nadams

This is all I see on Chrome - http://i.imgur.com/TtHA9zh.png

MySQL has been one problem after another.

Please elaborate. MySQL/MaraiaDB can be pretty relaxed when it comes to SQL standards (which you can disable/tweak), but I've yet to have data loss or data corruption. And speaking from experience - the system would be at it's knees and MySQL would happily do it's best to answer queries.

I'm not saying Postgres isn't stable (haven't really used it) - I'm just rather suspicious of the comments here. I find it hard to believe that it's as broken as people here claim when big businesses are using it [1].

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113381/what-databases-do...

There are no infrastructure changes, or hardware required. This was one of FTC’s guidelines for the contest.

Unfortunately, Nomorobo is not available on traditional analog landlines or wireless phones at this time.

Sounds like he failed the challenge...

I don't think his idea is revolutionary - one could setup Asterisk to do what he did.

No offense but I didn't mention a specific VOIP provider on purpose.

However, callcentric already has it built and much easier to understand than twilio. I'm not saying that service is bad - but the average person doesn't know what API, cloud, or SIP means (or care). Callcentric makes it pretty obvious what their service is and provides and how to use it.

How on earth do "normal" people fall for this?

How do people fall for phishing scams or running malware from an email attachment? The answer to that question is the same to yours. I think it's a combination of lack of public education about scams and the belief that the email or phone call is legit.

And I think it's really interesting. A lot of people talk about "infected" PDFs - I've personally never seen that but what I usually see are:

invoice.pdf.exe

invoice.pdf.js

Most sane email providers should scrub that attachment (or bounce it) - however email providers such as AOL don't. Thanks AOL.

I run my own email service and I get emails like these all the time [1]. And if you are someone who takes the tollway daily it could be a scary email that you open right away.

I do want to mention Amazon's practices. So it appears their system glitches and spews out this email to random people [2]. This email is plain text and, at least the last time I logged into my account, has no indication that they want this information (it does say that "functionality is limited" but those instructions that say to login to the site and submit your information are incorrect which immediately makes me think it's a scam - it even has typos that you would find on a scam email!). It's even been reported that customer service says that it is a scam. However, it is real and an easy template to scam people out of their identity. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee at starbucks you can get an 800 number from a VOIP provider with faxing ability. I've contacted Amazon about it....and they just sent me the same email back. Thanks Amazon. (You don't know how tempted I am to write a cron job that faxes a copy of my drivers license to them every hour)

[1] http://i.imgur.com/GH46n92.png

[2] https://gist.github.com/nadams810/cb1a85514484c2659f1b

Once the relatives get wind of this, there is a simple solution. Get a new phone number for the person in question. And even more critical don't cancel the old one.

Or an even better idea - transfer the number to a reputable VOIP provider and setup the number so that it rejects calls from all numbers except for the ones you specify. Your loved ones can still call but any other scammer would get a busy signal or whatever you specify as the destination. You could even direct unknown calls to you (you can setup a time condition) - and that would give you the ability to add that number to the whitelist if it was a legit caller.

Added benefit - the service will be vastly cheaper.

If the old number has been cancelled, the scammers know you're on to them.

I can guarantee you that they don't care if you are "on to them". They just stop calling because no one is picking up the line.

I think the burden of proof falls under the one saying youtube-dl is illegal, doesn't?

I kind of figured it would be obvious BUT....

Two days after YouTube-MP3.org, a site that takes music videos and converts their songs into MP3 files, was blocked from accessing YouTube, the RIAA has asked CNET to remove software from Download.com that performs a similar function. CNET, which is owned by CBS, is the publisher of this news site. [1]

Here is information on youtube-mp3.org [2].

Please do see my other post [3].

I want to make it very clear - I do NOT agree with the rulings and RIAA bullying. If you want to be upset at someone - call your representatives and ask them to start passing laws that are in favor of scraping.

