HN user

agiacalone

497 karma

Professor, security researcher, Unix geek. Spends way too much time browsing TV Tropes. Ham Radio Extra Class (N6SH).

Contact me: anthonyg@sdf.org (Email) anthonyg@jabber.sdf.org (XMPP/Jabber) anthonyg@social.sdf.org (Mastodon)

PGP Public Key: https://anthonyg.sdf.org/pgpkey.html

Posts31
Comments131
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github.com 3mo ago

Bring Back Buddy

agiacalone
1pts1
github.com 3mo ago

Claude Code skill to preserve traditional Unix style conventions

agiacalone
3pts1
www.cnn.com 3mo ago

Anthropic's next model could be a 'watershed moment' for cybersecurity

agiacalone
5pts0
www.cbsnews.com 4mo ago

CBS News Radio to Shut Down

agiacalone
10pts0
www.reuters.com 5mo ago

Amazon plans to use AI to speed up TV and film production

agiacalone
1pts0
www.tomshardware.com 11mo ago

McDonald's Login Security Vulnerability

agiacalone
2pts0
www.nytimes.com 1y ago

Company's Surveillance Tech Makes Immigrants 'Easy Pickings'

agiacalone
12pts1
www.thestreet.com 1y ago

Microsoft exec sends stern warning to staff about return to office

agiacalone
21pts10
apnews.com 1y ago

California companies wrote their own gig worker law. Now no one is enforcing it

agiacalone
83pts60
variety.com 1y ago

X (Twitter) Sues Former Advertisers

agiacalone
36pts24
github.com 2y ago

GoofCord: Highly configurable and privacy-focused Discord client

agiacalone
3pts0
phys.org 2y ago

Pet parrots prefer live video-calls

agiacalone
81pts29
www.cat-gpt.com 2y ago

Cat-GPT

agiacalone
2pts0
forums.beamdog.com 2y ago

Icewind Dale 2 Enhanced Edition

agiacalone
2pts0
www.timesofisrael.com 3y ago

Iran to criminalize sale of VPNs used to skirt Internet restrictions

agiacalone
16pts0
cancel.fm 4y ago

Ripcord: Alternative desktop chat client for Slack (and Discord)

agiacalone
11pts6
github.com 4y ago

The Jargon File (Community Edition)

agiacalone
2pts0
eblong.com 5y ago

The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog

agiacalone
21pts0
www.cyph.com 5y ago

Cyph Secure Messenger

agiacalone
4pts0
reactos.org 5y ago

ReactOS Virus Discussion

agiacalone
2pts0
github.com 6y ago

Gas Mask – Hosts File Manager for macOS

agiacalone
1pts0
olduse.net 7y ago

Old Usenet

agiacalone
3pts1
tomasp.net 7y ago

What Should a Software Engineering Course Look Like?

agiacalone
1pts1
arstechnica.com 7y ago

Top two-player board games

agiacalone
1pts0
www.distributed-systems.net 9y ago

Distributed Systems (3rd Edition – 2017)

agiacalone
3pts1
www.openemu.org 12y ago

OpenEmu: Multiple Video Game System

agiacalone
2pts0
www.ietf.org 12y ago

The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)

agiacalone
1pts0
www.net-security.org 12y ago

Phone call more dangerous than malware

agiacalone
1pts0
www.economist.com 12y ago

The threat in the pocket

agiacalone
1pts0
www.economist.com 12y ago

Verify, then trust

agiacalone
3pts0
Dumbphone 2 2 months ago

100% agreed.

Once you get over the hump of "I don't need to be notified of everything" and start pairing down the notifications, I find that most of the time I can put my phone down and just get the right notifications on my watch.

When I need to respond to something, that's when I grab my phone (or laptop).

NetHack 5.0.0 3 months ago

Wow. Did not expect this when I logged in to HN today. It's 1998 all over again for me. :)

I count myself among this group. I actually emailed Adams sometime around 1999 or so to ask him a question about a game that I thought was his. Turns out, the game was included in a collection of Adams's games on the TI-994a (the game was called Knight Ironheart) and was in the same exact style and used the same interpreter as his own games.

