donnachangstein

> The users (i.e. high level U.S. officials) did no due diligence.

But why would they? It's not their job. They have massive IT staff supporting them. "High level U.S. officials" are just executives; the pointy-haired bosses to the pointy-haired boss. Only difference is these wear little decorative pins over their breast pocket.

Every Fortune 500 company has dedicated IT staff for execs; someone you can call 24/7 and say "my shit's broke" and they respond "we just overnighted you a new phone".

These people couldn't even install an app on their MDM-controlled device, now the narrative has become we expect them to be making low-level IT decisions too?

Next week we'll be scrutinizing Pete Hegseth's lack of thoughts on rotating backup tapes.

> there's a dozen apps that cater to this need now

Before someone declared a need for buggy and unreliable locker apps, for decades prior you could deposit something called a "coin" into a slot which would allow you remove an equally archaic object called a "key" from the lock, which you would deposit in your pocket and be on your merry way.

You could have saved yourself $300 and slept on a bench in the central bus station for approximately the same level of accommodation.

> Windows LTSC builds don't have Microsoft Store preinstalled

No, it's not that it isn't "preinstalled", the Microsoft Store is literally not supported on LTSC, by design. LTSC was never intended to run the Store. The original use case for LTSC was for ATMs, industrial control equipment, hospitals, and the like, where IoT wasn't appropriate, where you needed the ability to run full desktop applications.

> Microsoft offers no official way to re-enable it.

Yeah that's because the Store was never supposed to run on LTSC. It's not supported. Why would they offer an official way to re-enable it? The whole point of LTSC is that it doesn't include the store.

If someone cobbled together an ugly hack to shoehorn it in, by definition it could break at any time.

Which it has.

There is no customer for this.

> On freebsd you have strlcpy()

strlcpy() came from OpenBSD and was later ported to FreeBSD, Solaris, etc.

> I see he's also using fopen/fread/fclose rather than CreateFile/ReadFile/WriteFile/etc.

It's a todo list, not a network service. So what if it's using unbounded strcpy's all over the place? It has basically no attack surface. He wrote it for himself, not for criticism from the HN hoi polloi.

For once maybe take someone's work at face value instead of critiquing every mundane detail in order to feel like the smartest person in the room.

Computers are tools to get stuff done. Sometimes those tools are not pretty.

I place much of the criticism being levied here in the same category as the "we must rewrite 'ls' in Rust for security" nonsense that is regularly praised here.

The lack of a universally functioning clipboard is the #1 blocker to Linux acceptance on the desktop.

The Mac had this figured out in 1984. Linux still struggles in 2025.

Why are you building 20 boards if you are new to PCB design and can't afford mistakes? That's tremendously risky.

Even pros build a couple proto boards for the first run, and sometimes hand assemble them if able, not.... 20?

This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government.

I hear the Juicero had an outstanding power supply.

For all the waste, some folks probably learned a lot about power electronics.

It seems odd to me that of all places, a forum run by a VC outfit, thinks a government jobs program to churn STEM grads with nonsense projects is the way to go.

> I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total.

Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. There is no government program in existence that costs $10k total, you are almost assuredly ignoring overhead and all other costs. It's like calling a contractor to repair something, then crying foul when he charges $350 because you found the part on Amazon for $15.

But let's assume it was $10k.

> $10k to build knowledge of cutting edge science that filters into industry. $10k to help give needed manpower to research projects that need it. $10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.

To be blunt, you are upset because you got to work on a fun boondoggle project and others are being denied that privilege. I won't doubt it was fun and educational but I can't in all honesty pretend that is a good value for the taxpayers.

Unless you are producing something of value to the public, it's wasteful, and that $10k deserves to be returned to the taxpayers.

Taxpayers are not on the hook to keep you busy with pointless yet fun busy-work. That is private industry's job.

"Your" modem is netbooting "their" firmware and they have full remote access on a management interface.

> I am on fiber and if I want to I can hook up my own router directly to fiber with an SFP+ module

I don't think you quite understand how this works.

The ISP controls whatever the other end of that fiber is plugged into. It doesn't matter if the medium is fiber, or copper, or a piece of string. The ISP always has control of the other side of the customer interface. It doesn't matter if the box physically resides in your home or not.

In the case of Starlink, it's all contained within one box.

In the case of DOCSIS (cable), you may physically own the modem, but the ISP controls the firmware it netboots and has full remote admin to the device.

The correct answer is no one outside US Government IT knows for sure what is or isn't approved per their own rules. Every article (and comments therein) are just speculation and people trying to confirm their own biases, desperately looking for something to blame someone for, to produce more rage-bait and thus feed more ad clicks.

Every single article is written with the presumption that there are no actual IT people in the White House, that someone wheeled in a Starlink dish on a dessert cart in the yard which is somehow running the entire government. It's silly and ridiculous.

When it finally dies, please inscribe WONTFIX as its epitaph. If the FF devs spent less time huffing their own farts they'd have more time and effort available to actually repro bugs.

They would also remember there is a man with a cape in a phone booth that could be called upon to stop this thing.

Absolutely! It's probably 90/10.

Nothing gives someone away as a poser as much as bragging about OSINT as if it's some sort of tradecraft meanwhile they're executing the same skills your average wine aunt does stalking her ex-boyfriend on Facebook.

