Hacker News: willfiveash

New comment by willfiveash in "AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach"

willfiveash — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 17:53:13 +0000

In the email I got from AT&T regarding this data breach was: "Protecting customer data is a top priority. We have confirmed the affected system has been secured. We hold ourselves to high privacy standards and are always looking for ways to improve our security practices."

Well, now I feel better. 8^)

New comment by willfiveash in "What You Get After Running an SSH Honeypot for 30 Days"

willfiveash — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 20:55:42 +0000

This story reminds me of the time I accidentally/naively set up a ssh honeypot when I configured the router I was using at the time (this was a long time ago) to forward incoming SSH connections to a ReadyNAS (which was using a Sun SPARC processor) in my house. I did that so I could log into it while I was away from my house. One day, I ssh'ed in and notice that the ReadyNAS was running very slow which surprised me because I thought it was idle. I checked the CPU usage and the sshd was using 100%. First, I thought it was a bug but it occurred to me I should check my incoming ssh connection attempts in my router log. Turns out there were a ton of ssh connection attempts coming from an IP address assigned to China. In response I changed the router port forwarding for incoming ssh connections to use a non-standard port number, like 55,243, and after that my ReadyNAS was no longer bombarded with ssh connection attempts. Lesson: try to avoid forwarding standard port numbers.

New comment by willfiveash in "Everything I wish I knew when learning C"

willfiveash — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 16:05:36 +0000

I still remember when a co-worker told me that the biggest problem with C is that programmers are terrible at memory management. Given the number of memory corruption bugs I encountered in 27 years of working with C, I have to say that rings true.

New comment by willfiveash in "Twenty years of Valgrind"

willfiveash — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 14:58:17 +0000

I see the article mentions Solaris, an OS that I am very familiar with, which had me thinking about the memory corruption detection Solaris offerred. Among the development features Solaris supported were two memory corruption checking libraries (libumem, watchmalloc) that could easily be used without have to recompile binaries to link with them. Libumem had support for detecting memory leaks, buffer overruns, multiple frees, use of uninitialized data, use of freed data, etc... but it could not detect a read past an allocated buffer which is where watchmalloc came in handy. To use either with an executable binary was as easy as:

$ LD_PRELOAD=libumem.so.1

I found a lot of memory corruption bugs using libumem in particular including some in MIT Kerberos that were severe enough to be considered security vulnerabilities. Sadly, Solaris is now in support mode thanks to Ellison and friends at Oracle.

New comment by willfiveash in "Show HN: Bike – macOS Native Outliner"

willfiveash — Thu, 19 May 2022 17:09:42 +0000

I've been using OmniOutliner for a long time, mostly to take notes in an organized fashion and I'm pretty happy with its functionality, however one thing it doesn't provide is split editing windows on the same outline. This is something I've used with Vim and found it to be very handy when editing code because I frequently needed to look at code at one spot in a file while modifying/creating code in another place in that same file. Anyone know if there is a macOS outliner that can do this?

New comment by willfiveash in "Apple Discontinues macOS Server"

willfiveash — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 16:48:28 +0000

I'm not sad to see it go. What I vaguely remember about macOS Server was that macOS upgrades were fraught regarding whether the macOS Server would function normally afterward requiring me spending time trying to debug what was wrong. Since macOS eventually started offering some of those services, like Time Machine Server, natively I've been using those successfully. For the services macOS doesn't offer I now have the option of using Home Brew to install those services.

New comment by willfiveash in "Firefox 96"

willfiveash — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 20:15:34 +0000

I've been using Firefox for a looong time. What convinced me to choose that over any other browser is the following: A. It ran on macOS AND Solaris (which I worked on for a looong time). B. It took awhile for the feature to arrive but eventually I was able to sync my bookmarks across both platforms (this made me so happy).

At this point, even though I'm not using Solaris anymore (sniff) I'm so used to it I don't feel the need to try anything else.

