Hacker News Reader

computeron Heathrow Airport recreates departure day 4x a year for young man with autism

Relevant fictional short movie (6 minutes) about a future where AR is used to make people's surroundings seem better: http://vimeo.com/7306050

computeron This hacker might seem shady, but throwing him in jail is bad for everyone

I may have not formulated that as subtle as I meant, since English is not my primary language. So my apologies for that. I do not wish him dead. I mean that I'll fight for him in this case since it's important for society, but since he's such an awful person I would lose all interest in him after he's out of court.

Read it as a figure of speech, since we technology people always speak about people who might get hit by a bus when thinking about the future of products.

computeron This hacker might seem shady, but throwing him in jail is bad for everyone

Throwing him in jail is an awful outcome for justice and for the precendent it sets. I'm very much hoping he walks out of court a free man. Once outside the court, he could get hit by a bus as far as I'm concerned.

When we want weev free, we're fighting for law and society, for just principles, not for the individual.

computeron SteamOS

My Linux system with Nvidia graphics easily gets a month uptime; I only reboot every now and then for updates and changes to the system. Never had an issue with the drivers, even when using them for 3d gaming with Steam.

Now, don't get me started on AMD's awful attempt at graphics drivers.

computeron Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID

Because it's the CCC, and they're very reputable.

computeron Intel: The year of the Linux desktop is here

Flash works just fine on Linux. Even out of the box, on many distributions.

computeron The new Bing

I just went to http://www.bing.com/ for the first time in ages. It seems to have achievements/medals in the top right (the 0/5 thing). That seems like a very unprofessional thing for a company like Microsoft?

computeron Postmates CEO tells customer to 'f--- off'

This reminds me of a similar incident where a customer accidentally got a similar message from the owners/management forwarded by customer support: according to the message, he was a "freak and a very weird dude."

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-varia...

computeron Local IP discovery with HTML5 WebRTC: Security and privacy risk?

It can be fixed for general cases (like advertisers or drive-by-exploits): make WebRTC click-to-play.

This also fixes the issue where any random site can use WebRTC to make your computer distribute peer to peer content of its choice (like bittorrent).

computeron A simple way of defeating the compiler backdoor attack

Note that compilation is often not deterministic-- i.e. compile it again (even on the same PC) and you could get different output.

The Tor project struggles with this, and is working on deterministic builds so anyone can verify that the source code actually matches the binaries provided.

See https://blog.torproject.org/category/tags/deterministic-buil... for more information.

computeron Download Windows 8.1 RTM, Visual Studio 2013 RC Today

It's for developers testing if their programs and apps still function properly. Not for consumers to get early access. Just run it in a VM.

computeron NIST curves backdoored

Link to the actual mailinglist for context: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-Septemb... The title of this post is not proven by its contents.

computeron How to handle millions of new Tor clients

My CPU-limited nodes lost several MB/s in bandwidth, which I now suspect is caused by this.

Note that the handshake is the CPU-limited part, so a CPU-limited node benefits (in terms of MB/s) from having few clients which use high bandwidth, the opposite of these bots.

computeron Amazon Can Support The Internet Sales Tax Because Amazon Is Exempt

This piece is written by a (flat-tax) lobbyist ("Katie McAuliffe is federal affairs manager at Americans for Tax Reform."), which is very clear when you read sentences like:

  "They want the MFA passed not for sales tax collection,
  which has been on the rise, but to set a precedent for 
  exporting their taxes and laws across their borders so they 
  can tax and regulate people who cannot vote against them."

computeron Didn't Get Enough Sleep? You Might As Well Be Drunk

Those experiences seem strangely spectacular, they are very different from any experiences I've witnessed or read about. Also, they decided to just use it to skip every nights' sleep? That's not what modafinil is meant for, nor is it capable of replacing sleep in that way.

More people doing dumb shit without having a clue, I guess...

  "With a Friday psychology exam looming, she stayed awake nearly sixty hours,
  sleeping for just four. "

seriously...

computeron Didn't Get Enough Sleep? You Might As Well Be Drunk

Just to make sure nobody takes the above as facts and decides modafinil is what they need: basically everything in parent is incorrect, except that sleeping is good for you.

