News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

burnhamup

Re:Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue on Sunday September 06, 2026 @04:13PM (#49590413)
I don't know about crucial, but a recent amber alert went out last week. It contained a bit.ly link to the CHP's Twitter page and I couldn't see the information. I clicked on it because the alert was from my town, but light on the details.

Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.

Re:Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @12:51PM (#49348574)
It depends on how old the user is. If the player is over 18, Fortnite can link out. I guess you call some Apple API to link out and they check the user's age for you before deciding if its allowed or not?
Re:A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game on Saturday July 18, 2026 @02:59PM (#48961090)
I poked at the Steam Depots for some of these games for more information. A game like Putt-Putt ships the ScummVM under the GPL license and runs it with the original asset files: https://steamdb.info/depot/294661/

Backyard Baseball does not appear to be using ScummVM. https://steamdb.info/depot/3170541/

The .he* files also appear to be the original assets for the game. And then they built a Scumm interpreter to run the game which can talk to Steam to use leaderboards and achievements.

Re:A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game on Saturday July 18, 2026 @02:31PM (#48960793)
I'm curious too. The original developers were Humongous Games (Putt-Putt & Freddi Fish) whose other titles used the SCUMM engine. My guess would be Backyard Baseball was as well. I dug up this article that seems to go through the process but not in great technical detail: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/backyard-baseball-97-in...

What I don't understand is why just grabbing the original game files and slapping it inside the SCUMMVM wasn't the whole story. That's definitely how the other Humongous Games were re-released on Steam a decade earlier. I just assumed Backyard Baseball had more complex rights.

Re:Why American ambulance rides are so expensive on Thursday July 09, 2026 @07:13PM (#48853653)
Yeah, my family was hit by two ambulance bills in California in 2024, and tried to balance bill us contrary to the law. It was a really frustrating experience trying to get them follow the law. One of the ambulance companies waited an entire year to even file paperwork and still tried to get insurance and me to pay.
I was curious how a man in Switzerland gets charged in the US for a placing bets on a site that doesn't allow the US to participate.

The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency.

And another commentor suggests that punishing insider traders in a step towards legitimzing and regulating prediction markets in the US.

Re:Subway Builder: A realistic subway simulation game on Thursday October 09, 2025 @04:06PM (#45532423)
In practice it means Steam reviews the key requests you make for third party bundles and sales. If they decide the deal is too generous, they may deny the key requests until you've offered the game for a comparable price on Steam.
> Here is a fun tip: Just transfer or deposited money in small amounts, whenever you feel like it. Avoids the questioning like your some kind of criminal.

Breaking up deposits into smaller amounts is a crime called structuring.

I wouldn't recommend doing this as an alternative to dealing with the reports and scrutiny on larger transactions.

Re:Should I Use a Carousel? (2013) on Saturday June 07, 2025 @09:59PM (#44214019)
Point taken. It was really annoying to try to read one of the slides of the carousel because it kept moving.
Re:A Minecraft server written in COBOL on Thursday December 26, 2024 @11:00AM (#42515928)
I think options are limited from the switch. You can't connect to arbitrary servers from the console version - just some curated public servers or by paying for Realms. You can hack around this with a DNS server that redirects the curated servers, but starts to get sketchy.

You also need the paid switch online for any sort of network play.

Re:The Lego Great Ball Contraption on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @10:36PM (#41575169)
Brickfest is more of a traveling attraction. The local convention was Bricks by the Bay - they had the GBC in 2023, but the convention is on an indefinite hiatus. I wish it were easier to see where upcoming GBC's would be,
Re:Compression efficiency with shared dictionaries in Chrome on Wednesday March 06, 2024 @10:46PM (#39624859)
The patch system I worked with generated signatures of each build. The signature had the hash of each block of the build. The client has the signature for their version (1.0) and they download the signature of the new version (1.2) and diff the two. Then they download each block that has changed.

I think it was the `electron-updater` for my electron app, but I don't quite remember now.

The theory I've heard is related to 'crawl budget'. Google is only going to devote a finite amount of time to indexing your site. If the number of articles on your site exceeds that time, some portion of your site won't be indexed. So by 'pruning' undesirable pages, you might boost attention on the articles you want indexed. No clue how this ends up working in practice.

Google's suggestion isn't to delete pages, but maybe mark some pages with a no index header.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

Re:Newsom just signed California pay transparency bill on Wednesday September 28, 2022 @02:48PM (#33011680)
I saw the Colorado excluded in job postings in the immediate aftermath.

I'm starting to see more and more companies listings a Colorado salary range in recent listings.

Re:Apple countersues Epic, seeks punitive damages on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @01:14AM (#24417385)
I'm not so sure that's true. They might have come to the Google Play store as part of their plan to sue Google. Their Google lawsuit has complaints about Google interfering with their third party deals with phone manufacturers.