Hacker News: trustingtrust

New comment by trustingtrust in "Operation Triangulation: What you get when attack iPhones of researchers"

trustingtrust — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 03:34:22 +0000

>Hardware security very often relies on “security through obscurity”, and it is much more difficult to reverse-engineer than software, but this is a flawed approach, because sooner or later, all secrets are revealed.

The later works when you are not as big as Apple. When you are as big as Apple, you are a very hot target for attackers. There is always the effort vs reward when it comes to exploiting vulnerabilities. The amount of effort that goes into all this is worth thousands of dollars even if someone is doing it just for research. If I was doing this for some random aliexpress board it would be worth nothing and probably security by obscurity would mean no one really cares and the later part works here. But I wonder what Apple is thinking when they use obscurity cause people must start working on exploiting new hardware from day 1. You literally can get one on every corner in a city these days. Hardware Security by obscurity for example would be fine for cards sold by someone like nvidia to only some cloud customers and those are then assumed obsolete in a few years so even if someone gets those on eBay the reward is very low. iPhones on the other hand are a very consumer device and people hang on to their devices for very long.

New comment by trustingtrust in "HN website is/was down. I'm curious why?"

trustingtrust — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 12:16:42 +0000

I restarted my phone because I thought my network was down blindly believing HN can never be down. Then I opened another website and realised this is one of those times that the website was actually down.

New comment by trustingtrust in "OpenWrt: Smartphone USB Tethering"

trustingtrust — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 04:31:26 +0000

A lot of 4G modems connected via pcie still are USB interfaces internally. So the usb 2.0 limits on these are still there (though that is not much of a problem in general as 4G speeds are low). With 5G if you connect to a usb3 port for tethering I wonder if the speeds are above the usb2 limits or if this driver is still limited to usb2. Because with 5G modems, most of the devices that use it as a backup likely use pcie speeds. Would be a waste to use usb2 speeds

New comment by trustingtrust in "Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?"

trustingtrust — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 03:36:31 +0000

Almost nobody cares about saving batteries. Those are replaceable and cheap to replace every couple of years.

Innovating more battery life and leaving 20% battery life on the table sounds extremely pointless for what costs 20-30$ a year but lets you use the device all day instead of just shutting before the end of the day.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Fourteen Years of Go"

trustingtrust — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 11:17:40 +0000

I have always felt there has been a learning curve for Go and Rust when it comes to syntax for me. I have used C C++ Java and Python and PHP for a long time but whenever I start Go or Rust, over time I lose interest thinking this is too complicated and difficult for me (no idea why).

Is there anyone in the same boat and are there ideas how I can make myself get good with at least one of these trending languages ?

New comment by trustingtrust in "Ask HN: To what extent have digital payments replaced cash in your country?"

trustingtrust — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 12:20:57 +0000

Not true. I live in India and have traveled to smaller villages in the south and some in the north. People have started to avoid cash altogether because of few reasons. They do have UPI they just don’t like it cause they like cash. There is never any issue with UPI, it’s just an excuse.

Cash creates a problem of giving change that end up dissatisfying the customer or the customer just leaves. Only after UPI people understood this so now they want you to buy it as payments are not a hassle. Rickshaws in cities have lost interest in random hires. I have waited 45 minutes for rickshaws. Everyone is on Uber or Ola cause they will show up and say cancel the request and give me little less money instead. Pretty common. So they don’t have the option to say no to UPI. They try to give you reasons why it’s not working but they just want cash for obvious reasons.

UPI also allows people to have multiple accounts in family to accept payments. This way they can avoid any tax payments as small amounts in small villages are not scrutinised by the income tax department.

UPI has created more and easier transactions. Small village or big town, I’ve never seen a shop without a QR code in the last year or so.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Making an USB Ethernet adapter work: hardware solutions to software problems"

trustingtrust — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 06:04:09 +0000

this is a very common chip that’s sold everywhere for as low as 4$ for that entire dongle at retail. If you touch the controller, at full speed it gets crazy hot on this one. The part I struggled with was that I was trying to install openwrt when raspberry pi 4b was new and use this as the wan port as my isp was limited to 40mbps. But the chip got so hot that eventually I gave up after putting on a tiny heatsink because the plastic casing simply offers no heat output. Mine didn’t have this SPI chip on it so both Linux and openwrt (with drivers) worked fine and it showed up as an additional Ethernet port in ip link. The usb cables are so thin I couldn’t leave it just like that cause at any point it would break and it eventually did break I think I don’t know where it is now. I ended up getting a tp link usb adapter eventually but in general usb Ethernet for anything other than just quick management of some console is not recommended if you want to do serious routing in my experience. The tplink one comes with Realtek which is just ‘okay’. Pcie Ethernet intel cards offer cpu offloading. I’m not sure if that can be achieved over usb. Heat is another problem as the casing is the limitation on it which is not a problem on pci cards or motherboards.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs"

trustingtrust — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 11:47:24 +0000

