skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After using it for a few hours I must say it is too distracting since it is overdoing it for links clicked that don't navigate away from the page (only some of them, though). So for example navigating GMail and Facebook you get the focus animation a lot when clicking around which is worse than having a gif animate w/o your interaction.
Ok, I get it!
If I understand it correctly, if it's lossless, 2 different fingerprints could pass the test (collision)?

So by a bruteforce technique, I could be able to generate a subset of all possible fingerprint (finite?).

Tell me if I'm wrong, but maybe by "cross checking" with another data (e.g. another device with a second different conversion algorithm) I could finally find out what was your fingerprint!
That's quite overkill though!
I noticed the Wii U's system software does this exact thing when you navigate the UI using the D-pad.
Oops, I didn't. Nevermind then.
> 1 in 50,000 probability means it requires trying up to 50,000
> different fingerprints until potentially finding a random match

If you were hypothetically able to extract the hash from the "Secure Enclave" you could take a database of fingerprints (no doubt these exist somewhere: prison, military, customs, ...) and hash those to attempt to find a match. As Apple says, you have a 1 in 50,000 probability of randomly matching it. Once you find a hash match, you can then 3D print it and use it to unlock the device.

A very impractical attack against the average Joe consumer. Someone would have to be a very high value target with sensitive information on their phone to use this, and that's assuming a direct extract via physical connection isn't the more viable option.
LinkedIn Hacked User Emails for Unwanted Marketing, Suit Claims
That is a disturbing pattern. Tourists welcome. Citizens shall not question the government...
Disc brakes aren't always used on road bikes, because their advantages aren't excercised much - you generally don't brake so much that heat is a problem; and wheel bending isn't a problem since unlike mountain bikes, you aren't expected to hit stuff that might bend a wheel and continue riding.

For wet conditions, disc brakes would have an advantage on road bikes for others, I'm not sure.
Stanstead: A Town on the Border
It seems to be approximately 2^32 tenths of second into the new millennium. Which is an odd way to do things, but I guess there were reasons.
What is the Canada-U.S. Border, Really?
There isn't, unfortunately. I'm sure it's being considered though.
Dung Beetles Navigate Via the Milky Way, First Known in Animal Kingdom
With 1 in 50,000 odds of matching fingerprints, how about I supply you with a list of 50,000 sentences. You choose one at random, generate a bcrypt hash with the default work factor of 10, and I'll give you back your sentence within the day.

Deal?
Thanks for your comment :)

So eventually, if you can generate all possible set of fingerprints which match that hash and "cross check" it with another fingerprint systems, you could be able to approach the guy fingerprint? (I mean you maybe reduce the set to a reasonable size)

The use case is quite overkill though!
Also, generating all possible set of fingerprints is probably a lot of computation.
>Tell me if I'm wrong, but maybe by "cross checking" with another data (e.g. another device with a second different conversion algorithm) I could finally find out what was your fingerprint!

Sure, but that's not the same as reverse engineering your fingerprint from the "mathematical representation".

It isn't possible for your actual fingerprint image to be reverse-engineered from this mathematical representation.
Think of it like this. We can oversimplify what Apple is doing with Touch ID.

Let's say when you scan your fingerprint Apple breaks it down into three key properties, A B and C. Each fingerprint has a different percentage for A B and C. So yours might read as

A 50%
B 30%
C 0%

This data is then cryptographically hashed with some unique identifier inside the phone (so the same data would store differently on every iPhone). The data is then irreversibly transformed into a different representation. You can't retrieve the unique properties of the fingerprint, nor can you retrieve the fingerprint itself.

In the linked article, Apple states that the probability of two fingerprints matching in Touch ID is 1 in 50,000. So that just means that their algorithm for breaking fingerprints down into key features discards enough information that it is possible to read two different human fingerprints as the same fingerprint.
Which OS and hardware platform are you referring to now?
Nice piece. I cannot over emphasise how amazingly effective actually getting off your butt and finding/talking to potential customers is.

A few random additional thoughts / tips.

1) If I'd have been in Patrick's shoes I'd have gone out a little earlier and start talked to folk with more open ended questions - before even building the 2 page demo. Things like "Can you just talk me through your typical day?" or "Tell me about a bad day?".

Why? If the problem you care about is important to those people - if it's problem #1 or #2 - it will come up in conversation naturally. If it doesn't then that is telling you something useful and interesting.

If you start the conversation by talking about appointments that is where it will go. Once you start talking about it with them it naturally becomes the focus of the conversation and any issues and problems will pop up and seem important - even if they would normally not care about them in the slightest.

More importantly - because the conversation is just around appointments - you won't here about the other major problems in their life. Maybe the biggest issue is dealing with staff who don't show up, or managing the shift rota, or keeping track of client preferences, or whatever.

