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magnaton QuestPDF: Modern .NET library for PDF document generation

For a proper page numbering, consistent word wrapping, pixel-perfect font rendering and document outline support.

Not if you brought your cellphone on the trip. Or used a car that has a built-in SIM card and cellular modem. Or you bought that laptop from a supplier that registers all MAC addresses of sold devices. Or that laptop had Computrace or some other firmware-based anti-theft mechanism.

magnaton The evolution of Unix facilities and architecture (2017)

> when power drops, and the voltage levels on the power rails start drooping, DRAM tends to go insane and starts returning garbage long before the DMA engine and the hard drive stops functioning

That doesn't sound right. DRAM can keep its content for a few seconds without power - it's what make Cold boot attacks [1] possible. Also, DRAM has its own buck voltage regulators, usually with hefty inductors, capable of delivering power long after +5V and +12V started to drop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack

magnaton We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion

And how that's different from gzip or base64, which can re-create original image when given appropriate input?

magnaton Arecibo telescope won’t be rebuilt

It could transmit at 22 TW EIRP, a feature quite rare in smaller arrays.

magnaton Gray386Linux – Linux for 386 Machines

> Currently, it's not possible to run gray386linux on i486 machines (but it's possible to run gray386linux on Cyrix 486DLC and similar CPUs)

What's the cause? Incompatible/missing peripheral or some breaking changes in instruction set?

magnaton A sane SSH(1) key management example

> Not a big deal at all considering that they're public keys, there's no security concern there.

I might be pushing the analogy too far, but: all the URLs I have visited are public and are not identifying me personally, yet uploading them all together to a third party feels like a breach of privacy.

magnaton A sane SSH(1) key management example

> Did you know that ssh sends all your public keys to any server it tries to authenticate to?

Never really thought about it. Feels kind of "leaky", even if necessary.

magnaton Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

After doing the same since 2003, out of ~200 email addresses used 18 are listed on HIBP, ~15 receive dozens of spam emails a day (or rather: would receive if I hadn't completely blocked them) and ~10 see almost non-stop login attempts from all around the world via IMAP and SMTP.

Address linked with "mailto:" on a contact page had to be blocked after a few years. Same with WHOIS addresses (published before there were sane privacy rules for those). Address with "@" and "." replaced with "at" and "dot" receive no spam at all.

Summed up, there are a few hundred inbound messages a day. Spamassassin and some basic postfix rules filters almost all of them. One or two a month get through.

magnaton Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

> These changes were accompanied by reduced EEG power in the theta band, together with preserved levels of Lempel-Ziv broadband signal complexity.

Sounds more like a specs of a DSL modem than a psychiatry paper. I certainly didn't expect to see Lempel-Ziv mentioned in a context other than compression.

magnaton Generating true random numbers from bananas

The whole contraption should be shielded from the environment, otherwise its output could be easily influenced by an outside adversary pointing X-ray gun at it.

magnaton Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

small issue = whole datacenter burned down

magnaton Star Labs StarLite Mk IV – 11" Linux laptop with Coreboot

I have been using one of those for a year or so (Dell Latitude 3190, 4GB, Debian 11), mostly for web and remote access.

Firefox with uBlock and NoScript runs OK, not much difference between this and a proper PC. YouTube on 1080p60 maxxes out all cores, but yt-dlp+vlc barely touches 20% CPU. Similar results with Twitch. Remmina/RDP to a proper workstation works flawlessly. Overall performance when browsing feels much more responsive than Atom Z3735F or RPI3. VSCode is workable, but not ideal. Virtualization (QEMU) is for decorative purposes only.

