News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

yyyk

Re:If IPv4 Were Land on Friday October 30, 2026 @08:33AM (#50303031)
IPv6 discussions keep having this scenario - which is barely relevant to how nearly all IPv4 LANs operate.

It's assuming a huge zero-trust point-to-point network where it's a rare scenario for IPv4 LANs. IPv4 LANs tend to assume the internal network is semi-trusted and route through hubs, so merging networks is a bad idea even when the mapping does not conflict (which often doesn't if the companies are tiny like most are). Even in a zero-trust point-to-point environment you'd want to review the other side, convert it to your software, etc. And the people on the being acquired side have little reason to care too.

It's a scenario that's only relevant for a huge company constantly acquiring other companies that operates via zero-trust point-to-point networking and strongly tries to minimize human review - basically Google/Alphabet.

Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @05:58PM (#50296731)
TOS and TNG were sci-fi, even if many scripts varied. Given its time, you could have the classic and interesting tech and society questions there, even if they avoided a lot of the implications. But over time the franchise lost this key part, and so it's much worse for the wear. We could use an actually relevant sci-fi series given current tech.
Re:US designates helium as a critical material on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @04:54PM (#50280760)
Iran already could. All the pieces were there as well as the plan. It's that US & Israel attacked first. The same would have applied even worse for JCPOA extension scenario. Ultimately, so long as Iran is strong enough and radical enough, it will use its power on the strait next door.
Re:US designates helium as a critical material on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @09:01AM (#50258532)
They did in the late 80s and were crushed. Also talk of doing it was rife before this war.
Re:US designates helium as a critical material on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:15PM (#50253533)
>You don't think Iran would have renegotiated to extend it further?

Why would Iran want to do it? Iran could absolutely control Hormuz* and get a nuke at will** under the deal. At that point it can avoid sanctions by threatening the Gulf. Or demand other concessions for allowing the Gulf to operate. That's what it tries to do now, but from a much weaker position compared to the deal timeline.

* Take the real life prewar Iranian missile and drone strength, assume Iran had an extra couple of hundreds of billions to pour into it, no import limits by the UN, a less restive populace, etc.

** Breakout timeline being a week at most at end of expiry timeline. Probably the only way to keep the Gulf independent at that scenario would have been nuclear deterrence.

>If not, why would they even bother to follow the agreement in the first place?

Because Iran wasn't anywhere strong enough at the time to risk a war, but the existence of the agreement and general developments would have predictably changed the power balance in its favor.

>The legality of what they do has never been a consideration

Well, if you decide something is legal, it's much tougher to change one's mind and stop it later.

Re:The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf] on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:09PM (#50253487)
Right, that's why I wrote "a generic sorting algorithm". Your case adds the integer limit which allows it to avoid O(nlogn) minimum.
Re:The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf] on Monday October 26, 2026 @08:45PM (#50253328)
Galactic algorithms have such huge constants they figuratively need a galaxy-sized computer and/or galaxy-sized problem, to have any advantage over the normal solutions. Imagine a generic sorting algorithm in O(n) that had a constant of 10^92 **. Technically superior but in practice unusable.

** Yes, I know that's proven to be impossible.

Re:US designates helium as a critical material on Monday October 26, 2026 @08:24PM (#50253147)
AFAICT US is self-sufficient in Helium, no surprise US didn't bother keeping a reserve:

https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-helium.pdf

Re:US designates helium as a critical material on Monday October 26, 2026 @08:18PM (#50253096)
>It also isn't nearly enough to make nukes

Enrichment % is very misleading. Natural is about 0.7%. 3.5% is halfway to 90%. The distance from 60% to 90% is tiny.

That's because the distance is calculated using the quantity of raw material that needs to be filtered and not the enrichment percent, the more pure, the less material needed, hence smaller distance to 90%.

>Right, they could, and didn't. Why?

Some people worked hard to ensure the latter would be very inadvisable for Iran. Being so close isn't a stable equilibrium though.

