Hacker News Reader

omhon Time travel: An isochronic map of travel times from London circa 1914

I suspect a modern version would have more discontinuities.

Areas near airports would be fast to reach, but onward travel from the airports wouldn't be so much faster than 100 years ago.

And the oceans would look different - it still takes a long time to reach the mid-atlantic!

omhon IP traffic over ICMP tunneling

High end firewalls will monitor ICMP and can restrict the size of the payload. They'd probably also notice the large number of ICMP packets.

Big corporate places can completely restrict things and prevent any traffic from internal hosts to the internet. You can use proxying for web browsing etc. and then monitor that to check for any unauthorised traffic.

omhon Details of UK website visits 'to be stored for year'

The proposal (as I understand it, from media reports) is that ISPs will be the ones required to intercept and log the data. So it's unlikely that they will store anything more than required, if only for cost reasons.

omhon Health hackers: Patients taking medical innovation into their own hands

As a Type 1 diabetic I've been watching these hackers with interest. There's clearly some great opportunities for linking continuous glucose monitoring and insulin pumps, particularly for young children. Compared to old-school closed medical devices it looks like we might get much more data and much more control over what's going on.

But it's easy to see why the commercial companies haven't produced this yet. If a bug in this means you get too much insulin then you'll end up passing out and it could kill you within a really short length of time.

I spoke to one of my doctors about it and he seemed slightly scared at what these people are trying. There have been doctors researching this for years in carefully controlled trials, and now there are hundreds of people just plugging together phones and trying it out for themselves.

omhon Sslip.io: A Valid SSL Certificate for Every IP Address

From what I can see this uses the same public/private key for everyone using the service. So it would be easy to MITM any HTTPS connection using this if you're a network admin or hostile WiFi etc.

I don't think this is a problem for the intended audience - developers and test sites.

But there should perhaps be a clear warning somewhere about not using this in production.

EDIT: Turns out this is actually mentioned on the FAQ page of https://sslip.io/

omhon Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire OpenDNS

This is an interesting buy for Cisco. The corporate/small business tier of OpenDNS looks like a good fit with some of their products.

But do they have any other freemium services like the personal/family tiers of OpenDNS? I can't think of any.

omhon Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire OpenDNS

Link via Google, to avoid paywall:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&url=http://www.w...

omhon Crossrail: The monster tunnelling under London streets

Seems like these machines are kept very busy

I believe that many of them are actually single-use. Some (or perhaps all?) of the Crossrail TBMs are being buried at the end of their tunnel. Apparently the effort of removing them isn't worth their resale value?

That tunnel talk page does mention that several TBMs are being reused though so perhaps this is changing with newer/larger machines.

omhon Maintaining Digital Certificate Security

Not directly via AD. But you can add it to the certificate database in the template Firefox profile.

omhon UK websites place average of 44 cookies on first visit

When I visit the ICO site I also get a "civicCookieControl" cookie which you don't list. I guess that this is probably coming from javascript and your site isn't processing this?

omhon Enabling KVM Virtualization for Raspberry Pi 2

This virtualisation is just for running ARM guests, so you can't run Windows.

There will apparently be an ARM version of Windows 10 for the pi, but that's a cut down version for internet of things type apps.

You can emulate x86 on ARM with something like QEMU. But the performance wouldn't be good enough for any modern OS.

omhon Microsoft tackles China piracy with free upgrade to Windows 10

Interestingly, that quote is from almost 17 years ago and they don't quite seem to have figured out how to "collect" yet.

omhon Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

Glacier have additional fees depending on how fast you retrieve the data. Honestly I'm not sure what they are because I've never had to use it, but my impression is that these fees could be quite high.

omhon Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

The detailed pricing is at https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#nearline-pricing

In short, if I'm understanding correctly:

  $0.01 per GB per month storage
  $0.01 per GB retrieval
  Normal egress fees on top, so additional ~$0.10 per GB if you want to retrieve outside of Google Cloud.
  Early deletion fee. Effectively just a minimum storage charge of 1 month.

It seems this is cheaper than Glacier and quite a bit simpler. The speed restrictions are interesting though.

omhon Where do the wealthiest 1% live?

I think that a PPP adjustment is required here to produce a reasonable analysis

This article is in response to the recent Oxfam report which talked about the wealth of the global 1%. So in that context the absolute wealth, in the way that Oxfam measured it, is relevant.

omhon That Debt from 1720? Britain’s Payment Is Coming

Yes, they'll only get the nominal amount back.

Although there has been a huge amount of inflation since then you'd expect that the interest payments have more than made up for this.

omhon Apple and IBM Deliver First Wave of IBM MobileFirst for iOS Apps

Based on the IBM pages at http://www.ibm.com/mobilefirst/us/en/mobilefirst-for-ios.htm... these don't look like full apps that you could use right now.

I guess that IBM are planning to use this as a framework to build custom apps on. And the publicity from this announcement is supposed to help them get more companies asking them for apps.

omhon Tech firms anti-terrorism efforts criticised in Rigby report

It's not clear what those proposals really mean. But even if Vodafone were sending a constant stream of IP->subscriber mappings to GCHQ then GCHQ would have to send them on to Facebook/Google/Yahoo etc. in close to real time in order to get what they're after.

omhon Tech firms anti-terrorism efforts criticised in Rigby report

The full report[1] has a number of interesting details about how the UK intelligence agencies monitor people. The "DIFFICULTIES ACCESSING COMMUNICATIONS CONTENT" section, from p139, mentions things like how GCHQ monitors backbone traffic.