Battery usually lasts 10-12h, with 4W power draw when idle and 10W at 100% CPU. No thermal throttling so far.

magnaton Firefox Addons Unable to Update, Undisclosed AMO Issues

NTP is commonly used for DDoS amplitication.

magnaton Why printers add secret tracking dots (2020)

Blizzard watermarks screenshots produced by World of Warcraft find and track users of emulated servers by embedding user account info and server IP all across the image.

https://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-...

magnaton BTC Hashrate dropped another 27% down ~62% form peak now at 2019 levels

Ethereum hashrate dropped by 20% in last month, too.

magnaton Introducing Windows 11

No mentions about privacy, more bundled in apps, more "AI", more cloud connectivity. I don't know what I even expected.

magnaton DJI FPV

> Low res analog video -> high res digital video

Major benefit of analog video is a progressive degradation of quality as a signal gets weaker and almost instant reacquisition after a complete dropout. I'm curious to see how DJI competes with that on a digital video.

> ~5 minutes fly time -> ~20 minutes fly time

For FPV racing that's rather a downgrade. Ideally you'd like to land with almost empty battery right after finishing the course. Any leftover charge is a dead weight that only slows you down. But then again - I don't think this drone will be used in competitive FPV racing.

magnaton Fedora and Fallback DNS Servers

Why wouldn't automatically starting a simple local recursive resolver be a better fallback than consuming a public one?

magnaton Distributed search engines using BitTorrent and SQLite

Opening and querying untrusted SQLite database can lead to (remote) code execution. Original research at https://research.checkpoint.com/2019/select-code_execution-f...

magnaton The Secret Apple M1 Coprocessor

> A team at IBM eventually figured out that with a well crafted dance of instructions this could be achieved by taking advantage of specific quirks within the chip.

Details are described at [1], tl;dr:

- store register values in RAM

- set magic value in CMOS

- cause triple fault to reset CPU

- BIOS sees magic value and instead of resetting rest of the system, it resumes from your stored state in real mode

So it's more like a BIOS quirk. A20 gate backward compatibility on the other hand ...

[1] - http://rcollins.org/articles/pmbasics/tspec_a1_doc.html

magnaton Microsoft's latest Windows 10 updates come with nasty printer bugs

When I still used it ~5 years ago, there were additional conditions on Action Pack licenses. AFAIR your company had to generate 80% of income from software development or similar services to be eligible and licenses were for internal use only.

After ending the subscription there was a one year grace period to either obtain new license, renew subscription or remove the software. In BizSpark you got to keep the licenses, apart from MSDN subscription of course.

magnaton Microsoft's latest Windows 10 updates come with nasty printer bugs

Until recently there was a free Bizspark program which granted you five MSDN subscription for two years. Apart from that, there is a Action Pack which comes with (among others) three MSDN subscriptions and ten Windows 10 Enterprise licenses for 500 USD/yr.

magnaton Microsoft unveils full Xbox Series X specs with 1TB expansion cards

Serious question: what's the reasoning behind naming scheme of Xboxes? Only serious, non-ranting explanation I've found [1] is that they're rebranding it back to just "Xbox", which somehow makes even less sense.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/microsoft-only-using-xbox-...

magnaton Hard Drive Stats for 2019

Does anyone remember what is their definition of "drive failure"? Is it SMART "failure imminent" report, single uncorrectable read error or complete data loss for a whole disk? I recall reading about it in one of their previous report, but can't find it again.

EDIT: nevermind, found it.

"Backblaze counts a drive as failed when it is removed from a Storage Pod and replaced because it has 1) totally stopped working, or 2) because it has shown evidence of failing soon.

A drive is considered to have stopped working when the drive appears physically dead (e.g. won’t power up), doesn’t respond to console commands or the RAID system tells us that the drive can’t be read or written."

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/

magnaton Ask HN: What are some example of low tech improving your life?

Nokia 225. Three weeks on one charge.

magnaton Ask HN: What are some example of low tech improving your life?

Switching back to dumbphone. It turns out whole economy didn't crash when I read and replied to emails next day and I didn't die of boredom during 30 min commute.

magnaton A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

Here's the transaction: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/6b7308c0ce185810a...

magnaton Microsoft urged: Open-source Windows 7 to 'undo past wrongs'

They did release Windows 2003 SP1 kernel source (named as "Windows Research Kernel") long time ago, along with re-licensing it for research use only. Not the whole OS and still not an open source, though.