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AlphaGeekZulu

915 karma · joined September 2, 2013

Rust, emacs, spaces, dark mode ... and Rust

https://hnbadges.netlify.app/?user=AlphaGeekZulu

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AlphaGeekZulu··on Ask HN: What's a good response to “It's fine, I've got nothing to hide online”?
It is important to point out that the quality of the data is not important. There is no such thing as dangerous vs harmless data, because that quality completely depends on the context.

So I usually give a context in which "harmless" data can be misused to build trust for scamming schemes (something, that most people, that do not care about data privacy, fear a lot as real threat). I look, for example, in the fb-timeline of my counterpart and immediately come up with a story, how I, as a stranger with scamming intentions, would ring their doorbell and tell some story why I need to enter the house or collect some money or the like, making myself believable with the information I collected from the social media sites. In the same way I describe how I would draft a spear phishing mail, pretending to be some member of the inner circle by using public information of that circle.

Finally I point them to the contradiction, that they ask their neighbour to empty the mailbox during their vacation, so nobody can see they are away, but then they provide a live-coverage of their trip in social media. Once they get the picture, that the burglar might not be walking down the streets looking for overflowing mailboxes but rather investigate his potential victims on facebook, they start to reconsider the "I have nothing to hide"-opinion.

The trick is to set the topic into a context that is comprehensible and likely. People can often not imagine how their average lives could be interesting for corporates and governments - it is a perceived unlikelyness on a deeper level: not only do they believe that corporates and governments would not misuse privacy data, they cannot even see why such a misuse could be of any value. In their perception, there is no misuse, because there is no reason for misuse.

AlphaGeekZulu··on Show HN: How to store a set of four 5-bit values in one 16-bit value
Ahh, just yesterday in HN: Operation Gunman

http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/index.htm

Quotes:

"The data from the 6 magnetometers (i.e. 6 bits) was somehow digitally compressed into 4-bit words and then stored in a magnetic-core buffer that could hold up to 8 such 4-bit data words." "It is unknown why and how the data was compressed from 6 to 4 bits, and the NSA report is very vague on this point. It is possible that the Soviets used 4-bit logic and had to spread the 6-bit data over more than one 4-bit data word, but it is more likely that they used frequency analysis"

"According to the NSA report, the Russians compressed the 6-bit data into a 4-bit frequency select word. Although the report doesn't explain what they mean by this, we can make a few educated guesses. The reason for compressing it into 4-bits, was probably the fact that the Russians only had access to 4-bit digital technology at the time. The problem with 4 bits however, is that each data word has just 16 possible combinations"

...

Maybe a similar "hack"?

AlphaGeekZulu··on FoldingText – Plain text productivity for Mac users
This looks like a small sub-set of org-mode to me. I like their homepage design and the logo very much.
AlphaGeekZulu··on Donald Trump signs directive to send astronauts back to Moon
Am I the only one who sees a clear pattern here: each and every action of the current US president undos something that predecessor Barack Obama has accomplished.

There are the obvious things, like health insurance, immigration policy and the like. Whenever I cannot at all understand a certain action of the PotUS, like, for example, the scaling down (or closing) of two National Parks in Utah (Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante), I'll do a little research and find: the action is undoing some former act of Barack Obama.

Each day I get more and more convinced, that Mr Trumps only motivation is the extinction of the traces of his predecessor. As cited: it is not about Moon or Mars, it is about "abandoning plans set by his predecessor Barack Obama, to send humans to an asteroid near earth". Therefore it is absolutely unimportant, if the program gets funded or executed. The directive has fulfilled its purpse by rescinding an Obama act.

I am into archaeology and history. Extinguishing the traces of the predecessor is a very common pattern in history, you know, like chiseling away the former pharao's name from the temple walls. Alarmingly archaic, primitive and despotic.

Even the most absurd actions of the US president become completely reasonable, when seen in this context.

