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Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”

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Re: Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”

#31

Post by danellis »

mkempe wrote: post #28
mikeash wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dictionary lists two definitions for "unique." One is "being the only one of its kind" and is thus a binary property as you say, but the other is merely "particularly remarkable, special, or unusual," which is perfectly amenable to modifiers like this.

"unique" comes directly from the Latin "unus", one. The modernist, American wishy-washy uses of the word to mean "unusual" are a sad travesty of thinking. One should simply use the word "unusual" if that's what one means to say.

If you think words gaining new and changing meanings is "a sad travesty", then I think you are a nice person -- and I don't mean in the modern sense of the word.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”

#32

Post by slackson »

mkempe wrote: post #28
mikeash wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dictionary lists two definitions for "unique." One is "being the only one of its kind" and is thus a binary property as you say, but the other is merely "particularly remarkable, special, or unusual," which is perfectly amenable to modifiers like this.

"unique" comes directly from the Latin "unus", one. The modernist, American wishy-washy uses of the word to mean "unusual" are a sad travesty of thinking. One should simply use the word "unusual" if that's what one means to say.

Language changes all the time. Everyone knew what was intended to be communicated. I don't really see what the problem is, it's not like there's some platonic ideal of the English language to be violated.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”

#33

Post by voidz »

geofft wrote: post #10
Animats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security Theater Everywhere strikes again. Unless you're logged in and entering data, Hacker News does not need SSL.

So I should take it that you're OK with every country's intelligence agency modifying links on HN for their citizens, redirecting crypto downloads to trojaned pages for specific users, suppressing links that are overly critical of the government, right?

Are you sure that the agencies you speak of are not able to do this anyway? Even the Hong Kong Post Office has a place among the trusted CA's supplied by most vendors: not really necessary for everyone on the planet, I'd think. If even just one of those trusted CAs would or has become compromised, all bets are off. Which has already happened in the past anyway.

So, how you defend "SSL everywhere".. I don't buy it. I feel more for what the commenter you responded to said, because your counter argument comes with a lot of assumptions that have more problematic implications. A false sense of being secure does seem much worse than knowing that most of the stuff you do is actually insecure to begin with.

Plain text is not a bug. It's a feature! Cheesy, I know.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”

#34

Post by chrissyb »

keithwarren wrote: post #24

I had this same phone, in the post iPhone era we tend to forget that smartphones did exist and some of them were actually pretty fantastic devices. From the 600 I upgraded to the 700w and that was probably my favorite phone of all time.

Totally agree, i sometimes reminisce about the good ol' days with my Nokia N70 i bought in 2005. Here's some memorable achievements:

- I watched most of the world cup 2006 games live streamed over 3G. -I used to frequently use google maps which without GPS would use cell towers triangulate my position within a couple hundred meter radius. - Used it as a wireless AP -And even uploaded videos to youtube.

When i first heard of the iPhone i wasn't that impressed as i already been using what i considered a smartphone. Obviously i that's all changed now! ;)

Re: Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”

#36

Post by warbiscuit »

rizumu wrote: post #15

Uniqueness is absolute, so the support email is either unique or not. There are no degrees of uniqueness for something to be more unique than another thing. Sorry, but this grammar mistake is a big pet peeve.

I'd argue that definition is incorrect.

To be unique, all something needs is to have a collection of properties which (taken together) are possessed by no other instance within some larger population.

Even then, it's still quite possible to have multiple unique objects within a set.

This quality of "uniqueness" can then be ranked, based on how many of those unique properties (or subsets of them) are sufficient to still make the item unique.

E.g. blue sphere among blue cubes is less unique than a red sphere among blue cubes.

So yes, "more unique" is perfectly reasonable IMHO :P

Re: Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”

#37

Post by willthames »

mkempe wrote: post #28
mikeash wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dictionary lists two definitions for "unique." One is "being the only one of its kind" and is thus a binary property as you say, but the other is merely "particularly remarkable, special, or unusual," which is perfectly amenable to modifiers like this.

"unique" comes directly from the Latin "unus", one. The modernist, American wishy-washy uses of the word to mean "unusual" are a sad travesty of thinking. One should simply use the word "unusual" if that's what one means to say.

What a pathetic [1] argument!

[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pathetic

Re: Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”

#38

Post by mikeash »

mkempe wrote: post #28
mikeash wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dictionary lists two definitions for "unique." One is "being the only one of its kind" and is thus a binary property as you say, but the other is merely "particularly remarkable, special, or unusual," which is perfectly amenable to modifiers like this.

"unique" comes directly from the Latin "unus", one. The modernist, American wishy-washy uses of the word to mean "unusual" are a sad travesty of thinking. One should simply use the word "unusual" if that's what one means to say.

From looking at the origins, it seems to me that pretty much the same objection could be leveled at your use of the word "one" as a pronoun instead of a number.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”

#39

Post by briandh »

Animats wrote: post #13
geofft wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I should take it that you're OK with every country's intelligence agency modifying links on HN for their citizens, redirecting crypto downloads to trojaned pages for specific users, suppressing links that are overly critical of the government, right?

Protection against changes should be done with subresource integrity hashes ( http://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/ ). With HTTPS, an observer still knows who you're talking to, and since they can see how big the request and reply are, they can probably guess what you're looking at.

Why would SRI protect against a MITM, who can simply change the embedded hashes? (not to mention that there's plenty of non-"resource" content that would not be hashed in the first place, yet an attacker might want to change)

Unless my understanding of SRI is totally wrong, it is to protect against malicious changes to third-party resources, usually by the hosts of those resources (or someone attacking them) or a poisoned cache thereof, not to guard against MITM.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”

#40

Post by yourad_io »

voidz wrote: post #33
geofft wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I should take it that you're OK with every country's intelligence agency modifying links on HN for their citizens, redirecting crypto downloads to trojaned pages for specific users, suppressing links that are overly critical of the government, right?

Are you sure that the agencies you speak of are not able to do this anyway? Even the Hong Kong Post Office has a place among the trusted CA's supplied by most vendors: not really necessary for everyone on the planet, I'd think. If even just one of those trusted CAs would or has become compromised, all bets are off. Which has already happened in the past anyway. So, how you defend "SSL everywhere".. I don't buy it. I…

> A false sense of being secure does seem much worse than knowing that most of the stuff you do is actually insecure to begin with.

It may feel so, but it certainly isn't. Some security (against anyone but the top 0.X% of "bad guys") is certainly better than no security (random script kiddie in your coffee shop injecting 0-days from exploit-db straight to your browser).

And regarding the hopelessness of SSL/TLS - the CA problem exists and is pretty huge. But we know the solution[1]: it's called certificate pinning. When you control clients (Google/Chrom[e/ium]) can just pin your own certs/CA and refuse anything signed by the Hong Kong office. For the rest of us that don't, there's HSTS (to tell the browser to refuse http:// redirects from a MiTM, overriding TLS altogether) and Public Key Pinning Extension (HPKP). They aren't very widely rolled out, but we're getting there. Test your browser here[2], you may be surprised. This all assumes that the user won't ignore the warnings when they come up, of course. Also it would protect you from your second visit onwards - if you're being MiTM'ed at your first attempt to grab a site with all the above bells and whistles, your browser doesn't know about the pinned stuff yet, so it is vulnerable to SSL stripping, etc.

In short, it's certainly better than nothing (protecting you from 99%+ of bad guys) and we're slowly fixing it[3]. Don't let the man get you down.

[1] Until we get to a proper, more distributed solution

[2] https://projects.dm.id.lv/Public-Key-Pins_test

[3] Shamefully slowly - TACK was proposed so long ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010711

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