possiblelion

long story short, exited my defencetech startup a few days ago. what to do next? well this crazy project started as an AI benchmark over a few beers celebrating the exit; and to never-ending awe it.... just works :)

just a fun hobby project to learn webrtc and p2p networking:

loads a real goldsrc .bsp map file (the same format half-life and cs 1.6 used), parses it in javascript, rebuilds the geometry for webgl with three.js, and runs a from-scratch reimplementation of valve's player movement so the surf feels right. multiplayer is peer to peer over webrtc with no game server.

it uses trystero, which does webrtc peer to peer and uses public relays only to introduce peers to each other, no game server in the middle. everyone in the same room name shares a session, broadcasts their position about 20 times a second, and you see each other surf.

SensusQ from Estonia does pretty much this, but is sovereign and data is held by the end-users, not sent to the US (or anywhere else) www.sensusq.com

AskUCP – UCP protocol explorer showing all products on Shopify (https://askucp.com/)

On January 11th, Google and Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (ucp.dev). It's an open standard that lets any application query products across e-commerce platforms without needing APIs, integrations, or middlemen. AskUCP is one of the first applications built on it.

Right now, if you want to buy something online, you have to know which store sells it. You go to Amazon, or you go to a Shopify store, or you go to Etsy. Each one has its own search, its own interface, its own checkout. The experience is fragmented because the infrastructure is siloed.

UCP changes this at the protocol level. If products are described in a standard format, any application can discover them. You don't need permission from each platform. You don't need to build integrations. Anybody or any AI agent just querys the protocol.

AskUCP is designed to be a single pane of glass into online commerce. You search once, and you see products from across the ecosystem. Currently, that means the entire Shopify catalog. As more platforms adopt UCP, their products become explorable too. Eventually, it should be everything.

This is a proof of concept. It's early, and there are rough edges. Let me know what you think, refinements, ideas etc etc.

Hi HN, I built this because I got tired of fighting with Safaricom's Daraja API.

If you've ever tried to accept M-Pesa payments in East Africa, you know the pain: XML callbacks, rotating OAuth tokens, undocumented error codes, etc.

M-Pesa processes over $300B annually. It's how 50+ million people in Kenya pay for everything from groceries to rent. But integrating it into your app? That's a different story. Most developers spend weeks on what should take hours.

Micropay is essentially what Stripe did for credit cards, but for mobile money.

Hey, happy to chat more. Ping me at erik@100toolkit.com

That's super cool, especially digging the openship UI! AskUCP started as an experiment as well. Let's see where the world takes us in terms of standards and open/closed/hybrid architectures.

100toolkit.com

I'm currently Chief Strategy Officer at a defence-tech startup. Doing some small angel tickets as well :)

Interesting, hope that these discoveries can be used to fight those amoeba's which cause infections as well!

pretty damn cool. tested it with some still frames from movies and pinterest boards and it found most of the things.

After 10 years in defense tech, watching missile attacks in Ukraine and the Middle East made it clear how little most people really get about air defense. So I'm building this simulator which drops you into the operator’s seat. You can test out different scenarios and build an air defense network against various types of threats (stats from real world). Also have Ukraine, Israel-Iran scenarios. https://airdefense.dev/

I also wrote a longer technical post on the maths behind it: https://medium.com/p/292c755a6ceb.

super interesting. the early days of military networks always fascinate me, especially the legacy holdovers like .arpa

Author here. This was a personal project to understand modern air defense that got a bit out of hand. I wanted to see what was possible using only open-source data and a web browser.

Happy to answer any questions about the tech stack or the simulation logic. The campaign mode has some interesting scenarios if you want to give it a try.

That's a very valid question! I've based everything on strictly datasheets or datapoints from open sources to be clear on those counts.

After 10 years in defense tech, watching missile attacks in Ukraine and the Middle East made it clear how little most people really get about air defense. So I'm building this simulator which drops you into the operator’s seat. You can test out different scenarios and build an air defense network against various types of threats (stats from real world). Also have Ukraine, Israel-Iran scenarios. The new version is a lot more optimized, thanks in part to feedback from you all in HN. Currently I am working on a new featureset with missions, where the user is given a budget and geographical area to defend by placing different air defense assets; after which the system attacks it with various missiles and UAVs. Useful for just learning, exercises, playing through scenarios to defend critical infrastructure etc.

https://airdefense.dev/

Fascinating. Could this be used in an industrial scale as well e.g spraying a fine mist of water to generate urea?

After 10 years in defense tech, watching missile attacks in Ukraine and the Middle East made it clear how little most people really get about air defense. So I'm builiding this simulator which drops you into the operator’s seat. You can test out different scenarios and build an air defense network against various types of threats (stats from real world). Also have Ukraine, Israel-Iran scenarios.

https://airdefense.dev/

Inspired by the events ongoing in the Middle East and in Ukraine I built an air attack/air defense simulator. It includes common attack UAVs, ballistic missiles and air defense systems. You can load pre-created scenarios such as Ukraine. Let me know your feedback!

