skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NameCheap.com massive spam with link to IP: 162.255.119.254
I've been dealing with NameCheap.com for over a two weeks regarding there IP address being used within spam emails like below. Does anyone know how or who to contact to shut down that IP or report NameCheap for not doing anything?

http://i.imgur.com/UOiho58.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/iU8yrAZ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/vpbkEOm.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/iD0iJWo.jpg

These are their canned responses when emailing abuse@namecheap.com about the issue:

1. As the reported server is used solely for forwarding purposes, which is not the abuse itself and there is a lot of legitimate traffic, we cannot disable it.

2. However, as we can see the domain name is listed in SpamHaus DBL. Since we consider SpamHaus to be a trusted organization, we opened a case regarding the domain name. Please allow about 48 hours for our further investigation.

3. While the domain names reported are registered with Namecheap, they are hosted with another company. So we cannot check the logs for the domains and confirm if they are involved in sending unsolicited bulk emails.

Thanks for the advice!
Technically they're saying that their competitors might be targeted by Google/Microsoft. But yes, it's messed up that a company is openly advertising their malware product like this.
I have a Lenovo laptop and had the superfish root cert installed. I also have a "Nuance" trusted root certificate installed. It's a SHA1RSA certificate issued by Nuance, expiring in January 2040 (serial 9e ef 9d f5 9a...), thumbprint (51 2d 19 4d 28 64...). It says it's usable for everything. Does anyone know about this one?
Oracle NVL Function Explained with Examples
Hey guys my names Alberto, I'm a junior studying game development at RIT and I'm one of the co-founders of Gamamia. Already see some great feedback so I'll go ahead and respond to it, I'll be around all day so feel free to ask me anything and keep the feedback coming!
You can't drop all those post rock bands without giving Mogwai a mention
It may have moved the market backwards in terms of public image.
Did dark matter do in the dinosaurs?
I was pleasantly surprised recently when I noticed that this book has a discussion of efficient list construction [1]. I know it's a fairly basic idea, but the author brings it up purely for performance reasons. Given the introductory nature of this book I didn't expect that.

[1]: http://learnyouahaskell.com/for-a-few-monads-more
I just want to use my computer. I don't want to just constantly administer it instead.

I usually don't want new features. I'd often rather have what's already there fully working. The lack of finished software available (e.g. TeX) is astounding.
Well, if this is opt-in mail, it's all cool. Where I live I, along with all my neighbours, have something like half a kilogram of spam mail weekly, all of it (except maybe first flyer from a newly-opened pizza place) goes straight to thrash. Scale this up to 1-million city or 30-million country and think of all this wasted paper, paint, electricity, fuel and labour.
Did you know linux crashplan doesn't store full permissions?

Try a 200GB restore of 5M files sometime, apparently often the client crashes after many hours.
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I was thought about adding something like that in the future. Maybe detecting the games that you have installed on your phone to use as a starting point for recommendations.
Big companies, yes. Small businesses, not so much.

There's certainly an unrealized support cost. But in my experience, it's pretty common to see several different manufacturers and OSs across a small business. When they need a new laptop, they're either picking up what's cheap at Best Buy or handing down machines when the boss gets a new one.
My argument is that a particular statement is not backed up by the book it is used to sell. You've twisted that pretty far to end up with the opportunity to moralize at me.

My logic isn't that we should ignore sentencing problems in the US, my logic is that bringing bullshit book marketing into the discussion is counter productive.

I'd be interested in exactly which of my statements you view as a casual dismissal of the problems with the justice system.

I said The book claims "How can the average American commit three arguable felonies in the course of a given day?". Yet your example of charge stacking is contingent on carrying a felonious amount of drugs, something the average (mean, median and mode!) American avoids doing., but that wasn't to dismiss anything about the sentencing in those situations, it was to point out that you probably don't want to argue the blurb from the book if you are having a discussion about drug sentencing.
Are these actually undermining jobs and workers, or the management structures over those jobs that make them low-paying?

