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graylights

331 karma · joined December 14, 2011

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graylights··on How to get your money back on a non-refundable hotel
"and I want to do it somewhere with a gym and pool"
graylights··on Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?
Even if it's just as good, you lose all warranty protections. Also if a counterfeit safety product fails and injures someone, good luck.
graylights··on Amazon let a fraudster keep my Sony A74 IV and refunded him
Would that service be indemnifying the seller from fraud? Or is your assumption that the platform would just make the right call?

Probably it's because the platforms don't want to make services to root out fraud because then they become more responsible for owning it. Outside services can't break in because the platforms aren't going to put trust in them. Those services would have to own the cost of fraud.

graylights··on Pay up or we’ll make Google ban your ads
If you're doing oblivion-dollars damage to someone, why shouldn't you be accountable. Otherwise you're just making society pay the cost.
graylights··on ‘Evil Corp,’ a $100M Cybercrime Menace
The messages are private communications, would probably require a warrant.
graylights··on Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS
It shouldn't be on the customer to investigate every company they deal with. The public will only know when it becomes so bad that these kind of news stories start coming out. If public opinion is that bad, it should be regulated. Or the drivers need to unionize. I think it's only a matter of time before the drivers join the teamsters.
graylights··on Cybersecurity Pros Name Their Price as Hacker Attacks Swell
Software is only one part. Do you trust your hardware, your people, your supply chain, your physical security. "Truly motivated" can mean extreme resources and willingness to cross all boundaries.

Are you secure if your admin's child is kidnapped and the ransom demand is for network access? Are you secure from the Secret Police wanting to hijack your service for their purposes?

Once you accept you CAN'T stop truly all attacks you can be comfortable with acceptable risk and work to mitigate realistic risks.

graylights··on NFL players' surprising performance hack: going vegan
There are a lot of events that make being vegan inconvenient. I value myself by going out and having a good time with friends. Sure I can tell my friends and family to fuck off, but that sounds miserable.
graylights··on Why the world should adopt a basic income
UBI is stuck in extremes.

Libertarians want to cancel social programs and replace with UBI so individuals determine how to spend their benefits. Socialists want to guarantee everyone a living wage but also want the safety nets.

Policy needs to be in middle. You need to enable people to self-manage. Must be ready to help them when there is a bad turn events. But you also need to have a humane way to deal with people that are incapable of taking care of themselves, for example mental illness. The way to handle that is guardianship, not other government programs that can also be individually mismanaged. Guardianship will surely be more expensive then UBI but it is the humane thing to do.

graylights··on Why the world should adopt a basic income
If a person can't take care of themself then a social worker should be the safety net. Adult protective services should step in and emergency assistance could be granted. But people with patterns of mismanagement should have a guardianship assigned.

With guardianship that UBI could be directed to an organization to provide that budget management. They can issue a food stamp card, housing assistance, etc. That management could be a government agency or privatized. If privatized it would have to be regulated as a fidicuary.

graylights··on Justice Dept. Seizes Times Reporter’s Email/Phone Records in Leak Investigation
source? She printed it on a work printer. They had a short list of everyone that accessed the file. Microdots were both unnecessary and useless towards finding who did it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-08/accused-l...
graylights··on ls | grep “echo ${data}” – Why/how does this work?
Another hint: set -x This will show you the expanded versions of your command.
graylights··on Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
As someone who regularly is late, I disagree. It's all a matter of consequences. I'm never late for a flight because I know it will cost me money. But I run late to work often because I know it the worse I'll get is some jokes. Unless I miss an important meeting, and then I make effort to be on time for.

Fashionably late only makes sense if the others can continue without you.

* 2 hours late to happy hour? glad you can make it, get a drink. (But don't expect me to stay another 2 hours)

* An hour late for D&D game? I guess we can start now. grumble-grumble wasted an hour of everyone elses time.

* 15 minutes late to carpool? You better have a good reason.

graylights··on Uber remotely locked down offices during police raids, shutting off computers
When the police show up to my door with a search warrant, I tell them to wait outside while I gather the items they ask for. Oh look, no evidence of crimes.
graylights··on I gave Amazon a key to my house and regretted it
This makes no sense as a cost reduction. Amazon drivers in my area don't even come to my door. Let alone knock. With this they want their drivers to: 1. Come to door 2. Knock 3. Wait a moment for response 4. Unlock door with app 5. Open Door 6. Drop package 7. Close and lock door

Delivery has turned into minimizing every excess second. I wager within a few months most of these amazon keys will be ignored as they leave packages on the driveway. I wouldn't buy this unless it comes with a guarantee it will be used.

graylights··on Tesla Model S battery degradation data
Sounds like a case of survivors bias. Cars totaled in accidents likely bring down the average.
graylights··on 2^74207281-1 is Prime
Great, I've just discovered the 50th mersenne prime, M50. Decompression takes a lot of time.
graylights··on Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
It could report on small events that are normally not covered to. Further it could customize articles based on readers interests. Have a favorite player? He is now highlighted in your articles.

