News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

clemiclemen

Re:"It works better in the app " on Saturday August 29, 2026 @04:41PM (#49493150)
Actually there are a lot of information that an app can do by default without asking for any permissions. You can check this opensource iOS app: https://github.com/mysk-research/loupe

For instance: check if some apps are installed or not, and a lot of small informations about your device that can fingerprint your phone with 100% accuracy (like the exact time where the phone was setup).

You can replace xcancel.com by nitter.net, it worked for me.

Like this: https://nitter.net/MaximeRivest/status/2073544461473169432

Both are running the same software but I guess the protection of the sites work differently.

Re:Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight on Thursday June 11, 2026 @03:11AM (#48487267)
This reminds me of the story of the "Feather" project at YouTube where they improved a lot the page weight and the average page latency went higher just because they were actually seeing a lot more traffic from places with slow Internet.

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

Re:How to break free from smart TV ads and tracking on Saturday December 13, 2025 @03:03PM (#46257481)
The ISP named Free in France also did this a while ago.

It was fairly well implemented I think: separated from your network, bandwidth was limited (to avoid impacting the host), you could opt-out (which meant opting out of using the guest network), joining the wifi was automatic if you had a cellphone with the same ISP and it was the same "guest" network for all routers so in big cities, you could rely only on this to access Internet.

It was stopped a few years ago when they deemed cellular network was reliable enough to not need the guest network.

Re:AirPods Libreated from Apple's Ecosystem on Sunday November 16, 2025 @05:58PM (#45949229)
It comes from the GitHub repo description. There is a typo though but this is maybe intentional as the name of the repo is librepods
Re:The Movie Mistake Mystery from "Revenge of the Sith" on Monday April 28, 2025 @09:23AM (#43821286)
A bit late to the party but there is a famous French internet show called "Faux-raccord" which does exactly what this article does: every episode is focused on mistakes for some movie, told by the duo Michel and Michel with some jokes along the way.

Very pleasant to watch :-)

Link: https://www.allocine.fr/video/programme-12284/

Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbUDA_Dd9s&list=PLAUaCoiUsx...

Re:Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @06:01PM (#43405677)
At which point does a monopoly becomes a monopoly?

There is no need to have a "clear" monopoly like Windows in 1990's to abuse your power and presence in the market.

Re:EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert on Friday February 28, 2025 @03:33AM (#43203198)
I don't if the remake will come at some point but in the mean time, you can enjoy this online port by fans: https://game.chronodivide.com/

You can play Red Alert 2 in the browser, with other players online.

Re:Apple Releases iCloud Passwords Add-On for Firefox on Thursday December 05, 2024 @04:14AM (#42326405)
Biometric or password is necessary for every access (which may be an inconvenience for some).

Basically, the addon communicates with a native application on the OS (the iCloud application on Windows or the password application on macOS) so there is nothing stored in Firefox.

Re:Google Removed Organic Maps from the Playstore on Sunday August 18, 2024 @05:52AM (#41281333)
The application seems to be back in the Play Store. It is a shame that Google can pull these kinds of behaviour without any repercussion...
Re:Kawaii – A Keychain-Sized Nintendo Wii on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @11:12AM (#41046821)
This is very impressive but I think Short-Stack [1] is a more impressive project because it is a fully fonctionnal Wii (as in, it works on its own as you would expect from a regular Wii) compared to this one where it needs other accessories to be able to play.

[1]: https://github.com/loopj/short-stack previously discussed 3 months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40071826

Re:Ente Auth: open-source Authy alternative for 2FA on Sunday July 07, 2024 @04:36PM (#40900276)
The free version does too. The paid version only adds cosmetics, last time I checked.
Re:EU to greenlight Chat Control tomorrow on Tuesday June 18, 2024 @06:48AM (#40716177)
The implicit line here is that if there is peace, then there is military security. And the EU has been pretty good at providing that within its borders (compared to the history of wars between countries of the EU).
Re:Bypass Paywalls repository is gone on Monday April 15, 2024 @09:56AM (#40040604)
Those looking into the history or the user agent, and why it happens to advertise itself as Firefox, Safari and Chrome ate the same time, can look into this article: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/comment-pa...
Re:Hello World on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @04:12AM (#39977167)
The min-sized-rust project [1], which you may already be aware of, has a lot of optimisations to decrease the size of a Rust binay. I think with all the optimisations, at the end, it was around 8kb for the hello world.

[1]: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

Re:Simpson's Paradox on Tuesday March 12, 2024 @01:21PM (#39682194)
This reminds me of a similar story with YouTube [1] where improving the page weight decreased the metrics because more people with lower end connections could access the page.

Metrics interpretation is as important as the metrics themselves!

[1]: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

Re:Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @02:05PM (#39607829)
I think this already exists for issues. git-bug [1] uses git internal files to store the issues. It is distributed and it even comes with a web ui in addition to the usual cli.

[1]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

Re:Planner programming blows my mind on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @11:39AM (#39456025)
This approach to programming is not all new to me (I studied Prolog at university which looks very similar but does not have the planner feature) but the planner is a very elegant and simple way of solving problems.

The comments about video game at the end of the article makes me wonder: the planner feature allows solving problems very easily by writing few lines of clear code. However, how does the performance compares against an algorithm written in imperative programming?

Picat seems to be fairly efficient compared to similar languages [1] but I don't find a comparison against "standard" languages.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.2538

This is impressive and actually looks like a real movie scene. And to think this only fits in 256 bytes makes you rethink how bloated the things we are using everyday are and also how powerful current browsers are.

I am however more impressed by the 8K demos such as "the Sheep and the Flower" [1] which was shared on HN recently or "One of those days" [2] which is a remake of an actual Youtube video [3] (granted not exactly the same video by the second but the style is immediately recognizable). They are way bigger than this 256 bytes movie but convey a lot more graphics and story.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39121101

[2]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=75790 and YouTube video: https://youtu.be/8T_Um-cw0Wc

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1NagZN2kjY

Changing the search engine in Safari is limited to a very specific list though. Using Kagi as a search engine in Safari requires using an extension that intercept search engines queries and redirects through Kagi[1].

[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

Re:Metric Time on Thursday October 12, 2023 @03:10PM (#37861671)
Fairly good article as to why removing time zones is a bad idea: https://qntm.org/abolish

(The article is still relevant with metric time/weeks)

Re:OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @06:07AM (#37567669)
Not exactly the same thing but this website is basically Red Alert 2 in the web with multiplayer support: https://chronodivide.com/
Re:Tailscale Has Partnered with Mullvad on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @04:46AM (#37478320)
I am not 100% sure but Firefox VPN is an actual VPN based on mullvad. On the main product page[1], it says it is built with Wireguard which is a VPN software.

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/fr/products/vpn/

Re:Memories from Old LAN Parties on Monday September 11, 2023 @09:39AM (#37467107)
If you want to revive your memories of Red Alert 2, some people ported the game in the web[1]. The online multiplayer feature works fairly well.

[1]: https://chronodivide.com/

Re:Tailscale Has Partnered with Mullvad on Friday September 08, 2023 @07:05AM (#37432049)