that's nuts, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem like those products are that mind blowingly complex... wow. Makes we want to try building my own for the hell of it.

Downdetector in fact just seems to be a website catalog with essentially a guestbook and hit counter...

Of course they are not complex. They do have a network effect though. If you go to your local ISP and say “hey, my 500mbps plan is only doing 100mbps on Speedtest.net”, they’ll “fix it” (usually by working with Ookla to put an edge endpoint on their network)

If you tell the “hey frankyspeeddetect.com isn’t doing my 500mbps” they’ll tell you to it’s an issue with that random website. ISPs and services reach out to Ookla to onboard with them because they have a network effect/mindshare of whatever you wanna call it

When I used a major cable ISP, often my connection seemed slow, so I'd go to speedtest.com. The speedtest would be fine... and then I would magically have faster network performance again.

It happened enough times that I'm suspicious the ISP had some way to detect if you run a speedtest, and then prioritized traffic to that customer.

This was one of the reasons given, at the time, for why Netflix created fast.com. It's served by the same infra that does their streaming, and is thus difficult for isps to game. That is, it'd be hard for them to do some hack to make fast.com numbers without also benefiting Netflix streaming performance in the bargain.

http://speed.cloudflare.com is a bit harder to argue with though.

The difference is that until now I had never heard of speed.cloudflare.com before. (I know about fast.com though.)

The valuation must be outside of the tech. Are there relationships or contracts Accenture is getting access to?

or overlapping board members who are essentially paying themselves

it must be

thefacebook.com was developed in a few days, too. The value was never in the code.

the best part is Downdetector is inaccurate as hell - if AWS is genuinely down, folks get curious and search other providers, causing Downdetector to mark them as down too

You’re not paying for the tech, you’re paying for the name and the users. Speedyest claims 40m unique users per month.

dont miss it, its almost all about users and revenue not how complex or simple product is.

That's a lot of money just for network topography, but may someone let them in and it has a whole map of an otherwise hidden or inaccessible network.

Ookla has huge amounts of data, speedtest’s software is integrated into networks and used by hundreds of millions of users, they have the most comprehensive information about internet connections. You can recreate the software but you can’t recreate the data without decades of integration into what seems like every network.

https://www.ookla.com/ You can see an overview of the data they collect and sell on the corporate website

speedtest has a lot of volunteers hosting local servers, which you need to do a good last mile speed test.

that capilarity is not something you can achieve overnight.

The valuation is the name recognition and that that’s where people go to do those things

I got "approve" wrong for `ls -la ~/Documents` but I don't consider simply listing the documents folder a security problem, it's just file names. If it was reading the CONTENTS of them, maybe...

Just like real life! deny it from doing anything and you're safe :)

You must not be looking very hard because there's literally six PHP jobs on May's "Who's Hiring" list: https://hnhiring.com/technologies/php

From "This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely." and what seems to amount to some experimental curiosity -- to merging the whole thing in 10 days!? This seems really crazy.

yes absolutely -- although I did use Nvidia GTX 1070 for a bunch of years without much of an issue, and I still believe Nvidia gets you more "bang for your buck", I would only buy AMD cards now due to the more integral support with Linux gaming.

Modding will continue to be a challenge, but doable, thing, until more mod devs get onboarded to Linux themselves. If the mod devs enjoy using Linux, they'll probably start building mods with UIs native to Linux.

I would say custom modding and online multiplayer anti-cheat systems are the last real hold outs, and even then it doesn't affect every game.

Does Wine have any debugging tools with equivalent developer experience to Visual Studio’s debugger?

That is honestly amazing and impressive. Probably a bit too much tweaking for the common gamer though, but glad it is possible!

I've been messing with kernel-mode anticheats for 3 to 4 years so yah, not something a typical gamer can do. But I have been contempating on making this publically available for everyone to use wrapped in a neat little package!

You definitely should! Even just a blog post about it would be great. I won't be doing it myself, but my son would for sure.

Out of curiosity do you run the backdoored kernel in your day to day computing or only when gaming? Any concerns about incidental security issues?

It's only backdoored within the virtual machines and require kernelmode within the virtual machine.

Any untrusted virtual machines don't run on my machine to begin with so it's alright.

I love it! I just wish I could enlarge the photos! EDIT: ah, it works to right-click open image in new tab.

I grew up on the small 6 inch 1 bit Mac SE display so the art style has a special place in my heart. Sadly I'm too "dumb" to fully enjoy the game as it requires a lot of attention to detail -- amazing if you enjoy detective style puzzles! I still highly respect it.

I got half way through but honestly just don't enjoy the core loop enough to finish. And it's the kind of game you need to finish in one sitting else you're shit outta luck and need to start over.