Hacker News: Cyberspy

New comment by Cyberspy in "Fastly Outage"

Cyberspy — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 10:42:47 +0000

We use Fastly (and our site is down too) but I asked them about this a couple of years ago. It is deliberate. They said it was so they can tell if it is their Varnish service or the customer's Varnish service that is down

New comment by Cyberspy in "Chrome’s address bar will use https:// by default"

Cyberspy — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 09:10:13 +0000

That's OK then, if that's we all have to do to run any devices inside our LAN/home network.

Want a NAS box for sharing family files/photos or some other IoT device at home? Just set yourself up some other device to run the docker image, get your self a certificate from LetsEncrypt and then... install it on the NAS box? How does that happen?

New comment by Cyberspy in "Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?"

Cyberspy — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:06:45 +0000

I actually bought this T-shirt for my daughter.It said:

!false It's funny, because it's true!

New comment by Cyberspy in "Context switching costs more than we give it credit for"

Cyberspy — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 20:28:34 +0000

Reading about this study and the experiences described in other comments, it seems the experiment is a bit limited in its scope.

The effect of music depends on the person, the type of music (lyrics or instrumental - even if there is applause or not), how well the person knows the music and, of course, the task itself and its complexity.

Until there's a way to test all of those permutations, I think the best we are going to do is rely on all our anecdotal evidence, as it affects ourselves.

New comment by Cyberspy in "No Cookie for You"

Cyberspy — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 18:32:16 +0000

I always look for that - and the 'deny all' button. They do not have a 'legitimate interest' to track the hell out of me.

New comment by Cyberspy in "ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks"

Cyberspy — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 10:17:00 +0000

Out of curiosity, why do you blocks HTTPS when you otherwise seem very privacy conscious?

New comment by Cyberspy in "No More Google"

Cyberspy — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 08:53:43 +0000

One of the reasons I don't switch to Firefox full time is that it (still, after many years) leaks memory. Use Task Manager to see how much RAM Firefox is using once it's been open a while.

New comment by Cyberspy in "No More Google"

Cyberspy — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 08:51:11 +0000

I doubt many other people here are going to ditch Electron completely - the current 'favourite' dev tool is Visual Studio Code which is an Electron app.

Even though Electron is actually a Microsoft supported platform, I understand the connection with Google - Electron uses Chromium rendering engine. But, this is not the same as Chrome. Chrome uses Chromium [1] but I think all the privacy issues are part of Chrome, not Chromium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)

New comment by Cyberspy in "A warning about Glassdoor"

Cyberspy — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 21:52:09 +0000

TrustPilot has gone the same way.

If you look in the clickbait at the bottom of lots of articles, you'll see one advertising a trick that every Android user should know. It takes you to a website at SecuritySaversOnline.com which has an Advertorial for TotalAV anti-virus, that implies it is free, which it isn't. I posted a negative review of this site and then called TotalAV to inform them of this site that was perhaps a fake affiliates site, but during the chat, they said it was their site - TotalAV were using a site with fake offers to advertise them. So, I posted a negative review of them too on TrustPilot - it's one of the 1* reviews here: https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/totalav.com?languages=en&st... (search for cyberspy)

TotalAV disputed my claims, but I demonstrated to TrustPilot that it was a genuine review, even though I wasn't a customer and the review remains.

Why is TrustPilot broken?

TotalAV have over 31K reviews, 87% 5, average 4.8 - but most of them one liners from people who have no review history. Compare with other AV providers - Sophos have 11 reviews, average 2.1, AVG have 2534, average 1.9, McAfee 358 average 1.4, Norton 347, average 1.5 Basically, people don't review their AV unless thay have a bad experience - or the supplier asks them to. I pointed out to TrustPilot that TotalAV's review profile looked fake but, while they let my review stay they have done nothing to rectify the entirely disproportionate review profile of TotalAV

New comment by Cyberspy in "Google disabled my husband's account"

Cyberspy — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 14:53:52 +0000

Though less serious, my wife has a similar problem with Amazon. She tried to review a product (first review for a very long time) and was greeted with this message:

"! We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon. If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email reviews - help@amazon.co.uk."

