News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pta2002

Re:The $6.3B Binance Hack Was Pulled Off in Just 20 Minutes on Saturday October 31, 2026 @05:20AM (#50314382)
> OTOH I heard that the culprits didn't steal the private keys of the affected customers. If this is true the stolen cryptocoins are worthless.

You’re misunderstanding where these coins were taken from/are now. Of course they did not get access to customer private keys, because in an exchange there isn’t really such a thing. You’re trusting the exchange to hold the coins for you, and they get put into a shared wallet that they manage with the exchange’s key.

Even if they did not have access to the exchange’s private keys and only got access to some API that let them execute the transfers, it doesn’t matter anyway, as the attackers transferred the coins into new addresses with keys controlled by them, so they’re free to move them now.

…well, mostly, the stolen USDC and USDT coins got frozen by the issuers, but those are not really decentralized as much as they are built on top of decentralized infrastructure.

Re:Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs on Friday October 09, 2026 @03:10AM (#50017101)
Another difference I remembered, this time a Microsoft-only idiocy: core Windows and Microsoft (Office) apps TRANSLATE shortcuts! Ctrl+A (“All”) becomes Ctrl+T (“Tudo”) in Notepad if the computer is in Portuguese. Ctrl+S also stops saving and is replaced by Ctrl+G (“Guardar”).

I can see why Microsoft thought this was a good idea, but the problem is that ONLY Microsoft apps do this, so you have two sets of shortcuts to remember. I don’t know a single person who likes this.

Re:Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs on Friday October 09, 2026 @02:41AM (#50016852)
One thing I never see mentioned, probably because it’s not very common, is that on some languages the Mac has a completely different position for symbol keys! This makes using a Mac keyboard on Windows (or vice-versa) extremely annoying (Linux tends to support the Mac layout as well so it’s fine).

For instance, in Portuguese, the Mac keyboard [1] has the + key two keys to the right of 0, and you use shift to input *. Meanwhile, on Windows [2], this key is one row below next to P, with the place it is on Mac occupied by «/». Most of the AltGr keys are also in different spots (particularly { and }), which makes this a major pain if you consistently switch between Windows and Mac.

Frankly I prefer the Mac layout, in part due to the Cmd/Ctrl split, but also because I believe it assigns more meaningful symbols to keys (I have literally never used «/», the internet will tell you that’s how quotations are done in Portuguese but everyone, books included, uses “/”).

I never saw any explanation as to why these differ. Does anyone know of any other languages where this happens? It doesn’t seem to be very common!

[1]: https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/1/as-images.apple.co... [2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/KB_Portu...

Re:iPhone Duo on Thursday September 10, 2026 @03:42AM (#49639866)
I haven’t seen anyone mention this yet, but… other than the Duo, the iPhones have been the same size since the iPhone X? Obviously not counting the Max/Plus/Mini lines, but the standard ones have had 6”-ish screens for almost a decade now (and the screen itself has increased in size, but that’s because they decreased the bezels), so they’ve hardly made a new phone that is larger than the one before since then.

Personally, I quite like the size of the standard iPhones, fits in my pocket, can use it one handed well enough, and the display is big enough to comfortably view content. I have quite small hands though and I can see how someone bigger than me would like the size of the Pro Max line.

Also this size clearly works, because basically all phones now are this exact same size give or take a few mm.

Re:How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @02:23AM (#49429781)
I’ve found that those sites tend to charge insane amounts for shipping (20€+ to Portugal at least) which considering the price of the parts in question generally makes it not worth it unfortunately. Maybe it’s better now, I haven’t tried in a few years.
In Portugal at least, all (I think? At least all the major ones like Benfica, Sporting and Porto) of the clubs are sports associations and are controlled by the club members. This does not mean that there isn’t major money in this, but a club president can get removed by fans, which happened with Porto recently (due to corruption… the club almost went bankrupt).

These clubs are often very old as well, and often were small regional clubs that got big, so they are significant in their cities and do a ton more than just football.

Re:Vehicle Motion Cues on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @11:20AM (#49085273)
I've used it on trains a bit and it does turn off when the train is going straight ahead. You might be going 200km/h, but if the speed isn't changing and you're always going forward you don't really feel any force, and neither does the phone, so the dots don't need to be there any more.
A lot of banks won’t even give you the option of a non-instant transfer now, at least here in Portugal. Though non-instant transfers can in theory be recalled since there is some time before the money gets to the destination account, my bank even gives a warning now when doing a transfer to ensure I have the details right because they can not recall a transaction after the money arrives.
Re:OnePlus halts operations in USA and Europe on Thursday July 16, 2026 @09:26AM (#48934251)
Google’s phones are pretty good nowadays, I feel like they carry that ethos more than modern OnePlus phones anyway. Plus they can be unlocked trivially, which is officially supported, and you can install GrapheneOS on them.
Ryanair has only ever lost a plane once, due to a bird strike with only some injuries, and they are one of biggest airlines by number of flights (if not the biggest).

