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crankylinuxuser

1,209 karma · joined October 30, 2017

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crankylinuxuser··on Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public
Indeed. That's on par with:

"I'm sorry you're an idiot."

Not an apology, an insult, and feigning to be apologizing about you (which is doubly insulting).

crankylinuxuser··on Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public
Wouldn't be the first time HN/automoderation/mods have removed 'critical to YC business interests'. Happened to me with the Thalmic Myo, when I open source forced them to open their platform. HackADay also notes that HN autohid my article.

https://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free...

HaD wasn't hidden.. Thalmic was.

Dang has usually responded with noncommital responses like they never do that. But further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears.

edit: and -1'ed. Is this because "my content sucks"? Is it because of 'offtopic'? Or is it a mod?

Considering karma here determines rights, rate limiting, mod-down, flagging, and more - these points do matter here. And of course the larger issue here is lack of transparency. In fact, with removal of mod scores, the site has gone down in transparency.

crankylinuxuser··on Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files
Network topological discovery is the hard pill to swallow with p2p based tech. You're paying for it in much higher network bandwidth, cpu, battery, and more.

Eventually the tradeoffs will be so minuscule that they will be a rounding error. But right now, that's not true.

crankylinuxuser··on Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression
Thats already happened once in recent times.

Occupy Wall Street.

Now, what happens when that expands to 1/10 of citizens due to lack of food, people getting evicted, no work, and more? Covid-19 is only accelerating the road we're currently on, in a very quick fashion.

And there's a reason why police departments were buying military surplus. They view us citizens as the enemy. There's nary a reason why you need APCs with 50cal's mounted for the local police force, or armed with a variety of grenades, or microwave cannons, or acoustic weapons.

Whatever it is that's forming and coming to a head, it doesn't look peaceful. At. All.

crankylinuxuser··on Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression
Indeed.

PKD gets IoT,EULAs, and contact law in one shot.

It's similar to when that engineer was investigating his purchased Tesla, and Tesla called and threatened him to not 'tamper with their car'.

crankylinuxuser··on Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression
Yeah I ran across some scaremongers on Twitter 6 months ago who were going on about vaccines (??) And 5G. I had and still have no clue about that.

As a real aside, networking everything does definitely have upsides and downsides.

Upsides: seamless monitoring, remote control via api, integration across a house/car/phone, remote presence (never worry that door was open, or coffee pot is on, or garage door up).

Downsides: DRM at every level, unupdated devices, non-service things are now shorehorned into a service model, you no longer own your possessions, hacking, pay for a plan per device?

There's also spectrum discussions with 10-100x devices chattering. That's going to raise noise floors even higher.

-----------------------

Relevant edit of where I see IoT going towards:

“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.

“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

--- Phllip K Dick, "Ubik".

crankylinuxuser··on Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
I sait on another comment on this article that being a mod allows you to strongly astroturf and control the narrative. From there, and having loads of bots, allows you to manufacture consent or dissent. And the moderation power allows you to remove what you wish not to address.

It's sheer power. It's not about the money, per se... But those with power get money, and those with money seek power.

It has nothing to do with good, in most cases.

(And yes, I'm a moderator of small groups. I just remove spam and malware.)

crankylinuxuser··on Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?
Yep. Thats only because Graylog requires it. We don't put any real data in Mongo. That'd just be silly.

I'd put SNMP telemetry data in Mongo, only for the fact that recording that can be somewhat lossy. Plainly, I just don't trust Mongo with consistency, availability, or partition tolerance.

And because Mongo's backup facilities suck (requires taking the DB into readonly, or accepting no time consistency egads), the only good way to do a backup is to put the DB on LVM, and making a LVM snapshot.

crankylinuxuser··on Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
NodeRed or Apache NiFi can help a great deal with that.

