Hacker News Reader

hamhandon Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

I read in a Chinese programmer forum that they just mark it as deleted when you delete photos,it seems to be a common practice, not sure about google.

hamhandon Encoding your WiFi access point password into a QR code

I mean turn if off once guests are gone, yes it's not safe as everything on the network can be sniffed by your nosy neighbors, you can quanrentine this guest network from your ethernet to make it less revealing. It's meant to be a one-off thing to avoid hassle. Good to know they have that in WPA3.

hamhandon Encoding your WiFi access point password into a QR code

Guest network with no password is the way, some firmware allow you to turn the reset button into this function's switch.

hamhandon Netflix was the top stock of the decade

The timeline confuses quite a lot people (the show has a 7.6 rating in China and a lot of people say it's intelligible, either due to bad translation or bad viewing habits like playback speeds IDK), but it's what made this show extra unique and intriging at least for me, I knew absolute nothing about The Witcher, but the way this show proceeds and the slight confusion came with it just made the whole experience another level, I felt I'm doing an adventure with the story trying to figure it out.

Some people aren't comfortable to be challenged, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

hamhandon WiFi deauthentication attacks and home security

Not only that，you don't have to be in close range when attacking, weak signal that won't get you connected or even shown up in the list is enough to make it work, you can stay even farther if you have high gain antennas, as this attack doesn't require your response packets to work, you just have to send the target AP one-way fake frames.

hamhandon A Twitter app bug was used to match 17M phone numbers to user accounts

The story has some problem, Doubi is not an SSR developer, SSR was a high school girl's popular personal fork who mysteriously stopped.

Doubi is a blogger sharing GFW circumvention tips, like easy-to-use installing scripts for VPS, tutorials, reviews and a list of donated free acounts. Before his arrest, his blog had been under attack, domain names blocked.

The phone number thing is very dangerous, twitter bascially won't allow you to use it after a while if you don't provide a valid phone number.

Police monitoring: https://twitter.com/tianlan/status/936909920334528513 https://twitter.com/midiexiang6555/status/117813328167558348...

Fried-rice festival, commemorating the day Mao's only son was spotted and bombed in North Korea while out cooking fried-rice. https://twitter.com/tianlan/status/1198841340865331200

hamhandon Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

Maybe just slightly change icon colors to similar modern material colors will please them.

hamhandon Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

Windows 10 too, it tries too hard to look chic. I've tried many it many times but I always return to 7. And the font is just always blurry, I guess you either use 4K display or don't use 10.

hamhandon Chinese Mass Surveillance – Snowden

Most Chinese don't hate the party, this is hard to believe for many people. As interest-vested, the most common way is buying over-priced condos, you don't want to lose money, and you want to double what you invested like so many others did.

hamhandon Chinese Mass Surveillance – Snowden

The trick is to make just enough people of a society interest-vested and happy, gradually you can basically ignore the rest as they are poor and underpriviledged, especially since technology is more omnipresent and powerful than ever.

hamhandon Chinese Mass Surveillance – Snowden

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/12/31/dont-call-xi-bun-chine...

And interestly, WeChat claims they don't store user messages, but Chinese police apparently has it. Any app, website or forum on which users can post comments must verify ID-linked phone numbers first.

hamhandon How Smartphones Betray Democracy

Let's not compare systematic and institutionalized measures to news-worthy odd cases.

hamhandon Boom Supersonic (YC W16) XB-1 Fuselage Construction Underway

It's not that hard to assemble a working passenger plane especially when you don't have to make money, selling it is the hard part. In this case, selling it to foreign buyers that aren't beholden to China.

hamhandon The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen (2016) [pdf]

It agressively pushes all the other products Baidu has, like every other Chinese big app, but Baidu's reputation is especially bad, think about it as Baidu's Wechat super app. You can try Tencent Map.

If you are using Android, then get ready being asked for all kinds of permissions as it's Chinese apps' tradition, some apps even outright refuse to run if you decline it.

hamhandon Is It Time for the US to Drag Jobs Out of Silicon Valley and into the Heartland?

