Hacker News: estel

New comment by estel in "Tell HN: Azure outage"

estel — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:48:45 +0000

It's possibly more likely that people mis-attribute the cause of an outage to the wrong providers when they use downdetector.

New comment by estel in "UK Electricity Generation Map"

estel — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 13:10:03 +0000

Generation might be a slight misnomer, but it's conceptually the same as pumped storage - grid capacity that can be called upon as necessary.

New comment by estel in "TfL's simple pop-up message led to a significant drop in paper ticket sales"

estel — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 14:34:39 +0000

These are typically stations that are outside of London. If you reach the destination station, you'd probably need to appeal to the kindness of staff members who attend the ticket barrier (if there is one), who might ask someone to buy a ticket or pay a penalty fare. But it's functionally equivalent to traveling without a ticket at all.

You'd also have to pay a default charge for an incomplete journey on the PAYG ticket, but you could potentially appeal to have this reversed.

It's usually made pretty clear on train announcements that you're leaving the contactless PAYG fare zone.

New comment by estel in "Firefox on the brink?"

estel — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 16:10:03 +0000

> If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone

Chrome and Firefox are already on iOS – if they're allowed to swap out their rendering engine, is this something customers will actually care about?

New comment by estel in "EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram"

estel — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 11:39:53 +0000

From the Independent (and presumably elsewhere):

> Meta said it has cooperated with regulators and pointed to its announced plans to give Europeans the opportunity to consent to data collection and, later this month, to offer an ad-free subscription service in Europe that will cost 9.99 euros ($10.59) a month for access to all its products

> Tobias Judin, head of the international section at the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, said Meta's proposed steps likely won't meet European legal standards. For instance, he said, consent would have to be freely given, which wouldn't be the case if existing users had to choose between giving up their privacy rights or paying a financial penalty in the form of a subscription.

New comment by estel in "How to destroy a certificate authority in one month"

estel — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 01:11:43 +0000

The suggestion might be that Trustcor received an internal build of the SDK because of their close links to the company. Perhaps the developer who worked on the mobile app also worked for the company behind the SDK?

Rachel’s suggestion in the thread is that the other examples of this SDK that have been observed obfuscated are much more recent, and that perhaps obfuscation was something the company has started doing more recently.

New comment by estel in "NFT's aren't the answer to the problems of digital art"

estel — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 14:16:01 +0000

> Want to own the unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse or the uber lazer in your favorite open world space game?

Isn't my favourite open world space game ultimately managed by a centralised developer, creating a centralised game; and recognition of my "ownership" only as meaningful as the developer happy for it to be?

Put it another way, what difference is there for me as a user compared to "owning" a ship in my open-world space game today?

New comment by estel in "iOS 14.5 delivers Unlock iPhone with Apple Watch, new privacy controls, and more"

estel — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 19:42:22 +0000

It was, yes. The SDK for App Tracking permissions has been there since 14.0. The change in 14.5 is that using the new APIs (and getting user permission) is now mandatory.

New comment by estel in "UK's 2021 census could be the last, statistics chief reveals"

estel — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 12:46:39 +0000

They employ 17,000 field staff as part of the census: https://census.gov.uk/jobs/

> Cost of running a few trial runs of one 10,000 house town or city to perfect the process: £100k

The census trial ran in four local authority areas each with populations in the hundreds of thousands.

New comment by estel in "UK's 2021 census could be the last, statistics chief reveals"

estel — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 12:42:54 +0000

If everyone answered their one letter I'm sure the census would be a lot cheaper, but I think most of the real cost comes from employing thousands of people who go around the country knocking on the doors of those who haven't responded yet.

New comment by estel in "UK's 2021 census could be the last, statistics chief reveals"

estel — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 12:40:59 +0000

They ran a trial for the online census at the end of last year, and it looks in pretty sensible shape. I think it's being delivered internally.

New comment by estel in "What’s New in Swift 5.2"

estel — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 19:28:20 +0000

It's been pretty standard for the last several years that the ~.3/4 Xcode point release increases the minimum macOS version.

New comment by estel in "Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date"

estel — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 13:49:35 +0000

On iOS certificates will be validated by CFNetwork provided you haven't disabled ATS.

New comment by estel in "Google’s GDPR Workaround"

estel — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 13:52:04 +0000

The first GDPR fines handed down by the ICO have been hundreds of millions of pounds for negligent breaches - I don't think it would be out of the realm of possibility for breaches by _design_ to result in multi-billion pound fines.

New comment by estel in "Activists release code to generate free public transportation tickets in U.K"

estel — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 13:05:59 +0000

I think that a design constraint on these apps is that the ticket _reader_ also is expected to work offline.

New comment by estel in "Monzo urges 480k customers to change their pin numbers"

estel — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 16:32:40 +0000

Embedding a particular SDK doesn't necessarily mean that there's a GDPR violation?

New comment by estel in "The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design"

estel — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 15:47:59 +0000

Shockingly it's not been scrapped - the deep tube programme is, to some extent, unscrappable.

They're currently due to enter service in about five years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Tube_for_London

New comment by estel in "Neighbourly by Google"

estel — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 20:22:12 +0000

Which of the businesses they've dropped is this true for? Few of the examples I can think of were market leaders when they were dropped, and none of those were monopolising the market completely.

New comment by estel in "Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone"

estel — Tue, 08 May 2018 21:03:41 +0000

The whole context of Google introducing this functionality was for the 60% of businesses that don't yet have an online presence at all.

New comment by estel in "StreetLend.com shuts down, citing GDPR regulations"

estel — Mon, 30 Apr 2018 01:56:22 +0000

GDPR is pretty clear that a users “right to be forgotten” isn’t absolute and that businesses should be weighing up (and documenting) a users right to privacy against their other legal obligations.