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AlbertVAustin

122 karma · joined February 1, 2022

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AlbertVAustin··on What happened with ASUS routers this morning?
I'm actually not that worried about them secretly doing something malicious (although that's also a valid concern) but rather in the "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" and the general risk factors (MikroTik going bankrupt and we're left with obsolete bug-ridden hardware).

Sadly given the large amount of software that's closed source there I don't see them working towards open sourcing any of it as, even technically, it would be a massive effort.

AlbertVAustin··on What happened with ASUS routers this morning?
MikroTik is definitely very nice (I'm running my home network with them ~7 devices). Too bad it's not open-source like OpenWRT is :-/
AlbertVAustin··on The day Windows died
Funny thing because the author experiences also mirror mine while setting up a computer for kids. I've got two: regular HP laptop with ad-ridden Windows and Raspberry 4 (the one that is all-in-one keyboard).

I can't stand Windows with their ugly dark patterns. Kids actually prefer Raspberry since Minetest works there just fine (although I'd be happy to have a little bit more powerful machine for that).

And I'm thinking on rather getting a more powerful Linux machine (Khadas Edge2?) than de-cluttering Windows (which is a sisyphean task by itself).

AlbertVAustin··on Encrypting Data in the Browser Using WebAuthn
> it passes the "your grandmother can use it" test IMO.

Indeed, but note that having the token is still rare. It'd be good if browsers exposed TPMs via WebAuth since they're more common on consumer-grade hardware.

And also the "minor" thing that having only one strong authenticator makes it super-easy to lose own data just in case the authenticator breaks etc.

AlbertVAustin··on Tencent WeChat is now a GitHub secret scanning partner
Any string that matches access token regexp provided by Tencent (see https://docs.github.com/en/developers/overview/secret-scanni...).
AlbertVAustin··on Will We Ever Run Out of Sudoku Puzzles?
> Even if we did do that, I've done some research on measuring difficulty of Sudoku -- many Sudoku grids are unsolvable by humans -- they are far too hard.

> A different, and interesting, question would be how many Sudoku are there which can be considered human-solvable. That's an even more open problem (we'd have to exactly define human-solvable to start).

What does it mean for a sudoku to be non solvable by human? I wrote a sudoku solver once and thought humans solving harder sudokus is basically exactly what a computer would do: guessing number and trying to solve it further, backtracking on failure. Or do you mean non-human solvable as "it would take a lot of time for a human to solve it"?

AlbertVAustin··on Ask HN: Good private email host with IMAP?
I've been using https://migadu.com for some time and it works fine (also underwent a Gmail->Migadu migration using imapsync).
AlbertVAustin··on Osm.el – OpenStreetMap Viewer for Emacs
Shipped as in "merged to master" but Emacs 28 that will feature this has not been released yet, or am I wrong?
AlbertVAustin··on Simple passwordless authentication for web projects
How would you address other users? Using SHA of the password?