Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not as far as I was ever aware. They were intended for guest areas.
So why is the RSSI thing worth having?
Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
211–220 of 539 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you like to live in a society where the laws are the same as they are now, but it’s impossible to break them and not be caught? (I know I’m jumping right to where the slippery slope ends.)
If we lived in such a society I would imagine we would be a bit more careful as we drafted laws. It would also be a lot more equitable due to the lack of selective enforcement.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#213I worked for a company that made deep packet inspection based network equipment. Western customers mostly used it for "security" and media streaming man in the middle attacks (actually a useful feature saving lots of bandwidth). The boxes were also sold to Syria and Burma, and were used to facilitate censorship and human right abuses
(I guess Bell Canada, which also sells TV services, lost too many customers over this policy to their unthrottled competitors)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/small-isps-fight-ruling-that...
Canadian telecom regulators are gutless.
Though I kinda liked it when my university throttled napster and torrents, because that meant my IRC downloads went very very fast!
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same thing that would be bad about using your phone GPS location sensors to automatically send you speeding tickets every time you wander >1mph over the limit. Even without intending to, everyone would go from a ticket or two per decade to dozens of tickets on every commute. "But the law is still the same!?!" Of course it is, but changing from poorly scalable human-required surveillance to always-on, fully-scaled…
It's still up to the manager to choose what to do about it. A reasonable manager would accept the occasional smoke break, but do something about hour long naps.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes. It's one of the reasons I've grown more disillusioned with computer tech over the years.
I had this realization in stages. 1. Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes. 2. Some software comes already designed for surveillance purposes up front . 2a. This includes plenty of well-known mass appeal software; importantly, the customer-facing marketing copy and the investor pitch can present a completely different value proposition. 3. Software doesn't become used for surveillanc…
> To stop the surveillance, [they] would have to get their equipment suppliers to make changes; they would have to change their own back-office systems; they would have to reformulate customer contracts so they would not rely on the data being available in case of disputes; and so on.
> [It] would cost [them] more money to stop the surveillance of their customers than to continue doing it.
> That is quite literally what "surveillance too cheap to meter" means.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#216I built a lighting system for to save energy by turning off hallway lights when not in use. The environmental aspect was great and saved hundreds of thousands in electricity. Someone eventually realized that the mesh network I built to connect all the lights together and report usage statistics could also be used to track employees moving throughout the building and catch them taking unauthorized breaks in the stairw…
that's the rule I've always followed.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#217ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser on Windows and available to be scripted by javascript? like, instead of Java? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, but sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. though it needed additional infrastructure to prevent abuse and allow global revocation, and that wasn't perfec…
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#218I was gone in 6 months, but 3 years later the team (having doubled and doubled) still used that dumb script. Had they buckled down redo it in Java, they would have learned a lot and would have relevant experience to get jobs in the then-burgeoning enterprise server market.
Not bad for society, just for them.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#219I built a lighting system for to save energy by turning off hallway lights when not in use. The environmental aspect was great and saved hundreds of thousands in electricity. Someone eventually realized that the mesh network I built to connect all the lights together and report usage statistics could also be used to track employees moving throughout the building and catch them taking unauthorized breaks in the stairw…
Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes. It's one of the reasons I've grown more disillusioned with computer tech over the years.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#220ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser on Windows and available to be scripted by javascript? like, instead of Java? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, but sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. though it needed additional infrastructure to prevent abuse and allow global revocation, and that wasn't perfec…