AlphaGeekZulu··on Donald Trump signs directive to send astronauts back to Moon
Ah, yes, I forgot to put the irony-tags on my post.
AlphaGeekZulu··on Donald Trump signs directive to send astronauts back to Moon
Yeah, exactly. And it will be certainly much easier to terraform Mars into a habitable environment, populate it and use it as a starting platform to reach new, fresh, habitable planets in deep space, lightyears away – than to agree upon an earthly effort to limit a temperature rise to 1,5 to 2 degrees Celsius by means of some modifications to industrial production and eliminating bad habits.

Maybe earth becomes a better place, when the people who think so, have all left for new unearthly frontiers! The sooner the better. I am all in for the new space program!

AlphaGeekZulu··on RSS: there's nothing better
"Feedbro" PlugIn in Firefox. For me, the browser is the natural environment for RSS reading. "Sage" did a perfect job for me in the past, but since it is not available for FF 57 yet, I switched to "Feedbro" and never regretted.
AlphaGeekZulu··on Can Germany Fix Facebook?
It depends very much on the subtle details:

"He is a terrorist." = claimed fact. Contravention, if false!

"He is a terrorist.", about a person during trial = claimed fact, contravention until the verdict, no matter how the verdict will be!

"He is a terrorist.", about a convicted terrorist = claimed fact, true, no contravention.

"I believe, he is a terrorist." = opinion

"I have evidence, that he is a terrorist." = claimed fact. Contravention, if false!

"For me, he is a terrorist, even though he was acquitted." = opinion

"All soldiers are murderers." = opinion (obviously false fact, but in an abstract, hyperbolic metaphoric way, no contravention - there has been actual trial about this in Germany).

"Soldier Frank Miller is a murderer, because all soldiers are murderers." = claimed fact, but with an obviously stupid reasoning, edge case.

"All refugees are terrorists" = claimed fact, but obviously false and therefore possibly hyperbolic metaphoric, edge case.

"All Syrian refugees are terrorists" = claimed fact, obviously false, but targeted at an ethnic group, possible hate speech and sedition.

It is a very complicated matter. Courts are dealing with this topics every day with sometimes very surprising results.

AlphaGeekZulu··on Can Germany Fix Facebook?
There is some legal definition for "terrorism" in german criminal law (do not ask me the details, but there is a difference if an act of murder was a terroristic act or not - it has to do with intentions, means, motives, acting alone or in a network and so on). So there is some factual definition.

A quote like "They call him freedom fighter, I call him terrorist" is clearly an opinion and yes, it makes a difference whether you use the word in the sense of a legal definition or an abstract concept or a hyperbolic metaphor. The level rod is dignity.

AlphaGeekZulu··on Can Germany Fix Facebook?
I think, what is important to understand in German law is, that you are not prevented from uttering your opinion. You are rather prevented from claiming false facts.

Let's take the example of the photo of Angela Merkel and the Syrian refugee, mentioned in the article. If you publicly declare, that the person on the photo is a terrorist, and the person is not, you are clearly breaking the law, because you are damaging the persons reputation with arbitrary false claims. If you mention something as a fact, which you cannot prove, you are held responsible for the consequences of the claim and you are prevented from repeating the false fact.

If you would declare "There have been rumours, that the person on the photo is a terrorist", the legal perspective is completely different. Because there obviously have been the rumours this is not a false claim. It now depends very much on the context. If it was known to you, that the person is not a terrorist and you declared the fact of the rumours, but in a way, that it nevertheless makes the person appear as a terrorist, you might be breaking law, but this now depends very much on circumstances and can only be deciced individually in a court case.

Saying "I completely believe the person is a terrorist, even though there is no prove" would most likely be covered by freedom of speech in Germany, because the claim is not presented as a fact, but an opinion. There are limits here (you cannot hide abuse and revilement in an opinion), but interpretation is extremely generous in those cases and makes, in my eyes, the biggest difference to systems like China.

I am completely fine with this approach. I think that a proper differentiation between fact and opinion is the key for a healthy social discourse.

How would anyone be able to defend himself against false claims, if any utterance of whatever was covered by free speech?

