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anon463637's comments

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: SaveDotOrg Protest at ICANN in Los Angeles this Friday Jan 24

These are vague and strawman criticisms that deny reality and that DNS can't solve everything itself.

Who owns which domain will always be centralized if only one group or individual can own a particular name. Having multiple domain name systems creates chaos.

Privacy can be solved on the client-side with VPNs or DNS resolution encrypted proxies (dnscrypt) and private registration (by the owner).

Security (integrity and non-repudiation) already exists in the form of DNSSEC and DANE. It's a Catch-22 to say it's not when it clearly exists. It's imperfect but it does exist.

ICANN was supposed to/should've been a steward in the interests of all people, not just corporations.

You can't replace it with something else and expect a different result. All you're doing is moving problems around without addressing them. Emperor's new clothes won't fix that, sorry.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

There's no solving infrequent social problems with technology, only socio-politically. I'm sure it does happen to a few people, but it sounds extremely rare.

At least a mail-in ballot usually has a "receipt," (that serial number thing that's torn off at the top/bottom) although it does little to show or prove a vote was counted, especially with the subjectiveness of interpreting handwritten marks. The bigger problem is electronic voting has no real records making it far easier to manipulate because there's nothing permanent to recount.

I suggest that to solve the receipt issue, privacy, speed of counting and accuracy to the best degree available, it's best to:

0. Make voting day a national holiday.

1. Mail every voter a durable, physical RFID token (signed by a closely-held private key) that has an unique code that is not recorded who it is given to. If they haven't received one before voting in-person, they can receive a random token.

2. The voter is first checked to make sure they haven't yet voted by keeping a database of "has voted"... completely independent of actual votes.

3. The voter either drops-off the RFID in a container in a booth for their vote preference, or they mail it sealed in two envelopes (outer mailing info, inner vote preference).

4. Votes are counted both by weight and by RFID scanning (whole containers of votes are scanned in batch) for redundancy.

5. Voters can check online in real-time if their vote was counted by searching for the RFID code they used.

6. Recounts are a matter of mass-scanning large containers (with appropriate chain-of-custody) of votes.

7. Tokens are reused to reduce waste.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

Voting by mobile is extremely problematic and shocking.

1. No paper record.

2. No privacy.

A better way would be to use anonymous physical RFID pebbles that are placed in a container to indicate voting preference. Votes can be both weighed and scanned for counting redundancy very quickly.

Mail-in voting would consist of mailing back the pebble chit in an outside return envelope with an inner vote envelope designating the preference; the outer envelope is removed and mixed with many others before sorting.

Then later, no matter how a vote was cast, it's possible to find how a vote was counted (by the voter searching for the RFID code(s) they used) in real-time because all votes were mass-scanned in RFID containers... that is, there will be a number of large containers that contain all votes for a particular preference in a particular election. Subsequent elections reuse the RFIDs to eliminate waste. No hanging chads, no provisional ballots, no hacked voting machines and no voting by mobile.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Public Transport in Wuhan Suspended Due to Coronavirus Concerns

Although true, Western meat agriculture isn't similar but different: zillions of animals, stacked one on the other and humans going in to clean up after them getting all that waste all over them. Either way, it's a bioreactor for evolving a pandemic. This is likely how we acquired many horrible persistent diseases: smallpox, avian flu, influenza, measles and many more.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Public Transport in Wuhan Suspended Due to Coronavirus Concerns

I've seen panic buying of face masks in Palo Alto and San Jose, mostly by people who appear of Chinese ancestry. I was doubtful on its efficacy, but it appears there is some benefit combined with hand-washing. It's probably a good idea to have hand sanitizer and face masks on-hand rather than waiting until they're sold out.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Millennials’ share of the U.S. housing market: Small and shrinking

Upsides to renting

+ often all-in/TCO cheaper than owning

+ less liabilities if/when expensive items break; landlord is in-charge of must repairs and expenses

+ easier to move

Upsides to owning

+ neighbors are further away

+ potentially quieter

+ customization (upgrades, ability to modify, holes in walls)