It seems the fundamental labor of taxi driving and accomodation are only marginally affected, but the distribution of the revenue is much more, uh, democratic.

These are great startups for the economy IMO.
>To be clear, Superfish technology is purely based on contextual/image and not behavioral. It does not profile nor monitor user behavior. It does not record user information. It does not know who the user is. Users are not tracked nor re-targeted. Every session is independent.

We've heard this song and dance before. Excuse my skepticism, but I don't believe you and until we can see some source code, I won't believe you.
Open Data Platform Initiative
I see this checklist is exactly what "DevOps" is, as stated in the first question:

DevOps is all about alignment. It was born out of frustration and trouble between the disparate priorities and incentives of Development and Operations teams. Alignment comes from unifying towards a common goal.

I see your checklist as only coming from experience and institutional knowledge shared by having developers and operations working together.
Fire the boss for ignoring latin instead.
Poll: will you buy Lenovo after the Superfish incident?
I woke this morning and read numerous stories about Lenovo and Superfish from various sources. My gut reaction is that this is a step too far and I would not be buying or recommending Lenovo again, at any grade/level. I have always zapped the factory install, so I would not have been affected, so my circumstances are somewhat mitigated. I am currently unsure as to how to proceed. I've read some excellent arguments today on both sides of the fence, which has got me thinking further but has made the decision less clear cut than it was.

Crunch time: will you buy Lenovo after the Superfish has died down and faded away?

I have no axe to grind, no affiliation to declare, and it's something that's been playing on my mind all day. Thank you in advance.

(Edit for formatting)
Yes, I will buy Lenovo in future
No, I will not buy Lenovo in future
Other (in comments)
"This article will be updated with additional instructions on clean up of deactivated files and removal of certificate shortly."

This was just edited, here is the post before that: https://web.archive.org/web/20150219151726/http://forums.len...
The clients learned something useful about the boss, I'd say. No, it is not reasonable to fire someone over pronunciation. What next, fire someone from Pittsburgh over the way he says "iron", or a Baltimorean for stressing the last syllable of "ambulance"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOILZ_D3aRg
I just finished this book a couple weeks ago. It was definitely a great one. Although, a difficult book to read, purely from the perspective of the topic. Growing old and/or dying are both topics people tend to ignore.

I also hadn't fully grasped the condition of growing old, itself. No one wants to die, but growing old and losing your independence is a disease all to its own, described in vivid detail in the book.

(I also appreciate that the author was so honest about mentioning taking antibiotics before drinking water from the Ganges [and still getting sick!]).
Study Finds Jack Shit
Not to be too snarky, but I don't think I'd trust somebody who wrote that function to have code where one could "not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns."

Perhaps this is some sort of style thing specific to javascript, but wouldn't:

function isRetargetingEnabled(){
return (similarproducts.b.enableRetargetingUnit &&
!isRetargetingBlackList());
}

be the better way to write it? Sure say what you want about micro-optimizations, but the function appears to be used in a boolean context, so shouldn't it just return the if condition? Things like this are why I have trouble trusting security claims.

EDIT: Fixed double-negative
In the United States it's actually the photographer who owns the copyright not the subject. Not positive if this is the case everywhere but I believe it is.
I will never understand the desire to control one's neighbors' property.

I don't care who owns it and it's none of my business how they use it.
I'm sure they might claim that the user agreed to it, but it's important to remember that EU Data Protection law places limits on what people can agree to. You can store person data if it's proportionate for a cause. MitMing all SSL connections? No way is that proportionate.
Google Search vs Alta Vista, Gmail vs Hotmail? Not saying they didn't innovate, but not much comes out of a clear blue sky.... Buzz and Wave didn't get Google very far.
Lenovo Installs Adware on New Consumers Computers
Too much finance is bad for the economy
There's a scene in the movie The Rum Diary where Sanderson says roughly that the way to sell the public on the idea of building a hotel on an untouched island is to start by trying to build 20 hotels. Public outrage will occur, people will write their politicians, and finally a compromise will be reached, in which you get to build only one hotel. But the trick is, that's what you wanted to do in the first place. In the end, this compromise wasn't good enough: the result is still horrible.

