HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Deathmax

500 karma · joined August 10, 2012

submissionscomments
Deathmax··on Secure Messaging, Anywhere
UX on iOS would likely to be terrible, since I don't think you're allowed to keep an active connection to Tor in the background on iOS, which is necessary to receive messages due to the P2P nature of Briar (and is the main driver of battery consumption of the app[0])

[0]: https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/44

Deathmax··on Microsoft announces Windows 11
Posting from the other Windows 11 post, I can confirm that a Ryzen fTPM will get a checkmark from the PC Health tool at least.

Screenshot of the security processor page: https://i.imgur.com/ZWtq8EO.png

Screenshot of the PC health check: https://i.imgur.com/Rb3eZIc.png

Deathmax··on Introducing Windows 11
From the manual[1], it is an option under section 3.6.1 AMD fTPM Configuration. It's built into the CPU rather than the motherboard, but the motherboard can provide a separate hardware TPM.

[1]: https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/SocketAM4/PRIME_X470-P...

Deathmax··on Introducing Windows 11
Since you're running Ryzen, you can enable firmware-based TPM in your UEFI settings and you should be good to go.

Screenshot of the security processor page: https://i.imgur.com/ZWtq8EO.png

Screenshot of the PC health check: https://i.imgur.com/Rb3eZIc.png

Deathmax··on How does 'kubectl exec' work? (2019)
I had to do it for work for a tool to interact with remotely hosted containers.

Tip for anyone trying to do this in Go, look at Docker CLI's code for all the knobs you need to turn to have an actually interactive terminal, for example, setting raw mode on the terminal, handling terminal resizes, and other things across platforms.

Deathmax··on Post Mortem: Incorrect Cache Configuration Exposes Personal Information
This happened to Steam as well, where misconfigured caching leaked PII: https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/19852
Deathmax··on 2021.06.08 Certificate Lifetime Incident
But that's what the grandparent was complaining about though? If you're not using the provider's managed services, then nothing is stopping you from running your own ACME client to provision certificates without paying the cloud provider money for certs.
Deathmax··on How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
Note that if you are using Chromium, it will refuse to load a PAC file from the file:// scheme. Here's the bug tracker issue for the change: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=839566.
Deathmax··on Fastly Outage
And ignore the pre-agreed SLA targets and compensation for not meeting those targets that's in the contract they signed right? If you're going to say you're losing $X/minute of downtime, then either deal with it, architect around it, or negotiate the necessary SLA and compensation.
Deathmax··on Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
yuzu, a Switch emulator, had introduced network play support a while ago that was gated behind Patreon subscriptions but was subsequently removed. https://yuzu-emu.org/entry/yuzu-x-raptor/

IIRC, for a while cemu (a Wii U emulator) had builds with support for Breath of the Wild gated behind Patreon early access as well.

Deathmax··on Let’s Encrypt DST Root CA X3 Expiration – September 2021
ZeroSSL's current RSA intermediate is https://crt.sh/?id=2427368505, which chains up to USERTrust RSA Certification Authority (https://crt.sh/?caid=1167).

I was going to migrate over to ZeroSSL, but there were red flags in the form of missing documentation that you would expect from a CA, like what is the chain of trust for certificates that are being issued? If I have to issue myself a certificate to check which CA is being used to sign the cert, that doesn't feel right.

Deathmax··on Blue Origin Challenges NASA over SpaceX Moon Lander Deal
Here's a link to the redacted protest: https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.spaceref.com/news/2021/BlueO...
Deathmax··on Latest Mozilla VPN features
Unfortunately as GP has mentioned, advertising around these typical VPN companies (Nord, Proton, ExpressVPN, Surfshark and many more) tends to be very misleading. Tom Scott put out a good video[1] that tries to debunk various marketing claims.

Sure there are use cases like getting around georestrictions, and like you mentioned you can use it to get around tracking. Except that for privacy and evading tracking you need more than just a VPN, you need to be doing things like adblocking, tracker blocking, clearing all of your cookies, not signing in to anything because then the service gets to link your new VPN IP with you again. VPN ads that sell "privacy" is snake oil unless it is paired with a guide on the additional things you should be doing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

Deathmax··on All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
Not quite the same situation as described in the article, but it is still possible for the kernel to swap memory in and out of disk even without a swap file/partition. Memory used for storing executable binaries is allowed to be moved out of memory, as a copy of it lives on disk. This means you can still encounter memory thrashing (and thus system unresponsiveness) under low memory situations.
Deathmax··on The Python Package Index is now a GitHub secret scanning integrator
GitHub documents the process over at https://docs.github.com/en/developers/overview/secret-scanni.... You specify a regex, and you check if the secret is valid on your end.
Deathmax··on Remote workstations for discerning artists
There are enough people that just aren't that sensitive to latency. For reference, look at any console player that doesn't go out of their way to enable PC/game mode on their TVs (HDMI 2.1 with Automatic Low Latency Mode is thankfully changing this) that is going to suffer upwards of 100ms of input latency[1]!

