rdl

I mostly stopped reading it in ~2021/2022, but from ~2015-2021 it was getting progressively more hostile to tech, fearful of anything new, etc.

I skimmed the online list of articles for the past few months and it does look better (but not 1993-1997 high water mark, or 1997-2021 still ok). There have been two different editors in chief since 2021, maybe that was a factor.

As sad as this is, what's sadder is that Wired still exists and is diametrically opposed to the values it had when created.

While I agree if he were doing anything questionable, IDK, my reading is that he's exporting software development services from Japan and paying taxes in Japan correctly on both business income and personal income incident to doing this.

It seems like work-from-home is going to be more of a thing over the next 30+ years than it was over the past 30 years (leaving the past 3 years as an exception to both). Work from home also seems to often involve multiple people in the same household working independently (both having two adults working at different jobs, as well as kids working on educational stuff).

This seems like it should change how houses are designed. A separate "writer's cottage" or "workshop" has a lot of value, but I've always just had N+1 bedrooms even when I lived alone so I could dedicate a bedroom as an office (and in my current place, the biggest bedroom is the office; the small bedroom is my actual bedroom).

Even before taking over as President at YC, he was incredibly helpful to a bunch of YC founders and others doing startups -- a combination of willingness to help, and knowing what to do/how to do it, plus being able to do it with high leverage. Mostly weird/unpleasant situations (like the OpenAI drama was, but at a much smaller scale). Doing that for several years before YC President, then presumably continuing to do so while YC President (I'd mostly drifted away from YC by then), goes a long way to explain everything.

Tether/USDC and other centralized stablecoins are really "their own thing", not "crypto" in the cypherpunk sense.

Actually worse than that, former employee phished for credentials, per Ledger themselves. Underlying cause is utter incompetence by company, 4th strike.

1) They are using some phishable auth (SMS? TOTP? password only?) to secure super high value repo? For fuck's sake, they're a HARDWARE KEY VENDOR which also supports U2F/FIDO2 as an app.

2) Former employee has signing/push auth on super high value repo?

3) Single person has signing/push auth on super high value repo?

.com

LOL https://twitter.com/Ledger/status/1735326240658100414

FINAL TIMELINE AND UPDATE TO CUSTOMERS:

4:49pm CET:

Ledger Connect Kit genuine version 1.1.8 is being propagated now automatically. We recommend waiting 24 hours until using the Ledger Connect Kit again.

The investigation continues, here is the timeline of what we know about the exploit at this moment:

- This morning CET, a former Ledger Employee fell victim to a phishing attack that gained access to their NPMJS account. - The attacker published a malicious version of the Ledger Connect Kit (affecting versions 1.1.5, 1.1.6, and 1.1.7). The malicious code used a rogue WalletConnect project to reroute funds to a hacker wallet. - Ledger’s technology and security teams were alerted and a fix was deployed within 40 minutes of Ledger becoming aware. The malicious file was live for around 5 hours, however we believe the window where funds were drained was limited to a period of less than two hours. - Ledger coordinated with @WalletConnect who quickly disabled the the rogue project. - The genuine and verified Ledger Connect Kit version 1.1.8 is now propagating and is safe to use. - For builders who are developing and interacting with the Ledger Connect Kit code: connect-kit development team on the NPM project are now read-only and can’t directly push the NPM package for safety reasons. - We have internally rotated the secrets to publish on Ledger’s GitHub. - Developers, please check again that you’re using the latest version, 1.1.8. - Ledger, along with @Walletconnect and our partners, have reported the bad actor’s wallet address. The address is now visible on @chainalysis . @Tether_to has frozen the bad actor’s USDT. - We remind you to always Clear Sign with your Ledger. What you see on the Ledger screen is what you actually sign. If you still need to blind sign, use an additional Ledger mint wallet or parse your transaction manually. - We are actively talking with customers whose funds might have been affected, and working proactively to help those individuals at this time. - We are filing a complaint and working with law enforcement on the investigation to find the attacker. - We’re studying the exploit in order to avoid further attacks. We believe the attacker’s address where the funds were drained is here: 0x658729879fca881d9526480b82ae00efc54b5c2d

Thank you to @WalletConnect , @Tether_io, @Chainalysis , @zachxbt , and the whole community that helped us and continue to help us identify and solve this attack.

Security will always prevail with the help of the whole ecosystem.

Github action

I went to Iraq despite being against the invasion (although very pro CIA/JSOC activities in Afghanistan in 2001, but anti Big Army stuff in Afghanistan -- I met some of the "first in" guys a few years later and double down on that belief now) to 1) get as far away from a girl I'd broken up with in 2003 in the US and 2) to do a startup IX business with some Iraqi expats (who'd moved to London in the 70s-80s) and 3) be close to the biggest news event happening in the world and see what it was like up close.

The helping-out-with-medical happened 5-6 years later and was entirely due to the company I was contracting for having some connections at the founder level with Christian and medical charities who were also helping out there -- I can't really take any credit for "volunteering" for that, it was much closer to "voluntold", but I'm glad I did it.

When I was in Iraq/Afghanistan 2004-2010, one of my favorite things was working with the military hospitals (I sold satcom to a variety of clients, including medical use for radiology, and then worked on radiology PACS stuff).