They used their leet "OSINT" skillz to ask the most basic of questions and background checks that nearly any traditional interview process would immediately uncover, then think it's so novel it's worthy of a blog post.

On the surface it seems the "security" industry is lacking in the most basic of security processes when hiring.

I don't think I've ever worked anywhere that could accidentally hire a North Korean without uncovering it somewhere in the hiring process, and all my jobs have been especially uninteresting.

What bothers me more is there are talented people sitting on unemployment right now that can't find a job, yet fake people are getting hired left and right. Something in the industry as a whole is quite broken.

If a source resorts to ad hominems and name calling in the very first sentence then it immediately loses all credibility. Sorry.

Edit: 3 minutes and already at -4. Is that what this site has devolved into? Fuck the rules when we hate the target of our derision?

I think you're mistaken. The use of WebDAV was not a requirement. Frontpage could function in "HTML editor" mode and just write to the filesystem. In that case, any WYSIWYG editor would do but FP was there and available.

> Can you recommend an alternative for a non-technical organization, where there's someone who needs to be able to edit pages and upload documents on a regular basis, so they need as user-friendly an interface as possible for that

25 years ago we used Microsoft Frontpage for that, with the web root mapped to a file share that the non-technical secretary could write to and edit it as if it were a word processor.

Somehow I feel we have regressed from that simplicity, with nothing but hand waving to make up for it. This method was declared "obsolete" and ... Wordpress kludges took its place as somehow "better". Someone prove me wrong.

> The US Government should nationalize Starlink and provide all Americans with internet service.

This is a repeated trope and more ridiculous each time I hear it. Starlink is a private company that is in the business of selling the US Government as well as consumers its services. You can't just "nationalize" it on a whim; after all, the US isn't Cuba.

GPS was always owned and operated by the US military so it's an apples and oranges comparison at best.

Sprint deployed WiMAX (remember that?) fairly widely, lot of good that did them.

mmWave is as dead as dead. The cellular Betamax. iPhone 16e (the everyman's iPhone) doesn't support it, and neither did the SE before it.

VZW will be converting those base stations into birdhouses in 5-7 years.

If something is controversial to an insignificantly small number of people, is it by definition a controversy?

Hypothetically speaking, let's say you were a famous or notable person. Your Wikipedia article would probably have a controversy section with a vague statement like, "Some people find crazygringo's feet objectionable."

The citation would be a podcast where a guest told the host in an offhand comment, "I went on a date with crazygringo once and thought he had oddly-shaped feet."

Any attempt to delete this statement, even by you with full knowledge of your own feet, would be reverted as 'vandalism'.

This is Wikipedia in a nutshell.

Articles for celebrities and political figures are full of this garbage, which merely 10 years ago we would consider exclusively tabloid fodder.

I've read articles on complete nobody actresses with a controversy section that listed any and every political opinion she's ever said. It's a lame attempt to extrapolate (or reimagine) someone's entire personality from a few offhand statements made once in her life.

It's low quality content like this that undermines Wikipedia. Unfortunately it's all over the site and growing by the day.

The problem is controversies can be embellished. In this case, the controversy focused on a minor detail among hundreds of others in a nearly two hour long film.

Is there guidance on what makes a controversy 'notable', or can anything be listed there? E.g. "Nobody blogger and her Twitter army were upset about $thing" - does that qualify? Nearly anything can be controversial, or have fabricated controversies. You see this a lot on political articles.

Wikipedia has been captured by special interests.

I recently watched The Silence of the Lambs, an Academy Award winning movie from the early 90s. Afterward, I skimmed the Wikipedia article to see if I missed any plot details.

There is a whole section on how the movie is considered transphobic by some nobodies, how the director defends that it isn't, blah blah blah. Having just watched the film, the thought didn't even enter my mind. I realized that the entire section is irrelevant to someone seeking information about the movie and at its worst, an opinion piece or cleverly disguised political shit-stirring.

Wikipedia is full of stuff like this. As a comparison I checked a 'real' encyclopedia (with editors) and of course not a mention of this, just the facts. Any attempt to delete irrelevant stuff from Wikipedia is closely guarded by self-appointed article gatekeepers because it has 'sources'.

I searched YouTube for actual evidence of Hurd booting to a desktop and only found two videos of Hurd freezing during boot, and a third video of RMS explaining to a very confused convention attendee that he's "never installed GNU slash lynn-ox" because he could just ask someone else to do it.

No videos of Hurd running Doom either, but anyone is welcome to create one and share.

A few months work by one guy and already more capable than the Hurd.

Imagine what you could accomplish given 35 years.

> Musk has installed Starlink terminals on the whitehouse rooftop, to bypass security

This is confirmation bias and absolutely unsubstantiated nonsense. Hedging your bets on hyperbolic dreck like this is why people don't take the serious stuff seriously.

Do you think cellphone hotspots - that everyone has in their pocket - are also part of some grand conspiracy?

It's worth mentioning that pre-washing the dishes too clean is actually worse, because the enzymes in dishwasher soap are activated with the organic matter in the food debris.

Not to mention if your dishwasher has a sanitize cycle, you are very likely making the dishes dirtier and spreading new bacteria onto them by post-washing them.