zoroa's recent activity

  1. Comment on The Internet goes on high alert after discovery of eight compromised TLS certs in ~tech

  2. Comment on I tried to buy a stolen house in ~finance

    zoroa
    Link
    Thought this was worth sharing for a couple reasons: It introduced me to a scam, deed theft, that I'd never heard from before and find unsettling. A scammer either forges a fake deed or tricks you...

    Every county in the US can auction off your house if the property taxes go unpaid long enough. It happens even if the house is fully paid off, no mortgage, no bank watching the title. When the county sells it, it keeps what you owed and the rest legally belongs to you--but you have file for it before the deadline, or the government keeps it.

    I found one of these houses, a 3-bedroom in Compton, California, because I tried to buy it. But I found out it had allegedly been stolen from a couple who'd owned it since 1959. A judge ruled that it belonged to them. Nobody was charged. And the county auctioned their house anyway.

    That sent me down a rabbit hole trying to find out how that happens — and why the quarter million dollars left over from the sale is still sitting in a county account with a separate party already filing to collect it. Someone who is not the family.

    Thought this was worth sharing for a couple reasons:

    • It introduced me to a scam, deed theft, that I'd never heard from before and find unsettling. A scammer either forges a fake deed or tricks you into signing away ownership of your home. Scammers often target vulnerable properties, like abandonned ones, or properties owned by vulnerable populations, like the elderly. Reestablishing rightful ownership can require a lengthy legal process.
    • It felt like actual Journalism in ways I'm having trouble articulating, but know I don't often feel from like videos on the platform. Sure enough, the author appears to be an investigative journalist notable enough have their own wikipedia page.
    10 votes

  4. Comment on Amazon uses its tracking data to guess whether shoppers have a flat butt and no friends in ~tech

    zoroa
    Link
    Direct link to Amazon's profile of you: https://www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useAiMode=1 I thought this was worth sharing after I looked at mine, and saw that one of its inferences was: This is more or...

    Most people know that Amazon collects data about your shopping history to serve up personalized product recommendations. But what some of us didn’t realize is that you can check exactly what Amazon knows — or thinks it knows — about you in your settings menu. One user’s findings went viral on Threads after she discovered that Amazon assumed she “has flat buttocks” based on her purchases, resulting in a flood of other posts with users sharing the oddly specific information Amazon uses to describe them.

    Direct link to Amazon's profile of you: https://www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useAiMode=1

    I thought this was worth sharing after I looked at mine, and saw that one of its inferences was:

    Gradually built comprehensive gaming setup

    This is more or less correct. "Gradually" is load bearing in that description and likely captures a lot about my behavior as a consumer. I was taken aback by how specific it was able to get and the fact that this is possible at scale.

    Which reminded me of this post from a couple months back, "LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy", since Amazon is effectively doing the same thing to build a profile.

    22 votes

  6. Comment on Akane-banashi | Chapter 223 & 224 in ~anime

    zoroa
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I've had this series on my radar for a really long time, starting around the time I had still been reading Show-ha Shoten!. Show-ha Shoten! was a series about a duo trying to make it in the manzai...

    I've had this series on my radar for a really long time, starting around the time I had still been reading Show-ha Shoten!. Show-ha Shoten! was a series about a duo trying to make it in the manzai scene, that I dropped because manzai wasn't translating well in the localization.

    That put me off Akane-banashi because it appeared to be in the same boat, another manga centered around a traditional japanese style of comedy that I probably wouldn't get much out of because the tradition was foreign to me.

    But here we are, 3-4 years later: Akane-banashi is still going strong, and you are enjoying it so much that you made a top level post on our tiny little forum that doesn't see much interest in manga. My interest is piqued once again.

    Can Akane-banashi be enjoyed even without being familiar with rakugo? Either because it does a good job localizing it, or because it's more than just a story about rakugo?

    1 vote

  7. Comment on Avatar: Seven Havens | Official trailer in ~tv

    zoroa
    Link Parent
    Could you expand on this. I'd always been under the vague impression that Nickelodeon was the big bad in the story, given how they barely gave Korra airtime and largely abandoned one of their most...

    The more behind the scenes I learn about ATLA and Korra, the less I trust Bryan/Mike.

    Could you expand on this.

