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Yeah, they're called ATM skimmers, they've been a pretty big problem in the US too. Kerbs has some nice articles about how they work:

http://krebsonsecurity.com/all-about-skimmers/

Firmata[0] is actually a messaging protocol upon which SkyNet is based.

http://www.firmata.org/wiki/Main_Page

This is a really cool solution to a problem that really seems like it shouldn't exist.

Unrelated, is one of the best open source project landing pages I've ever seen.

I think blocking might already be possible. Comcast is known for intermittent service problems, it would probably be pretty easy for them to give "intermittent service problems" to anyone trying to access a blocked site. They couldn't stop them from accessing it forever, but they could make it really really annoying.

I was pretty sure I knew what it was in 10 seconds, but they didn't tell me, so I had to guess. My guess was slightly off - I thought this was for making websites. It's better they tell me what their thing does rather than making me guess, even if it's an easy guess.

Something tells me a 35 km conveyor belt is moving slowly enough to give you plenty of time to hop off before the big crushing thing.

Because you can pay these guys to do that for you. Plus, they'll support it and provide fake user data.

I don't really have much else to say about this, except that I definitely didn't take "applications" to mean Flappy Birds, because that seems ridiculous. Obviously the guy who they introduced as crying at the end of a Tesla biography doesn't want to spend his life making mobile games.

> Maybe, but starting that discussion means that we'll probably start talking about "high/low" standards, and I try not to think like that.

I was thinking more in terms of the entertainment/pragmatism scale. I think this is good writing more because it made me go "wow, I enjoyed reading that", whereas it seems like you're coming from more of a "this was kinda lame because some of the things they said were questionable" standpoint. Nothing wrong with that, but if we didn't recognize it we'd be yelling at each other for hours.

I think Cryptol will make it much easier to become qualified to write crypto because it makes the programming more similar to the math. Your average programmer will be able to start learning how to implement crypto from a much more rigorously mathematical standpoint, and inexperienced developers will write safer code. Seems pretty neat.

> How overly simplistic and descriptive that is. Going academic, would, in it's most 2014'ish, pop-cultaral-way, mean that you probably wouldn't go on to make any cool apps.

I read that as the dilemma that Page was facing, not an absolute truism. This is an article about Larry Page at Google. It seems silly to be annoyed at the author for simplifying the dichotomy between academia and industry to move us through his life.

> If you manage to get through the introductory number slalom, it reads like the script for a trailer to a new action flick!

Oh shut up, that was a nice piece of writing. It was an interesting hook, a nice way to introduce a main theme of the article; Larry Page's admiration of Nikola Tesla. It may have been flashy but considering how well it fits into the rest of the article (and indeed, the quality of the writing) I'd hardly call it sloppy. Although maybe we just have different standards.

Probably engineering know how and money.

A kernel is a program that runs "on bare metal". This program is equivalent to hello world for kernels - it's the simplest possible one. It is called "Kernel 101", after all.

That's because emacs can already do anything, if you're willing to learn how. Still though, it's not a very useful thing to say.

I haven't had the time to watch this yet, but it seems like they wouldn't let anyone they didn't want to work with on their show.

This is obviously anecdotal, but hopefully it is an example of how discussion here can have a positive influence: Before I started reading about it on HN, my opinion of the NSA scandal wasn't much more complex than "it's bad". Sure I had some reasons (right to privacy, violation of the constitution, etc), but my thinking was basically "I already knew government is a bunch of dicks, and there was that AT&T thing a while back, so this isn't even anything new, it'll probably just blow over in a couple of days". Obviously, it didn't, and as I kept reading the discussions, I found myself caring about this thing more and more - I never really talked about the news with my friends, but the discussion on HN gave me a reason to; before, if I talked about the news with them, it was a one time thing - none of us read more than the article, so we only had our own insights to discuss. But the discussion on HN gave me (and them) a much broader view. It hadn't even occurred to me that this could be used by terrorists against us - until I read a comment here. As for real action, I have written my congressfolks about this, and I know 2 other people who have done the same because of discussions we had. Again, this is anecdotal, I (and/or my friends) might be a exception, but I hope you can understand that even though HN is obviously not the "public consciousness", discussion here can influence people who would never have otherwise cared.

(Of course if you were just diffusing the "We're such a important and powerful part of the world" type of attitude that seems prevalent on reddit and seems to be implied by pessimizer's comment, go for it)

Yeah, sometimes I like to just toss a album in a playlist and listen to it, and I always seem to end up skipping at least one song

Pretty low if I'm listening to all my music at the same time, but what if I have a playlist of 10 songs?

By "get in" do you mean to comment or to simply read the comments? I'm all for a intelligence test (I personally would like a "actually RTFA test"), but I'm pretty sure that making that test required to even read the comments is a terrible idea.

Because then I feel like I should be making that money. Also, there's the possibility (probability?) that in order to make money off of it, you're making it look like you made it, which my ego does not appreciate.

Time? But besides that, I can't really think of anything. Some guy on NPR was talking about how it might be some professional developers who did this in their free time, so that would kind of make sense.

"I've been exploring Google Drive for the past few hours now. It's a very stable storage platform".

How could you possibly tell that it's "very stable" after a few hours?

I wonder how he just happened to notice the keylogger connecting to FTP? Did he have a monitor in the background or something? Seems like that would be a good practice for doing things like this, and this guy obviously knows his stuff.

somewhat unrelated: The most beautiful implementation of life that I have ever seen is this 7 line Clojure one. It really turned me on to the value of using data structures that match the problem well.

http://clj-me.cgrand.net/2011/08/19/conways-game-of-life/

Wow, he did a really good job of making that weld disappear.

I interpreted it as very far ahead distance-wise If this was a race Ubuntu would have a sizable lead, according to TechRepublic.

I thought the line promoting his blog was amusing - he put it on an example letter for the reader to use (it says "sincerely (you)" at the bottom) as a joke. I don't think it was a actual e-mail that he would send out.

Yeah, it looks like a typo. A Google search for "ZX Spectrum 48x" shows this article as the top result, and the Wikipedia page only lists the 48k and 16k.

Slightly off-topic: Is SQL injection itself illegal? Because I was under the impression that only using SQL injection to gain unauthorized access to someone else's computer (like the OP is suggesting) was illegal.

Consumption is not useless. Yes, the iPad is purely for consumption, but if that consumption improves you as a person/programmer/whatever, it is not useless. You state that "by getting the iPad, you'll spend more time consuming and less time producing", but I think that's a fallacy, if you remember that iPad time is consumption time, it can be very valuable. It is also important to remember that much of that time may be time that you never would have spent producing anyway (lying in bed, riding the bus, whatever). If you think your iPad is destroying your productivity, then sure, return it, but remember that the iPad is very good for consuming things, and in order to produce, you must consume. Don't discount the role consumption has in production (great artists steal and all that).