Hacker News: asherkin

New comment by asherkin in "FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox"

asherkin — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 16:14:47 +0000

Firefox is/was really lacking in WebRTC support for non-P2P use cases - bandwidth estimation support was sub-standard until recently, there is no support for simulcast (multiple video quality encodings) when using H.264, and no E2E encryption support (which is very new to the spec). There has been a lot of back and forth on the Firefox / Jitsi situation but it does seem that most of the time the ball has been sitting in Firefox's court.

New comment by asherkin in "FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox"

asherkin — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 16:07:07 +0000

The originating browser is responsible for encoding all the desired quality levels and sending them to the SFU to decide what to forward to the other participants - that is the difference between a SFU and a MCU, and why SFUs can scale. SVC-capable codecs are coming to WebRTC too, which makes this a lot more efficient for the browser to do.

Encryption keys are distributed out of band of the media, so it's the same as whatever the tradeoffs are for multi-party E2E-encrypted text chat there (I don't know what those are though!)

New comment by asherkin in "Encoding data into dubstep drops"

asherkin — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 20:31:58 +0000

Pretty sure they're talking about Cinavia, as the PS3 was one of the most well-known implementors of it.

New comment by asherkin in "Ask HN: What is your company's maximum vacation (at one time) policy?"

asherkin — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:23:04 +0000

UK, more than 10 working days consecutively requires director approval according to the written policy, but I can't imagine it ever being denied or enforced (I have never had or heard of a holiday request being denied at all). We're not allowed to carry days over though, so people do not generally accrue large holiday allowances.

Understanding the Shadowban – Instagram Blocked Account from Hashtag Searches

asherkin — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 10:33:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thingsinsquares.com/blog/instagram-blocked-my-account-hashtag-searches/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836973

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by asherkin in "Reverse Engineering One Line of JavaScript"

asherkin — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 11:28:13 +0000

By that definition, analyzing compiled native code would be "un-obfuscating".

IMO, deobfuscation is a subset of reverse engineering - which at a push I would define as "taking a program from the form it is distributed into a preferred form for modification/understanding".

New comment by asherkin in "Reverse Engineering One Line of JavaScript"

asherkin — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 11:23:45 +0000

It is a shorthand method of casting to a boolean value - C didn't have a true bool type until "recently" (but did have the concept of truthiness, where true is `is not 0`), so many projects and libraries use `#define TRUE 1`, and #define FALSE 0` or some similar variant.

So rather than write `foo ? TRUE : FALSE` or being more explicit `(foo != 0) ? 1 : 0`, you can just do `!!foo`.

New comment by asherkin in "Opera is Reborn"

asherkin — Wed, 10 May 2017 08:14:29 +0000

Opera is licensed as the embedded browser that powers most set-top boxes.

New comment by asherkin in "NeverSSL"

asherkin — Wed, 11 Jan 2017 09:23:36 +0000

As the OP said, that is already in iOS - it is just that more and more captive portals are whitelisting the domains it hits to check for a captive portal.

New comment by asherkin in "Chrome 55 to start highlighting Not Secure websites"

asherkin — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 12:05:13 +0000

> Scaling that up - if I'm not logged into Wikipedia, and simply searching and reading articles, why does that need to be served under HTTPS either?

Because a malicious MITM could modify the content you are reading (and thus affect your perception of a subject). A bit of misinformation here and there can go a long way.

New comment by asherkin in "Windows 7, 8.1 moving to Windows 10’s cumulative update model"

asherkin — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 10:42:38 +0000

Both require running on Windows Server, WSUS is "free", SCCM is "very expensive".

New comment by asherkin in "No Man's Sky sued over procedural generation algorithm patent"

asherkin — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 12:52:08 +0000

> Company claims No Man's Sky uses its patented equation without permission

is pretty damn different from

> No Man's Sky sued over procedural generation algorithm patent

New comment by asherkin in "EU regulations on algorithmic decision-making and a “right to explanation”"

asherkin — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 15:38:27 +0000

Yes you are, it'll cost you £6 in processing fees to go to all 3 agencies.

http://www.experian.co.uk/consumer/statutory-report.html

https://www.equifax.co.uk/Products/credit/statutory-report.h...

http://www.callcredit.co.uk/consumer-solutions/your-credit-r...

You can alternatively use the free online services:

Noddle use data from Callcredit, and Clearscore use data from Equifax - I don't think there is a free service exposing Experian data.

New comment by asherkin in "The Children's Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes"

asherkin — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:12:18 +0000

Looks like illustration 12 got replaced with a repeat of 10 at the end, the file is there and matches the text: https://deis.com/images/blog-images/kubernetes-illustrated-g...

New comment by asherkin in "An Open Letter to Members of the W3C Advisory Committee"

asherkin — Fri, 13 May 2016 08:57:31 +0000

That's already part of the EME standard, implemented in the browser (so as open source as the browser is).

https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/#clear-key

New comment by asherkin in "Electron 1.0 is here"

asherkin — Wed, 11 May 2016 10:28:37 +0000

Not the OP, but in the same situation until I moved: Close-ish to an exchange (so no street cabinet on the line for fibre equipment), no cable coverage (so Virgin is out), out of range of wherever the hell Relish's tower is, and ancient wiring in a block of flats (so can't reach sane ADSL speeds).

New comment by asherkin in "Geolocation API removed from unsecured origins in Chrome 50"

asherkin — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 14:04:24 +0000

getUserMedia was killed off for insecure origins quite a while ago in Chrome.

New comment by asherkin in "AlphaGo Beats Lee Sedol in Final Game"

asherkin — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 15:29:51 +0000

He's getting $170,000, $150k for playing the 5 matches, and $20k for winning match 4.

New comment by asherkin in "Mondo bank taking £1m crowdfunding investment"

asherkin — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 13:23:33 +0000

> The problem with freezing cards is that transfers are not direct: freezing the card on the banks end might work, but some ATMs or other systems might have a sufficient delay to allow (some) abuse while the card was 'frozen' by the user. The question will be who will pay for the delay.

This is part of why their cards are online-only, every* transaction has to be verified with them before it can complete at the reader - so transactions are slower, but there is no grace period after the freeze.

* as I understand it, certain merchants are white-listed on-card for offline transactions - namely TfL.

New comment by asherkin in "Show HN: IPalyzer – Analyze any IP for location, RDNS, blacklisting"

asherkin — Sat, 16 Jan 2016 17:12:43 +0000

From hovering over the (?) next to Disabled: > Due to Conficker Sinkholes, the server got listed a few times on blacklists, so I decided to disable the HTTP check