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freakattack.com is an IP owned and managed by the University of Michigan. I could not visit the site due to them being in my firewall's ban list caused by unauthorized vulnerability testing against my home network.

As an aside I wonder why our tax dollars are being used to support unauthorized vulnerability attempts and for hosting a .com commercial site?

Is it legal for the person/people operating freakattack.com to use US Tax Income to fund their own commercial efforts using University resources? I didn't graduate college, maybe it's legal for them to do this?


> support unauthorized vulnerability attempts

That was probably just a random student who learned some fun stuff in Security class and slept through the Ethics lesson. I can't speak for UMich, but security research at my university (NC State) has a very strict "don't attack civilians" policy.

> hosting a .com commercial site

First off, .com sites are not necessarily commercial. Second, this isn't a commercial site, it's an informational page about a recently discovered TLS vulnerability.


In the first case I read you as saying it's OK to commit a crime against a civilian in the United States as long as [the person didn't mean to] and in the second case that since not all .COM domains are used for commercial purposes and since this one seems to be information only at the moment; that our tax dollars which helps Universities across the United States to run can be used to fund whatever .COM sites students feel so inclined to register and for whatever reason they feel is justified.


I heard that rhetoric when ones you are calling for help prosecuted Aaron Schwartz. All in times when NSA was hacking all the systems they could get their hands on both around the world and in USA.

You may be overreacting and unwillingly supporting erosion of civil rights.


What is your evidence that the vulnerability testing was done by someone supported by your tax dollars, instead of by a computer that was part of a botnet controlled by your government's cyberenemies?


Its probably just scans from zmap. Complaining about zmap scans is about on the level of complaining about ssllabs.com scanning your box.

https://zmap.io/

It could be a student in the dorms who discovered metasploit though. Or someone in the computer lab who has a tool that doesn't need root. (or who rooted the lab computer)


Here is a check for the IP for freakattack.com:

http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/141.212.122.194

Edit: They have been on that list for a while, so either the staff at the University is incompetent or they don't care; what was your point again?


This is why reverse DNS exists. http://researchscan450.eecs.umich.edu/


You are actually correct that you were scanned by an official, funded project at the University of Michigan. The research team specializes in "internet-wide measurement", meaning they scan for vulnerabilities on a regular basis in order to get a sort of "Internet health report".

Nonetheless, if this bothers you, visiting the IP that scanned you gives you instructions for opting out: http://141.212.122.194


He asked about why UMichigan is inaccessible from your network. How do you know it was a supported student activity and not either a malicious student, or a machine on the UMichigan network that's been compromised?

Have you reported the activity against your home network to UMichigan?


"In fact, in the past year, we paid more than $7 billion to developers distributing apps and games on Google Play."

Do they mean when I buy someone's app and send them my money that they are taking the credit for "paying" the developer? If so then that's wrong. My bank doesn't pay my bills. I pay my bills using my bank's system.


They did a little more than a bank. They built Android and its marketplace rather than just serve as an intermediary in the payment process.


That's true and very admirable but not what I was objecting to. It's this line that I find objectionable:

"we paid more than $7 billion to developers"

No, the Marketplace enabled $7 billion in transactions between the customers and the developers, that would have been a more correct way to state it.


I just ran a comparison with Expedia (which seems to no longer be ASP.NET based as an aside); not too surprised, Expedia found the cheaper flights. Read, cheaper, not necessarily better.


I gotta say this is a pretty cool app. A lot of the UI seems to be declarative. Very nice, considering donating.


If Stripe is doing Bitcoin then I now know to stay from and recommend others to say away from Stripe.


>> we have to use Wayland instead of X11, because X11 is impossible to secure.

Yet X11 was designed in the prime example world of a mult-user OS, UNIX. Hmm.

>> We also need to use kdbus to allow desktop integration that is properly filtered at the kernel level.

Didn't I read an article on HN recently talking about a vulnerability in Windows and the subject of too close a relationship between the kernel and the end user graphics came up?


This isn't about isolating users from each other, but isolating different applications running as the same user from each other. X11 (and Unix itself) was not designed to do this.

Also, kdbus has nothing to do with graphics.


We could have used this last week. A pole was damaged (I don't know how, just that it was damaged) and in the middle of a sunny day we lost power for 1.5 hours. Really looking forward to this technology.


I tried to like LISP many times since the 1980's when I was experimenting with it on the side, it just did not click for me like C/C++/Java/C#.


If they could make it last as long as solar cells are described to last, 20 years or so, then I'd consider it.


They don't look too bad on the same Firefox on Ubuntu 14.04:

http://imgur.com/6nKzwZq

What Linux are you running? "fc20" I guess that's Fedora? So it looks bad on Firefox on Fedora but fine on Ubuntu. That's a Fedora issue not a Firefox or general Linux issue.


Yes, fc20 stands for Fedora 20. The difference between it and Ubuntu isn't that big if I zoom in: http://imgur.com/ptlQEmf

Based on the other comments I got, the small differences could be caused by different anti-aliasing settings or font engines (I'm currently using freetype-freeworld-2.5.0.1-5 for example).


I see, well as a test you could download the Ubuntu fonts and switch to them for comparison.

PS I agree too, they look better in Chrome, don't know why.


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