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AustinDizzy

67 karma · joined February 20, 2014

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/abs; my proof: https://keybase.io/abs/sigs/-sN8veX5kG6M39iateCkVyMhJhOUbrz9FetA4kIg3Hs ]

dizzy at wow dot com

abs.codes

abs.ec

submissionscomments
AustinDizzy··on USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap
This just highlights the pervasive privacy issues in adtech. Many platforms today even support server-side events tracking which bypasses client-side detection & prevention like an adblocker would do to a tracking pixel. The true scope is alarming: way beyond clicks and views, they track events like "MakeAnAppointment", "AddPaymentInfo", "LoanApplication", etc.

This is the real reason why TikTok is a national security risk. Their ad platform, widely used by Shopify, Adobe, Segment, WooCommerce, etc., collects intimate data on non-TikTok users: prescriptions, medical appointments, loan applications, credit card details. Millions who'll never use TikTok, Facebook, etc. are still subject to this data collection in the name of "converting users to customers".

https://abs.codes/blog/2024/03/tiktoks-all-seeing-eye-survei...

At the policy level, we urgently need a national data privacy act to address these types of systemic issues. At the technology level, things like zero-knowledge advertising could mitigate a lot of the user privacy risk.

AustinDizzy··on I am using AI to drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers
Judging by the first picture in the article, it appears to be at Park Ave & E 33rd St.
AustinDizzy··on Former NSA Employee Arrested on Espionage-Related Charges
I tried that exercise after reading the affidavit, and determined they were using Monero (XMR) which makes this task much more difficult if not impossible.
AustinDizzy··on A Soviet Prisoner's View on What's Important
Looks to be a bot account (which was created at the same time the comment was posted).

The comment is an exact quote from this article at US Holocaust Memorial Museum: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-perse...

AustinDizzy··on GoPro cuts workforce, changes sales strategy
The northern counties of West Virginia have also issued a prohibition order for all non-residents, so that only West Virginians can purchase alcohol because apparently there have been hundreds of cases of Pennsylvanians crossing the border just to buy alcohol.

Some find this order reasonable, but most in WV find this irresponsible of both WV and PA since alcoholics cutting cold turkey can be hospitalized for their withdrawal symptoms.

AustinDizzy··on 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure
This is a good report, but I'd also be interested to see focus on GPU performance on both classic GPU intensive workloads and machine learning workloads.
AustinDizzy··on Square Could Pass Twitter in Value
Just wanted to note that Square Cash is also directly integrated into Snapchat and Facebook Messenger.
AustinDizzy··on Backblaze B2, Cloud Storage on a Budget: One Year Later
rclone [0] has great support for B2 [1]. The functionality you want is also available with rclone simply by making a B2 remote then a local encrypted remote which saves to your B2. This will encrypt everything locally before you save it to your B2, and it also has functionality to mount as a system drive. Plenty people do (ahem did [2]) the same with Amazon Cloud Drive's previously unlimited storage.

0: https://rclone.org/ 1: https://rclone.org/b2/ 2: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/23/amazon_drive_bans_r...

AustinDizzy··on A self-driving Uber ran a red light last December, contrary to company claims
Forget if you're behind a school bus as I'd hope it would stop for any vehicle stopping in front of it. If you're on a normal rural highway (i.e. one with two but oppositely travelling lanes) and a school bus which is coming towards you makes a stop, you must stop so that any exiting kids can safely cross the street to their homes. What happens when a school bus makes a stop and the car decides to keep rolling through the bus's displayed and flashing red stop sign?
AustinDizzy··on Show HN: Davine – An open-data social analytics site for Vine
Hey HN. Slowly over the past year, I've built Davine on the Google Cloud infrastructure to allow Vine content creators to see where and how their profile has grown over time. Davine is just a side project I whipped up to get experience with Google Cloud and using Go for a slightly larger project than I typically was. I've learned do's and don'ts for next time, so I'm already happy with it.

The current idea was to be 100% open-data, open source, ad-free, open ops, etc. to build a following who would get use from the service. Then, introduce data analysis offerings and offer to watch detailed posts as well for a small fee to turn some revenue.

Let me know what you think or if there's any potential at making this thing self-sustaining enough to just keep it alive and worthwhile.