As an aside note - to expand on my original post. Emulators are not illegal by definition (unless they circumvent/bypass encryption - but that's a whole other ball of wax), downloading a free or open source community made ROM for the emulator is not illegal. It is, however, illegal to download a ROM for a copyrighted game. Now, Nintendo isn't going to come after you for playing an old NES game in the privacy of your home - it's still illegal but they aren't going to expend the legal resources and the amount of bad PR to make an example out of you. They may and probably will come after you if you sell or distribute said ROMS.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/riaa-to-cnet-follow-google-nix-vide...

[2] https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-mp3-fights-google-with-lawy...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10355992

Yes - see:

Cache-Control

Expires

max-age

See https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o...

I don't know what country you live in - but in the US it's pretty clear on the court's stance on scraping [1]. I'm not saying I agree with it - but that is the legal precedent.

Although these are early scraping decisions, and the theories of liability are not uniform, it is difficult to ignore a pattern emerging that the courts are prepared to protect proprietary content on commercial sites from uses which are undesirable to the owners of such sites.

Straight from the youtube TOS [2]:

Content is provided to you AS IS. You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content. You shall not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit any Content for any other purposes without the prior written consent of YouTube or the respective licensors of the Content. YouTube and its licensors reserve all rights not expressly granted in and to the Service and the Content.

It's apparent the RIAA that is also against it [3]. If you ask the RIAA - they will most likely say you did not purchase a legal copy of it - so therefore you shouldn't own a digital copy of it. Thus making it piracy.

It appears my original stance got lost - I'm not saying I agree with it - but these are the cold hard facts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping#Legal_issues

[2] https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

[3] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110208/01511613004/is-do...

I'm surprised to see this on HN. This should be called "Illegally download any song".

I think the project is extremely cool and you have props from me - but I hate it when people try to skate the simple fact that stuff like this is illegal. ROMs and emulators have shown up on imgur many times as "free" - like as if the publishers have released the rights to the game(s).

How often have I wished I could at least see the age of someone when reading through comments.

I don't know if age is as useful as something like list of projects, publications, or contributions. Something to denote saying "yes - this guy has been down the path I have and released it's a dead end" rather than just spewing what he learned in class or some random article on the internet.

Someone laughed at me on reddit when I told them you didn't need a lot of money to make a good game (as you can outsource if you need to - trust me there is someone in India who is willing to create that sprite sheet for less than $20 versus your artist friend would charge $200+). They claimed you needed like $X million. An obvious counter-example would be Terraria - I know not everyone likes it but I think it's a pretty successful and well put together game. It was made by 2 guys sitting in a home office somewhere. I asked him how many games he worked on - I believe he responded with, if I remember correctly, 3.

I really don't know why you are being downvoted - but this is pretty spot on. I know one of the science subreddits started to add flair for people who proved they had X degree or background. Which I think it great - you know you are talking to a biochemist working with real science and not just some guy who spent 5 minutes on the wikipedia page.

I know a lot of people want to be anonymous on the internet - and that's fine but it's depressing to see someone pretend to be an authority figure on a subject just to find out the person is a high school student (trolling or not). And it's usually pretty easy to spot.

If this [1] person was actually experienced they would know that the menu setups change depending on how you answered the question when Visual Studio first runs (at least it used to) - and menus/buttons may be missing/moved depending on that answer (I've seen this first hand and it's quite annoying trying to explain to click on something that doesn't exist). But instead he degrades the person asking for help.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/5fmcFUh.png

That doesn't stop people from trying. I'm sure some manager in some company is angry at his IT staff because he is trying to load 10GB of statistics into Excel and his staff is telling him that he shouldn't do that.

I recall a story about an infected version of qemu (might have happened to other software) for Windows. Basically they hacked the site, replaced the binaries with infected ones AND updated the hashes.

I also recall one or two stories where the binaries were infected but the hashes not updated - this was obviously caught pretty quickly and fixed.

However, I remember a time when Firefox served downloads directly from their mirrors. This case could be good for comparing hashes - but now it looks like they use Amazon's cloudfront.

But yes - for the average guy generating a hash for your releases (where your release and hash comes from the same server) doesn't provide any real benefit.

