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wepple

3,233 karma · joined May 8, 2013

Security engineer. Strong opinions loosely held.
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wepple··on CrowdStrike global outage to cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4B
What’s that understanding based on?
wepple··on Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?
I politely disagree. If you think “hours spent at desk” correlates with performance, I don’t really know what to tell you.

I do work late, and over my career have absolutely pulled all nighters and weekends and been on the redeye, but that’s when I stretch or flex, and it’s simply not sustainable.

wepple··on Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?
> Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig. Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite

Utter horse shit. I want to earn enough to live without too many worries, and spend time with friends and family.

Being able to leave at 5 is irreplaceable

wepple··on Google Is Keeping Cookies in Chrome After All
https://archive.is/DoeTV

H/t garciasn

wepple··on Global IT outage shows dangers of cashless society, campaigners say
My barter system of growing vegetables to trade with managed just fine too.

But it was useless for buying gas with, unfortunately.

wepple··on Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio?
> Playing with radios teaches you so much: no hobby has been more helpful for my career than ham radio.

Can you share some of the broad categories of things you’ve learnt?

wepple··on USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap
At first I kinda recoiled at the horror of 1990s color.

But then, yeah, it loads fast and does what it needs to do. I don’t think I’d want my taxpayer money getting some hip design studio to “modernize” it.

wepple··on Panic at the Job Market
Fellow and VP are not the same track.

L8 is director level. So L10 might be both fellow and VP, given that Senior Director exists so is probably L9

wepple··on Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries
They mostly are. You don’t need laws… when you want good data center distribution you’re going to be putting DCs where the grid can’t support such a step change in consumption. So they need new energy production, and it’s typically going to be renewable
wepple··on Python toolkit for quantitative finance
It’s so bizarre my first reaction was that surely it must be so an LLM can make some kind of sense of it, otherwise what on earth are they doing?
wepple··on ID verification service for TikTok, Uber, X exposed driver licenses
> but a vendor who only does one thing, specifically a high-trust thing like this?

They’re not in the business of being trustworthy or secure, it’s just another software shop trying to grow product.

> which would tend to bring in specialists to make sure this kind of remediation is done right?

Ideally, sure. In reality an insurance company has many thousands of customers, they can’t possibly do any real assurance beyond basic compliance. Managing access and credentials is a hard problem for well staffed security teams, let alone a single compliance auditor.

wepple··on TeamViewer Security Breach
Oh no no no. They’ll still collect data about people. Just not security logs that could indicate an incident. Double loss for privacy.
wepple··on TeamViewer Security Breach
With recent govt mandates to report known incidents within XX hours, this approach will possibly become the gold strategy
wepple··on Spudguns: Potato Cannon Guide
That’s really interesting, I haven’t spent much time looking at the data from the landing impact.

I’m also not confident in my skills to translate G-forces into velocities or such. I guess it depends largely on what type of surface it lands on?

You’ve definitely got me thinking now. There’s a bunch of ways I could roughly come up with a model for this.

wepple··on Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?
Barriers to use IRC for non-technical people are higher.
wepple··on Spudguns: Potato Cannon Guide
Correction: it was a ADXL375 200g sensor
wepple··on Spudguns: Potato Cannon Guide
I built the fauxtato a while back; a small capsule to simulate a potato but with a 32g accelerometer (8g is wildly insufficient) and WiFi to be able to log data and make basic analyses about different cannon & fuel usage.

Really interested run some tests based on things in this thread, like different propellants.

wepple··on Spudguns: Potato Cannon Guide
Not strong enough
wepple··on Rabbit R1s break after elevenlabs key revoked
Is it? Did anyone take that product seriously?
wepple··on Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F
The data disagrees with you, significantly. Level 5 technology is only improving, and you’ll regress over time. A waymo never loses focus or gets distracted or tired in the way humans always will.
wepple··on Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F
> I'm not putting my life in the hands of this software.

If you were a professional driver, you know you put your life in the hands of people right? The average person is a pretty terrible driver. I’ll take a safely trained machine all day every day.

wepple··on Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F
> nowhere near where it needs to be to handle real scale.

This is a phenomenally solvable problem. And it’ll scale without requiring more humans to train and monitor.

wepple··on Ask HN: Is Firefox better than Chrome when it comes to user security?
Yes. And Chrome has made efforts to support Rust.
wepple··on Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
Crime, whether CSAM or drugs or theft, all have a component in the real-world: it’s never purely in messaging.

Stop the CSAM where it’s being created. Catch the drug manufacturers and distributors. Etc. do police work.

wepple··on Sei pays out $2M bug bounty
Not really - a bug bounty gives you some type of currency.

Jacking a database and trying to sell it on a DLS or dark web is a massive process.

wepple··on Apple's new AI leaves out more than 90% of current iPhone users
I suspect there’s a few factors preventing that - cost of server capacity, the UX of higher latency (it would be for possibly all ML stuff?)
wepple··on Group chats rule the world
#2 is one of those things like wishing happy birthday on Facebook: once there’s a hint or automation involved, it becomes absolutely meaningless.

If it’s organic, then it is indeed a great starter

wepple··on Japan enacts law to promote competition in smartphone app stores
> But I believe the reliance of a sort of "watchful eye" also makes us lazy.

This is a common point, but similar to how there was widespread fear that seatbelts would encourage people to drive dangerously.

Security should be baked into the platform and not a task for an 89 year old grandfather to have to deal with.

wepple··on Japan enacts law to promote competition in smartphone app stores
The Xperia has/had a proprietary Sony-Ericsson OS.

But your point is moot anyhow; Sony can’t innovate. So they’ll regulate their way back to awesomeness?

wepple··on Ask HN: Is it just me, or does the job market for IT seem bad today?
Never works this way. Efficiency gains will result in the expectation of doing more.

Maybe that “more” will be in other areas of the business or economy and thus lead to less headcount, but given how profitable tech is.. I’d assume they’d be redeployed to build more product

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