It could also do vanity articles. Go back to your college days and write about your games, making you the highlight.

Worse it could be influenced to do personalized advertisements in the middle of the article.

graylights··on More Data on Attributing the Sony Attack
The bigger issue is that even if you accept the USB2 transfer, you can't make any real conclusions. Was the USB transfer from victim machine to external storage or from attacker machine to external storage.
graylights··on More Data on Attributing the Sony Attack
"Do note that file creation time in unix requires kernel level access and quite a bit of low level filesystem knowledge to truly forge."

Timestamps are a mess on unix. POSIX doesn't support creation time but instead has ctime (change time). Newer filesystems add crtime but common utilities don't ever display crtime. Also partitions sometimes are mounted to not update atime for performance reasons.

crtime (and ctime) can be modified with root privileges without kernel access with debugfs.

Or you can go the ugly hackish way: date -s $forgedate && touch tmp && date -s $realdate && cat original >> tmp && mv tmp original

Neither are elegant, but certainly not hard.

What's really hard to forensically cover up is the order of inodes on a filesystem. That file with forged timestamps to 2012 will still have an inode that looks much more recent.

graylights··on CVE-2014-6271: Remote code execution through bash
Much easier to implement a custom captive shell (default login shell for user) then to mess with the crypto system.
graylights··on The State of NAT Traversal
Why would you need to filter an internal IP as a destination IP, routing should handle that.

I understand filtering the source address as internal IP because that could be malicious spoofing of internal host (and destination can't legitimately reply.)

graylights··on Count to ten when a plane goes down
The proper answer is to type "rm <dir> -rf" otherwise you're risking a stray strike on enter.
graylights··on Count to ten when a plane goes down
Not really, a lot of novice unix users are of the habit of removing files with -rf switch. I cringe everytime I see it.

The command "rm -rf ~/blue/" is just a single space key from being equivalent to "rm -rf /" with "rm -rf ~/blue /"

graylights··on Stealing unencrypted SSH-agent keys from memory
Not really a solvable problem. You want your machine to have the keys to run scripts but don't want your compromised machine to have the keys to run scripts. The best you can do is restrict what the keys can do or use authentication that doesn't work unattended.

If you're just doing batch jobs, then you could have the script remove keys from ssh-agent when it's done. At a certain point you have to presume the integrity of your machine. Otherwise your password can just be keylogged as you're unlocking key.

graylights··on Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC
It makes sense. If I say this proposal hurts companies like ACME Tech. Then they should just be looking for ACME Tech's comments.

But I wonder how it balances individual impacts versus business impacts. Is a thousand people complaining "This ruins my ability to watch netflix" as significant as netflix same comments in terms of its business losses.

graylights··on At The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos has the paper thinking global domination
I disagree. Newspapers may continue to exist, but I can't see it for the reasons you list.

First off, the news isn't tactile. The paper itself is tactile but so is a tablet. Paper tactility is not more appealing except to people that are uncomfortable with tech. Short blurbs followed by flipping through 16 pages of mostly ads to find rest of article is a level of unfriendliness that is hard to match in online news, though some sites try their best.

On archival and permanence, you're confusing the content with the medium. Try to find a permanent article from the NY times. While you may be able to find the print form, more likely you will find it in a digital medium. It has been decades since print form was the system of permanent record. Articles were being digitized in the 70s.

Online content isn't the same as online journalism. Even so there is an attempt to archive even the most obscure of online content (archive.org and waybackmachine). I doubt you can find an archive of a small town print newsletter. But you can on web publications unless they make efforts to block it.

graylights··on Maintaining digital certificate security
Agreed, but I think it should go a step further. Browsers should require 2 signatures from different regions. That way a government can't pressure a single CA within their borders to issue rogue certs. 2 signatures would be minimum with 3 for redundancy.
graylights··on Just how much is that 2% really worth?
I disagree and I would change your statement: Don't work for anyone whose success is not tied to the success of their software.

Plenty of non-software companies can live or die on the quality of their algorithms. It could be a small development team but it can be challenging and rewarding. Plus it will give you a bigger perspective.

The key is to work somewhere that you are valued.

graylights··on Music Sales Continue to Plummet for Albums and Digital Downloads
Well plenty of books are the same. Meant to be consumed, used up and then just take space.

But a quality reference book doesn't really have an analogue in music. That book can be a key tool to someone performing their profession. This applies even in a digital medium.

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