News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

HeavyFeather

> The signs also collect IP addresses.

Uh, false? What IP address? This sentence is meaningless, users don’t connect to the sign, so there’s no IP to it.

This article is just scaremongering by people who don’t know technology.

Re:A digital payments revolution in India on Sunday May 21, 2023 @03:47AM (#36018790)
> in remote villages

> the ease with which I was able to make payments

I find it hard to believe that handing cash was "hard" in any way.

Re:One million cancel broadband as living costs rise (UK) on Thursday May 18, 2023 @02:00PM (#35991738)
> there is free WiFi almost everywhere

Unless you're one of those people who don't need internet to survive, then this is nonsense. Wifi is far from everywhere and I'm not going to manually connect to wifi just to check if my date is running late. Is this the 90s?

Re:OpenAI Brings ChatGPT to iOS on Thursday May 18, 2023 @01:52PM (#35991627)
Same. I described my dizziness and pointed me to BPPV and 4 others that were quickly filtered out. I also asked how to further diagnose the issue and pointed me to some maneuvers. I then searched them on YouTube and I was fine 3 days later (this stuff can stick around for months)

Diagnosis is probably going to be one of the most impactful uses. Even if then you have to head to an actual doctor to confirm, it's good to have a possible lead.

We've been using Google for the same purpose for a decade but with much worse results, this is a step up.

Re:Google will soon let Pixel phones double as dashcams on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @01:38PM (#35978694)
> passively enforce speeding by using toll booth data

Some EU countries do that on tollways but don't keep them always-on because they generate too many tickets to handle.

Re:FBI Advising People to Avoid Public Charging Stations on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @10:09AM (#35539935)
Idea: use a power bank that allows in/out at the same time. It should charge both at high speed while also acting as a firewall.

This is also assuming that your powerbank can’t be hacked. In which case, god save us all.

Re:FBI Advising People to Avoid Public Charging Stations on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @10:06AM (#35539877)
If you can connect your turned off phone to your computer and start a reset, then that’s never going to be enough.

If you want data safety, you must skip the data pins.

If you want current safety, you must skip public chargers.

Indeed time to eliminate all those people I guess. /s

I don’t think you can compare people’s carbon footprint because those people will exist regardless of jobs.

Re:I ported the Firefox Archive.today extension to Safari on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:59AM (#35527030)
I think that’s a Safari bug with activeTab, you just have to click twice.

Regardless, with activeTab you can just inject script into the page itself through which you can open a regular popup.

    chrome.scripting.executeScript({
      func: () => window.open(' archive.ph' + location.href)
    })
Currently the extension will suggest that it needs access to every page the user visits, occasionally opening a popup automatically if I remember correctly.

For something that’s a glorified bookmarklet, that’s a lot to ask.

Re:I worked at Google for -10 days on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:45AM (#35526813)
Sounds like there should be a legally mandated escrow for this kind of hiring. The employer should guarantee 2/3 months of employment if they’re asking someone to move across the world. This really shouldn’t be an issue if companies actually fulfilled their duties.
Re:I ported the Firefox Archive.today extension to Safari on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:52AM (#35525999)
I don’t see any changes on the repo. The permissions in your case should just be activeTab and storage. That’s it.

You can run the extension via chrome.browserAction.onClick and it will receive the URL. You also don’t need the tabs permission just to create a tab.

Re:We Need to Talk About Vercel on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @12:41AM (#35520934)
I assume that’s because a VPN doesn’t let the ISP do any traffic shaping, which isn’t the case for regular CDNs (unless the ISP itself “positively traffic shapes” for)

Warp also regularly lets me escape public Wi-Fi’s where in-browser uploads fail.

> GPS looks broken

It’s a failure both on the app and Apple side to convey this information properly. Approximate location should be shown with a large circle and the user could be told explicitly about this.

Some apps really need exact location (think Uber and Google Maps) but many don’t (any social network)

Re:We Need to Talk About Vercel on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:11PM (#35508818)
> Potentially

Unless CloudFlare cables are somehow shinier than the rest of the internet’s, adding one hop almost certainly adds latency. More hops more time.

