News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

JonathonW

Re:Knuth Reward Check on Saturday October 10, 2026 @07:23PM (#50038141)
The current wording (per Amazon's sample of the 2021 edition) is "Zillions of alphabets can be generated by the programs in this book."
The initial phase of construction (what DC Blox initially applied for permits for) is for 69k square feet at 10 MW.

But that is only a corner of the property that DC Blox acquired. Other documents filed during the permitting process include their long-term plan for the property, and that's where the 50 MW number comes from-- two buildings totaling 345k square feet of data center space, a 72k square foot electrical substation, plus support facilities (parking, guard houses, etc.).

Re:Printing Gaussian Splats on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @05:48PM (#48651943)
Resin, on one of these big expensive Stratasys machines: https://www.stratasys.com/en/3d-printers/printer-catalog/pol...
Re:Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart on Thursday May 21, 2026 @10:46PM (#48231381)
The stars featured in the movie and in this chart (and in the book) are real, and reflect their real-world locations.

The planets around the stars, aside from our own solar system (obviously), are fictional-- both Tau Ceti and 40 Eridani are stars where we're looking for exoplanets, but we don't have strong evidence for either yet.

Cloudflare is not the only DNS provider supported for DNS-01 challenges, even if you restrict yourself to only using Certbot: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/dns-providers-who-easily...
Re:Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @05:44PM (#47159120)
You can trick the user into copying the same malicious link, but browsers have generally already implemented the same mitigation that is Microsoft's fix for this issue inside Notepad (specifically, prompting before opening outside applications after the user enters or clicks a URL that isn't one of the built-in schemes).
Re:Git's Magic Files on Sunday February 22, 2026 @03:06PM (#47114153)
`git add -f` will add ignored files. Once you've done that, any files you've added will be part of your commit regardless of the contents of .gitignore.
Bose's original plan was to remove all WiFi-dependent functionality (no AirPlay and no Spotify Connect)-- while they wouldn't quite be "dumb speakers" at that point (since Bluetooth would've still worked), it would've turned them into pretty much just overcomplicated Bluetooth speakers.
Re:Pokémon Team Optimization on Thursday January 01, 2026 @02:32PM (#46457220)
There's even a clear example of this in the non-legendary teams: both of them include Slaking, presumably because it has a particularly high base stat total (the highest of any non-legendary, and matching some legendaries).

But Slaking doesn't get that for free-- it has an ability (Truant) that means it can only use moves every other turn. That limits its usefulness outside of a couple very specific scenarios, and means that it'll usually be outperformed by significantly "weaker" Pokemon (going purely by numbers).

And that's just one of the factors you'd need to take into account to build a team optimizer that's actually useful. Actually building a team has to take into account a massive number of factors: roles for each Pokemon (not just what types they can counter), available movesets, any advantages or disadvantages provided by abilities, your opponents' team composition, etc... it's a big problem to try to solve.

My understanding is that LPL is not still practicing (he says he's retired, to focus on security work), but I'd guess he knows someone, if McNally didn't already have his own lawyer.
And Cyrix MediaGX (which remained with National Semiconductor after the VIA acquisition) became Geode which was eventually sold to AMD.
Re:PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin on Monday September 15, 2025 @11:47PM (#45257841)
This approach (using a separate domain for content that isn't part of their service itself) has security advantages-- for example, this way a compromise of their news site CMS can't expose users' PayPal session tokens.

It's decently common for websites to do this-- this is the same reason why Github Pages is hosted at github.io rather than github.com, and why static blobs are at githubusercontent.com. Those have a somewhat different threat model than PayPal's news site (hopefully PayPal isn't letting any random person add news stories...), but the premise is the same: if the thing does not need authentication tokens for the main service, make it so that it's impossible for it to get them.

