Hacker News Reader

tamirzbon Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

This is already an issue for tourists in many countries that have their own payment system (e.g. Brazil, India, Singapore, Thailand). In some of them you have companies that came up with products for tourists that allow them to pay but they usually come with fees. From what I know the majority of tourists in these countries just travel with cash.

tamirzbon AWS outage due to drone attacks in UAE

This comment makes it seem as if it's the US who striked the Amazon data center.

tamirzbon Cloudflare claimed they implemented Matrix on Cloudflare workers. They didn't

Since cloudflare are busy editing this blog post to say something completely different from what it originally said, I feel that this archive link is relevant

https://archive.ph/AbxU5

tamirzbon Linux kernel security work

> Know this - your kernel is not patched unless you run the absolute latest version.

This is correct for a lot of different software, probably most of it. Why is this a point that needs to be made?

tamirzbon UK, Canada and Australia formally recognise Palestinian state

Not sure why I decided to comment specifically on what you posted given the fact that there are various levels of misinformation going on in this thread, but I guess yours is the most blunt.

Anyway read the article you linked to again, you completely misread it.

tamirzbon Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

If you are worried about your Google account being banned for using ReVanced (not that I saw any evidence for anything like that so far but I agree that there could be a scenario like this some time in the future), for years now I've been using a separate Google account only for YouTube. This account essentially only contains my YouTube viewing history and nothing more. I have yet to see any disadvantage in this separation

tamirzbon Framework Laptop 12 review

I run my Framework 13 with 1.4 fractional scaling (on Wayland) and honestly I think it looks pretty good.

tamirzbon Don't guess my language

This is indeed extremely annoying and I never understood why so many apps are configured to only be available in specific countries. Like what at all do they stand to gain doing this?

Google will then go on to complain about users installing APKs from shady sources but this practice pushes users to do so. I'm sure a decent amount of users ended up with malware on their phones just because they wanted to install an app that wasn't available in their listed country.

tamirzbon Malaysia started mandating ISPs to redirect DNS queries to local servers

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_laws_by_region

It's really not that rare even for non-Muslim countries, especially in Asia

tamirzbon Fighting cookie theft using device bound sessions

> We are committed to developing this standard in a way that ensures it will not be abused to segment users based on client hardware. For example, we may consider supporting software keys for all users regardless of hardware capabilities. This would ensure that DBSC will not let servers differentiate between users based on hardware features or device state (i.e. if a device is Play Protect certified or not).

Personally I do not believe this for a second. Yes I do believe that this is what they will do now. But in a few years, if DBSC becomes mainstream? I fully believe Google will start abusing this to strengthen their control. It's the same with the Chrome browser that they eventually used to push MV3 and tried to push WEI.

Honestly? I feel that this could be their way of pushing WEI again through the back door, and I am concerned that unlike WEI, this seems to barely get any buzz or pushback from the community.

tamirzbon U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

It's a solved problem as in it's one single problem that is solved. I agree that WhatsApp is a really bad solution overall, just compared to iMessage it does solve the cross-platform issue.

I would also by far prefer a more open solution, but between relying on Apple for your country's messaging to relying on Facebook, at least by relying on Facebook you have one less issue.

tamirzbon U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

> it still just works, albeit with fewer features.

If it doesn't have features I rely on then I don't see how can I treat it as "it still just works".

> iMessage in the US is the closest things to universal modern messaging.

The key part here is "in the US". What if you want to message someone who is outside the US? To be honest I am not sure about carrier prices in the US, but I am sure the person on the other side of the conversation would get extremely high bills for international MMS messages. Personally I don't see how the words "universal solution" can apply to something that works well in only a single country in the entire world.

tamirzbon U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

Oh I definitely agree with you that I hope WhatsApp is the past. I sure do hope for something open, not sure if RCS is the solution here though.

In any case, iMessage share the exact same issues and also adds the issue of locking you to a single platform, so at least WhatsApp solves one issue that iMessage has.

tamirzbon U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

> On the other hand, I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps like WhatsApp and FB Messenger

I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step. Where I'm from already 10+ years ago every single person you know would have a WhatsApp account.