It's clear that if the UK have evidence of someone breaking the law then there are options available. What they're complaining about are suspects who are just being monitored as "suspicious".

But even if they'd wanted to ask e.g. Yahoo to monitor the suspects, I can't see how that would have operated. Obviously UK ISPs can identify and monitor specific people (or at least their home/mobile internet). But remote services can't tie things back to an individual[2].

Really they seem to be suggesting that anyone running a large internet service proactively monitor everything for "terrorism" and notify the relevant international authorities when this happens. From the report:

We note that several of the companies ascribed their failure to review suspicious content to the volume of material on their systems. Whilst there may be practical difficulties involved, the companies should accept they have a responsibility to notify the relevant authorities when an automatic trigger indicating terrorism is activated and allow the authorities, whether US or UK, to take the next step. We further note that several of the companies attributed the lack of monitoring to the need to protect their users’ privacy. However, where there is a possibility that a terrorist atrocity is being planned, that argument should not be allowed to prevail.

I find it hard to believe that anyone technical is suggesting this!

The MPs on the committee might not understand how impractical it is but what about the people from GCHQ who were suggesting this? Either they seriously think this is a good ide, or they're just trying to get more ammunition for increased monitoring powers within the UK.

[1] https://b1cba9b3-a-5e6631fd-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/indep...

[2] I suppose they could use the IP address, if GCHQ did the cross referencing for changing NAT etc. But that would be impractical for some ISPs where the IP changes regularly.

omhon IBM Verse

If IBM is trying to show their aptitude for designing frustrating user interfaces

This is basically the latest version of Lotus Notes. The UI might not be great, but anything is an improvement over the old versions.

omhon IBM Verse

It isn't clear from that page, but this is actually the latest version of IBM Domino, i.e. the server for Lotus Notes.

IBM still have a large number of corporate customers on Notes/Domino and they've been talking for a while about how to integrate email with other "social" apps for file sharing etc.

This is obviously server-based and so means e-mail without the Notes client, but I believe that it's still built on a Domino server underneath.

omhon Goldman Sachs Recasts Its Reputation to Woo Tech Talent

Do the stats include bonus? If you're a Goldman VP then your salary might be mediocre but your bonus will be significant

omhon Microsoft fixes '19-year-old' bug with emergency patch

Windows XP is old, but to call it 13 years old is somewhat misleading.

XP was the newest possible version of Windows as recently as 2007, and since most people ignored Vista it was the default install for many (most?) people up until Windows 7, which was only 5 years ago. SP3 came out in 2008 and significantly improved the features and security.

Combined with some odd licenses and old PC stock in stores there were plenty of people buying new laptops in 2010 with XP installed.

Yes, it's old. But more like 5-6 years than 13.

omhon Cyborg Unplug detects and kicks devices from wireless networks

This seems like it would be much easier as a feature on your router/access point.

Their description suggests that it's just using a blacklist of MAC addresses so it would be pretty easy to add to something like OpenWRT or a captive portal.

omhon Tracking Planes with RTL-SDR and Dump1090

I've been running a similar setup for a few months, feeding data to http://www.flightradar24.com/. If you upload data to them like this then you get premium access to their site and app which is nice. In fact I found that using the site was easier than accessing my own data on the pi so I haven't really used planeplotter etc.

I found that I can pick up a lot of planes even with the stubby antenna that came with the DVB stick. But I'm pretty close to the Heathrow flight path which gives me a slight advantage!

The dump1090 process uses 30-40% CPU on my pi so I start it up with nice -n+19. And it does seem to crash quite often so I've got something to check and restart it.

omhon Docker and Microsoft partner to drive adoption of distributed applications

Unfortunately you need a Windows license per VM.

I guess that at many places you'd just buy datacenter edition, but that's a bit too much for small businesses.

omhon This POODLE bites: exploiting the SSL 3.0 fallback

That's the "worst" RC4 attack I'm aware of. But I'm not sure that it's quite at the level of a practical attack - certainly not as bad as POODLE.

omhon This POODLE bites: exploiting the SSL 3.0 fallback

It seems that this is an attack on the CBC-mode ciphers but doesn't change anything about the RC4 ciphers.

RC4 is mentioned in passing as having weaknesses, but is it actually broken? If we can't disable SSL3 completely would using only RC4 ciphers be an option?

omhon iSIGHT discovers vulnerability used in Russian cyber-espionage campaign

I'm curious if this "vulnerability" also exists in XP

I was curious as well. Elsewhere the article says it's not vulnerable:

...a zero-day vulnerability impacting all supported versions of Microsoft Windows (XP is not impacted)

Are there any significant Windows vulnerabilities for XP since the EOL? I was waiting for the first one that isn't patched, will be interesting to see how the bad guys use it.

omhon Was your Gmail compromised in yesterday's attack?

Says my account was hacked, but then gives me the incorrect two letters for the start of my password

Out of interest - are those two letters the start of a password from any other site?

Presumably the leak came from a third party site so it would be your password from there rather than your gmail password.