News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Aloisius

Re:Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @02:30PM (#50092628)
It will poison it if you replace all of your code with public domain code.

A small patch here and there of uncopyrightable code doesn't really matter. Years of small patches, on the other hand, could end up replacing most or all the code.

If you have the policy that all contributions have to be significantly written by a human, and thus copyrightable, you don't have to worry about whether certain files or modules or the entire project are copyrightable in the future.

Re:NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect on Sunday October 11, 2026 @08:22PM (#50049652)
Several states have click to cancel laws including New York state.

Mamdani simply has better PR.

Re:Em dashes are fucking amazing on Friday July 24, 2026 @04:33PM (#49041240)
This isn't universal.

The New York Times Manual of Style, for instance, only permits using an en dash as a minus sign. Joining nouns like Sarbanes-Oxley and even number ranges use hyphens instead.

The BBC News Style Guide and the Economist Style Guide similarly use hyphens in place of en dashes - though sometimes BBC seems to use en dashes in place of em dashes.

The University of Cambridge Style Guide simply says to avoid dashes altogether.

The AMA Manual of Style explicitly declares that one should hyphenate two or more nouns of equal importance. They however continue to use the en dash when the first word in the compound modifies more than one word (e.g. anti–Norwalk virus).

The US General Printing Office Style Guide also uses hyphens, so the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is hyphenated in documents published by Congress.

The Chicago Manual of Style nearly got rid of the en dash as well, but backtracked after backlash.

Calling the American Revolution terrorism, in the modern sense, is a stretch. It was a war waged primarily between soldiers and materiel with the goal of ending the enemy's ability to wage war.

Systematic use of terror as a policy to induce fear in the general public to push them to coerce their government's policy was not widely used.

Re:ΠFS on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @04:38PM (#48482358)
That seems easy enough to solve. Simply record the index and length in pi of the index and length in pi.
My eyes glaze over any time an article uses the term "heavy metals" unironically.

This could be bad or it could not, but I simply can't take anything seriously that uses ambiguous terms so linked to woo.

Pretty sure I've seen exposure-adjusted incidence rates used in clinical trials.

Miles is simply a proxy for exposure.

That depends entirely on where you are.

In India, for instance, dairy cattle are fed almost exclusively on crop residues and by-products. Crop residues being what's left over in the field after you harvest and by-products being what would otherwise be waste left over after you process for human use.

Elsewhere, in addition to crop residues/by-products, you also have natural grasslands that aren't planted or irrigated, legume feed grown between major crop seasons when you can't grow anything else that also replenishes the soil and feed grown on otherwise marginal land or barely managed land.

Certainly some crops grown for cows would be edible by humans or the land repurposed for growing crops edible for people, but there's often a cost involved like heavier fertilizer requirements, pesticide use, water requirements, added infrastructure and/or labor.

Withdrawal of US troops from the region and acceptance of uranium enrichment appears nowhere in the other 10 points.

There are permanent US bases in the region.

Iran's semi-official Mehr News Agency (via China's state news agency Xinhua[0]) claims the 10 points are:

1. U.S. commitment to ensure no further acts of aggression

2. Continued Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz

3. Acceptance of Iran's nuclear enrichment rights

4. Lifting of all primary sanctions

5. Lifting of all secondary sanctions

6. Termination of all United Nations Security Council resolutions against Iran

7. Termination of all International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors resolutions against Iran

8. Payment of damages to Iran for loss in the war

9. Withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region

10. Cessation of hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon

Which is much different.

[0] https://english.news.cn/20260408/dd8df6148df94252aaa1d3fbb59...

To manipulate the price of oil.
> It’s a bizarre situation in that US elections have such a huge impact on a world that has no say

No say (or at least, no influence) might be a bit strong given foreign election interference.

I'm sure if Britain or France or whoever wanted to, they could have their intelligence services release dirt on candidates or engage in some dirty tricks.

I'd love for them to target their own code base considering we keep seeing security vulnerabilities in claude code.

How likely is it that they're not using their latest and greatest for their own projects though? Perhaps their ability to find security flaws is surpassed by their ability to create them.

Yes, you are correct. Bad editing on my part.

It should be that if tcp_now gets stuck before (<) (2^32 - 30000) ms from boot, it would cause deadline timers for reaping TCP_WAIT would always be greater than tcp_now because it wouldn't wrap. If stuck at or after (>=) (2^32 - 30000), it would cause them to potentially be reaped faster they should be.

Actually looking at the code a bit more, it looks like calculate_tcp_clock() is run at least once per hour even when there's no TCP traffic or sockets open, so getting into the state where it never reaps TIME_WAIT sockets which would be hard to predict if this would happen.

It also looks like if tcp_now gets stuck, other tcp timers may have problems as well.

