octosphere

What if I need absolute surety my image(s) is not going to be subject to bit rot and not be available in a few years time? What if I do 'multi-posts' and share the same image across 10,000+ bulletin boards? Your bandwidth will run out very quickly if you saw the types of posting that I do (I use automation software to post to 10,000+ boards). And those posts last for decades. I am not sure I can rely on this service for my needs.

This is why I self-host my own image server and have it hooked up to a well-provisioned CDN for peace of mind. Then I have full control and can renew the domain for ten years each time to keep the images online.

Any other show stopping bugs you have encountered? I'm thinking of making the switch myself, but I hear nothing but anecdotes of people having a bad time getting proprietary Microsoft Office .docx files to play nice in LibreOffice

> Amazon has never done that

Well maybe they do? I know Amazon's algorithms are opaque to the user, but after several purchases on Amazon I noticed this trend of items I researched showing a small uptick in the price after a few days when I go to buy it. The price uptick is there for all users, but Amazon knows only one specific person will buy it, so the price is adjusted for that person and no-one else. After buying, the price goes back to its default in a few days.

Never liked when Amazon increases the price a few days later after witnessing you researching something to buy. This is why I only purchase items 'on-the-spot' in a small window of time which allows me to escape such a practice.

> I feel like the list should be longer

Isn't there a small window of time to edit a submission before it gets committed permanently to HN? I imagine the list would be bigger if the grace period lasted much longer.

Thanks for recommending that :)

Worse still is the threat of quantum computers that will make cracking his vault trivial. Apparently in 20-30 years people will be able to fit a quantum computer into a laptop form factor and break certain types of crypto at will, regardless of the keysize or key complexity.

Sad to see Windows To Go being deprecated. It's the only way to have Windows running off a USB device. I hope it doesn't break the devices I own with WTG on them.

I wish Microsoft devs would add the option to install Windows on a USB drive during the initial install procedure.

> Google is not dying any time soon

One way to kill it is blocking all their domains either in /etc/hosts or using pi-hole. But I imagine using the web would be slightly broken as Google host various font libraries and javascript libraries which if blocked, could break many sites.

I never use a password, but I do use a passphrase like something similar to the one used in XKCD 936[0]. There's a few open source diceware[1] generators on Github that you should look at.

[0] https://www.xkcd.com/936/

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diceware

This is why I don't give registrars (or other actors) enough time to register a domain behind my back, so when I want a name, I do no prior research in advance of buying the domain, and buy it 'on the spot'. The same idea can be applied to something like Amazon where shoppers often research the items they want to buy, only to realize a week later the prices have all been hiked when they go to buy.

My personal favorite speaker on this topic is Chris Heilmann[0]. He's been in the trenches for a long time and highlights a lot of issues in webdev that are often overlooked, like accessibility, and a common thing: over-engineering.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=christian+heilm...

Oops, my bad. You are right, I didn't read the article fully and presumed it didn't talk about spreading oneself thinly. Thanks for pointing it out ;)

> but I’m always looking for another trick to hold the flow for longer.

Flow is usually something not to be sustained for long periods, because sustained flow is actually not practical - there must be an intermittent ebb to every flow state (usually in the form of breaks).

I noticed you mentioned Spotify and I commend that. Music makes everything seem epic even though you are doing very mundane tasks.

My only tip for making a flow state last longer is getting natural nootropics in your system like coffee, walnuts, omega-3 fish oil, MCT oil, and blueberries, which are all brain-boosting foods.

Yeah but the article overlooks the many polymaths who spread themselves thinly across a variety of different fields, never achieving true mastery of a particular field. The phrase 'Jack of all trades, master of none' springs to mind. There are however polymaths who achieve mastery of all the fields they choose to pursue, although I imagine they are rare.

I'm probably a bit naive, but who torrents on their phone or tablet? Like, who does that?

The TL;DR of most VPN reviews is use Mullvad

Seems like only high-profile accounts get sim jacked. I would love to see some stats to see how prevalent sim porting attacks happen to ordinary low-follower-count accounts that have little influence on the network.

Yeah but as per the parent post - Paypal makes revoking a recurring fee easier, as sometimes there is not an option within a particular SaaS product/service to disable recurring fees. Also it is impossible to login to Mastercard's systems to ban/revoke a particular service from charging your card.

Recycled comment from an article a few weeks back about Former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker Choosing Encryption over Backdoors[0]

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/10/former_fbi_ge...

