skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hardly saw ads for any big consumer brands on my Facebook feed even before the boycott. The vast majority of ads are from smaller companies. Not sure if my experience is typical?
> "Gigo" also is an acronym for "garbage in, garbage out." So you may want to rethink your name.

Ack.

I acknowledge that the name could lead to misunderstanding.

Actually, the name is supposed to be a play on 'gig' (as in, a synonym for side project). I'm planning on rebranding it so it's more 'gig-o books' than 'gigo books'.

Thanks for the heads up, though.
Isn't CWT the company that handles travel details of employees of Amazon, Facebook, etc?
If that's what you want, you can use the Gab instance.
The joinmastodon.org site curates the instances it recommends to only show ones that don't permit racism, sexism and transphobia. OP seemingly wants those on their instance so they won't find it there, and they also won't find them in the global timeline on the "mainline" fediverse because those instances are banned for obvious and good reasons.

You can, however, probably find links into the alt-right sphere fediverse on the chans. And they would be federating together so you can trace those instances to find one you, uh, want.
This is a very recent event (ransom was only paid on 07/28).

They're not out of the woods yet. Whats the bet they get crypto locked again next week?
I think it's more like a JC Penney or Macy's (neither of which you listed)? Or maybe those are all the same thing but I'm not acquainted with the ones you listed.

I've seen them in shopping malls in the northeast but never gone in.

AFAICT, department stores never really carry anything that I would want to buy. If the number of people who feel as I do is increasing, then perhaps all the other dept store chains are close behind.
If I am thinking about the same MMO, then every client update changed everything. I am sure they used some custom obfuscations tools to even alter the client / server protocol.

The way how bots were done, was that you had to write tools that try to fingerprint interesting variables by their usage patterns in the bytecode. This was by no means an easy task. But with the frequent client updates manual reverse engineering only helped to understand the codebase, but to actually keep up with the client updates you needed to automate that work.
I'm curious, how do you feel about people paying ransom for traditional kidnappings? Same logic, or is it different?
I inherited many 78 rpm records from my great-grandparents by way of my deceased grandparents and deceased parents.

They are from the 1920s-1940s. I've spent countless hours trying to find the right turntable to buy and then the right cartridge (people say the groove widths were different in the 1920s or 30s so i need special stylus with those records but not the ones from the 40s...maybe?). It's maddening... i just want to listen to what my great-grandparents listened to without damaging the media... but it seems to take weeks of research because there are thousands of opinions.

p.s. i never met my great-grandparents and thought this would be a cool way to get to know them.
I've deleted Twitter. In an economic depression and election year its become a very very dark place. I'm immediately less anxious.
Out of curiosity, how do think about the prospect of being arbitrarily locked out of your account if you’re mainly using cloud-first software?

(E.g., you can find example horror stories here on Hacker News: https://www.google.com/search?q=locked+out+of+gsuite+site%3A...)
What do you think makes open platforms an issue for mobile phones and not an issue for other devices?

I don't believe this issues you're facing come from android being open, but from google's poor design decisions like granting network access to apps by default.

Apple can do open platforms right if it wanted. It doesn't have to do them poorly like google.
> As a member of society, I don’t care if I’m paying a professional ransomware group, or a professional corruption gang.

The kidnapping analogy makes for a better understanding of why paying ransoms is bad for everybody else. If kidnappers know, or really just think, that they’ll get paid, they’re more likely to kidnap and hold hostages.

It’s not that companies are not solely responsible for their own lax security policies. It’s that incentivizing the exploiting of them is bad for society.
Our legal framework already contains many prohibitions on financial transactions with criminals and terrorists. It wouldn't be difficult to add one more.
While these stories are becoming all too common I’d like to think that while we’re in a golden age of being a ransomware payouts, it will lead to actually caring about security by many of the high-profile affected companies.

While the overall cost may be low for them, if they don’t make meaningful changes to prevent these issues in the future, it’s not hard to imagine it might add up quickly.

I don’t support these attacks and some of the targets in particular are insidious, like hospitals where an attack could lead to an actual death toll, but it might actually be the kick in the ass many organizations need to actually care.

It’s sad that it’s come to this point but the end result may be better for everyone.
Short answer is the effect should be even overall, but what matters happens at state and district levels, so you could even disenfranchise more people of your own party on the net and still end up with an improved electoral outcome.

You could steal the vote from 500k Republicans in just Alabama and 150k Democrats spread across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and have a net swing of 0 EC votes lost and 50 EC votes gained for Republicans.