Might want to update it if you used the blog post explanation because it's incorrect as justinfrankel noted below. From the post:

    tcp_now   = 4,294,960,000  (frozen at pre-overflow value)
The mistake in the blog post is timer isn't wrapped, even though it notes it should be:

    timer     = 4,294,960,000 + 30,000 = 4,294,990,000 - MAX_INT = 22,704
Therefore:

    TSTMP_GEQ(4294960000, 22704)
    = 4294960000 - 22704
    = 4294937296
    = 4294937296 >= 0 ?  → true! (not false)
This is a bug of course, but it would cause sockets in TCP_WAIT state to be reaped anytime tcp_gc() is called, regardless of whether 2*MSL has passed or not. This only happens though if tcp_now gets stuck after 4,294,937,296 ms from boot.

A bug similar to what the blog described can happen however if tcp_now gets stuck at least 30 seconds before it it would have wrapped. Since tcp_now is only updated if there is TCP traffic, this can happen if there is no TCP traffic for at least 30 seconds before before it would roll over (MAX_INT ms from boot).

It's should be easy to prevent the latter from happening with some TCP traffic, though reaping TCP_WAIT connections early isn't great either.

There does appear to be a bug, but it's not what the blog describes.

If tcp_now stops updating at <= 2^32 - 30000 milliseconds, then TSTMP_GEQ(tcp_now, timer) will always fail since timer is tcp_now + 30000 which won't wrap.

This does look like it is possible since calculate_tcp_clock() which updates tcp_now only runs when there's TCP traffic. So if at 49 days uptime you halted all TCP traffic and waited about a day, tcp_now would be stuck at the value before you halted TCP traffic.

In cases where tcp_now gets stuck at > 2^32 - 30000, it looks like TCP sockets in the TIME_WAIT will end up being closed immediately instead of waiting 30 seconds, which isn't great either.

It definitely exists, but it could be a completely unrelated issue.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250867747

Interesting. The article mentions complaints on the forums running Catalina, so that must be something else.
You want to drop the wc -l.

Mac `grep -c` counts lines that match, so it always prints 1 line, so piping to wc -l will always return 1.

Or just open up and do netstat -an |grep TCP_WAIT and just watch it. If any don't disappear after a few minutes, then you're seeing the issue.

According to the post:

$ netstat -an | grep -c TIME_WAIT

If the count it returns keeps growing, you're seeing a slow leak. At some point, new connections will start failing. How soon depends entirely on how quickly your machine closes new connections.

Since a lot of client traffic involves the server closing connections instead, I imagine it could take a while.

It's unclear if it'll leak whenever your mac closes or only when it fails to get a (FIN, ACK) back from the peer so the TCP_WAIT garbage collector runs. If it's the latter, then it could take substantially longer, depending on connection quality.

Re:LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer on Thursday April 02, 2026 @02:09PM (#47618039)
This only works if the web page knows the random per-install id associated with an extension.

That can only happen if the extension itself leaks it to the web page and if that happens, scanning isn't necessary since it already leaked what it is to the webpage. It also doesn't tell you what extension it is, unless again, the extension leaks it to the webpage.

The attack on Chrome is far more useful for attackers as web pages can scan using the chrome store's extension ID instead.

Re:The Claude Code Leak on Thursday April 02, 2026 @02:53AM (#47610850)
The copyright office has indicated that AI generated elements lacking human contributions to the expression (rather than input) would still not be copyrightable even if some human authored elements are made to the expression as well.

Seems like it would be a nightmare to provide evidence of what parts of a half a million line codebase were written by humans if no one bothered to track it.

The award is damages which would be minimal in most cases.
Given trade secrets can't be enforced once they are made public and contracts don't bind anyone who hasn't signed them, it's not a great substitute for copyright.

My guess is companies will simply pretend like generated code is copyrighted, file fraudulent DCMA notices if leaks happen and hope no one decides to challenge them in court.

This article seems to imply that 800V DC is high-voltage DC, but that seems quite low.
Re:Arm AGI CPU on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @06:01PM (#47510076)
> There is a long history of people arguing that intelligence is actually the ability to predict accurately.

That page describes a few recent CS people in AI arguing intelligence is being able to predict accurately which is like carpenters declaring all problems can be solved with a hammer.

AI "reasoning" is human-like in the sense that it is similar to how humans communicate reasoning, but that's not how humans mentally reason.

Re:The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild on Friday March 20, 2026 @09:14PM (#47463028)
The achievement is the speed the train can run at. Trains going over the old floating railway bridges that were part of the Milwaukee Road had to slow down dramatically to, iirc, 6 mph.

Of course those were first built in the 19th century.

I'm not sure one needs to stretch the analogy this far.

If someone from the UK calls me on the phone and I start reading them posts on 4chan, is the UK going to fine me too?

Re:Google Street View in 2026 on Thursday February 26, 2026 @04:24PM (#47172186)
Large sections of streets I look at on Google street view are blurred now which has started to seriously limit it's use for me.

Since anyone can request a building be blurred forever, I imagine it'll just get worse.

That's surprising low given 21% of the population are Israeli Arabs.

Older »