Hacker News Reader

4oo4on Flathub: One million active users and growing

This is by design iirc, as a consequence of sandboxing. However there is an easy workaround, which is redirecting your browser profile back to the host with flatpak override/flatseal. I don't need this anymore for Bitwarden but I did this for a long time with Firefox + Enpass.

4oo4on Ask HN: How'd you manage the password managers' master password?

You probably want 2FA as a means of separation instead. Not storing it in your password manager makes it more likely to be a weaker password since you have to manually type it in. However keeping your TOTP codes separate from your password manager, or better yet using a Yubikey that can't be phished means you get a long complex password that can autofill, but also means your Gmail can't be breached by just your password manager secrets leaking alone. Also, aside from the idiocy and amateurism of LastPass, password manager breaches/leaks are rare, as long as it's well designed and you have a strong master password.

4oo4on Aaron Swartz died 11 years ago today

I was actually just writing something yesterday using Python's html2text module and noticed that he was the original developer. RIP

https://pypi.org/project/html2text/

4oo4on Canonical to Work on Improving Snap Support Across Linux DIstributions

Can't that just be solved with this?

   alias foo="flatpak run org.blub.foo"

I would bet flatpak doesn't do this by default since it doesn't hijack a native package's namespace in the way Canonical is forcing people with snap hijacking apt install, and gives you a choice.

This lets me run multiple different Chromium flatpaks alongside the native package (stock Debian apt Chromium, official Chromium flatpak, Ungoogled Chromium flatpak) without issue, for example.

4oo4on Twitter XSS Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild

It's gone on Twitter too.

4oo4on Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

Network effects. In the US at least WhatsApp and Signal are barely used in comparison to iMessage, despite them being solid cross platform alternatives.

4oo4on Mold Course

What do you use to test for mold?

4oo4on Pepper X

Someone actually concentrated and taste tested some of this in a fairly scientific process, and it actually didn't end up being as hot as expected. iirc the molecule is too big to properly bind to receptors the way capsaicin can.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPe2bssalOY

4oo4on Sam Altman's sister says he sexually abused her when she was 4

I would think this would fall under "Negative stories about HN" under the FAQ and be treated with sensitivity, so I would be really curious for dang to weigh in on this, especially since this has seemed to happen repeatedly.

I noticed this went from the top 10 to disappearing almost completely within a few minutes, without being flagged or anything.

Annie's claims aren't yet substantiated but she should still be able to share her story.

4oo4on Spotify code suggests HiFi tier is coming with lossless audio for $20 / month

So this means that royalty rates for lossless streaming will be double the royalty rates for lossy streaming, right? (/s)

Since mastering for Spotify is usually optimized for earbuds and cheap speakers (i.e. more compressed) instead of a decent set of speakers/headphones that try to give as much soundstage/detail as possible, this is likely going to just be a huge waste of bandwidth.

4oo4on LXD: Containers for Human Beings

LXD != LXC

This does a pretty good job at explaining how containers work, but the author seems to equate LXC with LXD, and doesn't even mention LXC once. If I remember correctly the actual container part of Linux containers (doing cgroups/namespaces) is LXC, then LXD is a management daemon frontend on top of that? I think a lot of people do use LXD as their frontend rather than interacting with LXC directly (especially Ubuntu users, since they seem to steer you that way), but if you're going to do a deep dive into containers like this it's a pretty huge omission not to explain the difference. Another really cool security feature of LXC they also could've mentioned was unprivileged/rootless containers.

Personally I had a very hard time with Linux Containers when using LXD and prefer using LXC directly. I can see why it's supposed to be user-friendly but it always reeked of Ubuntu bloat to me.

4oo4on A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials

I would posit that Dimension Apple also extends into the shows it does product placement in, where they stipulate that villans can't use Apple products.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/apple-wont-let-f...

Once you see it, it's really hard to unsee and can make certain shows like Law and Order SVU seem like a longform Apple ad. Ted Lasso on Apple TV (and presumably other Apple TV shows too, though I haven't really watched others) is very bad about the amount of Apple product placement and comes close (but doesn't quite) ruin the show.

4oo4on Purism wants Louis Rossman to Delete video exposing refund scam & delay tactic

I did see that on the forums, I guess some more transparency on that would have been helpful, since it seems they only told people well after the fact.

At the very least not responding to customers is very bad for business, I'm not sure on what basis that Rossman is considering them a scam, but my basis is this, the (possibly illegal under US securities laws) "Investment Opportunity" they've been bugging people about:

https://gabrielsieben.tech/2023/05/10/sorry-purism-im-not-in...

