News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

steve_rambo

Re:Bossware is a big legal risk on Thursday May 16, 2024 @06:19AM (#40376780)
This is crazy to read. I live in what you consider a highly authoritarian and non-free society and can't imagine something like this happening here. Lower paid jobs are even more privileged in some ways: for example, in many companies you can just not show up for work for a couple of days if you feel like it, and the worst thing you can expect is a small pay cut at the end of the month.
Don't, there are many smaller email providers that will take that load off your shoulders for a small fee. I've been using purelymail and have had good experience with it, and heard good things about migadu and fastmail. The latter two are more well known and better staffed, but also expensive.

I've been using similar aliases for years ([email protected], [email protected], etc), but make sure you have a contingency plan for when you're no more. I've received lots of account info from previous owners of the domain by setting up a catchall mailbox. We will obviously not care, but when someone takes over your account, they might use it to do harm to others (spam or fraud or whatever else).

Re:ChatGPT consumes 25 times more energy than Google on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @12:31PM (#40356983)
> ChatGPT consumes 25 times more energy than Google

> ChatGPT consumes a lot of energy in the process, up to 25 times more than a Google search

I've also used phones which haven't received any updates for years without any obvious problems. Just maintaining basic digital hygiene like you do. In theory, one could use a zero-day in a web browser (like the recent libwebp vulnerability), then exploit one of the numerous CVEs in one of the system libraries or the kernel, and own the phone that way even without you doing anything worse than visiting a random website. For example, that's how one of the the first methods of jailbreaking PlayStation 4 operated.

Your average Joe six-pack like myself probably shouldn't really worry about it though, it seems more likely to be used against really high value targets.

You might want to try out another web browser that has aggressive ad blocking (Firefox, Brave, or Vivaldi should do it) since ads are one of the major methods of spreading malware.

Re:Using ARG in a Dockerfile – beware the gotcha on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @07:06AM (#40353846)
I wish we would rather get rid of Dockerfile in favor of what something like buildah does:

https://github.com/containers/buildah/blob/main/examples/lig...

Since Dockerfile is a rather limited and (IMHO) poorly executed re-implementation of a shell script, why not use shell directly? Not even bash with coreutils is necessary: even posix sh with busybox can do much more than Dockerfile, and you can use something else (like Python) and take it very far indeed.

Re:Why Use ECC Memory on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @06:56PM (#40303544)
ECC is fully supported by consumer AMD processors (at least Ryzen 7000, and I think earlier ones too). You need to pick a matching motherboard, most boards from ASRock will do. And you need to find unbuffered ECC RAM, this is more difficult than the previous two and is why I had to give up on the whole idea.

Related post:

https://sunshowers.io/posts/am5-ryzen-7000-ecc-ram

Re:Why Use ECC Memory on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @06:38PM (#40303433)
What was the difference between CPU and video card vendors (if you can talk about that at all)?
Re:New way to have complex discussions on Tuesday May 07, 2024 @06:22AM (#40283999)
aerc sometimes breaks on non-compliant email because the author of the header parser refuses to introduce kludges to handle broken email. When it happens, the mail in question simply doesn't show up in the list. I fully understand that position, but it's not really ideal as a user who can't simply refuse to deal with broken crap. So after using it for a couple of months I reverted to neomutt.
Re:Robert Haas: Hacking on PostgreSQL Is Hard on Sunday May 05, 2024 @06:37AM (#40263763)
Another discussion a couple of days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40231332

Re:Dear Europe, please wake up on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @01:41PM (#40213702)
For what's it worth, the page is unreadable without JavaScript disabled on an overclocked desktop 7900X. I think it's the slowest one by far among all the crap I've seen in two decades of browsing the web.
Re:Passkeys: A Shattered Dream on Saturday April 27, 2024 @04:33AM (#40178353)
Use a better token. YubiKey is the most popular one, not the best one by a long shot. My (cheaper) alternative supports 300 resident keys per each hardware key.
Re:A BSD person tries Alpine Linux on Friday April 26, 2024 @11:21AM (#40170548)
iptables has been with us for more than 20 years and is only now being replaced (pretty slowly I might add). The old rules are still supported through iptables-nft, you can just import them and forget nft exists.

Distributions I prefer have never used NetworkManager and haven't changed network configuration in a long time. RHEL and its rebuilds have used NM for what feels like an eternity. Ubuntu is the odd one out here with its constant churn, afaik.

Same with firewall wrappers like ufw and firewalld. Either your distribution uses one and you just use whatever has been chosen for you, or it doesn't and you go with nftables (or iptables-nft if you prefer).

This is all only really a problem if your organization uses a bunch of distributions instead of standardizing on one, but then you probably have a lot more other serious problems than learning how to configure your firewall...

