News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pbnjeh

Re:So my ISP was hijacking my DNS on Thursday November 05, 2026 @11:18AM (#50380995)
IIRC, early into ATT’s US fiber / gigabit rollout, they wanted an additional $40 / month to forgo collecting and selling your browsing history (DNS queries).
I started taking vitamin D (D3) because one side of my family has a lot of cancer. Within a couple of days, my mood had stabilized and overall improved. Thinking about it when I noticed this, the only thing that had changed for me was taking the vitamin D.

I’ve since observed that when I run out of vitamin D or forget to take it for several days, my mood slowly declines again. Resumption of vitamin D reverses this.

I did not go into this with any knowledge of such an effect. And the vitamin D influence is stronger in this regard than what I’ve experienced from any (legal) drug. That said, it’s hardly overwhelming. Just a bit more resilience and a bit of protection from feeling overwhelmed.

I now take it in combination with K2 as I’ve heard/read K2 helps keep too much of your calcium from being mobilized by the vitamin D.

The D3 isomer is said to be significantly more bio-available than D1 and D2. And, overdosing does have significant negative consequences over time. So, do your research — and I’m not going to suggest any specific dosages.

But after largely negative experiences with what the pharmaceutical industry has to offer, D3 has been an inexpensive and valuable contribution to my well-being.

Bullies dominate through force and intimidation.

There are always bullies, and they always want to dominate.

Denying them the tools to do so is a necessity.

Whatever the tool.

P.S. Maybe a I need to quality: I’m referring to the searches and collection of data, and not to the often specious arguments for doing them (t-rism et al.).

As I’ve said before, if a person did to me what Flock does, I could have them arrested for stalking.

It doesn’t matter their intentions, such pernicious tracking itself is stalking.

So, why don’t we treat this corporation like the “person” such corporations claim to be in so many other contexts?

Jail, jail, jail. Nothing less will stop these Gestapo-esque thugs.

And if you’re waiting for the mid-terms, you’re already acquiescing to their plans.

Also, it says something — to me, at least — that I have to think seriously before posting this. All I’m calling for is timely criminal prosecution of what I think and believe are crimes. I.e. for a lawful process. Yet doing so puts me at risk of an overbearing, unaccountable response?

This is some serious sh-t.

In explanations I believe, over the decades government programs have been difficult to deal with in good part because Republicans and their like (sorry if this seems political, but they’re the ones doing it) while they can’t stop all the legislation, they have enough influence even then to make the administration structure and requirements deliberately horrible and underfunded.

One of the first big bullets they put into the Affordable Care Act after it became effective, was to zero out funding of its provisions that were/are mandated by law.

The “government can’t do shit” people should spend some time looking at the reasons why. Government isn’t perfect — it’s made up of the same humans that compose the rest of society — but it often isn’t half bad, and many people going into it have good-hearted and honorable intentions. Some turn bitter or disengaged at the experience — as designed — but many fight such negativity to the bitter end.

Oh, and regarding the ACA, many don’t know or have forgotten that businesses were clamoring for it or some/any solution, facing 25% year over year premium increases for their insured employees. And the ACA has and continues to provide many substantial improvements and benefits to group policy insurance holders that have no ready optics and hype like the healthcare marketplace.

Have insurance through your employer and think the ACA does nothing for you? You’re wrong.

So, thanks, gub’mint!

Re:Amazon Employees Say AI Is Just Increasing Workload on Tuesday March 17, 2026 @05:53PM (#47418854)
25 years ago, a recently hired junior accountant would just run a cost accounting report and hand it off as if it were golden. Those of us who knew the system(s) would check the results and often provide some interpretation or even hold a report back so as not to mislead.

Plus ça change…

1) As I saw Rossman recommend the other day, once Android phones are locked down, just get an iPhone. I’ve had a Pixel 8 Pro and was considering the upcoming 11. If this lockdown goes through, I guess not.

2) I hope the lockdowns don’t strangle tethering. My other consideration is to use whatever phone for calls, texts, and “secure” apps. The rest I’ll do on an unrestricted device that just uses the phone as a data connection. More crap to carry, but crap that does what I want and need and not what “they” insist upon.

P.S. And that may mean spending less on future phones. Especially if I also switch my higher quality camera image needs to a real camera. Sigh, yet more physical crap, but I’m pissed enough to do it, and then each individual device would be less of a feature compromise than what a phone provides — other than size and portability, which are indeed quite significant.

