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shasheene

1,271 karma · joined September 23, 2013

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shasheene··on We Chat, They Watch
You are being downvoted, maybe because Citizen Lab has already investigated Zoom before: https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...

That report is one of the reasons why Zoom has such a poor reputation for security. The other being Zoom is largely Made In China software, so subject to the requirements of China's totalitarian government: to bolster domestic industries by stealing technology and R&D from around the world (by infiltrating companies, communication networks, computer servers and end-user devices using any software and individuals it has influence over, including hackers from Ministry of State Security and People's Liberation Army).

This is achieved through direct legal requirements to co-operate with Ministry of State Security corporate espionage (via China's 2017 National Intelligence Law), and more broadly through the China's attempts to switch the allegiances of all ethnically Chinese people through the overseas political interference organization called the "United Front Work Department" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTXPxWtl8Zw), and also through the Thousand Talents Plan.

shasheene··on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)
Also not yet possible to install a snap using a chroot yet : https://bugs.launchpad.net/snappy/+bug/1609903 (the bug has been open for 3 years). Chroots are a key mechanism to building any customized Linux image.

I hope they smooth these rough edges further before they push more snaps onto the world.

shasheene··on Huawei is dividing Western nations
The choice is not between the United States and China.

It's between Sweden (Ericsson), Finland (Nokia) and China (Huawei).

shasheene··on Huawei is dividing Western nations
Huawei is in large part built upon technology stolen from Cisco and Canada's Nortel Networks. In the latter case, there is strong evidence China was able to maintain access to Nortel's internal networks for over a decade (!!) which helped kill the 117 year old company. [1]

The government of China is systematically hacking corporations through the Ministry of State Security, and attempting to the switch the allegiances of all ethnically Chinese people across the world through the well-funded overseas political interference organization called the "United Front Work Department" [2]. In both the Australian and New Zealand parliaments, China has actually succeeded in installing individuals with undeclared links to government of China political interference and espionage organizations: Gladys Liu and Jian Yang. While there is no smoking gun that they are directly acting as spies, there is significant amounts of circumstantial evidence that they have been compromised by government of China influence operations. I don't need to explain the risk of politicians compromised by an adversarial government making key national defense decisions.

With this reality, why would any government risk allowing Huawei in their networks?

[1] https://www.afr.com/technology/how-chinese-hacking-felled-te...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTXPxWtl8Zw

shasheene··on Chinese Scientist Accused of Smuggling Samples, Amid Crackdown on Research Theft
Change in relative GDP is a very weak argument. A massive productivity boom in other nations (via the Industrial Revolution) doesn't necessary effect a nation's existing production (except when workers they are placed out of work by, eg. the cotton gin)

Theft is theft no matter how justified it may seem and whoever the perpetrator is.

Also the alliance you mention is certainly anglophone, but certainly not limited based on ethnicity.

shasheene··on Chinese Scientist Accused of Smuggling Samples, Amid Crackdown on Research Theft
As part of the exact employment contract, a researcher's work may be patented by the institute they work for (with the researcher being remunerated for this).

Biomedical patents are not trivial software patents. Billions of dollars of investment goes into developing a single new therapy. The molecular structure of medicine can often be easily replicated once discovered, so patents are a key part of commercializing new medicine and techniques. (See the CRISPR-Cas9 patent debacle.) Taking the right to patent some work away from the institute it was developed at means theft of the licensing fees derived from the patent, and an impact on an institute's ability to keep funding R&D.

shasheene··on Chinese Scientist Accused of Smuggling Samples, Amid Crackdown on Research Theft
I was hoping it was carefully written enough to not be flagged. I think it's an important debate for the technology community to work through. I do recognize it's a sensitive issue especially (with the risk of racism if not handled carefully).

I hoped it would count as "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon", especially since the United Front Work Department (and the post-1989 patriotic education system) is rarely discussed. In contrast to the featured article, which by itself does not really meet the guidelines for being on-topic (especially since it similar articles have been posted the last few months). Alas.

shasheene··on Chinese Scientist Accused of Smuggling Samples, Amid Crackdown on Research Theft
As far as China at its historical peak goes, the sentiment I was trying to express is the PRC's goal is for China to regain the world's most powerful nation and the worlds most powerful military with all nations recognizing this and being tributaries (and that this position is an exaggeration from historical truth).

