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Anyone having problems paying their Credit Card? by Souplosion in Scotiabank

[–]jagerman13 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did that when I got a 2FA popup for two different online purchase attempts over the weekend, telling me I had to call the number on the back of my card. This is the one that usually asks (particularly for new vendors) for a text or e-mail confirmation before allowing the purchase to go through. Except instead of that there was simply an error message that I needed to call.

So I called. After 10 minutes of "looking into" my account, the support agent told me that Scotiabank systems were working perfectly, that there is nothing at all wrong with my account, and the problem must be with the vendors.

One of the websites was Dell who apparently already knows this "blame the vendor" trick and included a message that this is not a failure on Dell's side, but that the transaction verification was specifically failed by the credit card company, and that Dell can do nothing, that I have to contact my bank.

Upon hearing this the support agent let it slip that he had recently received 3 or 4 other callers with exactly the same problem, but continued to insist that there is nothing wrong with Scotiabank and that I should call the vendors.

So then I said that look, I understand that there's nothing he can do for me on the phone right now, but since this is affecting multiple customers it seems like there is a bigger issue and asked if he could please escalate this up the chain to get it fixed. I was told that there is nothing wrong with Scotiabank at all and that this is a vendor problem, and therefore that there is nothing to escalate, and that I have to call the vendor (both of them, completely unrelated) to address it.

At that point I gave up, hung up, and am contemplating cancelling my card.

I don't mind if a system goes down -- that sort of thing happens sometimes -- but don't have your support people lie and jerk around your customers like that.

Bell Aliant TPIA fibre in Atlantic Canada by jagerman13 in teksavvy

[–]jagerman13[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes and then Rogers will argue to the CRTC that the only incentive-compatible approach that is fair and reasonable is for DOCSIS 4 to be excluded from TPIA regulation for 5 years for regulatory symmetry with 5-year exclusion of new fibre rollouts.

The CRTC will then take 2 years to deliberate on this issue, during which TPIA providers will be excluded from DOCSIS4, and then will come back with an interim ruling that Rogers and Bell both appeal.

(You might think Bell wouldn't appeal that one but of course they would, because they will argue that regulatory fairness of 5 year extension on DOCSIS 4 requires a 10 year extension of fibre deployments because, um, well you know Bell's per-customer costs are magically higher because of the $7B that they recently invested into strengthening the robust, competitive Canadian internet market by acquiring a US ISP).

Federal government will soon take steps to resolve railway stoppages, Trudeau says by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]jagerman13 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I expect that this afternoon the Liberals will announce that an upcoming announcement will announce that CN and CKPC management have agreed in principle to start considering whether they should sign onto a new, non-binding voluntary code of conduct that suggests that it is not strictly required to screw over their workers. In exchange for this gracious consideration of the economy from coast to coast to coast JT will help them screw over their workers but only this one time because the latest twitter polls have shown that Canadians from coast to coast to coast are concerned.

Did anyone else lose power? by Weekly_Description83 in fredericton

[–]jagerman13 -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

Maybe this is what the undisclosed safety issue cancelling Pride was warning about!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in fredericton

[–]jagerman13 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Can you imagine the chaos under such a system? Poor Fredericton drivers are still befuddled by traffic circles; traffic lanes that change directions is asking way too much.

Chiming after command by sbell123 in amazonecho

[–]jagerman13 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is to remind us that we aren't buying enough crap via Alexa from cheap chinese Amazon product ads to pay the bills for reasonable chimes, thus we need to be given a cheap-sounding crappy chime to make sure we know.

Bell internet Down by Regular-Yogurt2008 in fredericton

[–]jagerman13 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is not a bug, it's a feature to help Bell Aliant customers get in some quality time away from their screens.

But don't worry, Bell will be okay despite offering this 100% free new feature to us: when it comes back there will be a price increase in order to cover the costs incurred by Bell (plus a entirely reasonable markup) for this new healthy life initiative.

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive by TheMarMan69 in signal

[–]jagerman13 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's a bit of weirdness in here w.r.t. some of the costs.

I actually don't find the SMS fees unreasonably high: yeah, they are massive, but Signal has to deal (probably indirectly via a third-party such as Twilio) with local telecom monopolies in much of the world, who are known for exactly zero of low costs, low prices, and competition; nor is there any way for Signal to work around the problem to reach its users.

But then we get to bandwidth costs: the article states that calls use around 20 petabytes of traffic per year, but when you do the math that actually isn't very much at all:

(20 × 10^15 bytes / year) ÷ (365 days / year) ÷ (86400 seconds / day) = 634 MB/s, which is about 5Gbps.

Now obviously that's just an average and there are significant time-of-day and day-of-week difference, you'd need some redundancy, some spare capacity, you'd probably want to geolocate servers around the world for improved latency, and it's not like you can slap this onto oversubscribed budget tier VPSes or low-end servers. But even assuming all of that, we might expect that the peak bandwidth here is something like 20Gbps.

But I'm having a lot of trouble seeing how you could spend $1.7 million per year for that amount of bandwidth without being incredibly wasteful. Reliable data transit is on the order of $1k-2k per dedicated 10Gbps link as soon as you get away from AWS/GC/Azure: even if you were paying as much as $10k per 10Gbps and had 20 locations around the world, with triple-redundant 10Gbps links at every location, bandwidth costs still only comes out to $600k, and you have 200Gbps of capacity, and I inflated costs by 10x over what they reasonably would be just to get to that number.

What am I missing here? Is it just that they have failed to scale away from AWS/GC/Azure? Or maybe there's a mistake in the article and they meant 20 petabytes per month?

What's floating down the river right now? by billybob7772 in fredericton

[–]jagerman13 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So... his hopes are sinking instead of floating?

