Hacker News: ars_technician

New comment by ars_technician in "I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won"

ars_technician — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 07:44:39 +0000

>you aren't really affected negatively by them doing it.

Even if you are fine with your ISP committing fraud, you are negatively effected by the complexity (points of failure) and latency this adds to the network.

New comment by ars_technician in "I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won"

ars_technician — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 07:40:50 +0000

Did you even read his comment?

"dig @www.facebook.com news.ycombinator.com" does not use the ISP's DNS servers at all. It sends a DNS query to Facebook for Google, which should normally fail. His ISP hijacks the request and provides a response. In this scenario, the advice in your comment is pointless because they will hijack requests whether they are directly to authoritative servers or if they are to recursive servers.

New comment by ars_technician in "I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won"

ars_technician — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 07:34:35 +0000

Why do you keep posting this? It's irrelevant because the idea isn't to hide what site you're visiting, it's to prevent the ISP from modifying the DNS responses. Signing DNS responses would be helpful if that was actually enforced anywhere.

DNSCrypt is a perfectly fine solution for this threat model.

New comment by ars_technician in "I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won"

ars_technician — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 07:31:22 +0000

>All you've done is add an additional third party that can view and log what you're doing.

You forgot the part where it's protecting against trashy ISPs like the one in this article.

New comment by ars_technician in "Show HN: Use any text as a domain name"

ars_technician — Wed, 01 Jan 2014 22:35:19 +0000

The alphabet isn't restricted to English. Also, see: punycode.

New comment by ars_technician in "What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014"

ars_technician — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 21:43:01 +0000

It didn't happen, so all it takes is your imagination! :-)

New comment by ars_technician in "A Short Story for Engineers"

ars_technician — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 06:33:00 +0000

Are the workers so stupid that they think shipping empty boxes is normal?

New comment by ars_technician in "What I Didn't Say"

ars_technician — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 04:07:22 +0000

>Even with just names discrimination has been shown to occur at places like universities

Source? Also, universities are much different than ycombinator so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

New comment by ars_technician in "What I Didn't Say"

ars_technician — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 04:00:16 +0000

>I dislike the "talking head" approach to serious topics.

Similar to your unsubstantiated comment about Ayn Rand?

New comment by ars_technician in "I flew on a plane without going through security. It was amazing and no one died"

ars_technician — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 22:49:40 +0000

And you think you would survive by doing nothing and letting them take control of the cockpit?

New comment by ars_technician in "I flew on a plane without going through security. It was amazing and no one died"

ars_technician — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 22:48:30 +0000

Do you not think someone would spot them sawing the door open? Also keep in mind that pilots are FLYING THE AIRPLANE. They can just start to do maneuvers that would make it impossible for attackers to even stay at the cockpit door, let alone take it apart.

New comment by ars_technician in "What I Didn't Say"

ars_technician — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 22:44:01 +0000

>1.)The fact the female founders are asking for this, tells you that they don't feel on par with the way things are being done today.

How many are asking for this? Where are your stats?

New comment by ars_technician in "What I Didn't Say"

ars_technician — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 22:42:56 +0000

They would be a laughingstock if they did implement a voice adjuster. It makes it appear that rampant sexism is such a problem that they have to implement protection against it.

New comment by ars_technician in "About Python 3"

ars_technician — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 17:37:33 +0000

That's probably related to the user base of scale being orders of magnitude smaller. The network externalities of a large language user base give it incredible inertia that makes it very difficult to change.

New comment by ars_technician in "I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on"

ars_technician — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 07:42:57 +0000

>How? How does your brain get to this point? I'm just sitting here floored that I live in a country where a non-zero amount of people feel the way you do.

If you are really are floored by this, you have a very weak sense of perspective. These conclusions are all very easy to get to if you follow this notion that members of terrorist organizations must be killed. If you set that as an unmovable goal, you will very quickly end up at these types of conclusions.

Try to gain some perspective. Just throwing a fit of incredulity doesn't help any arguments because the other side usually feels the same way about you.

New comment by ars_technician in "I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on"

ars_technician — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 07:37:17 +0000

>They dare not do the same against, Russia, China or even India.

Is there proof that terrorist organization leaders are operating in those countries unchecked?

New comment by ars_technician in "I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on"

ars_technician — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 07:31:57 +0000

Why? It's just a strawman.

New comment by ars_technician in "I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on"

ars_technician — Sun, 29 Dec 2013 22:17:54 +0000

Ridiculousness is just a subjective opinion though, that's why it makes such a terrible argument. I think it's ridiculousness that McDonald's doesn't have free refills in the UK, but I doubt many UK residents feel the same way.

New comment by ars_technician in "Rap Genius Traffic Has Dropped By Over 80%"

ars_technician — Sun, 29 Dec 2013 21:01:54 +0000

You bring up an important point. The people pushing code.org assume people have the same 'operational' level of knowledge that a standard power user has.

We should be teaching people how to run virus scans and backups before writing an application that prints a colored letter to the screen.

New comment by ars_technician in "I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on"

ars_technician — Sun, 29 Dec 2013 20:54:45 +0000

Sarcasm is a tool for someone that can't actually come up with a counter-argument. It's an appeal to absurdity combined with a strawman. Exaggerate the other side's point until it sounds ridiculous and pretend that's an argument.