thricegr8

Wow thought I was the only one my entire life. I can give lots of very weird and specific examples, but yes; N=2.

This is an awesome tool and something I've been trying to do for too long. I've been trying to find ways of "quasi-replicating" SPA's like this and then doing analysis on them.

Can you talk a little bit about your approach? Any recommend readings or other tools for inspiration?

Thanks!

I know this seems the antithesis, but I've always wondered if you could fold and mangle cURL to actually act as a web server?

Can you expound on this?

Cross-posting /r/bestof (https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/113casc/scientis...) because it really does a nice job with history and breaking down the highlights (to me at least:)

-------- Reading the paper, this is the best summary I can make. Note that I'm an engineer, not an astrophysicist.

The basic thought is that in 1963, a guy named Kerr seems to have come up with the best approximation of black holes. Many observations have been made of various black holes, and they seem to line up with his proposals. The issue is that this solution has a nasty singularity in it, which is very very extreme and doesn't really "match" the rest of nature. However, it's the only plausible explanation for the behavior seen in black holes.

People have been trying to solve this for ages. A bunch of people have different ideas for how we can resolve the singularity issue - maybe the event horizon is moving with the universe's expansion, or something funky happens to physics at high density (like how quantum mechanics gets weirder as you get smaller), or maybe the mass is somehow moved forward/backward in time and this merely appears to be a singularity from our vantage point.

However, all these are flawed because they don't take into account the fact that black holes are spinning. When you make the black hole spin, these theories all fail in one way or the other - they give the wrong results in short timescales, or they give the wrong results in long timescales.

In 2019, 2 guys named Kevin Croker and Joel Weiner demonstrated that the universe's expansion rate varies based how heavy the space next to it is. (That is a link to a summary of the paper.) This 2019 paper basically solved some questions about Einstein's equations, and importantly it also possibly answers some of the questions around singularities - even spinning ones. However, it didn't delve too deep into those questions, saying they should have a follow-up study.

This new paper is the follow-up study of that paper. It basically holds that "yes, that theory does solve the issue of singularities." They go on to say that the stress that a black hole puts on an object (its gravitational pull) can vary based on how quickly the space near the black hole is expanding.

Because the space near the black hole is expanding at different rates relative to seemingly "minor" (on the scale of the black hole) sizes, you get fluctuations to the gravitational pull that appear to be shifted through time. The paper's authors liken this to how redshift works with light; further away objects are more red than closer objects just because the light's wavelength increases with distance. The difference is that the change in gravitational pull is shifted based on time instead of distance (remembering that time is intrinsically linked to space and that we already know black holes distort time).

The paper claims that the necessary outcome of this is that you now have a physical object ("relativistic material" in science words) that must be intrinsically linked to the universe's expansion rate - as the expansion rate changes, that material also changes (or perhaps vice versa). They call this a "cosmological coupling" between everyday physics and the universe's expansion rate.

You can use the strength of this coupling (i.e. how intensely some mass is tied to the universe expansion rate) and plug it into the old 1963 Kerr equations and suddenly they work without needing weird singularities. You still get a singularity at 0 (i.e. no relation between universe expansion rate and mass), but since we know that there is a link we know that it should always be > 0 (i.e. no singularity).

They predict that for black holes you can expect that number to be about equal to 3, give or take, and such a result lines up with the 2019 paper.

Now that they have an idea of a mechanism, they can use the scientific method to see if they can experimentally replicate their hypothesis. There should be a detectable difference between the "classic" singularity approach and a "not a singularity but pretty close" approach, and they are trying to detect this by looking at how black holes gain mass.

Specifically, they're looking at supermassive black holes which seem to grow in mass as they age, even though there shouldn't be a link between time and black hole mass. Because these old galaxies are "dead", the black holes have no way to gain mass by "eating" the stuff around them, and so science currently doesn't know why these black holes appear to be growing with time - they must be growing because of some other mechanism.

The paper goes on to say they're going to do an experiment to see if that "cosmological coupling" factor actually ties in to the size of the black hole, and if the expansion of spacetime local to the black hole may explain why the black hole appears to be gaining mass when it shouldn't.

