Hacker News Reader

dobbsbobon Hacker Who Helped Disrupt Cyberattacks Is Allowed to Walk Free

His last few months as a snitch he changed his twitter pic to an islamic black standard militant flag and was openly calling for violence and 'cyber-terrorism'. Ridiculous

dobbsbobon Leo The Homeless Coder Is Still Homeless

He probably has plenty of unpaid fines from the police too, as every homeless person is typically hounded with loitering and other petty fines that a collection agency would grab from his account.

dobbsbobon A Statement About Mahbod’s Annotations on Elliot Rodger’s Manifesto

After a gay co-worker and I watched his Luka Magnotta creepy, incredibly narcissistic to the point of nausea selfie vids he uploaded of himself driving around with a cruisey bar soundtrack we anecdotally declared this guy mad, and an extreme closet case which could explain his odd, jealousy filled hatred for women, obsession over the men they are with and his all around girl repellent behavior.

Too bad there isn't a history eraser button we can use to retroactively deny him fame for this.

dobbsbobon Thomas Piketty accuses Financial Times of dishonest criticism

There's a reason the Economist doesn't credit articles to authors, so it appears as received wisdom from seasoned economists/political insiders instead of actually being written by a 20something hipster intern. If you save a few issues they will contradict themselves every couple of months especially on articles about Russia. where Putin is the hero of capitalism in one issue then an evil protectionist Bolshevik in another. Europe's future will be declared as under the whims of Russia then a few issues later they claim Russia has little influence. It's a borderline tabloid rag, so is the FT.

dobbsbobon What does GCHQ know about our devices that we don't?

The article asks why did GCHQ destroy certain components and not others then discussion is hijacked by somebody transparently trolling on cruise control. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

dobbsbobon The Myth That Americans Are Busier Than Ever

Highschool I worked for Lufthansa here in North America, it was common to see Germans fly over their bikes to go on a 2 month road trip while on paid vacation.

dobbsbobon Ask HN: The best way to find remote job

Indeed http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/van/sof/4451591937.html

dobbsbobon What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War on Drugs?

Most gangs are not directly involved in the sale of narcotics, instead they are involved in extortion "taxing" those who are selling drugs in their area. If drugs disappear they will find another black market to tax like gambling, fencing stolen goods or selling weapons. However the difference is they won't make a million dollars per month taxing somebody running an illegal gambling operation unlike jacking cocaine drivers. It will be a much smaller criminal enterprise, they won't be able to afford a small army of thugs to terrorize an entire city like they currently do here now with all their windfall narco profits.

As for non violent street peddlers I imagine they will go into exports, shipping narcotics to countries where it's still illegal. After Marijuana was symbolically decriminalized by police here refusing to arrest people for possession, and the black market was swamped with declining prices, many former dealers and growers instead decided to operate unlicensed tourist operations selling weed travel packages, and running their own storefronts for legal drugs using their profits as street dealers to bootstrap it.

dobbsbobon What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War on Drugs?

I live a block away from Emery's store. There's a seed store still there that is doing exactly what Emery was doing (selling pot seeds to Americans) yet they haven't been busted. This is probably because it's owner didn't give a million dollars to NORML in the US to fight prohibition of Marijuana.

Emery also writes a federal prison blog, interesting insight into how foreign prisoners are treated in the US, like the time he spent at D.Ray Fed prison where it's entirely made up of foreigners. No racism/forced segregation based on skin color, no homogeneous gangs of all one ethnicity, they all live together in dorms without any of the problems he saw in other fed prisons like Seatac where some guy threatened him because he was playing dominos with a black inmate and that was "not allowed".

dobbsbobon How extreme isolation warps the mind

A guy on Texas Polunsky Death row, Thomas Bartlett Whitaker writes often for the blog Minutes Before Six on what life is like in constant solitary. http://minutesbeforesix.blogspot.ca/2010/07/how-to-go-to-lev...

Had no idea extreme solitary would cause prolonged vertigo

dobbsbobon How to build a Bitcoin Wallet

A lot of casinos and exchanges are using blockchain.info as a hot wallet instead of rolling their own multi sig hot wallet. Crazy risk

dobbsbobon Woman’s cancer killed by measles virus in trial

They altered the virus to kill cancer cells instead of kids which is what measles does by the truckload in Pakistan and India :/

dobbsbobon Ask HN: How did you find Hacker News?