On the second point, the CCP certainly deserves a lot of credit for Deng Xiaoping's reforms and the economic expansion since 1978. Though much of the early gains was to undo the Mao's collectivization of rural lands.

shasheene··on Chinese Scientist Accused of Smuggling Samples, Amid Crackdown on Research Theft
The risks of working with Chinese state-owned enterprises are well known. The risks of working with private companies (large and small) in China are are also great with CCP "party cells" officially embedded into at least half of private companies. Less discussed is the China's highly-successful "patriotic education" campaign implemented in response to the 1989 pro-democracy protests (the Tiananmen Square massacre). All school children since the mid-1990s have been indoctrinated from birth with a Chinese Communist Party's highly-exaggerated historical narrative called the "century of humiliation". This world view says the US and the European colonial powers held China down between 1839 to 1949, and that only the CCP's leadership China will regain its rightful place as global leader. Its false and highly-exaggerated for a number of reasons (China at its historical peak was never more than a regional power, never a global leader, and the CCP has done more to hold China's development back than western colonialism and the war with Imperial Japan).

Since the patriotic education system came into force in the 1990s, generations of schoolchildren indoctrinated. These students, now adults, have entered the workforce with the ideology continuing to be reinforced by state-propaganda and censorship.

This "century of humiliation" mindset is part of what helps justify the China's strategy of large scale technology theft (theft is a core component of the Made In China 2025 industrial strategy).

Interestingly enough, the CCP promotes its ethno-nationalist ideology far beyond its borders via the United Front Work Department to try and influence everyone, but especially overseas Chinese diaspora communities. It doesn't matter whether someone was born in China, or live as part of an overseas diaspora community, or have Chinese ancestral heritage but have lived for generations in another country, the Chinese Communist Party sees every single ethnically Chinese people in the world as owing allegiance to it, and wants to leverage these people to achieve its goals.

Defeating the CCP's ethno-nationalist agenda and highly-exaggerated historical narratives will be difficult, but understanding it is the key to fighting back against the widespread theft of advanced technology from developed countries to China.

EDIT: Why the downvotes? The "patriotic education" campaign, "century of humiliation" narrative, United Front Work Department and state-led technological theft are all core methods in the CCP's strategy (leading situations like the one in the featured article). If you think this comment is reasonable and meets the guidelines, please view it via the permalink and then 'vouch' it.

shasheene··on This Page is Designed to Last
There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format.

Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic.

[1] https://github.com/machawk1/warcreate

[2] https://github.com/machawk1/wail

[3] https://github.com/internetarchive/warcprox

EDIT: I forgot to mention https://github.com/webrecorder/webrecorder (the best general purpose web recorder application I have used during my previous research into archiving personal web usage)

shasheene··on Australia’s status as an open democracy downgraded by The CIVICUS Monitor
This refers to the CIVICUS Monitor rankings. See the interactive world map: https://monitor.civicus.org/
shasheene··on Tesla Cybertruck may be unsafe for other road users: Australian safety chief
"Tesla Cybertruck (pressurized edition) will be official truck of Mars"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1197627433970589696

shasheene··on Tesla Cybertruck
Here's the timestamp of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwvDOdBHYBw&t=7m22s
shasheene··on An update on YC China
Comparing Uigher concentration camps to Nazi Germany is valid and accurate, not a frivolous example of Godwin's law.

Your comment has a lot of whataboutism that isn't relevant to the discussion. I'll mention that US presidents have formally apologized several times for Japanese-American internment (which was 75 years ago), and that I would encourage anybody (and any government) to boycott and sanction companies contributing to human rights abuse.

shasheene··on An update on YC China
It suprises me that intelligent, reasonable people like Andrew Ng and Sam Altman were willing to help develop and invest in the Chinese Communist Party's AI/ML capabilities helping to create an authoritarian surveillance state used to repress minorities (Uighers, Tibetans, Falun Gong) on a scale not seen since Adolf Hitler.

The CCP and private companies are hand-in-glove. The risks of working with state-owned enterprises are clear. The risks of working with private companies are are also great with "party cells" officially embedded into at least half of private companies.

Fortunately for the free world, China faces massive structural issues to growth over the next 40 years, which the CCP is unable or unwilling to deal with. I highly recommend [1] and [2] to understand the future of the brutal Chinese dictatorship.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/17/world/asia/ch...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AvNT3vyzr0

EDIT: Instead of down voting, please articulate why you disagree.

shasheene··on Developer of Checkm8 explains why iDevice jailbreak exploit is a game changer
This is great news. After a decade of stagnation [1], an exploit that in theory allows Linux (and Android) to be ported to iPhone, iPads, Apple Watches, and I believe, Apple TV.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpeniBoot

shasheene··on Facebook Horizon
Facebook's realistic VR avatar research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCB_mfGmh9w&t=1h47m12s
shasheene··on Facebook Horizon
Facebook Horizon was announced at Oculus Connect Day 1 keynote yesterday.

