jeroenhd

I have to give it to the vibe coding industry, I didn't think one could reinvent the wheel quicker and more often than frontend JavaScript programmers, but they're pulling it off!

I can't really tell why you would need to support the newer spec. It's mentioned that old stuff will work for at least a year after the new spec has been released, but I'm not so clear on what exactly will break. Is there some kind of phase out plan that the AI players have agreed upon for protocol versions will support for how long? Who is making these promises?

More importantly, I see a whole bunch of changes in headers and routing and whatnot on the MCP side itself, but I'm not really seeing what the advantages of the new spec are to either LLM users or MCP server resellers. Why consider upgrading in the first place?

Interesting, what makes you think that? A quick scan through the text didn't highlight any of the usual slop marks that stand out to me.

The people who want privacy and the people you want to block are using the same services and techniques. That's why web firewalls block privacy focused browsers, why TOR exit nodes are blocked from bald the internet, why email providers block new domains, and why sign-up forms block burners ("aliases" as you might also call them).

You can accept privacy enhancing measures but doing so hurts your ability to filter spam and other abuse.

I use these burner email services all the time because nobody on the internet can be trusted. Especially not the ones that try to lure you in and pop up an email registration box at the very last minute.

I can't say I share your hatred. It's my go-to management interface for VMs like this. Especially because it allows managing a remote libvirt install over SSH, handling things like forwarding the screen and input for you.

If you don't want to pick an OS preset, you can always just go for "manual install" and a "generic" OS and pick your own preferred configuration later. Or you paste the URL for an online install directory, which is even easier.

To manage libvirt machine without root, you can add your user to the libvirt group.

Full title: "Commission preliminarily finds the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook in breach of the Digital Services Act"

Edit: for some reason, the URL has been changed. The page I tried to post is here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...

Node and (probably by extension) Electron infuriate me with their custom requirements.

Several Rust libraries also tend to default to a predefined set of certificates (which makes sense for libraries supposed to run on bare metal as there are no system certificates there, but that's not really a problem on most Linux installs). I make it a point to always use the native OS roots in the code I write, but unfortunately that's not universal.

Having to bind-mount certificates inside of docker containers is also always an annoyance I forget about until I see the first TLS errors in the logs, but that's by design and probably a good thing.

Using wildcard certs and/or a central reverse proxy defeats the purpose of internal TLS.

Split-horizon DNS for a publicly usable domain is almost always a bad idea, but running your own ACME server is pretty easy (maybe 10 lines of Caddy config) and using an internal domain (an actual one, not a randomly picked TLD you don't think exists yet) solves the problem pretty easily. You'll want a safe backup for your root certificate private key, of course, but that's pretty much all you need to really worry about.

> But to me TPMs are still mostly a black boxes that prevent me from installing Linux unless I disable secure boot.

Then I think you misunderstand what TPMs are. Secure boot works without TPMs and TPMs are usuable without secure boot. I have secure boot disabled on my laptop (until I have time to figure out how to generate my own keys reliably) but store my SSH keys on the TPM. You can also set up secure boot without ever initializing the TPM.

As for the documentation, the entire interface and the operations it can perform are well-documented: https://trustedcomputinggroup.org/resource/tpm-library-speci... Every command, response, and the logic behind the operation are written out. There's no need to write your own TPM driver, of course; software like https://tpm2-software.github.io/ makes the entire process quite easy. The project even has bash scripts explaining how to do things like storing secrets in the TPM using.

The TPM itself can do multiple things (storing secrets with or without a password ("PIN"), applying brute-force protection, using "measurements" submitted by the OS and firmware as a requirement for unlocking secrets, doing cryptographic operations, random number generation) but most often it's just used to store a key and then keep it locked away from the rest of the computer until you've proven that you're the user/OS that has put the key in there. Combine that with something like disk encryption, or managing a certificate, and you've got a way to protect against even some kernel-level malware.

The user is choosing to use apps that do remote attestation against the user's will. You can live a perfectly normal life without apps. It's quite annoying that I can't watch full-quality Netflix or use Google Pay on my rooted smartphone, but I'll survive.

TPM's, just like Secure Boot for that matter, can be an amazing security boon if used right. The APIs have been there for ages but only companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have started using them because every time someone from the open source community suggests using these technologies you get flooded with people raging on forums about how big tech is coming to subdue us and eat our babies.