Turns out plane accidents are expensive, and the reputation loss as well. Don't even need to lose the plane, just the plane being stuck on the ground is expensive (they are also one of the most timely airlines because of this). Really can not afford to have accidents!

Re:LineageOS Statistics on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @06:54AM (#48830308)
Honestly I just don't really care to anymore. I used to flash custom ROMs on all my phones because I could only afford cheap (100-200€) phones that were filled with bloatware, but ever since I started being able to afford a decent mid-range phone (Pixel 6a was the first one I didn't reflash) I just found out I wasn't actually missing anything, and I definitely enjoy things like contactless payments, and not having something randomly break every time I update.
Re:Show HN: Are You in the Weights? on Friday June 19, 2026 @03:49AM (#48595968)
Same with me, apparently three different models think I am a minor football player. Looking it up, I am not the first result for my full name, but there also is no minor football player with that name, so…

Also have an extremely common name in Portugal (just in my company there are 4 people with my name, including my previous manager), only slightly helped by the fact that we’re one of the few countries that inherits last names from both parents, which helps with differentiation. At least I did snag pedroalves.pt when I found it available!

EDIT: Username does better, but for some reason Kimi seems to think I do algorithmic competitions, and Llama 3.1 thinks I am a German football club (no longer just a player, a whole club now!)

Re:Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC? on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @02:25AM (#48366740)
Well, just the motherboard seems to be over 1200€ so it’s not really in the same league… https://smicro.eu/asrock-altrad8ud-1l2t-1?srsltid=AfmBOoqWFe...
Re:Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding on Sunday May 31, 2026 @08:05AM (#48345064)
Indeed, I was misinterpreting the OP's suggestion. Can't edit the comment anymore, unfortunately.
Re:Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding on Friday May 29, 2026 @12:23PM (#48325368)
I believe that's how the varint encoding used by protobut works: https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/encoding/#varints
They’ve got external kernel modules that they use for some hardware that is not supported upstream, namely the GPU, but also some things like Ethernet I think. Everything else is upstream though, so the situation is similar to a regular NVIDIA GPU.

Who would’ve thought that NVIDIA started upstreaming stuff once they realized how much money Linux is making them?

Nowadays upstream Linux with UEFI mostly works, with their out of tree drivers. I’ve managed to make it work in NixOS with the stock kernel. Look at the open embedded L4T project, they have some recipes for building that. No need to use nvidia’s kernel anymore!

Also, supposedly on the second half of 2026 they were going to be moving even more stuff out of their Jetson-specific drivers as they already do for their slightly newer chips (so you could use the standard drivers, and standard CUDA builds). Let’s see how that turns out.

I assume a selfish benefit is that OpenAI and Google don't want the models to train on their own data. There is just /so much/ AI generated content online that they definitely need to filter it out somehow when assembling the training data. This is a pretty effective way to do that, with the nice bonus of being mostly good from a PR standpoint.
Re:Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @01:10PM (#48124636)
Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but the playdate is pretty neat.
Re:Can You Find the Comet? on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:50PM (#47941333)
Update: I was wrong, check max-m's sibling comment! The satellites just move really fast across the camera because they're in LEO, so they can traverse rather large distances before there's a new exposure and a small gap.
Re:Can You Find the Comet? on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @08:55AM (#47933902)
Probably exactly that. If you take a single 10 minute exposure (or really, anything more than a few seconds) you'll get noticeable star trails if you don't put your camera on a rotating mount. Stacking multiple exposures also has other nice benefits such as noise canceling itself out and being able to remove satellite trails.

Last time I did astrophotography was a few years ago, before Starlink made the problem considerably worse, but satellite trails were relatively easy to remove with stacking. I'm sure it's harder now but definitely still possible, so I'm assuming in this case leaving them in was done on purpose to highlight the problem.

EDIT: Looking better at the picture, I belive this was taken with a star tracker and then composited with a shorter exposure of the foreground. Notice how the foreground, even far away, looks considerably blurrier than the stars, and how the tower in the background has some light streaks. This is exactly what you'll see if you use a star tracker. Rather than star trails, you'll have "foreground trails". This would explain why there are relatively few gaps in the satellite trails, since the exposures can be much longer.