New comment by willfiveash in "My First Impressions of Web3"

willfiveash — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 16:58:34 +0000

When I read "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will." I thought, what an elitist (and libertarian) idea to assume people would be able to afford and manage a server in their home but also afford/have access to the required Internet bandwidth. Yuck.

New comment by willfiveash in "Growl in Retirement"

willfiveash — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 17:59:53 +0000

I'm using Pushover (https://pushover.net/) to send notifications to my Apple devices. To make use of it easier on command line I wrote a simple Python script which I've found to be very useful for things like allowing Transmission to send notifications when a download is finished or in scripts that do backup jobs which take a long time, letting me know when my Mac has booted, etc... Reply to this comment if you're interested in my script (note that the pushover site has good examples of how to call their API).

New comment by willfiveash in "Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack"

willfiveash — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:11:17 +0000

I'm guessing use of 2FA internally could have prevented this intrusion but that's a hassle so...

New comment by willfiveash in "Rest-client gem is hijacked"

willfiveash — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:22:07 +0000

Another case for universal adoption of 2FA.

New comment by willfiveash in "Don’t Get Clever with Login Forms"

willfiveash — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 20:13:09 +0000

On my Mac I use a utility called Quicksilver that has an option to record and recall copies I've done then shows me a list of the last 10 copies from which I can drag one of them into an input field. This works on input fields that don't allow normal copy/paste. Quicksilver does a number other things like app launching -- I'm a fan.

New comment by willfiveash in "Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City"

willfiveash — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 22:12:07 +0000

Good point. As a long time (lived here since 1979) Austin resident I can tell you that it's a lot of fun to live here, in particular for someone in their 20's or 30's. There are a bunch of live music clubs, several large music festivals, SXSW, lakes and the Hill Country for biking, rivers to tube on, etc... On top of this the University of Texas main campus (~50K students) is located here and there are other universities in addition. This city is a magnet in Texas and surrounding states for tech talent unlike say, Waco because people want to live here.

New comment by willfiveash in "Australia’s vague anti-encryption law sets a dangerous new precedent"

willfiveash — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 20:44:09 +0000

Creating and maintaining a large software project that "features" differing crypto strength depending on the country it's being shipped to is a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS! I know because this was something I did for the Solaris implementation of Kerberos. What an excellent way to introduce bugs that never get tested. Crypto/security is hard enough to get right without added complications like this.

New comment by willfiveash in "‘Five Eyes’ Nations Quietly Demand Government Access to Encrypted Data"

willfiveash — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 21:08:42 +0000

I would refer people to these two posts about this subject:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/09/five-eyes_int...

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/04/illegal-math.html

Basically, crypto backdoors are a very bad idea.

New comment by willfiveash in "Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?"

willfiveash — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 22:42:00 +0000

I like OmniOutliner for MacOS as it makes it easy to reorganize my notes.

New comment by willfiveash in "Not Only Is the Mac Mini Outdated, It's No Longer Mini"

willfiveash — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 18:36:57 +0000

That may be the reason but I would point out that many companies that sell high end systems and OSes (IBM, Sun/Oracle, etc...) at some point require the customer pay for supporting older systems (even then there is an age cutoff). For Apple, supporting older Minis without the customer paying for this support doesn't seem to be in Apple's interest from a business standpoint.

New comment by willfiveash in "Not Only Is the Mac Mini Outdated, It's No Longer Mini"

willfiveash — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 18:17:34 +0000

Man, in the last couple of years I've been counting myself lucky in that I bought a late 2012 Mini with the fastest i7 offered. It appears to be downhill for the Mini from then on.

New comment by willfiveash in "Not Only Is the Mac Mini Outdated, It's No Longer Mini"

willfiveash — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 18:14:44 +0000

The problem, for me at least, is I don't want anyone smearing their greasy fingers on my display. I like seeing things on a clean display so I would never buy a laptop with this "feature".

New comment by willfiveash in "A Career Cold Start Algorithm"

willfiveash — Sat, 10 Mar 2018 15:49:40 +0000

Use the advanced job search and put in a salary range.