phkn1
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
89
Submissions
31
Member since
Jan 10
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/phkn; my proof: https://keybase.io/phkn/sigs/1X6UR9uC4N8XD0dzrOY3OKr6TmY_txot4scZznojrDk ]
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 10 years ago
DO was unduly spooked by an empty legal threat. This was not a DMCA notice, this was a trademark notice. Parodies are protected under trademark law. Bad form taking down even a single page, and terrible form taking down an entire service.
https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.ht...
Comment · 10 years ago
That sounds fascinating. Do you happen to have a link to anything he's written or recorded on the subject?
Comment · 10 years ago
Under this interpretation, wouldn't (say) a collection of Facebook photos with statues, in aggregate, constitute a database and therefore become illegal? At what point does the size and structure of a collection become sufficient to cross the legal line? Would an individual Facebook user therefore be liable? Would Facebook as whole? etc.
It seems that the law has created the unintended consequence that the organization of the depictions in question matter more than the actual depictions themselves. Or in other words, of imputing commercial intent to any such collection of copyrighted works, whether intentional or otherwise.
Comment · 10 years ago
Depending on the system you use to view the text, many of the characters are actually printed using non-Roman lookalike characters that still render as the "usual" ones.
In OSX / Firefox I see the usual text in the web view, but in source view there's a variation in shading between characters, in what should be an unadorned monospaced font. Viewing the same source in Chrome shows the trick for what it is...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oj9cqlh3kh90zep/Screenshot%202016-...
Subtle and not always visible due to differences in display normalization in various libraries? Way out of my depth for system fonts / encoding issues. But hopefully the above shows what I'm talking about. Could there be some data hidden in the lookalike string values?
http://www.lookout.net/2012/04/generating-confusable-lookali...
Comment · 10 years ago
Did anyone else notice the weird GNU/Linux screed on line 803? In particular, the "Additional Comments" content is actually written with a large amount of look-alike Unicode. Playing around with this data in Excel somehow byte-shifted it into garbage. I noticed that other folks thought it would be funny to put things like =SUM(G1:G1000) in other cells, but this seems a little bit more sinister for some reason. Anyone savvy enough in UTF-8 to deduce what's going on there?
Comment · 10 years ago
I've done a whole lot of individual research in the last two months, consulted with two dentists and an endo, gotten opinions from friends and family etc... seeing that any procedure is irreversible, it seems prudent to take the least drastic option first. I don't have a particular concern about recurrent infection in this case, because my diagnosis is about trauma, not decay. What concerns do you have?
Comment · 10 years ago
As someone about to go in for a root canal, I feel a bit better about how far medical science has come. :-)
Comment · 10 years ago
This calls for a stirring rendition of "Barbie Girl"... oh wait, nevermind.
Comment · 11 years ago
Assuming for a minute that bottled air is a viable solution to smog, it's only the prestige of "exotic Canadian air" that necessitates the long shipping distance. Bottling filtered air from a relatively local source might work... but only if your factory could generate net negative emissions.
And anyhow, to have a health impact, we're talking about large quantity concentrators for those lug-around supplemental oxygen machines. These look awfully small to have any impact long term:
http://vitalityair.com/products/bottled-goodness.html
Anecdotal: I once tried purchasing a similar Oxygen can at a high-altitude ski resort as a sort of "stamina inhaler" on a heavy powder day. A good puff would return one's breath to normal pretty quickly, but the can ran out after a few hours of occasional use. So, at best these can be used as an ersatz, non-medical inhaler.
On the other hand, the market for air filters is still booming.
Comment · 11 years ago
In particular, this summary graphic is telling:
http://img3.auto-motor-und-sport.de/Abgastest-Wertung-fotosh... (blurry, sorry)
At the top of the NOx scale we have a VW TDI engine (albeit in an Audi Quatro application).
Near the bottom of the NOx scale we have... a VW TDI engine.
In other words, VW already had the capability to eliminate the emissions through design, but chose to cheat the tests instead. That is rather damning evidence, and serves as a rebuttal for those who think that VW is somehow being unfairly targeted.
Clearly, many other companies also need to lower their emissions, and regulators need to adopt meaningful tests. But to cheat the tests that do exist, and for no clear need (except possibly profit margins) is inexcusable.
Comment · 11 years ago
Perhaps we have encountered a "clbuttic" filtering error in the HN news feed.
Comment · 11 years ago
> If you naively extrapolate from the 2013 Pew Poll The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (which in principle represents nations with a total Muslim population of about 1 billion), 40% of these think you should be killed for leaving Islam.
And, if you actually read the study, you find this number is 28%, not 40%.
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/infographic-the-worlds-mu...
Comment · 11 years ago
"American and French officials say there is still no definitive evidence to back up their presumption that the terrorists who massacred 129 people in Paris used new, difficult-to-crack encryption technologies to organize the plot."
IMO, that is the only part of the article that needs to be understood.
Comment · 11 years ago
The spice must flow.
Comment · 11 years ago
Safari on Yosemite also shows power usage per tab which is great for identifying rogue websites.
Also... TIL that some sites take more power to render than a 1080p stream!
This also of reinforces the argument for installing an ad blocker -- less elements to process on each page means less power used. µBlock is particularly promising as it's very lightweight.