Both are great at posting and reposting (on and off Reddit, or between FB, Reddit, Twitter, etc), along with controlling botfarms.

edit: Seriously, why the downvotes? We had a NiFi post a week ago. And those of us who do OSINT and investigative work also use deanonymizing techniques. We automate our defenses as well using similar.

crankylinuxuser··on Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
Karma is a social proof for being able to astroturf and control the narrative. And depending on what group you're a mod in, can provide a great deal of influence and control.
crankylinuxuser··on G2A pays Factorio developer $40k over illegally obtained game keys
> Buying keys in a region with low regional pricing then reselling them in a higher region

Notice that companies can do that with labor and buildings and tax evasion, and it's 'situation normal'... But when real humans try to, its bad and illegal and horrible.

Hmm.

crankylinuxuser··on Singapore Just Sentenced a Drug Trafficker to Death via Zoom
I would think the closest analogy would be to the death penalty in the USA surrounding lethal injections.

Every company that is knowingly being used for the cocktail to kill someone has made the supply gone. They refuse to supply to any state that diverts to executions. Sure, the executions are 'legal' (removing jurors who are ethically against death penalty is a whole different issue).... But the companies manufacturing these chemicals don't want anything to do.

I wonder how Zoom is going to handle this in the future? Even though they obviously had 0 input for Singapore executing a citizen, the article makes it sound like Zoom was somehow, peripherally complicit with state sanctioned murder.

crankylinuxuser··on Why Is This Website Port Scanning Me?
Then why did your "user agent" permit it? Seems rather anti-user.
crankylinuxuser··on Why Is This Website Port Scanning Me?
It doesn't make any sense in trying innocent people!

(No, seriously, I know people who believe that.)

crankylinuxuser··on Why Is This Website Port Scanning Me?
Yep. Just waiting for this "feature" to be added to metasploit.
crankylinuxuser··on The startup economy is fundamentally broken and the virus will make it worse
> What choice did Uber remove from the market when they started?

> What choice has Uber removed from the market so far?

> What choice do you expect Uber to remove from the market even if they are maximally successful in their overall plan?

I'm thinking of Meditations on Moloch from SSC (0). What Uber removed was 2 fold.

First, was that a gig worker could no longer be legal or not culpable (civil) regarding driving without appropriate licensure or insurance. The rates paid do not allow for the costs of a chauffers license, nor do they cover commercial insurance rates.

Secondly, Uber removed protections on riders with the first point, and by using the carrot of "we're cheaper than taxis". We saw this play out before, when there were no licenses for taxis. A whole lot of bad things happened, and the public demanded the licenses and checks to be instituted. Some places went way overboard ($1m medallions in NYC).

Uber and others are all the same - they wish to remove the checks and balances, cut a meager amount off the bill to customers, and extract money by running around the law until they can either change it or get shut down.

(0) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

crankylinuxuser··on Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
I also think that "real transparency" is something one can approach. Just because complete transparency is nigh impossible doesn't mean the steps towards it is worthless. And there is always a lower layer one can point at that is opaque... right down to the silicon.
crankylinuxuser··on Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
I would think that having more transparency (eg: moderation/removal log) is much more appropriate than "he looks good to me".

I've already seen a few times where content demeaning YC companies mysteriously got disappeared... and then summarily blamed on automated removal. Who's right? No clue. But being able to see that log as it happens would be a significant good faith action.

crankylinuxuser··on Ask HN: How long has Google been censoring YouTube comments critical of China?
> It contains troll harassment. By not letting a troll know they've been banned, you remove the incentive they might have to create a new account to continue their harassment.

Completely false.

It only adds another step, which is "check account with a private session". I'm sure eventually shadowbanning will also look at what IP address and also lie as well. But right now I don't know any sites that do that.

But shadowbanning is a disgusting practice, and is completely anti-transparency. It can be used to further political agendas (like the article is about). And if an account is spewing troll garbage, just delete, add to a mod log, and close. But very few sites are open like this. (The only site I'm aware of was the old site kuro5hin.org).

edit: And not only shadowbanning, but flags/dead also are abused here on HN. Its all too easy for a legit post with a differing (non-trollish) viewpoint that differs from the status quo, get -1'ed into oblivion, and then summarily flaggedkilled. Again, I've seen this happen when it appeared that there was some sort of concerted campaign to silence certain opinions. Requests to require a comment for flags/-1's, or even a 'who modded this' have gone unanswered.

crankylinuxuser··on Don't set the language of your website based on user location
That's not entirely true. You can "change" the charset from 1 type to another... The problem with that is fields may extend past the max length of that field when converting from 1 to the other.

