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jtchang

5,764 karma · joined July 28, 2010

jeff.tchang (at) gmail.com jeff (at) literatorapp.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tachang; my proof: https://keybase.io/tachang/sigs/3k4EnKOxZt-oQ7OIWzClI8l0yzGg3pl4mvp040CRyDQ ]

d5b3b0

Creator of OpenMiko (opensource firmware for security cameras) https://github.com/openmiko/openmiko

submissionscomments
jtchang··on NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami
Southwest airlines had a culture of turning around fast at the gate. So maybe no explicit policy but culture can drive unintended consequences and decisions.
jtchang··on FortiBleed – 75k Fortinet firewalls have admin passwords cracked
Article mentions the passwords were hashed with sha256 plus a salt. For a long password more than say 12 characters this would take a very long time to brute force. My guess is a lot of these were dictionary attacks ?
jtchang··on My first in-prod corrupted hard drive problem
Confused as to the actual root cause. Don't all hard drives provide SMART diagnostics these days? Was it really bad sectors?
jtchang··on Southwest Headquarters Tour
Fantastic write up. It's mind blowing how much complexity there is to keep flights going day in and day out.

My guess is all airline NOCs operate 24/7 as flights happen around the clock. Also planes typically don't have much downtime as that loses money so everything has to be a continuous operation.

Cool looking at the pictures of the dashboards. It's nutty to think how much has to be tracked when doing airplane maintenance.

jtchang··on BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought the primary appeal of LoRa was range? Also isn't the primary factor in making long range radio go through things is the frequency? So 2.4ghz is the same frequency as consumer wifi right and thus would propagate about the same right?

It doesn't seem like this would be that useful except that the protocol is LoRa so you can have higher bandwidth between two devices if they happen to be close enough together.

jtchang··on Vercel April 2026 security incident
How does the app read the variable if it can't be read after you input it? Or do they mean you can't view it after providing the variable value to the UI?
jtchang··on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting
I remember reading slashdot but what is their system? Is there a separate set of mods that moderate the moderators?
jtchang··on Lessons from the PG&E outage
How is this mode not a standard part of their disaster recovery plan? Especially in sf and the bay area they need to assume an earthquake is going to take out a lot of infrastructure. Did they not take into account this would happen?
jtchang··on Microsoft to replace all C/C++ code with Rust
Fundamentally is there anything you can't write in rust and must write in C? With AI languages should mostly be transposable even though right now they are not.
jtchang··on We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]
Great video on how the public is getting screwed on energy deals.

Basically large tech companies have the deep pockets to push up prices at electricity auctions. But why bid in public when you can do those deals in private. That's the first problem. All that needs to be out in the open.

What really irks me is that the market is so manipulated that we can't do anything about it. Think about NEM 3.0 vs 2.0. Putting data centers in their own rate class does make sense as the first step.

jtchang··on OpenIPC: Open IP Camera Firmware
A number of years back I got bored during covid and decided to reverse engineer as much of the Wyze Cam V2 camera I could and make some custom firmware for it. Right now that lives at https://github.com/openmiko/openmiko

That said it's really hard to make long term supportable open source camera software/firmware. And when picking cameras it is even harder because the market as it stands now does not let you have it all. You need to pick what facets you really care about.

Also keep in mind even the above code is not really opensource all the way: I still had to load the driver binaries. Not sure that source will ever be released. The kernel is also old as heck.

What I do feel good about though is saving these old cameras from the dumpster if Wyze ever stops supporting them. The firmware works for simple cases: just load it up and you can start curl'ing frames. I used it in scripts to put together timelapse videos with ffmpeg. No need to screw around with authentication, phones apps, email, etc.

jtchang··on LetsEncrypt Outage
So basically you trust something because you have a long chain of assurances that you trusted it before? Kinda like certificate pinning.
jtchang··on Async Queue – One of my favorite programming interview questions
Is the send function considered non-blocking?
jtchang··on $200k and still no recovery from Google's algorithm
Visiting the site it is easy to see why they got demoted. It's all fluff and no substance. Almost all the links I clicked through could have been generated by a LLM.

Lots of ads. I might be old school but I still hold quality to something like anandtech back in the day. Something that a real human spent time on because they were genuinely interested in the topic and decided to write about it. The bar is so low these days not sure if there even is a bar.

This site is suppose to be a men's lifestyle magazine but it barely has any content that isn't just filler and fluff.

jtchang··on Show HN: JuryNow – Get an anonymous instant verdict from 12 real people
I love it. Could definitely see more features where you can see the results of the jury questions.
jtchang··on Max severity RCE flaw discovered in widely used Apache Parquet
It's so dumb to assign it a CVSS score of 10.

