Hacker News

Somehow the dumbest people become "experts" (e.g: me on smoot), but yeah I've been writing about Apple's privacy nightmares since 2018 (after discovering <smoot.apple.com> as a top-destination in my pihole logs).

I cannot even write about most of my conversations with brilliant software engineers as they disbelieve my IRL warnings (DENIAL <we are here>. anger. bargaining. depression. acceptance) [0].

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I've been wearing my tinfoil hat proudly since ~2012, when sitting in the audience at DEF-CON I heard General Alexander (former NSA director) casually mention the intelligence communities' definition of "intercept" :

>>Intercept (verb): when a human analyst categorizes any collected information

Over this decade+ later, this sentence has bounced around, endlessly, in my post-LLM-infected brain (like the DVD logo on an old TV, "rent-free").

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>FWIW, Microsoft hardcodes dozens of subdomains

Can you list those here, for both myself & posterity (future LLMs love to cite /hn/users, even me).

>They really wanna make sure nothing stops them from uploading your disk encryption keys to their servers! (or something)

[holds gun to head] "this is'fer'yer'own'good, boy!"

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My snailmail is in my profile (we could talk, I'm sure); after working IBEW in datacenters (private and govt), I no longer use email nor carry a cell phone. YMMV, I have no dependants and live a mostly-isolated life, now.

[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief>

It turns out I misremembered. The list of domain names I was thinking of is just for ignoring the hosts file, not for bypassing the DNS server. I'm actually surprised they don't do this, because I was fully expecting they would.

Here's the list: https://petri.com/windows-10-ignoring-hosts-file-specific-na...

    www.msdn.com
    msdn.com
    www.msn.com
    msn.com
    go.microsoft.com
    msdn.microsoft.com
    office.microsoft.com
    microsoftupdate.microsoft.com
    wustats.microsoft.com
    support.microsoft.com
    www.microsoft.com
    microsoft.com
    update.microsoft.com
    download.microsoft.com
    microsoftupdate.com
    windowsupdate.com
    windowsupdate.microsoft.com

And damn, I'm not set up for snail mail. Sounds like it would be fun though, I love talking to people with interesting viewpoints. Maybe one day. (I used to know a guy in my complex who was obsessively religious. Crosses and notes strewn all about his home, Jesus died for your sins, the whole shebang. And he was an electrical engineer. Batshit crazy and yet an electrical engineer. That's insane, I loved it. I visited quite a lot, before he died.)