He was super nice about it, explaining that he didn't actually author that game. We exchanged a few more emails back and forth, but overall a great experience chatting with him over the earlyish Internet. I feel very fortunate that I grew up in an era of computing where it seemed much smaller than it does today.

Just tested Soundcloud with a PWA using iOS Safari and Private Relay enabled. It works fine, albeit a few annoying popups asking to download the app.

Project Gemini 8 months ago

Also, part of the idea is discovery through linked high-quality sites. Like the webrings of the 1990s.

You find a capsule you like and discover others through that person's links.

Project Gemini 8 months ago

I've had a Gemini Capsule (what Gemini calls a 'website/blog' since about 2021. It gets very little traffic, but it's fun to have. Browsing the smallweb is nice in the evenings when I want a high signal-to-noise ratio of interesting content.

I would be immensely skeptical of this unless he was talking about something much more narrow, like how there's a fraction of people who have really unfortunate genetics and can only improve their blood lipids with medication.

I am one of those unfortunate genetic people, sadly, and have had high cholesterol numbers since my early 20s. Most of my older grandparents passed from heart disease. Now in my 40s, have a decent diet, and my numbers are < 100 for LDL. Current (and previous) PCPs have indicated to me that diet will have little effect for me, and that I will likely be on statins for most of my life. Experiments with stopping the statins have shot my LDL numbers through the roof.

The good news is that it's a pretty low dose with decently high effect.

I teach CS at a state university, specifically computer security. At the beginning of this semester, I did a poll of my students and asked if they use any form of ad-blocking. Less than a third of my students did, and not many more even knew about browsers other than Chrome or Safari. This was out of a class of ~110.

Granted, it's anecdotal, but if 66% of my upper-division CS students don't even know about Firefox and ad-blocking, than I seriously doubt many non-tech people do.

Similarly, after that lecture, I had a student come to my office hours and ask for more info about ad-blockers. I had them open up msn.com and showed them the large banner ad on the page. It took a few seconds for them to even realize they were being advertised to! I then showed them my browser, nice and ad-free.

I get the impression that people have gotten so used to ads flashing in their face that they gloss over them. But the damage is still done.

I think the conclusion of this article is slightly flawed. The issue isn't with engagement with the training (although, the typical corporate training material is pretty bad), rather how we go about teaching cybersecurity.

I take a page from Jayson E. Street's DefCon talk from a few years ago with my students: promote "Security Awareness", not Security Training. Get people to think about what is being asked of them and the consequences of said actions. People tend to take "Security Training" as "I need to remember A, B, C, etc." Humans are bad at this sort of thing, typically.

I admit that "Security Awareness" isn't all that easy, but clearly our current approaches leave much to be desired.

I’m pretty sure that Gopher was only “Green on Black” because many of the terminals used to display them (ie. DEC’s VT220) used green phosphors.

If you had a white phosphor terminal, it would have been White on Black.

Brave's adblocker won't do anything against Google's trackers if Google builds it in to the engine.

Again, I advise against trusting anything Chromium-based.

Also, you apparently haven't heard of uBlock Origin's Medium Mode. Brave can't even touch that. There's more than just advertising to worry about on the web.

Sorry, but I'm not going to trust any browser based on Chrome. Even Brave.

It's not long until Brave won't be able to support Manifest V2 as Google has every interest to kill it completely.

I was there too.

Napster was good because it was new. And the music was yours when you got it.

Never used NAV. Never cared to. Linux didn't need it.

Hated Flash too, and never used it. Internet was still great without it.

WAP was new, too. But Ethernet existed, and we wired our house.

Used Firefox/Netscape Navigator. Avoided IE pages like the plague.

I do malware research. You're grossly underestimating how common malware is today. Ever hear of ransomware?

Not everything on the Internet is better today. Some things are, but many are not.

And don't even get me started on the cesspool that Reddit is.

CueCat 1 year ago

I work as a lecturer on a college campus. Printed QR codes are everywhere.

I even give a lecture to my advanced compsec class where I take a bunch of real flyers from all around campus and replace them with my own QR code.