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chmodd

38 karma · joined September 26, 2012

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chmodd··on UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal
> governments who murder and torture their citizens.

What about governments that murder and torture citizens of other countries? The number of Iraqi and Afghani civilians killed by the US is pretty high - this fact alone is enough to make the US one of the worst human rights offenders in the world.

chmodd··on As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption
I didn't know that! I used to be a member of FidoNet (pre-internet network that provided e-mail and usenet-like services) back in 1990s and any commercial activity and encryption was similarly prohibited - relay operators were even supposed to read their users' mail and delete any messages that violated the rules.

I don't think there's any chance of this coming to the internet though. There are just too much uses for encryption besides conspiring for terrorist attacks.

chmodd··on As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption
I can think of at least one counterexample, namely the failure of the NSA-promoted key escrow system in 1990s (aka Clipper chip)
chmodd··on As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption
I hope it works out similarly to how proliferation of public wi-fi led to increased adoption of https.
chmodd··on 10,000 Bitcoin Mining ASIC Chips Arrive in Switzerland – 3 TH/s
It's terahash where hash means double sha256 that is used in the bitcoin proof-of-work protocol
chmodd··on 10,000 Bitcoin Mining ASIC Chips Arrive in Switzerland – 3 TH/s
Which is year 2140 or so
chmodd··on Ubuntu forums breached - all passwords compromised
MD5 is so fast on GPUs, you can do some pretty ridiculous dictionary attacks in a matter of minutes (like trying every combination of words that has ever been written in a book or posted online - using google's n-gram corpus for example). Then you have plenty of time to try letter substitutions (3 for e), combinations such as word + number + word, etc. This doesn't apply of course, if your password is a long string of random characters.
chmodd··on David Cameron cracks down on online pornography
I now do searches like this using Tor Browser. Just in case.
chmodd··on Weak PC Market Catches Up to Microsoft
I had a similar thought recently. People who are currently in their 20s and 30s had a unique privilege of growing up when fully-featured computers appeared in almost every household. A bored 13 year old kid getting a Pentium-166 desktop for Christmas is much more likely to start tinkering with the system, learn to program, hack, etc. than if his or her first computer was a walled garden iPad. Now with the huge success of smartphones and tablets, it may well happen that most households of 2025 won't even have a computer suitable for anything but media consumption and "apps".
chmodd··on All three major Russian carriers dump iPhone
mobile contracts are very rare in Russia, almost everyone is on a prepaid plan
chmodd··on $99 ARM-based PC runs either Ubuntu or Android
By the way, bitcoin can no longer be efficiently mined on GPUs since the network hashrate has been increasing tremendously with ASICs (tenfold growth in the past 6 months and continuing steadily)
chmodd··on EJDB: Embedded JSON Database for C/C++, .Net, NodeJS, Python, Lua, Java, Ruby
For convenience mainly.. It saves me from having to install a "serious" RDBMS, import data, etc. With SQLite, deployment is simply copying the db file to the server.
chmodd··on EJDB: Embedded JSON Database for C/C++, .Net, NodeJS, Python, Lua, Java, Ruby
Indeed, this is probably the reason. The company that developed ejdb (Softmotions) apparently uses ejdb in their own proprietary software, and they wouldn't be able to if it contained any GPL components.
chmodd··on EJDB: Embedded JSON Database for C/C++, .Net, NodeJS, Python, Lua, Java, Ruby
I use SQLite in small and medium-traffic web apps (the largest one getting about 80000 hits daily) all the time with no concurrency issues whatsoever. My rule of thumb is that if you don't expect your app to require more than one server, sqlite will work just as fine as postgres or mysql.
chmodd··on Magic keywords on Google and the consequences of tailoring results
Here's a nice infographic for this: http://dontbubble.us/

Google has been serving personalized results for a while now, but this is probably first time it attracted such widespread attention from media.

chmodd··on Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
This is known as "shaving" among affiliate marketers and it mostly doesn't matter. E.g. when you are choosing among 10 offers to monetize your traffic, you split test and keep the one that brings you most money, regardless of whether advertisers are honest or not.
chmodd··on The Web Is A Mess
Exactly. Most people think that SEO spam is something that is only done by shady eastern european viagra-selling rings. In reality, the worst offenders are multi-billion dollar companies which capitalize on the strength of their domains to bloat the index with countless pages of keyword-rich fluff.
chmodd··on Illegal Numbers
> I've had a discussion with someone else about how a group of people could route each other's packets and then hypothetically law enforcement couldn't prove who they came from.

Combine it with encryption and you'll get something like Tor or i2p. Not just hypothetical, but works very well in practice too. Things like Silk Road have been running there for years with LEOs not being able to do anything about it.

chmodd··on Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof
A handful of countries attempt to block Tor and only two (China and Iran) do it seriously, using deep packet inspection (still doesn't work because of obfsproxy, duh). Even though, not even China and Iran outlawed it.
chmodd··on Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms
Depends on the definition of jumping. Besides paid character transfer (which is a "true" jump from realm to realm) a lot of activities in WoW take place in "instances" and players from different realms may participate in the same instance (PVP matches, dungeons, raids). A few weeks ago crossrealm zones were introduced, so normal questing areas can now span several realms too. It's kind of a hybrid between EVE's approach and classic UO's "shards as isolated universes" system.
chmodd··on Google disables AdSense account of user for sharing free book via torrent
The problem with AdSense is not that there are no alternatives (there are plenty - chitika, adbrite etc.) The problem is that those alternatives pay way, way less. All the customer service in the world isn't going to help if your website makes 10x more with AdSense than with any other ad broker.
chmodd··on Google Search Referrers Disappear In iOS 6
I don't disagree with your views on privacy, but what google does is simple hypocrisy. It still continues to provide visitors' search terms to paid advertisers who are probably much more likely to use them for questionable purposes than a random site from organic results.

If google is so concerned with privacy, why not block keyword passing from AdWords ads as well?

chmodd··on Dietary supplements: Scary substances manufactured under scary conditions
History disagrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
chmodd··on Mathematics at Google
They do (almost) the same thing at youtube, don't they?
chmodd··on Rent-to-Own Laptops Secretly Photographed Users Having Sex, FTC Says
* "email-advertising" companies in China/Russia/Nigeria.*

FYI, the US is by far the largest producer of spam e-mails: http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries/