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CapacitorSet

1,489 karma · joined July 27, 2016

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/capacitorset; my proof: https://keybase.io/capacitorset/sigs/3XQYiFYsETBVes6mFixMECaVoMYCJBjVFgwf6JikpeY ]
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CapacitorSet··on Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
This reads a lot like a PR piece for Amazon, with most "answers" promoting Amazon nearly like a press release and very little negative points.

A few sentences that stand out:

> If you have a ton of data in your data center and you want to move it to AWS but you don't want to send it over the internet, we’ll send an eighteen-wheeler to you filled with hard drives, plug it into your data center with a fiber optic cable, and then drive it across the country to us after loading it up with your data.

> Q: I know there have been a number of collective actions among Amazon warehouse workers around the issue of safety during the pandemic. > A: (a series of measures implemented at Amazon)

> Internally, people say, “Oh, we’re probably better than our competitions, or other warehousing and logistics companies.”

> Q: Has Ring brought Amazon into much closer relationships with law enforcement? > A: it would really surprise me if any of those relationships were the result of the Ring acquisition [...] I think Amazon also kind of backed into that situation. We only realized after the fact that we had all this data about who was coming to people’s front doors.

CapacitorSet··on Java Verbal Expressions
It seems that the cruft really boils down to using groups even where there is no ?/*/+ qualifier.
CapacitorSet··on Gitlab phished its own work-from-home staff, and 1 in 5 fell for it
>a very convincing page on śtellar.org

If you rarely use IDNs, toggling `network.IDN_show_punycode` in about:config can help with that - you would have seen `xn--tellar-2ib.org`.

CapacitorSet··on Zoom iOS app sends data to Facebook even if you don’t have a Facebook account
>I’ve met several founders who wanted to enable tele-medicine years ago but decided against it because “the lawyers cost more than the engineers”, and walking-on-eggshells destroys morale & iteration speed.

Thankfully so - I wouldn't want my telemedicine to rely on eg. some random unsecured Mongodb instance.

CapacitorSet··on Signs you're following a fake Twitter account
I feel like the article went way too much over aspects like TPDNE and the non-existent lawyer, which - while being useful to know - are somewhat poor indicators of fake profiles especially in a tech circle. I personally know a few people who use TPDNE profile pictures and many who use fake names, although none do both (a wise thing in this day and age). The rest was quite lacking.
CapacitorSet··on Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015)
>$0.11/hr Spot instance of a g2.2xlarge

I'm not an AWS user, but don't spot instances risk being shut down/paused/etc at any moment? It seems like a bad solution for remote gaming.

CapacitorSet··on South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal' sale of .amazon
The world is running at full speed towards a dystopia where private companies are more powerful than entire countries.
CapacitorSet··on Am I Unique?
All the fingerprinting tools I've seen so far do not include JA3 signatures, which in my opinion make for an interesting bit of information - they introduce few bits of entropy since they depend on the TLS implementation, but for the same reason they can't be easily spoofed.

Plugging in an article and demo I wrote some time ago: https://jwlss.pw/ja3/

CapacitorSet··on First Node.js-Based Ransomware: Nodera
Interestingly enough the JS source is not obfuscated, merely minified with no name mangling.
CapacitorSet··on Incident: Wizz Air and Air Europa Planes in Near Collision over Spain
Fractions of nanometers close? That's some insane precision.
CapacitorSet··on Debugging Network Stalls on Kubernetes
I feel like the title is somewhat appropriate: part of the post was about selectively removing parts of Kubernetes networking, and digging through the kernel networking stack, to troubleshoot the issue
CapacitorSet··on I got my money back from a scammer by contacting his mom on Facebook (2016)
If you share usernames, that is. I could very well make up a unique username like "Nikatoa" that I never even thought of before, and there's no way you could link that to any other account of mine - short of database leaks containing my email or linking/commenting from one account to another.
CapacitorSet··on NoSnoop – Find out if your HTTPS traffic is being monitored
I find it somewhat ironic that the tool is served over HTTPS over some random domain. Certainly if an attacker has the resources to forge a certificate for eg. telegram.org doing the same for trustprobe.com won't be much harder.
CapacitorSet··on Private firefighters go to work for California's wealthy
>if firefighting is privatized, insurance companies would require more fire-resistant building materials and design (instead of the typical match-box American single-family home or low rise apartment)

This is what happens when firefighting and house maintenance are in the same interest. The libertarian argument argues for a private interest, but it could very well be turned on its head in favor of a public interest.