Unless you are blindly accepting parquet formatted files this really doesn't seem that bad.

A vulnerability in parsing images, xml, json, html, css would be way more detrimental.

I can't think of many services that accept parquet files directly. And of those usually you are calling it directly via a backend service.

jtchang··on US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms
Thank you for providing this.

He mentions right after that "empathy is good but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot".

That quote is clearly taken out of context and is specifically chosen as click/rage bait.

Like all things, nuance and context is always key.

jtchang··on Segment for LLM Traces? Seeking Feedback on an Open Source LLM Log Router
Funny how this popped up as I was just talking to a friend about some of the challenges I've had with logging. Would definitely be interested in contributing to a project like this. Hit me up (email in profile).
jtchang··on Back to basics: Why we chose long-polling over websockets
This is using elixir right?
jtchang··on Microsoft rejects documentation PR because AI chatbots can't display tables
Is the documentation for AI chat bots or for humans?

The PR is now closed but seems like we should be striving to do better.

jtchang··on Beating the bookies with their own numbers
Such a great story. Something like this could have only been pulled off in that era.
jtchang··on US fertility rate dropped to lowest in a century as births dipped in 2023
Are you saying you think the Canadian government should pay more toward fertility and less toward LGBTQ procedures such as gender reassignment? I wonder how much money the latter costs. Seems like it wouldn't be as big a cost vs fertility treatments being covered.
jtchang··on Let the network tell you where you are
What switches enterprise or consumer tend to support this LLDP? My guess is maybe almost none on the consumer side. I.e. Netgear, to link. Cisco probably does. How about ubiquti?
jtchang··on Broadcom offers AT&T a 1050% increase to renew VMware contract
Long term this is good for the software ecosystem as a whole. Especially open source options like proxmox. I think Broadcom is making a strategic business mistake not willing to negotiate in good faith. However this is the true cost of using closed source solutions. The more this happens the more it gets factored into business decisions.
jtchang··on Rogers networks reliability and resiliency assessment after 2022-07-08 outage
> The July 2022 outage was not the result of a design flaw in the Rogers core network architecture.

Talk about some grade A gaslighting here. Reading the post mortem they first tell you it wasn't a design flaw then say they routed all their data through one core router ( including a lack of a management network). Then they say they are going to fix things by separating out the wireless and wired traffic.

Why would you fix things if it wasn't a design flaw?

Out of band access is like resilient architecture 101. Hell even homelabs generally have some way to do it. It's appalling that Rogers didn't have a way to access the core IP routers out of band. Yes it might mean having to use a competitors infrastructure but they ended up having to do it anyway. And with the failure of the service now all the infrastructure providers are under additional scrutiny. Rogers should be striking some agreements with other providers to carry core traffic in case of an outage such as in this DR situation. For example Visa, MC, Amex all have agreements in place to process each others auth data in case the other party goes down. The thinking here being an outage for credit cards makes everyone look bad.

jtchang··on Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
If you take a look here you can see how this type of tiering system works out:

https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis...

Some of the tiers for Visa cards:

Visa Infinite Spend Qualified Visa Infinite Spend Not Qualified Visa Signature Preferred Visa Signature Traditional Rewards All Other Products

jtchang··on XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
So this basically means to scan for this exploit remotely we'd need the private key of the attacker which we don't have. Only other option is to run detection scripts locally. Yikes.
jtchang··on Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Absolutely insane the level of wizardry being applied here to turn a lump of blackened, charred scrolls into readable text.

Having only cursory knowledge with machine learning are some of the techniques used in the article only recently discovered or have they been around for a while?

Is it due to us having reached an inflection point with these types of algorithms that they have become more popular and thus we are seeing new ways to apply them to old problems?

jtchang··on Post Mortem on Cloudflare Control Plane and Analytics Outage
For me it's basically summed up as "we didn't test turning the power off" and making sure things worked the way we planned.

Yes it is hard and very expensive to do these types of tests. And doing it regularly is even more $$$ and time.

As most customers we seem to be okay with a cheap price hidden behind a facade of "high availability" since I don't really want to pay for true HA. Because if I knew the real cost it would be too expensive.

jtchang··on Tell HN: Submit comments to IRS re tax treatment of software dev expenses
I don't think the issue is bad accounting. I think it comes down to software being uniquely different than a factory or piece of equipment. Amortization schedules that are even don't make any sense. Neither does anything measure in years. It's because we make improvement to software on a day by day basis. We don't necessarily add on to a factory every day.
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