You just have to create policies (like closing polling place, making vote by mail difficult, create voter id rules that exclude college students) that have small partisan differentials in a few swing states, which is why the greatest effort and impact is in urban centers in the midwest (followed by Latinx populations in the southwest like AZ and NM, and African American populations in the southeast like FL and GA).
Here’s my Pleroma ansible role if anyone wants to give it a try. Can run on a Raspberry Pi and supports multiple instances and domains.

https://src.nth.io/ansible-roles/file/tip/pleroma/otp
Also, this is a Very different scenario to the listed. The html loads in < 10ms, But I have to wait 400ms (!!!) to see it. It’s actually the exact opposite of the cases you mentioned above, they take a fast operation and dramatically reduce the perceived performance by making you wait 400ms (!!!) for it to complete.
Does that revenue include pass-through?
My point is there are better, more reasonable ways to arrive at the same end goal: effective infosec practices that prevent ransomware attacks (among other threat actors).

Banning ransomware payments just makes it more difficult; someone will still find a way to save their business by paying. You want to resolve the root issue: a business not taking security seriously.
I’d imagine the feds are involved at this point. They paid to get their data, but the feds have to be tracking the addresses from this juncture and examining the breach.

I hope.
CWT is used by corporate travel systems. I'd expect their margins to be similar to enterprise software vendors, rather than other travel agencies.
Why would someone bother to waste so much time and so many letters to defend something so obviously wrong and indefensible is a puzzle.

> scientism more generally—using, where appropriate, the analogous term “science-based social policy” (SBSP).

Climatism an other scientisms in the EU helped introduce taxes that doubled the cost of fuel and lowered the quality of life of hundreds of millions because "science". It did nothing except steal trillions from workers.

Then there's a laughable argument about the "ideal", scientifically-determined level of taxes. Could anyone be that stupid to be persuaded to increase her level of taxes rather than make it a voluntary donation (or just tell these fiscal "scientists" to fuck off)?

What a disaster of an article.
In general paying off kidnappers is also a bad policy. However I see a huge difference between protecting human lives versus protecting corporate assets.
Not the OP but I think it is clearly different, as kidnappers are putting someone's life in danger.
The first difficult part of a Stack Overflow clone is to get an initial community of experts. Joel and Jeff had both a well known blogs where they can got people to form the initial community. (HN was created from the readers of the pg blog^H^H^H^H essays.)

The second problem is moderation, that is not an easy task.

My guess is that they can keep the homeopathy folks away, but I'm worry that it will be difficult to filter other stuff like the EmDrive.

And using a crytocoin instead of worthless internet points will solve none of these problems.
Maybe a dumb question but -- I'm not a sysadmin, why isn't this the case already? At least for a company doing $1.5 billion in revenue.
Even better, I'm pinning my hopes on peer-to-peer matrix via dendrite.
So you suggestion is to let any company that doesn't have the budget to have a proper cybersecurity team just die? I'll guarantee you that most of the small businesses that you encounter each day do not have such a thing setup.
> Fortnite became available for Android on Aug. 9, starting with Samsung Galaxy devices, and then became available for all of Android on Aug. 12. Google brought the vulnerability to Epic Games' attention on Aug. 15. Epic Games immediately acknowledged its mistake and fixed the bug with version 2.1.0 of the launcher on Aug. 16.

Iirc the issue was that they first downloaded a file and then ran it. Thus there was a short window of time where someone can tamper with the file before it's running. Far from being a security nightmare it was a subtle flaw, and fixed quickly.
I think it was more Bonwit Teller / Altman's than mass appeal Macy's or working class JCP. Old school 5th Ave.
Isn't this likely short sighted in the same way that people talk about draconic enforcement of immigration laws?

Criminalizing ransoms will result in victims doing it in secret, not in the elimination of ransoms. People won't be able to share information, and the financial incentive will continue to exist.
Reading "Never Split The Difference" - sounds like the police will work with families pay off kidnappers is some countries, but get it down from millions to a token amount. I think he aims for zero though most of the time.
Wouldn't that be extremely obvious though?
Don’t be surprised if companies would rather roll the dice than pay whatever it costs to prevent the problem.

$4 million once times the risk of getting hit vs. the up-front and ongoing costs of dealing with an overly paranoid IT guy.

Tough call.
Oh that’s a great point. Maybe it would be even better to have a somewhat blanket idea of taking care of yourself physically.
I disagree with you, though you have my upvote for articulating that argument well.

I don’t want Apple to act like a government. I want the government to act like a government. Why isn’t the government doing more to stop companies from employing shady sales practices? Why doesn’t the government do more to protect my 92-year-old grandmother? Why is it so hard to cancel a gym membership? We should be able to get together and say, “as a society, we want to forbid predatory sales practices.”

The Apple approach has limited efficacy anyway. Sure, my grandmother can cancel subscriptions purchased through Apple—or she could, if she knew how to make them in the first place. But no, that requires a password.

So she has free apps like Duolingo. Those apps have ads. She taps the ads. They bring her to websites. She enters her credit card number. Bam, new scam subscription that she can’t cancel.