You can use this technology to verify that nobody has inserted a Microsoft bootloader into your boot process, or to ensure that only your GrapheneOS smartphone is able to connect to your WiFi. You can make it so border control guards/airport security cannot dump your hard drive and connect to your VPN. The same technology that allows Microsoft to lock down employee laptops can be used to lock out the people that want to threaten your freedom.

> Unless there are exploits..

Everything with a computer in it is unusable if you accept "there may be exploits" as a counterargument. You cannot trust Signal's encryption because there may be exploits. You cannot trust your doctor's heart rate monitor because there may be exploits. You cannot trust your car's speedometer because there may be exploits. You cannot trust your browser to read HN, because there may be exploits.

The sad thing is that for many of these examples, people got a better deal out of it.

The HP printer ink subscription makes a lot of sense if you print a certain number of pages each year. Many consumers who only print occasionally are better off with cheap subscriptions for getting their money's worth, even if from an environmental point of view the cartridge DRM is absolute bullcrap.

Adobe switching from making people pay thousands and charging them again for updates was a lot more expensive than the ridiculous yearly subscription they charge (per month, to keep the advertised price down, surprising people who thought they could cancel after a few months).

IE6 was awful at replicating what other browsers did, but it introduced a lot of features that reshaped the web. The XmlHttpRequest that moved the web from static pages to basic interactivity was a Microsoft invention.

Many if these cases didn't work out of course, but for many business decisions that cause outrage on the internet, it's worth reconsidering the options on offer after the outrage has died down. Unpopular decisions aren't often the unbridled conspiratory evil that the internet would like you to believe.

First time I'm reading about this, I'm glad there's progress in this area.

The JSON DSL for rewriting emails feels like a spammer/exploit vector waiting to happen. Some product is going to spam filter before applying reconstruction rules, or get tricked into applying reconstruction rules when it shouldn't, and spammers and scammer are going to abuse it.

Until either Google or Microsoft will adopt these standards, they'll remain effectively meaningless most likely. But even so, it's good to know people haven't given up on fixing email's spam problem entirely.

I'm living a glorious Outlook-free life at work. I'm glad that I don't need any of that crap. Maybe Slack is right to push people away from the Microsoft shitware that businesses stick to.

Checked on my phone, Chrome+Firefox work, WebKit (through wpe-android) doesn't. Safari and WebKit can't render this font for some reason, I suppose.

It looks like Safari doesn't render this correctly (checked on macOS). Works fine in Chrome and Firefox, though. Must be a Safari quirk of some kind.

> I asked them why they moved here and they answered me straight to my face "Because in Germany there are too many immigrants".

This reminds me of those UK elderly living out their pensions in Spain voting for Brexit to reduce immigration. Thanks to outrage media, I think this public perception of immigration ruining everything is almost everywhere now.

If you speak English and live in an area where most others speak English, then it's not hard to get by without learning the local language. People who do that often find it difficult to make friends outside of expat circles who do the same, but it's perfectly possible to live like that.

Now that manufacturers support their devices for 5+ years and ROMs are actually quite usable out of the box, the need for custom ROMs is much lower. Plus, some convenience apps require things like remote attestation, getting in the way of users. I suspect a significant chunk of the serious ROM user base is also lost to GrapheneOS these days.

Even Samsung is fine with a quick debloating session you can do through WebUSB these days. The only phones I'd really need a custom ROM on these days are those certain Chinese brands that stuff their phone with absolute garbage. Compared to the days where a custom ROM would be faster and updates would end after half a year, if they happened at all, I barely have a reason to use a custom ROM these days.

Note that these are the statistics coming from people who are willing to share statistics. Quite a few privacy-minded individuals use these ROMs but don't want to send telemetry, which means those installs don't make it into the statistics.

The large amount of Waydroid and Switch installs surprised me a little, but overall this is about what I expected in terms of distribution.

Dutch (and Dutch-bound) rail network overview: https://treinposities.nl/ And the equivalent for buses: https://busposities.nl/ Not all of them have GPS trackers, so some positions are guessed.

There's functionality for this in the official Dutch Railways app, but it looks like they didn't bother putting that onto their website. There is a common source of open data for most of these details, but I don't find the docs to be very complete.

I don't think they need to ship the cartridges themselves. Customers can just go to any store selling printer ink and get the cartridges. It's a bit steep to also need to buy the money-making product HP wants to earn on, but you can just refill them with cheap ink when they're empty so it's not as big an issue in the long term.

