controversial97

Have you considered how much money you could loose to credit card chargebacks and similar fraud?

How will you stop a flood of scammers trying to use your service to pay a 'freelancer' that is actually an accomplice in Nigeria by paying with a credit card then calling the card company and saying they never did that, or using stolen cards?

Have you seen the recent news stories about North Korea using fake identities and proxies to get North Korean workers remote jobs?

You will need to verify the identities of people you are sending money to.

This sounds like a cryptocurrency exchange with extra steps. Cryptocurrency exchanges have found it very difficult to avoid having their bank accounts closed as soon as the flood of fraud claims starts. Expect most banks to refuse to give you a business account as soon as you mention cryptocurrency.

There are lots of laws around this such as international sanctions, money transfer laws, money laundering regulation, the US Patriot Act, and the requirement for a payment processor to submit form 1099-K to the IRS for anyone receiving over $600.

The entity that is paying will, in many cases, be required to withhold 30% and give it to the IRS, so it will not be as simple as a client just paying you with a credit card. "Withholding tax" can be complicated.

"with the latest policy update in 2021, WhatsApp made data sharing with Meta mandatory for all users"

"Given the network effects and lack of effective alternatives, the 2021 Update forces users to comply, undermining their autonomy, and constitutes an abuse of Meta’s dominant position"

"all users in India [...] will be provided with [...] the choice to manage such data sharing by way of an opt-out option"

The background to this:

In the early 2010s Whatsapp charged a $1 per year fee, which brought in hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 2014, Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19 billion.

Before the buyout, Facebook claimed they would not be able to link Whatsapp and Facebook accounts.

After the buyout they did that, they began doing things like using location tracking in Whatsapp to allow Facebook to know where someone has been and use Whatsapp calls to allow Facebook to know more about who a person is in contact with.

Meta has been fined much more money by the EU and UK for things they have done with Whatapp.

In comparison, this $25 million fine is so tiny that they won't care about the fine at all.

India forcing them to give everyone in India an opt-out option is a worthwhile win.

I think it is a good thing that people in India will be able to use Whatapp with somewhat more privacy.

I think this would be better with a "How do I use this?" section at the top.

Normal people are unaware that the person who wants to receive a file or message should be the one who generates the key pair (in a public key system).

"To use this, the person who wants to receive a file or message generates a key pair, saves the links on their computer then sends the public link to a friend who uses it to encrypt, saves the encrypted file then sends it to the first person by any convenient means such as email. Messages and files are not stored on this website or sent to this website."

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40742556

On-device scanning of files is not "New Tech"

This video is someone vaguely rambling about EU chat control.

DRM is "Direct Rendering Manager"

KMS is "Kernal Mode Setting"

In Chrome browser on Windows and in Firefox and Chromium on Linux, the text on the /signup page is black. The background is black. That makes the text invisible.

The create-an-account pages have black text on a black background.

The text and submit buttons are not visible unless you ctrl+a or drag-select.

It sometimes makes sense to made a distro that is specifically for new or unusual hardware.

I point to Asahi Linux, supporting Apple computers based on their M1, M2 and M3 ARM cpus is a load of work that is still in progress and sometimes issues are only found when a load of people use it. Eventually the source code that has been written or modified to support Apples relatively-new hardware will reach mainstream distros so people can run Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat etc on an M1 mac with working sound, gpu etc.

If some new RISC-V single board computer reaches the market it might make sense for someone to make a distro specifically for it.

A distro for specific hardware may get better performance by being compiled to use the specific instruction set and cpu features.

VOLMET radio transmissions, which are computer generated voices reading out weather information on shortwave frequencies are getting much less range than usual.

Listening on some WebSDRs, overnight Shannon VOLMET on 3413KHz upper-sideband from Ireland was too weak to understand in continental Europe.

The 8.957 and 13.264 daytime frequencies have mostly faded out at my location in the uk.

http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/?tune=13264USB

This creates a booby trap for everyone who avoids using a Microsoft account to log on to their computer.

If you use a local account and don't keep a backup of your bitlocker key then you can loose all your files if windows won't boot.

You can't take the drive out and read it with a different computer if you don't have the bitlocker key.

Debian stable, but my hardware is all old.

Hardware that uses a new chip, such as some wifi devices released in the last couple of years, may require using a kernel from backports or waiting a couple of years for a new major version.

I like that Firefox still exists, despite the questionable management at Mozilla, and this is almost entirely funding it.

At least some good comes from this.

Two weeks ago that website said that they are moving their office and lab from one US state to another:

http://web.archive.org/web/20240406204554/https://www.greena...

The website was/is served by an ip address that appears to be a home or office internet connection from a large cableTV ISP in the city they are moving away from. Out of date Apache httpd.