Re:US designates helium as a critical material on Monday October 26, 2026 @08:11PM (#50253038)
The JCPOA enrichment limits would have started to expire this year, and soon Iran could have completely legally enriched as much as it wanted - while getting hundreds of billions via JCPOA sanctions removal. Given what it took to get Iran to this state, it would have been impossible to force it to give up renew the limits or anything on nukes. We'd have ended up with Iranian control of Hormuz at the very least, likely of Gulf as well. Perhaps that's an acceptable cost of avoiding higher gas prices right now - except Iran would have had the capacity to decide these at all.
The supply issues are a result of other foreign policy issues. Trying to do these directly would have been politically a total dead end, and without these issues would have led to increased investment in Russia and Gulf (it already does in the Americas and in Africa).

I think in the long run Russia will recover its output if that war stops. China wants its resources too badly, especially if it gets into a fight with US. As for Iran that depends on how the war ends. Gulf likely returns to normal.

Re:Upcoming Critical PHP Security Release on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @11:59AM (#50183183)
This.

The one gripe I'll have is that rowlevel security is slow and messy to use. If a design allows skipping it, it should be skipped.

Re:The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @06:03AM (#50178363)
Your examples are examples of cuts on the demand side. They satisfy current transport/electricity demand with a means that costs much less carbon, so fossil demand goes down.

(By contrast, a supply cut is 'not developing new fossil resource cuz someone else will buy it and burn it', which is obviously a dead end).

Re:The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @05:59AM (#50178325)
CO2 emissions trading is greenwash. CO2 capture not necessarily so. It could be a useful tool, so long as it's not used as an excuse to launder other emissions.
Re:The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @05:49AM (#50178190)
Skynet won't have to bother launching a nuclear war. It will just sit and munch digital popcorn, waiting for humanity to fix the humanity 'problem'. A tiny speck of time in the fullness of things.
Re:The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @05:47AM (#50178173)
We could always make more war in the Middle East (and Europe) and then 1,5°C would be totally viable. /s

Seriously now: Attempts to cut fossil fuel supply are worthless unless done en masse and in big scale - any single country doing it will just spur investment in another country. Since the world will not come to a truly binding agreement, the only thing that can be truly regulated is demand which can be regulated locally without necessarily increasing demand elsewhere.

The big new ticket is data centers, which strongly tend to use fossils due to SLAs and regulations. This can be fixed by new regulations, but only if people act now before the new approvals and builds are done.

It's not weird. Not politically. They know since the 80s they can't match growth of a capitalist society, they don't want that kind of society, so instead of considering their priorities, they market disadvantage as advantage. It makes perfect sense if gaining power is the prime concern.
Re:X Is Bad, Though on Monday October 12, 2026 @01:03AM (#50051581)
>Selling to Musk should have surprised nobody because Twitter was, in that sense, extremely traditional startup company work... And the goal was always to sell out.

It's more than that. Musk tried to back out and was forced in court to finish the deal to buy Twitter.

Re:Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @11:05PM (#50001497)
It's a philosophical difference I suspect. To quote from your site:

"I believe Web codecs should be purpose-built, efficient, and narrowly scoped to the needs of the Web.... [JPEG XL] is meant to be everything to everyone... Not to mention an additional compatibility headache now exists for anyone just trying to download an image from the Internet and use it somewhere"

Browsers aren't trying to be narrowly scoped anymore, nor made just for the web (Rust and LLMs must have improved their confidence regarding security). Other usecases (like PDFs and cameras) clearly benefit from JPEG XL. Once support was added, it was easy to just turn on for the web. After all, they need to consider the opposite case where someone creates a jxl image and tries to upload it to the Internet. They might even think that having a format that is everything to everyone is useful and eventually the (en)decorders will improve.

Re:Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:14PM (#50000861)
The problem is not that a file with a lossless extension (e.g. PNG) may have actually had lossy processing.

The problem is that it's not necessarily trivial to tell programs/pipelines/transforms to act only losslessly (there's definitely no common switch; Quality 100 is in fact still lossy in some encoders/formats). In practice some programs use the extension to realize what they should be doing.

Re:Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @07:56PM (#50000365)
* I don't deploy anything not supported in current Firefox ESR. That's June-July 2027.

* The versatility is a bit of a downside when it comes to lossless. Programs play games when it comes to formats mixing both and when may appear to be lossless isn't always thus. It would have been nicer if there was a direct way (via extension+mime) to indicate lossless is expected.

* JPEG transcoding is a very nice feature.