And then you can dive in with something like "Can you tell me more about that?" and discover this lovely problem that the customer actually cares about.

2) On the "talk to people in the target industry" another sneaky way to find folk is to see if you can find a $industry conference you can get to. You get a target-rich environment for $industry and they're often a bit more informal and happy to talk (or drunk - which also works ;-).

If you don't feel you can attend/crash the conference itself then find out what the conference hotel(s) is/are and hang out in the lobby. Or find out what the popular post-conference bars are and hang out there.

(This is, of course, an instance of the more general advice of "hang out where your customers hang out".)

3) If it's more than just you I'd recommend talking to folk in pairs. Most people find it really hard to both engage in a conversation and take notes at the same time. Having one person do most of the talking, and somebody else do most of the writing makes it much easier to capture the information. Having mixed-sex pairs also helps in approaching strangers too.

4) Dress slightly smarter than the default for wherever you're doing the interviews. It makes a real difference in how you're treated.

If the idea of doing interviews still scares you and you'd like some concrete advise on technique I'd consider reading this really short pocket guide from Andrew Travers http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/interviewing-for-res.... It's not written for budding startup/entrepreneur folk but much of the advice is applicable. Bonus is that it's very short.

If you you like that book and want to dive deeper Steve Portigal's "Interviewing Users" (http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users/) is a great book that covers everything in much more detail. Again - not written for startup folk but there's a lot of great advice you can steal.
FireEye Shares Jump 16 Points In First Day Of Public Trading
HTML5Form - looking for co-founder
Capsicum: practical capabilities for Unix [pdf]
Capsicum is still work in progress and worked on. Since FreeBSD 9, it has undergone a lot of internal design changes (capabilities are now embedded in the filedescriptors instead of being standalone structures), and API changes.

Yet another API change is undergoing to make the code more future proof (currently, you can have only 64 different capability rights, which is not enough), but it's happening out of tree. There are also new libraries to ease applications developpement.

Capsicum is not yet in a real production state. It's a big project and it needs a lot of thoughs to get it right. I don't know if it will get in FreeBSD 10, I'm not a freeBSD guy, but you can be sure there are still a lot of work dedicated to capsicum ! After the basic kernel API and libs has been stabilized, it will still need work to convert applications to capsicum before you can consider capsicum as a deployed security mechanism in FreeBSD.
Golang Automatic Reloads
I have JS enabled and it doesn't show any useful content anyway (win/Chrome29).
ماكينات طباعة اوفست مستعملة
ماكينات طباعة هايدلبرج 4 لون
لدينا افضل ماكينات الطباعة ومعدات الطباعة ، ومستلزمات الطباعة .. استعمال خارج .. استعمال اوروبى .
لدينا افضل ماكينات الطباعة ومعدات الطباعة ، ومستلزمات الطباعة .. استعمال خارج .. استعمال اوروبى .
لدينا افضل ماكينات الطباعة ومعدات الطباعة ، ومستلزمات الطباعة .. استعمال خارج .. استعمال اوروبى .
> you can then 3D print it and use it to unlock the device

You might not be able to do even this. According to the info released so far the sensor captures a sub-epidermal print.

Edit: Also I am unaware of a 3D printer that is capable of printing the resolution required to represent a fingerprint.
What went down at the Uganda Internet Government Forum
The other fingerprint system would need to be compatible with your data source, but if you had a compatible system and if you could generate every potential fingerprint for a given hash you could definitely use cross-checking to find any individual in your several million who also happens to be in the database.

I think the biggest potential problem with that approach is both incompatibility and also false-positives. You might have "too many" matches for it to be useful for much.
I don't think I could find a better summary for why rails was bad for a CMS than that post. You could do much better with ruby but until some more killer non-rails ruby web apps are written, ruby's reputation will be inseparable from that of rails.
It should be possible to design a nuclear power plant to operate safely after a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami following it, but I would still say in that case all bets are off.

The problem is that there are certain sorts of disasters where you really can't be sure you have the unknowns down well enough..... That's why aircraft components are rigorously tested. The only really safe solution I can think of is to try to anticipate the problem and sabotage the warhead first. For example one might, say, design warheads to destroy portions of the electronics if they get a signal that the pilot ejected.

So yes, it is probably possible. Is it possible to do so reasonably perfectly? I doubt it to be honest.
No country :(
Blah blah blah whatever. Apple has legal obligations to the NSA that they can't talk about in public. Anybody using the fingerprint unlock feature needs to understand that it is likely compromised by this.
Appears to be broken this morning. I see the template briefly, then nothing, in Chrome and IE. Which is sad because it sounds really great.
unbeliveable. whole world was alerted about the upcoming y2k doom and nothing particularly spectacular happened. but those guys managed to do it anyway. several yrs later.
A couple of years back, the last time fingerprints and biometric authentication became popular (mostly for notebooks, I believe), CCC managed to beat a lot of fingerprint readers with essentially a bit of tape.

