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half-kh-hackeron Ask HN: ActivityPub or Mastodon?

HTTP signatures ensure that you can't send a message and spoof the user/instance that it's coming from. Think of it like DKIM for AP.

They commonly include the specific actor who is interacting with the network (via the instance), so we can also achieve correct-side enforcement of blocks.

half-kh-hackeron Ask HN: ActivityPub or Mastodon?

It's not so simple.

In order to federate an object you must:

- send requests with proper 'HTTP Signatures' (many AP nodes have strict enforcement here)

- which requires you to have an actor with an attached signing pubkey

- so you have to host the LD-JSON actor descriptor on another endpoint

- actors MUST have an attached inbox & outbox, your receive endpoint will need to sit at your actor's inbox (on POST). both of these are OrderedCollections of Activities

- and in order to be properly interoperable you will probably need to maintain follow relations & write an endpoint which can ACK/NAK follows, etc etc

half-kh-hackeron Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?

You can transliterate English to Hangeul but you'll end up missing some sounds (e.g. you'll not be able to super easily get 'th' or 'f' or 'v' or 'z') because Korean doesn't use those

half-kh-hackeron IPv6 Only Cloud Server

Another thing to consider is that if you're torrenting you might already be going through a VPN so if you can get a v6 address to tunnel through you can get v4 traffic going through the VPN interface that way. I use WireGuard forwarding with v6-only boxes (they don't torrent, though)

half-kh-hackeron VRchat bans mods, embraces EAC

Aw. This is a real shame. Back when I played I liked dressing up in a little magician outfit and flying around / teleporting (the netcode takes the absolute position of the player from the client).

At the time the client was Unity + Mono (haven't checked if it still is) so you could just add a DLL with your own code that gets loaded, as well as ahead-of-time patching Assembly-CSharp to introduce your own hooks. Super simple & really mod friendly.

half-kh-hackeron Element (Matrix) adds video/voice rooms

This uses plain Matrix events to negotiate a Jitsi call: It's an Element feature.

half-kh-hackeron Windows 3.1 Flash Edition

> The Youths

for context: you've stumbled on the queer tech subculture of the fediverse; we're mostly in our 20s or teens

> sites on main page are outstanding

maia's is my favourite

half-kh-hackeron Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

As a jumping-off point for thought: Piracy-by-default would work very well in a world where access to a work is not charged, but the social custom is that revenue is collected via pre- or during-production crowdfunding

You may see lower revenues, but how much cost is currently poured into resolving licensing / investing in DRM / etc, all for works to be pirated anyway?

half-kh-hackeron OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

I think maybe this could be workable if an OpenBSD developer were to visit you in person to verify your existence and thereby transitively verify the existence of the claimed "visited airport".

half-kh-hackeron Git.io deprecation: Active links to be maintained in a read-only state

Can git.io links point to a server that's not controlled by GitHub though?

half-kh-hackeron You Win, Broken Database Schemas

So systems in these countries should just be built without any regard for foreign names?

There isn't really a working excuse for a broken schema.

Just have a blanket 'name' field.

The name someone wants to be called and their legal name isn't necessarily the same, either. If you're writing normal software, you shouldn't really care about these legal provisions. I guess you'd want a 'Billing Name' too in most cases.

half-kh-hackeron Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

I actually keep my nails pretty short (they're only about 1 or 2mm past the furthest-out part of my fingertip) for typing reasons!

My speed gets a lot worse if I let them grow out, so I like to file them down regularly (instead of clipping them occasionally) to keep them at a length I'm used to.

half-kh-hackeron Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

I like typing :)

Here's 163 wpm on a macbook keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ulK2VJdQpw

Here's 175 wpm on a custom mechanical keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO-A8rVJDOM

half-kh-hackeron Boston Dynamics’ Stretch robot can move 800 heavy boxes per hour

Fun fact! There was a fire at the Erith site too: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57883332

half-kh-hackeron Python, unlike C, has the mod operator always return a positive number

I assume n would be size(a)

half-kh-hackeron Python, unlike C, has the mod operator always return a positive number

The parent comment has brace-syntax as well as the square brackets.

I assume the braces are there for "I want to skip doing the wrapping"

half-kh-hackeron University Requiring Use of VPN

I go to Loughborough University and we have Anyconnect with Duo. I use OpenConnect for the VPN and I wrote a little Rust tool[1] to extract the HOTP secret and use FreeOTP to generate the codes [since Bitwarden seems to only have TOTP, not HOTP :/]

[1]: https://github.com/videogame-hacker/duo-hotp-export

half-kh-hackeron Saintcon: Lock Picking Lawyer Keynote

There is a video for modified Kwikset that he showed that's what is on his door, AFAICT.

half-kh-hackeron A bug that doesn’t exist on x86: Exploiting an ARM-only race condition

this slaps. I always see perfect blue a few places above us!

half-kh-hackeron Minecraft to add telemetry

On top of the JVM implementation potentially being faster, OpenGL drivers on Linux are sometimes better than their Windows counterparts; especially with the less modern OGL that Minecraft uses

half-kh-hackeron Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

I've seen, in other games, anti-cheats that spawn fake [player-specific] entities that if you attacked too much you would get hit with a ban.

half-kh-hackeron Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

Cheat dev here. Check out this prior art of someone utilizing PS4 jailbreak exploits to modify GTA V's scripting VM at runtime:

https://github.com/2much4u/PS4-GTA-V-Native-Caller

half-kh-hackeron Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

Another source engine cheat dev here. Source has had dormant entities at long ranges in culled-off areas [sectors of the map demarcated by func_areaportal] since... as long as I can remember.

Your cheat couldn't see those players because the server was doing a very cheap and primitive visibility calculation, deciding the player entities are dormant for you, and choosing to not send you the data for them.

This is different from the later-enabled player PVS system, which does more expensive ray casting once you get a certain distance away, which cut down on wallhack cheats a lot more [although they are still very useful]

half-kh-hackeron Knuth and Plass line-breaking Revisited

I'm excited for text-wrap: pretty; in CSS 4.

half-kh-hackeron Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

There's a lot of wisdom in those books, I really like 'em.

half-kh-hackeron Valve Steam Deck

In this context, 'mobile' does not mean 'phone', it means 'portable'.