Hacker News Reader

omhon The bttn – the simplest user interface

This seems like such a neat, simple idea. Perfect for integration with IFTTT or similar.

I'm a little surprised that nothing like this exists already. I can see how you could easily build one yourself. But that doesn't give you the IFTTT ecosystem, which is probably good for less technical users.

omhon The bttn – the simplest user interface

I think it also has a built in GSM module so that you don't need to pair it to WiFi. If it's completely standalone then that's particularly nice for the shop/hotel use case. And makes it easier for average home users.

But still - $100??

omhon Live map of Russia advancing into Ukraine

They're using the right dates. So today's tweets are for August 1942.

omhon Email encryption in transit

From that article:

Unfortunately, the SMTPS port is only used for the submission of authenticated mail by mail clients. Opportunistic encryption between SMTP servers, which is extremely important for preventing passive eavesdropping of email, requires STARTTLS on port 25

So for the sort of thing that Google are talking about STARTTLS is the only option.

Some of the disadvantages aren't such a big deal for large-scale server-to-server transport. But protocol downgrade attacks should certainly be a worry.

omhon Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista? (2012)

From a comment on that blog:

That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.) And besides, all the people who criticized Windows 95 as "not really a 32-bit operating system because it has some parts in 16-bit" would use the same logic to say that 64-bit Windows is "not really a 64-bit operating system."

omhon I am not planning any nuclear attacks

My understanding was that, roughly, if you pay a regular payment as rent for a property then you have an AST - whether the contract says so or not.

This is mainly in the context of house/flat rentals though; I realise that perhaps per-room rentals may have special cases.

omhon I am not planning any nuclear attacks

In the UK you almost certainly have an Assured Shorthold Tenancy (even if the agent says you don't). This gives you a lot of strong rights which you can use if you know how.

In practice the agent or landlord has a lot of leverage but you can often win if you use the law to your advantage. In particular there is a very specific set of steps they have to follow to evict you.

omhon An American doctor experiences an NHS emergency room

I've seen posters up in the local A&E that say something like "If you're a foreigner please be aware that we'll send you an invoice". And there's certainly been statements recently from politicians talking about doing this for the dreaded "immigrants".

I suspect that the total income from this would be tiny though, and perhaps not even enough to justify the administration costs. And my impression from staff at NHS hospitals is that they're just interested in helping you and really don't care if you didn't pay.

omhon What caused today's Internet hiccup

Is there a better workaround that doesn't hinder IPv6?

I agree that it would be better not to harm IPv6 growth. But if the alternative is to break the IPv4 internet then the choice seems obvious.

omhon Nukes of Hazard (2013)

It's certainly true that the UK has a sort of dead-man's-switch (depending on exactly what the letter of last resort says).

But I presume that there is also a more active communication method as well. If the Prime Minister wanted to launch the nukes then he would be able to send a message to the subs and launch immediately.

omhon The Fed suckered IBM into a failing cloud strategy?

It isn't just going to come from cloud/distributed systems.

You can scale up to a huge extent just with average x86 servers now and these are competing with what used to be done on a mainframe. So even many companies who don't or can't use distributed systems don't need to use IBM any more.

omhon Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find?

I doubt that little message is going to stop anyone from printing

On at least one occasion I've printed an email and ended up using an extra page because of the extended "Please think twice" section.

omhon Emergency phone and internet data storage law to be brought in

If you're in the UK then you should contact your MP about this to let them know what you think. And you need to do it now - the vote is on Monday. Perhaps if they realise what people think about this they might reconsider.

Contacting your MP is easy using https://www.writetothem.com/ or the dedicated anti-DRIP page at ORG https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/no-emergency-stop-...

omhon Emergency phone and internet data storage law to be brought in

Yes, this is separate from whatever GCHQ are doing.

GCHQ are (I assume) intercepting data out in the wild wherever they can then storing and analysing that themselves. This is apparently covered under other laws, but certainly isn't affected by this.

This law, and the one it's replacing, is about obligations on phone companies and ISPs to retain traffic data themselves. This data can then be used by the police and other agencies when they need it. I wouldn't be surprised if GCHQ had access to this but I doubt that it makes a big difference to their capabilities. I'd expect that they can do far more than this regardless.

omhon Emergency phone and internet data storage law to be brought in

It may be slightly more clever than that. David Allen Green suggests[1] that this moves the legislation so that it is directly implemented by UK law rather than as a result of an EU law.

