Hacker News Reader

bblbon Revocation of X.509 Certificates

DNS and PKI. Two of the most centralized services in the Internet. Take over both of them, and you have the whole net under your command.

bblbon South Korea police arrest man for posting AI photo of runaway wolf

Background image of some local street. Image of a wolf and object selection tool (pre AI era version). Touch up a little and add some filters to drop the quality.

Sure a little bit more involved than the two second AI prompt, but 3 min job for the lulz photoshoppers.

bblbon South Korea police arrest man for posting AI photo of runaway wolf

How about not believing everything that's posted to the Internet. This could've easily been done with Photoshop in the pre AI era.

bblbon A quick look at Mythos run on Firefox: too much hype?

Can IDE's be configured so that it won't allow to save the file changes if it contains the usual suspects; buffer overflows and what not. LLM would scan it and deny write operation.

Like the Black formatter for Python code on VSCode, that runs before hitting CTRL+S.

bblbon We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

These are all relics from the innocent 90's Internet. We had our global village and everything was fine. A couple of bad actors spamming blue pills here and there and that was it.

Now we have actual criminal organizations and other real bad actors.

I'm sure we can come up with something better than advertise our whole local computing platform on every HTTP request.

bblbon 2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email

This whole reactionist protectionist sovereignity fuss will blow over in a year or two. Way too costly to force mass migrate gazillion users and services. Even if just to move away from AD and Entra. Forget about it. Local gov all around the world is stuck with these permanently.

One little hint to all the European providers: just provide a better and more cost effective service than the US competitors, and the users will come. Innovate something new and interesting. Don't just copy paste Microsoft, Amazon and Apple.

(disclaimer: I work in European municipality IT infra)

bblbon NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

Your explanation is just as good as the Fermi paradox. In Futurama, the Omicronians know about the Earth from old TV show signals, that's been constantly sent from Earth by then. Would any alien civilization have the patience to constantly send hello world for a millenia or maybe hundred thousand years.

Both assume that there _is_ some other life, but that it's hard to reach. We don't know if there is anything else.

Earth could be completely unique in the existence, even with all the endless multiuniverses. Mathematical propabilities are not proof that there _must be_ life somewhere else. The answer could just as well be '0'. Only life that was, is and will ever be. When we are eventually gone, that's it. No more life.

edit: sorry about the negativity in my reply; just pondering out loud :D

bblbon 288,493 Requests – How I Spotted an XML-RPC Brute Force from a Weird Cache Ratio

>50% longer than it needs to be

Humans are good at distilling the word salads into actually coherent and useful bits of information. That's about the only thing left for us that we are good at. The machines will eventually catch up, and the AI slop blog writer agents will get good enough, so that 99.9 % of all text content on the Internet will be machine generated.

bblbon Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable

Huawei Enterprise devices tend to have a CAPTCHA by default on their BMC/OOB GUIs or the other various system/infrastructure service GUIs (such as the HuaweiCloud/FusionCloud products). I'm guessing the reason is that people leave the management ports and GUIs wide open to the public Internet, so the CAPTCHA is protecting at least from the very basic script kiddie bots.

bblbon Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable

Absolutely worthless pieces of paper. We had the ISO 270001 and the physical security "walk tour" or whatever it's called; I could've outsourced that to a bunch of preschoolers walking around the offices and data center rooms and would've gotten the same result. The only _actually_ working way to protect your org is to continuously attack your own systems and see what part of it breaks or leaks data.

bblbon Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work

Could it be possible to train LLM only through the chat messages without any other data or input?

If Guppy doesn't know regular expressions yet, could I teach it to it just by conversation? It's a fish so it wouldn't probably understand much about my blabbing, but would be interesting to give it a try.

Or is there some hard architectural limit in the current LLM's, that the training needs to be done offline and with fairly large training set.

bblbon Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords

  echo "$USER ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" | sudo tee "/etc/sudoers.d/$USER"; sudo chmod 0600 "/etc/sudoers.d/$USER"

  sudo mkdir -p /etc/polkit-1/rules.d

  echo 'polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) { if (subject.isInGroup("sudo") || subject.isInGroup("wheel")) { return polkit.Result.YES; }});' | sudo tee /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/00-nopasswd.rules

bblbon Show HN: How I topped the HuggingFace open LLM leaderboard on two gaming GPUs

It's the "I so pale." moment for us average lurkers.

Interesting content still in the sea of useless AI slop, even if I couldn't understand anything after the first paragraph.

bblbon Ask HN: How to be alone?

Are you me.

And it's not even depression and bitterness anymore. It's beyond that. It's the final form in the 50 yo wizard meme.

