News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

C4K3

Re:CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps on Monday July 06, 2026 @07:26PM (#48811822)
As the other commenter mentioned the web editor is probably the most beginner-friendly editor. It might seem a little daunting but it's actually not that difficult to edit OSM. When you save your change there's an option to request a review of it. That'll get an experienced contributor to take a look at it and help clear up any mistakes.

OSM also has a public database of GPS tracks that contributors use to aid in mapping. Even just walking the trails with GPS tracking on and then uploading the tracks to OSM without doing anything else is a valuable contribution that will allow other contributors to map the trails at some point in the future.

Re:Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format on Sunday May 17, 2026 @09:27AM (#48168751)
Its article was reorganized (moved from plain Capture the Flag to Capture the flag (cybersecurity)) 5 years ago. It's been on Wikipedia since 2004 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Capture_the_flag&...
Keybase or any of the tools inspired by keybase (foks.pub etc)
Re:Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English on Saturday December 27, 2025 @09:13PM (#46407770)
There was an ffmpeg drag-and-drop GUI that let you create ffmpeg commands visually instead of having to remember all the right arguments. Inputs, filters and outputs are all nodes in a graph, and then you connect them together. When done you would export it as an ffmpeg command to run.

As an occasional user this was a lot easier to use than having to remember all of the commands, and it did it all without hiding the complexity from the user.

Unfortunately it looks like they tried to monetize it but then later shut down. It doesn't look like they posted the source code anywhere.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230131140736/https://ffmpeg.gu...

Re:Signal's New PQ Ratchet on Thursday October 02, 2025 @08:34PM (#45457339)
At the very least they should have excluded any chats with disappearing messages enabled from being included in backups.

With disappearing messages off it was already reasonable to assume that a compromise of a counterparty's phone would result in exposure of all previous messages, so enabling backups wouldn't expose you to new risk.

That would cater to those who want to keep their chat history forever without exposing those with disappearing messages enabled to new risk.

Re:Reverse Engineering iOS 18 Inactivity Reboot on Sunday November 17, 2024 @11:46PM (#42169780)
They conclude that there's no wireless component to the feature.

This feature is not at all related to wireless activity. The law enforcement document's conclusion that the reboot is due to phones wirelessly communicating with each other is implausible. The older iPhones before iOS 18 likely rebooted due to another reason, such as a software bug.

Re:Not setting up Find My bricked my MacBook on Friday October 13, 2023 @01:44AM (#37867118)
You don't have to pay import taxes to bring ferraris in if it's just temporary for a vacation.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customs_Convention_on_the_Temp...

Re:What's the right UX for an expired certificate? on Wednesday January 18, 2023 @03:39AM (#34424682)
Browsers could add the less severe warning before the certificate expires, for example 3 days before it expires have a "this certificate is about to expire, are you sure you want to continue?" warning. That would maintain the security guarantees around expiration while still getting the attention of users/administrators.
Re:ssh whoami.filippo.io on Sunday January 08, 2023 @08:31PM (#34305606)
I learned about this when I encountered a server with an aggressive fail2ban that wouldn't let me log in because I had too many ssh keys. It apparently counted every wrong key as an auth attempt, so it blocked me before my ssh client tried the right key. Since then I've used IdentitiesOnly=yes
Re:Recovering a password-protected ThinkPad T60 on Saturday October 15, 2022 @11:12AM (#33215531)
A reasonable solution would be to have a "Do you want to disassociate this phone from your iCloud account?" prompt as part of the factory reset.
Re:iOS 16 Available September 12th on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @08:31PM (#32759376)
Personally I think the screen being made bigger is a downside, makes it harder to use one-handed.

Still, it's too bad there isn't a 14 mini.

Re:DuckDuckGo email protection beta now open on Thursday August 25, 2022 @04:29PM (#32599565)
https://sneakemail.com/ is another one that's been around for a long time.
Re:Using a catch-all domain is a mistake on Wednesday June 01, 2022 @02:09PM (#31585767)
I've been doing this for close to a decade and sometimes salespeople and customer service people will ask to confirm, but that takes 5 seconds and isn't awkward (in my opinion.)