    I'd always been under the vague impression that Nickelodeon was the big bad in the story, given how they barely gave Korra airtime and largely abandoned one of their most enduring IP for almost 20 years.

    But I've also never looked into to it, and am interested if there's a story to tell.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Avatar: Seven Havens | Official trailer in ~tv

    zoroa
    Link
    I remember really disliking the art direction in the key art they released a few months ago. None of those feelings returned watching this trailer, and I'm fully onboard with how the show looks. I...

    I remember really disliking the art direction in the key art they released a few months ago.

    None of those feelings returned watching this trailer, and I'm fully onboard with how the show looks. I can't tell if it's an issue with my computer, but the animation looked a little choppy at times. Especially in comparison to the new Avatar movie, or even to Korra from 14 (!!) years ago. But that's easily forgotten if the story is good.

    I'm not sure how I feel about the whole "hating the avatar" thing (even if I do agree that Korra was pretty meh). The feelings of hope and reverence the Avatar inspired in the first show were often really effective character building moments, since they either highlighted something about the character or about the Avatar that inspired the feelings in the first place. Unclear if I should put much faith in the showrunners sticking the landing, so I don't know that I'll be buying a Paramount subscription to find out.

    9 votes

  9. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link
    Android UI Automation with ADB I use a Hacker News client called Glider on my phone. It's my favorite client, and seemingly one of few that lets you bookmark comments. But weirdly, despite letting...

    Android UI Automation with ADB

    I use a Hacker News client called Glider on my phone. It's my favorite client, and seemingly one of few that lets you bookmark comments. But weirdly, despite letting you export your bookmarks, there's no way to restore backups of your bookmarks.

    That hasn't been a problem before, since Android's "Use Your Old Phone to Setup Your New Phone" feature would carry the data over. But I couldn't use that approach the latest time I had to setup my phone anew. A feature request would've fallen on deaf ears, since Glider was abandoned shortly I started using it. And despite how simple I imagine the implementation would be, I had no interest in rebuilding the app.

    So I started doing it manually, and after only a couple minutes I was researching how to automate the manual tapping I was doing in the UI.

    Unsurprisingly, adb can do that. It just takes enabling Show Pointer Location in Developer Settings so you can see the coordinates of the UI you want to hit. Then you can use adb to programmatically send touch events.

    So after only an afternoon debugging a surprisingly long Python script, a detour into a hackernews api, and another detour in programmatically clearing my bookmarks from the app, I successfully automated restoring my bookmarks. A process that probably would've taken an hour max if I just did it myself :)

    This exercise had me go through those bookmarks for the first time in a long time, and I was surprised at all the interesting stuff I had saved. A lot of it would be useful to me right now, but I only happened to look because I was setting up a new phone. Maybe its time to start using an actual bookmarking system.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on GPS tracker for an interstate move in ~tech

    zoroa
    Link
    Airtags are almost certainly enough on their own. I regularly read about journalists using airtags to track things in the same way you're trying to, often across the planet. Unless you're...

    Whatever I get, I also plan to get two airtags as backup. Maybe that's enough by itself, but I like the idea of having an active option, even though I know they could all fail for different reasons.

    Airtags are almost certainly enough on their own. I regularly read about journalists using airtags to track things in the same way you're trying to, often across the planet.

    Unless you're expecting your parents stuff to somehow end up away from anyone with an iPhone, Airtags seem to have the edge in almost every way:

    • Way better battery life
    • Integrates into a software ecosystem your parents already use and understand (?)

    The one advantage a dedicated GPS device would have is real time information, but that doesn't sound like what you're looking for in the first place.

    12 votes

  11. Comment on Who’s making these AI copies of my work? in ~tech

    zoroa
    Link
    Video from fern on the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gnrp_caPvo This video adds additional perspective: Many faceless educational channels, who rely on narrated and human animated...

    Video from fern on the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gnrp_caPvo

    This video adds additional perspective:

    • Many faceless educational channels, who rely on narrated and human animated videos, have had their style cloned by AI slop to the point where they are now getting accusations of being AI themselves.
    • In addition to how lucrative fully automated viral videos are, many of the people running these grifts also sell courses on how to start.
    • The resulting content often has egregious misinformation, which is especially damaging in the context of educational videos
    6 votes

  12. Comment on Stalking the wily hacker: forty years later | DEFCON 34 in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link
    I only knew Cliff Stoll as the Klein Bottle guy. He's been a beloved recurring guest on Numberphile over the years, with hugely a popular videos on the topic that show off his humor and teaching...

