Hacker News Reader

angotton Apple Reports Second Quarter Results

Wild and unfounded speculation: I feel that the thinness of the new iMac was not an explicit design exercise, but rather a consequence of bringing the M1 over to the desktop. Because of how powerful the M1 is, they were just able to recycle the already thin laptop designs, putting them in a desktop enclosure. They couldn't do this before, because Intel mobile CPUs didn't match the performance of their desktop equivalents. And since those desktop CPUs had more demanding thermals, they couldn't make a thin iMac.

angotton OpenFlights – airport and airline data

Yep. It is quite good for some data that volunteers can provide from open data. Things like runway numbers, surface material and length.

angotton CRTC allows small wireless carriers to use big networks

Yes, exactly. This ruling doesn't change much. All it provides is that regional carriers will now be able to offer services outside of their service area with mandated roaming wholesale tariffs instead of private commercial agreements. This might allow for players like Freedom or Videotron to start offering services in more areas, perhaps leading to a decrease in prices where only the Big 3 were previously available, but I do not expect any crazy disruption to retail pricing, as the numbers of players competing in the market will still be limited.

There won't be a Mint Mobile or a Google Fi in Canada for a long time, unless these players decide to partner with a Canadian regional carrier. And even then, I don't know if this would be legally possible, as majority foreign ownership of telecommunication providers is not allowed in Canada. Once again, the Canadian telcos have managed to keep their oligopoly untouched.

angotton Killing TurboTax

They usually claim that if people didn’t have to file their own taxes, they would not be aware of how much they are getting taxed. In their view, this would eventually make it very easy for the government to increase taxes without significant protests from the public.

angotton RethinkDNS – monitor app activity, block ads and firewall apps on Android

That API you're linking is only available on macOS (see the column on the right side of the page).

angotton OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities

This is an issue with all map services, really. I see the same thing happening on Google and Apple Maps, lots of places that are permanently closed haven't been updated yet.

angotton Apple's MacBook revival plan: Bring back old features

This is a problem with all laptop batteries, not just Apple batteries.

angotton Cyberespionage Using SS7 via Circles

This will break phone calls if your carrier does not support Voice over LTE (VoLTE), as the device will be unable to switch over to 3G to handle incoming/outgoing calls.

angotton macOS Big Sur

It was fixed in the first Release Candidate. Are you running the latest version?

angotton Photos from inside a Typhoon class submarine

Adtech is a major driver of growth for AWS products. See https://aws.amazon.com/advertising-marketing/. Amazon retail business also uses targeted advertising as part of their ad network: https://advertising.amazon.com/products/sponsored-display

angotton The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

MVNOs are unable to operate in Canada because the carriers mentioned above won’t let new entrants use their networks. It’s how they protect their oligopoly.

angotton NSA's Tips to Keep Your Phone from Tracking You

Isn’t iBeacon a passive technology, though? I don’t think the beacons are listening for any incoming client connection, they just blindly broadcast their identifier (UUID+major+minor IDs). Unless you are assuming an app might store the beacon IDs and then report back via the Internet.

angotton Google-backed groups criticize Apple's new warnings on user tracking

It already does that! 1Blocker lets you specify a list of websites for which cookies won't be sent in the request headers. So I suppose the API indeed supports this feature.

angotton The End of the Redis Adventure

One of them was LLOOGG: https://github.com/antirez/lloogg, which used to be at lloogg.com but it seems like the domain was not renewed.

I remember using it on my personal website long before I had even heard of Redis, it was a nice analytics tool for small sites with little traffic.

angotton Not new news, but tbh if you have tiktiok, just get rid of it – videos

The app is also extremely good at avoiding censorship, which I find highly ironic for a product made in China. I once tried to block TikTok at the DNS level, and I realized that if you block any of their DNS names, the app will start using encrypted DNS over HTTPS via 8.8.8.8 to circumvent your efforts.

angotton Siggo: A terminal GUI for signal-CLI, written in Go

Nice, looking forward to trying this. The Electron-based Mac client uses way too much RAM for what it does.

angotton Facebook News is filled with stories too mainstream to do well on the rest of FB

Sure, very good idea, but it will never happen. It would lead to a dramatic drop in user engagement, and ultimately a decrease in revenue.

angotton Zoom closes account of U.S.-based Chinese activist after Tiananmen event

If it wasn't clear, I was just being sarcastic about Google's huge number of messaging products... I fully agree with your statement, their move totally makes sense from an IP protection standpoint.

angotton Zoom closes account of U.S.-based Chinese activist after Tiananmen event

To be honest, that's also because they probably want their employees to use one of their 37 different video-conferencing apps.

angotton Signal app downloads spike as US protesters seek message encryption

The first step would probably involve getting a PhD in cryptography...

angotton Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

Not true. The iOS location history is encrypted and stored in your iCloud account with a key that never leaves your device. So it's quite different from Google's Location History: Apple stores it, but they cannot read it.

And if you disable iCloud, the data remains exclusively on your device.

angotton How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

You can add `--force` and zap will also work on non-brew installs. The paths are community-contributed, so watch out (you can print the paths with `brew cask cat <name>`).

angotton How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

You can also use “brew cask zap zoomus” to remove preference files, browser plugins, logs.

angotton Maza – Like Pi-hole but local and using your operating system

You can solve issue #3 by whitelisting that hostname in the NextDNS dashboard.

angotton Unpatched iOS bug blocks VPNs from encrypting all traffic

https://labs.integrity.pt/articles/the-curious-case-of-apple...

That's a post from April 2019 showing a very similar issue with IKEv2 VPNs leaking traffic on iOS. I wonder if the two issues are related. Back then, Apple was made aware under responsible disclosure but apparently nothing was done about it.

angotton Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business?

Yes.

angotton DuckDuckGo Traffic

Maybe yes. But also way more expensive shipping :-)

angotton Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights (2018)

Based on my experience in Italy, Lufthansa offices still offer free copies at the ticketing counter. I’m not too sure how many people buy tickets at the airport nowadays, let alone do so with a paper timetable, but they are still there! :-)

angotton I've been working on X11 on jailbroken iOS

There is an exploit that can be used, but it only works on old devices (iPhone X and older).

angotton Switching from Chrome to Firefox

Out of curiosity, can you elaborate on that?