Thanks!

AustinDizzy··on Windows 7 Update appears to be compromised?
Well, two years ago I tried to report a few fairly critical security vulnerabilities on update.windows.com and they responded saying it wasn't an issue. I'd consider denial of service, buffer overflow, possible remote code execution (didn't test because I didn't want to make MSFT mad), and sensitive configuration information enumeration critical vulnerabilities. Especially on update.microsoft.com, which distributes Windows updates. But apparently they don't. So who knows.

I'm not saying the OP's link is a result of these vulns being exploited, but them being exploited is always a possibility in the future if it hasn't already happened or been fixed.

AustinDizzy··on Man born with “virtually no brain” has advanced math degree
Here's a link to the actual article: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116
AustinDizzy··on Show HN: Showgoers – Watch Netflix with friends remotely
The interface [1] made everything a little better by adding some interactivity. Your Xbox LIVE avatars would sit in front of a movie screen, and you could express simple emotions through them while watching the film. It was actually pretty fun back when the feature was around, especially as high school kids.

I never quite understood why Netflix removed it.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/6W99ylc.png

AustinDizzy··on Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway
Does Wired really wonder why so many of their readers have ad blocking software? [1] I can't even read the article on their website because every ad I see is covering up some sort of text of the article. None of the ads have a close, hide, or dismiss button either so I can't just go and hide them.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/IZymUKm.png [2]: http://i.imgur.com/C7LiA60.png

AustinDizzy··on Show HN: One App for Web – Read Hacker News, PH, DN, Reddit All in One App
If you're going to display how many comments there are on an item, please make that linked to the actual comments so I can read them. Besides that, it looks nice! Good luck with it.
AustinDizzy··on Ask HN: Can I work for free for your startup?
Couldn't he get around this by doing contracted work and wanting only $1 for payment?
AustinDizzy··on How to get a massive discount on college: get married
Story of my life right now.
AustinDizzy··on Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook for dev? What is your toolchain?
I've been using a Toshiba Chromebook 2 (4GB, full-HD display version) that I got on sale at Best Buy for ~$280 during their Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales and it's really done good for me so far. Crouton took no time at all to set up, and I only use it when I can't do something in the cloud or SSH'd to one of my servers. Since most of my time, including most development time, is spent "in the cloud" then the only thing I really need my Chromebook for is basic web browsing and an SSH client. I also occasionally use Koding for development, and I'm looking into Cloud9 just for the added ability of being able to hook it up to my own server(s). Most of my work is web development (Go, JavaScript/Node.js, HTML stuff, python, ruby, etc.), software development (Go, Linux stuff, etc.), and security auditing/light pentesting (which I can do with a small set of tool using crouton or other tools that live on my servers).

Overall, if you have something that's nearly always on - like a server or VM - then the Chromebook will treat you really well. Even if you don't have one, you can easily use free services such as Koding and Cloud9 for development systems, all without even touching crouton. The only thing you'd really need crouton for is if you want more fine grain control of the software living on your machine, install other program (e.g. firefox, tor browser, atom, or any linux programs).

As far as hardware, the Chromebook has just what I need to survive. The speakers on the Toshiba Chromebook 2 are awesomely loud, and made by SkullCandy which explains that. The battery life at 100% can easily last 10-12 hours of full use. The display is a gorgeous 1080P IPS display, and it has HDMI out just in case. The 4GB full-HD model also has a 2.58 GHz intel celeron processor, so I don't have to worry about ARM compatibilities and it just runs very well, plus it has 4GB of RAM to help with that processing. One factor I was very surprised about was the weight: it's barely there. Seriously though, I didn't expect it to be that light. But it doesn't have a fan, so that could explain why it's so light - not enough thickness to pack heavier componentry into. And it doesn't get too hot at all either, unless you're using it from 100% to dead constantly with heavier processing then it gets just a bit warm.

Overall, if you can shell out the couple hundred dollars for a Chromebook, I'd go for it.

