News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

earenndil

You. You are the single point of failure; if you are compromised, then all your accounts can be accessed by the compromisor.

If you're looking for a point outside yourself, then memorising all your passwords would be an option.

But beyond that, I don't think your criticism is warranted. There's always a single point of failure - sure - but we can still consider gradations of how centralised that point is, and how likely it is to fail.

With a hosted password manager, you're at the mercy of their server code; specifically, at least for 1password, I think they have a 'dead man's switch' which lets you get at the encrypted content without the master password. This is more likely to fail than a password manager which stores all its content locally and really encrypts it (e.g. keepass). In this case, human error outside of yourself can't compromise you. But technical error can, which is why there are more steps that can meaningfully increase your level of security. Like running your password manager on a separate, air-gapped computer; or sandboxing everything you run a la qubes.

Are any of these especially likely to compromise you, as a user? No, but reducing centralisation and dependency still improve your chances, and are definitely worth considering if you are e.g. running a drug smuggling ring.

It's assumed that, if you're signed up for a service with an email address, you control that email address.

This is generally a reasonable thing to assume, and can be verified for whatever account providers you support.

Re:JITs are un-ergonomic on Sunday March 29, 2020 @01:01AM (#22716561)
Nope, because java is statically typed.
Re:A history of roguelike games on Sunday March 22, 2020 @01:34AM (#22652980)
This is not that great of an article, IMO. A prominent developer of one of the roguelikes mentioned says:

> you can immediately see that this article was stitched together by throwing some wikipedia articles together if it references the Berlin interpretation

> it's also hilarious if the guild of disgruntled adventurers is referenced as fun addition :)

> I'm not sure if I should feel insulted [by the article's description of my roguelike]

I mostly agree with these. I also feel a bit slighted by one of the descriptions. I'm also not sure quite what to make of the fact that they don't mention the two most prominent recent roguelikes: caves of qud, and cogmind.

Re:A history of roguelike games on Sunday March 22, 2020 @01:27AM (#22652955)
Notcurses is ok, not great.

Tickit[1] is much nicer, and comes with what is possibly the only good way of reading modifier characters from a terminal (seriously).

Alternately, if you're ok with not running in a terminal, check out bearlibterminal[2].

1: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libtickit/

2: http://foo.wyrd.name/en:bearlibterminal

Re:A Defer Statement for C on Thursday March 19, 2020 @04:26PM (#22631351)
You need to use nested functions if you want to have nontrivial behaviour in a cleanup, and nested functions are awful in c.
Re:A Defer Statement for C on Thursday March 19, 2020 @12:59AM (#22624629)
Raku has something similar.
Re:A Defer Statement for C on Thursday March 19, 2020 @12:58AM (#22624623)
I wrote on reddit[1] about why I prefer this over c++:

> It's not a technical problem, but a social problem. Yes, I would definitely prefer the c++ RAII (and refcounts would be nice too). If you say 'my project is in c++', that sends a certain message to prospective contributors, about what your priorities and ideals are. It can attract certain kinds of contributors and discourage others. Then you have the problem of how to define your subset of c++. It's easy to say 'no exceptions, no RTTI, no STL'. But there are subtler things. As you mention, templates are occasionally useful. But sometimes they're completely superfluous. Do you allow virtual functions? Multiple inheritance? The answer is almost invariably 'maybe'; you have to exercise taste. I can do that by myself, for my own project. But if I want to be able to accept contributions from others, I need a clearer set of contribution guidelines than 'wherever my whimsy takes me', and for such a purpose 'whatever the c compiler accepts' is the best I can do.

> Also, tcc is about 10x faster than gcc and clang, which makes development a joy.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f4gb6n/i_made_...

Re:A Defer Statement for C on Thursday March 19, 2020 @12:56AM (#22624615)
Author of the library here; AMA.
Re:A Defer Statement for C on Thursday March 19, 2020 @12:56AM (#22624610)
My version isn't as dependent on nonstandard extensions.
Re:What Is the Geometry of the Universe? on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @11:24PM (#22613316)
Hyperrogue[1] takes place in hyperbolic space. Definitely a good way to gain an intuition for it. It offers several different projections, so you can try them out. It's also open source[2].

