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flingo

146 karma · joined July 7, 2018

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flingo··on Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
I once signed up to a service (privately run VPN thing) run by a university club that required confirming a real university student email address without having such an address. So, you needed to click a confirm link sent to "studentfoo@uni.tld".

Then, mostly as a goof, I tried signing up with an address like "studentfoo@uni.tld@example.com" where I controlled the second domain. Lo and behold, the confirmation email showed up in my catchall inbox on that domain.

Pretty sure the only check the site did was .contains("@uni.tld") and assumed it was good enough. (or whoever wrote it put it in as a backdoor) Really regret not reporting that bug to them.

flingo··on $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
Meta-warning;

I'm more into the juxtapositions of interactions between idiots vs experts, specialists vs generalists, startup-billionaire vs unemployed-drug-addict-hacker, and the level of insight that can be gained from these conversations.

I believe that the civility, and desire for unfettered conversation (avoiding ad-hominem, flame-wars. etc···) are more of an instrumental-goal of this process, than the true goal.

I don't really know why the comments on hn are the way they are, and I doubt anyone ever will. But that's what keeps me coming back here. It's the only place on the internet I can get this kind of thing, whatever it is.

I do have to say, there's something special and unique here. Like the userbases of wikipedia, stack overflow, 4chan, or twitter, there's something here that's impossible to recreate and worth preserving.

flingo··on Google is going to turn on 2FA by default
How did you do this?

Is the process repeatable?

flingo··on I overslept because iOS 14 disabled my alarm
Is there a list of devices anywhere for which this doesn't work?

It's worked in anything I've tried (haven't tried latest iphones) with only a momentary power switch on it. I was under the impression it was some kind of legal requirement somewhere, and that's why it was so standard.

flingo··on Hidden standards make USB-C a pain to deal with
It's one additional resistor, I think. The first lot of raspberry pi 4s had that same problem, and I've seen it in other hardware that uses type-c to charge.
flingo··on Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
Cosmic rays can come from any angle, and even pass through the entire earth without impacting anything. (millions of them are zipping through you and your RAM, right now! electrons barely dodging out of the way in time.)

I think (but have no reference) that the amount of cosmic rays the planet blocks by being in the way is dwarfed by the effects of the magnetosphere and solar rays.

flingo··on Show HN: Lag – Know Before You Go
Are there any details on who's providing this app, who's running the site, and what they'll do with collected data?

The ToS and privacy policy are identical, and only refer to an app called "velo" and a company called "copilot LLC", and that their method of contact is "Joe Blau."

This seems very strange to me. (unless this is a "move fast, break things, collect GDPR fines" sort of thing)

flingo··on Lesser-known Web APIs
Here's one that's Firefox exclusive, and still seems to work: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...

It's something I've used on a few sites, and it's a shame chrome dropped support.

flingo··on Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account
I don't think my original comment was clear about how I view the ToS as a hammer Apple made for themselves to wield. Not for the good of anyone, but apple.

Their goal here being to cover their ass and have a rule, that you already "agreed" to follow, to point at when they want to get rid of your app. Apple's legal tech has always been years ahead of their electronic tech, I'm honestly curious to see if epic's got some sort of counter to apple's usual legal shenanigans.

flingo··on Expert overclockers successfully push DOOM Eternal past 1k frames per second
Using a blowtorch as a heat-source is common in extreme overclocking, to heat up VRMs and memory modules up enough to boot the machine, and keep it working.

liquid helium might get into the device itself and cause other problems. (e.g. iphones stop working in the presence of helium)

flingo··on Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account
Apple's iOS ToS specifically forbids downloading and executing code by the app. (with a definition of "code", and "execute" somewhere in the document)

While you could technically hide this from them during the review stage, apple can stop any app from functioning on any iOS device connected to the internet by revoking the certificate, if they discover it at a later stage.

Are there noteworthy apps that break this term in the wild?

flingo··on SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up
> I'm more drawn to the fact that the American government can greenlight this, even though it has global implications.

They only need to greenlight the launch, and radio-transmissions over the US.

As far as I know, there is no central authority anywhere to stop you from putting/keeping a satellite in a certain orbit. (aside from someone else moving it out of that orbit by force)

Space border laws aren't super-well developed yet.

flingo··on Show HN: ztext.js – JavaScript library that makes any font 3D
Does npm or whatever package manager is in vogue not have a hack to make a "package" out of a URL pointing to some javascript? (even if someone has to write some automation to package every version from github, as it comes out.)