+ able to purchase reliable/cheaper over lifecycle (TCO) items

+ feeling of dominion/stability

There are other options too: rubbertramp/vanlife, leathertramp, oceantramp, go expat in cheaper countries

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

It depends where you are, but a lot of people are struggling more because the very rich are using automation to eliminate jobs, take the extra money made for themselves and more easily move factories to other countries by chasing the cheapest workers. Also, consider that the decaying of the welfare state in many places has led to increasing homelessness, worsening medical conditions, shorter lives and more misery. Then there's ageism, where older workers worry constantly that they will be fired for being old and they worry that no one will hire them. And then there's the homeless, which in America as not all people know, there is a very loose patchwork of few services to help people who are permanently disabled or unemployed (but could work) to find housing, support and work. In America, if you're broke or working dead-end jobs/below livable wages: "sorry, it's your own fault."

Only a privileged few can take sabbaticals or work wherever/whenever they want.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Airlines scour the world for scarce 737 Max simulators

Scrounging around for simulators or wondering how close it is to the real thing is moot because the 737 MAX is dead. The CEO is gone and there are more and more safety "glitches" being discovered. Even if they return them to service, who is going to fly on them? You? Sorry, but the cheapening-out on engineering and manufacturing over the years has eventually produced a New Coke, who's side-effect is that it kills the consumer. There's only "classic Coke" as a fix (737 NG), but that's not much better. In fact, Al Jazeera did an exposé in 2010 about the internal whistleblower who was ignored by Boeing management when it was revealed that substandard critical structural components made by subcontractor Ducommun were being crudely constructed by-hand and were grossly out of tolerances, yet Boeing management ordered them installed on customer planes anyhow. 737 NG's (-6xx, -7xx, -8xx, -9xx) have already been involved in hard landings and runway overruns where the fuselages broke apart, killing passengers, when previous similar airframes survived intact but were possibly damaged and needed inspections. These NG's are flying around above your head today, and it's unclear if the next landing or severe turbulence is going to rip the plane apart because it was either poorly engineered or poorly manufactured due to decades of lax "self-regulation"/regulatory capture and corporate greed. Some engineering areas and some planes were made better than others, but it's unnecessarily playing Russian roulette with people's lives because management used "creative" ways to cut corners.

If you want less micromorts, stick to well-maintained older 737's/777's and Airbus.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: WhatsApp is storing unencrypted backup data on Google Drive

If this pans out to be true, it wouldn't be a shock given that they went along with PRISM. If you want e2e privacy, use Signal. You don't use Skype, Apple Messaging/Facetime (maybe), Telegram, TikTok, Periscope, Facebook Messaging, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp or other new/random/ubiquitous app because you don't know who they're buying giving, selling data or getting hacked by.

PS: Has anyone used FireChat in a crowd scenario without internet? There's no privacy and Bluetooth MAC is identifiable obviously, but it circumvents turning off mobile and internet.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it

The two best tricks I've found:

0) Getting antidepressants because you won't want to do anything much when you're depressed.

1) Getting meds if you have ADD because you will always be starting something else to never finish in order to repeat the cycle over-and-over again.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet

It's not UC Davis or Europe. Btw, if living near the main centroid of Davis, it's faster to bike than it is to drive or take a bus because parking + walking takes time. I even had the gate code to park right next to classrooms (it's good to know the parking folks, especially on rainy days) but that still took more time and costed more money than biking. Davis is also one of the most walkable cities, especially living around downtown.

PS: I took the ten year professional student plan between working at Stanford for a couple years and consulting. I had half of my courses canceled in 2000 when they couldn't find lecturers because most were out making $250-500k in industry.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Eardrum Suck: The Mystery Solved

I have a 3 year old pair of QC 35 (I), and actually prefer the ANC sensation and lack of city noises. I really do prefer this model from the dozens I tried precisely because their ANC seems be the strongest/best currently available. I don't see any advantage in the QC 35 II, only disadvantages with mandatory Google/Alexa. I'm not married to any particular brand.

Also, I've gone through 9-10 pairs of ear cushions. The first 3 I got free (which retail for an insane $35 each), and the rest I bought from AliExpress in bulk for $6 each, which are 80% as good as the originals.

