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cryptarch

1,001 karma · joined July 28, 2016

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cryptarch··on Louisiana prosecutors are using fake subpoenas to pressure witnesses to talk
I think your views on police are mostly appicable in the U.S. because the U.S. has (one of) the most militarized police force(s) in the Western world.

Your views do not match my experience in the Netherlands at all. My largest irritation regarding Dutch police is that they seem incapable of helping with bike thefts (even though all bikes have a mandatory unique ID), and sometimes they give you a ticket for carefully biking over pedestrian ways (excellent shortcuts) or for biking without a light.

However, I do think your post contributed to the discussion because the advice seems coherent and accurate for U.S. citizens and anyone planning on visiting there.

cryptarch··on NeoVim 0.2.0 released
Debian Stable (without a DE) only comes with nano AFAIK.
cryptarch··on Sent to Prison by a Software Program’s Secret Algorithms
My bad. Is sex included though?
cryptarch··on Sent to Prison by a Software Program’s Secret Algorithms
Legal precedents tend not to explicitly single out one gender, race or religion.
cryptarch··on Sent to Prison by a Software Program’s Secret Algorithms
Would it be ok if we swapped gender with race, religion or any other protected class?

There's your answer.

cryptarch··on Intel platforms from 2008 onwards have a remotely exploitable security hole
I don't own anything by Libiquity but I'd be happy to ask answer any questions about my Libreboot/Minifree X400, which is based off the Lenovo Thinkpad T400, including diagnostics and/or benchmarks if I can get them set up in less than 30 minutes.
cryptarch··on Intel platforms from 2008 onwards have a remotely exploitable security hole
Now this less-mainstream theory about the precarious state of our communication systems has confirmed to a greater degree, would anyone here know of similar risks that few seem to be aware of right now?

I'm not sure if this would be considered OT, but considering the nature and scope of these vulnerabilities I don't consider it reasonable to exclude the possibility of intent and malice.

For this reason I'd like to ask: what do you consider to be "the next, most likely to surface, conspiracy of this flavor"?

The flavor being: "the struggle for control of any and all data and computational resources".

cryptarch··on Intel platforms from 2008 onwards have a remotely exploitable security hole
I'm having fun, I finally have an excuse to dust off my Libreboot X200 (refurbished and modded Thinkpad with Libreboot firmware).

However, I strongly disrecommend buying from Leah Rowe unless you enjoy waiting months for payment confirmation and delivery. The worst webshop experience I've ever had.

I recommend you build/flash your own, contract it out or look for a different vendor.

cryptarch··on Getting Started with Headless Chrome
I use xvfb-run on Debian and it's a breeze:

    xvfb-run -s '-screen 0 1280x1024x8' ./cucumber
Or are you using more advanced Xvfb features, or perhaps running inside containers?
cryptarch··on Y Combinator When No One Cared
It's great to have for as long as it does not indirectly tie back to your LinkedIn ;)

But when writing that scrubbing script you may as well make it save a local copy.

cryptarch··on HardenedLinux: The way to the Ark
It seems to back up this quote:

>> they ported some mitigations while introducing more (exploitable?) bugs or incomplete implementations

I also disagree with GP that there isn't much of a point in using KSPP if it makes your system less secure and is not maintained diligently.

cryptarch··on A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet
You have a choice here if you're tech savy and a ROM is available for your specific baseband. I've so far been unlucky with my S6 because I have a rather obscure baseband.

I'm not saying it's anywhere near as bad as living in NK, but the "open" option is not at all known or available to what I'd estimate at 95+% of the population, and many fewer will actually use it.

cryptarch··on Wikipedia blocked in Turkey
Thanks for the clarification, I didn't know that was a thing.
cryptarch··on Digital Security for the 2017 Lawyer
I like the question:

Why should I trust this vendor specifically with my specific data?

Then again, I don't see cause to trust any businesses by default. Perhaps I'm missing something.

cryptarch··on Digital Security for the 2017 Lawyer
It seems like a decent list of recommendations to me.

If you follow all recommendations you're way ahead of the curve compared to what I've seen, but I've mostly seen small IT shops.

I do recall passworded ZIPs being easy to crack, that might be better replaced with a PGP-based alternative.

cryptarch··on Ask HN: Would you be interested in a “cyberpunk” inspired news site?
So basically something like Boing Boing?

If your execution is equally good, sure, I'd read that.

cryptarch··on Why Use Postgres?
How do model binding libraries compare to ORM's w.r.t. performance, e.g. query optimization?
cryptarch··on How I went from failing every interview to a job at Amazon
Which is why you should let companies filter you out by choosing clear personal boundaries regarding the interview process.
cryptarch··on Wikipedia blocked in Turkey
Sure, I'll elaborate:

>> In some cases, sex or gender assignment does not align with future gender identity, and the assignment can be problematic.

For starters, while this is a fringe case (~0.3 - 0.6% is a lazy estimated range taken from Wikipedia) it takes up 2/5 of the introductory section.

Sex assignment not matching future gender identity "can be problematic". This is something I do not agree with; I'm of the opinion that gender and sex should be treated very much separately, and this posits that assigning a sex at birth is "potentially problematic" just because the person's gender might not match up later in life.

>> Reinforcing sex assignments through surgical and hormonal means may violate the individual's rights.

That's well and good, but this is only relevant for intersex people, and this seems to imply that it is also so for transgender children. Intersex occurs significantly less than transgenderism, at around 0.06% of the population.