AustinDizzy··on Ask HN: I just got $100k in AWS credits, how should I use it?
I'd say do this http://lg.io/2015/04/12/run-your-own-high-end-cloud-gaming-s... and make it super affordable with generous free plans.
AustinDizzy··on What Facebook looked like in 2006
Something interesting is the Facebook still stores all (or most of) these assets, served straight from facebook.com instead of a CDN: https://www.facebook.com/images/pageheaderbg.gif
AustinDizzy··on Introducing $Cashtags by Square Cash
Sadly, he would be losing money to pay me money because 1 CAD is only 0.80 USD so purchasing BTC with a Canadian bank account/card gives him worse exchange rates. How we've gotten around this is him buying me Amazon gift cards. He can spend $50 CAD on a gift card that is worth $50 USD and I just use that on Amazon anytime I want.
AustinDizzy··on Introducing $Cashtags by Square Cash
I love the new features and usability they throw into Square every few months, but when will they start to branch out internationally or at least to support more countries? A client of mine live in Canada, and I in the US. There is no other fee-free and easy way to send money back and forth between us besides Square Cash, but it's not available in Canada. I'd imagine branching out to Canada would bring in a lot of other business besides myself.
AustinDizzy··on New Jersey legalizes direct Tesla sales
Meanwhile here in West Virginia, our legislature just banned Tesla and Uber from operating in-state. This is the same legislature that changed the motto of the state from "Wild and Wonderful" to "Open for Business" only to have the constituents petition and vote to change it back.

Our policymakers make no sense at all, I'd like to replace most of them.

AustinDizzy··on Windows Hello – Biometric authentication to Windows 10 devices
On the same note, while I think the technology is cool, I think there should (and will) always be an alternative for the traditional PIN/password. One prime reason why you'd want a password-only entry is because LEOs (law enforcement officers) can force you to swipe your thumb, look into an iris scanner, look at a camera for face unlock, etc. but they cannot force you to type in your password.
AustinDizzy··on Show HN: Call to Speakers – Find, track and apply to speak at tech conferences
Looks like a really useful site for enabling speakers!

A few months ago, I was emailed and asked to speak at two different conferences but didn't respond to either request because I wasn't sure if travel expenses would be covered or not. I could've just asked them straight up, but I didn't want to seem like I was only interested in compensation. I'm also still full-time student, so I believe I would've been justified if I asked but I guess I was just too busy at the time to worry about it.

So, HN, are speakers at tech conferences typically reimbursed for travel expenses or receive compensation to pay for travel + lodging?

AustinDizzy··on 2015 Chromebook Pixel
Google's marketing strategy for the Pixel isn't geared towards the "hacker" and developer type, it's more geared towards students and people who solely use their computers for simple web browsing and document processing. Offering 1TB+ of online storage is enough for all your office/school documents and all the photos you could ever want for the average person. If Google were making hardware only for developers and the hacker type, you bet they'd put more local storage in it and make it more "offline" friendly.
AustinDizzy··on Show HN: Timeline.com
It's gotta be part of the business strategy. If the business itself flops, they've always got the increasingly popular domain name to sell to the highest bidder.
AustinDizzy··on Ask HN: A big company wants an on-premise license of our SaaS app
I think the reason why the company wants it hosted in-house is primarily so the data never leaves their own hardware. Even if a completely new and private instance was brought up and hosted somewhere external of the company, it would still be hosting some of their data which could compromise business operations or infrastructure security should any of the data be ops critical.
AustinDizzy··on I was asked to crack a program in a job interview, part 2
A lot of debuggers and disassemblers do exactly that. They're getting smarter every day, but they still take some knowledge of assembly and lower-level computer science concepts.

IDA Pro [0] is a good example of an excellent debugger with plentiful features and productive disassembling tools.

[0]: https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/

AustinDizzy··on Why are these ports open on my iPhone?
The squid proxy, on port 3128, is used for WiFi hotspot and wireless data tethering.

The iphone-sync port, 62078, is to enable iTunes to wirelessly sync via WiFi[0] with your iPhone.

I believe port 80 and 8080 are opened as service ports. When under service, Apple repair technicians can sideload service menu apps onto the phone and browse to the phone's IP in a browser to get various debug statistics and perform other maintenance actions from the phone. Also remember iPhones are built on Darwin on ARM so those ports could just be opened by default to allow Apple services to connect to them (e.g. Find my iPhone, iCloud, APN, etc.).

[0]: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1386

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