Hacker News Reader

kabwjon Vulnerability in the Mac Zoom client allows malicious websites to enable camera

I guess he reported to Chrome first because that’s what everybody uses, found their answer (or lack of answer) unsatisfactory, and then went to report to Firefox.

kabwjon Is Ham Radio a Hobby, a Utility or Both? A Battle over Spectrum Heats Up

Given how many people hate cyclists, this might not be the best analogy.

kabwjon iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

iMessage activation sends an international sms to the uk. Which is pretty costly.

kabwjon iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

https://macreports.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/your-carri...

This shows up when you insert a sim that’s not activated with iMessage. Maybe it depends on your region. In my country you really have to pay because the activation process sends an sms message.

kabwjon iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

It costs money to activate it (or so says the pop up that appears when you set up an iPhone).

Also if I switch to Android I don’t have to worry about disabling iMessage before. (Not that anybody in my country would ever send an iMessage or an SMS though...)

kabwjon iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

Where I live nobody uses iMessage so this sounds like a good workaround :P (Yes yes I know it’s been patched already...)

kabwjon The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

Applications (and their toolkits) should be able to signal to Wayland whether they can handle DPI scaling or not, and if they can’t, Wayland should forcibly resize the windows (ie paint them bigger) like Windows does.

If something as basic as this doesn’t work...

kabwjon The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

Can Wayland currently handle several monitors with different DPI? And by “handle” I mean, being able to resize (blurry, I know) windows that are not DPI-aware transparently when I move them between monitors. What Windows has been able to do for years now.

kabwjon NYT reporter hides corporate ties of Sanders critics she highlights

Personally, I don’t find it that “the NYT has lied” could ever satisfy my intellectual curiosity”; if anything it’s business as usual.

kabwjon Nearly everyone who is new to Emacs hates it passionately (2014)

I’ve tried to use Emacs as an IDE for Python and Go but I find it hard to find a good tutorial on how to set it up on Windows.

Also, how do I reload the .emacs.d file without completely restarting Emacs?

kabwjon Myths about Perl 6

>I LOVED Perl.

5 exists and will always exist. :-)

kabwjon Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

I liked Twitter before it was popular. Being liberal with blocks works but eventually you realise you are spending more time curating your experience than actually enjoying the website.

kabwjon Aussie ISP gets eye-watering IPv4 bill, shifts to IPv6

Yes, I’m sure those iot devices will use infallible privacy extensions... Nah, they’ll probably expose their mac, which will make it trivial to scan for them.

Truth is, right now iot devices are protected by nat (your router) and maybe cgnat too (if your isp is good enough and provides that service). With ipv6 those devices will lie exposed to the wan. I hardly see how that’s an improvement.

Also don’t trust regular devices. Windows disabled privacy extensions because of a bug (not sure if it’s fixed already). https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/57... — I trust my router’s nat much more: it can’t be disabled because of a bug ;-)

kabwjon Aussie ISP gets eye-watering IPv4 bill, shifts to IPv6

Exactly. In many implementations I’ve seen the user’s MAC address ends up getting exposed to the WAN. I suppose this is the wet dream of Google, and that’s why they want to push ipv6 adoption.

kabwjon Partnering with publishers for a better journalism experience

I’ve looked at the list and literally all of them are leftist outlets. (Half of them belong to the Gizmodo family.) They are also all US-based.

There’s a clear bias and, honestly, trying to pretend it’s not there is doing a disservice.

Whether that’s because Scroll is not interested in serving right-wing customers or because right-wing outlets are not interested in participating in Scroll, that’s going to remain a mystery I guess.

kabwjon Partnering with publishers for a better journalism experience

The guy is obviously being facetious bringing up Daily Stormer, but I agree that it’s odd (or maybe not so much) that Mozilla only went with leftist outlets.

kabwjon Partnering with publishers for a better journalism experience

If you’re implying 99.99% of users of Firefox are leftists, you’ll have to prove it.

kabwjon Facebook’s image outage reveals how the company’s AI tags your photos

It’s funny how what purely is an accessibility feature done to help “differently advantaged folks” (how these journalists would say) is being turned against them by the media.

Reminds me how they are vilifying open APIs and explaining them as a way Facebook “gives away your data”.

kabwjon Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

Probably blob store, not just image store.

kabwjon How iOS 13 redraws your eyes so you're looking at the camera

This also happens with posts from Facebook often. People just want to show the world how virtuous they are by not having accounts in popular networks, so they don’t even click the link but complain they can’t read the content. Reminds me of this:

https://twitter.com/1990sLinuxUser/status/97350916902105089

kabwjon Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

Reminds me of https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32233

kabwjon Superhuman embeds tracking pixels in user emails

A proxy helps not to expose your IP and user agent which is good enough in most cases.

kabwjon Superhuman embeds tracking pixels in user emails

It’s a Commando 450.

kabwjon Superhuman embeds tracking pixels in user emails

Desktop email clients I know don’t load images by default, neither does gmail (well it does but it’s proxified) so this is quite literally not an issue

kabwjon Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

It’s fast on Safari mobile but very slow on Firefox desktop. Goes to show many things.

kabwjon 'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute

It’s the BBC, not much can be expected. I believe it’s simply a matter of looking at the source to know what quality of reporting you should expect and whether the headline might be clickbait or not.

Thank you for this comment, very educational.

kabwjon Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

Interesting, since I always have at least one terminal open, but opening an Electron app takes 5-10 seconds.

kabwjon Sarin Possibly Discovered in Package at Facebook Mailing Facility

Where does someone who thinks mailing Facebook sarin is a good idea get sarin from?

kabwjon Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

Page won’t stop refreshing on iOS Safari.

kabwjon Degraded performance on GitLab.com

Funny. Gitlab has always had terrible performance for me, both the website and the git server.