Hacker News: maqr

New comment by maqr in "YouTube to stop 30-second unskippable ads"

maqr — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 20:23:46 +0000

Look, my time is valuable. I decide what media to play based on my preferences. If I don't want to see ads, why would I instruct my browser to play them?

If giving out free videos isn't a sustainable business model, change your business model.

No amount of shame will ever be effective in getting me to turn off my adblocker. Sorry if this offends you.

New comment by maqr in "Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs"

maqr — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 07:54:47 +0000

What country and how? I'm just asking for a friend...

New comment by maqr in "Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?"

maqr — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 19:42:50 +0000

Yes, let's all keep believing that. If companies realized that all programmers can actually work decentralized, we might not be able to command a decent salary as it becomes a global race to the bottom...

New comment by maqr in "Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s (2013)"

maqr — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:27:03 +0000

I agree with the entirety of your post, but I'm unsure what can be done practically. Can you recommend an organization that is pushing for your positions? It may take a long time, but similar to marijuana legalization, it's gotta start somewhere.

New comment by maqr in "Why Remote Work Should Change Startup Culture"

maqr — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 15:12:51 +0000

If more startups allowed remote workers, would the salaries of developers fall in the bay area?

New comment by maqr in "Code Like a Girl: Harassment of Our Authors Is Not OK"

maqr — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 16:41:17 +0000

The post is tagged "sexual assault" by the publisher, so I assume there was some sort of lewd messages. That would make it not ok.

It is really hard to tell from the article if there was criminal behavior by members of our community targeting an underage girl or if she got a bunch of followers that happened to be older men and freaked out.

I think that's an important distinction. We all know it's not ok to solicit underage people. I'm not sure if it's still ok for older people to talk to younger people.

New comment by maqr in "Charles – Web Debugging Proxy Application"

maqr — Sun, 26 Jun 2016 16:15:41 +0000

I've tried fiddler, charles, mitmproxy, burp suite, etc, but the best one I've found is ZAProxy: https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy

The point and click scripting it does is pretty neat. Makes it easy to stub out responses if you happen to be a client developer blocked by your server developers.

New comment by maqr in "Domino's: Pizza and Payments"

maqr — Sun, 10 Apr 2016 09:00:50 +0000

Useful little tool: https://github.com/iSECPartners/ios-ssl-kill-switch

New comment by maqr in "How a federal spy case turned into a child pornography prosecution"

maqr — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:45:29 +0000

Can you elaborate on the femtocell vector and mitigation strategies?

New comment by maqr in "How a federal spy case turned into a child pornography prosecution"

maqr — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 23:28:18 +0000

You can tell your browser to not download images: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/981640

This would disable all images, but that's what you want, because you can never tell if a site you're going to has been compromised and what content they're going to serve up until you've already downloaded it.

This doesn't completely solve the problem though, you'd also need to make sure you don't have Flash or Java, and disable SVG and CSS now that I think about it... plus an encoded text of an illegal image is still probably illegal, even if it's text-encoded, so, uhh... I don't know, it depends how paranoid you want to be.

If someone wanted to force you to have illegal data on your machine, there's almost certainly a way to make it happen if you're connected to the internet in any way. Hell, even gmail shows embedded images by default... and even if you didn't open the email containing the illegal content, you still have it in your inbox, so there's that...

New comment by maqr in "My Biggest Regret as a Programmer"

maqr — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 16:22:57 +0000

You may be right, but I only ever hear my fellow working class people espousing that view...

Vic Gundotra Is Building a Heart Monitor for the Apple Watch

maqr — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 13:21:04 +0000

Article URL: https://recode.net/2016/03/16/medical-startup-alivecor-bakes-heart-monitor-into-apple-watch-poaches-two-googlers-for-exec-team/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11297018

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

New comment by maqr in "Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack"

maqr — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 17:29:51 +0000

> Apple seems to be worthy of that trust.

Oh no... it's working...

New comment by maqr in "Facebook has given some developers access to an unannounced Chat SDK"

maqr — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 05:58:47 +0000

> Throw away for obvs reasons.

Not super obvious to me, unless you work at Facebook. Is it really that much of a social taboo to delete your Facebook account?

I've been refusing to sign up for about 11 years now and I'm pretty OK with the social consequences.

New comment by maqr in "How the Daily Fantasy Sports Industry Turns Fans into Suckers"

maqr — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 18:38:10 +0000

> I never understood the "game of skill" argument, though.

I'm not sure if this is really on-topic, but I think you'll find this interesting if you're not aware of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill_testing_question

New comment by maqr in "Reports that Bassel Khartabil has been sentenced to death"

maqr — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 17:27:59 +0000

We (the people) should probably be at least one of the governments.

I don't know how these decisions are actually made, but I would think there'd be at least one government with one military team that would willingly rescue him.

If anyone is in the military, what's the feeling when these kinds of things happen? It seems like there should be brave people volunteering for those kinds of rescue missions where someone really needs their help.

New comment by maqr in "Hacking a parking ticket system"

maqr — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 18:51:43 +0000

Eventually, somebody would notice the car there and remove it by tow truck. Most garages need parking passes or have assigned numbers or something. When someone complains is usually when someone gets towed.

New comment by maqr in "The Ethical Ad Blocker"

maqr — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 20:50:04 +0000

I don't think you should be downvoted for this. The server chooses what to send me, and I choose if and how to display it.

Is it also considered unethical not to install that bundled spyware with your favorite freeware app?

Or how about that trojan installer tried to download automatically when you somehow landed on their page? After all, you used up some of their computing resources by serving you the page, you owe them the installation of their malware.

New comment by maqr in "Reverse-Engineering iOS Apps: Hacking on Lyft"

maqr — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 04:54:20 +0000

I just made the switch from Charles to mitmproxy. The only issue I've found with it so far is that it seems really slow in returning responses. I'm not doing anything crazy with it either, but Charles was getting content to the device way faster.

New comment by maqr in "Reverse-Engineering iOS Apps: Hacking on Lyft"

maqr — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 04:46:10 +0000

Yeah, as long as you have control of the device.

That hack only works if you have root, which means you have to be jailbroken, and Apple is always trying to stop that. I keep a jailbroken device around specifically for disabling all SSL for debugging and dumping app binaries/assets.

I wish they'd just let me buy the thing rooted like Google does.