Hacker News: secalex

New comment by secalex in "AirPods Max 2"

secalex — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:56:27 +0000

Phew, that's a relief. Guess that's a reasonable compromise for a $550 product for which there are no other quality competitors.

New comment by secalex in "Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability"

secalex — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 06:10:07 +0000

My friend/colleague had her phone stolen while she was napping in the hospital room of her terminally ill husband. Fortunately it had MDM. Called Palo Alto PD, I sat with them and tracked it from the hotel and it was already in San Jose. They worked with SJPD live and walked them into the guy who happened to be in a parking garage peering into cars. Caught him with a backpack full of stolen phones.

The stereotype of US cops not caring isn't always true.

Unfortunate fact for the perp was the ill husband was a US Attorney and stealing his phone made it a big boy federal felony that was not looked kindly upon by the colleagues of a dying AUSA in the Northern District. I wonder if he's still in FCI Lompoc.

New comment by secalex in "Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy"

secalex — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 13:40:54 +0000

Gmail is an Electronic Communication Service as defined in 18 U.S.C § 2510, meaning its contents are protected under the Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. Chapter 121 §§ 2701–2713).

Communications with an AI system do not involve a human so are not protected by ECPA or the SCA and get less protection. This is controversial and some people have called on ECPA/SCA to be extended to cover AI services. That means a warrant would be necessary to get your OpenAI history, not just a subpoena.

New comment by secalex in "KDE is now my favorite desktop"

secalex — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:55:31 +0000

Um, Windows 11 still hasn’t moved all the necessary utilities and administrative panels over to the windowing toolkit Microsoft introduced in 2012, and MacOS 26(??) is… hideous.

New comment by secalex in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

secalex — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:45:42 +0000

Thomas is one of the pickier, crankier, least faddish technologists I've ever met. If he has gone fanboy that holds a lot of weight with me.

New comment by secalex in "I hacked a dating app (and how not to treat a security researcher)"

secalex — Mon, 12 May 2025 18:01:06 +0000

Depending on what he actually did to enumerate that database and whether he downloaded all that PII I think changes the risk profile.

New comment by secalex in "I hacked a dating app (and how not to treat a security researcher)"

secalex — Mon, 12 May 2025 17:58:29 +0000

IANAL and this is not legal advice, but you probably fine reverse engineering a mobile app and intercepting your own network traffic. He was doing ok until he started enumerating IDs in their database, at which point he started venturing into the territory that got weev 3.5 yrs.

https://www.wired.com/2013/03/att-hacker-gets-3-years/

I am not endorsing this interpretation of the CFAA, but this kid needs a lawyer.

New comment by secalex in "I hacked a dating app (and how not to treat a security researcher)"

secalex — Mon, 12 May 2025 17:38:14 +0000

Agreed. I've been doing this for 25+ years and personally know a dozen people who have been threatened and several who have been sued or faced potential prosecution for legitimate security research. I've experienced both situations!

That doesn't make it right, and the treatment of the researcher here was completely inappropriate, but telling young researchers to just go full disclosure without being careful about documentation, legal advice and staying within the various legal lines is itself irresponsible.

New comment by secalex in "Laion Took Down Its Datasets After Discovery of Child Sexual Abuse Material"

secalex — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 16:01:31 +0000

Here is the actual paper: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:kh752sm9123/ml_traini...

SIO Finds Child Abuse Images in Foundational Laion Training Set [pdf]

secalex — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:46:53 +0000

Article URL: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:kh752sm9123/ml_training_data_csam_report-2023-12-20.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38709920

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by secalex in "Dagor Engine and Tools source code from Gaijin Games KFT"

secalex — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 21:46:30 +0000

The CEO is sanctioned, which makes dealing with the company complicated.

https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=34596

New comment by secalex in "Saint Helena Island Communications"

secalex — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 20:07:51 +0000

They aren't talking about general purposed datacenters, but satellite uplink stations. These new constellations of low-Earth orbit (LEO) internet satellites (like Starlink) can network with each other but eventually need to downlink into a big terrestrial dish where the traffic meets a fiber backbone. It's position in the southern hemisphere, middle of the Atlantic and political stability (still part of keeping the sun from setting on the British Empire) would make this an interesting place for downlink stations.

Not a ton of jobs, but some CapEx for construction and probably a couple dozen people year-round.

New comment by secalex in "Addressing the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors online"

secalex — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 17:15:02 +0000

A regression means that PhotoDNA scanning was working, and then stopped working correctly. This happened in the last several months, well after Mr. Musk's takeover.

I think it is good that they fixed it. That is why we directly reached out to them to help address the issue before we published. I think it is bad that they cut off our API access and are threatening academic researchers with lawsuits.

New comment by secalex in "Addressing the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors online"

secalex — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 17:04:31 +0000

We use Microsoft's PhotoDNA scanning service on all images we intake for research, which has access to hash banks collected by NCMEC, a government-sponsored clearinghouse on child exploitation, and the Tech Coalition, the private group coordinating child safety work between major platforms.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/PhotoDNA/Default

https://www.technologycoalition.org/

New comment by secalex in "Addressing the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors online"

secalex — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 16:53:17 +0000

This is an incorrect reading of our report. Twitter has scanned for CSAM using PhotoDNA for years, and is an early member of the Tech Coalition of companies working on this issue.

What we discovered is that, since Musk's takeover, that Twitter's CSAM scanning failed and was not noticed by Twitter. They fixed it several weeks after we notified them, and then shut off our API access to prevent further research.

New comment by secalex in "Addressing the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors online"

secalex — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 16:50:55 +0000

Hi, I'm one of the authors of the report. You have pretty significantly misread it.

> You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM."

The issue with Telegram is that they explicitly disallow the posting of "illegal pornography" on public channels, but not privately. We are not calling for any additional monitoring, but private Telegram groups (which are not E2EE, btw) turn out to be a centerpiece of the commercialization of online child sexual abuse.

> Going to ban cash then too?

Nope. The paper makes no recommendations around banning gift card platforms, but we do think they might want to take steps when teenagers are publicly linking to their payment wallets next to a price list that includes bestiality videos or content created when the child was pre-pubescent.

> This article is shallow, ignorant self promotion of their dept. to get more funding. It's almost offensive how they're exploiting chldren's safety for this purpose.

Thanks for reading!

New comment by secalex in "Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network"

secalex — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 15:17:55 +0000

Here is the detailed report (PDF): https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:jd797tp7663/20230606-...

Twitter cuts off API access to academics who noticed CSAM being posted

secalex — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 14:40:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-missed-dozens-of-known-images-of-child-sexual-abuse-material-researchers-say-58d44f7b

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36196801

Points: 28

# Comments: 8

New comment by secalex in "Windows 11 in Svelte"

secalex — Thu, 11 May 2023 02:53:18 +0000

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

New comment by secalex in "3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous"

secalex — Sun, 05 Mar 2023 18:14:37 +0000

I can still hear the clunk of the relay switching over to 3D (versus 2D pass-thru) when booting Wing Commander.