I built VoxOps from personal pain of coding, gaming, or streaming with constant dashboard checking or disruptive notification pings. Essentially VoxOps uses AI to transform alerts from GitHub, Netlify, Vercel etc into clear, concise voice messages. Often times when I'm in VSCode or doing something else, I can miss failed deploys or builds. VoxOps aims to solve this, let me know what your thoughts are!

Users unable to access their Exchange Online mailboxes or their calendar functionality in Microsoft Teams

Issue ID: MO941162 Affected services: Exchange Online, Microsoft 365 suite, Microsoft Teams Status: Service degradation Issue type: Incident Start time: Nov 25, 2024, 4:54 AM GMT+2

User impact Users may be unable to access their Exchange Online mailboxes or their calendar functionality in Microsoft Teams.

More info The affected scenarios are as follows:

Users may be unable to access Exchange Online using the following impacted connection methods: - Outlook on the web - Outlook desktop client - Representational State Transfer (REST) - Exchange ActiveSync (EAS)

Users may also be unable to access or modify their calendar in Microsoft Teams. This would include loading calendar, viewing meetings, creating/updating meetings and joining meetings.

Scope of impact Some users may intermittently be affected by this issue when attempting to access their mailboxes using any connection method in Exchange Online or attempting to use their calendar in Microsoft Teams.

Preliminary root cause A portion of infrastructure which supports mailbox and calendar functionality isn't operating as expected, resulting in impact.

Current status Nov 25, 2024, 10:54 AM GMT+2 While we’re continuing the restarts to improve service availability, we’re thoroughly analyzing recent changes and the specific failure path to determine the next steps required to resolve the issue. Next update by: Monday, November 25, 2024 at 1:00 PM GMT+2

History of updates Nov 25, 2024, 10:18 AM GMT+2 Nov 25, 2024, 9:21 AM GMT+2 Our ongoing service monitoring has determined that the issue is not limited to users in Asia Pacific, and instead that all users worldwide could be intermittently impacted. As such, we're expanding our restart efforts to ensure the issue is resolved for all users. Nov 25, 2024, 7:46 AM GMT+2 We're continuing to work to restart the small subset of machines which have previously failed to restart. We're also continuing to add additional capacity to the affected environment to mitigate impact as quickly as possible. At this time, we expect the majority of users will experience relief from impact as we work to address the remaining issues. Nov 25, 2024, 6:56 AM GMT+2 We've identified a small subset of machines which are failing to restart, resulting in persisting impact. We're further investigating what is causing the restarts to fail to determine our next steps. Nov 25, 2024, 6:18 AM GMT+2 Nov 25, 2024, 5:50 AM GMT+2 We've determined via our internal telemetry that the impact to Microsoft Teams calendars has self-recovered. To fully resolve the issue, we initiated restarts on affected infrastructure and are monitoring further to determine whether additional steps are required. We're also continuing our investigation into the root cause of this issue. Nov 25, 2024, 5:29 AM GMT+2 Nov 25, 2024, 5:00 AM GMT+2 Our automated systems alerted us to an issue in which some users may be intermittently unable to access their mailboxes in Exchange Online using any connection method or their calendar functionality in Microsoft Teams. We're analyzing a portion of Exchange Online infrastructure responsible for accessing mailboxes to understand the root cause of the issue and determine our next troubleshooting steps.

I've often struggled with understanding whether a way to hold or process data is compliant with GDPR or not. It's quite opaque, yet crucial for any founder in Europe. This very simple app aims to give a quick answers to these questions and where possible point in the right direction to remain compliant as well.

Interesting perspective. Coming from the perspective of a non-US defence executive, I will have to say that failing demos are quite normal in defence applications. It happens, and you still win contracts, because the end client sees the value prop and trusts you to sort out the issues. Still nerve wrecking though.

Ukraine is not at all comparable to Iraq.

Palantir is not trusted, at all anywhere outside the U.S.

The prevalence of PR work means that such direct hit pieces are usually at least nudged by a competitors actions, yes.

Has anyone decompiled the .jar files used for covert communication? Would be quite interesting to see how they work.

On another note it is easy to shame the CIA for making such a basic mistake as using subsequent IP numbers/same file layouts on sites. Of course they should be, but funnily enough mistakes such as these happen in every intelligence service. As example would be the Russian military intelligence (GRU/GU) who have for years sent agents abroad with fake/cleaned Russian passports. Only problem being of course that the passport numbers were sequential and as in the case of the CIA websites, if you identified one agent and his passport, you could look up the next ones in line on databases and identify all the other active agents as well.

Reference for GRU passports: https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-gru-operatives-unmasked/460...

"This Regulation shall not apply to AI systems developed or used exclusively for military purpose"

Yes, same tents in Sweden and Estonia as well. Mainly used in the winter, with a stove in the middle, which gives it rigidity.

I understand how that might seem the case, however the reality is quite the opposite. Intelligence work in general is mostly not about finding out some coke-recipe tier secrets, but rather verifying and giving confidence levels to things we already know.

n world of technology, where the problem is no longer the lack of information, but rather the abundance of it, such work is more important than ever.

Was just catching up on some mentions in academic papers I wasn't aware of using Google Scholar. Seems according to models I'm still too obscure :) (might be a good thing)