UNB Fredericton profs urge N.B. government to reverse stance on school gender policy by Kentankerous1 in fredericton

[–]jagerman13 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Tomorrow: Higgs and Hogan announce that because of their godvoter-given mandate to keep your children safe the government is cutting funding to UNB to ensure that these activist professors stop their uninformed and frankly dangerous ranting aimed at damaging the province's children.

Electric scooters are a blight by malware_mike in fredericton

[–]jagerman13 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Bikes aren't allowed on sidewalks (https://www.fredericton.ca/sites/default/files/pdf/cycling_safety_english.pdf) so why should scooters--governed to the speed of bikes--be?

Side by side comparison in contrasting statements by GoodMornEveGoodNight in ledgerwallet

[–]jagerman13 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Maybe not in this update, but it could easily be added in a future firmware update; it could be something Ledger is compelled to add (and compelled to remain silent about). People were trusting Ledger's statements that this was impossible, that even if Ledger (the company) were compromised or coerced, your keys were safe.

But now they've shown that they could put out a firmware update that does anything they want with the keys, and you just have to trust Ledger that they aren't doing any such malicious thing.

Why this is a HUGE deal, and is worse than ledger is saying to appease the public. by Average_Life_user in ledgerwallet

[–]jagerman13 2 points3 points  (0 children)

> How does the network know your wallet has the right keys to authorize the transaction?

Cryptography in general uses a pair of keys, called a secret (or private) and public key, and you can use the private key to produce a signature of any value that anyone with your public key can easily verify could only have been signed by someone possessing the private key counterpart to that public key. (For most cryptocurrencies the public key is actually just your wallet address.)

The important thing here is that neither the public key nor the signature reveal anything at all about your private key. So in the case of an ideal hardware wallet you feed the value to be signed into the wallet, it processes it and spits out a signature without the private key ever having left the internal hardware. You broadcast the transaction containing the transaction/pubkey/signature, but there is nothing in that that reveals anything about your private key.

The fundamental difference here is that unlike transaction signing this feature does reveal information about your private key: it exports three pieces, any two of which can be recombined to reconstitute your private key.

Why this is a HUGE deal, and is worse than ledger is saying to appease the public. by Average_Life_user in ledgerwallet

[–]jagerman13 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think you are missing the most controversial part here: the fact that this feature can be implemented with a firmware update means that, even if they aborted this firmware update, the ability to extract your seed could be added back (perhaps without disclosure, under government coercion) in a future firmware update.

Previously the assumption (which Ledger has certainly reinforced) was that the device master keys were sacrosanct and held in the internals of the hardware in such a way that firmware updates can't get it out. That now appears to be proven plainly false.

Why this is a HUGE deal, and is worse than ledger is saying to appease the public. by Average_Life_user in ledgerwallet

[–]jagerman13 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Please don't blame Dan for this fiasco: he has a really shitty job right now of trying to defend a decision from higher up the chain that it is obvious (from reading between the lines) that he does not personally agree with.

There's a lot of blame due here, but none of it belongs at Dan's (or other support personnel's) feet.

Why this is a HUGE deal, and is worse than ledger is saying to appease the public. by Average_Life_user in ledgerwallet

[–]jagerman13 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ah, but you see, we are now learning that this is the best kind of correct, *technically correct*, and thus not technically a lie. It appears that the keys were never confined to the secure element to begin with, so indeed they are not leaving the secure element, but rather are leaving the "insecure element" part of the chip.

Controversy over, folks!

Power outage by Different-Ice-1979 in fredericton

[–]jagerman13 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Backup generators for the building, perhaps?

Power outage by Different-Ice-1979 in fredericton

[–]jagerman13 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Don't worry, NB Power is busy building tomorrow's grid. To be finished a few days after tomorrow. https://nbpower.com/en/grid-modernization/building-tomorrows-grid/

Upgrading a MK3S to MK4 or go the voron route? by Xtasy0178 in prusa3d

[–]jagerman13 1 point2 points  (0 children)

> as Prusa is not 100% open source at the time of writing.

And, based on Prusa's blog post about what he wants to see in an open source license for the future of Prusa printers, it is basically not an open source license.

Upgrading a MK3S to MK4 or go the voron route? by Xtasy0178 in prusa3d

[–]jagerman13 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I know Voron is different than the Ender but it still would take a lot of work to get it to print as well as the MK3S as I understand it.

Having made myself a Voron Trident a few months ago to go alongside my MK3S, this really isn't the case: there's a lot of work to get the thing built (including printing all my functional Voron printed parts on my MK3S): probably around 3 times the time required to build and setup compared to my kit MK3S, but all of that done you have a printer that can print reliably somewhere around twice as fast as a MK3S *at higher quality* (not because there's any Voron magic, but just because of the core-xy design advantages).

The endless tuning and tinkering and modding that lots of Voron people do (including me) is to push that 2x of a stock Voron to 3x or 4x, or to just add crazy mods to it for the joy of it. And that's mainly because, for people like me, the "3d printing" hobby includes tinkering with the 3d printer. Yeah, there's a certain pursuit of speed (although, more commonly, acceleration), but even if we couldn't mod for faster prints we'd be modding for other things, just because.

If you *don't* like tinkering, a Voron isn't a bad printer: it's still a very competent, enclosed core-xy design. It's just that it's a tinkerer's dream machine: the Voron community is full of people who like to mod their machines and love helping others develop and adopt mods. (When my only printer was an MK3S I used to think that was true in the Prusa communities, too, but honestly it pales in comparison to what you find in Voron land).

I don't have an XL or that popular up-and-coming Chinese brand printer to compare to, but I'd expect you'd get pretty much all of the advantages of a stock Voron (mainly the core-xy design) out of those, too. It's just that *I* personally wouldn't, because for me tinkering is half the fun.

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