Hacker News Reader

un1xl0seron White-Collar Workers Are Rebelling Against AI – 80% Refuse Adoption Mandates

I left a career of 20 years, and good pay, and part of it is AI being slammed down your throat. It is not work, which may be iteresting, on doing your own AI, its just enforcing that you are an end-user of it.

Fuck that, I am AI vegan at the moment, and happy. I may build a machine and find out how to fix the architecual mistakes in this new scene, but thats very different than being an end user of it.

un1xl0seron Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

Hemp is classified as below .3% THC (compared to old-school weed strains at 15% and modern levels at mid 30%s). Hemp is male and female, and trash in potency, but THC and other products derived from it are fair game in some jurisdictions, or a grey area.

It is certainly a different market than legal, high potency THC, as well as medical.

un1xl0seron CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

That's not a sign of a good internship program. I've always put a great deal of time coming up with projects that are suitable for the intern, and they always have to be tailored to the individual skill-set after the process. At the end of it we either have something that worked, and we have a good sense of the capabilities and fit with the team dynamic.

I would ensure that you have someone to talk to who can discuss what success looks like for the role (of intern). With that, there is always what you want to get out of it, but if you are looking for a job, you need to have performance and goal conversations reguarly. How are you doing compared to peers or other interns, etc.

un1xl0seron CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

You may actually be hourly and not salaried. That said, it's not uncommon to be forced to log when you work, especially when there are PTO and things like that involved and that need to be accounted for.

Are you paid for the hours you work in the internship? If so then you are not an exempt salaried employee.

un1xl0seron CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

I love to work from the office, I prefer it. I hate working from my desk at home, next to my bed. We have two desks in the bedroom. I'm in MGMT. Today I'm working from home as I can't afford the commute time, last week was pre-pandemic 4 days in office.

What I don't like is changing what WFO looked like. If someone had to WFH for personal reasons (e.g. repair, packages, child issues, doctors appt), they just did it. Four days a week was normal, five was never normal. If we are trying to do 3 days and go to four, then everyone needs a dedicated desk. If you aren't willing to put a dedicated desk for people, you don't have a mandate for WFO, you have a mandate for hybrid.

I sit next to an officer who is not ranked highly enough to have a desk. A first year associate should have a dedicated desk.

It took the pandemic and a world in panic to swing the pendulum in this direction. It's going to take as much to get it back, and it may not go back to exactly the same thing.

un1xl0seron CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

The thing that I keep coming back to, is that if a company is taking an action, it should be about reducing friction to go to and making the office space a better place to work.

If the company is taking an action that makes it less likely for people to come to the office or enjoy it, then it's pretty clear what they are doing.

un1xl0seron micro – A Modern Alternative to nano

The main reason to know vi inside and out as a Unix administrator has to do with it being the lowest common denominator on Unix and Linux systems.

As a *nix tech I could get a call to work on a QNX system, HP-UX system, SGI Altix supercomputer or a Sun Ultra 2. Linux systems were easy, as they had the package management support for FL/OSS, and would commonly come with Emacs in the base-pack (before nano was mainstream). Sometimes you would have a terminal issue and have a single line to work with, in which case you would need to operate vi without seeing what you are doing (or use sed/awk). So maybe it is those instincts to KISS and force everyone to learn vi, like they had to (I had to).

Certainly it provides no significant surface area of attack to have an editor, but I wouldn't put it past a threat actor to leverage plugin functionality as a persistence mechanism. I presume that these applications operate differently as root, but maybe not as service (daemon) accounts. It's not very well hidden, but there are all grades of threat actors.

un1xl0seron NYC skyscrapers sit vacant

I can see this in progress. Needs windows, but we also need more residential, so happy to see it.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/24/longtime-nyc-home-of-the-daily...

un1xl0seron How to Detect Sneaky N.S.A. ‘Quantum Insert’ Attacks

I completely agree. While theoretically possible to do given full packet captures, it does not scale. IDS/IPS systems are not in a place to operate at this level and keep this much state.

It's more likely that it would be detected based on the nature of the injected malicious data.

un1xl0seron How to Detect Sneaky N.S.A. ‘Quantum Insert’ Attacks

Or they crack or compromise the keys that they need on a per operation bases. Even assuming ubiquitous SSL (or something more decentralized), the keys of a few advertising or web analytics sites would get a lot of coverage.

