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9/12/2017 @ 10:27 AM +MST (Time services reported back up according to status page)


Bandwidth amount wise - really not that much.

Looking at my history (pretty active player) I've used about 184 MB since June 24th (I am not as active on weekends so for the sake of this example I actually played 18 days out of the month averaged about the same per day). On average that means about 10.2 MB per day of playing (looking at the graph, however, I would say I used about 20 MB the day of the event as I was out for about twice as much time that day).

I don't think that is considered a lot


As thekaleb mentioned the creator seems to reference this symbol a lot in his games. Here is more of a back story (after some google-fu of course as I'm not very familiar with the games)

Seems like Keen 5 has it as an easter egg to reference Wolfenstein [1].

And Wolfenstein uses it since the game has a "Nazi Party" within it (if you fight them or fight with them I'm not aware of) [2].

Interesting quote from [2] "The inclusion of the swastika led to the banning of the conventional game in Germany, as cultural stigma against the swastika is high there."

[1] http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/Keen_5_Easter_eggs#Swastika

[2] http://wolfenstein.wikia.com/wiki/Swastika


For reference the plot of Wolfenstein is that you are a captured soldier trying to escape from a Nazi controlled castle. You are fighting against the Nazis.


While probably a mistake on John Romero's part, Keen uses 卍 in its easter egg while the nazis used 卐 instead.


True but regardless of which one is technically correct, both pretty much share the same negative connotations now. I used to always hear people talking about how the swastika is really a sign of peace, but regardless of what it originally meant, it doesn't mean that anymore.


It doesn't have anything to do with Nazis to at least a billion people in India. I'd even bet that the majority of people around the world associate swastikas with non-Nazi stuff.


I wonder if they will block cell signals?

I've noticed in certain Walmarts my signal won't work no matter where I am - more than likely the thick walls I would assume were blocking the signal not some malicious attempt to stop me from price matching.


Regarding the DNA bank: I would like to know what information will they hold - just digital fingerprints of the DNA, or actual organic material. Depending on what is stored this could become a big target for various organizations to get a hold of.

Then next you have to worry about a) Someone abusing their power and using the information/robots against you for unfair reasons, or b) Hackers are constantly trying to break into various systems and I'm sure this bank/human-less-cop-force would attract some sort of attention.

To be fair though I have never planned to visit Dubai because of personal conflict of interests so hopefully if this does become a thing and is successful it stays in Dubai.


For the lazy: (this will hide the referral and not forward you to the image crying about HN traffic)

https://anon.to/?https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/


The feature does exist however it doesn't work in every scenario. Essentially when your pager shows

"X - Y of Z" (and not "X - Y of many") the keyword being many of course.

Your able to hover over the "X - Y of Z" and choose "Oldest" [1].

So essentially if data is indexed your able to.

I was not able to search any filter and apply this however on any Label I created I was able to do this.

So steps to find the oldest from amazon would probably have to be

1. Create filter+label that groups them all into one category. Wait for indexing to catch up should be fairly quickly since we are not talking petabytes of random data.

2. Choose the label on the left and on the top right hover over the "1-100 of 9999" and choose oldest.

Not the best work-a-round of course and makes sense why it's setup this way (Helps with optimization) however if a person sets up a lot of labels then they are already set up to do this feature.

[1] https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/sort-email-by-oldest-first...

edit Also there is the method of using the search field parameters for example.

"Amazon.com before:2004/04/16" [2]

then you could more quickly go thru them (however if you didn't know your starting point this would prove to be tricky of course!)

[2] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en


I appreciate the response and in the case of a dire need I suppose I might utilize that. But WOW that's a lot of trouble to do something that's essentially a couple clicks in Outlook.


This feature really grinds my gears. They should at least allow a feature to disable showing the picture/name until the user has logged in. In some cases I'm handing out my email to avoid handing out my actual identity because I don't want to be spammed or followed. Until then I will continue to use a false name and photo under my accounts signed up to google (apart from the one work email I have thru them).


AFAIK the picture is only shown if Google is reasonably confident that it is actually you trying to log in.


> AFAIK the picture is only shown if Google is reasonably confident that it is actually you trying to log in.

