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pandog

272 karma · joined March 5, 2012

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pandog··on Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data (2020)
A lot of the time you are running experiments and seeing how the data changes, not looking at the data in a vacuum.

Many of the example critiques here don't apply so much when looking at the changes in data:

- if I got 50% more hits on my site this week vs last week, that's meaningful despite 36% of people blocking ads

- if my open rate doubled when I changed my email subject, also meaningful

The other examples are hard to pick holes in as they simply say "Z is a lie", but I can be looking at multiple data sources to decide how much of a lie Z is.

pandog··on Ask HN: How to learn marketing and sales as a solo entrepreneur?
Came here to post this - this was a great (and short!) read to help validate if your idea could be something somebody wants to pay for.
pandog··on Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?
I think a high definition photo taken on a recent phone takes up an awful lot more device memory than a "big number of chats"
pandog··on Engineering Management Checklist (2021)
Though I would add that looking back to when I was an IC, my Computer Science degree hadn't given me much if any formal training in Software Engineering (especially in a large team and code base) and I mostly learnt by doing that also.
pandog··on Fail2Ban
To put it another way - there is no security risk that fail2ban helps with that can't be resolved in another, better, more robust and less risky way.
pandog··on Fail2Ban
If someone is performing a denial of service attack from one I.P. address then this will help.

To tptacek's point, you've got to ask yourself is a denial of service attack in your threat model?

The reality is most folk set up fail2ban after seeing auth failures in their logs, not service degradation.

If you're considering a denial of service attack in your threat model, then I'd probably also consider a DDoS attack and there are likely more effective solutions here (a firewall or CDN).

And don't forget you're using some of those precious CPU cycles to parse the auth logs, with python no less :-)

pandog··on Fail2Ban
fail2ban is a real pet peeve of mine because anyone security conscious enough to deploy this will have likely already mitigated any actual security risks this could help with either by using a strong password or public key authentication.

That leaves noise in the logs - which sure, it's nice to reduce, but using an alternative port can help here.

I may sound like a spoilsport - but the fact that there have been a number of security vulnerabilities (https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-5567...) in this project, make it worse than security theatre, it actually increases risk whilst not at all reducing it.

pandog··on Tor’s shadowy reputation will only end if we all use it
There are a bunch of projects from Tor to aid in circumvention of the great firewall of China: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-ch...
pandog··on Hardening Drupal with WebAssembly
Don't disagree - but if I have a limited amount of resources to harden my Drupal server, it might be best to start looking at hardening around the most commonly exploited Drupal vulnerabilities.

Having said that, searching Druapl on the CISA know exploited list shows a number of remote code execution vulnerabilities that this would help mitigate: https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog

pandog··on Valve bans 40k Dota 2 accounts using honeypot patch
Implementing what you describe sounds to me way more "clever" and less robust than the canary page approach described above.

Specifically - I wouldn't fancy writing the "consistently anticipates their adversaries sneaking behind a wall" heuristic you describe but the earlier post describes the API that already exposes the "has read canary page" functionality.

pandog··on Ask HN: What prevents a company from hiring remote employees internationally?
Fair point!
pandog··on Ask HN: What prevents a company from hiring remote employees internationally?
These services help some issues but don't solve all of them, just a few off the top of my head:

Legal differences can be significant - for example, in France it may be difficult legally to ask an employee to put in more than their contracted hours compared to another country where this could be very normal.

A recent example in the news is the Twitter layoffs - in the EU they may have enacted layoffs that aren't legal there but are perfectly legal in the US.

Taxes in different countries can mean there's a significant difference in the difference between the amount an employer pays and the employee receives per country. Sometimes it's negligible enough for the employer to foot the bill, sometimes it's large enough they may need to pass on the difference. This can get even more complicated when share options come in to play.

If you are responsible for this it all really starts to add up, ultimately the more countries you employ in, the more cognitive overhead which can impact an organisation's agility (or require them to take more risks).

pandog··on OSX Chrome 55 Blocking non-store extensions without dev mode
Presumably in the short run it makes Google money - a great deal of those blocked ads are AdSense ads and Google gets cash for every click.

Though that obviously isn't sustainable when advertisers realise what's going on.

pandog··on Running containers without Docker
> but they don't want to use Docker, at least not immediately, because it requires to learn a few Docker commands

That's not what the blog post says. They don't want to use docker because it does a lot of things. They use rkt because it does fewer things. It's not about learning commands, it's about complexity of software. They selected rkt because it does less stuff, not because it's easier to learn.

pandog··on WhatsApp Blocking Encrypted Calls to All Saudi Numbers
Whilst it may be a better user experience for those with Saudi numbers in Saudi Arabia (calls would be blocked anyway) it is a much worse user experience for those with Saudi numbers not in Saudi Arabia (calls would work fine, but are blocked by WhatsaApp).

Maybe it's just a use case they missed - but quite a significant one!

pandog··on CHIP $9 Computer
If your tag line is "The World's first $9 computer" I don't think it's totally unreasonable for people to point out that you have to pay more than $9 to get the thing.
pandog··on TOTP SSH port fluxing
I appreciate this is tongue in cheeck but given that it should be possible for me to constantly scan his server and get each port change is there anything I can do with that? i.e. derive his 2FA private key
pandog··on On Botnets and Streaming Music Services
I suppose, but the thing with doing something like this on a botnet is you need to put that bit of spotify listening software on all those infected computers. Once spotify got their hands on the software they could come up with ways to defeat it.
pandog··on On Botnets and Streaming Music Services
There is really no need to call this a botnet
pandog··on Monitor your local network with Raspberry Pi
http://www.dx.com/p/346531 seems to be a rather nifty $25 openwrt router
pandog··on Windows Certificate Manager does not display the complete trust list
If it changes and you haven't taken the software update yet the lists will differ.
pandog··on Windows Certificate Manager does not display the complete trust list
But there's a difference between looking at the list of root certificates that Microsoft say Windows trusts and looking at the list of root certificates that Windows trusts.
pandog··on Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular
Isn't this just criticism of frameworks? If I want to do something a framework doesn't support I'm going to be in "a world of pain" but that's the cost of using a framework.
pandog··on Show HN: My wife's email was hacked, I created an app to protect online accounts
If you scroll to the bottom in Gmail you can see a "Last account activity: 1 hour ago: Details" link. If you click that you can see everyone who logged on.
pandog··on Firefox Developer Edition
Getting a 50kB/s download rate for the Linux bzip. If anyone's going to find that annoying, it's developers!
pandog··on Re: CVE-2014-6271 – remote code execution through bash
Looks like 14.10 is patched now
pandog··on Docker Hub Official Repos: Announcing Language Stacks
I think they're here: https://github.com/docker-library
pandog··on Docker Hub Official Repos: Announcing Language Stacks
Maybe I'm missing something here but I don't see this as being particularly useful?

It's a nice quick way to get an application running in Docker but realistically would you want to be depending upon these images in production?

The power I see in Docker is the ability to create portable images that contain everything my application needs. I don't want to depend upon Docker (the company) to figure out what these images should look like.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

pandog··on Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one
But I don't want to use a strategy, I want to click a button and have adverts blocked.
pandog··on Encrypted e-mail: How much annoyance will you tolerate to keep the NSA away?
They appear to take a SHA1 Checksum from an unencrypted (non-HTTPS) website to verify the integrity of the download.

Surely if you're worried about the integrity of the file you should also be worried about the integrity of the source website also?

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