AlphaGeekZulu··on Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
LiveCode.
AlphaGeekZulu··on Ask HN: What “new” programming languages will you be using in 2017
Rust.
AlphaGeekZulu··on Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
The book is pretty old, yes, and many of the topics are not uptodate any more (I just cannot believe how fast genetic research has developed in the last 20 years and the Internet was not even there when the book was written). But then - GEB never was a book for the classroom to teach computer science. The original intention, as confirmed by the author in the preface of a german anniversary edition of GEB in 2015, was to provide a graspable access to Gödels proof for a general audience. The project then escalated from an intended essay to the epic work it is.

I read it at the age of 19, multiple times, and for me it was the ultimate primer for everything: whatever you deal with, take it apart, change the context in which you are looking at it, look from the distance, look close and from all sides, extract patterns and apply them somewhere else, combine, prescind, generalize, play, be curious about each and everything and then - while reading the book, and on other occasions in life - enjoy brief moments of epiphany. And for this purpose - to open the mind for another perception of everything - GEB is timeless.

I gave it as a gift to a colleague at work, with whom I regularly ended up in funny, crazy scientific discourses. And I keep two shrink-wrapped copies from 1989 for each of my two kids - if I am gone and the kids ever want to know how I perceived the world, they just have to break the seal and read.

AlphaGeekZulu··on Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach
AlphaGeekZulu··on Snowden tweets 156 characters, which is deleted; speculation re assassination
Mainstream media in Germany are now starting slowly to cover the topic (based on a DPA release):

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/news/service/internet-mysterioese...

Greenwald tweets Snowden "is fine": https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/761995125824360448

Inquisitr: http://www.inquisitr.com/3389936/edward-snowden-dead-mysteri...

and well, yournewswire.com as a source - oh my.

AlphaGeekZulu··on Notice of security breach on Ubuntu Forums
Although they obviously failed in their security efforts, I think, they did a good job in communicating the incident. No beating around the bush.
AlphaGeekZulu··on The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
And at least a second person with you!
AlphaGeekZulu··on Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
All-purpose disc calculator.

Used it during my time as a typesetter to mass-calculate values based on a scaling factor. Soo much faster than an electronic calculator! Disc calculators have not completely vanished, they are still being made for specific purposes like aviation. But all-purpose disc calculators need to have a huge diameter and smooth mechanics to work nicely and I only seem to find them as antiquities on ebay.

AlphaGeekZulu··on Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
HyperCard lives on quite nicely in LiveCode [http://livecode.com/]. I loved HyperCard soooo much!
AlphaGeekZulu··on My Disastrous Experience with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Thar (2015)
For 16.04 it is hard to say, as it is only beta right now.

But I do have Ubuntu/Unity on my laptop and one desktop computer since 12.04, updated to each intermediate release about a week after its publication and encountered almost none of the problems that the author described in all the time. My laptop is a 4 year old Thinkpad W520, the successor to the W510, that the author referred to in his user story.

I use fulldisk encryption, have two graphic cards in the laptop and a Gefore 970 in the desktop system, I use the Lenovo dock and have multiple monitors connected to it. The desktop system is a dual boot with Win10. I use tons of software of different trades. So my setups are not completely trivial, but work absolutely flawless.

The mass of problems described by the author probably indicate a more general problem, either caused by the video setup or, considering the range and randomness, maybe a hardware defect (RAM?). Maybe the laptop is also a bit old, which, of course, should not be much of a problem for Ubuntu.

The things to take care of, in my experience, are:

1. setting up the proprietary drivers for the dedicated graphic card can cause trouble. Ubuntu offers the driver installation (Nvidia in my case) from Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center but it is a matter of fact, that the installation cannot be done reliably from within a running X-Session. It is mandatory to boot into the terminal and do the installation manually with an apt-get command, then reboot the computer. If you know it, it is absolutely no problem, but Canocial does not give instructions for this procedure, probably because it contradicts their claim for usability. Users who fail on the graphics driver installation often start to hack in random commands they find in user forums, maybe go for the xorg-edgers drivers and eventually end up with a seriously messed system. But: the problem exists in other distributions as well (except, maybe, Arch ;-)

2. background light control per hotkeys did not work out of the box but needed a manual tweak.

