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janmo

2,625 karma · joined May 4, 2020

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janmo··on Parallel Reconstruction of Lawful TLS Wiretapping
So it looks like Hetzner is doing the same thing OVHCloud did with EncroChat and SkyECC. But hey, we have GDPR, keep your data hosted in the EU it is very "safe" there (ironic).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_Sky_Global#Communi...

EDIT: Based on German law this certainly is not a lawful interception but one made by an intelligence agency.

janmo··on LLM scraper bots are overloading acme.com's HTTPS server
His robots.txt explicitly allows bots including LLM bots to scrape his site
janmo··on LLM scraper bots are overloading acme.com's HTTPS server
> I closed port 443

> Now closing https service is obviously just a temporary fix

Probably the best starting point would be to edit the robots.txt file and disallow LLM bots there. Currently the file allows all bots: http://acme.com/robots.txt

janmo··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
And at the bottom:

What can I do?

Please try again in a few minutes.

janmo··on Tinnitus Neuromodulator
The only way to temporarely get rid of my tinnitus (completely gone or at least very reduced for up to 30 seconds) is to listen to this beep tone from 8 to 12 KHZ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNf9nzvnd1k

apparently the phenomenon is called residual inhibition. If only there was a way to make this work permanently...

janmo··on SEC approves Texas Stock Exchange, first new US integrated exchange in decades
Depends what you are looking for. Is it real time quotes?

IEX data is now free after 15minutes instead of 15milliseconds.

One option is the Databento US Equities Mini for 200 USD per month. If I understand it correctly it is some sort of weighted average between multiple exchanges.

janmo··on SEC approves Texas Stock Exchange, first new US integrated exchange in decades
Hopefully they will provide cheap market data like IEX did in its beginning.
janmo··on Python: The Documentary [video]
It is a very subjective take indeed
janmo··on Why Grok Fell in Love with Hitler
Looks like they trained it on the 4Chan /pol dataset
janmo··on Show HN: I built the tool I wished existed for moving Stripe between countries
Where/what object would you like to use the company name field in?

> For the Invoice, but also to clearly identify the customer, for a B2B customer you have the company name and the name of the person in charge for the subscription. Both are essential. Currently Stripe only has a "name" field.

Can you describe a situation where you need to do an invoice correction on subscriptions (ie how do you handle this now)?

> The customer put a wrong address, a wrong or missing VAT number. Then a few months later the accountant notices the mistake and you have to issue a correction.

Currently Stripe is clearly focused B2C, but I am doing B2B.

janmo··on Show HN: I built the tool I wished existed for moving Stripe between countries
I was in the same situation as the OP 2 years ago and because of the migration nightmare I kept both accounts, new subscriptions would occur in the new account while old ones would stay in the legacy account.

Stripe has many issues, the missing migration is one. In my case there is alos the fact that there is no "company name" field and there is no way to issue an invoice correction for subscriptions... This makes it problematic for B2B use cases. I have alrady contacted them multiple times to ask them to add these very basic features but to no avail.

Had I known this before I would probably not have used them.

janmo··on Reading NFC Passport Chips in Linux
The passports contain a digital signature and a DSC (Document Signing Certificate). This DSC is signed by a CSCA certificate which you can download from the ICAO Public Key Directory. Link here: https://pkddownloadsg.icao.int/
janmo··on Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels
After vibe coding now we get vibe books
janmo··on Show HN: Photoshop Clone Built in React
Photopea is really amazing, we even use it professionaly
janmo··on Show HN: Photoshop Clone Built in React
It is a bit disappointing, almost every feature I click it says that it is still in develoment.
janmo··on Drinking champagne could reduce risk of sudden cardiac arrest, study suggests
It is quite irresponsible to come out with news articles like this when it is known that overall alcohol has very negative effects on the health.
janmo··on Nearly $13M stolen from Abracadabra Finance in crypto heist
Not surprised something like this happened, one of the persons behind Abracadabra had been outed as being Michael Patryn, Co-founder of QuadrigaCX.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/sdsp0i/shoc...

janmo··on European Cloud, Global Reach
The timeline is way too suspicious and the wording too broad. The encrypted container was decrypted only 8 days after the server was "imaged".

The term cryptanalysis is very, very broad, it could be anything.

