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xs

504 karma · joined February 2, 2010

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xs··on Pandora papers: biggest leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich
What I see here is tax evasion. But done in a roundabout legal loopholish kind of way.

1. Establish profitable company in your home country.

2. Establish 2nd company in a tax haven country.

3. Give 2nd company some kind of ownership, and then pay rental fees, licensing fees, or simply set up a high interest loan that the 2nd company loaned the first.

4. Once you set up a way to make it look like you owe the 2nd company tons of money, now your 1st company no longer is "profitable" and actually in debt losing money, which means it doesn't need to pay taxes on the massive profit it's making.

While I believe it's legal it hinges on bad ethical practice. But many large companies do this, such as cruise ships and I think Apple.

xs··on Arcology: The city in the image of man (1969)
The last one on the list 30 - Arcosanti. Was actually built out in the desert of Arizona.
xs··on The FTC Votes Unanimously to Enforce Right to Repair
Oh wonderful. So that means John Deere can drop all the lawsuits against farmers who try to repair their own tractors since farmers didn't break any law. Right?
xs··on Where’s the Apple M2?
But you aren't using an M1. The article says M1s can only go up to 16GB of memory, and the M2 should be able to do 64GB.
xs··on Where’s the Apple M2?
The article says M1 can only support up to 16GB of RAM. The M2 would be able to support 64GB.
xs··on M1 MacBook battery life so good Apple thought indicator was broken
What I don't get is that the intel based macbook pros allow you to get 32G of RAM and 4TB hard drive. While the M1s only allow a max of 16G of RAM and 2TB hard drive. I'm not taking a hit on these other, in my opinion, much much more important specs to gain an extra battery life.
xs··on Audacity: Clarification of Privacy Policy
The thing that isn't addressed. Their terms now say that people 13 and under cannot use their product. Yet this tool is taught in schools. They want to collect this data but do not want to follow COPPA laws.
xs··on An Oral History of the L0pht (2018)
You would think you could listen to an oral history right? Looks like it might be better titled "a written history".
xs··on Garage Door Monitor
I built one of these once. I even figure out a way to remotely trigger the garage door to close. I programmed it so that if I left it open for too long it'll message me telling me, and if I still stays open too long after that it'll be passive aggressive and say something like "I hate having to do all the work for you, but I closed your garage door because you forgot to."
xs··on Show HN: Instantly search 2M recipes
Wait a minute... What about copyright? Like I would love to have a blog where I can just copy and paste my favorite recipes, and add a few notes myself. But I don't do that because it seems like plagiarism.

Or another option is to use this site, and then use some kind of 1-5 star rating. And then just see my favorites without all the other bs that food sites show you.

xs··on PRET – Printer Exploitation Toolkit
This is what hacker giraffe used to print to 70,000 printers printing "subscribe to pewdiepie".
xs··on How to track and display profile views on GitHub
> The rest of the story is simple — you need to store a counter in the database and return an SVG image with the number of views as a response. Of course, there will be some extra requests from bots, but having such statistics is better than nothing.

"The rest of the story is simple" uh, no that's not simple at all! You want me to register a domain, get a hosting provider, create a database, and create logic to listen for requests with anti-bot detection? Please don't say this is simple.

xs··on Podcast Stats
wenbin, for stats on hosting providers, when it's like podtrac, do you count both podtrac and the real host?
xs··on Biggest Oil ETF Could Go ‘Lights Out,’ Warns Wall Street Strategist
I just wonder, what % chance is there of lights out? Because if it's only a 30% chance that that'll happen, then doesn't that mean a 70% chance of it coming back up, quadrupling in price in the next year?
xs··on Maltego – open-source intelligence and graphical link analysis tool
The bigger the map the better! When you have a ton of data points all mapped out Maltego has tools for you to analyze this data in amazing ways. You can sort of twist and turn the data to look at it in different ways to discover the meaning of it. Say you have a dataset of 1000 different hacks that have been attempted or conducted on your network. And you populated Maltego with tons of data. Source IP of the attacker, attack method used, port attacked on, country of origin of attack, time of day of attack, duration of attack etc etc. With Maltego you can identify patterns that you can't with other tools. Like you might see that 300 of the attacks all happened on port 337. So you can isolate just for that, then look for commonalities. Time of day? Tools used? Country of origin? In just seconds you can drill down to find some of these and start making a picture on who might be attacking you. I've used it and it's amazing for showing you graphs in ways you never thought to look which can help tremendously when doing research on certain things.
xs··on Affinity Designer: A Love Story
Been using Affinity Photo for a year now. I love it. I feel confident with the tool and can make some pretty cool things. No other tool has made me feel that way. I've spent 10 years on and off using gimp and photoshop. Never could get it. I tried Krita and Pixlr. They were buggy and had shortcomings. Affinity Photo has a great price and absolutely rocks.