3. I made bad experiences with the Unity Tweak Tool. Some of the author's description match my experiences when fiddling with it. Try not to touch it. System preferences and "Ubuntu Tweak" are completely sufficient for me.

Otherwise I am more than happy - the system is super fast, super stable, all major upgrades worked flawlessly so far, hardware-changes (graphics cards, hard disks) caused no trouble, incremental backup (backintime) works perfectly, and I cannot remember a crash, not even a crash of the X-environment. In my experience, nagging problems that require significant research and fixing are very common for me on Windows, much less so on Ubuntu and almost not existing on OSX. On the other side: I can almost always fix an existing problem on Ubuntu, for Windows I often need help from others or the problem ends in a fresh install and on OSX there is not much to fix at all ;-)

In conclusion, I cannot believe that the aggregation of problems described by the author is in any way typical for Ubuntu per se.

AlphaGeekZulu··on Unlocking my Lenovo laptop battery
Oh, yes, I had some funny experiences like this as well. Wanted to have the battery of my 17" MacBook (5.5 years old) replaced, as it started to inflate. (I have to admit, the battery had performed much better and longer than I had expected!) Made an appointment with the AppleStore; was told, that there are no replacement batteries for any MacBooks older than 5 years. As Apple doesn't officially recommend third-party batteries, this means in consequence, that you would be obliged to throw away the machine.

I told one of my customers, who has a lot of MacBooks in his company, about this. So he started to bring all MacBooks older than 4.5 years to Apple to get the batteries replaced. And every single time Apple made some suspicous battery-quality-tests and declared that the batteries were still good and didn't need to get replaced. (The batteries generally had a runtime of less than 30 minutes after 4.5 years).

"No, battery needs no replacement.", the Genius would reply. "I do not ask for a free replacement, you know, I am aware I have to pay 140,- Euro for it. The battery runs only for 20 minutes, I do not think it is good." "Yeah, maybe you have to calibrate it. But the test says, the battery is good." "So, in 6 months I will get no new battery, as the model is legacy?" "Ah, yes, this is true." "So, would you please replace the battery, for 140,- Euro, please, please?" "OK".

This dialog repeated for every single MacBook.

I switched to ThinkPad/Linux shortly after. Battery-wise doesn't seem to be much of a difference ;-)

AlphaGeekZulu··on Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation
The introduction of plausible deniability in encryption is actually the ultimate nightmare from an ethic perspective:

The torturer, of course, knows about plausible deniability. And of course, technically, plausible deniability is not limited to two levels (outer and inner volume), but can be performed on an arbitrary number of levels. From the torturer perspective, he has to continue to torture forever, because any passphrase revealed might not be the one for the "true" stash of information. In reality, the torturer does not stop at the first possible instance of revelation, but on the last (which will never be in this case).

Plausible deniability actually prevents the torturer from rewarding the victim for the revelation of information by ending his/her pain. Instead, plausible deniability opens the spiral of endless violence.

AlphaGeekZulu··on Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child
Sorry, I am not a native speaker. German. Will fix the comment, so everyone can ease off again...
AlphaGeekZulu··on Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child
I do not know for sure. My believe is, that kids at that age sometimes simply do not know what they are able to do or not. They watch others, as they climb down the ladder and they just imitate them, somehow expecting the same outcome. This boy for sure was not able to swim, but he probably didn't know it. He perfectly copied the behaviour of other people entering the pool and then was maybe completely stunned that he did not float, but sink, I guess. He was in a age where most kids in Germany are confident swimmers and like to dive as well. It was not obvious to us that something was wrong, because his behaviour was so confident. He did not hesitate to climb down, and there were no sudden unexpected movements when he was under. I mean, we did not watch him specifically and guessed whether he was in trouble or not - he was just behaving just like any other boy. And you do not press the stop watch when a kid enters a pool. It just took some time until our subconscious minds shouted "something is wrong - it is too long!".