They do some experiments, blah blah blah, traditionally if there was no link between expansion and ages they "should" get the number 0 according to the 1963 model. Instead they got a value of about 3, consistently, no matter how bad the redshift was. There's a graph, it's probably closer to 2.96 than 3.14 so don't get your hopes up for some weird cosmological coincidence. They can say with 99.98% confidence that the number is not 0 like the 1963 model assumes.

They go on and say this validates their hypothesis, that a singularity explanation is not needed, and that black holes will always grow at a constant rate of about 3, using the equation a3.

They say this means black holes are made of "vacuum energy" and because of the law of conservation of energy black holes cause spacetime to dilute at a-3 , meaning this constant growth rate is causing the universe to expand (or maybe vice versa - but they appear to be related).

They do more math to prove this also holds with everything we know about universe expansion so far and that the rate of universe expansion matches what we should expect with the number of black holes we think there are.

They are careful to say this doesn't prove anything, it just demonstrates a probable link with high confidence. They give examples of further experiments that could potentially disprove their theory:

Checking the cosmic microwave background radiation to see if the numbers still line up

Checking to see if black holes reduce the energy of gamma ray bursts by an amount predicted by their theory

Checking that when two supermassive black holes collide, the result appears to gain more mass than what traditional science would expect (but would be in line with this theory, i.e. a factor of 3)

Stare at a pulsar orbiting a black hole for a decade or so and see if you can see the pulsar's orbit change according to their theory

Their theory implies that there are more massive black holes than what we observe, so someone should check to see if there's a reason why black holes aren't getting as big as this theory suggests (is there some constraint that blocks black holes from growing?)

They don't have the exact formula, only that an exact formula should exist. Someone should work it out. There is a competing theory that solves issues with quantum mechanics that may not line up with this theory; someone should check

Take more measurements and replicate this experiment to verify the numbers are correct with a larger sample size

Check quasars with a redshift of 6 and see if the math still maths

And then they say thank you and do more math. Again, I'm not an expert here so maybe I misunderstood some things, but hopefully that makes things easier to understand. It seems like the 2019 study was more impactful, and this mostly affirms the 2019 study.

Some of the best, most elucidating insights into CORS I've read.

Looking more closely you are right, my apologies. Thank you so much. Have not seen this video before but it does cover what I'm after. Thanks again!

Yes! You're right. Here is what I was after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlrHNKatHMc

Thanks much!

Unfortunately no dice. It's a more recent video, maybe 5-7 years old. Modern stage.

I was wrong on this. See my comment above. I thought inspecting the certificate would be enough to tell you? I don't see the blob in any cert details. Where did I error?

Ah yes, perhaps a bit more due diligence was required.

Can someone help me out then here? I checked the domain here: https://phonebook.cz/, but manually inspecting the certificate, I don't see the * in front of okta.com to denote a wildcard domain is in use(*.okta.com). What am I missing?

What's really concerning is if this turns out to be true, Okta has, at a minimum 26k (yes), customers right now. A simple enumeration of subdomains reveals this. I've put them here in a paste: https://ghostbin.com/K7tIA

I bought a few shares in May of 2021 so I'm feeling it a bit. May also just buy the dip :)

Ya know, you're right. I guess I assumed the OP meant more along the lines of "What was your favorite podcast episode you listened to this year" vs the more literal translation. I'll throw in an edit to clarify.

Undoubtedly that personal award goes to Citations Needed Episode 73: Western Media’s Narrow, Colonial Definition of ‘Corruption’. You can read the transcript on Medium [1] or listen on Spotify [2].

It may seem a bit bromide for HN, but it really shattered my world view. Or at least was the impetus of a rather radical shift in how I viewed global power structures, old wealth, and the evil systems in place today that continue to perpetuate global inequality. In the episode, they dig into these popular "corruption" indices, why the Global South is always painted as the "most corrupt", true sources of institutionalized corruption, where the real tax havens and how they operate. It even highlights a (previously unknown to me at least!) stark and admittedly macabre distinction between London, the city in England and the ancient The City of London [3]. Yes there is a huge difference with the latter being a 1,000 British colonial-era holdover that's home to the largest tax haven hub in the world.

As a bonus, it features Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist who wrote The Divide [4]. Which, for reasons outlined above, is also one of my favorite books ever. If you find my poor attempt of summary or the article/podcast interesting, I'd implore you to buy the book and learn something new.

All the world is a stage and indeed we are merely players.