Creative use of advertising platforms is used you could easily narrow targets down and guarantee that you know exactly what the content is.

Anyways, this is just one gadget.

un1xl0seron D-Link patch doesn’t address all bugs listed in their own security advisory

I switched from OpenWRT to pfsense a while back and I am never going back. It runs great in a virtual machine, if that's your thing and you already have a need for VMs.

un1xl0seron D-Link patch doesn’t address all bugs listed in their own security advisory

I think that he means per month in electricity costs. ;)

un1xl0seron Bug 1202858 – Restarting squid results in deleting all files in hard-drive

I think it may be more scary for code that allows arbitrary execution using command-line arguments. Commands like find or xargs using without defense against this would be a problem. For example, site that does something precious with your uploaded pet pictures.

Defending against this being the use of -- to signal an end of command line arguments.

un1xl0seron Bug 1202858 – Restarting squid results in deleting all files in hard-drive

  $ diff -u /tmp/a /tmp/b
  --- /tmp/a	2015-03-24 08:33:00.021919797 -0400
  +++ /tmp/b	2015-03-24 08:33:05.629963015 -0400
  @@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
   #!/usr/bin/env bash
   set -e
   i=0
  -let i++
  +let i++ || true
   echo "i is $i"
  $ /tmp/a
  $ /tmp/b
  i is 1
  $

un1xl0seron Bug 1202858 – Restarting squid results in deleting all files in hard-drive

From the same page:"rking's personal recommendation is to go ahead and use set -e, but beware of possible gotchas. It has useful semantics, so to exclude it from the toolbox is to give into FUD."

You can use set -e, and turn it off (set +e) for code blocks and things that are problematic. He could also add '|| true', and you may be able to use colon to avoid point problems without turning everything off. These are edge cases and you can easily work around them if you an advanced user.

If you are not an advanced user then you should certainly use -e.

un1xl0seron Uber Database Breach Exposed Information of 50,000 Drivers, Company Confirms

Those are medallion numbers or TLC license numbers, but not drivers license numbers. They can't be used for identity theft.

un1xl0seron The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle

Can you please provide your definition of intelligence?

I would argue that theoretically, a government (or other entity) could use intelligence but use it within a set of moral and/or ethical guidelines that uses a system of checks and balances.

un1xl0seron The Bitcoin Piñata

A weak RNG may create an opportunity for successful cryptanalysis. This can especially be a problems on virtual hardware/platforms that don't have a mechanism for keeping a good random seed, and have predictable hardware events, et cetera.

un1xl0seron The Bitcoin Piñata

Crypto is not about breaking in, but breaking codes. It is mostly a bunch of maths.

http://www.amazon.com/Cryptography-Engineering-Principles-Pr...

un1xl0seron Update on Sony Investigation

One of the articles that was debunking the NK connection mentioned that the language used in NK stems heavily from Russian in a variety of ways. So if they took the use of false to mean lies and falsehoods it would make some kind of sense.

un1xl0seron Wikileaks releases copies of FinFisher surveillance software

Collision resistance is more interesting when hashes are used in cryptographic protocols and large amounts of data can be captured, seen and analyzed.

I can't think of a purpose where a collision of a non-malicious sample with a malicious file can be used by an attacker (let alone the same attacker). In addition, there are lots of historical threat data (tactical intelligence) that is based on md5sums. Newer tools support newer checksums, but will more than likely just increase the types of checksums supported, and not deprecate them.

Checksums are less and less useful when the malware can be configured, recompiled and re-assembled for a particular target. There are some good discussions on HN more fuzzy detection techniques that can't be evaded by changing inert parts of the payload, but that is orthogonal to using stronger checksums. Indicator of Compromise data including md5sums can be useful for general security, but because a determined attacker will mutate the files it is better suited to more commodity malware.

un1xl0seron Valve joins the Linux Foundation

Linux has good enough binary compatibility. I have seen 32-bit applications built on RHEL 2.1 run on RHEL 5. You need the correct libraries and versions, but that's not a difficult problem to solve. See AppCafe[1] by PC-BSD. You may use it if you use plugins on FreeNAS. Lets say that you need fifteen copies of SDL installed to ensure that you can support ten years of games. This is not a problem for a Unix/Linux system with existing tooling.

