Hacker News Reader

mje__on SIM Cards Have Finally Been Hacked, and the Flaw Could Affect Millions of Phones

I don't think this is a reasonable assessment at all. SIM manufacturers use 3DES, not DES, which - while not recommended for new systems - is still pretty damn secure.

I don't think you've really understood the complexity of the SIM - there are literally thousands and thousands of pages of specification, which means that any sim will interoperate with any phone.

A SIM is not an "MVP" by any stretch of the imagination - it costs millions of dollars to enter the market; there are stringent security and compatibility controls, and no-one will consider selling you silicon unless you're ordering millions of units per year.

mje__on Japan's radiation disaster toll: none dead, none sick

I think you'll find that Germany isn't replacing nuclear power, just buying it from outside their borders instead of generating it themselves [1].

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/greenwashing-af...

mje__on Are passwords stored in memory safe?

Power analysis can also be used if you can force the CPU to do work on the key/password. It's been used to extract key material from smartcards

edit: finish the sentence

mje__on Forgotten by the Future, Some Take the Internet Into Their Own Hands

In South Africa we have a government-run telco monopoly. We also have some of the shittiest, most expensive internet in the world.

At least with private enterprise you can choose the least bad option.

mje__on Vulnerability in JSON Parser in Ruby on Rails 3.0 and 2.3

It was pretty interesting to see the all-time details for the languages:

* Python [1,2] : 20 + 15 = 35

* Ruby [3,4] : 31 + 8 = 39

* PHP [5] : 336

Ouch :(

[1] http://www.cvedetails.com/product/2147/Python-Software-Found...

[2] http://www.cvedetails.com/product/18230/Python-Python.html?v...

[3] http://www.cvedetails.com/product/12215/Ruby-lang-Ruby.html?...

[4] http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3861/Yukihiro-Matsumoto-Ru...

[5] http://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_id...

edit:formatting

mje__on 'We thought we'd sell 1,000': The inside story of the Raspberry Pi

Sarcasm? I bought on the first day, and it took 8 weeks for my order to be shipped; friends who ordered later waited 17(!) weeks for their pi

mje__on Your code style guide is crap, but still better than nothing.

Also, tools other than text editors - especially those designed to show code side-by-side like web-based code review tools (), etc become much harder to use when you have long lines.

mje__on Sucking at Retina

Good to know. Got schooled on angular resolution today :)

mje__on Favorite Unix Commands

multitail[1] is also really nice for following multiple log files. It can do highlighting of lines based on regex's, and has built-in highlighting of a wide variety of log formats

[1] http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/features.php

mje__on Sucking at Retina

Those two are not the same thing at all; a 27" 2560x1440 like the one you link to is ~108dpi.

mje__on Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

Yeah, at one stage about 2 years ago they blocked the whole of South Africa, because most web traffic comes from a small number of transparent proxies from each ISP (bandwidth is pretty scarce here). Incredibly irritating

mje__on I don't want to download your app

What's even worse is when you get to a website pretending to be an iphone app... using an android device.

mje__on Amazon Announces new Data Warehousing Product

Yep [1]. SAS70, HIPAA, PCIDSS, FISMA, etc.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/security/#certifications

mje__on I’m writing my own OS

Sounds like you still don't understand the GDT :) [1]

I agre with you, though. As with any hobby project, picking the bits that are interesting or fun makes it easy to keep going.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Descriptor_Table (maybe you're thinking of the GPT?)

mje__on I’m writing my own OS

I've done quite a lot of (embedded) OS development in VS. It's a pretty nice experience, because you can generate a console app that you can use as an emulator that allows you to prototype really fast, and use your embedded toolchain when building for the device.

With the obvious caveats that you write as much of your code to be cross-platform as possible, and be careful with endianness.

mje__on Installing Rails on a Mac Shouldn't Be As Hard As It Is

Until you have more than one app running on the same machine with different dependencies... like say on a development machine. This is the point when bundling shines, because it elevates you off of the os-level dependencies.

mje__on Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/ec2-updates-new-instance-...

Not exactly the same, but you can log in to your instance directly from the console