Perhaps whatever server, old PC or raspberry pi they use to serve the website is current in the back of a moving truck.

Perhaps they have not got internet installed to their new office yet. Perhaps the internet at their new office is CGNAT so they can't directly host a webserver on it.

Windows file explorer parses files in the folder you are looking at.

It does things like read jpg files to get the date that that a photograph was taken from the EXIF data, read eml files to get the date that a saved email was received and read mp4 files to get "DateReleased" or "DateEncoded".

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230921-00/?p=10...

I prefer having a medium amount of RAM, 32GB, because I mainly run Linux with xwindow and many years ago I generally found that it handled out-of-memory condition very poorly.

I do not like the whole of xwindows crapping out or applications being killed.

I don't really know if it is better than fifteen years ago and have little interest in finding out.

Also I sometimes have 9000 browser tabs open.

Perhaps search hnn for "cryptocat" which was an attempt to do e2e chat through a website a dozen years ago. It was somewhat controversial at the time.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cryptcat

The author gave up on it after a while and the website stopped working.

Anyone doing that should be warned that it is not unusual for a new laptop to have the harddrive/SSD encrypted with bitlocker without any notification to the user.

If you don't create a Microsoft account and then later the laptop won't boot or the TPM gets erased then you loose access to all the files on it if you didn't make a copy of the bitlocker key. You can't take the hdd/ssd out and read it using another computer.

You can also be screwed if you don't have access to the email address used for the Microsoft account.

Yes, people should have backups but they often don't.

This reminds me of a thing from a few years ago, my vague memory is that it was by Travis Goodspeed.

A smart TV would accept a firmware update from a file on a standard USB stick.

The TV reads the file start to finish to check the digital signature then reads it again to update.

A device that is pretending to be a USB storage device can send a manufacturer firmware file the first time then send your unofficial firmware after.

https://xkcd.com/195/

A radio club in the Netherlands were able to receive it with their twenty five meter diameter dish.

https://www.camras.nl/en/blog/2024/uhf-signals-of-japanese-m...

Until about the year 1993, 3.5" disks were very reliable if you didn't abuse them.

Around the early days of windows 3.11, someone figured out how to make cheaper 3.5" disks and putting data on off-brand disks became a gamble.

Enticed by the low price, I bought several boxes of ten floppy disks that had plastic shutters instead of metal. A few from each box of ten had bad sectors from new.

I end up trying to only use TDK disks, though later in the 1990s it seemed to me that the quality of new 3.5" floppy drives went down as well.

I think the number of UK people who are inconvenienced by not getting huge 5G speed is small.

Two of the UK cellular networks are completely turning off 3G service over the next few months, which will allow them to use more radio spectrum for higher speed data.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quick-analysis-starlink-link-...

I don't think that polarization makes any practical difference to how hazardous non-ionizing radiation is. Please show a reference to back up your claim.

How do you think polarization makes any difference if a ten-millionth of a watt at 12GHz hits your skin?

In the example of standing ten feet from a cellphone base station, I point to IEEE C95.1-2019 which specifies a maximum of 2watts per square meter (below 6GHz) which does not worry me at all.

Here is another figure for you: The total power of the cosmic background radiation across 1 to 200GHz or so is 0.000003 watts per square meter

At the earths surface, the total power of the cosmic background radiation is higher than the power level of the starlink downlinks!

http://bostonastronomy.net/Power.html

The RF power from Starlink satellites that hits the outside of your body when you are outside is very very tiny.

It is estimated at 0.000000294 watts per square meter.

That amount of energy is much smaller than the 1000 watts per square meter of terahertz radiation, sunlight, that would hit you when stand outside in your swimming trunks on a bright cloudless summers day.

If you climb on the roof of a building and stand ten feet from a cellphone base station antenna there might be a few watts per square meter hitting your body.

It is not uncommon for a microwave oven to leak a couple of watts.

In a typical town the power level from starlink satellites is weaker than TV stations and 88-108MHz FM stations by a factor of at least tens of thousands.

Discussion at a slightly earlier post about this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38808026

I presume this open Mozilla issue is related

"incorrect relative order of Subject attributes"

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1864204

It appears that they didn't exactly follow the long complex technical requirements for how a web certificate should be formatted. I have no idea if this could somehow be a security hole.

He also paid $300 million for a minority share of a website for finding someone to walk your dog and invested $375 million in a company that failed to make robots that can make pizza.

It was not just WeWork that set his reputation as an investor.

In my opinion, all that matters is that you look at the screen while typing, not at the keyboard.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955264

I can say from personal experience that for at least five years it has been common for small companies to buy a laptop direct from Dell and for it to have a bitlocker encrypted drive without anyone choosing that.