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Comment My sense (Score 1) 536

My sense is that the MEAN Stack (Mongo, Express, AngularJS, Node) is sort of winning. There's some packaging of it over at mean.io.

Personally, I'm really getting interested in Meteor (www.meteor.com). Watch the videos, and realize I saw a smart non-coder go from zero to *ridiculously* interactive site design in three months.

Comment It's because Python 3 is broken. (Score 2) 432

No really.

I took a pass at Python 3 a while back. The amount of hoops I needed to jump through, to deal with compilation errors around Unicode handling, was terrifying. It was simply a poor user experience.

Python 2.7 just works. Sure, it's a nightmare past a certain scale point. But until you get into the dregs of OO it really is executable pseudocode.

Python 3 is some other language that lost that property.

The big problem is that we don't ship languages with telemetry that reports when they fail to work. So things that are completely obvious to outsiders never make it to inner circles. Not that I can really see any way for Python 3 to mend its errors.

Comment Write code! (Score 3, Informative) 472

Seriously. Write some code, publish it on Github. Spin up a single serving web page, does one interesting thing as soon as you arrive. Remember, everyone else with resumes could be pretending, you're actually doing stuff.

For work experience, sign up on freelancing sites like odesk. Take jobs just to do them. Nobody knows how old you are, there. Even if all you can do is sysadmin -- well, admin some cloud services!

Comment Perspective (Score 5, Insightful) 438

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/82-percent-of-atts-q4-2011-sales-are-smartphones-66-percent-are-iphones.ars

Yeah. 66% of AT&T's 4th quarter sales were iPhones. I was on Verizon for years, switched to AT&T only for their iPhone, and stuck with them only for their GSM capabilities worldwide. Sure, your margins are less when you offer a better service. Would you prefer no sales though?

Comment NES (Score 2) 348

The platform that most successfully upgraded itself was the NES. One of the degrees of freedom they had, because there were chips in each cartridge, was to deploy new memory management units inside the games themselves. Quite literally, the NES became more powerful for games released later in its dev cycle. SNES did this too, with the SuperFX chip inside of Starfox (the most popular DSP in the world, for its era) but it wasn't quite the "all games ship upgrading hardware".

I suspect if there was ever to be upgradable hardware, it'd have to work by yearly subscription, and it'd have to be no more than $50 a year for the part. However, with guaranteed sales in the millions of units (as games would hard-require it) the logistics of making some pretty crazy stuff fit into $50/yr wouldn't be unimaginable. Remember that XBox Live is already pulling, what, $60/yr?
Security

Submission + - Hacker Demos Easy Wireless Credit Card Fraud (forbes.com)

Sparrowvsrevolution writes: At the Shmoocon hacker conference, security researcher Kristin Paget aimed to indisputably prove what hackers have long known and the payment card industry has repeatedly downplayed and denied: That RFID-enabled credit card data can be easily, cheaply, and undetectably stolen and used for fraudulent transactions. With a Vivotech RFID credit card reader she bought on eBay for $50, Paget wirelessly read a volunteer’s credit card onstage and obtained the card’s number and expiration date, along with the one-time CVV number used by contactless cards to authenticate payments. A second later, she used a $300 card-magnetizing tool to encode that data onto a blank card. And then, with a Square attachment for the iPhone that allows anyone to swipe a card and receive payments, she paid herself $15 of the volunteer’s money with the counterfeit card she’d just created. (She also handed the volunteer a twenty dollar bill, essentially selling the bill on stage for $15 to avoid any charges of illegal fraud.)

The payment industry often claims that contactless credit cards are more safe than traditional cards, and that any data a hacker could wirelessly read from them can't be used for fraud. But with 100 million of the RFID-enabled credit cards now in circulation, Paget wanted to undisputably show that's not the case. A stealthy attacker in a crowded public place could easily scan hundreds of cards through wallets or purses.

Comment It's all being worked on (Score 5, Interesting) 77

DNSSEC is an infrastructure shift, and you can't use it on .com domains for another few months. Have some patience.

At Black Hat this year, I actually demonstrated the endgame. Want federated authentication in OpenSSH that actually scales? Want servers able to autogenerate TLS keys that will be recognized and secured worldwide, even against broken certificate authorities?

Want secure email, without the mess that is PGP key management?

End to end secure key management via DNSSEC makes it all actually really easy. Code is here -- BSD licensed, feel free to play:

http://dankaminsky.com/phreebird

Also, I'm putting together a set of diaries on the subject:

http://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/13/dnssec-ch1/

Enjoy!

Comment Knock It Off (Score 1) 318

The problem is collateral damage. Legitimate actors can't get into the DDoS game, because if they legitimize DDoS, the network will *fry*.

The "good guys" cannot flood nearly as significantly as the bad guys. Worse, the good guys are significantly more exposed -- they have corpnets, they have partner nets, etc. Today it's the website, tomorrow it's Hulu.

There are paths on which the anti-piracy people have the high ground (not moral high ground, tactical high ground). DDoS, in no uncertain terms, is not one of them.
Cellphones

Submission + - Cellphone interception at Defcon (tombom.co.uk)

ChrisPaget writes: I'm planning a pretty significant demonstration of GSM insecurity at Defcon next week, where I'll intercept and record cellular calls made by my attendees, live on-stage, no user-input required. As you can imagine, intercepting cellphones is a Very Big Deal in the eyes of the law; this blog post is an attempt to reassure everyone that their privacy is being taken seriously despite the nature of the demo. I'm not just making it up either — the EFF have helped significantly with the details.

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