Is there any evidence so far that these readers are better armed against the most trivial of attacks?

Another problem with all kinds of biometric authentication is of course that you can't exactly change your fingerprint. So if your credentials ever become compromised you have a bit of a problem.
"Touch ID does not store any images of your fingerprint. It stores only a mathematical representation of your fingerprint. It isn't possible for your actual fingerprint image to be reverse-engineered from this mathematical representation."

This is a tad disingenuous.

Fingerprint 101:

Fingerprint databases don't search images of your fingerprints. They search mathematical representations of your fingerprints.

To uniquely identify your fingerprint an image is scanned for unique features called "minutia points"[1]. The spacing and orientation of those points is what is stored and later searched for.

Fingerprint matching isn't boolean. When you do a database search you get a list of high probability matches. There are no perfect matches, even between two different images of the exact same finger. Everything is based on probability. For law enforcement purposes, strong matches result in a technician reviewing actual images and making comparisons. For biometric security like this (which is not my area) I expect that there is a threshold percentage match that must be met.

The reason this quote concerns me is that while the actual image can't be reproduced, the image isn't the part that matters! The "mathematical representation" is what counts.

Whether or not that information is actually secure onboard the phone, I don't know.

[0] I have worked with fingerprint processing systems.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerprint_recognition#Minutia...
Still working to solve this, meanwhile you can enter as guest at https://quolony.com and then visit https://quolony.com/demos/photomess/ or https://quolony.com/demos/quolony/developers/
I wouldn't call it functional. It's dataflow programming : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_programming
> Err, are you asserting that that is what I am doing, or what I ought to be doing?

Ought to be. Your Given and When manipulate the environment and store state in the test. Your then doesn't check the environment at all, it checks it's own internal state. I think in your example this is less of an issue than the cases I've worked with before (usually testing remote running apps).

> And yes, time-dependent code is evil. I should probably add commentary to my style-guide to explicitly call that out, but thankfully we never ran into that despite testing of distributed-job-queue functionality, by virtue of having a queue so simple stubbing its main loop to work in-process in a deterministic way was trivial.

Yes, as I say I wasn't claiming that was what you were doing, but it's the only other way I've seen the same kind of tests written. Before the first reply, I didn't know which it would be. I'm very glad it wasn't :)

> If my style guide isn't clear on that point -- that a When should NEVER follow a Then -- I need to clarify that. :)

My example was contrived, but I think you can probably see the point I'm making. What the test does is not clear without understanding the ruby underneath, and by storing state you can have tests which don't do what you expect because they aren't just querying the state of your application.

I'm aware I've been quite ranty about this, it's mostly I've had to deal with bad tests written in this style. Good tests written in this style seem fine generally. I think this is more of an issue with cucumber than the tests themselves.

> I recall a Gherkin-based testing framework that handled the actual step definitions MUCH differently and much more cleanly but I never got around to fully switching us over and don't recall the name... :-S

I might have a look around. It's something I've probably spent more time writing about it than it would have spent trying to write something better (/at least with dependency docs, maybe quickcheck style).
When viewing the github it is verry clear you are not Mary Lou.... So give her some credits when you are copying her work. http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/09/18/creative-loading-effe...
Hey Keith, I'm glad you brought this point up!

Well, in all honesty, design is something of personal preference. But, the 'right design' is the one that strikes a chord with the majority of your users, making them 'feel at home'.

There are a lot of examples I'd like to cite, but, the best example you can use for reference is most of Apple's web design philosophy (P.S - I'm NOT an Apple 'fanboy' though I like their designs). Another one would be Stripe. They have some pretty consistent designs!

As a bonus - Every designer has his/her own version of 'good design rules'. These are just mine :)

-Don't use complexity where it's not needed. Borders and gradients add complexity. (good example: iOS 7)

-Generally, try to use contrasting colors for action buttons (Purchase/Sign up/Subscribe). There is some psychological study associated with the color choice too.

Link: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/color...

-Once you use a color for a particular type of button (Action, or example) maintain it throughout the site - So your users will know which buttons are important and have side effects (like, costing them money) and which ones don't.

-Contrast is everything. If you use a dark headline, then use a light background. And vice versa. Also, a small black box of 100px x 100px provides more contrast than a mild grey box of 200px x 200px. Contrast is not something that is proportional with colors. Always experiment!

- Sometimes, you get drowned in your own designs that you wouldn't be able to tell them if they are actually good looking or you only feel that way because you bought it/designed it yourself.