Although, this point is moot as soon as someone packages it for whatever package manager you use. No matter how hackily they do it. e.g. if there were a npm package called "auto-import-arbitrary-or-versioned-file-from-git-repo-or-http-url" that consolidated _all_ of your random single-file imports, that'd count IMO.

flingo··on Exxon Mobil replaced by a software stock after 92 years in the Dow
Key points, ripped straight from the website;

* Exxon Mobil’s been in the Dow in some form since 1928, but its tenure as the longest-serving component is coming to an end.

* On Monday, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced the largest changes to the 30-stock benchmark in seven years.

* Exxon will be replaced by Salesforce. Amgen and Honeywell International are replacing Pfizer and Raytheon Technologies.

flingo··on Firefox 80
You could probably get alright performance running in the browser using webassembly. No idea if anyone's working on anything like that.
flingo··on An Update on MDN Web Docs
How did you find this comment?
flingo··on Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons?
> * Having a relatively big number of tabs (~600 in multiple tab groups)

I have found this extension[0] useful, for saving my machine when I leave too many tabs open. Just make sure to whitelist things you don't want unloaded. Like infinite-scroll webpages.

[0]: https://github.com/rNeomy/auto-tab-discard

flingo··on Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons?
Thankfully, they saw this coming, so wikipedia's licensing allows you to re-host the entire site. Useful if they ever turn crooked.

Stack overflow has the same sort of setup, for the same reason. (though, that site is far more likely to die/get perverted)

flingo··on Ask HN: How to do cross platform GUI?
The keyword here is "linking exception". It is a hack to sidestep the licensing problems caused by dynamic linking. e.g. If I encase gcc in java, and release gcc.class under GPL3+, but use it extensively in a separate proprietary java program, does that infringe on the terms of the GPL? Does providing copies of the two together, with a single installer make a difference?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception

flingo··on Ask HN: How to do cross platform GUI?
Is there any way to get a GPL-compatible version of Sciter?

I couldn't tell, just from glancing at the website/github.

flingo··on Teletext Bad Apple
Last I checked, 888 still works on satellite, and most digital TV.

Nothing there, but a page 100 telling you that there's no teletext, but page 888 still has subtitles on it.

flingo··on Office Drama on macOS
I found it more tolerable running it at 50% resolution.

Still horrible though.

flingo··on C will never stop you from making mistakes
> And this is how backwards compatibility comes to kill innovation.

With all of the novel and esoteric programming languages that exist, I wonder why hasn't there been a "I can't believe it's not c/c++" language that breaks these things, but isn't taken seriously enough to diverge completely from the ISO language standards. (for bonus points, with standardized gcc extensions, and something like embedded asm but for compiled languages (like iso standard c))

flingo··on The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 (2013)
I'm still not following why it'd require so much data? I thought the goal was to have the commit hash collide with an existing commit hash, is that not enough?

I looked around, and it seems like the right place to hide the added data is in the "trailer" section of the commit. It's where signed-off-by lives and is used to generate the commit hash.

You might want to come up with a plausible reason for random data to go in there though. (likely using a header that wouldn't normally get printed out)

flingo··on The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 (2013)
Why would it require that much data? I always thought you wouldn't need to add or change more bytes than are in the output.

Also, git hashes aren't just based on source code. You can add that data anywhere that git uses to generate the hash.

flingo··on The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 (2013)
Step 1: Get 3 pigs. Step 2: Number them 1, 2, and 4. ...
flingo··on A Linux driver to connect PATA/IDE directly to GPIO
When I saw the title, I thought it was going this way.

Or, more specifically, a driver to turn an IDE port into GPIO pins that PC programs can control. Closing the gap on making a feature-complete Windows 95 arduino core.

flingo··on I'm Open Sourcing the Have I Been Pwned Code Base
A lot of the "breaches" added to the site are from unknown origins. Like, a large mixed collection sold online that somehow found it's way to Troy.

Last time I used HIBP, it told me what site the leak was from.

If your password shows up at all, you should change it wherever you use it.

flingo··on Terminating a Frozen SSH Session
See also: detaching from, or quitting a tmux/screen session.
flingo··on A crash course on hacking satellites
Why do you think that? Are you just guessing?
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