This is roughly what Lenovo is trying to pull off here.

> Superfish was previously included on some consumer notebook products shipped in a short window between September and December to help customers potentially discover interesting products while shopping.

This is the compromise being offered. They're claiming, "We didn't violate your privacy, we didn't violate your security, we just wanted to help you discover interesting products."

Superfish opens up all sorts of security holes and privacy concerns, but it's probably true that this wasn't Lenovo's intention (not yet, anyway). But to accept this as a compromise would be to give Lenovo the thing they want in the first place: to serve ads into our web searches. And that in itself is deplorable. It is not acceptable for companies to force their agendas on us.

Lenovo's only defense here is that they were doing something disgusting. We should not accept this compromise.
Is there any way to not use MongoDB in the backend?
Long "a" or short "a"? ;)
He indicated that the law would limit a company to N employees. The stated goal was to benefit the greater good, but the metric was simply a number.
I Wanted to Be a Millionaire
Nuance makes Dragon Naturally Speaking, which also comes preinstalled on some Lenovo laptops (including mine, but it was one of the first things I uninstalled). I'd imagine it has something to do with being able to voice control applications/websites/whatever-Dragon-does. If you don't use Dragon, you can probably safely delete it.
My apologies! I just added it to the about section, can you see it now?

Thanks for letting me know folks.
Clearly Lenovo are stupid for bundling third-party ad-injection software, but who knows what Apple are doing behind closed doors? e.g. CarrierIQ in the baseband... etc.
Okay middle click, it's on firefox right? We've recently been getting a lot of reports on it.
I'll pass this along to philipp (resident back end wizard).

That's a pretty good point on the game page's blurry image we're starting to notice, it's fancy but not really all that function. In the first mock up we did we simply put a darkened overlay on the image to contrast with the white text

We are hoping to add screenshots, related links, blog articles and embedded vids: let's plays, twitch streams above the X amount of upvotes section.

We're working on the design, the game page in particular has been a challenge for us. If you have an idea of what you would love to see it as then jump in on assembly.com/gamamia you can directly affect the design.

And I totally agree about community, in the end that's the most important thing. So we're really trying to get devs involved and discussing their works with players.
"We thought that performing an SSL MitM on our users to serve targeted ads would improve their experience. What a shocker when we found out we were wrong!"
It's not just the text. It's links and the overall structure of the document - the screen reader has no context for this. How does the screen reader know that what's on the canvas is a menu, and that you can tab to it and select menu items with the relevant keys?
Do you really need an IT department to handle all that? Why not let the employees be responsible for their own machines?

Google apps is not that hard to manage: definitely setup a script to make it easy to create new users and add them to groups, because it takes about 7000 clicks otherwise.
Maybe think about it this way:

Loops are not expressions.

(Where I assume that you are talking about for-loops and the like.)
That's Some Strange Velvet Rope on WSJ's 'Billion Dollar Startup Club'
Yup. You know how real value-add looks like? Permanent +50GB of DropBox I got when I bought my Galaxy S4. While I wasn't aware of it until I bought the phone and was just pleasantly surprised, it's a kind of thing that really could influence my choice of phone if I was on the edge of a choice.
Punish bad behaviour. It will scare other other technology companies from doing this sort of thing again. If you switch to another company, you're rewarding the new company for not putting this spyware on their machines.
No, a windows user would have to buy a second copy of windows from microsoft and use that to install on the machine.

Using Lenovo's recovery images will reinstall the same bloat that it originally came with
Thank you so much for the kind words haha it's actually really nice to hear that people are enjoying what we're doing.
Your neighbor's actions have an affect on your home, including day to day comfort and how much your home is worth. HOAs exist for a reason.

