packet_nerd

Burmese women (she's Burmese) aren't used to changing their names at marriage and she found the practice demeaning. We never really considered it beforehand. But, I think if she had fully realized at the time how hard it would be to live here with one name, then yes, she would have taken my last name. You live and learn.

I know Myanmar is one country where basically everyone has just one name, but there are probably others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_names

I feel for her. My wife was in the exact same situation, like almost everyone in her home country she had just one given name. When we moved here to the states she found it highly annoying and even limited some opportunities.

Recently she decided to legally change her name to something that fits in better here. Although it has been an emotional decision for her, she felt she had to as it's very hard to live in the US without a first and last name.

Edit: "Annoying" doesn't even begin to cover her experience. Everything from getting a bank account, to buying a car, to getting a marriage license was a whole process of explaining until we were blue in the face, escalating to a manager, being told basically to get lost, etc. etc.. It left her in tears more than once.

Wow...

Our first daughter was born a few weeks ago. I took off the first week, but it had to come out of my PTO (and I only have 2 weeks total per year). My wife had to quit her job so she could recuperate and spend time with the baby. She had a rough c-section and is still in bed in a lot of pain. I'm trying to work, take care of her, and take care of the baby.

I wrote a long angry paragraph about US politics and culture here, but on second thought, for my mental sanity I need to drop it.

SO and I have been seriously discussing moving somewhere else and plan to once the pandemic eases up enough for travel to be easier. We're still not 100% sure yet where to go though.

Thanks for the link.. yes, I had energy and power confused.

How so?

If you feed 1 watt of power into a 10Mhz isotropic antenna you get a photons of a certain energy spreading out in all directions. If you feed 1 watt of 10Ghz into a isotropic antenna, are you saying that the photons have more energy than the 10Mhz version? Where does the extra energy come from?

I'll admit it's been way to long since physics class, so forgive me.

Edit: As several have pointed out... I'm wrong. I was confusing energy with power.

> microwave energy—an electromagnetic wave just like Marconi’s radio waves, only a bit more energetic

Sorry for the nitpick, but, the difference between microwave and longer wavelength radio waves is frequency, not energy! I see this all the time in popular science reporting and it drives me nuts... Microwaves are electromagnetic waves, just like UHF, VHF, etc., except that they are a higher frequency (and thus, shorter wavelength). In fact, in general, longer wavelength radio waves are often transmitted at higher power than shorter.

Unless they mean that this microwave energy transfer scheme itself is using more energetic radio waves than other types of radio systems... but it doesn't read that way to me.

I lived with Karen people in Easter Burma for several years. One year the combination of poor timing for the rains[1] and fighting with the Burmese[2] left food scarce for many, including the village I lived in. We ate thin rice soup with bamboo shoots (bamboo is all fiber and water, very little if any nutrients) and greens for the first few months, and then fresh or fermented bamboo soup.

Normally the village elders have strict rules on where and how much fishing they allow to keep it sustainable, but that year people were so desperate they fished the river clean. You couldn't catch even the smallest fish, and it took several years to recover.

[1] There was too much rain and the slash-and-burn farms never had a chance to dry out. Slash-and-burn farms are very dependent on an old forest (usually 10 to 20 years or more) and a dry period in which to burn it off and expose the rich soil underneath.

[2] The Karen would try to hide their rice silos in the forest so the Burmese troops would be able to find it. If the soldiers did find them they'd take what they wanted and burn the rest.

AFAIK bouncing off clouds isn't a thing. :-) But lots of other types of bouncing for sure: the ionosphere, ionized trails from meteorites, the edge between air masses of different temperatures, mountains, the moon, satellites, repeaters....

I'll be honest, I've been into the hobby for 16 years now, and have actually been on phone no more than a few times. To me, all the fun is building things, tinkering, just generally understanding and overcoming the technical challenges. And then when I get things working I prefer CW or digital just because it makes me a little self conscious blasting my voice out for all the world to hear.

Sure you can tinker with Raspberry Pis and Arduinos... but come on, what could be cooler than building your own radio and antenna system, and using it to make contact with some dude in Kazakstan without any Internet, or undersea cables, or satellites, or anything. Just two guys on the planet with wires strung up some trees. :-) How cool is that?!

Human error is a bigger cause of downtime than technical failure or natural disasters. And in practice, a single server like this tends to be a hand managed one-off which only exasperates the human error component.

I see $4,000+ for the Iridium terminal and $500/m for a 100MB plan.

Thats really really expensive for not a lot of data. Click the wrong link from HN front page and you could burn through half that in one click!

I suppose it could be doable. You'd want to be setup with all your software and development environment before hand and just use the satellite connection for text-only email/chat. Maybe SSH to an outside server and use w3m for web browsing?

Yes

(If the service supports U2F)

I've long dreamed of sailing the world. The biggest obstacle is being able to support myself while doing that, and looking at existing boat satellite service is really depressing.

Does anyone here know if between this, Starlink, and OneWeb, it will ever become realistic to work remotely from a boat in, say, the middle of the South Pacific?