But Duolingo carries on, displaying the same scam ads, unimpeded by Apple or any government. Duolingo probably doesn’t even know about those ads. And if they did, “that’s the ad network’s problem.”

Some people will argue that it’s difficult to write legislation that covers all the bases. Of course it is. But a private company’s contracts and guidelines are no different in that regard.
Kind of like how I can't buy an M9, because when it's sold to civilians it's called a Beretta 92F. Must be a totally different weapon.
Exactly. Governments and large multinationals don’t like relying on a single supplier for anything because a single supplier is a single point of failure. No matter how good a new option is, they’ll keep the old option on life support until they have a third option.
Good question, I was wondering the same thing. It seems it doesn't. The main article body puts total transaction volume at $23B.
While I understand the sentiment, there needs to be a reasonable alternative here. You can’t ask people or organizations not to protect or recover their property if they have no other recourse.

I don’t know much about this travel agency. They may or may not have had a security team. What they did have was mentioned in this article: liability. They took steps to reduce or eliminate this liability. I think we all know that there’s no proof these attackers acted in good faith past the actual decryption, but now CWT can at least say they attempted to recover lost data.

I think we can only realistically hold companies liable for transactions like this when we have better government resourcing and oversight. Getting the FBI involved in stuff like this is difficult, as they’re over loaded with such cases.

I also feel we should never hold individuals liable for stuff like this. It’s unreasonable to expect people who aren’t security professionals to know how to defend or respond to threats like this given how rapidly the landscape changes.

Figuring out a good way to holistically deal with cyber criminals will probably be a problem we struggle with for years, if not decades.
I can't go into a long list of ways to attack the various systems. But if you go above, I link to two different stories. Mail in voting is just much easier to hack.
>It does seem that Mastodon was the first one and has more functionality

Pleroma has rich text support, emoji reacts, polls with more than 4 answers... It never struck me as having less features than Mastodon, except maybe when it hadn't gotten polls yet at all some months back.
> Historically it's how they stop kidnapping in countries where it's common. It REALLY sucks for the first few people after the law is passed, but after that things get better.

Is this based in reality? What countries have banned ransom payments for human kidnapping and what people did it “suck” for?

My hunch is that if your spouse gets kidnapped and you have the means to get them back, you’ll risk it.
> What did I tell existing customers about the price change?

> Nothing. I probably should have, but it fell off my to-do list.

This pisses me off, I started paying for Notion back when they limited the number of blocks monthly and then at some point they changed the pricing to unlimited blocks in their Free plan, and I didn't notice until last month. I googled, I couldn't find any announcement, no tweet, nothing. I felt betrayed, It's been over a month, and now I find myself using Notion less and less every day.
Ok, and now a hospital with critical medical information gets hit by the ransom. What then?
The Captain/Engineer analogy later on also has a similar problem. In my experience, engineering is always a major stakeholder in a (healthy) product roadmap. They often have good ideas for how to shape the product, they define what is feasible/costly, and have to build it in the end. On a ship, I don't imagine that engineering would be very involved in helping to set the direction, but I could be wrong.
You can find the small tubes at hobby stores, with the supplies for Pinewood Derby cars for Cub Scouts. I went through several tubes during my son's years in Scouts.
I think this is where insurance can come into play. Like get a smoke alarm and sprinklers, but also get fire insurance.
If you were a corporate executive would you risk hard prison time just to save your employer from taking a loss? The whole point of imposing draconian penalties is to make such attacks unprofitable. If the attackers know they won't be able to extract any money from victims then they'll move on to some other scheme.
Go: How to Reduce Lock Contention with the Atomic Package
Hey; me, too! I use my iMac G4 and PowerMac G5 (with 16GB RAM and 2x1TB SSDs) daily. Love ‘em. Thank God for TenFourFox!
How? Gravity will make all such changes impossible to measure except at galactic scales.

Again any "new space" doesn't stick around where it was created. The atomic forces, chemical forces, and gravity maintain the system distances we are used to.
The main idea here is that prohibiting payouts might make the crime less frequent. That’s somehow reasonable given the relative low stakes involved—from a moral perspective, data is usually of a lesser value than human lives. Therefore, yes, those cases are very different indeed. For once, kidnapping a human being is already punishable enough by itself so it makes no sense to punish a payout that could actually save a live.
The responses suggesting backsups are ignoring the exfiltration part. The ransomware groups have updated their strategy to encrypt and carry away data that they would leak if not paid.
Protecting against that is much harder. Compartmentalization and data minimization might help.
As a business owner, I can tell you that having a “cyber” rider on a business E&O policy can be eye-wateringly expensive.
> let any company that doesn't have the budget to have a proper cybersecurity team just die?