He entered the pool, face to the stairs, hands on the rails, continued to climb until the ladder ended (with his head already under water), released the rails, and sank, vertically, until the bottom. It was not a very deep pool, maybe 1.70m or so. He seemed to stand there, as if trying to see how long he could keep his breath. And when he shifted out of the upright position it became obvious that he was in trouble. A man standing next grabbed him, pulled him up, saw the boy was unconscious, started to shout for help and within seconds the boy was out of the pool and the lifeguards took over.

AlphaGeekZulu··on Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child
I'd rather suggest to train children in swimming as soon as possible. Even if swimming pools would be banned, there are private pools, there are lakes and rivers and creeks and canals and oceans and shores, there are ships that sink and idiots that push you down a bridge. The drowning rates are especially high in countries, where people are not able to swim. I know this from the Sudan: people do not learn to swim in the desert (and not in the cities, because there are no water parks). Everytime a boat capsizes in the Nile (and this happens unfortunately too often) all of the passengers drown, just feet away from the shore, because they are unable to swim. A couple of years ago the entire national soccer team of Sudan died that way.

Being able to swim is an absolutely necessary survival skill and kids should learn it before they start to read and write!

AlphaGeekZulu··on Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child
I was actually spending quite some thought about this. At least for water parks, I think this should be doable. My idea was to have a wide angled camera above the pool (distortion is not a problem here), with an algorithm that would recognize any structure that is not moving for a given time (lets say 30 seconds). This would create many false positives, probably, but the system could just activate a buzzer and zoom to the spot on a display that would be permanently monitored by some lifeguard. The number of false positives could probably be dramatically reduced, if there was some way to only react to non-moving-structures underneath the surface, maybe by some cameras from the side?
AlphaGeekZulu··on Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child
I witnessed a scene like this a while ago and it was such a pure horror, that I still get tears in my eyes when recalling the event.

I was lying with my wife next to the pool, casually watching. A small boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old, stepped to the ladder and climbed down into the water, in a completely confident, unspectacular way. With the water up to his neck, he did not start to swim, though, but just continued downwards, slowly to the ground of the basin. I loved to enter the pool this way as a little boy as well.

The boy made no movement underneath the water, at all. He just sank to the ground and that was it. There was nothing suspicious, and it took us some time to realize that he would not come back up. I would guess roughly two minutes. Then we and some people in the pool realized he was not moving for too long. The boy was quickly recovered, lifeguards rushed in and reanimated the boy. It was a remote location and it took the emergency doctors 15 minutes to arrive, in which the boy was puking, caughing and barking his soul out. His mother was just 10 meters away when it happened and had a complete nervous breakdown when they reanimated the child in front of her eyes.

So there was a happy end, but we were shocked to the bones that a child almost drowned in plain sight, 4 meters away from us, WHILE WE WERE WATCHING THE CHILD DROWN. The disturbing point was, that this child showed absolutely no signs of panic - he did not wave the arms, tried not to grab something, made no swimming movements with the legs, just nothing!

A few weeks later I was back in the same water park (which has a dozen of pools and slides) with a group of 7 boys in that age celebrating a birthday. I can tell you, I had no real fun that day, desperately trying to track the bunch and not loose them for a minute.

AlphaGeekZulu··on What Is Code?
"is there really no way to mute the audio?"

There are so many ways to mute my computer, I wouldn't even know how to list them all. But on top of the list I would start with the volume keys on the keyboard and then with the volume panel in the menubar and then with the audio panel of the system preferences. Towards the far end of the list I would cut the wires to the speakers.

AlphaGeekZulu··on When 100 people lift a bus
"One of the worse worse worse things bystanders often do is pull objects out of patients. i.e. if you are stabbed, and the knife is still in you - do not pull it out."

When I had my last first-aid-course, the instructor told us exactly this - do not pull out the knife. And then he added: but if you did and you realize your mistake, do not put it back in!

;-)

AlphaGeekZulu··on Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition
Just for the records: the update 21 indeed improved battery life significantly! I am all happy ;-))
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