Hacker News: adsr

New comment by adsr in "Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked"

adsr — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 21:49:45 +0000

Was it JTRIG? In any case, here are links to the stories from the Intercept.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/controversial-...

New comment by adsr in "3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled"

adsr — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 18:48:41 +0000

Fair point, perhaps I should have phrased it more as a technology with similar applications. I find it interesting that there are parts available now, albeit made on a 180nm process apparently.

New comment by adsr in "3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled"

adsr — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 18:15:22 +0000

I hope someone will give a push behind MRAM which seems like a more interesting option imo.

MRAM has similar performance to SRAM, similar density to DRAM but much lower power consumption than DRAM, and is much faster and suffers no degradation over time in comparison to flash memory. It is this combination of features that some suggest makes it the “universal memory”, able to replace SRAM, DRAM, EEPROM, and flash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_random-access...

New comment by adsr in "Collateral Damage"

adsr — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 07:28:52 +0000

Another point is the fact that mobile Safari wont allow the use of plugins. A wild guess is that ad blockers are the most common plugin that people use, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to add this in the browser itself as an opt-in feature.

I don't really see the difference from using an ad blocker in the form of a plugin, and blocking ads by turning on the feature in the browser itself. Ad blocking is also a feaure built into the latest Firefox release.

New comment by adsr in "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but..."

adsr — Wed, 10 Jun 2015 21:57:57 +0000

"I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book." Albert Einstein

It seems like this tests a) how much you want to work at Google and b) how good you are at memorize things.

New comment by adsr in "When will we stop using Facebook?"

adsr — Thu, 28 May 2015 12:54:17 +0000

Yes, Gmail is definitely a brand but I don't need to have a Gmail account to send an email to someone who does.

New comment by adsr in "When will we stop using Facebook?"

adsr — Thu, 28 May 2015 12:35:28 +0000

I don't really get the first point about scale and brand, because the examples you give like email are built on open protocols, so it's the protocol itself that is the brand. I don't need a particular brand of email client to send emails to someone.

New comment by adsr in "Accidentally Quadratic"

adsr — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 03:17:44 +0000

You could keep pointers to both the head and tail in the list object though. Then adding and removing stuff would be O(1) for both ends.

New comment by adsr in "Major security flaw undermines Apple and Google users, researchers discover"

adsr — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 23:11:18 +0000

Something is odd with that site. If I enter https://www.freakattack.com it reports Safari 5.1.10 as safe from the attack. If I simply enter https://freakattack.com it reports it as vulnerable.

New comment by adsr in "German researchers discover flaw that could let anyone listen to cell calls"

adsr — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 15:02:07 +0000

I doubt that would work well in practice. The reason is that timing is extremely important for this to work, if you're even one sample off you'll here a faint sound, and more than a few then it's quite obvious. So if the sound is generated by a separate OS process, you'll never know exactly when the sound is generated and you will not even have control over exactly when your own sound is played back in relation to the other process, think sub ms accuracy.

New comment by adsr in "Fight Over Yahoo’s Use of Flickr Photos"

adsr — Sat, 29 Nov 2014 21:27:25 +0000

But it's only commercial in the sense that it permits commercial use, but it also explicitly leave the creator out of any compensation beyond attribution.

New comment by adsr in "All cameras are police cameras"

adsr — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:36:52 +0000

I think it's understood that what is done in public is public, however that is not the same as having the same information recorded, analyzed with facial recognition and machine learning technology and stored for the future.

New comment by adsr in "Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite"

adsr — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 08:33:39 +0000

Can't this just be turned off with the Spotlight setting in system preferences though? For browsers it seems to be the same for all that uses the unified search field, it was last time a checked Chrome with tcpdump. I personally preferred to have the URL field separate from the search field for that reason.

New comment by adsr in "BBC to publish 'right to be forgotten' removals list"

adsr — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 17:21:02 +0000

I don't think it's that clear cut, there are some inherent challenges related to privacy and internet, a persons past that may influence future opportunities in a way that's not really fair. In fact, Eric Schmidt has expressed that same sentiment publicly.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-w...

New comment by adsr in "Fixing a 37-year-old bug by merging a 22-year-old fix"

adsr — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 22:50:33 +0000

It's a bit more, the bool type can only hold two values, 0 and 1. (6.3.1.2 Boolean type #1) "When any scalar value is converted to _Bool, the result is 0 if the value compares equal to 0; otherwise, the result is 1."

New comment by adsr in ""Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this""

adsr — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 14:30:13 +0000

> I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux.

This appears to be a false dilemma. I don't think the success of the kernel and Linux depends on Linus' foul mouth. And I think the point was that he, as a role model may influence and inspire others to adopt the same behavior.

New comment by adsr in "Why can't Apple decrypt your iPhone?"

adsr — Sun, 05 Oct 2014 14:41:37 +0000

In Apple's case, they use the ARM ISA but implement their own micro architecture and from vvhn's comment seems to also use a co-processor specifically for the secure enclave. But the link above on TrustZone hardware architecture mentions that this isn't a requirement.

"TrustZone enables a single physical processor core to execute code safely and efficiently from both the Normal world and the Secure world. This removes the need for a dedicated security processor core, saving silicon area and power, and allowing high performance security software to run alongside the Normal world operating environment."

I guess since Apple use the ARM ISA, it's still binary compatible with ARM but with a different implementation. AMD uses an x86/ARM hybrid where the ARM part is an off the shelf Cortex-A5 which already contain TrustZone.

New comment by adsr in "Why can't Apple decrypt your iPhone?"

adsr — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 23:27:15 +0000

It sounds more like they are using a Cortex-A5 to gain access to TrustZone with an existing x86 core.

New comment by adsr in "Apple – Privacy – Government Information Requests"

adsr — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 07:59:23 +0000

It's a bit less than 4 in 100,000, which I think is an easier number to relate to.

New comment by adsr in "HipHop: A "Popcorn Time" for music"

adsr — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 11:44:44 +0000

But enabling private communication is not the same as a public free for all. Some information should use private communication, but not be shared publicly, some examples that comes to mind is credit card numbers or private encryption keys.