Hacker News: xyfer

New comment by xyfer in "NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide"

xyfer — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 04:16:20 +0000

Everyone in Silicon Valley is talking about this and the media has painted a picture of criminal undertaking by the NSA. A lot of this is just speculation that has been blown out of proportion. The only way the NSA could compromise private data centers without placing moles in their respective ops teams, is to sniff the traffic on the private DC to DC lines leased by the companies. Assuming they did this by overpowering the ISPs, they are still left with a ton of TCP/UDP packets which they need to reconstruct, decipher and schematize. Although DC to DC traffic is typically not encrypted, it is often compressed or transmitted as binary streams. There is absolutely no way they NSA would be able to make sense of the data without reverse engineering the innumerable communication protocols used and then using that protocol to decipher the packets. It is a lot more feasible to force a company to hand over data on specific users than it is to piece together user data using this packet sniffing technique. If the NSA really is wiretapping DC-DC communication, it's not because they are trying to build profiles on individuals. It's likely that they are using this raw data for keyword lookups. And, although I question its effectiveness, that is a level of surveillance I'm comfortable with.

New comment by xyfer in "An EEG-Controlled Vibrator (NSFW)"

xyfer — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 05:37:16 +0000

Something tells me this would not be received the same way if the hackers who created it were male. IMO, this is more crass than the titstate app.

New comment by xyfer in "No Bread, Beer or Biscuits: How I Lost 63lbs in 100 Days"

xyfer — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 19:28:25 +0000

I once lost 140 pounds in a day. She was just weighing me down..

New comment by xyfer in "Happy Programmers' Day"

xyfer — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 06:11:18 +0000

Cheers! https://github.com/the-teacher/cocktails_for_programmers/blo...

New comment by xyfer in "My first project in Rails – Pastebin for Mathematicians"

xyfer — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 18:11:57 +0000

This is pretty cool. I hate how we have a tough crowd here that's not very encouraging. Keep hacking and having fun doing so!

Emirates Airlines is hosting a travel themed hackathon in the Bay Area

xyfer — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 19:48:20 +0000

Article URL: http://www.emirateshackathon.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6298179

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: What do you think when you hear "I just need a tech co-founder"?

xyfer — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 03:34:38 +0000

Specific to programmers and based of the Quora post - https://www.quora.com/Startups-and-How-Important-Are-Ideas/Programmers-what-do-you-think-when-you-hear-I-just-need-a-tech-co-founder

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6216015

Points: 3

# Comments: 4