    40 years ago today, I tripped over a 75-cent accounting glitch in a Unix system. That tiny clue led to a year-long chase across networks, modem banks, and international borders, ultimately uncovering a crew of German hackers working for the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB. We had no budget, no roadmap, and no “cyber” anything. We improvised with soldering irons, shell scripts, logbooks, curiosity, and far too much coffee. Let’s revisit the chase – not just to remember, but to ask what changed, what didn’t, and why it still matters.

    I only knew Cliff Stoll as the Klein Bottle guy. He's been a beloved recurring guest on Numberphile over the years, with hugely a popular videos on the topic that show off his humor and teaching skills. But that characterization ignores all the other things he's done.

    I found this video worth sharing because its a joyous dose of Cliff Stoll, an engaging retelling of his adventures in cybersecurity in the 1980s, and a reminder of how much has changed in the last 40 years and will change in the next.

    7 votes

  14. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link Parent
    Unfortunately, for most of the apps I use, its either: Not an option Such a massive UX downgrade that the tradeoff isn't worth it

    Unfortunately, for most of the apps I use, its either:

    • Not an option
    • Such a massive UX downgrade that the tradeoff isn't worth it
    5 votes

  15. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link
    "Operation: Paperthin" hits the presses My last phone died suddenly at the end of last year. Despite knowing better, I had no backups, losing ~15 years of messages, contacts, and other data from...

    "Operation: Paperthin" hits the presses

    My last phone died suddenly at the end of last year. Despite knowing better, I had no backups, losing ~15 years of messages, contacts, and other data from my phone. I was somewhat lucky that recovery was possible (but costly).

    Given that I might not be as lucky in the future, I need to make the sudden loss of my phone as painless as possible.

    Goals

    Make my phone a "thin client" (I know I'm bastardizing the term, but it's a useful north star).

    Data should not only live on my phone; my phone should never be a singular point of truth for anything I care about. Either:

    • Synced from a remote
    • Backed up frequently

    As a byproduct, I hope this also makes the process of switching phones easier

    Requirements

    • Self-Hosted
    • None of the following should only be saved on my phone
      • Contacts
      • SMS and Calls Logs
      • App Data
      • Files in /storage/emulated/0/

    Challenges

    We're almost 20 years into Android, and its backup story is still dogshit.

    The best option on stock, non-rooted Android is Google's backup system which I don't think is great:

    • It's cloud-only. So you have to pay a subscription, unless you have less than 15GBs to save
    • It isn't guaranteed to be end-to-end encrypted

      • Google says, duplicitously:

        How your data is protected

        To help keep your data safe and secure, it’s encrypted.

        All data, including photos and videos, messages and more are encrypted as they move between your device, Google services, and our data centers.
        Some data is further encrypted with your device’s screen lock. Photos and videos in Google Photos, and MMS media received from your carrier aren’t encrypted by your device’s screen lock.

        • "Are encrypted as they move" is just standard https
        • There's no clarity about what data is encrypted at rest, so it's only safe to assume that none of it is.
    • It isn't a true device backup
      • Contacts, SMS, Calls, and Files are saved
      • App Data is best effort, since individual apps must opt-in.

    Apple was doing full, offline backups of their devices back in the late 2000s!!

    Solution

    Contact syncing was pretty painless. I set up radicale a couple months ago and its been rock solid.

    Initial Plan

    For everything else, I initially planned to reduce the problem to a file sync problem:

    • I don't use RCS, so I could use SMS Backup And Restore to make periodic backups of the SMS database and Call Logs
    • Most of the non-SAAS apps I use support dumping backups to disk, either on a schedule or manually, which was good enough for me.

    This transformed the backup problem into "how do I mirror files from my phone to my backup location".

    Syncthing seemed like the solution that most people used. But I wasn't filled by confidence seeing how the official Android client was discontinued, or the seemingly fragmented stewardship of the community fork.

    What I Actually Did

    In comes Seedvault. It's essentially Google's backup system, but backups are incremental, encrypted and stored on your own storage. That means that it shares the same limitations with respect to app backups, but it was good enough for me.