You can read the discussion on HN here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21377093

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This is why Tor and onionland is a lawless wild west. All so that journalists can report and trade documents, and so that repressive regimes can't easily censor access to news and information. This is the cost of encryption: you get all sorts of scoundrels in the mix in the name of privacy and security for the masses. Some might say this cost is too high: that scoundrels are running rampant and won't stop their criminal actions. But without this we get a broken backdoored Internet where no such privacy/security exists and could actually cause more damage to society since spying would be rampant.

Got it. Thanks for elaborating!

More on Melissa here and also some more detail on David L. Smith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_(computer_virus)

> The virus itself was credited to Kwyjibo, who was shown to be the macrovirus writers VicodinES and ALT-F11 by comparing Microsoft Word documents with the same globally unique identifier

Not sure how that explains how the FBI caught David though. Can someone else elaborate? What sort of OPSEC fail is at play here?

Everything is a bardo[0]. I learned that from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I tested out the theory and it's the truest thing I ever heard. A bardo basically means 'in between'. We are forever in between something, never having truly finished it, including life itself. It's just one long infinite attempt to get to the next phase, and then once we are in the new phase, we are striving for another phase. For some this is Samsara, or the hedonic treadmill, for others it's a great relief knowing everything is essentially unfinished.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo

Or learn to meditate without crutches like this. I've learned to not rely on something outside of myself for my own peace of mind. That's what meditation is about: getting to know your inner self and calling upon your inner calm to face difficult situations.

I think the more meta and wide ranging the subject matter, the better, because there's something for every user of HN to comment on, and oh do users love to snipe on specific sections of an article. Meta content is like crack for users. Narrowly constrained articles seem to be ignored.

There is an alternative called Liberapay[0] but I haven't tried it, so I can't vouch for it. There is also Flattr[1], but Flattr is more for small micropayments to show your appreciation for a project or piece of software (not to mention you need a Paypal account to cash out your earnings). There's also things like Buy Me A Coffee[2], but again, centered around small micropayments (I imagine these performers need more than a coffee, although when you have several fans buying you a coffee it's a good gig). Also: I'm surprised nobody is talking about Patreon[3] (Prolly against their terms of service too though)

[0] https://liberapay.com/

[1] https://flattr.com/

[2] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/

[3] https://www.patreon.com/

This is neat. Although in recent years I have trimmed down my extensions to just uBlock Origin and HTTPS everywhere. I went through a huge phase of installing novelty addons like this but got concerned about the privacy of the addons and what kind of code they were running. Sure - I could vet the addon by inspecting the code, but that's now outside my scope. I don't have the time or energy to do it anymore.

I read somewhere that Chrome will be adding DoH (DNS over HTTPS) and I'm not sure if it's some experimental flag you toggle. I imagine they will be using 8.8.8.8 (which supports DoH). So now you are sending all your personal data to Google instead of Cloudflare :o But you can always use another DoH provider if you dislike Google or Cloudflare[0]

I imagine any browser worth its salt will eventually switch over to DoH as the default as time goes on, as it's a great feature even though it doesn't honor the /hosts file or honor pi-hole[1] configured routers, it's still a great feature to have.

[0] https://github.com/curl/curl/wiki/DNS-over-HTTPS

[1] https://pi-hole.net/

> So even though they can't tell Bitcoin itself to stop they could stop underlying technologies Bitcoin uses.

It's not as simple as that. Due to things like carrier grade NAT, thousands if not millions of users and services use the same IPV4 address, so shutting down a specific IP would be equivalent to an authoritarian dictator censoring innocent users.

I'm going to 'recycle' an older comment of mine, pertaining to the comments about the book. The original comment can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583363 I was annoyed that someone called Ed Snowden a 'Traitor'. Hopefully it gets a bit more recognition in this thread

__________________________________

For me he made the Great Game of Privacy a lot fairer. You should read the excellent entry on Wikipedia about the aftermath of the leaks[0]. If the leaks meant that privacy-loving folk went 'dark' in light of the leaks, then this is a net plus. Snowden's actions possibly hindered NSA in catching undesirables, but it's a small price to pay for a bolstered Internet and privacy-respecting comms. And who's to say that the apparatus even worked that well in foiling the efforts of plotters? Bill Binney[1] consistently drives his message home that the NSA's surveillance apparatus is very inefficient at foiling plots, and I agree with him.

Even if it stopped one plot in all the time of its existence, it's still an enormous effort and an enormous amount of money spent just to foil one plot. Old fashioned police work is better at foiling plots because it doesn't have to rely on big data algorithms sifting through the noise of Internet traffic (most of which is innocuous). Old fashioned methods work because they employ simple detective work - it doesn't need the NSA at every choke point and decrypting countless crypto.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli...