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gnyman

744 karma · joined September 1, 2011

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gnyman··on Speed Is the Killer Feature
If you have a iPhone without home button, go to settings, wallet & apple pay and uncheck doouble click side button

Now turn off the screen with the power button.

Notice the annoying delay when turning off the screen is gone? enjoy :-)

Of course you also don't have a way to invoke the wallet manually, but luckily if you put it near a payment terminal it will auto activate

Probably won't work if you're a heavy apple wallet user but if you use it only sporadically I personally think it's worth it, I found the delay very annoying when I switched to a homekeyless iphone

gnyman··on Griddy Is Shutting Down
Do you have any documentation or recommended reads for how and what you did? I've been thinking of doing something similar but wondering what parts make most sense to automate
gnyman··on Diablo II: Resurrected
If anyone is wondering what the original Diablo II battle.net experience looks like in 2020 (yep, it's apparently still working, hows that for legacy support?), Carbot recently did an episode on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYIyQMVzUnI

Also the Diablol 2 series does cause some flashbacks, especially the soundscape... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ru-UM1nYJQ&list=PL0QrZvg7QI...

gnyman··on Tell HN: A case of negative SEO I caught on my service and how I dealt with it
I had not heard about slowloris, thanks for the tip. I am always on the lookout for ways to make life harder for scrappers and scanners.

In this case though, to defeat scrapers maybe create some link which only the scraper sees and leave a "gzip-bomb"' like described here https://blog.haschek.at/2017/how-to-defend-your-website-with... and see how their scraper handle that :-)

Personally I just used a html-fuzzer to generate 5 MiB of junk html and named it wp-login.php :-) And a ssh-tarpit

gnyman··on Ask HN: Show me your half baked project
https://noscript.it/

A little hack I made to view websites with JavaScript disabled, mainly useful on iOS where there is no real noscript extension.

Useful to share links with JavaScript disabled. And as added bonus it bypasses a few paywalls or article-per-month limitations.

Still has bugs and issues with detecting when a site blocks rendering in iframes.

gnyman··on Show HN: NotAn.app
I like it. This is a well written argumentation on why not all webpages need to be Webapps. I'll save this for later.

One little nitpick or question, the page isn't very readable on my mobile (iOS), it's too wide and tiny text.

A quick check tells me you have not set a meta-viewport. I've found adding <Pre><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"></Pre> makes things work better for mobile most of the time.

gnyman··on Show HN: Noscript.it – browse and share links with JavaScript disabled
Hi everyone

I made this some time ago because provide a per link/site "noscript" on iOS.

I am not sure if this is useful to anyone else, or even if anyone else understands what it does. So I posted it here to see get see if I get some feedback.

I am specifically curious about

1. is it clear what the page does and why it's useful? 2. does anyone else think it's useful? 3. any suggestions to make things better?

The backstory is that I wanted "noscript" on Safari/iOS as I've found a lot of sites is simply nicer to visit without javascript. No popups, no GDPR consent screens, no ads etc.

The option of globally disabling javascript on Safari is not really realistic, so I was for some time thinking about solutions using content blockers, but never got that working.

Then I happened upon the sandbox feature of iframe's and decided to see if I could make it work. This is the result.

It's a hack and often breaks, but sometimes it's nice to be able to share a fast-loading version of some website which loads way too much javascript for little benefit.

gnyman··on Camouflaged Military Bunkers of Switzerland (2015)
I had the same thought, I even assumed there would be some international wartime law against it. But turns out it's apparently ok according to this study I found from US Naval College

> Conventional IHL (international humanitarian law), then, indicates that at least one form of disguising a military object as a civilian object—camouflage—is a permissible ruse of war, not a prohibited act of perfidy.

Page 521 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42550238.pdf

gnyman··on I Built My Own Shitty Static Site Generator
Like many other here I looked at a lot of options and ended up writing my own, because spending time finding the right solution (if it existed) was more effort than just doing it myself.

Inspired by https://github.com/giuseppeg/xm I ended up writing a absolutely minimal no-frills PHP snippet to turn the PHP file itself in to an html page.

https://github.com/gnyman/piss / https://blog.nyman.re/2020/10/11/introducing-piss-a.html

Doing it yourself is of course not an option for most people. But as the author and many other commenters here, programming is a hobby so the journey is as important as the destination.

gnyman··on Getting a biometric security key right
If you have a macbook with touchId you can use that as webauthn/u2f already with softu2f, I've been doing this for some time and it's really smooth, much prefer it to OTP.

Rough instructions here https://twitter.com/gnyman/status/1217797385184841734

gnyman··on Tasmota: Cloud-free open source smart home firmware for ESP8266 devices
Second the recommendation for esphome, especially if you are trying to do something a little smarter than just a remotely controlled switch. I started with tasmota for my little wastewater pump controller but I found it hard to get my simple if-this-then-that logic to work in tasmota. ESP home on the other hand allows you to write you own C/++ code if you want.
gnyman··on Check if your IP is exposing any ports. If you see 404 page, nothing is exposed
Yeah, It does not scan all ports, just a select thousand or so, and 51820 does not seem to be among them
gnyman··on What happened to Firefox Send?
Yeah for streaming transfers wormhole is great.

Also check out the the go port https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william (compatible with the original) and https://webwormhole.io/ (not compatible I think)

gnyman··on Level 3 Global Outage
This had me really confused until I saw it was a global outage. I have been getting delayed iOS push notifications (from prowl) now for the last few hours, from a device I was fairly sure I had disconnected 3 hours ago (a pump)

Got questioning if I really disconnected it before I left.

I'm wondering if we're at the point where internet outages should have some kind of (emergency) notification/sms sent to _everyone_.

gnyman··on Accurate N64 emulation gets resolution upscaling powered by Vulkan (RetroArch)
If you happen to have a old N64 lying around, or can find one to buy, there are also great options for getting it working with a new TV.

The RAD2X being a easy way to get started https://www.retrogamingcables.co.uk/RAD2X-CABLES In combination with refurbishing the original controllers with some new plastic https://store.kitsch-bent.com/product/n64-joystick-gears you and maybe a everdrive you can enjoy the original experience without too much work.

Still.. It can't increase the original resolution like this, this is just gorgeous... And so sharp

gnyman··on Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC
Chiming in with yet another alternative, I had success with https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william which is also Go, but is compatible with the original python wormhole.

I think the main difference is that webwormhole tries to use STUN/firewall hole punching to connect two nodes, while the original implementation will use a TCP-TCP relay as fallback.

I recently needed to transfer a 30 GiB file within a restricted network but the firewall blocked webwormhole, so I ended up with -williams instead.

Hopefully at some point all these project can converge into something that supports ALL the solutions :-)

gnyman··on Inkscape 1.0 Release Candidate
PSA, you can use Inkscape to edit text in (some) PDF's.

Just note (as it says when you import it) to use the internal importer as otherwise you won't have editable text.

Saved me a bunch of work already.

https://twitter.com/gnyman/status/1243103422313836544

gnyman··on Stop using Material Design text fields
Yes, I was unclear. I meant that I think it's coming back now. My feeling is (but it could be just colored memory) that for a long time people were happy with just changing the colors/borders/css of the standard components. Now I have the feeling people (or frameworks) code new <option> functionality from scratch in JS, thus making them look and function slightly differently on each site.
gnyman··on Stop using Material Design text fields
I'll join the choir with this example I came across a few weeks ago.

https://twitter.com/gnyman/status/1230424668970024961

Not sure if it's material design widgets being limited, a lazy Web dev or google intentionally making it hard to update your marketing settings.

I think I'm having flashbacks to the custom windows UI's/skins of the 1990's when SW devs and designers felt they needed to differentiate and replaced the standard windows components with their own designs.

gnyman··on MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
I am afraid I don't have better information on when but some anecdotal information about the state of it. I have done some limited testing and research for our own internal Root CA I got the impression it works nowadays.