I work on automotive software (not Tesla), and it's like this partially because it makes development _way easier_. Rather than needing to get a whole car to the dev team, you just give them the specific part that they're working on. Anything that needs outside features usually just fails gracefully (e.g. no speedometer or no location for maps). These are usually mocked for testing, or you add the specific ECU that provides it for your testing setup if needed.

Modern cars have tens of ECUs, so if you had to have all of them for testing, that would get unwieldy extremely quickly. Not to mention that cars are pretty resilient to having random parts failing, you don't want to lose the entire dashboard just because the ECU that provides camera data failed, or something.

That’s not really incompatible with this? That’s just how secure boot works. You can re-enlist keys for a different root of trust, or disable it and accept the trade-off there.
Re:An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review on Friday February 20, 2026 @03:24AM (#47085231)
As of this past year (6.15+), most stuff you’d need for a regular desktop is upstreamed. Collabora has been working pretty hard on getting the chip mainlined, so it’s on a very good place compared to something like the Pi 5, which is not at all what the experience used to be in the past!
Re:Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan on Thursday February 19, 2026 @02:27AM (#47070932)
It doesn’t really. Server side mods don’t touch rendering code at all, and most client side mods also don’t come anywhere near it. I last did Minecraft mod development some 7 years ago but even then you would basically never reach into the raw drawing calls unless you were implementing shaders or something.

Considering the vast majority of mods are just adding some items or creatures, they don’t need to worry. This won’t be more than the regular API changes in between versions that they’re already used to, unless it’s a more graphics heavy thing like a shader mod.

Also, even with shaders, it’s fairly straight forward to port a shader from OpenGL to Vulkan (for the most part Vulkan just gives more flexibility in that regard). The stuff around it is the hard part.

Re:The end of the kernel Rust experiment on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @09:47AM (#46218278)
Yep, that's what I'm referring to.

For now there aren't many popular drivers that use Rust, but there are currently 3 in-development GPU drivers that use it, and I suspect that when those get merged that'll be the real point of no return:

- Asahi Linux's driver for Apple GPUs - https://rust-for-linux.com/apple-agx-gpu-driver

- The Nova GPU driver for NVIDIA GPUs - https://rust-for-linux.com/nova-gpu-driver

- The Tyr GPU driver for Arm Mali GPUs - https://rust-for-linux.com/tyr-gpu-driver

I suspect the first one of those to be actually used in production will be the Tyr driver, especially since Google's part of it and they'll probably want to deploy it on Android, but for the desktop (and server!) Linux use-case, the Nova driver is likely to be the major one.

Re:The end of the kernel Rust experiment on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @04:48AM (#46215899)
A few distros already do that. Of the top of my head, both NixOS and Arch enable the QR code kernel panic screen, which is written in Rust. Granted, those are rather bleeding edge, but I know a few more traditional distros have that enabled (I _think_ fedora has it? But not sure).
Re:Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop on Monday December 08, 2025 @06:41AM (#46191152)
I have an X1 extreme. I’ve never gotten it to last over 2h on Windows. On Linux it can last an hour or so more if I turn off the NVIDIA GPU, but otherwise it’s still abysmal.

Then there’s the stupid BIOS warning that requires you to press ESC for the computer to boot if it’s not plugged in to the official charger, which means that if it ever reboots at night it’ll just keep you awake (because the power management hasn’t been initialized yet so it’s stuck at 100% CPU) until you go press ESC.

Oh and it thermal throttles all the time so the CPU performance is good for a few minutes and then it’s just awful.

Re:Cloud-Init on Raspberry Pi OS on Tuesday December 02, 2025 @03:16AM (#46118893)
Unfortunately the TPM story for the raspberry pi… isn’t, really. It doesn’t come with one, and while it does support secure boot, it’s incredibly limited and more akin to what you’d find in a microcontroller (you can burn vendor keys to EEPROM). So all that to say, it would be kind of pointless, unfortunately.

I’d you’re interested in this, I know systemd has been working pretty hard on getting TPM-provisioned credentials usable on Linux though!

I've encountered systems that only have bash in /bin/bash, or in /usr/bin/bash, and it's a hell of a pain to have to fix every script when using different distros (I think it must've been an old Fedora and Ubuntu?).

Nowadays, most distros are moving towards having /bin be a symlink to /usr/bin, so it's mattering less and less, but I see no reason not to just do /usr/bin/env which is supposed to be on the same place on every distro.

Older »