This kind of thinking can and has resulted in the thinking that it is a child's right to determine their sex; see for instance the gender reassignment clinics in Canada that treat children as young as 4 years old. I find it very hard to envision a reasonable country where a child of 4 is given the choice to undergo intensive surgery which will also render them infertile.

It's already forbidden for Canadian schools to tell parents if their children are identifying as the opposite gender at school; I suspect the next step will be placing children out of their homes if their parents refuse to let them transition. A brave new world.

To add insult to injury, child gender reassignment surgery and the usage of puberty blockers are still highly experimental. A few things are known (like the decreased bone density) but many important questions remain unanswered, like the impact on brain development. It will be a long time before this is solved because there just aren't a lot of children undergoing sex reassignment surgeries, thank god.

>> Terminology

This section goes to great lengths to only use "Male" and "Female" in the context of "Assigned X at birth". In fact, the whole article contains not one mention of the names of the two sexes, except when narrating about people who do not "fit typical notions of male and female bodies", the one in "Terminology". Again, over half of this section is dominated by transgenderism-related text.

>> Assigned X at birth

To me this idea seems to imply that sex is something that is arbitrarily chosen by a Doctor at birth; the Doctor here being portrayed as the personification of "the Patriarchy". As if sex has nothing to with sexual organs and the means of procreation.

>> Sex reassignment: ... physically change a person's gender to match their gender identity after a putatively erroneous sex assignment at birth

"Physically change a person's gender". I don't agree that gender is a physical thing at all. I consider gender to be a set of social protocols that generally ease interactions between individuals, by providing a default set of roles a person of either gender can build their identity off, and while also easing day-to-day interactions between the sexes by defining common protocols.

"putatively erroneous sex assignment at birth" implies that gender dysphoria is more real than a person's sex, ignoring the fact that a person's sex does not change with "sexual reassignment surgery" as a person's chromosomes don't change and that person will never have the same sexual function as a person of the sex whose visual characteristics they imitate with surgery.

Neither this section or the rest of this article acknowledges that sex is in any way grounded in biological reality. There is a much better Wikipedia article on "Sex determination systems", but none of the information there is mentioned in the "Sex assignment" article. It's also not mentioned in the "See also" section.

>> Assignment in cases of infants with intersex traits, or cases of trauma

This belongs in the main article ("History of intersex surgery") but takes up twice as much as the introduction and Terminology section.

>> Challenges to requirements for sex assignment

"the perceived need to legally assign sex is increasingly being challenged": there goes the narrative again, "assigning sex is bad and you should feel bad".

cryptarch··on Wikipedia blocked in Turkey
I consider dismantling environmental agencies criminal in the ethical sense, but US law obviously does not consider it criminal.

Does Erdogan ever actually violate Turkish law? You call what Erdogan does criminal, but I'm under the impression you're using "the letter of the law" as a measure for Trump, and "what's ethical" for Erdogan.

As an aside, Trump and his staff have removed press from press meetings and refused to let certain question be asked. Those actions aren't arrests but they don't particularly cultivate a climate of open debate either.

cryptarch··on Wikipedia blocked in Turkey
Thanks for kinda proving my point.

Would you care to give me some pointers/links regarding what you consider a better view on this?

Edit: if you want more of a handle on my problematic opinions, here's a fairly expansive dissection of the article by me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14232717

cryptarch··on If you opened your PayPal account before you were 18, close it
Good luck, these are the 3 email addresses I've been able to find so far:

complaint-response@paypal.com

service@paypal.com

hostmaster@paypal.com

cryptarch··on Wikipedia blocked in Turkey
How do you find out where they came from? And is it at all plausible to survey enough of the sea to catch even half of refugees coming in by boat?
cryptarch··on If you opened your PayPal account before you were 18, close it
Thanks for the reminder, any tips on how to do this?

I tried removing my debit account coupling but it refuses citing "a pending transaction" (no specific reference given).

The "close my account" button takes me to an error message. I guess I'm spamming all their email addresses I can enumerate until this is resolved.

cryptarch··on If you opened your PayPal account before you were 18, close it
CC, debit transfer, Stripe, Bitcoin or Monero are some internationally available options.

There are are probably local debit-card based payment processors available to you as well; iDeal is one such system that is very popular in the Netherlands, it lets you pay with any Dutch debit account just as easily as with PayPal. It's a system in that there are a bunch of companies offering access to it. AFAIK processing costs are around ~€0.10, irrespective of transaction size at least for transactions under €1000.

cryptarch··on How Web Forums Make Neuroticism Viral
That's just comedy gold, have you skimmed through it?

I'm not entirely sure OP (of the 97 page PDF) is not mentally unhinged but I'm assuming it is part of the joke.

cryptarch··on Wikipedia blocked in Turkey
How will you tell where to ship them if they've discarded their passports?
cryptarch··on Wikipedia blocked in Turkey
Erdogan is within his right to censor.

Does that mean he does not censor?

cryptarch··on Wikipedia blocked in Turkey
Censorship is the suppression of undesirable information. Data on climate change is now being suppressed because it is undesirable to the POTUS.

The US Gov. has many branches and is not one consistent entity. The administration choosing the censor other branches is censorship.

A = A

cryptarch··on Wikipedia blocked in Turkey
The censorship is a fact, only its justification is in dispute.
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