HP could stop selling ink cartridges to stores, but they'd be shooting themselves in the foot as well.

Printheads are nanotechnology with extreme precision requirements. The rest of the printer is a few well-timed stepper motors, simple in comparison. HP cartridges including the printheads will take a lot of complexity away from the open design.

In theory you could probably modify one of these by grabbing an HP cartridge and slapping an ink tank on top with the right sponge for transferring the ink over. Selling parts from HP printer cartridges might creep a little too close to HP's patent lawyers, though, and having users open cartridges to extract the print heads themselves sounds like a messy solution that would reduce the appeal.

I'm sure that given time, someone will 3D print an ink tank holder that will let you use cheap ink supplies through the expensive HP cartridges.

> Then Microsoft added a green start button and dark blue backgrounds and packaged Win2k for home users as Windows XP.

XP contained a lot more than just theme changes. XP solved a lot of compatibility issues that Win2k still had at the time. Running 2000 applications on XP would be nearly guaranteed to work, but Microsoft needed to also get Windows Me/98/95 games and applications to run for consumers.

XP brought a few general improvements such as ClearType and the ability to revert driver updates (which Windows users are still unable to find these days, leading to the "I have to uninstall updates every week or my weird USB keyboard breaks" rants online).

Everything Windows 2000 did good, XP did as good or better. The biggest difference was the UI, but the "classic" theme stuck around until at least Windows 7.

You can run KiCad just fine on Wayland because XWayland was built for applications like these. The big issues that KiCad can't fix are encountered when running it on Wayland without compatibility tooling.

With the oldschool way KiCad was designed, I don't think they'll ever be natively compatible with Wayland, but thankfully they don't have to.

Sort of, if the EU were a country. But the council doesn't consist of separate senators to determine the weight of the vote. And there's also the Commission and Parliament, which are closer to the American government structure as it stands now. The three bodies have different procedures or different decisions and law making processes.

But generally, the council represents the governments currently ruling the EU member states. A council of member states pushing for laws the comission opposes makes for a very interesting but confusing situation, where the EU is opposed to this legislation but the individual member states are not.

> Why didn’t the DMARC spec say that a domain is “not present” if it lacks MX records?

MX implies a domain can receive email, you don't need it to send email. A setup where company.example sends email from companymailings.example but sets a reply-to for support@company.example is perfectly valid (even if it's stupid and confusing). Plus there's that weird legacy behaviour of mail servers delivering to port 25 to the IP in the A record if MX records are missing.

> "But why are those providers returning incorrect data?"

In this case, because they decided actually implementing the protocol they were supposed to be implementing didn't work for their hacky design, so they hacked together a series of Good Enough workarounds.

These cloud companies are the Microsoft Internet Explorer of DNS service but unlike IE6 they're considered cool enough that they're tolerated.

Investors chasing the ideal of not having to employ any people while still making money somehow. And, of course, being the company to provide all the AI; in a gold rush, don't dig for gold, start selling buckets.

Apple's profit margins on many services are at 76% (according to Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/01/13/apples-de...), over twice that of their hardware sales. Margins are higher on reselling licensed content (their Spotify and Netflix alternatives), but their customer base for those is still rapidly growing according to their 2025 report.

Tim Cook said it himself: Apple is not a hardware company (https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-hard...).

Revenue wise, the services part is not that large. Profit-wise, though, I don't believe the same is true. Their 30% cut is barely costing them anything compared to manufacturing hardware and physical logistics.

I don't think the Mac App Store is going to get to iPhone levels of lock-down soon, but Apple thinks in ecosystems, not just in laptops. If you have an iMac, you probably have an iPhone, and you're probably going to buy an iPad should you ever want a tablet.

If they wanted, they could open source all of the drivers necessary to boot an OS as part of their Darwin core, but they choose not to. That actually breaks with their older, more open development style. I guess they just don't see the benefit of being open any longer.

Linux applications are being sold. In fact, GPL-licensed applications get sold, so it's not even the OSS part that's holding you back. ElementaryOS even has its optionally-paid app store: https://appcenter.elementary.io/ Autodesk and other industrial software providers are quite happy to sell you software, though unfortunately not through a unified app store.

In practice, I expect a paid Linux app store to go down about as well as the Microsoft Store has. Especially now, in the age of vibecoding.