Hacker News Reader

vescheon Python malware on the rise

Author here. The obfuscated code example was to show what a malware author might do to make malware analysis of a Python "compiled" binary more difficult. The code might be obfuscated & turned into an executable before deployed.

As far as the opencv library goes, used by PoetRAT, you can choose to bundle third party packages inside your executable with all the executable generators I mentioned at the beginning of the article like PyInstaller or Nuitka.

vescheon Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

Some light reading:

https://rufposten.de/blog/2019/12/05/privacy-analysis-of-tik...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QEyWqAiTE_5xzCs_X3tjDCQx...

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/tiktoks-owner-is-helpin...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/video-app-linked-to-china...

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-is-the-latest-window-into...

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/478015-exer...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/06/26/warning-a...

vescheon New German law would force ISPs to allow secret service to install trojans

Conceivably: If you have MITM and can inject... you'd next need web browser 0day exploit chain w/ sandbox escape and then a stealthy trojan to install. This would obviously be quite the capability and require a lot of maintenance to work cross-browser, cross-OS, and evade security products / built-in security features. It is definitely possible however.

vescheon PurritoBin: Ultra fast, minimalistic, encrypted command line paste-bin

http://ix.io/

vescheon Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive

I like how you can tell that the HTML was done by hand. There's a parallel here, something like: handmade furniture is to hand written html as mass produced furniture is to generated html. There's a quality to it.

vescheon A 28-year-old with no degree becomes a must read on the economy

> I think one big problem with college here is that it's fairly easy to attend and get a degree while putting in only minimal effort.

> I think we'll fail to make college a truly valuable experience for all unless we increase the challenge

This is really interesting. I think we need to both increase the challenge of getting a degree and find other ways to make it more "exclusive". One way to accomplish this might be to make certain, non-technical majors limited somehow. That way areas of study that are over-populated like social sciences, psychology, etc are smartly minimized so they could produce fewer, more elite graduates with credentials that are more valuable. This is obviously easier said than done.

Also, if you're still looking for a book on compilers there's none better than the "Dragon Book" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compilers:_Principles,_Techniq...

vescheon A 28-year-old with no degree becomes a must read on the economy

I definitely agree with this, and I will check out the book you suggested.

The title of the posted article is particularly relevant to me, as I'm also a 28 year old without a degree. I gained my technical skills from schools in the military, OJT, and self-teaching. When I was applying for software engineering jobs in the civilian world, my resume often wouldn't even be looked at because I didn't have a college degree.

vescheon A 28-year-old with no degree becomes a must read on the economy

Paywall bypass:

  wget -U "Mozilla/4.0" "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-02/nathan-tankus-s-newsletter-subscribers-don-t-care-about-diplomas" && firefox nathan-tankus-s-newsletter-subscribers-don-t-care-about-diplomas

I don't really like when non-formal education is highlighted as surprising in a talented individual. At least in the US, a college education will often put you in serious debt and seems to currently be teaching all sorts of non-technical inaccuracies while ill-preparing people for the real world.

With so much knowledge & resources being available for free online: why would any smart, independent young person want to go to college in the US? The only reason I can think of is to become something that you actually _need_ to go to college for like a doctor or lawyer.

It's pretty crazy when people like Jordan Peterson, who used to teach at Harvard, is suggesting that young people go to trade schools. The college system in the US needs to be restructured or die.

vescheon Signal app downloads spike as US protesters seek message encryption

The Signal Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. They're funded by Brian Acton (former co-founder of WhatsApp, net worth ~3 billion), donations, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. They are not owned by Facebook not sure why you said that.

vescheon The pervert's guide to computer programming languages (2017) [video]

From the video...

Psychopath Languages: Javascript, PHP, VBA, and SQL

Masochist Languages: C, Assembly, Ada, Brainfuck, and Factor

Sadist Languages: Perl, Clojure, Erlang, and Regex

Fetishistic Languages: Erlang, Smalltalk, Elixir, and Factor

Obsessional Languages: Java, C++, Haskell, Scala, Go

Hysterical Languages: Python, Ruby, C#, Prolog, Elixir, and Matlib

Depression Languages: COBOL

Melancholy Languages: Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk

vescheon ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

Mine is quite silent I'd say. How I run my OS is very minimal so my CPU/RAM usage at rest is very light. I only hear the fans kick on loud when I run intense jobs. However, I'm also interested in AMD offerings- but more because of the intel chip vulnerabilities that have come to light over the past ~2 years (Spectre/Meltdown).

vescheon ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

I also use a T480 as my main laptop and love it. Here are my notes & dotfiles for running Arch Linux: https://github.com/vesche/t480

One big item (which you'll see at the bottom of my install notes) is that intel chips in these thinkpads have a throttling issue. There's a nice python program to fix that, I run it as a systemd service on boot: https://github.com/erpalma/throttled

vescheon U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

Related (fitbit/strava leaking overseas military base layouts):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

vescheon U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

You obviously didn't read the article.

