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dobbsbob

1,976 karma · joined January 28, 2013

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dobbsbob··on Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
That's why SICP endured so long as an introductory course to programming. because Scheme is easy to use. You learn programming instead of a language.
dobbsbob··on Mark Zuckerberg on a Future Where the Internet Is Available to All
Unfortunately all our governments are determined to not let this future happen http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/07/03/net-threats/
dobbsbob··on U.S. Banks Curtail International Money Transfers
You can issue your own assets on the blockchain now, tie them to fiat and make a p2p money transfer startup. Mastercoin, Counterpartyd, counterwallet.co are an example of what you could create and hire competent crypto engineers so you aren't cleaned out (counterwallet.co makes bold client side security claims yet don't offer browser extensions). Make your asset issuing company as transparent as possible, holding reserves as insurance in bitcoin or with a trusted 3rd party http://www.coindesk.com/new-hong-kong-bitcoin-exchange-offer...

Sell and redeem your asset for local peso deposits in Mexico. The vast diaspora will use their accounts at home to buy the asset then sell them p2p in the US to their community network. Traders all over Mexico can change the asset to cash p2p using your business as guarantee the assets are worth something. No correspondent banks to worry about. Now somebody in the US can load up your version of counterwallet.co, click on p2p trade and buy your asset from somebody local either for cash or bitcoins to send to their family back home or directly to a cash out service in Mexico that just delivers money.

dobbsbob··on The Developer's Dystopian Future
There's plenty of remote sysadmin jobs https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/16884/unix-devops-sys...

Note: "If you don't meet all those criteria, apply anyway. We'd love to talk to as many people as we can."

My local craigslist has dozens of jobs posted today looking for "Linux sysadmin" with scant requirements, offering $60-70k. Not huge money but better than being unemployed.

dobbsbob··on The trip to federal prison from court to your new bed (2004)
One punishment BOP uses is Con-air for weeks at a time or "diesel therapy". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_therapy

CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou was threatened with permanent con-air for complaining to the press about prison conditions. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1018653-john-kiriako...

Living shackled on a plane or bus transferred from prison to prison for years sounds like a nightmare

dobbsbob··on The Developer's Dystopian Future
First day CompSci 101: 'The language you will work with professionally hasn't been released yet so we are learning this" I wouldn't worry about it. I work with developers in their late 40s who started out learning Fortran in the 1980s.
dobbsbob··on The Developer's Dystopian Future
DevOps in my area means you do everything except clean the bathrooms for 1/2 the salary of whoever you are replacing, and work at least 10-12hrs per day because unlikely you can fit in customer support, chef/ansible/puppet deployment, databases, front and back end development, testing and debugging, presentations and piles of internal paperwork and emails in 8 hours.
dobbsbob··on Show HN: Find and Report Bed Bugs in North America
I thought it was run out of Romania http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/09/urban.pests/
dobbsbob··on Show HN: Find and Report Bed Bugs in North America
I found my reviews I wrote on the bedbug registry back in 2008 on this site. Definitely scraped
dobbsbob··on Show HN: Find and Report Bed Bugs in North America
This is needed, because the bedbugregistry seems abandoned and has submission errors where you can't add new entries to some addresses.

One problem is legal backlash, I would have hosted this overseas like the bedbugregistry did to prevent takedown notices and lawsuits.

This is helpful when dealing with lying landlords who claim there was never a problem until you moved in, so it must be something you did and refuse to pay for treatment, refund damage deposits and generally screw you over. Then you go on one of these bug registry sites and discover they've had bedbug infestations for years.

dobbsbob··on Clicking Their Way to Outrage
Actual social justice 'warriors' should be anti-capitalist and committed to enforcement of identity politics with authoritarian zeal. They can only gain victories against their own political allies on the so-called left so focus activism on controlling university staff recruiting, campus funding decisions, campus behavior bylaws, banning books from campus libraries/bookstores, banning music and films by appealing to regulatory authorities or by harassing large companies with public shaming campaigns to have somebody fired even though their own anti-capitalist ideology should be in conflict with working with a corporate HR dept.

The social justice student society on my campus literally marched into the campus library, seized and burned books in the parking lot that they said encouraged colonialism.

dobbsbob··on Jamming XKeyScore
that article: "The filename xkeyscorerules100.txt is implausible. Source files do not end in ".txt" and the term "rules" is an odd choice."

Looks to me like a typical sample config file that you rename xkeyscorerules100 after editing just like how you would create /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules or SELinux custom module policy before compiling.

dobbsbob··on Move Over Kickstarter, Crypto-Equity Is the Next Frontier
http://swarmcorp.com/faq.html

Is this Legal?

"We believe this falls into section 1(d) of our Cryptoequity whitepaper, meaning it is allowable under U.S. law and is probably not problematic elsewere"

This is 1(d): People can redeem cryptotokens at some point in the future for some service in the network. [Legal assessment: Probably fine, may limit upside of “equity” growth]

So it's "probably legal" which doesn't instill much confidence

dobbsbob··on On being targeted by the NSA
Could be Germany got an evaluation copy of the program and somebody there leaked it. Maybe it isn't restricted to just 5 eyes alliance
dobbsbob··on Music Sales Continue to Plummet for Albums and Digital Downloads
Somebody is seeing U2 in concert, they are making hundreds of millions per tour. Merch licensing is also huge income now compared to 20 years ago.

