Hacker News: cyphunk

New comment by cyphunk in "USA tried to pay Germans so coronavirus cure vaccine would be exclusive to USA"

cyphunk — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 21:29:28 +0000

Actually it's been reported very widely in Germany as well with exactly this headline.

New comment by cyphunk in "The clever cryptography behind Apple’s “Find My” feature"

cyphunk — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 15:49:40 +0000

Is the connectivity layer considered: Is the 3rd party "proxy" handler uploading the information using an Apple ID? Does Apple record, store IP information? It seems to me that by using this system you volunteer to send data to Apple constantly which may not reveal your GPS location but will reveal your network location.

I'm happy to see someone trying to innovate in this space. I still wonder if it is okay for journalists and risk affected users to use this or if they should be advised to avoid it.

New comment by cyphunk in "Apple introduces 8-core MacBook Pro"

cyphunk — Sat, 25 May 2019 00:51:23 +0000

Buying max RAM from start is a $200 extra which may validate saved space. Not justified is soldered SSD. Ive doubled SSD size once a year to extend laptop life by 6 or 7 years.

New comment by cyphunk in "What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right"

cyphunk — Thu, 09 May 2019 14:44:33 +0000

The comments in this thread indicate clearly, I think, why we should never listen to engineers on social topics and questions.

New comment by cyphunk in "Show HN: Should you buy a house and rent it out?"

cyphunk — Sat, 20 Apr 2019 20:28:37 +0000

Note that these models are created in an era of great inequality. You can expect that if at any point a correction is made to this disparity these numbers will also be effected.

New comment by cyphunk in "The Dutch East India Co was richer than Apple, Google, Facebook combined (2017)"

cyphunk — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 17:40:50 +0000

Additional information about the companies use of slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company#Slave...

New comment by cyphunk in "Huawei isn't trustworthy 5G partner, German spy agency says"

cyphunk — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 11:40:37 +0000

also if in the future we actually make cellular standards where encryption isn't demarcated at the tower and instead setup e2e between consumer devices, some risks are mitigated

it's really a shame that with both 4g and 5g standards bodies did not already work on this.

New comment by cyphunk in "Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service"

cyphunk — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 23:14:43 +0000

most abuse mitigated by their limits on the number of downloads allowed and how many days it can stay online. Currently at 7 days max and 100 downloads. If they see abuse they could reduce this further.

about revenue, there are so many valuable directions this can go. It could undercut competitors in ways they cannot sufficiently respond to. (google responding in kind would leave them less reason to not add encrypted storage for drive) By stabilizing this platform they can start to build new privacy-enhancing apps on top. Calendar, contacts, etc. With more dependency on the platform, they will find areas where more storage, longer retention, will be income generating.

privacy may be the only frontier that can displace google,apple,microsoft.

New comment by cyphunk in "Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service"

cyphunk — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 23:00:29 +0000

There are many use cases where compromise through code-interdiction after warrant is a perfectly acceptable risk. Also considering what it replaces may further increase the weight of privacy gain. Absolutism is definitely not the way to go, and looking at the state of the tech community (eg. npm, apt, pip, pacman, check that sha256 sum) we left the design-it-right-first a long time ago. A valid argument, though I wouldn't defend it to the death, is that we need to work slowly back toward more secure behaviors rather than chasing absolutely secure technologies. I think send.firefox is a step back from dropbox for some.

New comment by cyphunk in "China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds"

cyphunk — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 11:05:07 +0000

Could someone explain why this is on HN? I ask because this comes up often on other non-tech topics. Personally I'm happy these topics can be discussed here.

New comment by cyphunk in "'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes"

cyphunk — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 19:45:36 +0000

Overlooked: the apathy required to become techno-mercenaries started with the agents convincing themselves that spying on nationals was different than foreign nationals while working in the NSA. To resist this apathy cyber intelligence agents working for any government/corporation should deploy a moral compass that assumes they are working for the UAE.