(You could get some of the same effect by scoping your cookies to a specific subdomain rather than allowing them to apply to all subdomains, but (1) that's not always how you want to structure your site, and (2) it's really easy to mess up and inadvertently scope a cookie too broadly (or for the browser to misbehave and send to subdomains anyways, which was the default behavior of one very prominent browser for a really long time). Using a different domain entirely sidesteps all of this completely.)

Re:Ubiquiti Launches UniFi OS Server for Self-Hosting on Thursday July 31, 2025 @02:59PM (#44748922)
There are off-the-shelf all-in-one Asus home routers that do VLANs?
Re:Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: WebAssembly SDK on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @02:51PM (#44726973)
Because the game already also runs on Xbox and, given MS's recent gaming strategy (which is putting less emphasis on Xbox exclusives), could conceivably come to Playstation or maybe even Switch 2 in the future.

On the Windows side of things, there's also a push towards ARM hardware (with current Snapdragon-based hardware actually performing pretty well). Not sure if Flight Simulator is currently ARM-native, but having the ability to go ARM-native is probably desirable at least as a long-term goal.

Re:Alternative Layout System on Friday June 27, 2025 @02:00PM (#44398872)
Scrolls written in a single column and "scrolled" vertically (like a modern text editor or web browser) weren't completely unheard of, particularly for liturgical or legal documents. See http://grbs.library.duke.edu/article/viewFile/9191/4607

But, yeah, the horizontal format would've been more common.

Re:Airpass – easily overcome WiFi time limits on Saturday June 21, 2025 @04:15PM (#44340436)
Modern Macs do not always have en0 as the WiFi adapter (it's en1 on current iMacs and on the Mac Studio; en0 is the ethernet jack).

But you're unlikely to be taking one of the machines that has built-in ethernet to the airport or coffeeshop.

Re:Omnimax on Monday June 09, 2025 @09:16AM (#44224194)
Soarin’ (in California and Florida, at least) originally used IMAX film projectors and OMNIMAX-style dome screens; it was updated to digital at around the same time as the ride film changed to the current “Soarin’ around the World” in 2016 (plus or minus a year; I think the digital conversion might’ve been a bit earlier in California)
Re:Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts on Tuesday May 06, 2025 @06:46PM (#43910439)
In Old Timey Mono, lowercase "L" and the number "1" are also very similar.

Old Timey Code fixes both of these-- it has a slashed zero and redraws the number 1 to be distinct (angles the top serif).

Re:Ubuntu 25.10 Replaces GNU Coreutils with Rust Uutils on Thursday April 24, 2025 @02:19AM (#43779791)
This reads like AI spew, and it's also not news (the post announcing this initiative [1] is from March).

[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-ox...

> After all we wouldn't talk about Dropbox being sold resulting in ransacking of your personal data why is that in the conversation with 23andme?

Both 23andme and Dropbox's privacy policies only require them to notify users if the privacy policy changes (no restriction on scope of those changes), so maybe we should (if Dropbox were to be sold)?

Re:All clocks are 30 seconds late on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @01:19AM (#42619844)
I have a round analog clock with a particularly strange arrangement: it has a second hand (that ticks every second), and it has a minute hand that only moves every fifteen seconds.

(It's a radio-controlled clock: it has the second and minute hand on separate motors presumably because syncing to the actual time if there were only a motor for the second hand like a conventional analog clock would take too long (and probably make determining position more complicated). There is no independent motor for the hour hand, so it does have to roll the minute hand around to move that one.)

Re:Cramming Solitaire onto a Nintendo E-Reader card on Saturday November 02, 2024 @12:54PM (#42027544)
Is it even an emulator? There's an SM83 (the Game Boy Color's weird not-quite-Z80 CPU) hiding inside the Game Boy Advance's SoC.

[edit] Reading a bit more, it is an emulator-- and apparently an inefficient, poorly-written one at that.

The A17 Pro (originally in the iPhone 15 Pro; now also in the iPad Mini) and A18 Pro (currently only in the iPhone 16 Pro) are the only chips Apple has produced with a "Pro" suffix.

