News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jayelbe

As somebody who works in local government IT, consistent scraping of our data like this is the bane of our life. We get hit by thousands of these, many with no rate limiting, making hugely intensive requests, that cause downtime and knock-on effects for actual customers and citizens. We block IPs, add captchas, and yet it persists.

If you really want the data, just FOI it for goodness' sake.

I get the distinct impression that many of these outfits aren't really advocating for impoved transparency but are simply trying to exploit and monetise illicitly obtained government data to make a quick buck.

Waste disposal and planning for quarrying and mineral extraction are different functions, decided at a higher tier of local government, and are not directly comparable to development management/planning.
Re:iPhone Air on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @05:43PM (#45189650)
Cools pics! They should show it behind a pencil for scale.
Re:RSS Beat Microsoft on Monday September 08, 2025 @11:43AM (#45169717)
Websites usually link to their RSS feed using a <link> attribute in the head of the page.

Browsers used to detect this and show an RSS icon near the address bar if the website you were viewing had a feed - and you could click the icon to see more details and subscribe.

I use this Firefox addon which replicates that functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feed-preview/

FreshRSS is a good self-hosted RSS feed reader, and you can configure it to scrape non-RSS webpages for updates too: https://danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/

Re:Firefox 141 Released on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @07:17AM (#44657889)
> On Linux, Firefox uses less memory and no longer requires a forced restart after an update has been applied by a package manager.

Holy cow! A huge change in a single sentence.

Re:The Guardian flourishes without a paywall on Tuesday April 01, 2025 @06:12AM (#43544985)
If you combine it with the 'tone/news' tag, it narrows the field quite a bit:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/investigative-journalism+t...

Re:Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data on Friday February 28, 2025 @11:54AM (#43207740)
I find this so sad. I would gladly pay/donate to support Firefox, far in excess of however much money they would make from data mining and advertising. I am sure that enough people feel the same way to make it a viable model.

Thunderbird raises more than $8mn a year in donations to support their development. Thunderbird's success has proven that this model would work.

I miss my N9 so badly! Without a doubt the best phone I've ever owned.
I bought an N9 in 2011 and it was an incredible phone. The design and UI were gorgeous and it was a joy to use. I still miss the swipe-driven UI - it was clever, intuitive and well thought out. The phone itself had Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Spotify clients, and MS Exchange support for calendaring and email (I believe Nokia developed or ported many of these in-house) and was completely usable day-to-day.

Compared to Nokia's symbian phones and earlier Maemo efforts, it felt revolutionary and I'd agree Nokia had a device which could have paved the way for a post-symbian future. It definitely felt like, with continued investment, it would have been a real iPhone competitor, and in just the nick of time.

Elop's strategy was a disaster.

Re:All Garmin Connect services are down on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @08:34AM (#42634023)
It was loading a blank white page. Looks like it's back now though!
Re:All Garmin Connect services are down on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @07:40AM (#42633552)
Try visiting their FlyGarmin services at - https://fg.garmin.com - certainly looks to be down.
>Had the EU passed a similar law a decade ago, they would be stuck on mini or micro USB today.

They did and (surprise!) we aren't.

https://www.slashgear.com/micro-usb-formally-chosen-as-cellp...

Re:London's 850-year-old food markets to close on Thursday November 28, 2024 @09:55AM (#42265682)
The Mayor of London doesn't have any power over the City of London Corporation. They are completely separate authorities.

The Corporation is essentially a unitary/borough-tier local authority, overseeing the "square mile" centre of the city, and has a council of elected councilmen. It provides housing, education, social services, street cleaning, markets etc for a small area of central London, and has existed since time immemorial.

The Mayor's remit, which has only existed since the year 2000, covers the whole 600-square mile area of Greater London, and provides strategic services like transport, strategic planning, fire and rescue, and the metropolitan police.

The Mayor of London wouldn't have had any involvement in this at all.

The Post Office is separate from Royal Mail. The two were separated when Royal Mail was privatised in 2013. The Post Office is still in the public sector.
Re:OpenScope Air Traffic Control Simulator on Saturday February 10, 2024 @06:41AM (#39325445)
Good grief, I'd not seen this before and now I've lost an entire evening to it. Who'd have thought a game nearly 40 years old could still be so engrossing?! Thanks
Re:UK 2022 rail station flow images on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @09:55AM (#38854760)
Oh wow, I completely forgot, yes! From Aberdeen it continues all the way to Penzance (but in the opposite direction it starts from Plymouth). So the longest journey is Aberdeen - Penzance; my mistake. Thank you!

Another mistake: it doesn't run on Saturdays.

Re:UK 2022 rail station flow images on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @07:09AM (#38853157)
There's one direct train between Exeter St Davids - Aberdeen every day Mon-Sat, in each direction.

It takes something like 10½hrs. If you join the train at Plymouth (the start of the journey) it's 11½hrs, and the longest possible train journey you can make in the UK without changing.

Re:The Piccadilly line’s new air conditioned trains on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @08:34AM (#38378898)
I never knew this existed before and can't help thinking it's absolutely incredible. Thanks for sharing!
Re: on Friday October 20, 2023 @08:27AM (#37955160)
Previous discussion (in 2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24217116
Is that really true? Section 51 of the London Hackney Carriage Act 1831 (to which the article refers) doesn't seem to require that; it (among other things) forbids a taxi driver feeding another driver's horses with anything other than corn or hay - but doesn't say anything about requiring them to carry hay for this purpose. There is no other reference to "hay" in the act.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1831/22/pdfs/ukpga_1831...

The Post Office hasn't been privatised. The company is still owned by the state. Individual subpostmasters run their branches as their own semi-independent businesses using the Post Office brand - but it has always been this way in most of the country.

It's Royal Mail (the letters and parcel delivery side of things) that was privatised.

Re:The Password Game on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @07:00PM (#36499892)
I thought I was being so clever by filling up the password field with food, so I could buy lots of time to search YouTube. I didn't realise Paul could be overfed :'(
Re:The Password Game on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @05:42PM (#36499068)
I couldn't get it to accept a move which involved the knight jumping over a hostile piece. It was definitely the best move (I fed it into stockfish and got the same response). I refreshed the page to get a new puzzle and got a new street view as well. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Edit: Oooohhh, I think I forgot to add a + for check!

Re:PhpBB on Friday June 16, 2023 @02:59PM (#36361983)
OpenID does exactly that and has been a thing for something like 15 years now.

Quite a few big sites like Yahoo, Google, AOL Verisign would provide a URL you could login with (they were identity providers) and there were lots of independent providers too. You could easily host your own with as simple PHP script.

Sadly, fewer large sites would actually accept OpenID as a way of logging in, but you could used OpenID for authenticating Blogger comments. Stackexchange supported OpenID logins for 8 years [until July 2018](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307647/support-for-...).

The BBC wrote quite a good summary of how things stood in 2008: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/10/openid_found...

It's another one of those sad parts of the web we lost.

Sshhh, they'll hear you
Re:Google to Drop Eight New GTLDs on Tuesday March 28, 2023 @03:22AM (#35337050)
I really dislike the use of "drop" in headlines like this, it's so ambiguous.
Re:Welcome to the Mastodon Flock installation wizard on Monday February 06, 2023 @12:01PM (#34680380)
This looks like a useful tool for anyone moving from Twitter to Mastodon. And it has a fantastic aesthetic.

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