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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

For what looks at first glance to be a potentially impactful development, this post and the "encode.su" one linked from it are extremely sparse on details.

Where is the source code? A detailed description of what the codec actually does? References to relevant publications?

All I see are two mystery Windows binaries, hosted on a forum I've never heard about. The fact that "encode.su" uses the world's most notorious domain extension doesn't inspire confidence, to put it mildly.

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> The fact that "encode.su" uses the world's most notorious domain extension doesn't inspire confidence, to put it mildly.

Encode.su (formerly encode.ru) is indeed the most known forum dedicated for data compression in general. So much that many if not most notable data compression projects posted to HN are often first advertised to that forum first (for example, Zstandard [1]).

[1] https://encode.su/threads/2119-Zstandard

The fact that "encode.su" uses the world's most notorious domain extension doesn't inspire confidence, to put it mildly.

The leaders in data compression and information theory are all from the former Soviet Union, so that's no cause for concern.

I think Andrey Markov started it all.

Hydrogenaudio is well known in this area and many new prototype codecs are announced there first. Also, the lack of source control and Windows-only binaries are very much congruent to the style of development there. See it as your confrontation with a new world, because small it is not!

And later, you will learn to understand the depth of the contribution that the ffmpeg project provides :)

So people just download .exe files that they see in those forum posts and run them on their machines?

New world indeed...

You can always use a sandbox if that's the most concern. A bigger issue is that, as like other established forums, enough many people don't know much about data compression and contribute to the noise.

My goal is to try to do something practical just on data compression. I have neither knowledge nor experience about malicious software mentioned. You may be comfortable about this. https://www.linkedin.com/in/hakan-abbas-178b5852/

I was referring to the practice of downloading executables from such forums in general, not to your post specifically. I have no reason to suspect that this particular post contains any malware. But in most parts of the software world, Open Source has been the standard for experimental publications for a long, long time, and seeing a forum depart so strongly from that standard is certainly surprising, and does of course have security implications when this practice is used at scale.

That's an old world, for me. It's how the Windows software ecosystem worked and works to this day.

There are open source developers out there who literally write installation instructions like these in their READMEs:

  curl http://example.com/script.sh | bash

Also, what does the High Availability in the name of the codec refer to?

I've searched the web and found not a single mention of "high availability" in the context of audio codecs. In fact, the top-ranked result was this very post, which doesn't explain what the term is intended to mean.

I wasn't really careful when making this naming. I just tried to make it a little different. I can't say that I'm successful in nomenclature.

If you need some retronym, how about "highly astute ..." or "highly apt ..."?

I will evaluate them.

Sounds like a retronym for the author’s initials :-)

Great detection :)

It uses less resources, so the resource retains higher availability?

HALAC and HALIC really consume very little memory. The process speed is high at the same rate. And they offer a reasonable compression rate. Therefore, they can be used at high level and different areas.

Really? Tearing down the OP because of the TLD the forum uses? That's just lame.

>>>uses the world's most notorious domain extension doesn't inspire confidence, to put it mildly.

What does this mean? Why or how is this TLD the world’s most notorious?

> The .su TLD is known for usage by cybercriminals.[4][5][6]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su

I would think that ICANN/whomever would have mandated its retirement / de-orbit, but a special exception was asked for:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#Exceptional...

All three references are 10 years old (or only have a secondary reference that is 10 years old). More recent analyses give much more diverse set of TLDs---.ga, .tk, .us, .ru, .ml, .pw and so on [1]. In fact, at this point we should be much more concerned about .us than .su.

[1] https://www.interisle.net/PhishingLandscape2023.pdf#page=18

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