One thing I still think is clunky though is the Color Picker Tool. I have to select my paint brush, then click and drag the color picker to the color I want, then click the color I want again to get it on my paint brush. I think other tools simply let me hold alt+click on the color to get that color on my brush. But Affinity is like a 5 step deal which slows me down a lot.

xs··on Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
No. My entire business is based on RSS. And it's doing great. I'm a podcaster. All podcasts are RSS feeds.
xs··on How to Invest in Startups
Poking around I found this: https://pod.fund/

Apparently they are investing in podcasts with a lot of potential. And then when they become profitable they take a cut of the earnings.

xs··on How to Invest in Startups
There's glimpses of this out there. Leon Neyfakh created the podcast Slow Burn while working for slate. But he wanted to make a second podcast called Fiasco, but Slate wasn't on board with it or Leon was tired of slate or something and Leo had to do it on his own. But the problem was, Leo didn't have the funds to quit his job at Slate and make Fiasco. This would be a very heavily reported podcast, traveling, interviews, research, editor, producers etc are all needed. So Luminary got in contact with Leo, and funded the whole thing. Gave Leo enough money to make Fiasco with the condition that Luminary has an exclusive on the show. So there's an example of how a company gave Leo the funding to make it happen and is possibly getting back that money somehow.
xs··on How to Invest in Startups
Anyone know anything about investing in podcasts? Like, suppose you find a fresh new one, where it has a lot of potential but just needs more practice/exposure/equipment. And you want to help them get there quicker by giving say $20,000 in hopes they hit it big and their show becomes very profitable down the road.

Perhaps investing in a twitch channel or youtuber is similar?

I just wonder if there's any help or guides to doing this or if it's ever been done.

xs··on Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
First that comes to mind is Joe Rogan. He started a podcast in 2009.

His SocialBlade profile says he makes between $16,500 - $264,000 a month from his youtube videos alone.

But the bulk of his downloads are going to be from his rss feed, where he has between 2m-20 million downloads per episode with about 4 ads baked into each episode. If he charged a (low) standard of $20 per 1,000 downloads for those ads, this means he makes at least $160,000 per episode. He does like 20 episodes a month. Some believe Joe may be the first podcaster to make a billion dollars. If he hasn't earned that already he will in the next few years.

Let me reiterate. Joe started his podcast himself. By himself. Like as in, he set up his Libsyn account, bought his own mic. Booked his own guests. Then published it all himself. Now he has very minimal help, like 1 or 2 people to help him. It's so insane.

Now you might say "that's not a one-person business". But in this gig economy, not many people are. There's always someone hiring a lawyer, or graphic designer, or podcast producer, to work freelancing gig by gig. So the single person business is usually getting help from others. But there are other podcasters who have also done it all themselves, and are raking it in too.

xs··on Source for CARBANAK backdoor leaked and placed on GitHub
Carbanak is a piece of malware originally used to rob banks in Ukraine and Russia by jackpotting ATMs and changing the account balances. Since then the malware has lived on to be used to target US companies such as Chipotle, Ruby Tuesday, Baja Fresh, casinos and so many more. This malware was held tight by the hackers and not shared but now, you can have it too.

The podcast Darknet Diaries Ep 35 does a good job explaining it. Very fascinating.

xs··on The Price of a Hack
I just listened to this podcast episode. At no point do they answer the question on the title.

This is a very short peek into cyber insurance and phishing.

It you like podcasts and stories about hacking, skip this one and try the podcast Darknet Diaries.

xs··on Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
I learned how to podcast. Editing, writing, narrating, interviewing, sound design, publishing, and marketing were all things I had to learn to accomplish this. Some were technical others weren't. Glad I got into it. It's been a dream come true.
xs··on If hackers attacked the hospital (2017)
The Boston's Children's hospital was attached once by anonymous. This podcast covers the story very well. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/14
xs··on They Hacked Their School District When They Were 12
If you like this story you may like this podcast episode. 15 year old hacks his school and gets more than he bargained for. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/17/
xs··on Reddit AMA on Photopea, a free alternative to Photoshop used by 1.5M people
Been using Pixlr (a photoshop-like web browser app) for over 5 years now. Here's why.

* It's free

* It loads so much faster, and the interface is in my opinion just as responsive as photoshop.

* It doesn't require 200+ Meg of space on my hard drive

* I can use it wherever, on any computer that has an internet connection.

* And it has all the features I need in a photo editing tool.

The only drawback for me is that it was flash based and now I found a html5 version and I think I'm in love with Photopea now.

xs··on The Oldest Building in Every US State
In many of these states there are still buildings that were made by native Americans far before the ones listed.
xs··on Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal
This is interesting timing. I just released a podcast episode today about the history of the relationship between Google and China. To get caught up on what's going on listen to this. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/19/
xs··on Finding the longest straight line you could sail without hitting land
Why not start at the most southern point of South America and go due east? Maybe even 0.01 degree South. Couldn't you do loops around the Earth before hitting Antarctica?
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