Re:Mosquitoes Are a Choice on Monday October 05, 2026 @01:24PM (#49967743)
The technology to eradicate Aedes mosquitoes exists. Time to use it ruthlessly. There's no good reason not to do it and at least a million reasons per year to do it.
Re:Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @03:39AM (#49905690)
They never cancelled their original charter, and their position is to accept borders only as a stepping stone towards getting all of the land as a Muslim waqf.

Also, Hamas literally operated the 'March of Return' (demanding the 'right of return') that year. The best implication of that 'accepting borders with Palestinian majority on both sides on them', which is just a funny way of taking all the land.

Re:Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @03:34AM (#49905653)
Iran gave Russia their Shahed drones, still exports artillery shells and missiles to Russia.

UN cannot allow UNRWA - since any actual operation would require Israeli cooperation given Israel is the only open border to Gaza - and Israel will not allow what it considers to be an extremist front.

UN peacekeepers in Lebanon have proven to be unable to restrain terrorist attacks, and proven to be unable to restrain the Israeli response.

Re:Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah on Monday September 28, 2026 @09:06PM (#49886705)
>Nobody reports that Hamas was shooting for a "get out pillaging free" card

'Israel to withdraw and grant all other Hamas demands' is a 'get out free' card.

> they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.

These hostages _escaped_ and were shot in error. Not 'tried to return'. Note that there was a week's ceasefire a month earlier and Hamas could have returned everyone then if they cared to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Gaza_war_ceasefire

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/21/world/israel-hostages-cam...

>Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the terms.

You mean all of 'Hamas's terms'. Right. The Israeli government had very different terms as the final deal (very different from what Hamas demanded) shows. The Israeli gov insisted on controlling the Egyptian border, Gaza demilitarization, etc.

>It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.

Of course. They wanted the hostages out ASAP, and could only pressure the Israeli government (obviously Hamas wouldn't care for the families).

>Two wrongs don't make a right

Right, but there's such a thing as hypocrisy. One could make a 'genocidal' case against the country who started a war by bombing a schoolhouse and spoke of 'destroying an entire civilization' (it would still be wrong though). But they're a little too strong, and it's easier to pick on Israel.

>That's what world leaders should have done.

Most world leaders want to be reelected (or not be overthrown if they're dictators). Sending out troops to die in a foreign land for an arguably hopeless cause is not very helpful to that end. They're likely aware of the history of military involvement in the Middle East.

>The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens

Qatar etc. gets around it by donating billions to US universities or using organizations like ISNA. Everyone seems to have found a way.

Re:Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah on Monday September 28, 2026 @08:27PM (#49886353)
That's 2003. Really really relevant.
Re:Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah on Monday September 28, 2026 @08:26PM (#49886346)
>Hamas tried to return civilian hostages

Lie. It was a deal to get complete immunity for a massacre. Also, 'Civilian' per Hamas is anyone over 60. 'Let Hamas murder and keep nearly all hostages' was not in Israel's playbook.

>They reached out and were ignored.

Lie. There was repeated negotiations for two years after, with plenty of Hamas demands for the hostages. It was totally public too.

>As Israel started to show genocidal intent (for example, killing aide workers multiple times)

Literally not relevant. The US has much bigger errors in the current conflict.

>the UN should have deployed peace keepers

Snort. Look at how successful they were in Lebanon. Peace keepers need to be willing to fight to keep the peace, and in this case, it meant fighting both sides. LOL.

>our politicians are so bribed by Israeli lobby money

I suggest looking at the far bigger Qatari and Saudi expenditures (didn't they just grant an entire 747?). It's more that US politicians recall the war on terror, and know all this nonsense will one day be sent back at them with much greater force (wasn't it 4 million deaths or so?), they have no wish for the precedent to be set and deployed at them.

Re:Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric on Friday September 25, 2026 @03:22AM (#49841241)
Tesla never had the production ability to take out the established companies. Tesla simply saturated and moved on to other things, while Toyota etc. kept most of their untouched market.

China (BYD etc.) definitely has the ability to produce the entire amount of cars Toyota sells. It's a totally different scale of threat - the result of Toyota (etc.) not reading the signs in time. Tesla gave them a warning they did not listen to.

Re:UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8 on Sunday September 20, 2026 @03:46AM (#49773475)
Just limit it to 8 bytes at which point you always do 'know the number of follow on bytes' from the first byte.

Nobody needs more than 4.47 trillion characters. (famous last words)

Older »