Defenestresque

Hey, thanks for making the course free! I'm sure it took a lot of time and effort. I'll be definitely checking it out.

Similarly, I found that OP's article provided an excellent primer on many concepts -- it certainly clarified the relationship between NAT and firewalls: that is, the latter being somewhat of an unintended consequence of the former.

Stumbling upon a great blog post that makes something click is always a pleasant experience.

The leaders of the free world sat around a secret table...

https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow

(I know this comment is not exactly in the mood of HN, but this is the one thing I never fail to think of when someone mentions the Bagger family of murderous machines!)

Lots of interesting answers to your question, but if I may present another:

There is none.

These robots are currently in use screening COVID patients, assessing parts of the Chernobyl plant and working in warehouses. Those are just the applications that I know of.

I think the "barrier to industrial use" was simply that Boston Dynamics wanted to ensure they had a fairly mature platform before scaling up to significant production.

I know many have seen this, but for those who haven't:

Slaughterbots https://youtu.be/9CO6M2HsoIA

>It would help a lot more to compare footage with real-world people interacting with the bipedal robot.

Maybe I misunderstood your comment but there are definitely videos of people interacting with Atlas (the bipedal robot) to the point that it's a running joke that they'll remember said interactions. See https://youtu.be/rVlhMGQgDkY?t=83

The story (by a fellow Times writer) you linked is not only fascinating but provides a lot of context for Callimachi's investigation.

I think it does lend some credence to the claims that she was a reporter trying to massage the facts to fit a preconceived narrative.

I entered 8TB initial load/1TB monthly transfer into BackBlaze's "calculator" for "cloud storage" (is this the same as their personal service? It's the only pricing info I could find even after three min of looking..) and it quoted me $735/year.

Maybe I'm missing something.

It's not really up to the submitters. One of the core guidelines of HN is to use the articles title and not to editorialize [0]

>[otherwise] please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Obviously there are upsides and downsides to this, but IMO it significantly cuts down on clickbaity titles at the expense of some readability when the site being linked to chooses a less-than-descriptive title.

>All attack payload data must use professional language

Huh.

In a moment of serendipity, I was just finishing up a tiny project prompted by a moment of nostalgia: installing a Windows XP system under VirtualBox and getting the internet working on it.

I always had fond memories of Win2k and WinXP and I wanted to know if my feelings today would match what I remembered, or if I was just seeing the past through rose-coloured glasses.

I couldn't get IE to co-operate with modern browsing bar a few websites, I'm assuming this was to do with SSL. I did get Firefox 41 .0 working a few minutes ago and immediately went to HN to test it (as an easy https-enabled text-based website) only to find this to be the top post.

For those curious, clicking Help -> Is this copy of Windows legal? goes to a 404 [0] page in IE.

To answer my own question: Windows XP feels incredibly more user-friendly and accessible than the version of Windows 10 that I bailed from to Linux. I don't know how much of that is familiarity and how much is actual difference, though I did use Windows 10 far longer than I did Windows XP before finally deciding it's not working for me.

Why are there two control panels? Why do I have to move the mouse all over the screen to click something because the OS uses a weird mix of desktop-oriented and touchscreen-oriented design? Why do I have to dive into the guts of the system to disable the invasive features that track me and send my information to Microsoft?

Opening Windows Media Player prompted me with some privacy options such as obtaining licensing info and sending diagnostics back to Microsoft, each of which were clearly explained and had to be toggled on/off in the setup. It was so clearly out of the norm at the time that they went out of their way to make it visible. I feel like today it would not even warrant a mention, bar locales where that's required by law.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but with WinXP it feels like I own the system. The customer-merchant relationship is clear. I paid Microsoft money, they provided me with software and now I am using it. 15 years ago I never would have though to consider that a company whose software I use would be selling my personal data to figure out exactly what kind of ads I should see.

Using Windows 10 now feels like a constant battle between me and the company that sold me the software ("do you want to enable Cortana? can we send your keyboard input to our servers? can we update your system without permission unless you have an enterprise account? can we, can we, can we...")

I'm not RMS. I don't care if companies use binary blobs to distribute drivers or collect basic usage info without full disclosure. Yet I still feel the pendulum has swung too far and its momentum continues to push it in the same direction. In both UI design and privacy.

I'm glad that there are still a vocal group of enthusiastic people that are keeping the spirit of FOSS alive, but I'm concerned about the commoditization of our information.

Phew, sorry, I got really bloody off-topic. Great website! It didn't work on my WinXP VM under Firefox or IE but it did work on my Linux system. Congrats!

[0] https://i.imgur.com/M2NoHrt.png

Definitely Handbrake!

Thank you for this fascinating write-up. It's given me a lot to think about. I'm quite curious as to why no existing social networks have tried to implement your ideas in a meaningful way, and to a lesser extent why no new start-ups have.

Perhaps when I have a few hundred million to invest in a better platform I'll reach out! (One can dream).

Thanks! For those who are busy:

>Hubert Lim, a biomedical engineer at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, hit on the role of the tongue in tinnitus by accident. A few years ago, he experimented with using a technique called deep brain stimulation to restore his patients’ hearing. When he inserted a pencil-size rod covered in electrodes directly into the brains of five patients, some of those electrodes landed slightly outside the target zone—a common problem with deep brain stimulation, Lim says. Later, when he started up the device to map out its effects on the brain, a patient who had been bothered by ringing ears for many years, said, “Oh, my tinnitus! I can’t hear my tinnitus,” Lim recalls.

>Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”

>That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new.

This occasionally strikes me as true when reading some of the comments in this thread about how it's easier than ever to deploy because of a new tool, easier to create a website or app because of a new framework, easier to order a car, easier to buy an airplane ticket..

