rfrec0n
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11 months ago
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on: The Guardian flourishes without a paywall
They revealed the existence of PRISM and afterwards published lots of analysis on the Snowden leaks. I believe they were also involved in the Panama Papers and I believe they broke the news about a UK/US black site and some war crimes after the invasion of Iraq
rfrec0n
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1 year ago
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on: The reckless policies that helped fill our streets with large cars
Cars of all sizes are usually much cheaper outside the US, so I don't think it's a price thing. Maybe just because they don't spend as much time in the car or something?
rfrec0n
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1 year ago
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on: Meta Reports First Quarter 2024 Results
When Facebook says "users" in claims like these, what they actually mean are accounts. This statistic includes all the multi accounts, fake accounts, spam accounts, and bot accounts. They have been getting sued over the past several years for charging advertisers when a bot or fake account engages with the advertised content.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/meta-platforms-must-face-adver...
rfrec0n
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1 year ago
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on: Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar
To be fair, nobody actually neeeds cruise missles
rfrec0n
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2 years ago
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on: Beeper Mini is back
Yes I'm well aware. What I'm talking about is iMessage doing it's own compression, which is more than what the carrier limit requires, as well as stripping file formatting from images and making them all JPEG. Me and my wife are on the same family plan so we have the same carrier. If the 32kb was a carrier limit, then the pictures I send my wife would be 32kb and just as blurry as the ones she sends me. They aren't, however. They're only compressed enough to where the fit the MMS size limit for the carrier
rfrec0n
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2 years ago
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on: Beeper Mini is back
Have you tried sending a picture via iMessage MMS? My wife's iPhone compresses every single picture she sends down to like 32kb and converts it to a JPEG. That's with the setting to compress images to save data turned off (I'd hate to see what it sends when its turned on). The pictures I send her arrive only compressed down to 700k-1.1mb and retain formatting and even transparency (our carrier limits MMS messages to 1.2mb).
Oh, what's even better is that it tricks the iPhone owner into thinking that a full resolution image was sent. On my wife's end she see's the full resolution original format image in the messages thread, not the blurry 32kb version everyone else gets so she had no idea that this happens.
rfrec0n
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2 years ago
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on: WiFi can read through walls
Walls of homes are usually insulated enough to make an IR camera useless unless it's inside the home. It would be good for identifying cracks that heat can seap through though. Surveillance by laser microphones can easily be mitigated by curtains or blinds. Both of those also require the person spying to intentionally use them to spy. There is no legal commercial device that could prevent your neighbor's Xfinity Hotspot from selling what you do in your own home to Facebook/Google to use to target you with ads.
rfrec0n
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2 years ago
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on: Every Louisiana driver's license holder exposed in cyberattack
From my brief experience working at a similar company, calling the software they use closed-sourced is a bit of a reach. When I worked there, we almost exclusively used rebranded and slightly modified open source/freeware CMS systems. Actually the only software we sold that was completely developed in-house were testing/configuration tools or extremely simple and basically worthless LDAP auth based reporting programs that could only be used on-premise.
rfrec0n
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2 years ago
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on: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
> cars _save_ _time_
Cars only save time if there aren't very many of them. Look at Northern Virginia, at 3 A.M you can drive 10 miles in 10 minutes because the roads are direct and have high speed limits, but that same drive would take close to an hour during the day.
rfrec0n
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2 years ago
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on: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
> One average US citizen produces around 20 tons of CO2 per year. A bus needs 3 of them working full-time. This completely dwarfs the emissions due to fuel use.
Are you trying to say that these people wouldn't already exist without the bus? So everytime we commission a new bus, 3 fully grown licensed drivers appear in a flash of smoke from the storage compartment of the bus?
rfrec0n
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3 years ago
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on: Java 20 / JDK 20: General Availability
I think this is supposed to be the last preview version of FFI and the other JEPs from Project Panama, so hopefully we will have them at least but I definitely share a bit of that concern.
rfrec0n
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3 years ago
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on: Sci-Hub: knowledge as a human right
Surprisingly, China has lifted some 800 million people from poverty so it does happen. I'm not a communist and wouldn't prefer a communist country but I've gotta give credit where it's due.
rfrec0n
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3 years ago
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on: JPMorgan to spend $1B on rental homes in the US to become a megalandlord
There are no examples in the past 40 or 50 years. The country is infested with illegal monopolies. At this point there really aren't any industries left that aren't completely dominated by 3 or 4 massive companies. This has even spread to industries which have been historically immune to monopolies for various reasons, such as local news, FM radio, primary care practicianers, hardware stores, textbook publishing, car/heavy equipment mechanics, etc.
rfrec0n
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3 years ago
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on: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code
A tool can't be held accountable and can't infringe on copyright or any other law for that matter. It's more of a product. It seems to me like it's a gray area that's just going to have to be decided in court. Like did the company that sells the tool that can very easily be used to do illegal things take enough reasonable measures to prevent it from being accidently used in such a way? In the case of Copilot, I don't believe so, because there aren't really even any adequate warnings to the end user that say it can produce code which can only legally be used in software that meets the criteria of the original license.
rfrec0n
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3 years ago
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on: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code
Right, but what if you commission an artist to create a work similar to an already existing piece of art and the artist decides that the most efficient way to do that is to just place the original piece of art in a photocopier, crops out the copyright notice and original artist's signature, and sells you the resulting print?
rfrec0n
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3 years ago
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on: About Lockdown Mode
rfrec0n
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3 years ago
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on: GitHub is removing the Trending Repositories page
This is weird and the low usage thing seems totally incorrect. Pretty much everyone I know who knows about GitHub uses the trending page.
rfrec0n
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3 years ago
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on: NSA's Warrantless Wiretaps (2012)
To be fair, supernatural beliefs are fairly common amongst olderish veterans of the IC/DoD because those agencies spent/spend billions and billions of dollars a year on programs for things like that (mind reading, controlling the physical world with your brain, remote viewing, binaural beats, etc). The popular movie The Men Who Stare At Goats was based on a non-fiction book/documentary, which is unbelievably crazier than the Hollywood version.
rfrec0n
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3 years ago
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on: Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
My student loan payments will probably be around $1200 a month after I graduate and a studio apartment in my pretty small city is $900 without utilities. I could probably survive on a $35k salary but I'd have to switch to income based repayment on my loans which would suck because I'd like to eventually be able to buy a house
rfrec0n
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3 years ago
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on: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year
None of those companies have gone bust though. RCA got purchased and integrated by/into GE, Kodak filed bankruptcy but still exists with a significant number of employees, Tektronix is currently a fortune 500 company, Novell is now owned by Micro Focus, Lotus was never that big of a company, but they still exist and are doing pretty poor but still sell cars, AOL still exists and is owned by Yahoo, MySpace still exists and is owned by an advertising company and the other 2 or 3 I've never heard of.