This life is not something you want to pursue. There is nothing romantic about a hermit. Choose another path.

bblbon First Website (1992)

Money. Ruins everything. And also enables. So it's a win/lose situation.

bblbon First Website (1992)

Xanadu

Ted Nelson's dream since early `60s: all the world literature in one publicly accessible global online system (analogy: you can today get a telephone link from anywhere to anywhere, so why not from any text to any other?). Every reference to a text will lead to royalties being paid automatically to the author. Autodesk, (the makers of AutoCAD) will produce a product "real soon now". Includes the use of full versioning (claimed to be horrifyingly complex), "hot links" (called transclusions) and zippered texts (eg. parallel texts like for translations or annotations.)

bblbon More dynamic cronjobs

Also check out the 'chronic' command from moreutils. No more dev nulls.

bblbon I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)

>their version of windows seems to require an ipv4 adddess on an interface

Could be DirectAccess. Microsoft's earlier built-in VPN solution before Always On VPN. DirectAccess works only with IPv4 inbound so you can't use IPv6 only stack. Under the hood it uses a combination of v4-v6 transition and translation protocols, but it still requires the Windows client machines to have IPv4 addresses.

If you can run PowerShell commands on the laptop and if "Get-DnsClientNrptPolicy" returns some DirectAccessDnsServers then it's DA laptop.

bblbon CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution

Two years ago switched permanently from Win11 to Mint. It was ok, but craved something more bleeding edge. After two dozen distro hops landed on Cachy. Might try Gentoo at some point.

bblbon $96M AUD revamp of Bom website bombs out on launch

>It's the government IT project equivalent of ordering a renovation, discovering the contractor has made your house less functional, and then learning they charged you for a mansion.

Or rather, it's you and your neighbours deciding to fix your house because it's an eyesore, but then you build a huge unpractical mansion for yourself on their expense.

bblbon The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it will survive it. It will survive a complete nuclear winter. It's too useful to die, and will be one the first things to be fixed after global annihilation.

But Internet is not hosting companies or cloud providers. Internet does not care if they don't build their systems resilient enough and let the SPOFs creep up. Internet does it's thing and the packets keep flowing. Maybe BGP and DNS could use some additional armoring but there are ways around both of them in case of actual emergency.

bblbon Google Antigravity

> genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best results survive so they have to fight for their virtual lives

AI Agent Orchestration Battle Bots. Old school VMs are the brute tanks just slowly ramming everybody off the field. A swarm of erratically behaving lightweight K8s Pods madly slicing and dicing everything coming on their way. Winner takes control of the host capacity.

I might need this in my life.

bblbon Linux and Windows: A tale of Kerberos, SSSD, DFS, and black magic (2018)

"You should set your hostname to be your FQDN, uppercased."

Never had an issue with this.

"name: initialize Kerberos ticket"

What's the use case for this Ansible task. Never had a need to manually generate tickets.

edit: didn't read it through; this is part of their automation pipeline

We manage 1000+ Windows Servers with Ansible and it's been as simple as Linux SSH. Multiple SOCKS5 proxies to different AD forests, WinRM double hop works great when become:true, GPO works just fine on Linux, initial setup is very simple with realmd. Biggest manual task is setting up the service accounts for Ansible.

bblbon The G in GPU is for Graphics damnit

Room for new competitors then? Surely Nvidia/AMD/Intel are not the only graphics vendors? Or is the tech too hard to even enter the market?

bblbon URL-Driven State in HTMX

Glad I skipped the whole "JavaScript only" webdev phase. My mad PostNuke skills are relevant again.

bblbon Display any CSV file as a searchable, filterable, pretty HTML table

PowerShell is the first thing I install on my Linux workstation/jump host because of those built-in Import/Export/Convertto goodies. Import-Excel module works on Linux too. Too bad the Invoke-WebRequest uses basic parsing only, it used to parse the actual DOM with JS and all, but I guess that was a security issue.

bblbon Levels of configuration languages

"vibeconfig"

1. You give LLM the requirements

2. It spits out whatever monstrosity is required to configure the software or service in question

3. When issues later arise, you just vibeconfig again with new requirements

Eventually new vibeconfig tools will rise because even those three steps are not complex enough. These call LLM APIs to inject the config files dynamically at runtime. "But it's a security issue". So another vertical is born: auditing and securing the vibeconfig LLM autogeneration toolsets.

bblbon Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft

I started my Windows Server career around 2003R2, so can't comment on the peakness of 2K.

2008R2 snowballed it's own "revolution" when it introduced PowerShell 2.0, which was pivotal for many future things to come.

Out of the more modern ones, 2012R2 was "peak".

I would guess we will still see 2012R2 installations well into the future. Still running bits and pieces of critical infra, even if it has been EOLed long ago, but that's the way of the Server I guess. Can't wait for the 5000+ uptime day screenshots of ancient 2012R2's.

My guess is the next "long LTS" will be Win2025. Just because it's introducing the NTLMv2 deprecation path and working solutions to replace it.

bblbon The indieweb doesn't need to “take off”

Technically correct. The best kind.

Maybe _I_ am the sad old person here, with my stale opinion of World Wide Web equals the browser?

Nah. It must be children who are wrong.

bblbon The indieweb doesn't need to “take off”

"IndieWeb movement". It's just the web, right? Always has been?

Do we already have entire generations of people who never open web browsers and live their whole online life in Apps? Sad.