In some instances where the original server was closer than CF’s edge, I measured increased time even for cached content, effectively making CF slower for every request by that specific user.

And I love it, but it has two issues:

- Apps can refuse to work with that, like Google Photos (it used to work during the beta and it was perfect for me)

- Apps still offer their awful photo picker on top of your already-picked photos, so selecting new ones requires a lot of taps.

I wish Apple would reign in some of these apps. In-app browsers and custom photo pickers should be banned unless they have demonstrated advantages.

With that logic you really shouldn't use your computer.
> For tax and reporting reasons alone, payments practically need to be bound to a given transaction/receipt number.

Cash doesn't work like that, so some countries might not require this link even for some cashless payments. Heck I receive money transfers in EU and US that don't have any numbers in them, and they're not $2.

Nope, same, they also have one-person street food vendors
file:// can access any file on your computer, out of the box.

Localhost cannot (unless you set it up that way, which requires user action)

That’s why.

Re:Ask Wirecutter: Can You Recommend a Not-Smart TV for Me? on Saturday April 08, 2023 @01:44AM (#35490879)
I think people are generally concerned with “badly-designed” TVs and conflate “smart TV” with “bloated TV”. If Apple made an actual TV you bet nobody would bat an eye. In fact many advocate using Apple TV alongside their offline TV.

I agree that smart TVs are nice to have, especially when they receive Airplay, YouTube, whatever straight from my phone. Dumb TVs are pretty useless on their own, I only use mine to consume internet content anyway.

Sounds like it’s VNC centered around a remote browser, that loads in your own browser.

It has extra features and fewer limitations than a regular browser I suppose, but that’s what I gather.

What's cheaper to program and produce: a speaker or a display and chip?

I think that this device is super smart. It's a "cell phone" chip that "reads" the texts out loud when received from a hardcoded number. It could cost a few dollars.

The only cheaper thing would be upcycling existing smartphones, but that would be a support nightmare.

> it would never work

Ask Thailand and their QR-code based payments, TrueMoney and "Thai QR", because that's exactly how they work. Maybe scammers are less prevalent in Thailand than in India so they go by trust, even in 7-Elevens.

Re:Google reverses 5M file limit in Google Drive on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @02:27AM (#35435839)
If you think Alphabet is nearing “the end” I’m afraid you’re too deep into the AI bubble.
Same exact thought. Imagine dropping 50-100k on a car and getting a UI that looks like pre-alpha.

I suppose car owners are used to junk UIs, but this feels like a polished turd.

Re:Windows Sandbox on Sunday April 02, 2023 @11:02PM (#35418052)
Are you from 2010? What computer doesn’t have 4GB of ram? My phone has more than that
Re:XUL Layout has been removed from Firefox on Sunday April 02, 2023 @02:00AM (#35407638)
Maybe people should stop hoarding tabs though. I see this as no different from people who hoard pizza boxes.

It's like someone opens a bug report "I clicked this button 2000 times in a row really fast while holding alt-shift-control and it crashed the app." Ok maybe don't waste my time with reports that affect only mentally insane people.

> the issue was deferred without acknowledging the reporter's concise suggestions of how to handle it, engineering-wise

A day in my life at my last job. Basically a regular occurrence that it was “urgent” after a customer report.

Re:When Google paid websites to promote Firefox on Friday March 31, 2023 @11:12AM (#35388309)
VirtuaGirl wasn’t nearly as bad as that quiet extension mining bitcoins and syphoning your dad’s passwords in the background.

Flashy != dangerous.

Heck today viruses don’t even limit themselves to restarting your computer, they encrypt your files and blackmail entire hospitals.

So yeah no, things did not get better at all.

Re:Thunderbird to add automatic encryption after 21 years on Friday March 31, 2023 @11:09AM (#35388265)
Gotta hand it to them for not closing bugs after 2 months of inactivity as is the norm for large OS projects.

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