The QC 35 really hates moisture. Ever since one episode where they got a bit too damp, any amount of humidity now causes one ear cup to whine/hum at a low volume before exploding to full, deafening, microphone-speakers PA-system-like feedback right in your ear. I suspect some corrosion/intermittent short on the PCB and I'll go full Louis Rossmann if it gets worse or the battery degrades too much. I'm not handing $400 to Bose, Apple or anybody every 2 years because of their greedy cash-grabbing engineering products to fail/be avoidably fragile. (Tim Cook really ruined basically ALL consumer electronics, small and major appliances because said brands who cargo-culted Apple's approach now treat customers like idiots, hiked prices on their over-designed, over-engineered, under-tested products. I just saw a CBC video on kitchen appliance in Canada and customers keep buying crappy, defect models in droves that fail just outside of the warranty. That looks like a Lemon Law class-action lawsuit waiting to happen IYAM. The original MBPs and the ones from 2012-2013 were fairly well-made and upgradable.)

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest (2015)

There are risks almost everywhere. I remember seeing a combined risks map that showed there was really only a small patch in the southwest devoid of all types of regional major disasters. There is no "perfect" place to live, and you live in fear, you'll never live. And if you ignore the coming droughts and famines that maybe nearly global and everyday safety, then you're optimizing based on unreasonable, manufactured FUD from watching too much mainstream media rather than taking an active, data-driven approach.

I grew up in San Jose in the early 80's through the late 90's. When I was 12, I went through the Loma Prieta which had aftershocks for 2 days. I turned off the gas to every house on the block as a preventative measure. There was a lot of internal contents damage but the building codes worked out fantastically... there was very little actual damage except to poorly-engineered structures and structures on landfill that experienced liquefaction. The only real changes where anchoring bookcases and furniture to studs and Velcroing monitors to furniture.

In 2018, I evacuated with my mom from the Camp Fire. As the property had little fuel and large set-backs because of large, water-hungry lawns, the structure survived. What burned: wood fences, a very large shed, ½ cord of wood, almost all of the landscaping and a large blue recycle wheelie bin caught fire and melted into aggregate concrete in a ring. PG&E and the city have so far removed tens of thousands of trees such that a future mega-fire is highly-unlikely for at least 80 years, and they're doing the PSPSes. The worst case near-term is local brush fires. What may lead my mom to move would be if insurance rate go up any more as her CSAA (AAA) premium has doubled. The PSPSes are annoying because maintaining the fuel and oil on a generator is a pain and Xfinity (Comcast) infrastructure shuts-down after the first day.

Elsewhere the weather is horrible. You won't find better weather than the Bay Area outside of San Diego, parts of LA or Hawaii.

The biggest cases against living in the Bay Area are the cost of living (unless #vanlife) and the majority of people aren't planning on staying and so treat the area poorly and each other not so neighborly. These are compounded by the messy, inconsistent, unpleasant decline of American influence where there's a mass shooting nearly every day, terrible poverty like a third-world country and the largest military white elephant the world has known so far.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: Smart homes will turn dumb overnight as Charter kills security service

Think carefully and lock-it down (not as an afterthought), because unsecured IoT can be exploited to cause devastating harm.

Phoning home should be disclosed and disable-able because you're opening up an attack surface and a privacy risk. And, if there's no clock synchronization, it will be impossible to check the validity of X.509 certificates used in https://.

You should support APIPA and Zeroconf.

Bonus points for Bluetooth to allow configuration from a mobile app. The mobile app should also be able to securely download and send a firmware update.

ZigBee is also low-power and mesh oriented, but will need a bridge/gateway to the internet to be connected.

Device pairing like NetVue cameras having QR barcodes and/or Bose headphones with NFC might be Good Ideas™ too.

anon463637 | 6 years ago | on: A Sad Day for Rust

Forking if it's mature and featured enough to justify it, but it maybe too unsafe broken to invest in rewriting large swaths of code. That's the perpetual trade-off of engineering decisions; whether to build, fork or buy.
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