As a counterpoint, I evaluated FreeBSD for a project about a year ago and was really put off by its primitive service management (compared to systemd which I know pretty well and use its features extensively, they really do help in your daily work), and the three firewalls which all seem to be approximately equally supported and you never really know where to put your time. (Unfortunately, I had to pass the OS for other reasons which have no relation to its technical merit.)

I had a chuckle at this being a "non-issue". Where I am from, you'll get a severe beating (or worse) if you refused to provide the authentication credential, whatever it might be. It's like we're living on different planets. I can only humbly suggest fighting for your rights tooth and nail while you have them.
Re:A disk so full, it couldn't be restored on Thursday April 04, 2024 @03:01AM (#39927367)
btrfs does reserve some space for exactly this issue, although it might not always be enough.

https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-filesystem.html

> GlobalReserve is an artificial and internal emergency space. It is used e.g. when the filesystem is full. Its total size is dynamic based on the filesystem size, usually not larger than 512MiB, used may fluctuate.

about:config → media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.enabled → false
Multi-master replication out of the box. Very useful, very occasionally.
Re:Managing Linux Servers with Cockpit on Friday March 29, 2024 @07:25AM (#39862752)
Somewhat related: if someone whose technical proficiency you don't hold in high regard needs to perform a limited number of administrative actions on a network-connected Linux machine (like restarting a specific service or installing updates), there's OliveTin. You pre-program it with the list of actions you need by writing a small yaml config, and it builds a simple web interface which the person in question can use to solve simple problems without calling you all the time.

https://www.olivetin.app

Re: on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @04:27AM (#39825359)
You don't need annotations for descriptions, they get picked up from javadoc-style comments which you should have anyway. Same with asp.net.
Are you sure you haven't visited hacker news by mistake?

Hardware overclocking requires a decent amount of knowledge, most of it obtainable only through months of trial and error, and a lot of tuning to push dozens of often conflicting parameters just right. Extreme overclocking requires that much more. If what they're doing is simply "pushing a button", then programming and system administration can be reduced to that too, along with many other things.

You simply can't get full performance from modern systems without some amount of overclocking, and things like PBO and XMP/EXPO profiles are far from what your hardware can achieve because they have to be very conservative, or many systems won't run without additional manual tuning, which most consumers won't do.

(Except for closed systems like Apple's where your hardware doesn't belong to you and you can't change anything anyway.)

So one immediate thing overclockers provide are general guidance on what you can expect to achieve and what thing to tune which way to get close to maximum performance from your hardware without spending months on it like they did. I heavily rely on such information. My system would be at least 25% slower if not for these "button pushers".

I can't speak for Gnutella, but BitTorrent remains as popular as ever. Every non-technical acquaintance of mine is at least familiar with it, except for those over 70 years old. Most keep on using it. Flash-in-the-pan streaming platforms of the day come and go, this thing has endured and will outlive anything centralized.
Re:Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @10:17AM (#39630114)
Do you mean runtime type checking? Coming from compiled type safe languages, it was difficult to wrap my head around full type erasure too. Your name would have definitely helped.
Re:What is going on in Argentina? on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @08:01AM (#39453251)
The most developed countries should show us an example then. I am not Argentinian or from South America at all, but we have the same problems. As long as an average American keeps their consumption levels at more than 10× of ours, I am not listening to what they think we should or shouldn't do. Same for other poor countries, I guess.
I worked on a project with "forced typescript" and poor code review practices (since fixed). It ended up with overuse of `any` and all the same problems you run into in a pure JS codebase. I had to fix most of that which was a massive undertaking. Whoever wants to (and knows how to) use typescript already use it without being forced to. I don't think other people will benefit from that at all.
Telegram manages just fine, and looks the same on all platforms. I even ran it on FreeBSD for a few weeks with no issues. Their desktop client is developed pretty much by one person in C++ with Qt. It's really feature rich these days and actually works, unlike some of the things you've listed.
Wine requires no more installation than Electron. There are lots of "pirated" releases for macOS/Linux with a bundled copy of Wine (sometimes with third party patches or some libraries swapped out).
Why not, maybe we can get the original meaning of the term hacker back at some point.
Re:Show HN: USD 0.99/TB/month cloud storage on Sunday February 04, 2024 @10:24AM (#39250888)
Right click on the back button and you'll get the full navigation history. Or long tap if you're on a touchscreen.
Re:A new Debian package helper: debputy on Saturday February 03, 2024 @01:20PM (#39243151)
Arch has a very similar package format and is 21 years old. Alpine is more than 18. They haven't accrued much cruft in that time. One could argue they have worse support for things like cross-compilation, but many (most?) of us don't need that, and I see no reason to pay for it in 99% of use cases.

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