Source: me. I had to help someone with specifically this when they set the wrong charset on their DB. Had these problems.

crankylinuxuser··on Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
Giphy was the reason why at my last job, a manager inadvertently posted porn to our slack channel.

Nevertheless, giphy was just a gif image host. They do have access to current meme culture, which I imagine is useful to FB. But for me, thats just a less of a reason to use them. Im data-mined enough already.

crankylinuxuser··on Why Is Facebook So Afraid of Checking Facts?
Indeed you are.

Enter "US-linked Australian church fined US$98,000 for selling bleach as coronavirus ‘miracle cure'"

citation: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3084250/u...

And thats just a single example of content that can get people killed.

We also already have FB playing MinTruth as well here with "Post shared incorrect number of deaths caused by respiratory diseases in Ceará"

citation: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/scienceandhea...

This one gets harder as who has the better/right-er numbers? Is Bolosonaro lying? Probably. But how do you tell? Who's fact-checking the fact-checkers?

crankylinuxuser··on An Implementation of Tempest in GNU Radio
Light is a TEMPEST emission :) It too is EM.

But yeah, you're right. Shoulder surfers are very much why * are used.

crankylinuxuser··on Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
Whelp... That shows just how little I know about Mac.
crankylinuxuser··on Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
The answer is to run a campaign to work with Firefox and Safari only, and convert all users to either platform.

Seriously, fuck google. I'm just done with them.

crankylinuxuser··on Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
You misspelled "sharecropper".
crankylinuxuser··on Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
There's too many techbros and 'rockstars' that think they're 10x better than anyone else. Surprise - they're more average than others tell them.

But I've seen it again and again, IT people don't seem to gravitate towards unions.

crankylinuxuser··on A non-moral dilemma about cheating, but it brings up some points (2019)
Do you honestly think there's education when a uni teaches cattle class of 200 people for calculus 101, and intends to flunk 80% of them?

This could easily be a set of videos recorded from a real lecture. Problems could be assigned from problem sets (plug n chug from schematics). What someone would pay for is 1 on 1 time from a professional.

And there's NO reason to fail someone, as in retake and pay a pound of flesh again. If you don't get it, go to a different degree that doesn't require it.

crankylinuxuser··on A non-moral dilemma about cheating, but it brings up some points (2019)
I think it's a false premise.

The purpose of learning is to understand the topic at hand. But school's purpose isn't for learning, primarily. It's for accreditation and getting a paper saying you learned certain things. And then you use that paper to get a better job, make more money, and get things like retirement and health insurance. (It used to not be that way - things changed after the GI bill... but I digress.)

If the school was non-profit and did as such, failure would not be wasted money or a permanent grade against you. Failure would only be lost time... But that's not how it is. Failure haunts you the whole time. The negative grades stay in the form of ever-approaching GPAs. But if you buy more classes, you can buy the average a slightly bit higher IFF you get better grades than the average.

The moral dilemma is that schools are using the threat of continuous harm of failure(GPAs) and harm to the pocketbook over taking a class and not doing well in it. Schools and their teachers aren't on the hook for bad teaching. It makes sense when possible to use other methods to make sure your grades and wallet aren't harmed.

I believe it would be different if schools were actually on the hook for teaching what you paid them to do. That calculation would certainly change - we wouldn't have "weeder" classes... Well, not in anywhere near the same way.

(Wonders just how much schools make on failing students. I'm sure there's an Atlantic or Vice writeup in that question.)

crankylinuxuser··on Scraping Recipe Websites
I don't have any direct proof that recipe sites are doing this. I only look at just how many "stories" there are, and how many recipes. There just looks like too much writing. And it too is also very formulaic.

And it's also 'if I was to do a recipe site, I'd use a text generator'

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