It has more benefits than knowing who leaked your email, it lets you easily filter your incoming email by who you gave the email to, and when your email is leaked it lets you shut off that email address. Of course you can also filter your email by the sender's domain, but that isn't as consistent, and doesn't help at all when your email address has been leaked.

It's true that you do have to set it up so that you can send email from the addresses to avoid not being able to reply by email, and you will want a password-manager or something to remember exactly what email you used, for convenience.

Personally I'm glad I've done this, it's made it much easier to organize my emails.

You don't have to use microsoft authenticator. TOTP is a big step up from SMS and most/good apps won't violate your privacy.
Re:HTTPS Everywhere will sunset in January 2023 on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @12:54PM (#31507155)
The best you can do is set HSTS and redirect from http to https.

You not serving http won't prevent a MITM from serving http to the victim.

In South Park in San Francisco there's a little playground that has a sign saying adults are not allowed without children, which if anything feels backwards to me. It's a nice place to sit, eat and chat, and I've never seen anybody complain about adults being there, but I imagine there has to be some busybody who thought a rule like that would be a good idea. Maybe they have the rule so they can selectively enforce it against people?
I wonder if it isn't possible to get it to save your command to history when you do Ctrl-C.

I tried a naive way by trapping sigint but couldn't get it to work.

I have one of those macbook keyboards (2018 macbook pro) and it is easily the worst keyboard I have ever used. I do not understand how a keyboard like that could possibly have made it onto a $3000 laptop.

Which is funny because the touchpad is by far the best touchpad I've ever used, it's the first touchpad I'd ever used that made me think a touchpad could compete with a mouse. It even made me start donating to the linux touchpad improvement project that got posted on HN [1].

My thinkpad is the exact opposite. Decent keyboard for a laptop but terrible touchpad.

[1] https://www.gitclear.com/blog/linux_touchpad_update_december...

This has been going on for a long time. There was a company called geekedin that scraped data off public git repositories (among other things) and who then had their database leaked back in 2016.

https://www.troyhunt.com/8-million-github-profiles-were-leak...

Re:An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email on Sunday April 10, 2022 @03:14PM (#30980629)
Another one that's come up in the past is https://sneakemail.com/
Why is it possible for a pilot to "fight" the autopilot? From my (layman's) point of view, it seems logical that either the pilot would be in control or the autopilot would be in control, but not both at the same time.
also https://ugenr.dk/ if you ever wanted the number flying out at you.
Re:Ask HN: Gmail account security on Sunday January 23, 2022 @06:39PM (#30051855)
One site I've found particularly annoying in this regard is ebay. I'll log in, enter a 2FA code (both SMS and email), do whatever I need to, and then 30 minutes later I'll get an email saying my password has been reset because of suspicious activity. ("your eBay account has been secured because your login information may have been used without your permission") This has happened several times now. At least they haven't canceled any of my orders or anything.
It is not just for the phone, the passphrase you set is also used to encrypt your data on the signal servers. Signal claims to use intel SGX to secure the passphrase on their servers, though.
Re:Clever uses of pass, the Unix password manager on Thursday December 16, 2021 @08:19PM (#29586489)
Some distros package browser extensions, so you can install them via your regular package manager. For example arch packages firefox-extension-passff (I haven't personally used it though)
You can get around the youtube restrictions using yt-dlp (fork of youtube-dl) There are video players such as mpv that integrate with youtube-dl/yt-dlp so you can watch videos without saving them.
Lithium batteries are used on the grid, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_Energy_Storage
I wish push-to-talk was more common. On linux I've been using this little python script that implements global push-to-talk by (un)muting the microphone in pulseaudio when you push a button. https://gitlab.com/somini/inpulse-to-talk

Time to see if there's something equivalent for mac.

Older »