-In such situations, close all tabs, watch a movie or perhaps even go for a small cycling session and come back and re-check. You'd be surprised how many flaws you will be able to discover, then :)

I'm only telling you all this since you specifically mentioned you are a non-designer. I hope this helps :)
At this point in time, the 4-digit PIN on the IPhone is protection against someone casually looking at the phone when you've left it on your desk. It takes 10 minutes to remove the PIN lock and keep the data intact without using specialist tools. With specialist tools the data can just be read and the owner will never know as the PIN lock will stay on.

Given that, the fingerprint reader will be an improvement for most people. It keeps the same level of security and makes people feel like they're in the future when they unlock their phones.
"Touch ID does not store any images of your fingerprint. It stores only a mathematical representation of your fingerprint"

Everybody questioning about wether they can or can't rebuild your finger print from the mathematical model. While this is relevant, it's just one of the many implications that implementing finger-print technology in mass-production products has.

Apple here is saying that the "mathematical representation" of your finger-print IS stored. Where? Nobody knows. Locally? Cloud?

Very likely they will abuse this, as they are abusing social data in general.

I'll just leave it here:
"So, we have your day-to-day activities and a solid face recognition mathemtical model thanks to facebook, all your phone data thanks to Apple and Google, now we will have your finger print as well"

As far as i'm concerned, at the moment NSA reversing from the mathematical model to the actual finger-print image is quite irrelevant and the general sitution is becoming disturbing.
What I find interesting is that nobody criticizes the M7 motion coprocessor, but everybody criticizes the fingerprint sensor. It's now possible to log every movement you make and where you are 24/7. And here Apple offers a nice API for every app developer that is interested in your data.
I'm afraid we will see more of those puke-colored gradient backgrounds in the near future...
It's definitely not paging in the traditional, OS-level sense, but the standard Android (and, I think, iOS) behaviour of providing applications with a framework to restart exactly where they left off should be pretty much the same in theory. In practice, not so much.
Like a single person on earth EVER complained "boy, does my smartphone touchscreen not react"... yeah... Actually, i wouldn't have thought it would be >100ms for my HTC One, but it's certainly small enough that i cannot see a difference.
The best thing I did with a Raspberry PI was to setup openvpn on it to connect to my server where I have minidlna running and a lot of other services, then give them to my friends and hook up to their Smart TVs and routers. Now all my friends can view my music and family pictures on their TVs, with basically no setup, just pushing buttons on the remote - the Raspberry Pis openvpn connects the UPnP/DLNA at the openvpn server to anyone that is connected, and so my friends can share their family pictures with each other in a very secure way - no third party, its all going over the vpn and they can use a web-interface to add pictures to the server directly, or let the rasppi mount their images on their NAS for those who have that. This one was a bit tricky to setup, since minidlna needed to index remote content.
I've been there, in these cities. They exist, they are massive and very much empty.

A lot of them are still being built, in those ones you find workers and business people who are part of the process to help sell the massive amounts of residential and retail space that has been created.

Having said that, people talk about how it has worked before. I dont know, maybe it will, but for now there are a lot of empty cities waiting for people to "step up" into the middle class.
Indeed - it's worth noting that on the non-farm payroll figure (which is closely watched by markets) this month, most markets jumped in the wrong direction a split second early, before violently reversing.
> Apple here is saying that the "mathematical representation" of your finger-print IS stored. Where? Nobody knows. Locally? Cloud?

Apple explicitly says that fingerprint data is not backed up to iCloud.

The data is only stored in what they are calling "Secure Enclave" on the A7. From my understanding this is an area of the SoC that is out of reach to all processes and most of iOS itself.

From the article:

"The Secure Enclave is walled off from the rest of A7 and as well as the rest of iOS."

I think all OS processes that wish to interact with the secure enclave must do so through a secure monitor. The idea is that the secure processes are completely isolated from anything untrusted.
So it's essentially a md5 hash and the only way someone can determine what your actual fingerprint looks like is from a rainbow table of fingerprints.
> A really good text to speech app for news so I can listen to it in my car

I use Umano (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sothree.um...) while travelling. It is actually news recorded by professionals.
Mobile Marketing - Context Awareness Matters
There is only the claim that the Apple sensor reads a "sub-epidermal" layer of skin. We'll have to see if people manage to fool it with standard tricks in the coming days.
Nobody knows where the model is stored. Considering the records and recent history, very likely finger prints models will be used for further intelligence analysis.
Privacy in the Digital Economy: Requiem or Renaissance?
Yes - most journalists/analysts prefer to be wrong together than wrong alone, so there is usually a lot of groupthink. The previous fed minutes suggested that most members wanted to wait to taper, unless data improved, and data didn't improve. It seemed obvious to me that the taper was nowhere near a done deal.
The researchers won the 2013 Ig Nobel "Joint Prize in Biology and Astronomy" for this interesting discovery
( http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/ )
Does anyone else see the fail here? Basically they state that Touch ID is more secure than using an passcode but then state that it falls back to passcode, in other words it actually reduces security by now giving you two ways of getting into the phone....