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controversial97

370 karma · joined February 24, 2022

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controversial97··on PuTTY on my Win98 VM crashes OpenSSH
Believed to not be exploitable.

Roughly four months from the bug being created to a fix being released.

controversial97··on Writing Software That Will Still Build and Run in 20 Years
No mention that 64bit ntp time will roll over in the year 2036, 32bit unix time will overflow in 2038 and the next GPS week rollover is in 2038.

The year 2038 is fifteen years from now.

controversial97··on Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022
Backblaze has stated in a blog post that they purchase drives in large quantities direct from manufacturers and negotiate for good prices. Backblaze says that a model of drive which is significantly cheaper and somewhat less reliable can be ok for them.

This means that these stats may not be a very meaningful indication when purchasing a few drives from a retailer.

Never the less, the world is full of situations where you have to make choices with insufficient data. I'm still going to prefer to avoid Seagate hard drives where practical.

controversial97··on Ask HN: Do you think the bubble has burst?
In my opinion, the value of assets in the USA going up is driven by the US government creating astronomical amounts of new money and that is very unlikely to stop in the next couple of years.
controversial97··on Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Privacy has been extinguished. It is now a zombie’
https://archive.ph/jmTzT
controversial97··on To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, and be nothing
You met my mother?
controversial97··on Why does the government worry about Apple encryption but not Signal et al.?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI-Apple_encryption_dispute

Part of it is the time that the FBI wanted Apple to create custom firmware to allow unlimited attempts to enter a PIN number.

controversial97··on Ukraine Has Digitized Its Fighting Forces on a Shoestring
According to news reports, in April 2022, they had a smartphone app called e-enemy, which was used by any random person to report sightings and locations of Russian forces.
controversial97··on Smart Elevators going horizontal and cable-less – see video
Here is the Tom Scott video about this elevator system from five years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI

controversial97··on Rishi Sunak wants all pupils to study maths to age 18
In the UK children do some GCSE subject around age 14 to 16. They get some choice of subjects such as choosing geography or history.

At 16, they have options. They can stay at school and do some A-level subjects of their choice. They can leave school and do whatever they want.

16 year olds can join the army, they can do a vocational course such as learning to be a cook, baker or a bricklayer. They can get a full time job, which in practise often means working for a family business because not many employers want 16 year olds.

Teenagers doing A-levels have a wide range of math knowledge. Some of them dozed through gcse math lessons and got a very low grade. Some of them learned geometry, probability and basic statistics.

One teacher trying to teach twenty teenagers who don't want to be there and where some can't add up three digit numbers and some can do algebra will be ineffective.

Children over 16, and their parents, can't be criminally charged or fined for truancy. Schools can threaten to throw them out, but the schools get money for each pupil.

There is not much you can do if 16 years old just don't turn up for math class.

If you tell the teenagers that hate math that they have to keep doing it if they stay at school age 16 to 18 then more of them will leave.

controversial97··on The Media Rarely Lies
The media may not lie often, but they continuously deceive.
controversial97··on Ask HN: What does your battle station look like?
A dozen year old PC with ECC ram and a low-performance video card.

It would make sense to replace it with something that uses less electricity, but the requirement for ECC ram limits the options.

controversial97··on Cloudflare Has No Vision
There are reasons that e-commerce websites are behind cloudflare and put ip blocks in place:

"The website is being ddosed, a criminal in China has sent us an email demanding a bitcoin payment to stop."

"Ugh, fine put it behind cloudflare"

"We are getting a load of attempts to place orders with stolen card details from Nigerian ip addresses"

"just ip block the whole country, we have already blocked all the commercial vpns and tor exits right?"

"Someone is trying to spider the whole product database from a cheap vps provider and we got more credit card fraud attempts."

"just block all datacenter ip addresses"

controversial97··on Why Not Mars
There is also the issue that the average temperature on Mars is -60 celsius.

Keeping humans alive on Mars would require nuclear power sources much larger then any that have been flung into space so far.