The Army Combat Support Hospital (think MASH tv-show...) guys could set something up like this really fast, but it was expensive hardware, required their own personnel, etc. This makes sense for the US military (massive logistics, budget, etc.), but not for others. Also worked (volunteer/charity) with some local clinics who didn't have these kind of resources, but did have great personnel, who could use more locally-acquired or bespoke solutions -- problem was it was slow, not uniform standard, etc.

A cost-reduced, standardized, easily transportable hybrid is great. Ideally you'd use existing standardized readily available stuff with minimal medical/flown in stuff on top.

That was possibly the worst written tech article I’ve read in a while, despite generally agreeing with the premise of home Wi-Fi being important. I look forward to LLMs actually eliminating the bottom 75% of human writing.

This is amazing -- I've been a happy Beeper user for everything except iMessage and Signal until now, and this mostly kept me from using iMessage much at all. Congratulations to the team, and wow -- that high school kid hopefully has a long and impressive career ahead of him.

There are repeaters on the cable every ~50-200km (depending on technology), powered by DC power carried on the cable. There are branching units powered the same way -- I believe they handle branching at the fiber level, rather than waves, but not sure of the specifics on modern DWDM cables. (they can run ~80-160 different frequencies of light on the same fiber, and the cables contain multiple fibers...)

I sort of enjoy things like this a a way to observe sales/manipulation tactics. Usually as long as you're committed to no-buy, you can give them a fun and totally fictional story about why, have fun, and get free stuff out of it.

Last one I went to (in Las Vegas) the guy was actually very chill and we spent the whole time talking about the sales tech/presentation tech he was using, about the LV market generally, etc.

FedEx famously got to within days of running out of money early on, and there is a story Fred Smith made payroll by taking the remaining cash to Las Vegas and gambling.

Is there a website/etc for employee hiring?

I just follow https://events.ccc.de/

The announcements are inconsistently made in English; usually it's up in German first (which is reasonable given it's a German org and most of the attendees...)

It's a combination of virtue signaling/perceiving the risk to be higher than others perceive it to be (right or wrong; not commenting on the merits), and the long lead times/limited financial reserves the org has in planning events.

The go/no go decision had to be made months before, and there was some risk of covid restrictions being in place in December which would have made the event suck or not happen. Probably harder to cancel a single event in, say, 2019 over that level of risk, but easier to continue not running it in 2020, 2021, and then in 2022, I think. I really hope it happens this year.

Yeah, lots of hotels in the $100-160/night range in Hamburg especially during that time window. The Radisson (attached) is unfortunately pretty expensive, especially for a Radission Blu, but very convenient especially if the weather is inclement, and being able to run back to the room throughout the day (vs a 0.5-1km trip by foot or car or whatever) is really nice. Radisson cancellation policy of one MONTH in advance is pretty annoying, though.

Agree about scale making qualitative differences in events, but CCC has been happy operating at larger scale organizationally. I disagree with a lot of the organizational politics with CCC, but they're amazingly good at organizing events, and those events are really good. Combination of the main org/structure, volunteers, and especially making it somewhat federated with other groups/chapters doing their own stuff during the event as well.

In this case CCH doesn't really have more space, and Leipzig sucked as a city to host events (no hotels/food/etc. immediately near the center, etc.). CCC is not so profitable as to get the truly top-end convention centers, and cares about the total cost/experience to participants (accommodations, food, side events, travel logistics). Hannover, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and Munich have the biggest ones in Germany. Berlin is almost as big; I think it's really expensive to book but if I had the money that would probably be much choice for ideal CCC location. CCH is really quite small as congress centers go.

I hope it actually happens this year. 2022 where it was "definitely going to happen" and then cancelled was kind of sad.

Blind signatures are totally different from hash chains.

New cars come out every year, with minor updates, and big updates every 3-10 years ("generation"). I am still pretty happy driving a 2006 car. Maybe phones move toward that, but I like incremental improvement, and I'd be annoyed to buy a phone today which is 4-5 years old if I'm also wanting to keep it for 3-5 years.

Enterprise computers get refreshed every 3-6 years, usually (I'd probably do shorter for most laptops, longer for desktops). Monitors can do 5-10 years. Until they became active electronics, headphones/speakers/microphones which were decades old were fine.

Biggest boost on a lot of new mobile device refresh is getting a new 0-cycle battery and a clean OS install, and for a lot of people, "buy a new one" is the main opportunity for that kind of upgrade.

Not just in billing, but also in implementation cost and general overhead. I actively avoid buying anything which requires talking to a salesperson to get basic service info; ideally one has something like the Cloudflare self-service model with enterprise upgrades. I know someone currently paying >$800k/yr to Cloudflare who started out a couple years ago with a $200/mo plan.

That image (if it's the one circulating on twitter) is from years ago and not this event.

For this “desert island” use case, a solar powered quartz watch seems like it would work the longest, of COTS options today (although a mechanical watch might be fine without servicing).

Of course, my favorite watch in this case would be something like the Breitling Emergency (https://www.breitling.com/us-en/emergency/) which could call for rescue. Looking forward to a satellite connectivity version in the future — iPhones are able to do this now, so something like the Apple Watch Ultra 2 may be able to.

The legal term in the NFA is "Silencer", and the original items were in fact called "Silencers".

Yeah, I went this year and regret it; it's been getting worse but Covid really killed everything good about it.