I highly recommend people checkout Michael Abrash's keynote discussing some jaw dropping "social teleportation" research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCB_mfGmh9w&t=1h47m12s

shasheene··on A Year Ago I Put Saltwater in a Jar [video]
I haven't seen anyone mention it here, but this concept is known as a "terrarium".

There have been terrariums that have been sealed for 50+ years and are still thriving.

shasheene··on Show HN: CLI forensics tool for tracking USB device artifacts on Linux
Slightly tweaked the above, in case anyone is interested. Copy the following to /etc/udev/rules.d/10-block-device-history-rules:

> SUBSYSTEM=="block",ENV{DEVTYPE}=="disk", RUN+="/usr/bin/logger --tag=block-device-history -- '%E{ACTION} | %E{DEVNAME} | %E{ID_SERIAL}'"

Run

> $ sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

> $ sudo journalctl -f SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=block-device-history

...Then re-inserting a USB device produces output similar to the below:

> Jan 01 12:00:00 hostname block-device-history[12345]: add | /dev/sdY | TOSHIBA_TOSHIBA_USB_DRV_012345678900FF00-0:0

To customize the printed variables, have a look at:

> sudo udevadm info /dev/sdY

shasheene··on Show HN: CLI forensics tool for tracking USB device artifacts on Linux
Yeah, here's a one-line udev rule to log USB removal and insertion into the journal.

> $ echo 'SUBSYSTEMS=="block", RUN+="/usr/bin/logger --tag=block-device-history -- %E{ACTION} | %E{DEVNAME} | %E{ID_MODEL_ID} | $attr{serial}"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/10-block-device-history.rules

Activate the new rule by reloading and retrigging:

> $ udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

Then in another terminal run:

> $ sudo journalctl -f

...Insert a USB drive and see information about it printed.

journalctl supports querying with time intervals (eg, journalctl --since "2018-01-10" --until "2019-08-01 23:59").

shasheene··on Link’s Awakening disassembly progress report – week 5
> it was well before my time and the graphics just didn't work for me. Older now, and I feel like I can appreciate this game now and overlook the old graphics

As mentioned on the featured article, Zelda: Link's Awakening is being released on the Nintendo Switch in a few months. You may be interested to see the graphics and art style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U-_XfDGgDw

shasheene··on Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China
On the merits of the lawsuit, after reading the whole district court filing [1], the core allegation is that the 'Nreal Light' is based on Magic Leap's unproductized internal designs produced "after extensive investment of time (multiple years), money (hundreds of millions of dollars spent on research and development) and human resources (hundreds of engineers)", and that the defendant learned about the product designs and research during his employment, including adapting (as discussed elsewhere in this thread) Magic Leap's proprietary font (https://i.imgur.com/7pYZ8bp.png)

If Nreal Light is indeed based on Magic Leap's unreleased designs, this makes me very sympathetic to the price difference -- Magic Leap One is a development kit backed by 5+ years of huge R&D investment, and is/was never intended for end-users (hence the price and awful aesthetics).

The Nreal Light is an indication of what a consumer Magic Leap was going to be: a cheaper, slimmer, less ambitious product (by avoiding multiple waveguide displays) that appeals to a consumer market, then it's unfair and sad that they didn't have the opportunity to go to market with their own product.

On the other hand, Magic Leap has had ample opportunity to release an affordable high-quality AR headset so I do feel some sympathy in an employee leveraging legitimately acquired knowledge and experience to build a commercial product that beats its competitors. The situation may not that different to the Traitorous Eight, or Steve Jobs infamous "adapting" of design ideas of the Alto for the Apple Lisa and Apple Macintosh, after his visit to Xerox PARC.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.343717...

shasheene··on Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China
You may not be aware of the great talk titled "Modchips of the State" [1] (presented at 35C3 in Dec 2018).

The speaker managed to reproduce the exact single-chip hardware implant attack suggested in the Oct 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek story [2] [3], which claimed Amazon and Apple found malicious hardware implants in Supermicro motherboards while conducting detailed inspections.

While Bloomberg has never retracted the story, there's an argument that the sources have vested interests in lying to Bloomberg suggesting that attacks developed in lab-conditions actually occurred in the real-world, in order to raise awareness of supply-chain risks (something the current US administration has been attempting to do for some time). There's also a suggestion that the journalist was acting in good-faith but mixed up a few different attacks, with the sources reluctant to clarify things. Another suggestion is that the attack did happen, and Amazon and Apple were forced to issue denials.

