News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jakejarvis

Re:Show HN: Lnk – Git-native dotfiles manager on Saturday May 24, 2025 @10:09PM (#44085024)
Acquired by Zoom (yes, that Zoom) and left to rot. A huge loss for the internet IMO. :(
I've noticed the same, and it's an incredibly hard habit to break!
I believe a big chunk (the majority?) of this comes from a fairly simple deal to set Google as the default search engine in Safari. Facebook doesn't have something similar to leverage, that I can think of at least.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...

Re:Travis CI Leaked Secure Environment Variables on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @10:39AM (#28525527)
They posted this insanely embarrassing "security bulletin" yesterday as well: https://blog.travis-ci.com/2021-09-13-bulletin

> As a reminder from the Support Team, cycling your secrets is something that all users should do on a regular basis per your company’s security process. If you are unsure how to do this please contact Support and we would be happy to help you.

...and that's it. That's the full "bulletin."

Re:Slack is down on Monday January 04, 2021 @12:29PM (#25634732)
root / hunter2
Re:How HN crushed David Walsh's blog on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @10:15AM (#24918946)
Since the post mentions already relying on Cloudflare for help with traffic, I enabled Cloudflare's new Automatic Platform Optimization [0] on a client's website as a test last week. Thought it would be another overhyped WP caching solution but it truly feels magical. I believe it's powered by CF Workers and stores the pure HTML in KV on the backend, but all of that is handled for you and automagically updated/purged by the plugin on any site change.

Highly recommend trying it. I'm seeing the vast majority of visits now are not hitting the origin server at all — for assets or the page itself. At least it's a good stopgap until we can convince everyone to move 100% static...one can dream, right?

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/automatic-platform-optimizations...

Re:HomePod Mini on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @09:42AM (#24776404)
Binged Schitt’s Creek over the last few weeks and David shouting “Alexis!” triggered all of my Sonos speakers. Every. Single. Time.
Re:Spamtoberfest on Thursday October 01, 2020 @05:51PM (#24656513)
> it's enough to file a Pull Request, not needing for it to be accepted

This part never made any sense to me. Such an easy fix to make.

Re:Say goodbye to hold music on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @07:21PM (#24645272)
Huh? Google already controls the entirety of the Phone app — if you're convinced they want to eavesdrop on your calls, they certainly don't need you to enable this feature to do so.

Also, the post states this is done completely on-device and links to a page with significant details on this: https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/10104618

Re:The High Privacy Cost of a “Free” Website on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @08:40AM (#24638153)
Commento is super easy to self-host with Docker, highly recommend it!

https://gitlab.com/commento/commento

Much of the article pulls from interesting/terrifying first-hand reports on Reddit, which are still pouring in:

> We are down in Florida. It’s a hot mess in the ER today. EMS diversion on cardiac patients because the cath lab is down.

> I work at an inpatient psych site in Philly PA. The nurses told me they asked the patients what they take for morning meds and then didn’t even distribute evening meds bc they have no record of their medications.

> We have no access to anything computer based including old labs, ekg's, or radiology studies. We have no access to our PACS radiology system. No patients died tonight in our ED but I can surely see how this could happen in large centers due to delay in patient care.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/j17aj1/cyberattack...

That's my understanding of how it's worked for decades...

1. Check for <link rel="icon" ...> tag(s)

2. Check for /favicon.ico

3. ...give up?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong!

Re:The irony of Apple homepage and Safari WebP support on Saturday April 18, 2020 @10:22AM (#22907942)
Their stubbornness around WebM is even more frustrating to me, honestly.
Re:GitHub Is Down on Thursday April 02, 2020 @05:19PM (#22763989)
Or Gitea, if you want to use a fraction of the resources! I use it solely as a GitHub backup — you can mirror Git repositories from anywhere and it pulls changes on a schedule. Literally set it up this week, thank goodness.

https://gitea.io/en-us/

Re:GitHub Is Down on Thursday April 02, 2020 @04:43PM (#22763555)
Even our static assets from raw.githubusercontent.com are throwing 500s. Whatever it is, it sounds like a pretty widespread failure...
Re:Wunderlist Is Shutting Down on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @02:01AM (#22306553)
What a shame. But I really appreciated (and was shocked by) how long they kept it maintained after acquisition, and I’m finding Microsoft To-Do a comfortable equivalent so far.
Re:Upcoming changes to our CDN for GitLab.com on Friday January 17, 2020 @09:22AM (#22074790)
via https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/readiness/tree/master...:

> 1. Once traffic is ensured to flow though Cloudflare, we initiate decommission of Route53.

> We would disable the transfer lock and generate an auth code.

> immediately after, we move the domain over to the Cloudflare registry

I love the overall plan but this part would worry me... The most obvious contingency plan when you're putting so many eggs into one basket is to keep a kill-switch somewhere like your domain registrar, where you can abandon ship entirely by switching nameservers in the worst of scenarios, right?

Correct me if I'm wrong but when the Cloudflare dashboard went down a few weeks (months?) ago, no sort of DNS-level changes would have been possible. (Either way, I don't think you can even set external nameservers for domains on Cloudflare Registrar yet?)

Just curious about the thinking behind this particular move and why the pros outweigh the cons of leaving the domain where it is.

Re:Apple's New Privacy Page on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @12:39PM (#21464867)
Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed with the progress Apple has made in spearheading consumer privacy practices — but unfortunately, half of the benefits listed here are negated by the fact that my iCloud backups are fully unencrypted (or "encrypted" with a common key that Apple holds; same thing in my view).

So, if I want convenient nightly backups (without plugging my phone in and using the "new" Catalina apps, which I'm still convinced are just new iTunes skins), Apple — and adversaries — will still have unfettered access to all my iMessages, Maps history, photos, health records, almost everything listed here and more [0][1].

Tim Cook has claimed a fix is coming for a while now [2], but meanwhile using iCloud for its intended purpose is a huge, and largely unadvertised, gaping hole in Apple's otherwise impressive privacy promises. :(

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/2/11144588/walt-mossberg-app...

[1] https://www.cellebrite.com/en/productupdates/move-your-inves...

[2] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/02/28/eff-user-encrypted-iclo...

My university switched to something called Canvas (right after I graduated, of course) and it's incredibly slick, on top of it being fully OSS. Sakai is out there too — the quality isn't much better than Blackboard but at least it's free!

https://www.instructure.com/canvas/

https://www.sakailms.org/

Re:GitHub is down on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:07PM (#20499358)
Absolutely. I'm (cautiously) optimistic that some good can come from all this downtime in that sense.
Re:GitHub is down on Monday July 22, 2019 @11:55AM (#20499214)
I feel like this whole year has served as one big reminder of how fragile the internet really is...
You can also set this directly in about:config under network.http.sendRefererHeader:

  0 = never send the header
  1 = send the header only when clicking on links and similar elements
  2 = (default) send on all requests (e.g. images, links, etc.)
If you want more granular control (like sending referrers but only the root of the domain) all of the various network.http.referer flags for Firefox are listed here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer

Doesn't have a few of the features that your extension has, but it's done the trick for me!

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