Except it's not really a sliding scale with SMS being "easy" and U2F being "hard". U2F is SO much more convenient than either TOTP or SMS. SMS might be a little easier than TOTP, but with either one you still have to (1) find the phone, (2) unlock it, (3) hunt around for and open the app, (4) manually type the code in, often looking back and forth between the phone and webpage 2 or more times before you get it. Compare to just taping the U2F key with the side of your finger (assuming it's already plugged in, which is what I do). There's just no comparison in terms of UX between U2F and anything else I've ever seen.

Regarding the "SMS-2FA is not only worthless, but harmful" claim, it's true, but only in the sense that widespread "lazy" SMS 2FA deployments stifle U2F, which, I believe, should just be the standard across the board[1]. Of course SMS does help, just not as much or in as many attack scenarios (and is more of a UX pain too).

[1] The common HN objection which you alluded to is "but it's so hard!" It's really not. Passwords are hard! If only I could have back all the hours I've spent trying to help my grandparents remember their passwords. I have a U2F token plugged into the side of laptop and nothing could be easier than tapping it to get in. Implementation might be hard, but come on, that's our job.

This is true regarding "next-gen" firewalls. But, if you design a plain old segmentation strategy with simple but well thought out allow/deny rules, then a firewall will be pretty valuable in many situations.

Extreme example: you can think of an air gap as a "firewall" with all deny rules. Air gaps are pretty secure. (Yes, there are still way's in but finding them will be many orders of magnitude harder than finding a 0day in a "next-gen" firewall).

Another example: I put all printers in a dedicated VLAN and block all traffic in and out except specific print ports from the print server IP only. In practice, way more secure than any "next-gen" firewall will ever be.

Maybe have the DMV be the notary for driver's licenses?

I got a little U2F token that I leave plugged into my laptop and set it up on everything that supports it. It's really nice because you don't have to stop and hunt down a code, or a phone or app, just tap the side and it lets you in. I just wish more sites supported it.

In terms of both UX and authentication strength it's infinitely better than SMS/email/TOTP 2FA in every way. (My understanding is most alternatives, including SMS and google auth type TOTP, are still vulnerable to MitM attacks whereas U2F tokens solve that too).

Ha, I remember one of my brothers and a bunch of people from my hometown got all into those perpetual motion machines. They bought the "plans" and went on and on about how revolutionary it was, what a good deal the few hundred dollars for the plans were, and how there's a global conspiracy by energy companies to stop this information from getting out. Despite trying and never quite getting it to work, I think my brother even today still believes in it.

I guess the answer to your question would be "normal every day folks." But, still, how does the thinking that leads them to believe this stuff even actually work? I don't get it.

Circular polarized antennas are often used in ham radio especially to communicate with satellites[1].

I'm not expert enough to know, is this the same physics as what the article is talking about?

[1] https://www.qsl.net/sv1bsx/antenna-pol/polarization.html

Learning to type in a new language maybe?

I've used stickers for that before[1] but it would cool to be able change the labels on the keys automatically. :-)

[1] Like this: https://www.amazon.com/HRH-Keyboard-Stickers-Background-Lett...

China has a stock market [1] and 389 billionaires [2], second only to the US. A decidedly un-communist state of affairs... In reality they are an authoritarian capitalist surveillance state.

[1] http://english.sse.com.cn/ [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/04/08/the...

Nah, most people are caught in bullshit jobs that wouldn't matter if they went away. Consider, we're more or less just as busy now as our grandparents a 100 years ago, despite massive improvements in computers, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. etc.. We have to work because not working would be socially unacceptable, not because we actually provide anything of value.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466958-bullshit-jobs

In the Bullshit Jobs book, he quotes then president Obama as defending not streamlining healthcare because millions of jobs depend on it's inefficiencies.

The box in people's home's colloquially known as a router actually commonly combines a lot of functions into one:

* router

* firewall

* NAT device

* modem

* switch

* access point

* DNS resolver

* DHCP server

And probably others I'm not thinking of :-)

My wife and many of her coworkers quite their jobs in the last two weeks as working from home wasn't an option. My understanding is they won't be eligible for unemployment?

Switch and router OSes have a unique CLI configuration system that is both simple and quite powerful. Compared to Linux I especially like the ability to enumerate the entire configuration with one command ("show running-config" in Cisco's IOS, for example).

I would love to be able to see and manage a Linux system's configuration in an analogous way. Obviously there's a lot more to a modern general purpose OS than a simple network device, so I'm not sure, maybe it wouldn't work very well?

L1 to L4 are just a shorthand way network engineers talk about:

  1. The physical connection and voltage/light levels
  2. Switching and MAC addresses
  3. Routing and IP addresses
  4. TCP/UDP and port numbers

Of course we know it's more complicated than that, but it's still a useful simplification.

Agreed. The wireless (and wired) login/ToS page redirects common in guest Wifi and corporate environments were never really designed for. They work now by abusing what are essentially design flaws, and they don't even work very well.

Another glaring hole in Wifi is that there's no open + encrypted option. Your options are basically open with no encryption at all, personal mode (shared key for authentication and encryption), or enterprise mode (username + password, certificate-based, or similar).

The Wifi authentication standards should really be modernized to address these issues.