It's a very fascinating story. Maybe I'm naive, but if Bloomberg was in-fact wrong, they would issue a correction or a retraction. The fact they haven't retracted it suggests to me that there's truth to the story.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7H3V7tkxeA

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJGbcjfJ7rU

shasheene··on Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China
The article reports on the lawsuit, but is light on details about the headset. Tested recently did a 10 minute review on this headset, the 'Nreal Light' [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9A9u-lwjTs

Regardless of the merits of the lawsuit, I can see why Magic Leap would be scared. The AR glasses looks great. They're certainly stylish enough for the mass-market -- they look like normal glasses at first glance, they're quite reasonably priced (at $500), and run from a regular Android phones via USB-C (for power, as well as sensor and video data).

For reference, here's the Tested review for current Magic Leap product, the Magic Leap One Creator Edition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrq2akzdFq8. It retails for $2295. Though it comes with controllers, eye-tracking for focal accommodation, two waveguides displays that are used to provide two separate physical layers to focus on.

shasheene··on It's Cold in the Information Age
I've played quite a bit with the Oculus DK1, GearVR, Oculus CV1 and the Oculus Go, and after 2 weeks of usage I can say the Oculus Quest is much better than any of them. Low barriers to putting the headset on and immediately walking around in VR is hard to overstate.

I think it will be a very big hit. The virality levels are very high with people showing their family and friends, who then want to go out and get their own.

The downsides are the games are a bit too expensive, and the headset itself costs $400 which is alright, but it does need to be cheaper if they want to achieve Nintendo Wii type sales figures (which the Quest fully has the potential to do).

shasheene··on Worried about Huawei? Take a closer look at Tencent
Carefully constructing a household network topology and being disciplined with separate physical machines appears to be a strong mitigation.

But will your colleagues who play competitive online games be willing to buy a separate machine used only for remote employment, and be willing (and able) to construct such a network topology correctly?

Most household routers don't even support VLANs.

shasheene··on Worried about Huawei? Take a closer look at Tencent
Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games, which develops the incredibly popular Fortnite Battle Royale computer game. Epic Games happens to also develop the influential tool Unreal Engine, which is used widely throughout industry to produce interactive 3D applications.

Fortnite BR, like other competitive online games, runs anti-cheat software in-order to detect cheaters. Fornite BR happens to use Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye [1] [2].

Anti-cheat software runs with very high privilege. More importantly, with many anti-cheat software, every session a new binary payload is downloaded directly from the internet.

Anti-cheat software seems like a great platform to launch targeted malware in-order to achieve a beachhead on a computer network: highly targeted, and effectively undetectable.

I would expect most software developers don't sandbox their gaming machines from their work-from-home environments.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/82xyhb/launch_e...

[2] https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/7446514/fortnite-cheats-beware...

shasheene··on Thinkpad X210
Video card interface electrical standards may have changed, but GPU form factors have not.

Electrical interface changes just need to be paired with compatible motherboards.

Same with hard drives: the interface changed but the form factor has not. They are even compatible with their larger versions: a laptop 2.5" platter drive or SSD can fit in a 3.5" drive bay with a cheap bracket. The SATA versions were backwards compatible speed bumps. Performance was always the maximum supported on the motherboard.

M.2 is just PCIe in a different form factor, so on desktops a $5 passive adapter allows NVMe SSDs to be used on any PCIe slot on even on relatively ancient PCs (though use as a boot drive dependent on BIOS support).

Same with display interfaces. VGA is still supported on many systems, with DVI-I being backwards compatible with cheap passive adapters. DVI and HDMI are electrically identically (minus audio) so cheap passive adapters work.

The broader point is that large incompatible electrical changes are possible because they only mean the new motherboard just needs to be paired with a compatible component. There's still market pressure for backwards compatibility unless the leap is large enough.

shasheene··on Thinkpad X210
Being able to continue to use the display, keyboard, mouse/trackpad means you can choose higher-end components.

Even if you don't want to keep your widescreen DVI display from 2008, the interoperability means that when you drop it off at a e-waste center, it's more likely to be reused in its current state for a few more years, rather than immediately recycled (reduce, reuse, recycle!)

I do agree there is some degree of changes in interfaces overtime (like IDE to SATA to NVMe M.2), but if you build a system for a similar intended use case the changes within any given 5 year period are small. This means the upgrades you do over a 15 year period will go from a 2.5" platter drive to a 2.5" SATA drive, or from 800x600 to 1024x768 resolution display, but not both at the same time (with a different but significant set of components being shared every upgrade)

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