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Only the author knows about his motives.

Your point seems to be that the author should not have written the blog post and done a PR instead.

My point is that whatever the authors motives are and whether he did a PR or not, his blogpost was informative to me and has value on its own.

pingecon Getting forked by Microsoft

You could open the PR and it would also be faster than writing all these comments here about opening a PR.

That's not the point, it is not the author's duty to do that and him pointing out Microsoft's wrongdoing is meaningful at least to me because I will be more cautious if I'm ever being approached in a similar way.

pingecon Pixel 9a: The latest A-series phone with Google AI smarts at an unbeatable value

I recently switched from 4a to 8a because google killed 4a's battery with a recent os update. Other than 8a being bigger and heavier I don't notice much difference and I think 9a is going to be the same story.

pingecon We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

The idea of client-side "cookies" existed even before CS:GO. I remember in CS:S the server was able to change game variables set on the client. I wrote a script for a CS:S server that would fingerprint a cheater by setting an obscure game variable to a unique value and so being able to identify the player through that even if they had a different steam id and ip. It seemed to work well for a long time for getting rid of the most common cheaters but of course the most commited and capable ones with RE skills will always be ahead of the game.

pingecon In This Beautiful Library, Bats Guard the Books

Where do they poop?

pingecon What You Get After Running an SSH Honeypot for 30 Days

A bit tangential but is there a service or self hosted solution that would take a list of IPs and then keep scanning them periodically and alert me if any new ports have suddenly open?

pingecon Running a Raspberry Pi with a read-only root filesystem

Few years ago I used this script and the r.pi is still running fine. https://gitlab.com/larsfp/rpi-readonly

pingecon OpenIPC is an alternative open firmware for your IP camera

To me this seems to be for cameras what OpenWrt is for routers?

I've found web ui screenshots here: https://openipc.org/web-interface

pingecon Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 Is Deceitful and Threatening (2021)

I use it to watch youtube, because youtube on FF causes way higher cpu load and battery drain on my windows laptop.

pingecon Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

FF is great, only two things left I go to Chrome for are DevTools and watching Youtube (lower cpu usage, lower battery drain).

pingecon Air France denied my delay compensation, so I challenged them and won

I wish there was a huge decision tree covering all possible scenarios for flight delay/cancellation, it is very hard to know exactly whwt to do in such cases.

pingecon De-Stressing Booking.com (2019)

Carlton City Hotel Singapore, I arrived there in the middle of the night with a printout from booking.com of my (already-paid-for) reservation.

The staff said they don't have my reservation, told them to check booking.com, they replied they do not have access to booking.com, a third party manages that for them which was unavailable at night. In that moment I realized I was putting way too much trust in that website. I was able to pay for a new reservation and later got the booking.com payment refunded. Luckily the hotel was not fully booked...

pingecon Tell HN: Instagram demands I send a picture of myself to prove I own my account

Similar story here. Some years old IG account, logging in maybe once per month. One day few months ago instagram decided to deactivate my account and wanted my selfie to get it back. I never really used the platform so I'll just stay without.

pingecon Statement from Roman Abramovich

I've found this article interesting https://www.salon.com/2022/02/26/the-ukraine-and-how-we-got-...

pingecon 13 years sailing around the world

How does one get started? How does one get the necessary experience without taking unnecessary risks?

pingecon Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

Is there a way to seamlessly migrate current email address to another email provider and what steps can be taken so that it will be even easier to switch provider next time?

pingecon Ikea Vindriktning Air Quality Sensor Review and Accuracy

Are there any air quality devices that work well outdoors in all kind of weather?

pingecon The machine that saved Moore's Law

Can anyone explain what role does ASML play in TSMC's advantage over other fabs? Let's say TSMC and other fabs can all source same equipment from ASML, what else exactly does TSMC do better than the others?

pingecon Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

I am super scared of accidentally exposing a port to the internet. Is there a service / tool that I could provide with a list of all my public IP machines and it would keep port scanning them periodically, sending me a report of all open ports by email each month and sending me an email each time a new port becomes open to the public internet?

pingecon Microsoft Authenticator Chrome Extention is not from MS and is phishing

I was able to learn how to use containers quite quickly and some container addons make it very easy to use them. Not so much for profiles, setting up multiple profiles seems very tiresome and honestly whenever I look up how to create multiple profiles I lose interest. Would really love a solution that is as easy to manage and use as containers and allows to control which addons are allowed to load/run.

Edit: Also IIRC multiple profiles cannot be synced across devices through the same firefox account while it is possible with containers

pingecon Microsoft Authenticator Chrome Extention is not from MS and is phishing

Slightly offtopic but I think the problem of rogue addons applies to firefox as well. I wish it were possible in firefox to limit which addons can be loaded on a per-container basis. The extensions I want loaded on banking websites, social media and youtube are completely different. And limiting them per-container makes it a relatively simple mental model to reason about.

pingecon China lands rover on Mars

It's impressive how far China has come in just 2 decades. How significant is this achievement space technology wise? I still remember the first rover on Mars and it was a really big deal in my eyes back then.

pingecon Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

Interesting, do you have a link?

pingecon No ID, no vaccines for Indonesia’s invisible people

One strange thing (to me) about Indonesian ID cards is that they have a compulsory field "Religion" where one must choose one of six possible religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. If one is without religion or follows another religion he must still pick one of those 6.

Another strange thing (to me) is the complex dependency between institutions. In order to be able to apply for various things like documents, benefits, scholarship, school admission etc. one needs approval from head of family then head of the village, then letter from the police and so on. Be on bad terms with any of these (individuals) and some government services are unavailable to you. I heard a story from and Indonesian about how he could not go to university because the head of the village didn't want to give him the letter that he needed to apply to university.

Also marriage between members of different religions is not possible. So one person must convert to the other's religion before they can be married.

pingecon uBlock Origin works best on Firefox

Try on youtube, it loads ads on chrome startup that ublock usually blocks.

pingecon PayPal launches crypto checkout service

Are there any alternatives to bitpay?

pingecon PayPal launches crypto checkout service

Can I transfer Cryptocurrency into and out of PayPal? Currently, you can only hold the Cryptocurrency that you buy on PayPal in your account. Additionally, the Cryptocurrency in your account cannot be transferred to other accounts on or off PayPal.

https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/cryptocurrency-o...

pingecon Open Source Media Service CCTV/Video Recording/Object Detection

I feel like there is a lack of solutions in this area. I messed with Zoneminder a few years ago and I never want to touch it again. What I would like to have is a low-maintenance setup in a docker container that I can throw on a VPS or raspberry pi, run it, set a username/password, point my dad to the web interface where he can configure anything he wants and I never have to deal with it again.

pingecon How to revert HP printer’s ban on 3rd-party ink cartridges

I have an OKI C301dn.

What I like:

- Build quality and the low price, the thing is huge and weighs 22kg and I paid only 100 EUR for a new one

- Availability of cheap third party toner cartridges

What I do not like:

- Every toner cartridge must include a circuit board that needs to be replaced together with the cartridge. This increases toner cart replacement price by ~4 EUR

- Third party toner quality varies a lot even from the same seller it's hard to find a cheap supplier with constantly good quality

- After 7 years and about 3k pages printed, a white vertical line / streak started to show up on the printed pages

Based on recommendations here I guess my next printer will be from Brother.

pingecon How to revert HP printer’s ban on 3rd-party ink cartridges

Are there any online resources on what is the most reliable and cheap printer to use long term? I'm thinking a BW or Color laser printer where the parts last a long time and accept cheap third party toner cartridges?