Hacker News Reader

ikonston The Windows Driver Frameworks are on GitHub

It means nothing. WDF is a high-level framework for drivers on top of Windows NT – basically a convenience library you link with. While using WDF, you can freely call regular NT functions too.

It's like MFC to Win32.

ikonston Google discloses three severe vulnerabilities in Apple OS X

Right on their blog, though it's a guest post but they don't seem to have anything against it: http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/01/exploiting-nvm...

ikonston WebVR lands in Firefox Nightly

Can it display VRML?

ikonston Wireless in Gaza: the young entrepreneurs beating the blockades

Well, Israeli actions can breed hatred amongst Jordanians or Egyptians as well, or amongst latte-drinking hipsters in Berkeley for that matter. It's a bit of a stretch to tie this to the people's welfare, that's all I'm saying. The blockade and limitations on peoples' movement actually affects people.

The tirades about Israel on popular television (of any arab-speaking country), or the calls for martyrdom by clerics — it's silly to try and appease those. Israel should hold itself to a higher moral standard, as you've said.

... a-a-nd, I think we've gone wildly offtopic for HN, so let's just call people once again to support the Indiegogo campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-gaza-s-only-startup-...

ikonston Wireless in Gaza: the young entrepreneurs beating the blockades

You're mixing up Gaza and the West Bank.

What Israel (and Egypt) are doing is - 1) blockading Gaza, 2) entering armed conflicts with the Hamas with high human casualties and vast damage to infrastructure

Israel is not occupying Gaza. All settlements in the Gaza strip were dismantled in 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza

The Israeli military absolutely does not enter Gaza frivolously as it does in the West Bank, and Hamas law is in full effect there, not Israeli martial law.

Supporting the project on Indiegogo is probably the best thing to do, as an Israeli: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-gaza-s-only-startup-...

ikonston I found a bug in the .NET framework and fixed it by hand-altering the DLL

Just recently I wrote https://github.com/ikonst/LongPathFix to work around a clang/gcc issue, cause it seemed easier than going through the hoops of building clang for Win32, understanding its code and writing a patch good enough to be accepted.

ikonston GoTenna – Send and receive messages even when you don’t have service

This can be significantly better than walkie-talkies. In poor reception, sometimes you can't manage to deliver even a simple message coherently (especially since, to be understood by a fellow human, you need reliable communication in real time for the duration of your entire message).

But usually, you just want to get a message across. You want something like morse code, not voice. Delivering a short textual message, not in real-time but "instantly", with redundancy, error correction and retries, serves me better than walkie talkies.

(Heck, you can deliver a short audio fragment, but I don't see too many people using the "send voice" feature in Whatsapp, don't know about you.)

ikonston Google Taking Aim at Device Modders in Android 4.4 KitKat

Oh, you're talking about persistent rootkit. I was talking about making a one-off backup of your phone, then returning it to your shelf.

ikonston Google Taking Aim at Device Modders in Android 4.4 KitKat

Forensic tools used by law enforcement and intelligence organisations don't modify the system partition; in fact, modifying anything on the phone is highly undesirable, from a forensics point of view.

Re needing to wipe the disk:

1) Modern Android has 'adb backup' so if your phone is not locked, someone who got ahold of your phone can use it to dump your data from a non-rooted phone.

2) Law enforcement and intelligence organisations may or may not have tools to dump your data directly off a (desoldered) flash memory chip. You need to enable disk encryption (* ) to protect against this.

(* ) I'm assuming a disk encryption that's not rigged, i.e. has no key escrow available to law enforcement.

ikonston Prince Of Persia Code Review

I don't have the physical one, but I can't imagine what I could be missing out. If anything, you can keep reading it on your phone if you don't have your e-book with you etc.

ikonston Is the NSA outsourcing its domestic spying to Israel?

It is outsourcing domestic spying to an Israeli company (yes, a private enterprise) that produces "lawful interception" software (which it undoubtfuly sells to other customers too). Saying "Israel" is helping NSA spy on its citizens is akin to saying "the United States" gets people hooked on Farmville.

ikonston Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

The common opinion is that your mental capacity for learning is at peak when you're young and gets worse with age. You might find an engineering degree more frustrating with age.

Also, you might feel out of place in a regular college.

Not that I recommend schooling for the sake of schooling. I'm now doing it myself at the age of 29 (nearly done), and I keep wondering whether I'm doing something wildly irrational.

ikonston Things about being a founder I wish I knew years ago

It's been said that stupid people learn from their own mistakes and smart people learn from others' mistakes.

However, this is untrue. Smart people learn from their own mistakes, and stupid people never learn.

ikonston How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers

I doubt skin tone plays much of a role. Relative to other places around the world, Americans are rather colorblind.

ikonston How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers

I concur. I live in Israel. From what I know of my friends who have moved to the Silicon Valley under H1B, they went to fill high-demand engineering positions with high compensation (definitely on par with their US-resident coworkers).

ikonston Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps

http://www.winulator.com/

P.S. knowing this dude's previous work (coLinux), he's pretty good :)

ikonston Add two-factor authentication to your ssh in 30 seconds

Yes, so use your backup keys, or a secondary phone number, or a secondary email address... plenty of options.

ikonston Add two-factor authentication to your ssh in 30 seconds

What?! This is an online method? Why don't people just use Google Authenticator? It's totally offline, on both ends.

ikonston Add two-factor authentication to your ssh in 30 seconds

You can use the same key for all the servers. Just copy the files generated by the 'google-authenticator' app. I don't see any less security in that.

ikonston Add two-factor authentication to your ssh in 30 seconds

I use ssh keys with this setup. If I login with an ssh key, I don't need the OTP.

ikonston Never again be thwarted by restrictive “guest” wifi (e.g. on buses or airplanes)

I'm kinda baffled how this recipe for using ssh, rudimentary sysadmin skills and scripting is deemed news. Maybe back in the heyday of Slashdot, this would be half-interesting -- like, uhh, when OpenSSH actually introduced tunneling, or when Iodine was introduced, or whatever... At best, a "protip" everyone could've discovered himself through a few minutes of Googling.

ikonston How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

If you're logged into your Google account from your Android, it's roughly the same amount of control as an IMAP account would give.

They can wreck havoc, but they cannot change your password and steal your account.

ikonston How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

If you have two-factor auth enabled, your Android phone stores a app-specific password -- even if extracted, it wouldn't be terribly useful (assuming you revoke it).

ikonston How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

I use pam_google_authenticator to login (via SSH) to my Linux server, and so can you.

ikonston Privilege escalation vulnerability on 64-bit Intel CPU hardware

Date Public: 12 Apr 2006 ?!

ikonston I am a developer, yet I outsource the development of my startup

I'm surprised nobody yet mentioned this is a trivial case of a developer who matured enough to be more valuable as a manager. Once you see beyond the odd difference (it's a startup, and he's supervising a guy in Ukraine), it's all the same you see in most developers' careers as they progress.

Some developers won't heed the call and prefer to stay "close to the metal" cause they enjoy it more, and some are genuinely bad at managing. However, very often an experienced developer will benefit a project much more when he can afford to look at the grand scheme of things.