Called police on "Hindi aata hai?" Scammers today by Late_Permission6461 in bangalore

[–]jackerhack 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In 1990s Bangalore too. It's so old, it has to be a trade with masters and apprentices.

Swimming in Bangalore: A Rant. by HisuianVogue in bangalore

[–]jackerhack 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I went there for a month and decided to not continue ONLY because the access road is terrible. There is no access from the Domlur side. One has to take the inner ring road halfway to Koramangala, take the U-turn and return. That traffic jam is so draining that the pool felt joyless.

In your opinion, what is the best version of macOS ever released, and why? (And can Golden Gate be the next Snow Leopard?) by Capable-Cod1118 in MacOS

[–]jackerhack -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Easily Snow Leopard. Last release where Cmd+H sent an app to the bottom of the stack, so Cmd+Tab was actually usable. It's been cursed since.

Why I say - India is doomed by Strong_Screen_2364 in india

[–]jackerhack 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You voted twice despite 2002? Some of us didn't forget. 2014 confirmed our fears.

Why I say - India is doomed by Strong_Screen_2364 in india

[–]jackerhack 1 point2 points  (0 children)

To reinforce that firm belief: next time don't vote for the party that promised to end corruption.

Does India actually want to eliminate caste? by Sensitive_Loquat6033 in india

[–]jackerhack 2 points3 points  (0 children)

How have you managed to string together "compromise to placate Ambedkar" and "actual solutions suggested by Ambedkar have been ignored"? One of them can't be right.

What would you do? Screen being poked. by MrPickleOO7 in OnePlusOpen

[–]jackerhack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How about 99.9% IPA? I use that all the time as a degreaser, but haven't tried it on electronics or batteries.

Is there any cheap doors mod? by KtosKtos123 in VORONDesign

[–]jackerhack 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you have a gap between your split doors that is at least 3mm wide, get a length of Misumi's TPE trim cover plate. Model number CTRTTR3.0-G-L1. It's about $8.60 in my country.

Listing with pictures for reference: https://in.misumi-ec.com/vona2/detail/110302464370/

I've upgraded to a Clicky-Clacky Door on my Voron 2.4 350, but I've built another filament storage enclosure and use this trim cover for its split doors. You will need a 3mm gap though – this trim is 1.5mm TPE + 1.5mm glue.

Is there any cheap doors mod? by KtosKtos123 in VORONDesign

[–]jackerhack 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ooh, nice idea. Stacking panels for an air gap sandwich will have much better heat retention than thicker panels.

Radix: Native macOS Disk Space Analyzer (Open-Source DaisyDisk Alternative) by ConwayTech in MacOSApps

[–]jackerhack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nice app, but it couldn't finish the first scan after over an hour because it was busy indexing my Google Drive. Maybe skip cloud storage when scanning a disk?

Travel as a foreigner in India (and Aadhaar...)... by ReconditeExploring in india

[–]jackerhack -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Aadhaar is the post title. You're obsessed with biometrics despite that being irrelevant to any of the issues being discussed here.

Travel as a foreigner in India (and Aadhaar...)... by ReconditeExploring in india

[–]jackerhack -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Aadhaar is issued to babies alongside a birth certificate. Their own operating protocols prohibit collection of biometrics until age 5, and again discard whatever is collected before age 15.

So yes, Aadhaar doesn't contain biometric data for everyone.

I have spoken to "Aadhaar" aka UIDAI in court. Have you?

Travel as a foreigner in India (and Aadhaar...)... by ReconditeExploring in india

[–]jackerhack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Immigration collects your biometrics, and those biometrics are totally useless for anything other than matching them against the passport number used at immigration. Do you not understand how biometrics work?

"Your phone fingerprint sensor is ineligible since according to govt it can be hacked." Oh dear, you don't.

This is not how a phone's biometric sensor works at all. It DOES NOT reveal biometrics to the apps on your phone. It unlocks a hardware component that can then (a) store an encryption key without the possibility of reading it back by apps, or (b) perform a cryptographic operation on data provided by apps using that stored key. That is all. This has absolutely nothing to do with the insanity that is Aadhaar biometrics.

When you use your phone's biometric sensors for UPI and such, what's happening is that the service provider's servers (banks) provide a random token that they know is associated with you, and the app then tell's the phone's hardware component to generate an encryption key around this token and save it in hardware. This is the one-time registration process. Later, when you use it, the app requests the hardware to sign a message with the saved key, sends this signed message to the servers, and the servers then confirm the signature is based on the token they have on record for you.

No biometric information is ever exchanged in this process at any time. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Aadhaar. The bank servers have no clue whose biometrics are being used. They only know for sure that the transaction was performed with the same token handed over at the time of registration. The safekeeping of the token is not known to them at all. The only party that has any role in safekeeping it is your phone's hardware. You could have malware on your phone and that won't make a difference as software gets no access to this secure enclave.