Are you implying that without a cybersecurity team, you'll fall victim to ransomware and be forced to pay up to stay in business? Because that's a false dichotomy - the simplest of backup solutions would have prevented this. And if a company can't manage the most basic offline redundancy for their critical business operations, I really don't have a problem with them going under. It's less burdensome than being compliant with the local tax code, which all businesses have to do already.
how did they get bitcoins that fast?
Probably not since this is chrome specific. If it becomes a standard and publishers start blocking/restricting browsers that don’t support it well, that would be a different story.
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but you don't learn anything from this exercise. Unless you somehow know how many new customers would have signed up without a change in the price, you can't infer anything from this. It's tempting to compare with earlier growth rates (as the author did) but for a small, growing business the growth rate isn't going to be constant over time. What is really problematic, though, is trying to do this type of comparison when we're literally in a different world due to the pandemic.
In that situation an email would have been nice, but just raising the price with no feature changes doesn’t warrant notification. Especially since existing customers would be charged their current rate anyways.
What are the chances this is a $4.5m transfer to North Korea?
big fan of what you're doing @ elevated woodworking! gorgeous stuff
Crazy the battery still holds charge. Those were first to go for me.
Apple’s very own marketing material acts as if their platform is indispensable and life-saving:

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/06/apple-watch-real-storie...

Obviously PR speak is PR speak, but it goes to show that the narrative of Apple as an essential product is out there, and even courted by the company. The government usually has a hand in regulating such products.
Apple, ARM, and what it means
An insurance would be a much better idea than what OP suggested.
That makes sense. $1.5 billion didn’t sound like it would buy a lot of travel/conferences/whatever once you paid 18k employees.
I'm a little bit confused about the notion that composition isn't used much in lisp as opposed to Haskell.

Isn't composition literally the benefit of S-expressions, prefix notation, and everything being a function?
Another "expertsexchange" style domain name!
That was an obvious joke. So many people get "woosh"ed by him so much. He obviously takes pride in doing it to people who believe in things that are obviously nonsense.
I think there will be tons of global customers for Starlink. Any cable or signal that leaves the premises has to be encrypted anyway, addressing the privacy security issue for civilians, and the military, which also has availability as a security concern already has a local/nationally-run satcom system for their use today.

Satcom isn’t an issue for governments right now. It is, however, for billions of normal people who live far from population/commerce centers.
Oh, for business's sake write like you talk
The best approach is always to run your own.

The second-best approach is to run a managed instance via something like masto.host or spacebear (https://app.spacebear.ee/).

The third-best approach is to join an instance that is (a) neutral in its content and (b) not overbearing in its moderation policies. Most of those listed on joinmastodon fail this test.

I am running a instance at https://mastodon.communick.com, and my moderation policy is basically "don't post anything illegal and follow the Silver Rule - don't treat others in a way you wouldn't like to be treated".
The way I read the parent comment:

> Tricyclics work directly on gut neurology. [The effect you are noticing] [has] nothing to do with the brain [as it is a direct result of the direct effect the tricyclic has on the gut].
The takeaways from this potential acquisition for me:
- The splinternet is real - as a foreign business with US interests be aware which side of the splinternet you are positioned. (Stratechery wrote a good piece of the four way split of the internet between US, China, India and EU https://stratechery.com/2020/india-jio-and-the-four-internet...)
- While this may appear as a weird adjacency for Microsoft to go into they have successfully run Xbox a consumer business for many years
- The consumption ecosystem from user data and behaviour from TikTok acquisition can only bolster Microsoft
- Social capital is a lucrative currency for any tech company especially one such as MS who has a lot of catching up to do to other Big Tech
-
Google’s existence is based on tracking user behavior. There is 0 chance they will let go of that ability.
Once sold, an Apple device is no longer the property of Apple. Maintaining exclusive access to the primary (and I'd argue only) means of purchasing software for a device they do not own is a monopoly, even if it might not have been classically considered as such.

I hope the investigation ends in telegrams favor.
Tomotopy: Topic Modeling Alternative to Gensim
It depends on what kind of sacrifices your willing to make, but if you really focus on low power you can build a laptop with multi day battery life. The upside of this is you end up with fewer charge cycles which increases battery lifespan in year 3+.
well how much capital are you investing for 5 years at zero percent return? I think if that was required for an insurance company there would be no insurance companies.

> Making apps and integrating with telematics doesn't come for free and its not coming out of the insurance company bottom line.

yes, it is. their bottom line has to make room for that by increasing prices. in insurance as in anything, you get what you pay for.
I have a similar anecdote. Starting an ssri (luvox) cured my ibs.
this content seems to be very centric around internet business. do you provide or will you add new content for other types of businesses like restaurant, bars or laundromat, etc.
The idea that CEOs tend to become inhuman is a bad thing, not a good thing. If we say they should be come inhuman machines then they will, and all the corporations will be led by inhuman machine-like humans. So yes, he definitely can be both, and more CEOs need to act like him, not less.