EDIT: forgot, I found this site much earlier. I was learning Lisp, found the pg Lisp story of running Yahoo stores, had no idea who he was, found HN through his page on wikipedia

dobbsbobon Outbox vs. USPS: How the Post Office Killed Digital Mail

Canada has epost which is a crypto vault to hold bank or gov mail you can give other people access . Nobody here proposed the scheme of this article's opening of all mail though, that's illegal to do without a warrant due to hundreds year old laws. A nice reminder that once upon a time our ancestors rejected state surveillance.

dobbsbobon Icelandic High-Voltage Electrical Pylon Competition – Honorable Mention (2008)

I guess this architect forgot the Quebec 1998 ice storm when towers collapsed in a cascading effect and were rebuilt with 'anti-cascading safety towers'. It would also be impossible to climb these and maintain them safely but they look awesome

dobbsbobon Inside the ‘DarkMarket’ prototype, a Silk Road the FBI can't seize

The name could also be used against them by Feds wanting to shut it down by charging the devs with conspiracy to traffic or launder. Imagine if Bitcoin was called NarcoCoin and Gavin was openly giving interviews he develops it to facilitate trafficking and thwart law enforcement. They also might run into problems elsewhere, like Thailand or Singapore which require less burden of proof to send people away for conspiracy if this network has vendors listed there. These guys can't travel anywhere if this is released with their names on it.

dobbsbobon A Bitcoin Debit Card Is Almost Here

Not the 'world's first', been plenty of bitcoin to debit card schemes. I have an ecoin.cc card Russians reload automatically whenever I send BTC/LTC

dobbsbobon California Senate Rejects Smartphone ‘Kill Switch’ Law

I've always assumed bricking legislation has nothing to do with theft and everything to do with shutting down communications during civil unrest to prevent even adhoc wireless networks by completely bricking the device. The proponents of a similar bill in my country are all intel agency shills that normally never dabble in any laws regarding street crime yet are heavily lobbying for this. The ability of the owner to opt-out or perform this remote brick themselves was also rejected with the police having sole power over the keys.

dobbsbobon Feds Beg Supreme Court to Let Them Search Phones Without a Warrant

If you root an android phone then it's trivial for police to bypass the lock screen. There also isn't any time to fiddle with a phone while guns are being pointed at you and police are screaming orders not to move.

dobbsbobon In Canada, find a penny, recycle it

Well there's GST+PST added in Canada depending on province so that $4.99 item would probably cost $5.58 then they round the price since the penny is gone, so $5.58 would be $5.60

Retailers are supposed to round up/down depending on amount but you will quickly find that everybody is rounding up unless you say something.

dobbsbobon Wait, WUT?

Many, many forums use a feeble ratings/trust indicator for pseudo-anon users but then you end up with a clique of highly rated posters and the circle jerk is complete. The whole point in anonymity is every post has it's merit in what it says not who wrote it. I can easily skim the various *chans, filtering out shitposting pretty quick.

For trading pseudo-anon there is already this reputation system which has worked well http://bitcoin-otc.com/trust.php

dobbsbobon Digging for answers: The “strong smell” of fraud from one Bitcoin miner maker

If you want an excellent example how to not run a company, go through this guy's post history

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276848.msg4602313#ms...

'Inaba' is the COO of Butterfly Labs. He also runs his own mining pool (prob with customer miners)

dobbsbobon Twitter blocks two accounts on its Turkish network

These accounts will just switch to Russian social media or blogs.mail.ru which have Turkish language support and would be happy to host corruption docs of the Erdogan regime. Then use twitter to spread links to it.

Nothing twitter can do if thousands of Turkish twitter users are linking to pastebin entries and other moving targets hosting links where to get these docs.

dobbsbobon One week of OpenSSL cleanup

This pays off for them too. NTP DoS reflection attack this year didn't work on OpenNTPD which had removed test commands and extensions that were used by attackers. The BGP hijacking going on last year sending traffic to Belarus didn't work on OpenBGPD http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/repeated-attacks-hij...

dobbsbobon One week of OpenSSL cleanup

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973312304511&w=2

They use that old equip to find bugs

dobbsbobon One week of OpenSSL cleanup

OpenSMTPD, OpenNTPD and OpenSSH are avail for other platforms. They will strip OpenSSL down to essentials, spend months auditing what's left then when satisfied it is reliable software porting to other platforms can begin. It's only been a week

dobbsbobon It’s Time to Encrypt the Entire Internet

To avoid DNS censorship, my ISP filters pirate bay, plenty of other sites.

dobbsbobon It’s Time to Encrypt the Entire Internet

HTTP/2.0 is working on encrypting everything though NSA shills have managed to derail the working group by proposing "trusted proxies" that are allowed to decrypt traffic for nonsense optimization reasons.

dobbsbobon SigmaVPN: Stateless OpenVPN Replacement Using NaCl Encryption Library

ssh depending on what you're doing https://www.michaelwlucas.com/nonfiction/ssh-mastery

dobbsbobon BitUndo – Double Spending as a service

This is why it exists https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=257525.0

Bitcoin apps/sites are using blockchain.info API as a hot wallet. I bet some exchanges are secretly doing this too. Surprised there doesn't already exist a hot wallet as a service yet. A competent one would make assloads of profit from gambling and betting sites that don't want to run their own.