Keep piling big budget infrastructure like subways into existing cities seems like a dead end, you push the living cost ever higher, concentrating workers ever more into city centers, congestion, then more big budget infrastructure, this is just a vicious cycle.

If electric vehicles are the future, young people shouldn't be afraid to creat their own new cities with scattered companies and minimum infrastructure investment, you only need roads and charging stations. Cheap land make for cheap houses and low living cost, in fact, isn't this what their fathers did to achieve the American dream life young people nowadays so pine for?

This seem to be the only way the American dream can still be realized.

hamhandon Two Las Vegas Men Plead Guilty in U.S. Criminal Streaming Piracy Case

The numbers don't add up.

hamhandon Toyota believes hydrogen fuel cells are the future

Producing hydrogen using electricity and then convert it back.

hamhandon Yahui: The Chinese Art of Elegant Bribery (2011)

Accepting bribes and risking it being used against you is for low-level officials now, for those from humble beginnings who had had nothing but poverty and being treaded on, so they enjoy their priviledges extra hard, you now regularly hear news of corrupt Chinese officials with hundreds of millions in bribes, hundreds of mistresses and condos. But they are taken because of political struggles not for their crimes, no one is allowed to be clean in this game.

Those with immense political clout, who are born red with innate immunity, they play financial games. It's largely legal, much more profitable and effortless. The NYT has written many articles about Chinese listed companies with red investors and princelings.

hamhandon How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

My old comment still applies.

>After seeing all those sketchy or even fraudulent mobile ads by TikTok's parent company ByteDance, I won't be surprised if that SMS is a bait.

>But pretty much everybody does it in China, Baidu etc, like "You phone has 8GB of garbage, download us to clean it", "Download us to boost your signal by 4 times immediately", "This cutie just sent you a message, download us to repsond", basically anything to make you download their apps, and only political problems go punished.

hamhandon How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

Google doesn't push their shopping affiliate links as agressively.

hamhandon Vietnam’s Richest Man Bets $2B to Sell Cars to Americans

It's simple to make one that moves, but hard to make it superior to other brands.

hamhandon Fed Adds $72.8B to Markets, Balance Sheet Moves to $4.07T

The geography of dollar funding of non-US banks

https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1812b.htm

hamhandon Australia’s status as an open democracy downgraded by The CIVICUS Monitor

One can argue that to fight authoritarian infiltration and culture clash, certain amount of de-democracy may be needed. After all, the free nature of democracy by which malignant powers exploited is what allowed the situation worsening to alarming levels.

hamhandon Privacy analysis of Tiktok’s app and website

After seeing all those sketchy or even fraudulent mobile ads by TikTok's company, I won't be surprised if that's a bait.

But pretty much everybody does it in China, Baidu etc, like "You phone has 8GB of garbage, download us to clean it", "Download us to boost your signal by 4 times immediately", "This cutie just sent you a message, download us to repsond", basically anything to make you download their apps, and only political problems go punished.

hamhandon The Great Cannon has been deployed again

DDoS attacks against business competitors are common and rarely punished in China.

Injecting ads/affiliate or whatever js in webpages, stealing social media tokens to do follower boosting business and selling optic fiber traffic dump is also common for Chinese ISPs.

hamhandon China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

The shocking and disturbing thing about it is the ignorance the general public showed toward it. "Super baby", "supermen army", people just assume that this much touted CRISPR is precise, that human actually know more than a tiny bit of the human genome. All in this current wave of technological optimism.

hamhandon Craigslist releases new mobile app for iOS and Android

I'm surprised they are going strong to this day without mobile apps and innovation.

hamhandon How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net

127.0.0.1 graph.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 staticxx.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 api.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 an.facebook.com

hamhandon ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B

I've seen plenty of scam and piracy sites using it in recent year, don't know if it's China-specific.

hamhandon TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

It's ultimately the war on the definition of free speech.