Modafinil does have various side effects, does not allow you to never sleep, and you do have some effects of sleep deprivation if you use it to skip nights. The shady sites that sell it do ship to non-US addresses. Your doctor probably also has it (provigil), if you have narcolepsy.

computeron How not to check the validity of an email address

Just send an email and see if it arrives.

computeron HelloRun - A WebGL 3D Game

Not on my up-to-date Firefox on 64-bit Linux; it works perfectly.

computeron Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

Question to the Emacs crowd: how do I hit Alt comfortably? My instinct is to use my left ring finger, but have trouble doing that without moving my other fingers much. Could it be because I have very large hands (or because my keyboard sucks)? Is it a good idea to just remap capslock to be the meta key?

computeron UX Design of Google Glass Apps

Feeling lost is a feature to me-- having the whole world speak one language would seem awfully boring to me.

computeron New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking

Yes, Wikileaks and its media partners requested that for the cables. The USGov refused to help censor the cables to protect sources and other people.

computeron Ask HN: reCaptcha isn't stopping spam, what should I do?

Perhaps as an experiment try "enter the first character of your post/comment". That would kill any remote human captcha solvers (since they don't actually know the post content), and likely require some rewriting of the spamming software, assuming that is automated.

Of course, this is not a long term perfect solution against motivated adversaries, but it's a way to see how the current spammers work.

Another: Add a keydown handler to your message-textarea and log (to a hidden form field) how many key presses are being used per post. If the spam software is setting the content field programmatically, you then know how to detect them.

computeron Ask HN: reCaptcha isn't stopping spam, what should I do?

Is the spam very specifically targeted at your site? If not, just implement your own very simple captcha system and see if they can handle that.

Spammers generally use captcha solving APIs which map to humans in low-wage countries. They pay ~$2/1000 solved captchas (a few years ago, not sure what it's like now.)

If you're not a specific target, changing your captcha might be enough to no longer easily be a victim of such a service without changes to the spammer software.

computeron Boarding Pass Redesign

Also, consider the fact that you have to show the TSA your boarding pass. If you have to unlock your phone for that, they get full access to copy all your data if they decide you look like a terrorist.

Likely not a consideration for most people who don't mind privacy stuff, of course.

computeron Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

I bet their competitors can't wait for you to switch to their free accounts.

In other words: why not pay?

computeron Don't Get Pwned on Public WiFi: Use Your Own VPN

The "Dropbox of VPNs"? What does that even mean?

computeron Don't Get Pwned on Public WiFi: Use Your Own VPN

Of course, running Tails inside a VM is likely slightly safer than running TBB (Tor Browser Bundle) on your normal OS, depending on your threat model. For example, a Firefox exploit that breaks out of its sandbox could access your personal files when you use TBB, but only files within the VM when you use virtualized Tails (without an extra VM or network (fileshare) exploit).

If you're going to use a VM for your Tor browsing, consider Whonix [1] instead, which was developed specifically for that usecase. (Note that this is not developed by the Tor project people!)

But indeed, to get the full benefits from Tails, always use the live boot option whenever you can.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/whonix/

computeron Reddit: Lessons Learned From Scaling To 1 Billion Pageviews A Month

Presumably the web tier does slightly more than just reverse proxying. For example, it could build (render) pages based on an internal RedditAPI it queries. This RedditAPI (application layer) would then basically be a distributed database front-end with some state, like user sessions.

Seperating it at that point allows the web tier to offload much of the work (mostly rendering), while keeping it stateless, thus allowing effortless scaling of that tier.

computeron Detained in the US for “Visiting Thailand Too Much”

http://i2.wp.com/goodmorningblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013...

A border going through a house:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-44CWQkimcko/UeemC9NcL0I/A...

computeron Operating System Development Series (2008)

I wish this resource existed 10-15 years ago. I remember scavenging the internet for information about OS development, assembly and everything.

I think in the end the best resource I found was something called "DS-OS", a basic assembly OS implementation. Looks like it's online at http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=22083

This stuff got me into lower-level (than VB) computer programming-- good memories.