I have not gotten as far as testing it in production but based on testing Safari and Chrome in https://nameconstraints.bettertls.com/ and creating our own name constrained cert and testing it with both OS X Curl and Linux Curl (OpenSSL) I am still of the impression it works.

Most other people seem to be sure that it does not though (for example in this discussion and here https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/95600/are-x-509...) so I am not sure if I missed something or if people are just not up to date.

gnyman··on Terminals Are Sexy
I'm not sure this is still the case or has been for some time. The maintainer of iTerm2 commented on it here https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/5922 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14800195.

Also recent versions include a metal renderer[3] (not sure if it's enabled by default) which might be even faster, I have been running it for some time but have not noticed much difference.

Another reason why it might be hard to notice is also because when one is using ssh you anyways have the network latency so might be one is simply trained not to react to latency in terminals as much.

[3] https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/wikis/Metal-Renderer

gnyman··on iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages
Did you try running the hardware test? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257

I had a old Air which ran very slowly and fans spinning like crazy due to a issue with the cable from the keyboard/touchpad. Apparently if the SMC does not get proper signals it will go into a "failsafe" where things work but slowly.

Probably not the same issue, but just a little anecdote on a similar symptoms caused by different issues so that nobody gets tunnel vision on the battery, which might very well be the cause in this case.

gnyman··on An open source re-implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2
Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed it. Especially the later parts. Looking at your GH it looks like it lost some steam? Did you continue on it and if so did it produce anything "surprising"? As in, this should not really be a good coaster but it has great score :-)
gnyman··on Accidentally Stopping a Global Cyber Attack
As with all SW development, there are always a lot of things that they "could have" or "should have" but every day you wait with malware which has a know patch out means less spread for you. So they probably made the decision to just get it out as quickly as possible even if it was not perfect.
gnyman··on Accidentally Stopping a Global Cyber Attack
Yeah, I guess in his experience that scenario is less likely tan it being a c2 endpoint so he made the decision on that. And it turned out to be the correct one and might have prevented this from becoming a much more destructive blaster worm.
gnyman··on Datadog introduces anomaly detection
OP here, apologies if this is not suitable for HN. I posted this not as much for highlighting the fact that datadog does this. But rather in the hopes that there might some discussion about alternative approaches and maybe some critique.

So from the look of this, this is something I have been trying to find for some time. I guess only way to tell if it's as good as it seems is to try it. If anyone else knows any alternatives for doing anomaly detection in stats, open source or other services it would be great if you could share it here.

gnyman··on OVH to establish North American headquarters and first U.S. data center
I believe this is due to them being a French entity and the French laws or banking systems requiring this. But I could be wrong, I'm basing it on the fact that Gandi had the same thing unit they created a US Entity which could do the billing. I'm guessing this is not far away for OVH either now.
gnyman··on The ESP32 has been released
Anyone have a good idea on how it compared to for example the CHIP? (https://getchip.com/pages/chip). I saw the announcement for ESP32 a few days ago but it looks like it's around $7 for one which to me seemed expensive compared to $9 for the CHIP.

From my quick scanning, power peaks seems to be lower but if somebody with better knowledge of these things can chip in that would be appreciated.

Mainly wondering if I should add these ESP32 to my collection or not (as I already have 2 CHIP:s and a few ESP8266) :-)

gnyman··on Colorized man pages
For people on OS X I recommend checking out Bwana https://www.bruji.com/bwana/ ,it's not the same thing, it's man pages in your browser but in combination with Alfred (or similar) and/or a terminal plugin it's great. I find it much faster to skim man pages with bwana.

Main issue is of course that this shows man pages for OS X, which is usually similar but not identical to the ones on your favourite distro.

gnyman··on Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction
The link is dead but vice motherboard has a good overview for I think and the full text is posted further down also http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hackers-hack-nsa-linked-equ...
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