The Freedom Hosting operator was in the process of moving his servers away from OVH, and they somehow found the last server remaining at OVH.

janmo··on European Cloud, Global Reach
If these takedowns were lawful, why do they lie and hide the details about how they did it?

Read carefully the sections related to the encrypted containers and the OVH servers and tell me your opinion: https://www.justice.gov/d9/press-releases/attachments/2019/0...

janmo··on European Cloud, Global Reach
They intercepted and read the messages of most users, yet the number of arrests is significantly lower than the total number of SkyECC and EncroChat users.

Not only that, but they also have charged and are attempting to jail the creators of these phones/end-to-end messaging apps.

With what is happening it is becoming pretty much impossible to provide backdoor free communication tools within the EU.

janmo··on European Cloud, Global Reach
There is a pattern:

Silk Road, SkyECC, EncroChat, TorMail+Freedom Hosting.

What do they all have in common?

Their servers were found or their encryption were broken under mysterious circumstances involving classified "techniques". In 3 out 4 cases malware was sent from the services to their users once taken over.

All were hosted in the EU, even stranger, all of them had servers hosted by OVH. Although SR was not directly hosted by OVH Ross Ulbricht had a vnc server (virtual desktop) there which he apparently used to administrate the SR main server and on another OVH server he had a deadmanswitch and his will.

In a sense this is the counterpart to the survival bias. But in this case we only know where the taken down services were hosted, we don't know where the survivors are being hosted.

All this has serious Crypto AG vibes. Back then it was: trust us, we are from Switzerland, we are neutral....

janmo··on European Cloud, Global Reach
The fact that this was "due process" and "legal" makes the matter even worse IMO.
janmo··on European Cloud, Global Reach
Look at the technique they used with Silk Road:

"Because the SR Server was located outside the United States, the Fourth Amendment would not have required a warrant to search the server, whether for its IP address or otherwise."

- Assistant US Attorney Serrin Turner

janmo··on European Cloud, Global Reach
Thank you for pointing that out! I would add that intelligence agencies and law enforcement are almost completely exempt from all those fancy GDPR requirements.

Furthermore, in the EU, there is no such a strong equivalent to the 4th Amendment. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies can access your cloud data without needing a warrant—unless the data is stored in the US in which case a US judge would have to approve it. This is one of the reasons they are so eager to keep it "home".

The craziest thing is what happened with Encrochat and SkyECC. These two services made the critical mistake of trusting OVH to host their servers, and then OVH literally placed law enforcement and intelligence agency backdoors on them. Eventually, they even used these backdoors to send malware to users' devices, not caring whether they were located in the EU or not.

While all this was happening, the founder of OVH appeared on a popular YouTube tech channel and proudly explained that, unlike Amazon and Google, they weren’t sniffing their customers’ data. What a liar!

janmo··on X.com Is Down
Probably fired the DDOS protection team
janmo··on Show HN: Search and analyze millions of SEC filings with AI.
I have built something similar for my personal use.

The problem is that some filings especially the 10-K onces, can be very long (too long for chatGPT or Claude). Only Gemini can handle them properly. It can be quite expensive if a user chats a lot with a long filing.

janmo··on Espargos: ESP32-based WiFi sensing array
It makes sense now. Thanks.
janmo··on Espargos: ESP32-based WiFi sensing array
Thank you for your reply, I have been reading the code and there are some things that I am not sure to understand.

- The Espargos code uses rxstart_time_cyc & rxstart_time_cyc_dec for the ns timestamp calculation

- Both values are not documented in the Espressif code and just marked as /*< reserved */

- The timestamp parameter is documented but it is in "microseconds"

Is there anywhere I can find more documentation on the "rxstart_time_cyc" and "rxstart_time_cyc_dec" fields? Are these cycle counters from the wifi chip?

janmo··on Espargos: ESP32-based WiFi sensing array
I am very interested in knowing how they are able to get such precise measurements with an ESP32.

In their chart there is a time of arrival difference that has nano second accuracy. The ESP32 runs at 240MHZ max, and usually it takes several cycles to read certain values, so I really wonder how they were able to pull it off.

Please enlighten me.

janmo··on Huawei's Ascend 910C delivers 60% of Nvidia H100 inference performance
That's also a good point, electricity prices are much lower in China than in the US and Europe.

See the article: "China’s Overlooked AI Energy Edge Over the US: Cheaper Energy"

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