HN user

joshaidan

655 karma

I am a computer programmer and I've read Pride and Prejudice. I work in the telecommunications industry and program iPhone and Rails apps.

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www.nugget.ca 8y ago

Cell phone conversations being leaked to other callers in North Bay

joshaidan
2pts0
main.mp4.cbc.ca 12y ago

The Electronic Web: An 80s era CBC documentary on digital privacy [video]

joshaidan
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www.cic.gc.ca 12y ago

Santa granted Canadian citizenship

joshaidan
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www.facebook.com 13y ago

EHarmony experiencing +24 hour outage after scheduled upgrade

joshaidan
1pts0
twitter.com 13y ago

Programmers should take the day off today because Oct 31 == Dec 25

joshaidan
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mintchipchallenge.com 13y ago

Winners of the Royal Canadian Mint's MintChip Challenge

joshaidan
1pts0
www.cbc.ca 13y ago

CBC Ombudsman complaint: using the word hacker to describe criminals [pdf]

joshaidan
1pts0
joshaidan.tumblr.com 14y ago

Let’s Convince the Media to Stop Stereotyping Hackers as Criminals

joshaidan
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www.quora.com 14y ago

Oren Jacob describes how Toy Story 2 was saved from rm -rf *

joshaidan
2pts0
blog.plaxo.com 14y ago

Plaxo's servers used to access Google Accounts, and their cryptic response

joshaidan
6pts1
www.brianjones.ca 14y ago

Why Don’t Phones Let Us Record Calls?

joshaidan
36pts38
brianjones.ca 14y ago

Facebook to purchase old paper mill on Lake Superior

joshaidan
1pts0
www.npr.org 14y ago

Early Sound Recordings From Alexander Graham Bell Recovered, Played Again

joshaidan
17pts3
www.youtube.com 14y ago

Richard Stallman rebukes University for streaming with Windows Media Player

joshaidan
6pts0
www.chroniclejournal.com 14y ago

Economic growth is part of the problem, we need sustainability

joshaidan
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Could we improve password security by using a public/private key system?

joshaidan
1pts5
www.brianjones.ca 15y ago

Microsoft informs husband he infected wife's computer with virus

joshaidan
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www.youtube.com 15y ago

Preview of new features in iOS 5: Makes the iPad even more magical

joshaidan
11pts0
www.theglobeandmail.com 15y ago

Humans are capable of using echo location.

joshaidan
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www.brianjones.ca 15y ago

Recording of telephone scammer trying to get me to install spyware on my C64

joshaidan
1pts0

While reflecting on this--and ethical issues aside--it did occur to me that there's probably a lot more data you could collect from the audio gathered in the rainforest, i.e. what animals are active in what areas of the rainforest and what times, weather data such as intensity of rain or wind, volume of animal activity in a particular area of the rainforest, etc.

Have the creators of this project considered the privacy implications of capturing, recording, or analyzing audio from the rainforest? What happens if people are walking near a microphone and a conversation is picked up by the microphones?

I realize that the audio is probably analyzed for the sound of chainsaws, and then thrown away, but there's still the potential that such a system could be misused. So just wondering what people think about the ethical issues related to this technology.

There are many fraudulent USB sticks in circulation that report to have a high capacity (ex: 8GB) but are really only capable of storing a much smaller amount (ex: 1GB)... Internet searches such as "fake capacity usb" will turn up lots of disturbing information about this problem.

This caught my attention. Never heard of this problem before, but doesn't at all surprise me.

Stop blaming my feelings on other people. Always take ownership of how you feel; I'm responsible for my feelings.

For example, if I feel lonely because my friends didn't invite me to the party, don't blame them. Loneliness is my feeling, so I should do something about it. i.e. Go out and do something that I like, invite some other friends over, whatever... If I don't take any action, blaming other people for my feelings won't change how I feel.

Bilingualism in Canada is very common among French-English languages, and depending on what part of the country you live in, your exposure to both languages can be fairly even.

My favourite bilingual situations is seeing a child "complain/whine" to their grandparent in English while the grandparent tries to soothe the child in French. Both understanding each other perfectly.

Something that blew me away once was this one kid at church who spoke with a British accent--I believe he lived in Whales before moving to Canada. A week later I heard this same child speak with a perfect Québécois accent. I later found out his mom was from Montreal.

To me, obtaining bitcoin (or whatever crypto-currency) has been one of the most challenging aspects of using the currency. It's too hard to obtain. Mining these days isn't that feasible, but even if I could mine bitcoin, I probably wouldn't be able to do it at a rate to fund whatever venture I wanted to pursue. The only alternative is to purchase a crypto-currency with another real world currency, which to me seems to defeat the purpose of not having to depend on central banks or real world currency.

If there was a way for crypto-currencies to handle credit, I think that would greatly increase it's likelihood of replacing real world currencies and central banks--going mainstream. The money we use nowadays is transferable credit and central banks can produce enough to meet the demands of the economy. Crypto-currencies on the other hand are more like gold: there's a limited supply that doesn't meet the needs or demands of the economy.