    The real catch is that Seedvault needs to be integrated at an OS level, which practically means that you need to install a custom ROM to use it. Luckily, I'd been somewhat interested in doing that since the Cyanogenmod days so I spent an afternoon prepping the swap and installed a new ROM on my phone.

    From there, it was just a matter of configuring which folders and apps I want to backup, and it's been running daily ever since.

    Epilogue

    I do have some concerns about this solution...

    I've read that some people have had reliability issues with Seedvault. I'm currently unsure whether its SMS backups are actually doing anything for me right now, since it claims to have backed up 1.0 MB of data for a corpus of messages I know is substantially bigger.

    The right thing to do would be to reset my phone again and validate the backup, but I have yet to summon the willpower.

    4 votes

  16. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    zoroa
    Link Parent
    I don't know that I was expecting this one in the thread. I feel like I've been having the opposite experience; a crisis of trust and companies sequestering their data from LLM crawlers has me in...

    I don't know that I was expecting this one in the thread. I feel like I've been having the opposite experience; a crisis of trust and companies sequestering their data from LLM crawlers has me in a dark age of asking questions.

    I've largely abandonned my reflex of using search engines like Google. When I try, I'm hit by articles that feel sloppy or bot challenges that don't run because I haven't whitelisted cookies for that domain yet. Repeatedly watching LLMs (including frontier models I have to use at $JOB) confidently lie to me has made me deeply skeptical of their output.

    I'd be interested to hear more on how you've been finding good information lately. Maybe there's something I'm missing.

    28 votes

  17. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    zoroa
    Link
    Cinematic Youtube Videos about Hiking, Thru-Hiking, Bikepacking, or, more generally, long distance self-supported (i.e. not a car) journeys. On their face, they're really interesting to watch...

    Cinematic Youtube Videos about Hiking, Thru-Hiking, Bikepacking, or, more generally, long distance self-supported (i.e. not a car) journeys.

    On their face, they're really interesting to watch because they're often shot beautifully, show really beautiful views, and follow someone on a really interesting journey where they're pushing themselves through an experience most people wouldn't dream of doing.

    Unexpectedly, I've come to love this genre because of how often the films reaffirm how many good people are out there. So many times, you'll see examples strangers maintaining food and water drops in remote places, welcoming travelers into their homes for free, or spontaneously sharing a convivial moment. Especially now, when it can be easy to get trapped in negativity about our communities and neighbors, I value the reminder of the kindness that's still out there.

    A couple of my favorites:

    Though, one of the great things about this genre is that the content is so compelling that's lots of really small videographers on the platform that make great stuff

    12 votes

  18. Comment on Replicating Reddit's best feature on other forums in ~tech

    zoroa
    Link
    Pretty sure you can achieve something similar with Tildes ReExtended

    Pretty sure you can achieve something similar with Tildes ReExtended

    Assign custom colors to usernames.

    You can enter multiple usernames separated by a comma if you want them to use the same color.

    If randomize is enabled then all usernames will be given a random background color based on a hash of the username. Manually assigned colors will be applied normally.

    3 votes

  19. Comment on Ploopy A+ | Open source trackball in ~tech

    zoroa
    Link
    Thought this was worth sharing because it's cool and comes from a company I think is cool since they open source all their work I have no affiliation I'd been thinking about getting a trackball...

    Three years ago, we released the design for the Adept, a unique trackball perfectly suited for the use of QMK, for 3D-printing, and for ambidextrous use across a wide variety of applications.

    The Adept has been consistently popular ever since we released it. It’s been used by people for many different purposes, and spurred many of our community’s members to make innovative modifications for it, taking advantage of it’s open-source nature.

    Today, I have the privilege of sharing the next iteration of our Adept design. It’s been improved in every way we could think of, leveraging the enthusiasm that we’ve seen for the design in our community.

    Here it is: the A+.

    Thought this was worth sharing because it's cool and comes from a company I think is cool since they open source all their work I have no affiliation

    I'd been thinking about getting a trackball for a while as an investment towards wrist health as I get older. Ploopy's hardware checks a lot of boxes for me that other devices don't. I can avoid being locked into manufacturer software for configuration (it uses Via). I have access to the design files, if I ever want to mod or repair the device.

    And I like a lot of the design decisions they made. I'm weirdly excited that it has knobs.

    4 votes