HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Tarball10

413 karma · joined June 28, 2021

submissionscomments
Tarball10··on Oneplus phone update introduces hardware anti-rollback
Until they switch to eSIM...
Tarball10··on 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11
Apps need to adhere to some new conditions to contribute items to the Win 11 context menu. The 7-zip creator has been unable or unwilling to make these changes[1].

There are other open source projects which do display in the context menu, such as TortoiseGit and Notepad++. In fact there is a fork of 7-zip called NanaZip which supports the Win 11 context menu.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/1...

Tarball10··on GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
Not paying full price is not a "lost sale". People unwilling to pay full price wait for a discount or price reduction. Look at how popular the seasonal Steam sales are. Pirating the game very likely means they never purchase it at any price, which _is_ a lost sale.
Tarball10··on GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
Isn't that exactly what companies use as justification for DMCA and DRM protection?

Without those, you'd have sites full of pirated game downloads easily found through search engines. DMCA takedowns force those sites into shady corners of the internet, making them harder to find and riskier for the average user. And (effective) DRM makes users have to wait for a crack which may take weeks or months.

The result is that it's easier for the average person to just log into Steam/Epic/PSN/eShop and spend $60 to play immediately.

Tarball10··on GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
They might spend $600 on 10 of those games, though. It's not all-or-nothing.
Tarball10··on Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
If you're running a media server (like Plex or Jellyfin) you can do hardware accelerated transcoding on the GPU.
Tarball10··on The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)
There was a long period (15-20 years) where LCDs were quite a downgrade from CRTs. Poor contrast ratio (gray blacks), backlight bleed, low resolution, poor color gamut (they're still putting 45% NTSC screens in budget laptops!), stuck at 60Hz refresh rates.

Those gaps have finally started closing in the last few years, now that 4K 240Hz 99% DCI-P3 OLED monitors are readily available and relatively affordable.

Tarball10··on Primer on FedEx's Distribution Network (2024)
Might depend on location but I've always had Express packages delivered by a dedicated Express truck. Which feels wasteful sometimes when both a Ground and Express truck come down my street within the same hour.
Tarball10··on PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin
Good point. I should have clarified that I'm referring specifically to PayPal in the US, which themselves state that "PayPal is not a bank, does not take deposits and is not FDIC insured".

https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/program-banks-tnc

Tarball10··on PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin
Fair enough, maybe "outsourced" would be a better way to put it. Basically they want support to cost them as little as possible and do not particularly care whether it actually offers any useful help to customers.

More specifically, their support cannot actually do anything to resolve problems. They read off what their computer screen is telling them. They can't take any actions to fix things.

Tarball10··on PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin
Holding money (or crypto) in PayPal is a terrible idea. They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations. They can lock you out of your account and your money at any time and leave you going in circles with their offshore support.

Yes, they are somewhat of a necessary evil if you do any online peer-to-peer buying/selling, since they are the only money transfer service that provides some level of "buyer protection", but you want to do the bare minimum with PayPal to avoid unnecessary risk.

Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately. Link one credit card for purchases. Nothing else. Do not link debit cards, do not sign up for their "balance account" where money is held in PayPal (no matter how hard they push it with UI dark patterns in their app), do not sign up for their crypto account.

Tarball10··on When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army
>Most Americans continue to express positive views of the military: 60% say it has a positive effect, while 36% say its effect is negative.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/02/01/the-u-s-mili...

Tarball10··on Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 Incident on July 14, 2025
For a limited set of DoH providers. It does not let you enter a custom DoH URL, only a DoT hostname.
Tarball10··on FEMA to end coverage for North Carolina recovery efforts
The governor is a Democrat, though. I imagine this is punishment/retribution similar to cutting Maine's federal school funding after its Democrat governor publicly confronted Trump.
Tarball10··on Launching RDAP; sunsetting WHOIS
This is about sunsetting the WHOIS protocol in favor of RDAP, not doing away with domain owner registration data.
Tarball10··on MacBook Air M4
Also false, you can build a custom configuration of the gen12 with the 165U cpu and 64 GB of ram.
Tarball10··on MacBook Air M4
120Hz on Snapdragon/Mediatek Android phones works great with little impact to battery life. Pixels are hobbled by the poor power efficiency of their Tensor chips.
Tarball10··on Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge
Check out the Auto Tab Discard extension for Firefox. It removes the contents of tabs from memory after a period of time, but keeps the tab icon/title around. Next time you click the tab, it acts like a bookmark and reloads the page it was on. As a tab hoarder, I've found it very helpful to keep CPU/memory usage down.
Tarball10··on Ads chew through half of mobile data
OP was suggesting an outright block of traffic from ad providers. I don't believe any US ISPs have gone to that extreme, at least not yet. They allowed peering points to become congested which affected Netflix traffic, but weren't blocking it.
Tarball10··on Ads chew through half of mobile data
That sets a terrible precedent. You do not want ISPs picking and choosing what content to deliver, or forcing content providers to pay extra to deliver content to their customers.
Tarball10··on You might want to stop making your bed in the morning
I don't usually snoop around other people's bedrooms when visiting.
Tarball10··on A novel channel contention mechanism for improving wi-fi's reliability
Thanks to DFS restrictions in the US, there are effectively only two 80 MHz channels that can reliably be used in the 5GHz band.

2.4GHz only has three non-overlapping 20MHz channels, and those can only do ~286 Mbps throughput in the best case when using 802.11ax.

The 6GHz band is finally allowing 14 non-overlapping 80 MHz channels and 7 160MHz channels, without any DFS restrictions (though some channels are lower-power/indoors only).

Tarball10··on Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns
I think you're underestimating how important the out-of-the-box experience is to casual users. Having Steam games "just work" and being able to do the familiar double-click of an exe file to install a Windows app in compatibility mode is valuable to those users.
Tarball10··on Unreal Engine 5 gains WebGPU support
Aren't Chrome tabs supposed to be isolated processes? That seems like quite the vulnerability if it can crash the entire browser.
Tarball10··on It's time to stop using SMS (2021)
None of that is required to compromise SMS. A SIM swap is much easier to accomplish because the cellular carriers have historically had woefully insecure policies and their support agents could easily be socially engineered into moving your phone number to an attacker-owned SIM card.
Tarball10··on Missouri AG sues Media Matters over its X research, demands donor names
This is nothing new. Just yesterday this AG was blaming a fight between students that hospitalized one on the district's DEI programs. He also continued 7 lawsuits started by his predecessor against school districts that dared to implement mask requirements during Covid.

Missouri gets what the majority votes for, and the majority seem happy with these frivolous lawsuits.

Tarball10··on Former telecom manager admits to doing SIM swaps for $1k
AT&T is headquartered in Dallas, TX. Verizon Wireless headquarters is in New Jersey.
Tarball10··on New Federal Rule Caps Credit Card Late Fees at $8
You still have to make the minimum payment on time when carrying a balance.
Tarball10··on Meta outage
I see Corporate Memphis has even infected status pages now.
Tarball10··on Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
A theory for the reported Verizon/T-Mobile issues is that when AT&T went offline, all of those phones went into SOS mode and tried to register on the remaining available networks (Verizon and T-Mobile) to allow 911 calls to be made. The surge in devices registering at once may have overloaded some parts of those networks.
Page 1 of 3Next →