I'm not sure I'd want to live next to an apartment that constantly has new guests, any of which could do who knows what to the building.
Or a VCR that plays BETAMAX? (maybe a better analogy)
I love mine too, but this makes me pause. If they were willing to do something like this in software, what's to say they wouldn't do something that you couldn't just flash away? Like an 'enhanced user experience' BIOS. or hardware component? You can't just reformat those.

The, it didn't effect me because I reformatted is kind of a "First they came for the communists..." argument.
Milking taxpayers
C# 6 Parameterless Struct Constructors, Its Quirks, and Restrictions
That's right... I will need to check if there are any hard-to-fake signs on my bank statements (e.g. company stamps/special kind of paper/watermarks).
Yeah, it's a balancing act, and there's certainly a desire (and probably even a legitimate need) to monitor encrypted comms for malware C&C channels, data exfiltration, etc.

Your view seems to reflect a similar nuance as my own. Administrators need to weigh the risks and benefits as it relates to their own environment, and users should at least be aware that such monitoring is taking place. Beyond that, there's some technical challenges, but I see the bigger issues as political and expectation vs. reality alignment.

There's also a video of my talk online, which I'd honestly forgotten about. Maybe someone will find it interesting; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TNdHzwTNdM
I'd can developers who say "jaw-vah-script" instead of "jah-vah-script". Goddamn I find that pretentious.
Hackers' $1B bank theft may still impact consumers
That's a great suggestion.

I've been through everything trying to get a decent HiDPI experience, I'm running Opera beta and it all just works perfectly.

I'm running Debian Testing/Jessie and I've found that the Cinnamon Desktop Environment is the best for me, I've tried them all (trying to get the best results for HiDPI) and it is the one I'm most happy with.
Don't forget paper [1] and pencil [2] to go with your cup!

[1] http://www.fiftythree.com/paper

[2] http://www.fiftythree.com/pencil

Maybe this tech could be extended to create anti-drug cups en-masse for bars, or maybe use it for simple safe-water testing? Or what if diabetics could use it to test for sugar levels? Just speculating, I have no idea how it works though.
Yes, Backblaze's "window" is limited to 30 days. Crashplan may delete files but it's up to you:

"Backblaze will keep versions of a file that changes for up to 30 days.
However, Backblaze is not designed as an additional storage system when
you run out of space. Backblaze mirrors your drive. If you delete your
data, it will be deleted from Backblaze after 30 days." [1]

"If you delete files from your system, they remain backed up and in your
backup archive forever, as long as: 1. The files remain selected in your
backup file selection. 2. Your 'Remove deleted files' setting is set to
never." [2]

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/remote-backup-everything.html

[2] http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Backup/Backup_FAQ
I forget where I heard it, but in a discussion about stealth fighters and stealth capabilities, the conclusion of one person was that it was a game of material scientists vs computer scientists, and that in the end, computer scientists seem to be able to outpace material scientists.
> Lenovo: One customer lost. More to be lost.

Never purchased a Lenovo but I was bent on using one for my next machine. No longer. Their lies about it "not being a risk" have put the affected customers at immense risk.
So Jason (co-founder and lead front end) just told us that the mouseclick issue is a result of us using React.js. We'll try and look into it further, thank you for this!
Microsoft famously launched the Surface tabletop computer :)
Well, r/science and r/askscience are filled with "real" scientists and in general they're two of the calmest and most respectful communities on the site. You may not want to admit it but that shows a lot. That's the joy of empiricism, winning arguments is no longer what it's all about.

You've mentioned the "superiority complex" four times now? So lets look at it. Physicists show deep respect for many fields: chemistry, mathematics, computer science, earth science, materials science, biology, astronomy, engineering, etc. Even Feynman who was famously irreverent joked about how much top level physicists have to ingratiate themselves to mathematicians. I think your feelings are hurt because philosophy isn't in this group.

> Actually you won't find many philosophers who are disrespectful of physics even outside their academic work.