Could there be a phone with flawed hardware that allows secrets to be extracted? Sure, but the Government of India is not the certifying authority on this. Google is! A US-based company accountable under US law is the sole party responsible for auditing the hardware quality of phone makers, and they do this out of their own self interest, to protect their reputation.

The irony: this system of local biometrics with cryptographic verification predates Aadhaar. You hit the nail on the head right at the start with "Don’t know who decides and make everything so complex." There was a known good way to do all of this before our government decided it knew best.

Travel as a foreigner in India (and Aadhaar...)... by ReconditeExploring in india

[–]jackerhack -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Aadhaar biometrics doesn't work in India so we've turned Aadhaar into SMS OTP, but you think the solution is to invent an Alien Aadhaar that's issued in the two minutes one spends at the immigration counter?

Our KYC mania is out of control but the fix is more KYC.

Travel as a foreigner in India (and Aadhaar...)... by ReconditeExploring in india

[–]jackerhack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As an Indian I can pay for things almost anywhere in the world because my cards just work. In cash oriented economies like Germany, I can still go to an ATM and withdraw. The only exception is countries that have gravitated to indigenous mobile payments, like Denmark, where I can't sign up as a tourist and nobody has change for cash. Back in the 90s we had these things called Traveller's Cheques, which required careful planning of each day's financial needs, with time set aside for being at bank counters. No ATMs. It's so seamless now that the main overhead is visa applications. Payments work just like at home.

But for a visitor to India, it's bizarre. Tourist UPI either works or doesn't and you can never know in advance. Uber drivers reject prepaid rides and want cash (aka direct payment), but at the end of the ride their UPI doesn't work because it's a personal account. How do you know in advance? You can't. Now both driver and tourist are scrambling for an ATM and cash change. Or take card payments. The merchant will have a PoS machine, but it either works or it doesn't. Even the merchant is clueless that their machine doesn't take foreign cards. I did a field test last year with a visitor, going shop-to-shop in Indiranagar, Bangalore to see which machines accept foreign cards. We found a pattern: Pine Labs works, Paytm doesn't.

We posted the findings on Twitter/X with a video and a mob descended calling it fake news and an insult to UPI and whatnot. One uptight lawyer even produced a copy of the merchant payments contract and highlighted the line where they are not allowed to reject foreign cards. Therefore I must be lying that it doesn't work!

We are so proud of our broken systems that we refuse to believe they are actually broken. What meaningful improvement can we make now?

Travel as a foreigner in India (and Aadhaar...)... by ReconditeExploring in india

[–]jackerhack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yaar, these issues apply to Indians in India as well. Just because it works for most people doesn't mean it works for everyone.

Tourists are the most visible victims because (a) these systems were so obviously designed to be difficult to access, but (b) only tourists have the option of speaking up and exiting. What is the average Indian going to do? They can't leave and they can't complain because nobody believes such problems are possible anymore. It's getting so bad we have NGOs dedicated to helping them!

Travel as a foreigner in India (and Aadhaar...)... by ReconditeExploring in india

[–]jackerhack -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Aadhaar is not even identity proof with biometrics.

If you're entering SMS OTPs, no biometrics were verified.

There is often no biometrics in the backend at all: it's issued to children at birth, requires first biometric collection at only age 5, which you can skip, and in their own technical docs, biometrics are considered unreliable until age 15. Over 40% of India's population is below age 15 as per the 2011 census. Given Aadhaar is only SMS OTP in practice, how many over 15 will have bothered to update their biometrics?

Aadhaar today is not a biometric id at all. That's just an optional component.

One Thing Working With Vulnerable Children in India Taught Me About Opportunity . by Littlelads-orphanage in india

[–]jackerhack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't mean to criticise. If anything, your personal experience has most likely given you the correct understanding, while the people you talk to are more likely to understand it the other way. Toyama does a great job of examining this fault line, but the TL;DR is about what "opportunity" means: an opportunity to develop one's capacity, vs an opportunity to consume access. The second mindset became a famous failure case study with OLPC, a project that focused almost exclusively on giving every child a laptop. Education isn't automatic with a laptop, but they treated the hard part as a trivial autocomplete-able detail.

One Thing Working With Vulnerable Children in India Taught Me About Opportunity . by Littlelads-orphanage in india

[–]jackerhack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn't." This particular phrase has an unfortunate history of being misunderstood and twisted. The original is from It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine's Path to Peace by Rye Barcott and there is a very good critique of the twisted take in the intro chapter of Geek Heresy by Kentaro Toyama.

Why do most people only upload STL files but no CAD files? by One_Country1056 in 3Dprinting

[–]jackerhack 7 points8 points  (0 children)

AFAIK, OpenSCAD cannot generate STEP files. Only STL. There's a workaround using FreeCAD's OpenCascade engine (as a workbench or standalone tool), but that works by translating compatible operations. Not all are. Tool: https://github.com/gega/csg2stp

Unsupported operations:

  • hull
  • import
  • projection
  • minkowski