Music producers are also getting paid, Andy Samberg used to buy his SNL shorts music and Lonely Island beats from producers on twitter selling and leasing their songs directly.

dobbsbob··on NSA targets the privacy-conscious
Oliver Holmes already has one of the worst reputations, nothing any of us write can compare with the man's own words regarding his reputation. Here's part of his decision in upholding the the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. [...] Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Of course this has nothing to do with the NSA/GCHQ/CSEC collecting IP numbers of users of privacy software. Only a police state casts a wide net and then spies on it's own citizens to determine their innocence presuming they are already guilty by seeking out this software in the first place. It's the exact guilty by association kind of nonsense every police state throughout history has done.

dobbsbob··on Why Everyone Should be Concerned By the Seizure of MyRedBook.com
My first online paid job was writing fake reviews by the hundreds on that and similar sites like TER (the escort review) years ago. Every review site for sex work is rigged I'm sure I wasn't the only one hired to do it. Feds lately have targeted banks for dealing with sex workers for unknown reasons, like when banks dropped porn valley actress's accounts. Who knows why they decided now to takedown the site and not backpages or TER, and dozens more clones of myredbook.

Most are independent sex workers, you can spot the micros run by gangsters (brosan) that are trafficking women pretty easily.

dobbsbob··on Pizzerias Receiving Extortion Letters Demanding Bitcoin
This extortion attempt could create a new startup: Nakatomi Pizza that processes calls to check for fingerprints of fraud, and to verify orders. "Now I have a machine learning caller-ID with advanced heuristics ho, ho ho"
dobbsbob··on What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police
Police also use questionable blood splatter pattern 'science' they draw sweeping conclusions from
dobbsbob··on What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police
Phone baseband proprietary stack is bombarded with type0 SMS which will silently ack the msgs and thus 'ping' your location. There's probably carrier made tracking programs on SIMs too and/or your SIM can be modified by over the air update to install stealth tracking programs the host OS will never know about. FBI asked a carrier to do this once to track a fraud suspect http://www.wired.com/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-aircard/all/
dobbsbob··on Fast Food for the Mind: Why I Don't Have a Facebook or Twitter Account
I have a pseudoanon twitter account to follow various researchers and people in the mobile security space. It's great for asking questions since most of them don't have public email addresses and I'm usually asking a minor question. Facebook I've never used, I have a group textsecure room open with close friends and use it like an IRC room idling on it.
dobbsbob··on NFL players: height and weight over time
In hockey there's a strategy for this you both grab each other and slide in at the same time to avoid getting killed on the boards. When Gretzky played no other player could hit him because they didn't have the instigator rule, so if you clobbered him on the boards the biggest goons on his team would take your head off so the result was nobody touched Gretzky until late in his career when they put in that stupid rule.

Hockey also has the problem of players wearing body armor now so hits are even worse than what they used to be.

dobbsbob··on Peek Inside a Professional Carding Shop
Competition also gives him this info to bring heat to their rivals in the game. One forum used a unique marker that appeared to be a benign msg count number so they could identify krebs from screenshots he puts on his site and ban his account but he figured out what the marker was, cropped it out and was back with a new account.
dobbsbob··on Justin.tv ending archiving, deleting all archived videos after June 14
i only use JTV to nerd out in the trek streaming channels and make fun of rikers lack of beard in chat during season 1 TNG
dobbsbob··on Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
There's also 2 guys declared 'unfit to execute' yet they are still in solitary on death row since the 70s
dobbsbob··on Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
Texas you don't get the death penalty for murder, you get it for committing a second felony and murder. Rob Will is on Polunsky DR and likely innocent considering he was handcuffed at the time, zero physical evidence, and his partner confessed to the murder. DA is a stepping stone to governor and senate there is much incentive for DAs to seek the death penalty due to all the media attention these trials receive, propelling the DA into a household name. The more inmates you kill the bigger your public profile.
dobbsbob··on Replace TrueCrypt – Candidate alternatives
No reason you can't write a script that automates cryptsetup/luks, or a UI for PySkein or Java Skein, or the plenty of Keccak implementations.
dobbsbob··on Hacker Who Helped Disrupt Cyberattacks Is Allowed to Walk Free
It was a red flag. One day he is lulzsec doing lulzy mischief, disappears and comes back inciting terrorism and giving big ups to reactionary militant islam.
dobbsbob··on Is College Worth It? It Depends on Whether You Graduate
Or Germany's apprentice programs, like the one they have for developers.
dobbsbob··on Hacker Who Helped Disrupt Cyberattacks Is Allowed to Walk Free
It's likely he still works for the FBI and had a hand in taking down DPR. His FBI handler was in charge of that investigation, an anonymous 'agent #2' is referenced all through the complaint.
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