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socket0

309 karma · joined January 26, 2015

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socket0··on FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is
Imagine tech journalists in 2025 not knowing what a canary is...
socket0··on AI and the Rise of Mediocrity
Absolutely. They're going for all the safe, boring choices, and depending on the business side of their industry to make money. You don't show a profit by making the next Children of Men, you show a profit by tweaking the Fast&Furious formula and strong-arming theaters into showing it.
socket0··on AI and the Rise of Mediocrity
And yet when I watch the flood of movies, television shows, novels, music, and fine art available to me, I have a really hard time finding anything unpredictable. Great skill is involved in creating them (sometimes), but for every one experience that amazes me I have to slog through hundreds that really don't. At best I'm entertained. The output is formulaic, as you would expect from businesses guided by bookkeepers. The sad fact is that a large number of these productions very well might have been generated using an advanced LLM.
socket0··on History of the Salvator Mundi
It might be this one? Secluded treasures & tax incentives - The freeport system https://youtu.be/5bIGd3jcrS4
socket0··on No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
What bothers me most about the recommendations I get are the videos I have clearly watched. "You recently watched this clip, so we at YouTube think you should watch it again."
socket0··on Winning Wordle
Wordle is basically gambling, but like a lot of games of chance you can improve your odds using skill. A good vocabulary, good starter words, solid analytical skills. But peeking at the word list, players are often still left with three or four viable options after two or three guesses. Lucky guesses will result in completing the daily game in three or four tries, unlucky guesses will push this up.
socket0··on Tildeverse.org: A loose association of like-minded tilde communities
If it's intentionally shielded from prying eyes, and possibly nefarious, it's the dark web. More often than not this would be on Tor, I2P, or similar, but that's not required. If it simply can't be easily indexed by search engines, it's the deep web. Overlap between the two is possible.

Your mailbox would be deep web, if it's exposed to the Internet. If your mailbox uses an auto-responder to respond to coded messages with encrypted binaries of an illegal nature, it would be dark web.

socket0··on Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
One of my first websites used the single pixel GIF for layout, which still works. The website for a snowboarding magazine was intended to symbolise the curved slalom of descending a slope, and was a nightmare in absolute positioning:

https://i.imgur.com/QVcAYqf.png

https://i.imgur.com/2SDxhii.png

https://i.imgur.com/ZBEk9ae.png

socket0··on Stopping phishing campaigns with Bash
Many phishing pages reside on compromised domains. Bob's Plumbing Supplies might wonder why their Wordpress site loaded with plug-ins has stopped working, ask someone to take a look, and see your IP address all over the logs.
socket0··on Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
That's the whole point of this, by blocking Amazon, these countries would be taking down a large part of the Internet inside their borders. We're not talking Amazon your one stop shop for dildos and bobble heads, but AWS, which powers a lot of other websites. The countries listed, like Egypt, know that you can get away with torture, but don't touch the people's memes.
socket0··on Abusing Gmail to get previously unlisted e-mail addresses
I'm going to have to agree with Google here, in that this isn't an exploitable security vulnerability. Knowing that the mailboxes famous.celebrity@gmail.com or controversial.journalist@gmail.com exist doesn't bring me any closer to exploiting the knowledge. I don't know that Famous Celebrity is in fact THE famous celebrity. I don't know whether Controversial Journalist still reads mail sent to that account. Most importantly, I don't learn anything I couldn't have learned by sending messages to every likely permutation of famous.celebrity@gmail.com. This won't teach me anything particularly useful for spearfishing, as I'm just throwing out a net hoping something gets caught.
socket0··on An analysis of the Nomx secure communications device
Definitely. The problem is that consumers (especially small business) so often end up buying an overpriced and badly configured black box, when a decent expert would have been able to set up the same software properly.
socket0··on An analysis of the Nomx secure communications device
I find these kinds of stories infuriating (and just a bit frustrating). Charlatans repackage, rebrand, and repurpose FOSS, then sell them at an unrealistic markup to unsuspecting dupes. Anything from PABX or VoIP systems based on Asterisk, through overly complex CMS's based on Wordpress. I'm not sure what riles me more: consumers being ripped off by these products, or the fact that my strengths lie in tech rather than sales.
socket0··on Google announces workshops to tackle the spread of hate speech and fake news
Indeed, the art of badly written headlines apparently takes up a whole chapter in the Ars Technica style guide. This should have been: "Google pushes fake news and hate-speech workshops (and YouTube) on UK teens". In addition, even the most basic grammar checking tool should have picked this up: "The ads was later removed."
socket0··on William Shatner's Seat
“Are they going to try and land anyway?”