This also begs for international conventions. New international conventions would provide a psychological back-stop against the infosec industry's unchecked nationalism. When an agent asks themselves "is what I am doing okay" international convention and law would give them an alternative to compare with other than the militarist default of "yes".

New comment by cyphunk in "'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes"

cyphunk — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 19:42:43 +0000

most comments are thoughts and opinions and only few provide new critique. The OP comment here, though presented in an obnoxious way, is new critique because no one else has discussed the civil liberty bias deployed by agents. Though the OP presents this in an offensive way, which is maybe breaking a different rule than just "new critique"

New comment by cyphunk in "'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes"

cyphunk — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 19:25:38 +0000

Taking the sources of the article on their word...

They said the tools use faded in late 2017 due to apple patches and that compromise required only sending a text message. Examining CVE's up until late 2017 may give more of an idea of how this tool worked. Judging from a cursory review, there are many remote code exploits so it would be hard to narrow down. But this is what I chose to look at when considering CVE's between Jun 2017 and Dec 2017 that could effect iMessage. Many of these are classified as Denial of Service bugs but often those can be extended to code execution with extensive research.

IOKit https://www.cvedetails.com/cve-details.php?t=1&cve_id=CVE-20...

IOMobileFrameBuffer https://www.cvedetails.com/cve-details.php?t=1&cve_id=CVE-20...

CFString https://www.cvedetails.com/cve-details.php?t=1&cve_id=CVE-20...

CoreText https://www.cvedetails.com/cve-details.php?t=1&cve_id=CVE-20...

Fonts? https://www.cvedetails.com/cve-details.php?t=1&cve_id=CVE-20...

ImageIO https://www.cvedetails.com/cve-details.php?t=1&cve_id=CVE-20...

Messages https://www.cvedetails.com/cve-details.php?t=1&cve_id=CVE-20...

SQLite https://www.cvedetails.com/cve-details.php?t=1&cve_id=CVE-20...

Kernel: too many to count

These were compiled by reviewing the apple security mailing list https://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2017

New comment by cyphunk in "Elon Musk Unveils Boring Co's First Tunnel"

cyphunk — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 09:35:56 +0000

I can't see how autonomous cars and Musky holes will be good for common people and not just turn into another form of exclusive transport for the rich.

New comment by cyphunk in "The New Brave Is 22% Faster"

cyphunk — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 15:02:14 +0000

until recently i tried using firefox to quarantine social media and google but the persona extensions would break all the time, leaving me to reconfigure things over and over. Is there another way to quarantine now?

New comment by cyphunk in "The New Brave Is 22% Faster"

cyphunk — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 15:00:08 +0000

Not about BAT,cryptocurrency. It's all about usable privacy. Makes it easy for me to quarantine Google services, social media, from each other. Privacy as the killer feature is what makes it killer

New comment by cyphunk in "UK spies: You know how we said bulk device hacking would be used sparingly?"

cyphunk — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 11:57:26 +0000

eventually this (e2e encryption everywhere) will happen once governments realize their security and secrecy depends on the security of consumer technology and to protect the public is to protect themselves.

New comment by cyphunk in "Amazon Quantum Ledger Database"

cyphunk — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 18:49:46 +0000

This doesn’t explain how amazon has removed capability for themselves to mitm the whole process. Or perhaps I missed that part somewhere?

New comment by cyphunk in "Video Games in East Germany: The Stasi Played Along"

cyphunk — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 18:42:51 +0000

Your a stasi department in charge of monitoring the activity of privileged children (able to afford and get smuggled goods which from what I’m told was something most stasi family could afford to do) whom many probably have parents above your pay grade... what to do?

New comment by cyphunk in "Improving DuckDuckGo"

cyphunk — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 12:37:45 +0000

Is the OP Swiss and wants it hosted where he/she lives? I'd be fine with that as an alternative to US, but do not understand why that would be better than, say, Sweden