Not to be that guy - but did you test this?

    parameters = {'hostname': self.hostname, 'myip': myip}

    parameters = {'hostname': self.hostname, 'myip': ip}

    for host in hosts:
        print(host)

    for host in hosts:
        host.update(myip)
        print(host)

but they're... proprietary

Everything you ever wanted to know about Exchange [1] (but were afraid to ask). I personally use SOGo [2] as a Exchange ActiveSync provider but I know OpenChange is a project to implement the entire Exchange stack. So I would not consider it proprietary.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc307725%28v=exchg....

[2] http://www.sogo.nu/

I completely agree - things needs to be simpler not more complex. I believe a quote from Albert Einstein fits here:

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

Though I think I get why this email client and Android's Outlook [1] will hoover your emails to some other server - the server may have more processing power than your device. And/or use an RDBMS to index the emails which is better suited for a server than a smartphone. And that's fine - but the email client should be able to do this on it's own without the need for a server (and explicitly show a warning/message allowing you to opt-in to using the third party service). It will be slower indexing emails on your phone but that is the price you will pay.

And to be fair - I've tried almost every email client I can get my hands on: Evolution, Foxmail, Pegasus, Thunderbird, Outlook, ElementaryOS. To date no one has gotten calendar, contacts, and email better integrated than Outlook. Trust me I REALLY REALLY REALLY don't want to use Outlook - but I've yet to use an open source alternative where in 5 clicks or less I am syncing all those items previously mentioned. Thunderbird comes in second place - but I have to install 2 different extensions for contact and calendar syncing. The contact syncing has been hit/miss and the calendar syncing was stable for the most part. I should note that I don't use Exchange but I use iredadmin with SOGo.

I think SyncML was supposed to solve the whole syncing problem - but never really took off.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....

I think what Buge is saying is that some user X used the "find my contacts from my email" feature. Linkedin hoovered all emails (and potential conversations) and built a database of consisting of emails and conversations which looks like:

nadams sent email to moron4hire etc..

But moron4hire does not have a linkedin account, so what linkedin will do when I sign in I'll see the ability to add that email as a connection (and thus send them an email asking them to sign up for a linkedin account?).

I'm just guessing - for all I know linkedin has a crystal ball in the backroom.

If you used a credit card - you should have asked your credit card company to do a chargeback. I've only done about 4-5 in my life - and every time the credit card company always went in my favor. One time was even a scammy ebay seller - wouldn't talk to me so I contacted my credit card company told me to send the item back to his address and I would get my money back (the item in question was defective and did not state it in the ebay auction).

Unfortunately some people do abuse it - there was one guy who admitted on DSLreports forums that he uses his credit card to buy all items off ebay. And if he doesn't get it in 2-3 days he does a chargeback - even if he gets the item later. Which, I'm under the impression that when that happens Paypal may yank the funds from the seller's account. I don't agree with it - but I understand why.

My experience with Paypal disputes on the other hand...

I used buzzfeed as a quick popular example - but Yahoo news is just as bad. I recall a "scientific study" where there was a link between plastic and issues with fetuses. The yahoo news article proclaimed that there was a link, the actual science study said while there may have been related incidents but there was no positive link between the 2.

I saw many comments on facebook from pregnant mothers claiming that they threw away all plastic in their house. If they bothered to actually read the official study - they would know that was not necessary. I understand they wanted to be careful - but plastic and materials made of plastic have been around for many many years. Unless they were burning plastic or using plastic exclusively - judging from years of exposure I think there are more important household hazards than that.

Again - I'm more likely to believe a wikipedia article with cited sources than a bias site or news report. But yet when you are taught in class - that freewebs site that is made by some random guy is more of a reliable site than a site that can be updated and monitored by people around the world. That's my problem and point. For academia we shouldn't say "you can't use wikipedia but any other site is ok" - but rather "find N articles that support this fact or opinion - where wikipedia is ok to include as a supporting article".

Wiki is not a very reliable source for citations

I've always found this paradigm troubling. Any class I've been in has banned the use of wikipedia - but not big-jims-site-o-facts.com, freewebs.com/someuser/page-copied-from-wikipedia.html, or president-facts-dynamic-dns.us.to/obama.html . I'm not saying wikipedia is perfect - but the simple fact that people have bots that monitor pages for bad edits I'm much more likely to believe a wikipedia page than some random buzzfeed article.