Apple used to use the X suffix for bigger versions of their phone processors that went into iPads (starting with the A5X); that went away when the M-series was introduced.

And the "Pro" suffix itself doesn't seem to denote anything in particular-- there was never a non-Pro A17, and the "A17 Pro" going into the iPad Mini is itself a cut-down version of the chip that went into the iPhone 15 Pro (it has one GPU core disabled).

Re:The Static Site Paradox on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @11:02PM (#41784092)
SeaMonkey (the direct successor to Netscape Communicator and the pre-Firefox Mozilla Suite) still does.

Doesn't produce particularly modern HTML, but if you want to author HTML like it's 1999, it's out there.

Monopoly was patented-- in 1935. So that's long-expired.

And many of the non-Hasbro -opoly games (that use that as part of their name) actually are licensed. Hasbro's been known to go after unauthorized users of the name for trademark infringement.

Re:Git Bash Is My Preferred Windows Shell on Tuesday September 10, 2024 @05:54PM (#41506009)
WSL2 is "just" Linux running in a Hyper-V VM (with some special sauce on top of it to handle things like interacting with the filesystem or doing Wayland and X11 graphics, plus containerization stuff to allow multiple distributions to be installed and run under one VM and one kernel).

WSL1 was a completely different approach, adding a Linux compatibility layer to Windows itself. There, you never had a Linux kernel running at all-- Linux syscalls would call into WSL, which would talk directly to the NT kernel to do whatever that syscall needed to do.

WSL1 didn't last very long (still present, but not actively being developed)-- turns out that reimplementing one operating system on top of another is a Hard Problem (see also: Wine). WSL2 avoids this entirely, and also avoids most of the impedance mismatches that you get when trying to reimplement POSIX on top of NT. WSL2 solved a whole bunch of compatibility problems essentially overnight that WSL1 never even got around to.

Re:Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison on Tuesday September 10, 2024 @12:26AM (#41497155)
Windows 10 only does 16-bit DOS and Windows apps on the 32-bit version of Windows 10, so it only has a VM layer for those 16-bit apps. (On x86, NTVDM uses the processor's virtual 8086 mode to do its thing; that doesn't exist in 64-bit mode on x86-64 and MS didn't build an emulator for x86-64 like they did for some other architectures back in the NT on Alpha/PowerPC era, so no DOS or 16-bit Windows apps on 64-bit Windows at all.)
Re:.INTERNAL is now reserved for private-use applications on Saturday August 10, 2024 @12:20PM (#41210508)
> One can resolve "localhost" (even via an upstream resolver) to an arbitrary IP address. At least on my Linux system "localhost" only seems to be specially treated by systemd-resolved (with a cursory attempt I didn't succeed in getting it to use an upstream resolver for it).

The secure context spec [1] addresses this-- localhost should only be considered potentially trustworthy if the agent complies with specific name resolution rules to guarantee that it never resolves to anything except the host's loopback interface.

[1] https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-secure-contexts/#localhost

Re:.INTERNAL is now reserved for private-use applications on Friday August 09, 2024 @09:57PM (#41206781)
Unlikely. Localhost can be a secure context because localhost traffic doesn't leave your local machine; .internal names have no guarantees about where they go (not inconceivable that some particularly "creative" admin might have .internal names that resolve to something on the public internet).
Re:Things you wish you didn't need to know about S3 on Friday May 31, 2024 @01:28AM (#40531799)
You shouldn't do this if you value things working, though-- this is a pretty rare configuration (you have to go way out of your way to get it), so many developers won't test with it and it's not unheard of for applications to break on case-sensitive filesystems.

If you absolutely need case-sensitivity for a specific application or a specific project, it's worth seeing if you can do what you need to do within a case-sensitive disk image. It may not work for every use-case where you might need a case-sensitive FS, but if it does work for you, it avoids the need to reinstall to make the switch to a case-sensitive FS, and should keep most applications from misbehaving because the root FS is case-sensitive.

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