Re:Denver dumps Flock, awards contract to Axon on Thursday February 26, 2026 @06:45PM (#47174006)
If a person did to me what these virtual people (corporations) are doing, I could have them prosecuted for stalking.
Re:The Missing Semester of Your CS Education on Thursday February 26, 2026 @06:29PM (#47173782)
One bit of very simple feedback. Keep the prior/older versions online. 1) There’s value in older (e.g. pre-AI) perspectives and tools; 2) Different presentations/wording may click better with different people; 3) Links to them won’t break.

Thanks!

Mechanics are a "cost center". Modern "Management" does not like paying for "cost centers".

The rest is atmospherics.

(The US has, in general, taken a similar attitude towards public education, while simultaneously making it responsible for "everything" regarding children's upbringing. Compounding the problem.)

His prior dishwasher videos rescued my parents' 30-ish year old dishwasher -- one they had previously been advised to avoid replacing as long as possible, as modern units don't have the same construction quality.

Following his cleaning instructions and, subsequently, his usage advice, did the trick.

Regarding the latter, notably adding the recommended prewash dose of detergent in addition to the main dose, and running the kitchen sink's hot tap until the water is fully hot before starting the dishwasher. Here in the US with our lower power capacity, resulting in dishwasher heating elements being restricted to lower power to avoid circuit breaker trips, when the dishwasher is correctly connected to the hot water line (typically, of the kitchen sink), doing this results in a hotter prewash and often also wash.

This all really does make a substantial difference.

Take the time to watch his dishwasher videos. If you struggle at all with the performance of yours, you won't regret doing so.

Re:FreeDroidWarn on Tuesday September 02, 2025 @09:35AM (#45102918)
This is what I expressed considering, in another recent thread. Phone does phone things and "necessary" apps. Otherwise, it's a hotspot for the "unhindered" device.

I'd enjoy suggestions as to suitable unhindered devices.

P.S. I just hope we can continue to access / create unhindered devices -- and programs/apps (cough Manifest v3 cough).

I recently bought an iPhone (Pro Max, on a secondary number) to have one on-hand to better tutor and troubleshoot for my parents. I just had to provide an instance of that this weekend on a phone call.

My daily driver is a recent Pixel Pro. If Google takes away the already limited additional flexibility it provides me over an iPhone, I don't see the need to provide them my money nor my attention, going forward.

Actually, I've been thinking about carrying some sort of Linux device and relegating the phone to being a hot spot for it, plus traditional calls and texts (and "necessary" apps, I guess). I don't really want to schlep more around with me, but even less so do I want to be squeezed into the box of BigCo corporate approved activities.

IIRC, I saw some reporting that Hungary was spending (far) more on ads targeting other European countries and those elections, than on ads targeting their own.

In other words, an instigator, agent, and/or vehicle for right wing propaganda Europe-wide.

Close to 20 years later, people still complain about the ribbon. (1)

I think that says something about it.

--

1. And not just "grumble, grumble... get off my lawn..." Many of its controls are at best obscure. It hides many of them away. It makes them awkward to reach.

Many new users seem as clueless, or even more so, than pre-existing customers who experienced the rug pull. At least pre-ribbon users knew there was certain functionality that they just wanted to find.

(And I still remember how MS concurrently f-cked with Excel shortcut keys. Or seemed to have, when I next picked Excel up after a couple year hiatus from being a power user.)

Re:IRATA.ONLINE: A Community for Retro-Computing Enthusiasts on Monday December 16, 2024 @07:48AM (#42430522)
I took advantage of that to generate Mandelbrot and Julia set graphics on one. It was fun as a coding exercise, but pretty slow processing.
Years ago, someone well-known quipped that the biggest gang in Chicago was the police.

I've read reporting on civil asset forfeiture abuse for many years -- the inclusion of "abuse" composing a tautology, it increasingly appears.

Nonetheless, it remains active policy appearing in ever more circumstances.

People argue that it's only a few bad cops who make the rest look bad. I'm having increasing difficulty these days believing that argument.

> I've found them indistinguishable from the OEM ear pads.

Thank you. I was doubtful about the third-party replacements; I'll give them a try.

I still think it's scandalous that Bose ships them with such a crap failure rate.

(If they're expected to fail like this, then at least ship them with a few replacement pairs included. At least that would be honest, and at the price they charge, probably still profitable. /s )

Their ear pads are terrible. I was extremely careful with mine, keeping them in my home office and carefully setting them down with the ear pads uncompressed when not in use. Nonetheless, the ear pad leather came apart in about a year.

Same with the pair I gave my father.

German friend visited with some 700's. (I think that's the model number; the sleek but uncomfortable redesign of a couple of years ago.) When he visited again the following year, their ear pads where likewise blown out.

In contrast, I have multiple models of inexpensive Chinese ANC headphones whose ear pads have survived significantly longer.