I didn't know about this feature, but I often saw pictures of people I know when I tried. Apparently, it seems that for example just sharing IP address is sufficient to trigger this reasonable confidence. Not sure what other ways there may be. But indeed, it didn't work for a few random strangers from LKML I just tried.


IP is a factor, but it's actually much more sophisticated than that :)


Thank you for this information - seems to be so - just tried a VPN from Canada and it only shows the email that I entered. However I still would like to disable it on the off chance that someone in the future messes up. May never happen but I'd like to not take that risk. Thank you none-the-less as that has eased my mind a little bit.


I believe the idea is to make it so this technique isn't useful for analytics anymore (edit: because your MAC mining data would be telling the user is in 100+ places at once). If it would work is an entirely different story because since the devices are stationary and not moving (like a device in your hand or pocket would) would it be easily detectable that it was a "faking" device.


It is not so much about your device being at many places at the same time (though it is a nice side-effect) as it is about polluting tracking databases. If you normally have 10 people in an area, and all of a sudden there are 2000, you know something is wrong. But there is no telling which of these 2000 devices is the real one, meaning you have to accept false metrics, or remove all of them from your system (including the real device).


Pollution is essentially what I meant apologies for my poor phrasing.

However detection of these devices could become easy considering they probably wouldn't move a lot, meaning you'd have to either (a) move the device frequently and randomly or (b) the antenna that reproduces the signal would need to add a bit of weakness to the signal to adjust and make the user look like he is moving.

(e.g. If the signal strength stays the same constantly then it might be easy to tell the user isn't moving ever and therefore likely not a spot they are at currently, or even if everyone shares a very similar signal strength).

According to the description on GitHub the system only adjusts the sequence numbers.


(see below for update about Android 6.0+)

Depends on the phone and if they use passive or active probing [1]. I also do not see a way to disable it globally yet as it's currently in the Google Issue Tracker [2]. Some say it's meant to be passive by default however Android documentation doesn't specifically state this [3].

"The existence of an hidden function to start an active scan (reported here) suggests that the normal scanning function is indeed passive. This is to be taken with a grain of salt, though, as the Android documentation doesn't explicitly tell if the function WifiManager.startScan() is passive or not." [3]

[1] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/10/02/what-is-your-pho...

[2] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36989646 Please do note this same issue exists with Bluetooth (in comments).

[3] https://android.stackexchange.com/a/131446

edit Looks like iOS randomizes the MAC address while scanning for WiFI networks since iOS 8 (should be noted that it says "may not always be the device's real (universal) address" [4].

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7864813

edit2 After some more reading supposed Android 6.0 solves this issue by randomizing the mac address as well, however the user in this blog tested it and was able to still get the original MAC address [5].

[5] https://urbanjack.wordpress.com/2016/03/04/game-over-for-wif...

edit3 After even more reading it's kind of hard to tell what devices are affected and who isn't (Some say Google phones aren't affected and it's just OEM phones, however others claim that some Google phones are still affected by this issue). The only way to get this fixed globally is to have a security push to all supported versions that by default disables it globally then a user can enable it by choice. Considering the spaghetti mess of who is using it by default and who is not.

edit4 I agree with many on that the MAC randomization isn't really a good idea because some networks assign IPs based on the MAC address and to address that issue only the probing/scanning packets have the spoofed MAC address. All a hacker would have to do is create a network with the spoofed SSID and get the user to connect with the real MAC address thereby circumventing the randomization technique.


Thanks for your in-depth comment.

As you found out, this whole things is pretty unclear and it really depends on the phone/vendor (or combination vendor and software version) . While testing I've noticed some phones use their own MAC address every time (like my Nexus 5), while others change their MAC address. Changing the MAC address doesn't really help if they send the full probe request though, as you can still use the combination of ESSIDs a device is looking for as a way of fingerprinting them (the chances of someone else asking for the exact same list are quite small).

Also, in one of the cases where I noticed a device using different MAC addresses, it only changed the last part of the address, keeping the vendor ID the same, making identifying a device easier.


Thanks for taking note the entire thing was being presented as irrational. I determined my phone was not leaking this data, so decided to say as much. I appreciate puddintane's work in collecting this information for us. Unfortunately, I decided to not assume to unknown amount of work for myself which would be required for determining a rational outcome for the rest of us. Their work here helped with that immensely.


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