The 'community guidelines' link goes to a page with what the rules are, but doesn't say what rules have been broken.

We emailed Amazon, using the email address in the post and got this reply:

"I relayed your information to the team trained to handle this scenario regarding your inability to post reviews. They are not able to provide an exact date or time when they expect this issue to be resolved. For more information about our policies, please see our Community Guidelines (http://www.amazon.co.uk/review-guidelines) We appreciate your patience in this matter.

Warmest regards,"

'Warmest Regards'? Really - you just told me she's locked out and it's gonna stay like that for the foreseeable future. :(

New comment by Cyberspy in "Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel"

Cyberspy — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 08:30:58 +0000

The same problem happens with UK phone numbers, where the leading 0 gets chopped off Solvable if there's a space between the dialling code and the number, but when individuals enter their number, they don't always do this

New comment by Cyberspy in "Darling: macOS Translation Layer for Linux"

Cyberspy — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 08:24:33 +0000

In the UK, the shop Lidl was supposed to be pronounced Lie-del and I think that is how it is pronounced in Europe.

But, everyone pronounced it with a short 'i' and now they've adopted that in adverts - 'Every little [lidl] helps' - doesn't work if you pronounce it Lie-del!

If they wanted it pronounced Lie-del - they should have spelt it like that - Lidle!

New comment by Cyberspy in "Milky Way’s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as Bright for a Few Hours"

Cyberspy — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 20:54:57 +0000

It's not a typo - it's 299,792,458 m/s - approx 300,000,000 m/s or 300,000 km/s

New comment by Cyberspy in "A Conspiracy to Kill IE6"

Cyberspy — Wed, 01 May 2019 21:54:27 +0000

It doesn't seem though, from the story, that the 'OldTubers' group was exposed. It seems like the 'why' was more important than the 'how'

New comment by Cyberspy in "A Conspiracy to Kill IE6"

Cyberspy — Wed, 01 May 2019 21:32:45 +0000

This is why I like to work at small businesses, where I'm either the only developer or one of just a few. Even with annual turnovers, through the website, of approaching $10million/year (in my current and last role) there is very little oversight of what I do - there's literally no-one to challenge me on a technical level. That doesn't mean I abuse my position, but it does give me a lot of technical freedom in how I create the functionality the business asks for.

New comment by Cyberspy in "Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming"

Cyberspy — Tue, 08 May 2018 20:39:19 +0000

Just read Week 1 of this course - very easy to follow. Although with a different instructor, there are later versions - http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall16/ seems the most recent, with plenty of updates since the spring13 course. I'll be reading more!

New comment by Cyberspy in "The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user"

Cyberspy — Sun, 08 Apr 2018 09:18:23 +0000

In that case, he must have been logged into Eve's account before he received the email. How did that happen?

New comment by Cyberspy in "WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook"

Cyberspy — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 07:20:18 +0000

In May, once GDPR becomes mandatory, we'll all be able to issue data requests to the likes of Facebook and Cambridge Analyitica etc, to find out just what they know about us. The requests are free, so with social media, you could almost mount a denial of service attack against a business if enough people make a request!

New comment by Cyberspy in "Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile"

Cyberspy — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 20:25:41 +0000

This is karma for the way they started their 'Windows Smartphone' project, aka 'Stinger' (their internal name). They partnered with UK-based Sendo, who should have been their go-to-market partner, until Microsoft nicked all the code and gave it to HTC. They, in turn, partnered with Orange to bring out the SPV. How do we know it was Sendo's code? becuase it had Sendo's bugs - the eact version could be determined by which bugs it had and didn't have.

When Microsoft starts out like this, they deserve every little failurethey get!

Refs: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/06/microsofts_masterpla... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_SPV

New comment by Cyberspy in "An Email Thread Between a Developer and Gigster"

Cyberspy — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 23:46:42 +0000

So, what wording would you have used?