> ... Naval and Marine personnel who use government issued smart devices are generally allowed to use popular commercial apps, including common social media apps ...

vescheon Red Hat Cloud Forms migrating to IBM Cloud Pak

This. I bet Government is a large percentage of their entire revenue. SELINUX, STIG profiles come ootb, and if something breaks they have a number to dial.

vescheon Google claims copyright on employee side projects

Are we really at the point where we're using 100 tweets to write what should be in a blog post?

vescheon Why do holes horrify me?

Not even clicking on this article because I know it's about trypophobia and I'm afraid of seeing the pictures!

vescheon The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

Thank God. This was the worst thing ever.

vescheon Show HN: Vy – a powerful but retro and minimalist IDE

It's written in Python and the developer is Brazilian.

vescheon Early Retirement May Speed Up Cognitive Decline: Study

This seems like a no-brainer to me... slaps knee

vescheon Don't Use VPN Services

https://thatoneprivacysite.net/#detailed-vpn-comparison

Sure, you're always trusting a VPN at their word that they don't log, the above gives a detailed analysis of which ones you probably shouldn't trust. You can always host your own: https://github.com/n1trux/awesome-sysadmin#vpn

You can also VPN chain (l2iptables), tunnel over TLS, etc. That gist post is pretty dumb imo

vescheon LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

You can make it so your picture on LinkedIn is only viewable by people who are connected with you. I do agree that people should be cautious about what they post/share online however.

vescheon Convert Curl Syntax to Python Requests

There's a bit of a hidden feature in Postman that can do this and way more, hit the code button in the right corner and you can convert your web requests to something like a dozen languages: https://i.imgur.com/0qUV8b9.png

vescheon GitHub and US Government Developers

I'm not dismissing anything, I think you made a lot of assumptions based on me dropping a link. The post I responded to indicated that this issue has gotten much worse with the current administration, which isn't true. I think if we're going to fix the issue, we need to be honest about the issue.

vescheon GitHub and US Government Developers

It's been pretty linear since the 90's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_detention_in_the_U...

vescheon GitHub and US Government Developers

I agree. Why is the title targeted at all US Government developers?

I feel like this press release is also trying to create political drama where none is needed. GitHub is used by good people and bad people, just like anything is. I'm a long time GitHub user, but this press release is disappointing.

vescheon Why does 1.1.1.1 not resolve archive.is?

Roads...? Where we're going, we don't need roads.

vescheon How the U.S. Hacked ISIS

This article has no substance and is seriously completely stupid.

vescheon Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

Let's break down what the the rep from Brave said... I don't think I misinterpreted anything.

> Your beautiful drive through Colorado requires quite a bit of maintenance and financial support.

Roads cost money.

> Somebody has to pay for that.

Someone has to pay for the roads.

> With Brave, Advertisers can pay for it (without getting hold of your data) by way of users. ... Brave aims to sustain the roads that grant you access to that scenery.

Ad's (billboards) can pay for a great browser experience (the roads)...

So, therefore I said: Billboards don't pay for roads, taxes do. I get that the analogy isn't 1:1. However, stating that is an easy way to demonstrate that Brave doesn't have a market. Just like I don't need billboards to pay for my roads, I don't need ad's to pay for my browser experience. Firefox is open-source, and adblock exists. Come off it.

vescheon Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

You are supremely lost. If you carry the analogy, you're saying the billboards destroying my view through Colorado are somehow paying for my roads. Well, actually taxes pay for my roads. And no, viewing ad's on Brave does not somehow make my internet better or faster. It just clutters the experience.

The only thing that will opt into this crap are the selenium bots I write to farm some Brave cash or whatever you're calling it, until I realize that the AWS fees are more than the Brave cash I'm getting and shut them off for good.