This means that the current court ruling wouldn't apply and that it would be almost impossible to mount a similar court challenge in future.

[1] Non-reg link: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&url=http://blogs...

omhon Google glass now in UK

It calls it the Glass Explorer Edition but the price is "only" £1,000

omhon Tell your ISP to stop retaining your data

Can you clarify what you mean by "browsing data"? I understand why some data could be useful for debugging, but it's the DPI-style data that I'm most concerned about. I'd assumed that it would be too expensive for ISPs to bother collecting it if they weren't legally obliged to.

omhon John Lewis fined over spam emails

The article says:

unless it can be proven that the recipient consented to them or was a customer – with John Lewis unable to satisfy either requirement

So it sounds like in this case he didn't actually purchase anything.

I've never been a big fan of the "existing business relationship" rule. It basically means I have to click an unsubscribe link once for every company I buy from.

omhon Crucial's MX100 solid-state drive reviewed

Obviously it will depend on your workload.

Although I rarely boot my PC I am running a number of virtual machines and the SSD helps when booting those.

omhon Why TLS is called "TLS", not "SSL 3.1"

SSL 2.0 is a disaster

How bad is this? I have internet-facing production web servers running software which (unfortunately) does not support TLS even in the most recent versions.

Are there practical attacks I should be worried about?

omhon How we nearly lost our domain, and how to prevent this

I've just checked, and I have this for one of my .com namecheap domains but not the other.

I suspect that this is a side effect of Namecheap's "WhoisGuard" feature. This hides your Whois details, and I think there was a free trial of it when I moved my domain across.

As I understand it, for WhoisGuard domains you'll get the annual checkup email from Namecheap rather than ICANN[1]. Potentially in this case Jitbit missed the email because it didn't look important, or perhaps the way that Namecheap and ICANN are interacting has changed and has some loopholes?

[1] https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...

omhon Why TLS is called "TLS", not "SSL 3.1"

So they couldn't call it "SSL 3" because it couldn't be seen to be the Netscape proposal - fair enough. But it's a shame they didn't take the simpler route and just call it "SSL 4".

omhon The Trouble With IBM

The most interesting quote for me:

A federal judge agreed, ruling in October that with the “overall inferiority of its proposal,” IBM “lacked any chance of winning” the contract. The corporate cliché of the 1970s and ’80s, that no one ever got fired for buying IBM, had never seemed less true

omhon Xip.io: Wildcard DNS for everyone

Unfortunately it looks like the entire xip.io domain is blacklisted as "Reputation-Viruses" by the filtering service that we use.

I guess this is because it's been used by some bad guys already.

omhon The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

The next campaign could encourage everyone to give a low rating at all the different sites.

omhon Why Microsoft really patched XP

But after the patch the advice wouldn't hold any more, everyone could go back to happily using IE.

If XP wasn't patched then the news articles would be more nuanced. The "Internet Explorer is dangerous!" theme from earlier articles might have continued and left the average consumer thinking that IE was broken everywhere.

(I'm not sure if I totally agree, but this seems to be what the article is suggesting. And I think it still makes sense even with IE on XP stuck at IE8)

omhon We'd lose our security certificate if we allowed pasting

I'm in the UK as well. I was actually thinking of Chip & PIN transactions, but you may be right about cash points.

omhon We'd lose our security certificate if we allowed pasting

I like that idea.

Unfortunately it doesn't prevent them using them online as well. At least for my cards, if I lock out the PIN I can still use them for non-PIN purchases.

omhon Netflix to get its own ‘cable channel’ next week

I'm sure that's part of their thinking.

But note that this is only on TiVos, so many (most?) of the consumers will already be used to the idea of HDD recording and series links. Once I got a TiVo it wasn't long before I got into the habit of hitting "My Shows" rather than channel hopping.

omhon Netflix to get its own ‘cable channel’ next week

It sounds like it's only a channel in the sense that "tuning" to channel 450 will launch the app. You'd then have to search for the show you want to watch.

A TiVo box already has lots of options for browsing through a database of shows/series/actors, so it makes a lot more sense to link Netflix into that.