News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

zabuni

Re:The Buy Nothing Project on Sunday January 17, 2021 @07:19PM (#25816763)
I've seen very apolitical people do a buy nothing for kids stuff. I called it the great chain of baby stuff. Just last week a coworker dropped off some diapers that their kid grew out of at another coworkers desk who could use them. Cribs, toys, clothes, handed from one family to another. I've seen a crib go to three different families.
Re:The Guy I Almost Was (1998) on Monday December 28, 2020 @08:41AM (#25559094)
Given the whole #vanlife craze that is happening now, Spacehawk look prescient.
Re:Central Bank Digital Currencies Are a Bad Idea on Sunday December 27, 2020 @08:18AM (#25550811)
Why the Quarantine is actual serfdom. https://www.forgac.me/blog/2020/4/5/pandemic-the-shortcut-to... Also on Mises.
Re:MacBook Pro 16" 2019 Teardown on Monday November 18, 2019 @05:23PM (#21568781)
They don't have the membrane because they don't need it. With the old keyboards, any spec of dust would cause them to stick. That means these are back to the original, non-fragile keyboards with good travel.
Re:The troubling age of algorithmic entertainment on Friday November 08, 2019 @12:24PM (#21484436)
>But it also suggests that tech platforms don't just deliver content, but that they shape it too

The medium is the message. Every medium shapes content. This is the whine of incumbents who want their power back.

At the end of their Black Hat talk they showed one. Anyway, Project Zero doesn't accept bounties.
Re:The Fully Remote Attack Surface of the iPhone on Wednesday August 07, 2019 @07:17PM (#20640234)
What's really cool is that they released all the code they used to create the attacks.

https://github.com/googleprojectzero/iOS-messaging-tools

Just went to the talk. TL;DR: iMessage uses old serialization libraries, they are terrible.

I think that the best part is that he still has papers from when he was a kid on floppy disk. He was afraid of not being able to recover them, when the @textfiles symbol was sent out and http://archive.org 's Jason Scott came up to bat. https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1097251935453876224

It there is anyone who can recover those files to a modern readable format, even if only in an emulator, it's him. Also, if you have any old Apple II, C64, or other vintage floppies, he's love to archive them. He's always up for copying....that floppy.

Re:Introducing Amazon Translate Custom Terminology on Wednesday November 28, 2018 @05:47PM (#18556405)
Internet sleuthing leads me to believe he works at AWS as a senior program manager.
Re:Removing Old Versions of TLS on Monday October 15, 2018 @06:35PM (#18224546)
This will give the techies a reason to give to their bosses to pay off that technical debt that has accrued with these systems. Every system that uses outdated websites will need to upgrade. And they will have two years to do it. It makes the argument go from the nebulous "it will make us safer" to the concrete "things will not work".

And yes, it's a heavy handed way, but the fact there are "There are still some essential government, military and corporate websites relying on these protocols that will not be updated any time soon" shows the soft touch isn't working.

Re:What you can't say (2004) on Monday October 15, 2018 @02:02PM (#18222030)
Jonathan Chait makes a living doing that.
Re:PeerTube stable 1.0.0 on Friday October 12, 2018 @05:20PM (#18204804)
Anything that gets large enough to matter will have to deal with false copyright claims and censoring content bullshit, without the help of the Google legal department. Your future is a future of hosts constantly disappearing, due to copyright claims, child pornography, and not wanting to deal with the bullshit drama of running a server anymore. With a couple of surviving, but being way locked down and moderated. 21st century phpbb message boards, ephemeral as hell.

Not to say I don't approve of the software. A self hosting video platform that doesn't die at the first viral video is a powerful thing. But Youtube is Youtube because of network effects and monetization, not technology.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek-got... Finally, in response to questions we have received from other news organizations since Businessweek published its story, we are not under any kind of gag order or other confidentiality obligations.
Re:Google's 20th Birthday on Thursday September 27, 2018 @03:39PM (#18087873)
If you mouse over it turns into something else. First time I clicked it, I got a built in solitaire game: https://www.google.com/search?q=solitaire Second time, it linked me to this: https://onetoday.google.com/ It seems to go to random places around google.
Re:Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up on Friday June 29, 2018 @12:28PM (#17425484)
If you compare the article, the main takeaway is that Apple seems to be starting to use some of the improvements that Google has been adding to their map program the last several years.

-Satellite imagery to generate build footprints. -Lots of human intervention -Land based car imagery

Re:Yakhchal: Ancient Refrigerators (2009) on Sunday June 24, 2018 @02:08AM (#17385211)
Sadly, where I lived summers usually brought the mother of all high pressure zones, which meant WHAT BREEZE?!!!! Much of the American south has the hottest, most humid type of the year matched with only the dream of wind.

The first time I went to the desert I was amazed at how much you can change the climate without a hermetically enclosed environment. Fans work! Shade works! Blowing air over water works! Ice wrapped in a towel works!

You can make 115 feel tolerable with very little electricity or effort. THAT'S CHEATING!

I solved it by moving away.