Oh, you want to restrict the conversation to academics insulting academic work? That's strange but OK. Scientists absolutely should be dismissive of the Philosophy of Science because when the field gets something right it tends to be 10-100 years behind and, probably because of the egos of the philosophers writing the books, it misdefines science to exaggerate the importance of philosophy. People who learn what science is from the Philosophy of Science get a picture in their head of a caricature of science and they become not just wrong, but aggressively and arrogantly wrong about what science is. Of course the scientific community pushes back, why should philosophy be allowed to teach people wrong ideas just to beef up their own self-importance?
Pedantically some (trans) men can get pregnant.

Downvotes for pointing out something that has happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Beatie
> For the non-technical, can you explain the search engine you are building.

It is a search engine for one subreddit(/r/learnprogramming).

> so, what is your interest?

I know about search engines, and I wanted to share my knowledge with people(personally, I think there isn't much info on the web, compared to e.g. operating systems). I also wanted to start live streaming, so I started this.

> are you looking for ideas or do you have other pet projects you want to work on?

Suggestions are always welcome! I have a couple of ideas for side projects(and I sometimes stream building them).

> My suggestion, if you are trying to build an audience, crowd source your next project idea.

We tried something like this in /r/WatchPeopleCode, and it doesn't worked very well(for some reason). Although the subreddit was 10x less popular then(and maybe implementation wasn't that good).

I am curious about your project idea though!
Why is probing for weaknesses against the law? If I walk up to a house and jiggle the door handle, and figure out whether it's unlocked or not, and do not actually enter, what crime did I commit? What precedent caused this to be the case? If I am a salesperson who probes for weaknesses in a customer to my own gain, am I also violating the law? What if I am an employee who figured out how to reduce my workload but didn't inform my boss, so I get to surf Hacker News more?

I'm a website developer who patched 11 security holes after a security audit in my last contract gig. I think there is nothing wrong with probing. Actually breaking in and taking is another story.
Walmart ups pay well above minimum wage
Partial data will serve as a distraction if you present it as important. I'm saying this doesn't belong on a dashboard. Granted, they just did this for fun.

The more data the better - That's not true. Some data is better than others. Some data is poor quality. Some is unimportant.
It is their IP because they're doing domain forwarding (via HTTP headers). Someone registered a domain with Namecheap and Namecheap offer free web-forwarding (as opposed to setting up normal A records and pointing at a web server directly).

So as they themselves told you, no spam or phishing content is being hosted on a Namecheap server. They could stop forwarding, but since the spammers are paying them to do that (and nothing about the forwarding is inherently illegal in its own right) that is a grey area.

Ultimately why don't you contact the actual host of the sites rather than picking on Namecheap randomly? Seems like domain forwarding is barely involved in the whole thing. You bring up the IP like that is meaningful, if you actually visited the links you'd see that all that IP does it give you a HTTP redirect.

They would be no more or less involved if the client had just used A records or CNAMES.
EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection
Beehive That Automatically Extracts Honey Without Disturbing Bees
Whole organs on a chip coming to diagnostic centers near you
Eric Andre is pretty avant garde. In fact, there is much content on Cartoon Planet that could be deemed at least 'experimental'.
IANAL;

In the Lenovo case, probably not. But in the case of an employer-provided system and network intended for business purposes which performs SSL interception for security and data leak prevention? I think it can clearly be considered reasonable for the company to do that, and the user's expectation of privacy is significantly different. I do feel it's important that Acceptable Use Policies, Employee handbooks, etc. disclose the activity though.
The word "SQL injection attack" has the word "attack" right there in the name. It's not innocuous. And there are plenty of places you can go where you're permitted to perform the types of analysis you're talking about without repercussions. If you want to be a locksmith you don't wander your neighborhood randomly attempting to break into houses as part of your training.
> you'll be stuck with versions of software that are really really out of date

I've had way more trouble with out of date packages on Ubuntu than Debian (Sid).