It's unlikely that the pilot simply took a gamble. Presumably ground crew took a look, either on the first go-round or during the second approach, and confirmed that the landing gear was down. I like to think my "screw it we'll see what happens" IT methodology isn't used in all industries...

socket0··on William Shatner's Seat
Even as late as 1995, I remember flying from South Africa to the UK (in the non-smoking section) while the guy behind me (in the smoking section) was smoking extremely smelly eastern European cigarettes. Quite an adventure when you're prone to airsickness.
socket0··on Finding Free Food with Python
Presumably, regular customers also react to these free offers. You always get your pizza from A, but because it's free you try B. Perhaps B think their pizzas are better. Perhaps B just offer you free pizzas long enough to break your habit with A, and your habit becomes B. Or you tend to stick with Italian, but because it's free you try Thai, and you find you like it. Businesses have many reasons for subsidising free promotions.

Mind you, I haven't done the math on this, and presumably neither have the participating restaurants. However, the logic is sound, and becomes even sounder if you treat a restaurant owner to a couple of glasses of wine.

socket0··on US Customs block Canadian man after reading his Scruff profile
If they're really interested, they'll probably just Google you. Or use something they purchased for tens of millions of dollars, that simply performs a Google search. If you're an older person, and have no online footprint, they probably wouldn't have stopped you in the first place. If you're young, and have no online footprint, that would be pretty suspicious.
socket0··on US Customs block Canadian man after reading his Scruff profile
That's likely to be a red flag and used against you. Remember, as a non-US citizen, border guards don't have to prove you're guilty of anything. Any suspicion, no matter how trivial or unreasonable, and you have to be able to convincingly prove your own innocence. No electronic devices will probably simply result in them asking for the passwords to your accounts on Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.
socket0··on Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
Make mine deep-fried potato products, and I'm in. Although something nausiating to kill any appetite might be more productive.
socket0··on ‘We are poorer for the things you are looking at in these pictures’
"The United States and Russia maintain roughly 1,800 of their nuclear weapons on high-alert status – ready to be launched within minutes of a warning.""

Yes, we're doing much better now.

Source: http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-arsenals/

socket0··on A Message to the Apple Community in Europe
That statement itself means very little. I would argue the value is created where thousands of workers turn designs into millions of individual devices; Tim Cook might argue value is created where slapping an Apple logo on the device transforms it from a regular gadget into a luxury status symbol. Either way the issue here isn't where Apple should pay tax, but that they should be taxed fairly. There are many international tax treaties to prevent double taxation, Apple simply need to pay tax like (most) everyone else.
socket0··on Reddit is still in turmoil
I think you've nailed it here. Viewed from the outside, Reddit is a very different place than when viewed from the inside. Outsiders tend to go to the default subs, which are the first subs you unsubscribe from when you choose to stay. Once people migrate to a topic-focused sub with decent moderators, they definitely become part of a community.
socket0··on Some Lost Superstitions of the Early-20th-Century United States
gfaure probably meant something we now would consider completely unrelated. An owl hooted twice, and then the child died. So two hoots from a certain type of owl predicts a death in the house. As silly as this sounds to us today, there's a huge survival value in making these kinds of connections. Certain smells and tastes predict toxic subtances, certain noises predict predators or natural disasters, and certain animal behaviours predict all kinds of calamities.
socket0··on This is not a place of honor
One clear problem with using A.D. (anno Domini) as measure for time elapsed, is that in 10,000 years Domini will no doubt be taken to mean either Bender Rodriguez or Donald Trump.
socket0··on Another Hack: 117M LinkedIn Emails and Passwords
On the plus side, perhaps I can now expect LinkedIn contact requests from a better class of tech savvy scammer...
socket0··on Born for it – How the image of software developers came about
> Trust that the people doing it know what they are doing.

Science does not require trust. The wonder of the scientific method is that any old nutty crank (given the ability to convince a small panel of his peers of the merits of his crank cred) can get an article published. Then it's up to the community of malicious and slightly less nutty cranks to gleefully prove him wrong.

That's why the method goes wrong when you trust someone. Which is really hard when it's not your field, and you're just looking for someone with authority on the subject. But the reality is that the loudest voices with a lot of media time often also tend to be the nutty cranks, rather than the slightly less nutty cranks.

socket0··on Just who are burner phones for anyway?
The end result of such a ban would be to punish legitimate users (those mentioned in the article, like tourists and the poor). It would do absolutely nothing against criminals who can persuade anyone desperate enough for money to buy a burner in their own name. You want drugs? The price just went up by cash plus a cheap phone.
socket0··on Reddit removed NSL canary from 2015 Transparency Report
Courts (especially in the US) have been known to equate all kinds of things with speech, so it's not unthinkable to equate the symbolic act of NOT doing something with a form of speech. Not standing for the the national anthem or Pledge of Allegiance, for example. So in THEORY a court could rule that the act of not doing something you might be expected to do, such as include a warrant canary, is still a form of speech, and in doing so you are violating your gag order.

Still, all theoretical and purely speculation, because as far as I know this has never been tested in court.

socket0··on The collective insanity of the publishing industry
There was: http://9to5mac.com/2015/11/12/flux-iphone-sideloading-shut-d...
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