Stable 3D depends on the hardware and drivers, but gaming already has hardware requirements for graphics and it's getting much better. As far as OpenGL support, recent posts on HN lead me to believe that we are doing okay.

Audio compatibility? Support ALSA and OSS.

1. http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/AppCafe%C2%AE/9.2

un1xl0seron Explain Shell

I would expect xargs to stop processing arguments strictly after the first non-flag argument.

Arguments to xargs do appear to be parsed, example below:

http://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=find+%2F+-type+f+-print0...

un1xl0seron Explain Shell

Amazing tool for beginners, but also helpful for advanced users.

GREAT: find / -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep heythere

I tried some sub-shells, and seemed to not work so well. $() and `` would be nice.

ps -fp $(pgrep -d, krb5kdc)

ps -fp `pgrep -d, krb5kdc`

http://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=ps+-fp+%24%28pgrep+-d%2C...

edit: newlines

un1xl0seron Show HN: ImageSwaps - Swap images anonymously

I like the concept of the random encounter, but it may need to resolve around something.

Lets say with Artsy, two people get a random piece of art and look at it and discuss it. It would be nice to relate about a common thing somehow. I don't think that I've seen this type of random person thing done with enough existing applications.

un1xl0seron Show HN: ImageSwaps - Swap images anonymously

Images are an possible attack vector, so I would expect some level of processing (and therefore, storage) to be necessary to make this secure.

Of course I got an explicit picture, but thankfully the animated gif did not load. Conversation was good and it wasn't A/V like CR so that was actually nice.

The random stumbling upon another person is a great thing to have to emulate the randomness of meeting someone IRL.

un1xl0seron Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

I don't care so much about the memory, but this reminds me of how chrome doesn't have a way of vertically showing the tabs. know that firefox when I use it supports that.

I saw support for vertical tabs in Chrome that can be turned on, but I think that is experimental. The people that suffer from the memory problems are the people who really just need better tab management features. Maybe this is something for power-users that just needs to be handled with extensions.

Also being able to suspend and resume sessions better is a good idea, and this may help with. When coding on a particular thing, I'll have most of the tabs open that I need. When I get back into it it's just a storm of CMND-T and searching for the references I was using. Sounds like this could help with that.

un1xl0seron Employees of kixeye accused of racist remarks fired

Uhm, those comments were not connected in the story, it was wingtips provoking the RUN DMC comment. Baggy jeans and thuggish were connected in the story, which does make some modicum of sense. If anything I would say that the skinny/wingtip == RUN DMC comment was more worrisome because it is completely out there.

Lots of rappers wear hoodies. My point wasn't that anything there was racist, just that you do get comments for dressing differently, not fitting in. Those alone don't make this racist, the other comments do.

So is it that baggy jeans are less professional looking, or a racially motivated attack on urban lifestyle and dress. It doesn't matter really, the rest of the comments provide enough of a backdrop for us to make our own conclusions, which is all this is.

un1xl0seron Employees of kixeye accused of racist remarks fired

It is quite clear that this was not an inclusive working environment. Some of the comments on their own are not overtly racist, but it is certainly walking thin line.

I've had a situation that was sort of similar where a co-worker made a comment on my clothing being too uhm, urban. Jeans, oversized hoodie (hood up), and shit kicker boots. I was sick, and it was freezing out walked into a meeting and it was announced that Eminem just walked into the meeting. My reply was (paraphrased) that "Is that the only white rapper you know, I don't look anything like Eminem". I guess I was looking for something like Sage Francis or Necro, but I digress. I felt singled out for the way that I dress. Now I guess that anyone can debate here if what I said or the initial comment was racist, but I would say that it wasn't, just ignorant and stupid. That said, if that comment was slanted ever so slightly to the fact that I have some Jewish heritage, it would trigger a soft spot and would have REALLY irked me. Had some issues with that early in life.

So considering the more over-the-top racist comments, and initial reaction of management when confronted, this whole situation is really awful and should not happen. Instead of debating if this is really racism, we should probably just try to limit and control it's effect on our lives. It exists, it's all around us and you don't have to look very far, even in tech companies.