I can't help but consider that we expected so, so much more.

>Technically, these aren't being blocked. They're being audited. The payments will still go through.

They buyers are literally getting a message saying "This transaction cannot be completed because it violates the PayPal User Agreement" [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/ArchieMcPhee/status/1304437732584771584

This is a good example of the adjustment the camera makes: https://mobile.twitter.com/ceejay35_/status/1303702328323653... (linked from article)

I don't want to derail the discussion too much either, but anyone curious about the reasoning can see this comment from CloudFlare [0]

>We don’t block archive.is or any other domain via 1.1.1.1. Doing so, we believe, would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.

>Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.

>The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users. This is especially problematic as we work to encrypt more DNS traffic since the request from Resolver to Authoritative DNS is typically unencrypted. We’re aware of real world examples where nationstate actors have monitored EDNS subnet information to track individuals, which was part of the motivation for the privacy and security policies of 1.1.1.1.

> [snipped the rest]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702

The graph in your first link is absolutely fascinating. I found the number of "Unintentional Poisoning" and "Suicide" deaths especially surprising (due to the high numbers)

I thoroughly enjoyed both the blog post (as an accessible but thorough explanation of your experience with PDF data extraction) and the linked news article [0] as an all-too-familiar story of a company realizing that a creative person is using their freely-available data in novel and exciting ways and immediately requesting that they shut it down, because faced with the perceived dichotomy of maintaining control versus encouraging progress they will often play on the safe side.

[0] https://www.thoroughbreddailynews.com/getting-from-cease-and...

Your website demo video is impressive and I can imagine there are many businesses that would save a lot of time and man-hours by incorporating a solution like this.

I've often thought about creating products like these but as a one-man operation I am daunted by the "getting customers" part of the endeavour. How do you get a product like this into the hands of people who make the decisions in a business? (For anyone, not just OP). PPC AdWords campaigns? Cold-calling? Networking your ass off? Pay someone? Basically, how does one solve the "discoverability problem"?

>DNS has become frighteningly unreliable. Here are previous stories that show how it is possible to lose access to your domain for no fault of yours:

The second story you posted is about a user who forgot to renew their domain and did not wish to pay the overly-inflated fee to re-register it while it was in the grace period.

I hold no love for any registrar that jacks up rates for getting back an expired domain and agree that they should have sent a reminder email, but describing this as someone "losing their domain through no fault of their own" is, frankly, incredibly misleading.

The user:

1) forgot to renew their domain 2) had full right to recover their domain but objected to the price 3) had full right to transfer the domain out to another registrar for the original 15EUR price and 4) eventually got back full control of the domain

They mention that the wearable component was a conscious design choice to overcome certain limitations of standalone devices:

(On standalone device limitations)

>(2) They rely on multiple transducers that enlarge their jamming coverage but introduce blind spots locations were the signals from two or more transducers cancel each other out. If a microphone is placed in any of these locations it will not be jammed, rendering the whole jammer obsolete.

>To tackle these shortcomings, we engineered a wearable jammer that is worn as a bracelet, which is depicted in Figure 1. By turning an ultrasonic jammer into a bracelet, our device leverages natural hand gestures that occur while speaking, gesturing or moving around to blur out the aforementioned blind spots.

Thanks! I was very curious about the before/after comparison but didn't see a working link in the original article.

Here is the direct YT link (from your article): https://youtu.be/o1ls7Gr9LTE

This truly seems like a completely massive change in the observable characteristics of the star especially on such a short timeframe. 36% dimmer in 12 months? I'll be really interested to see if we can find out for sure what's happening.

I have to disagree with the false dichotomy you are presenting wrt to the invite system. Specifically, being forced to reveal your real identity to at least one other user vs. "inviting people that they don't know the real identity of" which you say means that "the invite system isn't really adding anything beyond making it slightly more complicated to join."

There are many people online whose real identities I don't know whom I consider thoughtful individuals more than capable of engaging in meaningful and respectful discourse. I'd be happy to vouch for them in an invite-only board.

If Google is able to introduce this then why can't Apple?

>Starting in Android Pie, devices can take advantage of a new capability where backed-up application data can only be decrypted by a key that is randomly generated at the client. This decryption key is encrypted using the user's lockscreen PIN/pattern/passcode, which isn’t known by Google.

>By design, this means that no one (including Google) can access a user's backed-up application data without specifically knowing their passcode.

https://security.googleblog.com/2018/10/google-and-android-h...

Re: 1

Google gives their customers the option for end-to-end encryption of uploaded data and I'm sure they have to play by the same rules as Apple.

Incorrect. See this video[0] from the product stage. They have two ways to hotswap if it's not plugged into a powerbar: 1) plugging in their device into the adjacent power outlet then removing the socket assembly and 2) an adapter that can splice leads into the power cable

https://youtu.be/-G8sEYCOv-o

Pretty ingenious, tbh. Though I'm a bit concerned about how much you end up handling energized plugs.

I disagree. The people you refer to did not hate Holmes/Enron/etc unilaterally because of a vague feeling that their talents were overestimated. They had, to use PG's term in the article, a dispute with them over a particular issue that they had picked up on, often as a result of having domain-specific knowledge that allowed them insight into their operations (i.e. that financials did not seem to be adding up for Enron or that Holmes's promised device would require significant breakthroughs in analysis that they thought she did not achieve given her evasiveness on technical questions).

I have a feeling OP means they are sterilized or autoclaved but some (now non-dangerous) particles remain as there is no medical point in thoroughly cleaning them after sterilization. Which would make sense.