If you are thinking of solar power then consider than the watts per square meter is about 40% of that on earth, that a big pile of batteries would be needed as well and how much work it would be to maintain a huge solar farm.

controversial97··on Ask HN: What made it so hard to create the Spotify player back in the day?
I'v never used spotify but I imagine part of the problem was that when they launched in 2006 there were lots of people using windows 98 and windows ME on single-core 233MHz cpus and dialup internet.
controversial97··on Teardown: Nokia 3350 GSM Mobile Phone (With Direct Ringtone Recordings)
In Europe and the UK, there is still 2G service, with the exception of Switzerland. 3G is going away long before 2G.
controversial97··on SSL certificates used to be much more expensive
Also, until around the year 2012, if you wanted https to work for the people using random outdated browsers, you needed a unique ip address for each domain name.

Cheap web hosting companies usually charged a monthly fee for each ip address.

controversial97··on Pentagon picked four tech companies to form $9B cloud computing network
This was all going to go to Microsoft, then Amazon somehow got that cancelled by suing.
controversial97··on Disaster-prone communities turn to UHF CB radio networks in disaster preparation
UHF CB in Australia and New Zealand is similar to GMRS radio in the USA and Canada.
controversial97··on Is anyone else getting cold/sick much more often these days?
Not me, I'v had much less contact with groups of random people.

Months ago I went to an event in a poorly ventilated pub basement, several days later I developed symptoms and had a positive covid test a couple of days after that.

In past years, in December I travelled on trains full of coughing people and caught a cold. This year I havn't.

controversial97··on Twitter to Put 1.5B Abandoned Handles Up for Grabs
Twitter used to allow account names that are one character long or longer. They now have a 5 character minimum length so I presume a load of unused short account names will be deleted and won't be available to re-register.
controversial97··on Your Home is Insecure: Practical Attacks on Wireless Home Alarm Systems [pdf]
related

https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/security-alarm...

controversial97··on [dead]
Can you give some more detail of what you want to achieve?

Are you looking for a software developer?

What specific skills or knowledge do you think a "Raspberry Pi Magician" has?

controversial97··on Ask HN: Is there a list of vendors selling unbloated Windows?
A related thing to watch out for is that a new Dell laptop may have the harddrive encrypted with bitlocker, it you don't attach it to a microsoft account then you may later find you have no way of retrieving the bitlocker key so if it won't boot or you can't log in you can't get any files off the storage by other means.
controversial97··on Tell HN: It's possible to close annoying Twitter's login screen without tricks
You can read twitter without being logged in and without any nagging by using nitter, just choose one of the many nitter instances

https://xnaas.github.io/nitter-instances/

controversial97··on ‘Dark Ships’ Emerge from the Shadows of the Nord Stream Mystery
Posted two days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33569719

controversial97··on Ask HN: Book Scanner Recommendations
I have a Plustek Opticbook 3600 which is an old model that can be found on ebay. I used it on a windows 7 machine.

It is tolerable for a small number of books. Scanning a thousand pages is an ordeal that you will not be keen to repeat.

I spent a day trying different software. I don't remember for certain which software I used, it may have been naps2.

controversial97··on Has the Time for 32GB of RAM Finally Come?
I like to have thousands of browser tabs open and use virtual machines so the time for 32GB of RAM was about six years ago when I could get fairly-cheap used RAM from ebay.
controversial97··on Ask HN: Is Elon Musk good at sales?
Musk has sold lots of "full self drive" packages for $6000 to $15000 and I think it is likely that either a court or the California Department of Motor Vehicles will order Tesla to give full refunds. A class action lawsuit was filed recently.

If a salesman sells a lot of things that don't exist then you might think he is good at it if he manages to keep his commission and find a new job before the company that he sells for goes bankrupt.

Musk has sold billions of his Tesla stock, so perhaps it depends if he ends up in personal bankruptcy due to buying twitter or if he has some money left in a few years.

controversial97··on Ask HN: Any hardware folks want to help make a next-gen souped up Walkie Talkie?
Also there is gotenna who are burning a pile of venture capital money doing some sort of radio mesh thing.
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