News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

theandrewbailey

> but with HDDs you must take care to always use both duplicate HDDs and archive files with redundancy

I'm a noob when it comes to tape backups. Is copying the same stuff to multiple tapes standard practice?

[delayed]
> Elder Scrolls 6 will have the same dead-eyed, dumb NPCs, the same disastrously poor writing, the same jank as “Starfield”.

That's been the case for just about every Gamebryo/Creation Engine/Todd Howard game. TES4 and everything after kinda blurs into the same slop for me. I remember people saying F3 was 'Oblivion with guns', and Skyrim was 'Fallout with swords', and having played all those for hundreds of hours, those statements aren't wrong.

Halfway through my second playthrough of Fallout 4, I realized that I had been playing (more or less) the same game for 10 years. Same gameplay loop, more shallow characters, and more mediocre writing, and to top it all off, I wasn't enjoying the open world/sandbox all that much. Not to mention, all of them have the same weird kinds of bugs and crashes. I decided that until Bethesda starts writing games properly (story- and code-wise), I'm going to pass.

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:22AM (#50338057)
Not bad. Steam/Proton keep themselves updated. If you rely on Wine from the repos, you might be in for a bad time, but Heroic/Lutris/Bottles in Flatpak stay updated. You mentioned Nvidia, but amdgpu has a repo that should keep things reasonably up-to-date: https://instinct.docs.amd.com/projects/amdgpu-docs/en/latest...
Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:18AM (#50337965)
I don't like ads, and I didn't like logging into SSH and seeing a nag to update to Ubuntu Pro because I had the balls to keep running 20.04 in 2023. I've seen this before on previous releases (and know how to remove the message), but seeing it again was the straw the broke the camel's back.
Re:Do you have a Plan B? on Monday November 02, 2026 @06:48AM (#50335605)
Pay off all debts and loans (credit cards, student loans, car leases, mortgages, etc.) and do not get more. Interest rates don't matter: eliminate them all.

Have six months worth of your expenses in a savings account. Do not have it in investments because their worth can collapse very fast (market downturns coincide with massive amounts of layoffs).

Assets, not just cash. Though sometimes, they literally have stuff they can't use:

> Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ceo-says-company-do...

If Anthropic has made promises that its wallet cannot keep (as it looks like), it will fail. Let me remind you that Anthropic isn't profitable yet, and there's no clear path that it will be.
Privatize the losses. These are the largest companies the world has ever seen, sitting on piles of assets like dragons. They have hyped AI endlessly to the point that everyone else is sick of it. If they haven't saved any money, and can't bail themselves out, they deserve bankruptcy.

Signed, the Silent Majority

Sure, I'll stick them between the racks of Nvidia chips that don't have power plants yet.
Re:Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11 on Monday October 26, 2026 @04:30PM (#50250476)
In terms of aesthetic, I love Windows 7-era Aero glass design (and to a lesser extent, Vista), but I also love the classic Windows 9x/2000 look. If I had to choose between the two, I'd go with Aero simply because of the start menu search bar.
Re:Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11 on Monday October 26, 2026 @04:23PM (#50250377)
I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Windows 8 is a very low bar in terms of desktop UI. It was universally panned as a regression.
Re:Full Disk Encryption on Fedora with TPM2 on Saturday October 24, 2026 @08:32PM (#50226975)
> What if it breaks? Should I backup the recovery key beforehand?

TPM unlocking uses a keyslot in a LUKS container, just like your passphrase does. There are 10 keyslots, so it's not mutually exclusive operation. If TPM doesn't unlock LUKS (as would happen when you put the drive in another device), the bootloader will prompt for a passphrase just like it did before, once entered it will decrypt from another keyslot.

CAA records are requested and used only by certificate authorities. They might as well not exist for web browsers (they don't even look for them). Maybe that should change?
Unless there's a test page with a webfont version, no.
Considering that MindTheGapps is a distribution of the real Google Apps packages, yes, it's too late.

https://mindthegapps.com/

Re:Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:48PM (#50123601)
I think it's only a matter of time before we decrypt the Voynich manuscript and the fourth message of Kryptos.

https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/beinecke/collections/beine...

https://allthatsinteresting.com/kryptos

Re:JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:16PM (#50123102)
It's part of libavif. I've usually compiled it myself.

https://github.com/aomediacodec/libavif

avifenc supports args like enable-chroma-deltaq. I've used those but recently stopped, and nothing substantial changed.

Re:JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:52PM (#50121822)
I've been using AVIF on my blog for a few years. My blog's image corpus is almost entirely videogame screenshots, and I keep the original PNGs so I can re-encode if better encoders release. Despite playing around with JPEGXL every year or so, AVIF images usually looked better (if only a little) at the same file size (vs JPEGXL).

After reading this article, there's something to point to prove I'm not going crazy.

Re:JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:12PM (#50121238)
> I think one overlooked aspect is that AVIF is container based.

Many other image formats are. AVIF uses HEIC, the same container that HEIF does.

> when AV2, AV3 etc. will come out, there won't be a need to go through another very difficult phase of sites adoption - it will still be AVIF just with newer codec inside, and it will be just up to browsers to catch up on newer versions and newer codecs will address technical needs as times goes.

Fingers crossed, but AV2-based AVIF specs haven't even been finalized, so who knows.

https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/av2-isobmff

Re:It took me nine years to hack my Xbox 360 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:40AM (#50101786)
Won't somebody please think of the trillion dollar multinational corporation?

/s (if it wasn't obvious)

Re:Nvidia's first GPU: GeForce 256 on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:54PM (#50090833)
> (non-programmable until GeForce 3) hardware

I think the term you're looking for is fixed-function hardware.

Windows will always assume that it is the only operating system on a computer. It's not interested in sharing.
Re:D-Bus Hell on Monday October 12, 2026 @07:58AM (#50055081)
Re:I guess I'm using WebP now? on Monday October 12, 2026 @06:50AM (#50054449)
> and trashing the PNG.

I don't delete my original source images, in case if I want to change the encoder parameters later, or if a newer encoder version improves quality.

Re:Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers on Sunday October 11, 2026 @02:56PM (#50046578)
I've played the LOUD mod for years, seems to solve a bunch of performance problems.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-ai-supreme-commander-forged-...

Re:Decade-old RAM is making a comeback on Sunday October 11, 2026 @01:38PM (#50045705)
Bring back DDR4? Journalists need to check their "I got new shit" privilege. I work in e-waste recycling. I've sold terabytes of RAM over the past year and a half. DDR4 never went away, and for that matter, neither has DDR3. (DDR2 and older isn't as common.)
Re:What a 2 MB Page Costs Your Visitors on Saturday October 10, 2026 @09:21AM (#50032691)
> Images usually offer the least painful savings

Others here wonder why I'm so fascinated by compressing images to around 1 bit per pixel.

Re:White House targets tech giants with H-1B visa suspension on Friday October 09, 2026 @06:36AM (#50018589)
This is long overdue. What happened to that $100,000 H-1B application fee? Has that not taken effect or was that scrapped?
Re:Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @07:45AM (#49991397)
It's great that Chrome is shipping JPEGXL.

AVIF is still better at 1 bit per pixel and less. Is it possible for JPEGXL to beat that?

Older »