With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.

tamirzbon Firsty.app – free 300kbit/s eSIM for US/EU

People here seem to quickly react by recommending their favorite travel eSIM provider. I'd propose what I find to be a bit more useful, a website that compares a bunch of different travel eSIM providers: https://esimdb.com

No affiliation from my side. I find it nice to know I always have many options.

tamirzbon UPI Payments: 10B transactions a month done, next stop 100B

RedBus and many other Indian apps & websites don't accept foreign credit cards. It can become a real headache when traveling in India as a foreigner.

tamirzbon YouTube Threatens to Cut Off Ad Blocker Users After Just Three Ad-Less Vids

YouTube Premium is not available in some countries in the world. More than that, even just traveling to a country where it's not available is enough to lose the YouTube Premium features.

tamirzbon Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

I'm a frequent visitor of /r/soccer. The only poll they did[0] had a staggering 88% in favor of the blackout, with 80% in favor of keeping the sub private as long as it takes for reddit to change their mind. I would be surprised if other polls had such different results, as I'm not sure what would make the /r/soccer community so drastically different from the rest of reddit.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1429lkh/meta_thread...

tamirzbon Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

Why not have each user register their own "client"? Is it that complicated?

tamirzbon Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

I agree, India in general has pretty bad bureaucracy against tourists, it feels like the government doesn't care at all about attracting them.

But I recently saw that Wise supports transferring money to India via UPI (also more anecdotally - I am living in Singapore and saw that some local banks have this feature as well). I guess this won't be as comfortable as just scanning a QR, but couldn't this technically work for tourists?

tamirzbon Framework Laptop 16

I'm not sure what issues in Wayland you're talking about. I've been using sway with fractional scaling for a few years now and never really had any problems.

tamirzbon The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

While I definitely think you have a point, I'm still not sure I have a better idea of how to do good. Perhaps you have though? (genuinely asking)

I work in tech and definitely make more than I need. I work for a small company (and don't even have any employees under me) so I'd at least like to think that I'm not that involved in exploiting people in order to make money.

Now the question that I have is what do I do with the excess money I'm making, especially since I do actually agree with you about the not accumulating wealth part. One option is of course spending a lot of time analysing charities to figure out which one I think would be the best to donate to, but while I'm still not completely ruling it out, I feel like that would make analysing charities almost a part time job. Since at least at the moment i don't want to do that, I still settled on donating based on GiveWell's recommendations, essentially outsourcing the charities analysis. I am aware that GiveWell and I probably don't share 100% of our values, but I truly don't see a better option.

So really, if you, or anyone else, has a better idea of what I can do with the excess money I'm making, I'd be more than happy to listen.

tamirzbon Accidental Google Pixel Lock Screen Bypass

If you follow published reports of Android vulnerabilities you'll see that taking longer than 90 days for a fix is actually not that rare. I myself had a similar experience a couple of times.

tamirzbon Apple asks suppliers to shift AirPods, Beats production to India

This sounds interesting but I don't think it holds true?

Going by the languages I have some knowledge of, that doesn't hold true for Portuguese, where the word "country" itself is masculine but the truth is different countries have different genders. I guess it would be the same for other latin languages? (at least for Spanish). German is also the same but the word "country" is neutral.

I guess it does somewhat hold true for my native language, Hebrew, where all the words you specified but "house" are feminine. So I guess it might also hold true for Arabic then?

tamirzbon Firefox Relay

A little bit unrelated question, but since we're talking about being available anywhere. Is there a reason the extension is not available for Firefox on Android? I'm thinking about using Relay but I'm afraid it won't be easy to add aliases from mobile.

tamirzbon CVE Stuffing

The problem though is that issues with CVEs are not caused only by bad CNAs. MITRE (understandably) doesn't have the resources to verify every CVE request it receives, which have resulted in bad CVE details being filed on multiple occasions.

I wonder if maybe, instead of trying to fix CVEs, we could try to think about creating alternatives? I know some companies already use their own identifiers (e.g. Samsung with SVE), so perhaps a big group of respected companies can come together to create a new unified identifier? Just an idea though.

tamirzbon Drivers who keep their windows down are exposed to 80 percent more air pollution

To be fair traffic is not the only factor in Delhi's pollution. Another thing is crop burning in Punjab and Haryana, which some people even claim is the biggest cause for the pollution.

You can see it has an effect as Delhi's pollution drastically differs between different times of year, which generally correlate with the time of crop burning.

tamirzbon NewPipe – ad-free, open-source Android YouTube client

Unfortunately, YouTube premium is not available in all countries, so some of us have have to go for more "hacky" solutions if we want to avoid ads.