I was enrolled in the French Immersion program. At my school, we had both English and French programs. One of my memories of being in French Immersion, which is likely of relevance to this article, is that I remember in the 7th and 8th grade one of my teachers (who was also the vice-principal) was concerned about the segregation between the students in the French program and the students in the English program. i.e. During recess the students French program wouldn't play with the students in the English program, vice versa. We may have had a name for students in the English program--but I can't remember it now.

The segregation in the older years wasn't as strong as younger years, but it still existed.

I find this story pretty fascinating. First, it's interesting how a broad attack, such as putting malware into software used by a large number of people, suddenly becomes a targeted attack: the attackers grab SSH keys and start cloning git repositories. I'm assuming that there was a significant number of victims in this attack. Were they targeting developers? Or did they just happen to comb through all this data and find what looked to be source code / git repositories.

The other thing I find interesting is this comment:

We’re working on the assumption that there’s no point in paying — the attacker has no reason to keep their end of the bargain.

If you really want to be successful in exploiting people through cyber attacks, I guess you will need some kind of system to provide guaranteed contracts, i.e. proof that if a victim pays the ransom, then the other end of the bargain will be held.

It might seem that there's some incentive for ransom holders to hold up their end of the bargain for the majority of cases if they want their attacks to be profitable.

I found the author posted this on Changelog:

Hi, Rooby is a new object oriented language I created recently (written in Go). It looks just like Ruby for now because it's mainly inspired by it. But I want it to be a new language and start developing its own feature when it gets more mature. So I'm looking for developers who also interested in this project, any help or idea will help me a lot.

https://github.com/thechangelog/ping/issues/698

I encountered "process as proxy" today dealing with Cisco. We were requesting a replacement for a defective part, they asked us for our serial number, which we provided, but then responded to us that our serial number was invalid. Likely because it wasn't registered. We were told that we had to contact our sales manager, or open a TAC with a different department because they department only deals with technical issues.

Could they not have done something to help us, maybe forwarding the ticket to the department that could register the serial number, to help us rather than just leaving us stranded? It's as though they want to follow process rather than helping the customer.

From my experience using public transit, there is a code of conduct which all riders must follow, and my understanding is that if you violate that code of conduct, you could either be fined, or if it's serious enough, banned from using public transit. (i.e. I think assaulting a driver or passenger could get you banned from using public transit) I imagine that if you were to behave on Uber the same way as you would on public transit, you wouldn't get banned (or rated low).

I wonder if there's some way to apply this to coding. Besides annoying my co-workers, would verbally talking about what I'm coding improve the quality of my code, or productivity? What about physical gestures?

This is the situation I am currently finding myself in. I work as a telephone switch administrator for an independent phone company in Canada. I've had this just for 13 years now, it was the only job I've had since university. My undergrad is in computer science. I ended up with this job because the company bought out a friend's ISP that I was helping run when I was in high school. It was a good job, nice company, they treat me very well. Pay isn't quite at industry standards, but back then I was living in an isolated Northern Ontario Community, so it was a decent job. Plus it allowed me to work from home.

But I love programming. I've been doing it ever since I was a kid on a Commodore 64. While I do get to do a good amount of programming, I wish I could do more. It would be awesome to get more into systems or embedded programming. I recently moved to Ottawa, one of Canada's major tech hubs, and I've been sending out resumes everywhere. So far I've only gotten one interview, which was at Shopify. But I didn't make it past the initial interview--there were too many other applicants with more experience than me. I've applied to other telecom related vendors as well, like Cisco, Genband, Nokia, etc. but I've never gotten a callback.

Now I find myself wishing that after graduating university I'd taken an internship at Nortel or someplace like that, so that I'd have it on my resume, and focused on my programming career rather than just keeping the same job. I find that all entry level job postings are for new graduates only. I've contemplated doing my masters so that I could "reboot" my career so to speak and become a "new graduate."

I implemented a very simple SIP and RTP stack using Ruby. At first it ran terribly, but with some tweaking, and I think running a newer version of Ruby, I got it so that the sound quality was very legible. Not perfect, but good enough. Ruby certainly isn't the best language for it, but it was a good learning experiencing in understanding how the protocol works. For example, I quickly learned what the "tag" parameter does.

Shared line appearance is a big feature missing from SIP based systems that I find frustrates a lot of users, particularly medical clinics. Nurses are used to the putting a call on hold on line 1, then telling the doctor or whoever to answer the call on line 1.

Reading the examples in the man page brings me back to a different era of modems and BBSs:

"The name 'Expect' comes from the idea of send/expect sequences popularized by uucp, kermit and other modem control programs."

"Cause your computer to dial you back, so that you can login without paying for the call."

"Start a game (e.g., rogue) and if the optimal configuration doesn't appear, restart it (again and again) until it does, then hand over control to you."

"Connect to another network or BBS (e.g., MCI Mail, CompuServe) and automatically retrieve your mail so that it appears as if it was originally sent to your local system."

"Carry environment variables, current directory, or any kind of information across rlogin, telnet, tip, su, chgrp, etc."

Interesting, I wonder why Facebook has this website blocked, preventing me from posting it on my wall.