I'm pretty sure alternatives already exist [1].

[1] http://beebom.com/2015/05/best-itunes-alternatives

This is why you should always be careful about black-box devices that you connect to the internet. It's convenient but extremely risky.

I just discovered that AstroBox runs their web service as root!

Mental illness aside - he accomplished something that I can only dream of. I'm sure if I sat down, quit my job, and read hundreds of tutorials I could come out with some sort of OS. I'm not a fan of the whole religious aspect - but the core of the project is pretty amazing I think.

I found this article [1] and I'm already suspect of FUD.

The first part talks about bluetooth pairing with the device - which requires unlocking. The second page talks about unlocking an iPhone with plist files from a synced computer. So it's not a matter of some magical device that can backdoor a phone - but rather using interfaces that already exist.

I found this company [2] and it has the usual marketing ploy - but a quick google search doesn't reveal any actual reviews of people using it. I can paragraphs of marketing spin but no one actually saying "we used this to get into cell phones that were password protected".

I'm not saying it's not possible - I just find it hard to believe without it making modifications to the underlying software (ie flashing a ZIP on android that zeros out the pin password or something).

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/michigan-state-po...

[2] http://www.cellebrite.com/Mobile-Forensics/Products/ufed-tou...

Is this workable?

I know in the Windows Mobile/Blackberry days if you typed in the incorrect password so many times it would reset the device.

However, with many Android devices now a days have the ability to have a "guest mode" - that is activated using a different unlock code. This mode can be limited to not even be able to make/receive calls. Arguably most people won't know what this "mode" is and if they are in it.

When they arrest you and take your phone (or anything electronic, really) the first thing they do is clone the memory

Depends on the situation. If it's a raid due to software piracy - then probably. If they pulled you over for speeding and arresting you - they probably won't or even know what to look for.

And I really can't think of a way to clone a device like an Android device without unlocking it. ADB now a days requires your explicit permission from a prompt. And if you are like "oh they have ways" I would be very interested in that because that sounds like whatever they are doing are using an exploit or some sort of back door.

The latest Oculus SDK (0.7.0.0) on Windows _absolutely_ fixes this mess.

Tried to use that to show it off to a friend on his desktop running Windows 10. Didn't work. The demo desk worked - but nothing else did. Also - didn't I read something where .7 is not backwards compatible with apps compiled for .6?

AMD drivers and the Rift's extended mode stopped working together.

I find extended mode only works for me on my AMD card. And I think this is part of the problem - there appears to be a number of "it works for me"/"it doesn't work for me" threads all over the Oculus Rift forum from people with varying builds including threads of "if you follow this incantation and sacrifice a chicken while modifying your registry - this will make the Oculus Rift work"

Also, if you haven't checked out the latest VR Desktop

I tried that out - but it crashed for me almost every time I tried using it.

For me the Oculus Rift has pretty much been a fail - I couldn't tell if the fail has been on my end (ie my desktop) or Oculus Rift's end. Though I really think if they hope to get a market share is to hire the guy(s) who has been working on JanusVR and make that a bundled "app". Right now that is the only reason why I don't just put it in a box and forget about it. Yes - I understand this is a "development kit" but I would like to know that it's functional before I develop for it. If people have to read out of the Necronomicon to use it - there is no point in developing for it. I feel like others share this opinion because I think Elite Dangerous implemented support but said that they won't update it until the Oculus Rift has a non-dev kit version.

I'm just frazzled because I purchased this $300 device expecting it to be somewhat stable - and it seems like something I would get out of a kickstarter.

In Visual Studio 2013 [1].

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2013/07/19/c99-librar...

My only question is have they fixed the whole driver problem yet?

The Oculus Rift DK2 was a complete disaster. I understand it's a "dev kit" but if they are to release it for general use they will need to drastically change the way the driver installs, the way it communicates error messages and issues with the connection.

It took me several hours to release I needed to move the Oculus Rift "monitor" to the right. And it's working "fine" on my desktop - but I can't get it working on a laptop (and current Oculus Rift statements suggest they will never support it on laptops...).