Agreed. I think just like everyone in this world, they hired aggressively when money and contracts were there and firing now that it's slowed down. Majority of their networking has been from Alcatel Lucent over which they built their own products but I feel good management can take them to the top. They don't make groundbreaking networking products but they do offer solutions people are willing to buy which telecom companies in North America would love to invest in if done right. It's sad they couldn't capitalise on Huawei ban that much.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs"

trustingtrust — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 10:35:22 +0000

A lot of 5G deployments shifted to Nokia after Huawei ban and Nokia also dominates a lot of GPON FTTH deployments for end to end solutions.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Google cannot close your GPay account anymore"

trustingtrust — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 16:40:11 +0000

I am not saying they shouldn't retain data. I am saying they should allow me to delete the account which they did until some time ago. I checked the laws linked and it doesn't say anywhere you can't delete the account. So for example if I was to delete my account my contacts don't see me on GPay anymore. If google keeps the data of both location and payments on their servers for whatever time it's required (Square did the same) then it's fine as laws required that. But until they don't allow me to delete the account the contacts keep seeing me as active on the app. This is not about privacy of payments it's about not allowing to delete the account which seems a generalised privacy problem of not allowing deletion of accounts.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Google cannot close your GPay account anymore"

trustingtrust — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 14:27:33 +0000

I thought so too. I was able to delete a Square Cash account a few years ago when I was in US and they gave the same explanation that we are required by law to maintain records for some time. However, they did delete my account.

I do not believe any such law exists in India for UPI accounts. I do believe however that Google has chosen not to allow deletion of GPay accounts for some reason other than the law.

Also GPay requires location access to work at all. So its not just payment information, it is location information along with payment information.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Google cannot close your GPay account anymore"

trustingtrust — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 13:46:08 +0000

They did allow it previously. They no longer do. I wanted to close it because I don’t want people to find me on GPay and make payments or ask to. It’s become inconvenient as I use a different UPI method. Just because a few don’t care doesn’t mean everyone else shouldn’t either. And any privacy policy must include as a good practice to be able to delete the account as well.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Cisco can't stop using hard-coded passwords"

trustingtrust — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 12:16:36 +0000

Can confirm the hardware vendor that I work for does the same. root password is given and customers are asked to change. No one wants to. Heck I would prefer if they disabled root login completely and used keys instead. But thats now it is. Some customers even enable login from web with those passwords. The stupidity is crazy.

Google cannot close your GPay account anymore

trustingtrust — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 12:06:50 +0000

Google has removed the option to close your GPay account in India on iOS devices. Customer support confirmed that you cannot delete a GPay account anymore. All your transaction history cannot be wiped from Google services which was possible previously. The only way to do that is delete your entire Google account.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37869675

Points: 7

# Comments: 8

New comment by trustingtrust in "Framework 13 AMD 7040 Series: A Developer's First Impressions"

trustingtrust — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 07:21:08 +0000

The intel stack is more mature right now as someone pointed out in the comments above. Down the road AMD will get better with better drivers and newer chips. If wifi speeds matter to someone and they are upgrading from an older intel board then keeping the old wifi card would make sense as of now.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Enabling IPv6 support for IPv4-only apps on Linux"

trustingtrust — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 07:14:59 +0000

> To prove that IPv6 is ready for production use

No one is debating it's not ready for production use. It's just that it's a lot easier to configure clients in dual stack than do a 6 to 4 translation.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Intimacy does not scale (2021)"

trustingtrust — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 03:08:39 +0000

Positive or negative ? Positive comments don’t generate interaction. If a comment was positive I’d like and move on not comment. Negative comments in the other had generate a lot of interaction. If I was to guess, Google as a marketing company loves interaction.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Intimacy does not scale (2021)"

trustingtrust — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 02:59:46 +0000

Anonymity plays a key role here.

New comment by trustingtrust in "Why are websites requesting access to motion sensors on my desktop? (2019)"

trustingtrust — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 12:47:15 +0000

A while back I stumbled upon google chromes privacy settings and found things like serial port on your computer to be accessed by websites. Turns out google has thrown everything in the mix because they probably want their 'Chromebook' users like children in school to use motion sensors for convertibles to maybe play games via a browser. Websites are just taking advantage of these things. The chrome browser has ruined the internet.

New comment by trustingtrust in "I got robbed of my first kernel contribution"

trustingtrust — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 09:09:17 +0000

My thoughts too. A bug existed, the maintainer looked at a contribution and as the maintainer picked the best solution which happened to be his own solution. That’s how the kernel community works. The community picks what’s best for the kernel. Not what looks good on your resume.