Hacker News: socket0

New comment by socket0 in "FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is"

socket0 — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 17:11:12 +0000

Imagine tech journalists in 2025 not knowing what a canary is...

New comment by socket0 in "AI and the Rise of Mediocrity"

socket0 — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 15:22:53 +0000

Absolutely. They're going for all the safe, boring choices, and depending on the business side of their industry to make money. You don't show a profit by making the next Children of Men, you show a profit by tweaking the Fast&Furious formula and strong-arming theaters into showing it.

New comment by socket0 in "AI and the Rise of Mediocrity"

socket0 — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 14:59:40 +0000

And yet when I watch the flood of movies, television shows, novels, music, and fine art available to me, I have a really hard time finding anything unpredictable. Great skill is involved in creating them (sometimes), but for every one experience that amazes me I have to slog through hundreds that really don't. At best I'm entertained. The output is formulaic, as you would expect from businesses guided by bookkeepers. The sad fact is that a large number of these productions very well might have been generated using an advanced LLM.

New comment by socket0 in "History of the Salvator Mundi"

socket0 — Tue, 10 May 2022 11:17:10 +0000

It might be this one? Secluded treasures & tax incentives - The freeport system https://youtu.be/5bIGd3jcrS4

New comment by socket0 in "No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me"

socket0 — Tue, 10 May 2022 10:23:20 +0000

What bothers me most about the recommendations I get are the videos I have clearly watched. "You recently watched this clip, so we at YouTube think you should watch it again."

New comment by socket0 in "Winning Wordle"

socket0 — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 13:27:13 +0000

Wordle is basically gambling, but like a lot of games of chance you can improve your odds using skill. A good vocabulary, good starter words, solid analytical skills. But peeking at the word list, players are often still left with three or four viable options after two or three guesses. Lucky guesses will result in completing the daily game in three or four tries, unlucky guesses will push this up.

New comment by socket0 in "Tildeverse.org: A loose association of like-minded tilde communities"

socket0 — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 12:42:29 +0000

If it's intentionally shielded from prying eyes, and possibly nefarious, it's the dark web. More often than not this would be on Tor, I2P, or similar, but that's not required. If it simply can't be easily indexed by search engines, it's the deep web. Overlap between the two is possible.

Your mailbox would be deep web, if it's exposed to the Internet. If your mailbox uses an auto-responder to respond to coded messages with encrypted binaries of an illegal nature, it would be dark web.

New comment by socket0 in "Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)"

socket0 — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 20:27:47 +0000

One of my first websites used the single pixel GIF for layout, which still works. The website for a snowboarding magazine was intended to symbolise the curved slalom of descending a slope, and was a nightmare in absolute positioning:

https://i.imgur.com/QVcAYqf.png

https://i.imgur.com/2SDxhii.png

https://i.imgur.com/ZBEk9ae.png

Fairy Chess Piece

socket0 — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 14:32:11 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_chess_piece

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28642952

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by socket0 in "Stopping phishing campaigns with Bash"

socket0 — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 09:48:46 +0000

Many phishing pages reside on compromised domains. Bob's Plumbing Supplies might wonder why their Wordpress site loaded with plug-ins has stopped working, ask someone to take a look, and see your IP address all over the logs.

New comment by socket0 in "Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention"

socket0 — Tue, 01 May 2018 20:09:56 +0000

That's the whole point of this, by blocking Amazon, these countries would be taking down a large part of the Internet inside their borders. We're not talking Amazon your one stop shop for dildos and bobble heads, but AWS, which powers a lot of other websites. The countries listed, like Egypt, know that you can get away with torture, but don't touch the people's memes.

New comment by socket0 in "Abusing Gmail to get previously unlisted e-mail addresses"

socket0 — Mon, 08 May 2017 13:19:47 +0000

I'm going to have to agree with Google here, in that this isn't an exploitable security vulnerability. Knowing that the mailboxes famous.celebrity@gmail.com or controversial.journalist@gmail.com exist doesn't bring me any closer to exploiting the knowledge. I don't know that Famous Celebrity is in fact THE famous celebrity. I don't know whether Controversial Journalist still reads mail sent to that account. Most importantly, I don't learn anything I couldn't have learned by sending messages to every likely permutation of famous.celebrity@gmail.com. This won't teach me anything particularly useful for spearfishing, as I'm just throwing out a net hoping something gets caught.

New comment by socket0 in "An analysis of the Nomx secure communications device"

socket0 — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 13:28:16 +0000

Definitely. The problem is that consumers (especially small business) so often end up buying an overpriced and badly configured black box, when a decent expert would have been able to set up the same software properly.

New comment by socket0 in "An analysis of the Nomx secure communications device"

socket0 — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 12:00:09 +0000

I find these kinds of stories infuriating (and just a bit frustrating). Charlatans repackage, rebrand, and repurpose FOSS, then sell them at an unrealistic markup to unsuspecting dupes. Anything from PABX or VoIP systems based on Asterisk, through overly complex CMS's based on Wordpress. I'm not sure what riles me more: consumers being ripped off by these products, or the fact that my strengths lie in tech rather than sales.

New comment by socket0 in "Google announces workshops to tackle the spread of hate speech and fake news"

socket0 — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 12:45:02 +0000

Indeed, the art of badly written headlines apparently takes up a whole chapter in the Ars Technica style guide. This should have been: "Google pushes fake news and hate-speech workshops (and YouTube) on UK teens". In addition, even the most basic grammar checking tool should have picked this up: "The ads was later removed."

New comment by socket0 in "William Shatner's Seat"

socket0 — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 10:27:37 +0000

“Are they going to try and land anyway?”

It's unlikely that the pilot simply took a gamble. Presumably ground crew took a look, either on the first go-round or during the second approach, and confirmed that the landing gear was down. I like to think my "screw it we'll see what happens" IT methodology isn't used in all industries...

New comment by socket0 in "William Shatner's Seat"

socket0 — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 10:16:08 +0000

Even as late as 1995, I remember flying from South Africa to the UK (in the non-smoking section) while the guy behind me (in the smoking section) was smoking extremely smelly eastern European cigarettes. Quite an adventure when you're prone to airsickness.

New comment by socket0 in "Finding Free Food with Python"

socket0 — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 10:13:58 +0000

Presumably, regular customers also react to these free offers. You always get your pizza from A, but because it's free you try B. Perhaps B think their pizzas are better. Perhaps B just offer you free pizzas long enough to break your habit with A, and your habit becomes B. Or you tend to stick with Italian, but because it's free you try Thai, and you find you like it. Businesses have many reasons for subsidising free promotions.

Mind you, I haven't done the math on this, and presumably neither have the participating restaurants. However, the logic is sound, and becomes even sounder if you treat a restaurant owner to a couple of glasses of wine.

New comment by socket0 in "US Customs block Canadian man after reading his Scruff profile"

socket0 — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 13:09:58 +0000

If they're really interested, they'll probably just Google you. Or use something they purchased for tens of millions of dollars, that simply performs a Google search. If you're an older person, and have no online footprint, they probably wouldn't have stopped you in the first place. If you're young, and have no online footprint, that would be pretty suspicious.

New comment by socket0 in "US Customs block Canadian man after reading his Scruff profile"

socket0 — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 10:30:25 +0000

That's likely to be a red flag and used against you. Remember, as a non-US citizen, border guards don't have to prove you're guilty of anything. Any suspicion, no matter how trivial or unreasonable, and you have to be able to convincingly prove your own innocence. No electronic devices will probably simply result in them asking for the passwords to your accounts on Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.