CapacitorSet··on Curryfinger – Find the Server Behind the CDN
>I just find it odd how someone would go through the trouble of setting up HTTPS (instead of terminating it at the CDN)

At least wrt CloudFlare, it's actually recommended - for privacy reasons, at least so they claim - that you run SSL both between client and CDN, and between CDN and server: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170416-E...

CapacitorSet··on How the UK Security Services neutralised The Guardian
>An error occurred during a connection to www.dailymaverick.co.za. Peer using unsupported version of security protocol. Error code: SSL_ERROR_UNSUPPORTED_VERSION

How can you test so little on Firefox that it doesn't even connect? (FF Nightly, Linux)

CapacitorSet··on Activists release code to generate free public transportation tickets in U.K
Gates access to whom? Trade-offs in favour of what?

Introducing a fixed price gates the poor the most (eg. a wealthy individual can afford to spend a couple hundred pounds on a yearly subscription without much thought), and often incentivises trade-offs in favour of individual transportation (i.e. cars), which is less desirable in terms of pollution and traffic.

CapacitorSet··on A DMZ 'gardening job' that almost sparked a war
Arguably, the US doesn't quite have the moral high ground in Asia...
CapacitorSet··on Privacy Sandbox – Open standards to enhance privacy on the web
Your setup will marginally benefit from the addition of [Decentraleyes](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...), an add-on which prevents requests to CDNs by serving some content locally.
CapacitorSet··on Ask HN: What are some niche or alternative news aggregators worth checking out?
Italian users might be interested in https://gambe.ro, a news aggregator to discuss the technical and social aspects of technology. Likewise, https://www.journalduhacker.net/ for French users.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of gambe.ro.

CapacitorSet··on Pentagon testing mass surveillance balloons across the US
It's a matter of cost and disincentives.

Want to pass a law that cuts on workers' rights in a country that typically doesn't protest? Sure, go ahead. Want to do that in France? You'll think twice about it after the clashes of 1st May and of the gilets jaunes.

CapacitorSet··on Almost half of Europe’s soil is dryer than normal
This is not consistent with the data presented in the article, which shows that the "percent of Europe's area that is dryer than normal" is historically between 5% and 25%.
CapacitorSet··on Hong Kong protests: 'I'm in Australia but I feel censored by Chinese students'
I fail to see how this would be of any help, especially the former. To me it looks like a feel-good action with virtually no political impact.
CapacitorSet··on Chinese insurer’s facial-recognition software offers a cautionary tale
>It’s reasonable to charge fat people more.

It's only reasonable insofar as you view insurance as a profit-maker and deprive it of its social function of financial relief.

CapacitorSet··on NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities
Arguably, point 2 is the only real concern about releasing the source code - 1 and 3 are optional responsibilities that people take to a varying degree, with "Works On My Machine (tm) - no documentation - here be dragons" being a valid (though in my opinion not very kind) option.
CapacitorSet··on Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android
To me it feels like it's less of "nobody [in the industry] knows who's responsible" and more of "everybody takes responsibility for the earnings and nobody for the evils".
CapacitorSet··on How random can you be?
Why can't pi be used as a PRNG, and why does converting each digit to its parity lose a possible PRNG property? Sure it removes a lot of entropy, but it does so by destroying information, not from creating/overwriting memory.
CapacitorSet··on Linux Kernel Through 4.20.10 Found Vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Execution
The uniformity argument becomes rather silly when applied to other constructs.

Would you ditch switch-cases in favor of if-else chains (leaving aside fallthrough/Duff's/etc for a moment) because the latter is uniform with existing constructs? Would you ditch "for (int i = 0; ..." in favor of "int i; for (i = 0; ..."?

CapacitorSet··on IIR filters can be evaluated in parallel
Think of a filter as an electronic circuit that has a voltage input and a voltage output. In control theory a filter is described by how it reacts to an "impulse", which is essentially a brief peak followed by zero voltage.

Finite Impulse Response means that the output of the filter will eventually go to zero - after a finite duration. Infinite Impulse Response means that the output of the filter may never go to zero.

It can be proved that FIR and IIR filters have different properties; the article mentions that IIR filters are necessarily stateful, for instance.

CapacitorSet··on My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8
It's not a dependency that I expect of browsing devices. I expect to be able to use eg. a TV, a radio or an ebook reader entirely without relying on the vendor, save for technical support maybe.
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