[1] https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-73-western-medias...

[2] https://open.spotify.com/episode/7cf3g7670FYKrD9OE6vHQd?si=v...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

[4] https://www.jasonhickel.org/the-divide

Edit: Just to clarify, this episode is from 2019. I did not interpret the question clearly and assumed it was in the spirit of "Favorite podcast episode you listened to this year". Hope this helps.

I agree so very much with not only your framing, but that of the original tweet(s) and the distillation formed by my own experience.

I'm proximate to development (information security/penetration tester). After university, my journey to graduate neophyticism had begun. As such, my exposure to the techniques, tools, and glue that helped build this industry was certainly sitting high up on the shoulders of giants. And I wanted to be up there. I deeply yearned (and if I'm going to be honest with myself as I write this, perhaps a small part of my still does) to be in the same group as these folks. But it just hasn't happened yet, and I still kick ass at what I do. I know how to use the tools, understand them, write miniature bastardized versions of a subset of functions when need be. I know the space, understand it (as much as someone who has ~10 years of experience, so granted a long way to go :)).

I'm just....average. And that's okay.

Human, I'm 28, been in InfoSec for ~10 years. Granted, I was lucky enough to be interested in and peruse this as a professional branch when I graduated college in 2016. I am also an adjunct professor at my local university, where I make it a salient point to remind my students of the history of hacking. We talk about this still.

I also start every semester off with the opening scene of Hackers - the best hacking movie ever made :)

Woah - can you expand on this a bit? I don't have a system to test atm, but I'm curious how that works. Are you sure privileges/security boundaries are circumvented?

I've had decent experience using [1] WebDumper to scrape SPA (single page applications), which rely almost entirely DOM rendering and client-side JS.

I'm curious if folks here had any other recommendations for scraping SPAs, ie React or Angular applications.

1: https://github.com/EllyMandliel/WebDumper

In case anybody doesn't feel comfortable downloading a PDF within the context of the title :)

https://github.com/chip-red-pill/udbgInstr/blob/main/paper/u...

Would something like this work for single-page applications? Given that most applications today are built entirely through the DOM, would regex matching on embedded scripts be that useful?

I've actually started thinking about how to build a spidering/scraping tool that extracts links/JS, etc from an SPA but would rather not reinvent the wheel if possible.

Citations Needed just had a great episode on this [1].

[1] https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-136-the-ungratefu...

Starter comment (shamefully) pulled from Reddit's FatFIRE community: https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/o25gxo/i_was_taugh...

My grandfather Roy O. Disney, who co-founded the Walt Disney Company with his brother Walt, was a fervent believer in this idea. He was so determined to prevent the government from taking any of the money he wanted to leave to his family that he created generation-skipping trusts to end-run the IRS. What he did back then was so effective that most of it is illegal today.

I will protest to my dying breath that he was a good man—one of the best, in fact.

But I will also add, at the very end of that dying breath, that he should not have been able to do that.

Would love to hear some chatter from HN.

From the same article: " “In late 2008, I started developing “Tracker”, a software program that receives GPS signals to determine the location of any cell phone, whether it is turned on or off."

How is that possible?

I'm not sure "quantum leaps" were ever seriously described as "instantaneous". Headlines like OP haven't done much service to the more concrete (albeit layman) definition; when we are talking about quantum speed limits and propagation, what we are really getting at is the speed at which information is propagated through spacetime.

When we talk about the cosmic speed limit and why nothing can travel faster than light, that's what we are really trying to describe. Not that nothing can travel faster than light, but rather information propagates at a certain speed, which also just so happens to be the speed of light. The consequence is of course that nothing can travel faster than the speed of information propagation, not even "quantum leaps".

I cannot confirm this.

Post is here and let folks take a look.

IIRC, at one point he offered a semi-bounty on anyone who could actually reveal the source, only partly in jest.

Background: In US (midwest), 7 years of security engineering/security consulting (penetration testing) experience, looking to move into a more senior role (read: increase salary & professional skillset).

I'm currently on a job hunt and I typically dread these conversations around salary and total compensation, but I understand that I need to step a bit out of my comfort zone. I've read over and over that these negotiations can be tense and I liked the way Zaheer here (Levels.fyi co-founder) handles this.

What does HN think? Is this solid advice?

That pesky Page 25.