1: https://roguetemple.com/z/hyper/

2: https://github.com/zenorogue/hyperrogue

Did you have a strong (10+ character, alphanumeric) password on the device they were able to get into?
Re:K Language (2011) on Friday March 13, 2020 @02:00AM (#22565093)
> not once have I seen an explanation of what makes it fast and why those techniques aren't looted for open-source languages

The language design is such that the programs you write can make optimal use of cache and SIMD. The interpreter can only take advantage of that if the language offers you that. It's like saying "not once have I seen an explanation of what makes c so fast and why those techniques aren't applied to python and javascript."

(Note also that the reference J interpreter is opensource and very competitive, performance-wise.)

Re:Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @08:00PM (#22541429)
BSD was already open-source and superior to linux as the time it came out; it was only hampered by licensing concerns.
The last two paragraphs of the article imply that they will continue using their own fabs for CPUs.
Re:Stages of denial in encountering K on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @07:15PM (#22541017)
What is TFA?

> the use of "nested arrays" (not the same as multidimensional arrays) induces pointer structures that are difficult to do anything with

J doesn't allow nested arrays by default; if you want to create such a structure, you have to use boxes (and then unbox the values inside of them to get at them), which makes it explicit and reduces its usage. AFAIK, k doesn't have nested arrays at all.

Re:Stages of denial in encountering K on Monday March 09, 2020 @03:21PM (#22528748)
Arthur wrote an OS in k with some c. Not public, but geocar can probably talk more about it if he shows up.
Re:Project Sandcastle: Android for the iPhone on Friday March 06, 2020 @01:48AM (#22501479)
> swipe typing is inaccurate compared to android

A couple of years ago, microsoft made a keyboard for ios called wordflow. It had better accuracy than any other keyboard I've tried. Sadly they removed it not long after; I still use it, but I don't think it's possible to download it if you haven't already.

Re:Romu – Fine random number generators on Sunday March 01, 2020 @09:05PM (#22460978)
> All copyright licenses (except CC0) require attribution for the work in all copies (verbatim and derivative)

Boost licence

Unlicense

WTFPL

Problem is not server specs, but bandwidth.
The cost is bandwidth, not ram/storage.
Re:Assange Hearing Day 2 on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @04:54PM (#22427785)
> world socialist website

Doesn't exactly seem to be impartial either.

Re:Show HN: Magit for VSCode (Alpha) on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @04:48PM (#22427719)
I tried magit briefly, but found it unusably slow. Is this different?
The game is distributed as an archive accompanied by an executable unpacker. The unpacker is signed by GOG, and it can verify the hash of the archive, meaning no malware concern.
Re:Ask HN: How are you preparing for COVID-19 disruptions? on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @04:43PM (#22427681)
So basically a bank run but with naturally (not artificially) limited resources. Great...
Re:Securing Firefox with WebAssembly on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @11:53AM (#22424758)
WASM has less of a perf hit.
Re:Securing Firefox with WebAssembly on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @12:17AM (#22420492)
Afaik those make for a 2x performance hit. And they don't necessarily protect against buffer overflows; if you overflow out of data addressable from one pointer, but into data that's legally addressable from another pointer, that's still an issue, but it won't be caught.
Re:On Voice Coding on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @10:53PM (#22420142)
Something to consider: replacing 'jury' with 'jug' (or some other one-syllabic phoneme) might increase overall efficiency, even if one or two combinations need a slight pause.
Re:Brave Browser and the Wayback Machine: Working Together on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @10:47PM (#22420112)
Content creators don't deserve revenue. Putting something on the internet is a voluntary action, and a voluntary agreement to pay whatever costs are incurred. Anyone who chooses to put advertisements before people's eyeballs and thoughts into people's heads is a bad actor.

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