Hacker News Reader

gopkarthikon India is leading IPv6 migration with 61.67% adoption

Airtel does dual stack model. I've been using it for about 2 years now.

gopkarthikon Why electric cars will take over sooner than you think

Agreed.

Half a decade seems too optimistic to me though - lack of charging facilities at residences, current power grid cannot support any significant usage of electric cars, little space for charging stations in cities etc.

Though if fuel taxes & prices continue to rise in current fashion, ICE might become too costly to use.

gopkarthikon Do Language Models Know How Heavy an Elephant Is?

It was interesting to note that on typing "how heavy", the only search suggestion I got was "how heavy is an elephant".

gopkarthikon LastPass Android app has got 7 trackers in it

According to the same researcher, 1Password has no trackers. 1Password does use UserID & DeviceID as identifiers though.

FWIW they do conduct regular security audits and post it at https://support.1password.com/security-assessments/ . The most recent one was done by Cure53 in 2020-Oct [1].

I've been a happy 1Password Family user for a few years now. Very easy to share common account login credentials, important documents etc with the family.

[1] https://bucket.agilebits.com/security/Cure53-B5_1PW-06-repor...

gopkarthikon Wikipedia is 20

As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot Wikipedia already tries to add all referenced pages to Internet Archive.

gopkarthikon Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

Agreed, I doubt the EU is going to do that too. I replied assuming that the parent was from Kashmir/India.

gopkarthikon Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

Agreed. Though Signal has more utility than WhatsApp thanks to its disappearing messages features.

Technological solutions only go so far when offline restrictions can be imposed. It's entirely likely that once Signal figures out username based registration & sees some traction in, Governments will just ban it.

gopkarthikon Vitamin D Supplementation Improves Cognitive Function: 12-month RCT

In India, Its pretty easy to get various preventative tests done. As for as prices, its cheap enough for engineers but non-trivial sums for a majority of the population.

As an example here's a list of all the tests, prices that a diagnostic center chain in South India provides https://appointments.aarthiscan.com/#/city/Bangalore/select-... https://aarthiscan.com/test-package/preventive-health-checku...

The test for Vitamin D is about 16EUR and comprehensive blood screening starts at 18EUR

gopkarthikon ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

It's a shame indeed. Then again we are a pretty small market with arbitrary customs screening at border.

I usually ask one of my friends to get similar products when they visit India but with the pandemic, it doesn't look like it'll happen for a year.

gopkarthikon Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

That's true along with proper notification support. Firefox for Android has 'Add to Home Screen' and was one of the reasons along with extension support for my switch from chrome.

gopkarthikon AndOTP: Open-source two-factor authentication for Android

Perfect, thanks for this.

gopkarthikon AndOTP: Open-source two-factor authentication for Android

Ah my bad, looks like it only happens when I kill the app and not when I exit the app properly. I do not know if android apps are supposed to clean up persistent notifications when they are killed or even if they can.

gopkarthikon AndOTP: Open-source two-factor authentication for Android

I'm using 'Password/PIN' for database encryption and it isn't compatible with 'Device Credentials' in authentication method. Can you tell me how you've enable fingerprint unlocking?

gopkarthikon AndOTP: Open-source two-factor authentication for Android

Thank you for this recommendation. Just tried Aegis on Android:

1. Its UX is more polished than andOTP; the AMOLED theme in particular is well done.

2. It also supports fingerprint unlocking, the lack of which was the biggest pain point when regularly using andOTP.

3. Supports imports from popular 2FA apps, though this requires root access.

A few issues I noticed:

1. While importing from andOTP, the issuer is blank when the 2FA token was manually added to andOTP. So now I have a list of 2FA codes with no indication as to which website they belong to. [Screenshot](https://gopi.dev/images/aegis.jpg)

2. The 'Vault is unlocked' notification persists even on closing the app.

3. OpenPGP integration for backups isn't available.

gopkarthikon Prime Video on Chromecast and Android TV, YouTube on Fire TV

But this only works if you are a new prime user and not an existing one :(. Though at least in Airtel you get INR 1500 worth of Netflix subscription which is pretty useful.

gopkarthikon Florida couple wins the right to plant veggies in front yard

Drying clothes out in the sun is the defacto practice in India and it's really surprising that people would complain about this.

I feel the same way too; Clothes dried in sunlight always seem fresher and crispier (if it makes sense).

gopkarthikon US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

Yes, I agree that India sorely needs comprehensive data protection laws. IIRC the IT rules act only concerns with sensitive personal information which includes bank accounts/cards. Though I'm not sure if individual transactions are covered under this.

Given that MasterCard & Visa are only intermediary's between Indian companies and banks, Indian companies(PayTM, PayU, CCAvenue) already have access to all available data as the one who've initiated the transaction. In fact MasterCard/Visa processing the data outside the US actually increases the exposure of data and no amount of US data protection laws will help.

gopkarthikon AMP for email is bad

> maybe Amazon will helpfully add an alert to your order receipt when the shipment is unexpectedly delayed?

Alternatively Amazon could send a followup email. This way the sequence of events is preserved and not dependent on the sender.

I currently use email as a immutable list of events that have occurred in my life but with this I can no longer continue to do so.

gopkarthikon US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

Pompeo said the Trump administration would push for free flow of data across borders, not just to help U.S. companies but also to secure consumers’ privacy.

How does 'free flow of data across borders' help secure consumers' privacy?

Setting caps on H1Bs is the US governments prerogative though this will have adverse impact on US-India relationship.

gopkarthikon Languages of India

In Hyderabad which is in a neighboring state to Bangalore, most people speak both Telugu and Hindi.

Among white collar workers English is pretty common.

gopkarthikon SIM swap horror story: I've lost decades of data and Google won't help

After reading a similar article on HN a year ago, I too decided to use Authy but the realized that it was vulnerable to the same methods. I eventually decided to use andOTP[1].

While it doesn't automatically sync across devices, it does allow you to create backups[2] which can be encrypted with AES or your PGP key. Just store this in Dropbox/Drive/Box and offline storage and you're good to go.

[1] https://github.com/andOTP/andOTP/blob/master/README.md [2] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flocke/andOTP/master/asset...