost of losing voluntary Tor users is insignificant if they can easily choose not to use it.

Re:VNC Roulette on Sunday March 27, 2016 @03:55AM (#11369275)
Roman poets and everyday people's curses demonstrate the need for security two millennia ago, even.
It's regressive because of the marginal utility of money. The difference between earning 0 and 10K (getting to pay rent and groceries) is more important than the difference between earning 100K and 110K (better luxuries), yet a flat tax assigns it the same value.
Re:Where did all the HTTP referrers go? (2013) on Sunday February 21, 2016 @08:05AM (#11144335)
Have we already forgotten FireSheep?
Re:Why Rust's ownership/borrowing is hard on Sunday February 14, 2016 @11:25AM (#11098826)
OTOH sometimes you ought to think about it the way the type system does, because its own limitations reflect those of other users of your code. The biggest one is consumers of your (public) interface, whose code shouldn't fail to compile if you merely change the implementation to use an additional struct member.
Re:Is it time to rethink recycling? on Saturday February 13, 2016 @11:04AM (#11094431)
My local council has a reward scheme. Recycling earns points redeemable at participating local shops.

I suspect it is ineffective. I've always recycled as much as I can but the incentives are too small for me to bother signing up, let alone encourage someone else to recycle more.

Re:Walmart is ending its Express concept and closing 269 stores on Saturday January 16, 2016 @05:57AM (#10914974)
The prices aren't much different to the full-size stores, but they (understandably) only stock the small sizes of everything. You wouldn't buy in bulk there.
Re:Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days on Tuesday January 05, 2016 @03:15PM (#10845684)
Unfortunately my bugs are typically too gnarly and need more context than a 1-2 hour interview allows, or I'd definitely incorporate them into interviews. In the best case, it's like free labour!
Re:Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer on Thursday November 26, 2015 @01:11PM (#10634048)
Couldn't find it in those places in two other locations in outer London. Would be nice to have a list of stockists!
Identifying home or work location is something Google Maps does for your convenience. It would be trivial for cell operators.
Re:Introducing Shadow DOM API on Monday October 26, 2015 @05:09PM (#10454503)
Frames like frameset? It sounds more like Netscape 4 layers.
Re:All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013) on Thursday August 27, 2015 @07:36AM (#10128784)
State in a closure is equally as bad as state in an object. The difference is FP gives you ways to manage and isolate state that simply don't exist in OOP.

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