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wampus | 10 years ago | on: How not to report on the encryption ‘debate’

I think universal end-to-end encryption is an all-or-nothing proposition. You can't sell it by saying, "It's secure, except when it isn't." It's also a slippery slope to establish a key escrow for the government; will it be a crime to encrypt using a key that isn't in escrow?

Encryption can facilitate evil, but it also protects against evil. Universal adoption is hampered by obstacles including:

1. It's hard to do.

2. It's hard to understand, even if the tools become more user-friendly.

3. Most people will share a private key with a stranger when asked.

The right way to handle this is to encourage people to use strong encryption and acknowledge that it can be safe from eavesdropping, but still subject to weaknesses or participants revealing the information in other ways.

wampus | 10 years ago | on: Your own Debian Mail Server (part II): how to prove you are not a spammer

I've run mail servers for decades without configuring them and have never had issues. Reputation is probably the most important (note that my domains and even some of my servers were online before these technologies existed) and it's extremely important to get your DNS right, especially Forward-confirmed reverse DNS (FCrDNS). Strictly enforce authentication on submission port 587 and segregate user submissions from application generated submissions so you can tweak each configuration appropriately. Keep in mind that marking messages as spam involves a complex chain of weighting, so if a minor adjustment gets your messages accepted, you could still be straddling a line and would benefit from fixing the basics. And never launch a server on an IP without first checking it against blacklists (demand a new one if it's listed anywhere).

wampus | 10 years ago | on: Rikers Drove My Innocent Patient to Plead Guilty

You're projecting your ire on the wrong person. I ride 20+ miles daily in large city with outdated, poorly maintained infrastructure for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike. I'm just trying to get to work, not break any speed records, and I'm extremely mindful of pedestrians (for their safety) and cars (for my own). I'm not the guy laying on the bell without reducing his speed or treating a shared trail like a personal racetrack. I've cycled my entire long life and hardly qualify as a hipster (not that it's pertinent). Whenever I've been in Europe, I have to remind myself when I'm back in the States that drivers won't stop for you when you step into the road, even when there's a sign in the middle of the crosswalk telling them to do so. I have no idea what I said to inspire your alienating rant, when it seems we both want the same thing.

wampus | 10 years ago | on: Rikers Drove My Innocent Patient to Plead Guilty

The tragedy of Rikers Island is that it's inhumane to everyone involved, guilty or not. I absolutely feel empathetic to all of them. It's disingenuous to suggest that it's a problem only because some of them might be innocent.

I'm not a hypocrite. I've had plenty of close calls, and some of them were my fault. I was lucky, but left the scene with full knowledge I was to blame. However, that's a personal acknowledgement; I would still do whatever it takes to stay out of jail, because the US prison system is broken and I don't want to get raped, beaten or forced to join a gang.

wampus | 10 years ago | on: Rikers Drove My Innocent Patient to Plead Guilty

Every fact in this story is presented in a way to support the author's premise, and there are no trustworthy narrators here. If you remove the emotion, an equally plausible scenario is that he rode past a school bus that had stopped to let out students and he ignored the signals. The story only says he wasn't drunk or speeding. It doesn't say he wasn't cited for violating other traffic laws, and clearly he was cited for something because he's in jail. The article's title tells you he's innocent, and you believe it. Fine. But guilty or not, the reason I'm glad he's off the road is because he killed a pedestrian with his motorcycle.

wampus | 10 years ago | on: Rikers Drove My Innocent Patient to Plead Guilty

The severity of his own injuries indicates that he might have been going too fast for the conditions (whether or not he was exceeding the speed limit, which nobody can confirm conclusively). In his version, "It was like he fell out of the sky," but that's a misleading comparison that paints him as entirely innocent. "The kid darted out from behind a bus," sounds more like a situation that required caution (was the bus pulled over to discharge passengers?). "Doesn’t he have any responsibility for what happened?" he says of the victim. Yes, he does, but the person who wields the most lethal power also bears the most responsibility. Unless a pedestrian intentionally and directly charged me or truly fell out of the sky, I would assume blame if I hit one while riding or driving.