Re:Yakhchal: Ancient Refrigerators (2009) on Sunday June 24, 2018 @01:50AM (#17385148)
They work much better in dry climates that cool down massively at night, and require that digging that far into the ground doesn't make you hit the water table.
Re:Yakhchal: Ancient Refrigerators (2009) on Sunday June 24, 2018 @01:48AM (#17385141)
Evaporative cooling plus the fact it freezes at night, and they have a system for transferring melted run off to the outside to refreeze.

Being originally from a hot, HUMID climate, I find these articles so exasperating. It can get to 85 degrees at night where I was born. So thanks, thanks for the mystic knowledge of the ancients, but it's central and a fridgedair for me.

Half the articles are trying to stop people from using cooling compressors, and discuss the limitations in passing.

If they have positional data they could do a correlation of location speed, along time time of week. If they constantly see you going to the same places on the weekends, that might be a clue, especially if in close proximity. Especially if traveling at the exact same high speed in close proximity (Driving there). GPS, at the high range, can tell location within meters.

And none of this would have to happen while you were talking about cars, or anything else. Just enough times to make the correlation, and with data that could have been collected months to years ago. Google Now did that for my commute from work to home.

I think it is more likely Facebook is using location data to create edges on a shadow social network. We just bleed metadata.

Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002) on Sunday February 18, 2018 @07:48PM (#16409927)
My biggest issue as well. People seem to be drawn to creating a DSL for their problem set, and then programming in that. I've thought of Go as the Anti Lisp, in that there will be NONE OF THOSE SHENANIGANS LIKE THAT HERE. I think that's why Go draws so much vehemence. It's the "No fun allowed" of computer languages.
Re:Cuba's Lack of Literature on Friday February 09, 2018 @08:03PM (#16345196)
It's weird, because Cubans manage to pirate all manner of other things through El Paquete, a system where pirated content is sneakernet'ed throughout Cuba. But looking at the list of files: http://paquetedecuba.com/ Literature doesn't appear to be on the list. Either they aren't popular or they might be seen as propaganda, and incur the wrath of the officials.
Re:Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines? on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @09:56AM (#15905940)
I assume they are talking animation-wise. While it may be a complicated picture to draw, most of the power line shots are still shots, which means they only have to draw the power lines once. Static pans across a background are a classic way to save the precious precious animation budget.
Re:Amazon Sellers Brood as States Come Calling for Taxes on Thursday November 16, 2017 @04:28PM (#15716799)
There has always been. It hinges on the whether the business has a nexus by storing product in an Amazon warehouse. The problem is:

a) States really really hate that part of the Constitution, and verdict in Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, which led to the inability of states to collect tax across state lines. Up to the point of passings laws that directly contradict that Supreme Court verdict. So you're going to get sued, it's just a matter of how long it takes to make its way through the courts. b) They piss off enough states, the state governments complain to their Senators and Representatives, and suddenly we have an arm of the IRS federally given the power to collect state sales tax. Which means the IRS gets to know everything you bought online.

Amazon agreed to collect taxes to mollify the states, so they wouldn't start the above two options. It's a giant company, so it can take the hit of compliance. It also puts them at a competitive advantage over smaller retailers. Their margin is Amazon's opportunity after all!

If they get forced, I suspect Amazon might even get into the business of determining sales tax required for third parties, on that county by county basis. Make it an API, price it by the lookup, more business for them. Call it Compliance as a Service (CaaS).

Re:Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @12:59PM (#15551809)
It doesn't help that Microsoft cancelled a large amount of their second party titles like Scalebound.
Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:31AM (#15533894)
It's happened before: https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-spying-fir... If a person has enough access, and they have to, given that someone has to have admin access.
Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:14AM (#15533760)
I think what's telling here is that the blog post does not point to Protonmail's own threat model.

https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-threat-model/

Which says don't use it if you are up against state actors and: "Sensitive business communications – You have sensitive business information that you want to make sure is protected from competitors and other malicious parties. For example, you fear a competitor may want to sue you under false pretenses to get access to sensitive data. In this case, ProtonMail offers a great deal of protection. ProtonMail will not release ANY data unless provided with an enforceable Swiss court order. To get such an order, the case must first work its way through the Swiss courts where stricter privacy laws might result in a different ruling. Even if an adversary went through the expensive and time consuming procedure of obtaining such an order, ProtonMail’s zero access cryptography means we would only be able to release data that is encrypted since we do NOT hold the decryption keys."

Given that they have Javascript to handle the decryption keys, couldn't they demand ProtonMail change the code delivered to your browser session to give up the keys? This would make the only extra security provided by this scheme would be the multiple court jurisdictions and the less tested legality of a court order making their product less secure, ala the FBI and Apple.

Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:08AM (#15533721)
Web based encryption. Pointless. If you trust them enough not to send you bad Javascript, you trust them not to read your emails. You trust them with your private keys.

If you trust them with all that why even encrypt the mail client side?

Re:Toys ‘R’ Us Plans Bankruptcy Filing Amid Debt Struggle on Monday September 18, 2017 @05:31PM (#15279786)
At least for Gamestop, you're probably not wrong. Amazon Prime gets you new video games at 20% off MSRP. That's cheaper than what the distributor sells them for.
There's a reason "just asking questions" is known as JAQing off. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

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