Hacker News: flixic

New comment by flixic in "Find images from movies based on what you draw"

flixic — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 16:16:05 +0000

It somewhat decently identifies the object drawn, but fails badly to actually find the identified object.

New comment by flixic in "Why Did Satoshi Decide to Use Secp256k1 Instead of Secp256r1?"

flixic — Sat, 09 Oct 2021 22:22:41 +0000

This is a pretty good intro article: https://andrea.corbellini.name/2015/05/17/elliptic-curve-cry...

New comment by flixic in "The Facebook Status Page is up again"

flixic — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 21:55:18 +0000

Facebook app, Instagram and Messenger are working for me.

New comment by flixic in "Brave and Firefox to intercept links that force-open in Microsoft Edge"

flixic — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 16:11:10 +0000

I'd like to hear Microsoft's explanation for this "feature".

New comment by flixic in "Cryptocurrency and the unbanked"

flixic — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 11:57:35 +0000

Despite benefiting tremendously from crpyto, I don’t believe this narrative.

The article mentions the core problem: being your own bank is a HUGE risk. I can accept that risk and deal with complex security mechanisms I have to maintain to both protect my own bank and keep it accessible. But a good security guide for crypto is 20-30 pages and requires serious cryptographic understanding. Currently, I can’t expect that from average users.

Everything can be solved over time. Social recovery wallets and user-friendly hardware might become mainstream. But I don’t see that happening in the next 5-6 years, and I fully expect CBDCs to be far along in that time. Then, countries will be a lot less motivated to promote crypto for the unbanked.

New comment by flixic in "The Rise of One-Time Password Interception Bots"

flixic — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 16:22:45 +0000

For transfers, Smart ID displays both recipient and amount. So that part can’t be easily MITM’d.

New comment by flixic in "The Rise of One-Time Password Interception Bots"

flixic — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 15:15:48 +0000

I never thought about this, but yes, I think it can be MITM'ed exactly as you described. Same attack can probably be performed on the web, where Smart ID is also a sign in method.

New comment by flixic in "The Rise of One-Time Password Interception Bots"

flixic — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 14:52:37 +0000

Banking systems in Baltic countries use a unified 2FA system called SmartID[0]. When authenticating to bank via phone, they ask for two things: your user ID (which is not secret), and to authenticate using Smart ID, which means entering a PIN on your phone.

However, each PIN entry is accompanied by "code check": bank's support person says their 4 digit code, and you can verify that it matches on request for PIN screen. This neatly prevents someone pretending to be a bank during a call, because each PIN request uses a different "code check".

[0]: https://www.smart-id.com

New comment by flixic in "S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'"

flixic — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 12:03:10 +0000

It's also very simplistic. In subject matter, in character archetypes, sometimes in acting, and most annoyingly, in editing (how it never trusts the viewer to remember what happened 25 minutes ago, so they show flashbacks to remind you).

New comment by flixic in "Show HN: Motion One – New animation library, built on the Web Animations API"

flixic — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 19:57:56 +0000

In many cases, "animations on the web" has become Lottie animations. Or, at least, Lottie raises the bar for animation expectations.

I'd love to see two things:

- A decent free or one-time payment editor for Lottie (don't make me use AfterEffects)

- Perhaps a Lottie implementation using Web Animations API, if that is even possible.

New comment by flixic in "Internet Freedom Around the World Declines for 11th Consecutive Year"

flixic — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 21:39:34 +0000

So, China is the worst because of censorship (strictly controlled information), and US is in a bad spot because of too much misinformation (too little control on information).

I'm struggling to understand this "measurement".

New comment by flixic in "iOS 15"

flixic — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 20:38:53 +0000

Initial Safari design was quite different from what shipped today (beta process worked!). The main differences were: all the buttons where crammed into the address field, dropping the toolbar (shipping design returned the toolbar), and the address bar was floating over content, detached from the bottom. This caused many sites to break.

New comment by flixic in "Renting a car will be a pain until at least 2022"

flixic — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 21:39:52 +0000

It's been a long, long time since I read an LATimes article. It looks like they finally allowed people from Europe to view their website, after years of blocking it completely due to not willing to deal with GDPR. Well done, and "finally".

New comment by flixic in "Waste from one Bitcoin transaction ‘like binning two iPhones’"

flixic — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 09:33:10 +0000

Current comments seem to be responding to the wrong topic. This article is not at all about energy use, but about mining hardware lifetime and resulting eWaste. Which seems like a legit argument, and harder to dismiss with "but it uses renewable energy".

New comment by flixic in "Monotype acquires Hoefler&Co"

flixic — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 06:43:21 +0000

Can’t agree more with this tweet. It was amazing fonts directed by Frere-Jones that created almost all the value for H&F-J.

New comment by flixic in "Kape Technologies buys ExpressVPN for $936M"

flixic — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 17:42:46 +0000

Looks like we have a VPN duopoly forming:

- Kape with Cyberghost, PIA and ExpressVPN

- Tesonet with NordVPN, and allegedly a couple more most known, but there is no strong proof, so I'd rather not list them here.

New comment by flixic in "NSO Group iMessage Zero-Click Exploit Captured in the Wild"

flixic — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 21:07:43 +0000

Apple specifically introduced BlastDoor framework to combat this, so NSO shifted their attacks around decoding, avoiding BlastDoor.

New comment by flixic in "Starbucks and TrustArc add fake cookie processing delay if you don't click agree"

flixic — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 15:58:31 +0000

What if 3 US citizens said "fuck no", and it was someone on much shakier ground who felt the pressure to say yes? Not a given at all, just makes it more likely.

New comment by flixic in "A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl"

flixic — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 14:05:20 +0000

The way I look at this, the UI would be only to speed things up / simplify things a little bit. It wouldn't try to do full error validation before execution. It's the job of a command-line app to fail with an error if wrong combination of flags or inputs was provided, and the UI might display that error in a pretty generic way.

New comment by flixic in "A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl"

flixic — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 12:52:26 +0000

Can be XML as well, but I think HTML is too complex. The goal, for me, is simplicity.

It shouldn't be a hassle at all to convert a man page to a UI that speeds up actions and avoids common errors.

Anyway, this idea is free, so feel free to take it and do whatever, even full HTML (: