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The "stolen" argument seems a bit odd. Sure, anything can be stolen.

When purchasing an e-bike a removable battery was a must have. The one I wound up purchasing has a pretty heavy duty locking mechanism for the battery so I never really have to worry about it being stolen.


I'd use Safari over Chrome, but Safari has a couple of show-stopping bugs:

1. Swiping back on the trackpad to navigate backwards freezes the page for a couple of seconds. It then redraws the page with any updated elements (perhaps a refresh?).

2. The element CSS attributes in the dev tools often fail to update the DOM, duplicate with every keystroke, or revert what you have typed.


1) is a known bug. The fix is to switch to 3 finger back swipe in trackpad settings. Back becomes instant.


good of apple to not fix the bug and instead rely on the internet to fix the issue, very safari


For me, for 1. it seems to do the same thing as the back button. There is a refresh, but it has to do that.


I got bit by this over this weekend, too. I received the initial email September 27 @ 1:35 AM local time. I called Rackspace to see if they would be sending out emails prior to each VPS being rebooted 30 minutes or so before just as a heads up for human monitoring purposes. The representative told me that it "was not feasible" for them to do that for every VPS. Instead... I've been camped by my computer all of today (Sunday) to monitor the reboots since I have servers at DFW & ORD and they have a 24 hour time window for those regions.

While their status page was somewhat helpful, I find it absolutely absurd that they can only update it once every 60 minutes to cue customers in. In addition, their Cloud Control Panel doesn't reflect the reboots. When a VPS goes down for a reboot... the CP shows the server as "Active - Online and functioning as properly". Thankfully great third party monitoring services (using Scout) exist so they can notify in-place of Rackspace's incompetency.

As someone who shells out a significant amount of money to them each month, this is pretty disheartening. That being said... I seem to have survived the Great Rackspace Reboot of 2014 and can only hope they handle the next event better.


We've been given a 6 hour maintenance window. They won't give us a smaller window or tell us when it's finished. Apparently, we should apply our own monitoring - fortunately, my tech chaps are psychic and can tell if monitoring is down because Rackspace maintenance is taking place or because it's taken place and something's broken.


Perhaps... but let's not forget about the "Poke" app which was their first run at a Snapchat clone. Anything FB puts out isn't an instant success.


She retracted and said she was actually contacted (later in the day): https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/453337287766450176.


GitHub employs a handful of women.[1] Have any others ever spoken out about sexism internally? Out of all these women why was Horvath singled out? Maybe I'm missing something but it really seems that this isn't adding up...

[1] https://github.com/about/team


Thanks for sharing these. The 'hacks' so far seem pretty beneficial and I'm planning on trying them.


Thanks. Glad they are helpful.


Pretty much for anything that I want to store to a database but is too costly do to write every time I update. For example, I use Redis store counters for things and then batch process them storing to Postgres.


Certain shows from Showtime are streaming. For example, Netflix has all of 'Weeds' available for streaming.


This is actually talking directly to the iMessage service. It's hitting https://service.ess.apple.com:443 (and https://service2.ess.apple.com:443 when authenticating) and not being proxied through any third-party servers. That being said, it does look like the app reports basic analytics but nothing sensitive.

This is truly impressive!


> That being said, it does look like the app reports basic analytics but nothing sensitive.

Are you referring to the seemingly-encrypted network connection over port 5332 to a server in China at IP address 222.77.191.206 that has traffic that precisely correlates to me sending and receiving messages using the application? [edit: Which happens to be the value of the resource ServerId in the APK?]


Try sending a picture--surely the size of the Chinese body would scale with the picture


No, pictures sent using iMessage are uploaded directly to Microsoft Azure when using a true iOS device.

http://i.imgur.com/W3QitN6.png


Why does Apple use Microsoft Azure though? I would have thought that they have enough server capacity for that.


Storing files in the cloud is a commodity service. Why wouldn't they outsource it? They use AWS too.


They're encrypted, though, right? Do they need to be sent to this third party to decrypt?


I don't quite remember, but I think the images are just passed over SSL with no other encryption.


That's crazy. The protocol for iMessage is so complicated that I gave up very quickly after getting IP banned many, many times, it's an incredibly sensitive service to things like this. At the time I just wanted to be able to check if an email address was iMessage-supported, but it required piles of signatures and other authorisation.

It will get banned on Apple's end so quickly, but not before it's used to send mountains of spam.


Haha, same here. Instead I wrote an app that uses the iMessage Mac client to insert a mail address into the to: field and check whether it supports iMessage. And then I use pixelbuffer data to figure out whether the mail address has the correct iMessage supported color in the ui. Works great, but is a bit slow.


Haha, that's a great hack for checking if an email is an iMessage account. Can you gist the code :)



That is just looking for embedded URLs: it totally fails to notice the IP address hardcoded into the APK (222.77.191.206) that seems to be used every time you send/receive a message.


Thanks - I also downloaded it directly from the developers site, which appears to be an older version (v1.2.1) http://www.huluwa.org/imessage/

So I wasn't sure if things had changed in later versions of the app.



They seem into cloning many of Apple's services to the other side: http://www.huluwa.org/

(eg. iCloud for PC)


iCloud isn't nearly as exciting as iMessage, with the majority of iCloud services just being WebDAV (bookmarks, etc), CardDAV, CalDAV, IMAP, etc.


Indeed! I wonder if Apple will be able to patch this app out while retaining access for their own devices.


They can start by getting Google and other major app stores to pull the app for copyright / trademark infringement on the term "iMessage", then they can sue the developer for the same (he's public with his identity).

Beyond that all they need to do is include some form of digital signing in the login process which he can't duplicate and jobs a good un.

Alternatively they may say that they don't care and leave it alone as it strengthens iMessage as a platform.

But my guess is that this won't end well. Isn't it trademarks that you have to defend or you lose them? If that's the case then Apple at the very least need to have him change the name and so on.


Digital signing on the login process? Could you be more specific? I was under the impression that verifying data is coming from an 'approved clients' over a reverse engineered protocol is impossible.


It's not impossible, but it requires either secure hardware or homomorphic encryption.


very much agreed this won't end well


Reminder: iMessage's "encryption" is open to the NSA. (What's more, Apple partners with the NSA.) Not sure why you'd want to submit to the surveillance state.


<sarcasm> Because if you connect to an iMessage client that also sends your packets to China, the MSS and the NSA get stuck trying to both look at your packets. We call it Two Stooges Syndrome. Your information is safe. No, it doesn't make you invincible </sarcasm>


And here you are, posting messages in plain text to a public forum...


There is some truth to your statement. For example, we will never know if PG would shut down HN if required to hand over the private logs. So yes, our posts can be cross-referenced with other online profiles, etc.

Now, should the conclusion be "we should stop communicating electronically"? That would be a severe restriction to free speech and thus advancement of our species. So, no.

Maybe the right direction is to migrate the discussion towards encrypted and distributed forums. RetroShare offers such a feature (amongst others): http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/


I'm wondering if they have friends inside of Apple that can tell them the protocol... or even copy code.


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