[1] https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/input-lag

Deathmax··on Using Ghidra to Reverse Engineer Super Monkey Ball for GameCube
That's what cheat codes allow you to do. The Dolphin wiki documents various "enhancements" you can apply with cheat codes (https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=The_Legend_of_Z... as an example).
Deathmax··on Is your Browser Extension a Botnet Backdoor?
My personal policy is that if an extension doesn't have a very limited scope (for example adblockers that need full access to everything), it has to be open source and I'll install it from source to control when extensions are updated.
Deathmax··on Show HN: Epub.to – ePub to pdf, mobi, Kindle, and an API
> PDFs retain their formatting better

Which is also its downside when formatting is not critical. I want to be able to change the font size and have the text reflow correctly. With PDFs you end up with broken layouts if you don't view it exactly as formatted.

Deathmax··on Chromium cleans up its act and daily DNS root server queries drop by 60B
I believe it was mainly to detect when a user is trying to navigate to an intranet site with a single-word name (for example http://fileserver). To do that, Chrome needs to make a DNS request for the word and check if it's valid.

However, you can have misbehaving ISPs that replaces all NXDOMAIN responses with something (producing false positives for what constitutes "valid" hostnames), or a guest portal that is hijacking DNS responses, so Chrome will make requests for random DNS hostnames that are unlikely to exist to detect if DNS hijacking is occurring and disable the intranet detection if it is.

Deathmax··on Chrome 89 Beta: advanced hardware interactions, web sharing on desktop
Core NFC has been available since iOS 11 (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc). You don't have full access to implement for example contactless EMV payments, but you can read and write data to NFC tags.
Deathmax··on Steam's login method is kinda interesting
> Monzo did other stuff to effect the same result, i.e. they only allow one device to be logged in at a time. So you couldn't use Monzo's app AND access your account via Teller at the same time.

Only if you were trying to impersonate Monzo's iOS/Android OAuth clients instead of the expected AISP/PISP flows.

Deathmax··on IoT Unravelled Part 1: It's a Mess but Then There's Home Assistant
For the HS100 issue he was having at the end of the blog post, TP-Link decided to push out a firmware upgrade that broke existing integrations (https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/43088).
Deathmax··on Does Apple really log every app you run? A technical look
Which is still sufficient information to narrow down to the set of applications developed by a single entity. And because this is being done over HTTP, anyone along the network chain has visibility as well.
Deathmax··on Slack Incident Resolved – Degraded service affecting multiple features
From London, Slack was resolving to a load balancer in eu-west-2 earlier during the outage. It now resolves to eu-west-1 and I have no issues connecting to Slack.

  $ nslookup edgeapi.slack.com
  Server:  1.1.1.1
  Address: 1.1.1.1#53
  
  Non-authoritative answer:
  edgeapi.slack.com canonical name = prod-haproxy-edge-nlb-eip-038c466f971aa8b8.elb.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com.
  Name: prod-haproxy-edge-nlb-eip-038c466f971aa8b8.elb.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com
  Address: 35.176.156.206

  $ nslookup edgeapi.slack.com
  Server:  1.1.1.1
  Address: 1.1.1.1#53
  
  Non-authoritative answer:
  edgeapi.slack.com canonical name = prod-haproxy-edge-nlb-eip-1bffe8d4fbdf4b94.elb.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com.
  Name: prod-haproxy-edge-nlb-eip-1bffe8d4fbdf4b94.elb.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
  Address: 18.200.77.145
Deathmax··on The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)
It would be possible for an ISP to MITM the traffic between Cloudflare and the origin server since it can be configured to be done via unencrypted HTTP or non-trusted certs on HTTPS (flexible SSL). See https://medium.com/@karthikb351/airtel-is-sniffing-and-censo... for an example of Cloudflare serving a MITM notice page for pirate bay.
Deathmax··on Is your chip card secure? Much depends on where you bank
A Monzo engineer describes nonconformance with specs which might lead some card issuers to be more liberal with what they accept: https://twitter.com/erincandescent/status/128153445694436147...
Deathmax··on Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi
I think you might run into a lack of connectivity on the Pi Zero W. Since the only data USB port has to run in device mode, I would assume you can't connect the HDMI capture device.
Deathmax··on Cloudflare was down
And that is why you host your status page on separate infra.
Deathmax··on Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027
At least for the two Hyperoptic installs I've had or seen in the past 2 years have been Tilgin routers (https://hyperoptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Tilgin-HG2...) instead of ZTE routers.
← PreviousPage 4 of 5Next →