And, the official Bose ear pad replacements are $40 on Amazon (if they're even real...).

I don't buy Bose, anymore.

Re:Unfortunate things about performance reviews on Monday November 04, 2024 @12:25PM (#42043820)
One year was insightful, when in a meeting we watched our management rewrite their own performance plans on the fly to pass them. They even threw in the minor only partial success or two, so that the results didn't look too perfect.

Another time, at another job, while we had hiring and expense freezes, my manager walked up to my cube with a 12% raise -- out of the blue. Because my previous management had screwed me (causing me to accept his internal hire offer) and I was "doing the job" he'd hired me for.

Performance reviews, of themselves, are bullsh-t and serve primarily to generate a record that your management and HR can use to accomplish and "legitimize" whatever they want.

Once you know this, and if you're still in a position subject to them, it feels like a hostage situation. Any information you provide to them is subject to use against you or someone you care about (and/or just in violation of your own ethics -- "s/he's not my friend, but this just isn't right" -- if you have them).

Mr. 12% and I learned, through experience, to trust each other. No management process is going to replace that.

P.S. And, in my experience, if you don't "provide them enough ammunition", they will actively "guide" you in rewriting it until you do, refusing to accept otherwise. They are not really soliciting your feedback. They are soliciting your tacit endorsement of what they are hoping to accomplish -- regardless of how and whether that aligns with their and the business's public statements and objectives -- internal and external).

Sorry, my language went a bit into the weeds, there. Stated shortly, I've had managers insist I write what they want, contrary to my own actual opinions and feedback. The process was entirely rigged. Glad I don't work for them, anymore.

Re:Passkeys: A Shattered Dream on Friday April 26, 2024 @03:26PM (#40173065)
What the parent says. I'm hoping this HN thread will help clarify this.

Currently, I view the entire paradigm as asking me to trust resources (software, hosting, etc.) that I am not ready to trust. Both from a knowledge standpoint, or lack thereof on my part, and out of experience. Re the latter, third party resources die, go bad -- technically or morally -- and... just observing the nature of "online" resources over years and now decades.

Re:Why is it called the Ribbon? (2005) on Friday April 19, 2024 @03:06AM (#40084133)
After being a heavy Excel user for a few years, I was away from using Excel while this change took place. It's been a long time, but as I recall it, when I then sat down to do something more intensive in Excel, I found a bunch of "muscle memory" actions failing; they'd also changed a number of shortcut key combinations!

Serious Excel users could work the keyboard like an experienced Vi/m user. For example, when extensive manual data entry, editing, cleanup was necessary.

A curse on those responsible for these interface changes.

Serious Excel users, for one, bitched for good reason.

Re:Going in circles without a real-time clock on Friday April 12, 2024 @04:05PM (#40017073)
I don't have Pi 5 to check this, but from what I've read, it does not support PPS. And such support is required; otherwise, even with a source that supports PPS, the connection will behave in a non-PPS fashion.

Apparently, cable quality is also demonstrating itself to be a significant factor in the Pi 5 power supply environment.

Regarding both these points:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/497

Re:Radios, how do they work? on Wednesday March 27, 2024 @11:16AM (#39840396)
Replying to sibling comments: The links are there, but are hidden by Javascript. Since I'm on my phone, I didn't look into how.
Does anyone remember the Firefox extension Scrapbook, from "back in the day"? I used to use it a lot.

Look "back" 5 - 10 years, or more, and it's striking how many web resources are no longer available. A local copy is your only insurance. And even then, having it in an open, standards compliant format is important (e.g. a file you can load into a browser -- I guess either a current browser or a containerized/emulated one from the era of the archived resource).

Something that concerns me about JavaScript-ed resources and the like. Potentially unlimited complexity making local copies more challenging and perhaps untenable.

Thank you for the clarification. Great extension!
I was about to post a similar question: What does this mean for those using the Firefox versions of the extensions (SingleFile as well as the version that zips the result)?
Re:Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio on Sunday March 17, 2024 @01:53PM (#39736389)
Images still very slow, but:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240316173921/https://blinry.or...

(there are also two snapshots from today (2024-03-17), but yesterday's is the one I didn't give up on waiting to load)

or

https://archive.is/ZHnfV

Saving with SinglePage, it's around 125 MB (original a bit less, archived copy a bit more).

Re:Time to delete your Glassdoor account on Friday March 15, 2024 @08:04AM (#39714612)
I guess all I can do is upvote this, and hope the sunshine helps lead to the demise of those who turn the public goodwill they've solicited -- here, transparency into employment practices -- against the very folks they've gotten to exercise it.

I guess we all know now not to work for Glassdoor...

(Including the unpaid work that built their product in the first place.)

Older »