wampus | 10 years ago | on: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

Apple has been a driving force for better UI in a number of areas, but some of their choices are baffling. Even in this page, the "Contrast" section uses a large black header, but a small grey font on a white background for the content. Who chose Shift-Command-] for switching tabs in Safari? Why include the power switch in the keyboard, which makes it challenging to clean? Could their glossy displays be any more reflective?

wampus | 10 years ago | on: How a keyboard changed what I look for in an editor

I learned how to touch type before home computers were commonplace, so I get frustrated when I can't close my eyes and type what I'm thinking. Maybe I'm a dying breed. I've had laptops with such difficult keyboards that I've turned them into servers that I can manage remotely, and others that I'll plug an external keyboard into to get a consistent experience. I can use a wide variety of keyboards, but some are just plain bad.

wampus | 10 years ago | on: How a keyboard changed what I look for in an editor

The keyboard's alright, but the spongy wrist pad is challenging to keep clean. I like the ergonomics of the mouse, but it's a dirt collector. They need to find a new material for the bottom that doesn't accumulate grit. The biggest problem with the Sculpt is that you can't associate new devices with a single dongle, so you'll tie up more USB ports unless you buy preconfigured combos. That's extremely shortsighted compared to Logitech, which allows you to associate up to 6 devices to a single dongle.

wampus | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: I have ssh, they have ssh, how can we chat?

You definitely don't want to name the alias 'say' because there's already an OS X command by that name. In fact, if you both have Macs and want to have some fun, create accounts for each other and use the 'say' command to use the speech synthesizer for chat. You can even choose different voices:

    man say

wampus | 10 years ago | on: Why did Borland fail?

What you don't understand is that Bill Gates is from the future. I don't wanna talk about time travel shit. Cause if we start talking about it, then we're gonna be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws. It doesn't matter. The point is, Gates grew up in a dystopian world and traveled back in time to divert money from the assholes that created it towards charitable enterprises to fix the parts of humanity that were breaking down. Only time will tell if this strategy will work, but we have all the time in the world (and then some), thanks to time travel.

wampus | 10 years ago | on: How I do my computing

My guess is that Netflix couldn't negotiate agreements for a lot of the content that makes the service attractive without relenting on DRM. We'll know when Netflix turns evil, because it will force you to sit through commercials and previews before showing you the content you want and paid to see.

wampus | 11 years ago | on: Let’s all laugh at my horrible 2006 post: “YouTube is not a real business”

Is that a good thing, though? I'm not a gamer, and there are times when I take a break from YouTube and Reddit because it can be difficult to discover new content without the results being dominated by gaming (especially Minecraft).

To an outsider performing random searches, it would seem our civilization is based on games, guns, fingernail polish and BDSM.

wampus | 11 years ago | on: Integer Overflow Bug in Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Agree with the first paragraph, but in the second I don't see how requiring a periodic reboot is a solution. Your "service needed" light is a "Case closed, WON'T FIX" message made real.

wampus | 11 years ago | on: Deprecating Non-Secure HTTP

The move to deprecate HTTP is solely inspired by the need to authenticate online communication. It's necessary to protect speech on the web, because it makes it harder to tamper with the content in transit. Your ISP shouldn't be able to inject ads into a web page, a WiFi access point shouldn't be able to change every "do" to "do not", and a passive listener shouldn't be able to collect information about you for his own gain. SSL/TLS is a huge mess and the current CA situation is abysmal, but authentication needs to happen now, or there will be no privacy or freedom on the Internet.

wampus | 11 years ago | on: Deprecating Non-Secure HTTP

That's true if you're trying to save money by putting a ton of domains behind a single wildcard cert using a single private key. But there are security advantages to using multiple wildcard certs based on different private keys. One of them is that you can develop a nearly infinite number of sites without exposing the domain name via the certificate, so they can't be crawled or pentested until they are deployed publicly. The number of certs you buy should be based on the number of private keys you can securely deploy.
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