alister

36 ms·

331.
by alister 11y ago
In terms of ATM struggles for foreign visitors, Brazil really holds the record. The workflow requires you to insert your card twice (at least for Banco do Brasil). It goes like this: Insert card -> Take card (no PIN entered yet) -> Ch
332.
by alister 11y ago
One solution to the problem of user flow A vs user flow B is to dispense the cash and return the card simultaneously and together . The "together" part is admittedly difficult to engineer but perhaps the card slot could be pla
333.
by alister 11y ago
> Less an issue of the computing power, more an issue of the knowledge. I think you're mixing up two issues: (a) Strengthening DES against differential cryptanalysis is a knowledge issue. The NSA knew about that attack, and maybe
334.
by alister 11y ago
The choice of the numbers used for S-boxes can be very mysterious unless the designers explain it. So reverse engineering the S-box design might reveal something interesting (something good or something evil). For years people thought that
335.
by alister 11y ago
> I strongly recommend you install the Symbola font, which contains basic glyphs for a vast number of characters. They may not be pretty, but they’re better than seeing the infamous Unicode lego. Well, I installed the Symbola font as h
336.
by alister 11y ago
The most connected spot in the world isn't New York or Hong Kong, but the unlikely city of Fortaleza, Brazil, with 17 cable landings.
337.
by alister 11y ago
What a difference a year makes. Brazil had the most overvalued currency in the world a year ago[1] according to the Big Mac Index, but today it's undervalued by 10.6%. It strikes me that currency exchange rate is a very inconspicuous t
338.
by alister 11y ago
> What's changed over the past fifteen years is that the internet has dramatically decreased the cost of identify in an open job listing and sending in an application. The stack of resumes you need to read through in order to start
339.
by alister 11y ago
All sorts of high-quality stationery are becoming impossible to find. I used to love poking around real stationery stores as a kid. Today's "warehouse" stores are a lot less fun that a real stationer. For people who don'
340.
by alister 12y ago
That inflation-adjusted price[1] would be $450.19. It does seem amazing that a lot of people were paying that much for a pocket radio, but then again $450 is in the same ballpark as a smartphone which everyone happily buys today. [1] http:
341.
by alister 12y ago
> the author is sophisticated and that's why they chose RC5 I'm saying that because the author is sophisticated, they know that the strength of the algorithm doesn't matter (so long as it's not something ridiculousl
342.
by alister 12y ago
Let's not jump to conclusions. If Symantec's characterization of the sophistication of this malware is accurate, then surely they could have afforded some crypto expertise. First, can we agree that any encryption algorithm better
343.
by alister 12y ago
No, the linked article[1] says, "a CPF number is demanded from the purchaser when booking online, but passengers can leave the CPF field empty". I can confirm that that's how it works. The CPF number is needed from the pe
344.
by alister 12y ago
There's also the risk that aggregators will screw up something. On two separate occasions I saw someone arguing with hotel reception about a booking they made with an aggregator that the hotel never received. Customer says, "But
345.
by alister 12y ago
Brazil's major airline, TAM, has a nice little trick of their own to fend off the OP's advice. Even if you use TAM's Brazilian portal where you have to navigate in Portuguese, and even if you use it from within Brazil, you wo
346.
by alister 12y ago
tl;dr: The crypto component of Windows was discovered to have a 1024-bit public key embedded within it whose symbol name is _NSAKEY . The "obvious" assumption was that this permits the NSA to read, sign, or authenticate anything
347.
by alister 12y ago
> Buying luxury goods that can be resold overseas at a significant markup amplifies the fraudster’s “profit.” > where electronics and other luxury items typically sell for a much higher price than in the United States (think new iP
348.
by alister 12y ago
The bottom of a modern beverage can has a glowing blue ring that you can see only under UV light (aka black light). I've seen this on Coke, Sprite, and other soft drink cans. The bottoms of the cans are coated with a varnish to make th
349.
by alister 12y ago
Does anyone remember when beverage cans used to be so thick that it was considered an exercise of manliness to be able to crush a can--particularly a beer can--with one hand? I had always wondered what the key innovation was that allowed al
350.
by alister 12y ago
Brazil is far from the economic center of the Internet. South Korea, a country with 1/4 of the population of Brazil, is probably better connected because it's on the route to Japan, China, etc. Brazil's poor latency may be pa
351.
by alister 12y ago
Having stayed at a couple of the reviewed hotels in Brazil that get a good rating, you would think everything was fine. But latency is a HUGE problem in Brazil[1], and in probably any country that's far removed from the major backbones
352.
by alister 12y ago
My amusing thought experiment is that two startups could easily give themselves billion dollar revenue as follows: 1. Startup A sells 2 twin puppies to startup B at $500M each. 2. Startup B sells 4 hand-drawn logos to startup A for $250M ea
353.
Treasury and Justice Departments effectively rule that Bitcoin is legitimate(cringely.com)
3 points by alister 12y ago|0 comments
354.
Recomputing MD5 hashes de-anonymizes all 173 million NYC taxi trips(arstechnica.com)
7 points by alister 12y ago|0 comments
355.
by alister 12y ago
Name and email, you say? Check out the form you need to fill in to use free wifi at Brazilian airports: http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Wi-Fi_and_Internet_se... They want your: name sex marital status nat
356.
by alister 12y ago
> the German translation produced was very poor quality compared to the English one They would have selected the best possible language pair for this demo, so we should expect it to have done very poorly if they picked, say, English&lt
357.
by alister 12y ago
> on my Macs use Time Machine Time Machine for the Mac is excellent--I use it myself--but I must say that it is not sufficient by itself for the following reasons: (1) Since the Time Machine backup drive is typically online all the tim
358.
by alister 12y ago
> If we are talking about recorded data, ... You could encrypt the data with a public key and store it so that the drone itself can't read it. About the only reason to do this would be to ensure if it was captured, the target would
359.
by alister 12y ago
Sure, external constraints aren't always apparent to the public. But in this particular case, the Brazilian airlines can't claim that because visitors to Brazil can buy airline tickets through other interfaces (from travel agent
360.
by alister 12y ago
It's gotten to the point that whenever I want to post a URL in an article or email a URL to someone, I need to sanitize it. I don't know what information I might be leaking. If the URL looks like it might have some hidden informat

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