I am a happy owner of a Librem laptop and very much want them to succeed as a company despite all this (assuming that they can get new leadership), but that can't happen if they can't simply be honest with their customers. They're doing something extremely ambitious so it's OK if there are setbacks but they need to be transparent about that. They need to be honest about the setbacks in getting the Librem 5 shipped for people that have been waiting literally years for a phone, and not change refund policies after the fact without clearly communicating it. Trying to silence critics via toxic positivity also isn't helping.

In the investment email, they say that they expect to ship both a Librem 11 tablet and Librem 16 laptop sometime this year, that also seems naively optimistic at best and extremely dishonest at worst. As much as I'd love that to happen and would even consider buying a Librem 11 in spite of everything, if they're struggling this badly to ship a phone they've been working on for years, I don't know how they expect people to believe that they can ship two completely new products in that amount of time.

4oo4on Purism wants Louis Rossman to Delete video exposing refund scam & delay tactic

Purism forums are still down, based on this I'm beginning to think that this might be intentional to shut down more unhappy customers.

This is such a shame, my main device for years has been a Librem 15 and overall I had been really happy with it. Although it is overpriced compared based on specs, I thought it was worth it to have a user-friendly version of Heads firmware (PureBoot) that someone flashed for me. I don't need that level of security but it's awesome to have open source firmware that's Linux based.

Louis nails it when he calls out that they see themselves as always being the good guy as being particularly insidious. Purism had good intentions with what they were developing and were very ambitious with what they were trying to do, and because of that I too had always wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. At this point I'm really glad I never bought a Librem mini or Librem 5 like I was wanting to before, I had stopped following the company a while ago but I knew something was up with their shady "investment opportunity" emails that appear to violate securities laws and may or may not be a ponzi scheme.

Seriously, you tried really hard to do something really ambitious and awesome and have failed your customers, it's way past time to come clean. It's laughable to be organized as a Social Purpose Corporation but defraud and lie to your customers.

If you work at Purism and you see shady and unethical things going on as part of this, don't be afraid to be a whistleblower.

4oo4on Transform your Android device into a Linux desktop

I just misread the last updated in F-Droid, so my original comment is inaccurate.

4oo4on Transform your Android device into a Linux desktop

Whoops, that's completely inaccurate. I think I had misread the last updated in F-Droid when I installed it on my new phone. That does have the v0.118.0 like the repo does. So you are totally right, thanks for the correction! I'm glad it's not as bad as I originally thought.

4oo4on The history of spaghetti squash in America

How are you cooking it? For years I had always been baking spaghetti squash cut side down, but recently I tried it cut side up and it was a night and day difference. I also brush the inside with a good amount of olive oil and then season with some salt and a lot of black pepper.

It came out way less watery and the consistency was more like actual pasta. I'd recommend trying that if you haven't before.

4oo4on Transform your Android device into a Linux desktop

Is there a good summary somewhere of what all changed in the fork besides Monet theming?

4oo4on Transform your Android device into a Linux desktop

I just learned recently that termux is almost unmaintained and hasn't had a new release since 2018 (packages are still updated though). I'm hoping someone steps in soon (since I lack android Dev skills) since I can't imagine my phone without it.

This is awesome, I thought about installing a full DE in it before but got lazy.

4oo4on Musl 1.2.4 adds TCP DNS fallback

This was really helpful for me:

https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Docker_Securi...

4oo4on Panic Among the Streamers

Fair point, this is a feature I didn't realize I could use, will give that a try. However I will still continue to avoid using Spotify whenever possible out of principle based on their business practices and bad search feature. Also a lot of music I'm into isn't on it.

4oo4on Panic Among the Streamers

Yes, they are. This is a summary some of the points of a chapter from Cory Doctrow's book Chokepoint Capitalism, which lays this out in way better detail than the blog post (highly recommended read).

The labels are more culpable (and have been terrible way before streaming) and Spotify is at their mercy for a lot of things, buy they also hurt artists on their own. There is also the fact that at least for a time the labels owned a decent stake in Spotify and other streaming services, so to a certain degree, financially speaking, they are one and the same.

Part of the bland algorithmic playlists diversion strategy is being able to control what content people are listening to via playlists to be able to sell listener data ("real time mood and activity data") to advertisers, and Spotify being able to strengthen its position by acting as a gatekeeper between artists and listeners. Spotify also uses placement on playlists as a form of payola, to punish even very well-known artists such as Katy Perry that give exclusive releases (even temporary ones) to rival streaming services and hold leverage over labels. When people listen to playlists they'll also be listening to more music, which also helps juice their user count/activity numbers for investors.

When people don't care what artist they're listening to and just want playlists, they become more loyal to Spotify's algorithms than any particular artist. A lot of the most successful playlist "artists" come from music content mills (similar to the way advertisers can commission a knockoff song when they can't license an original) that churn out large amounts of music to game the algorithms, and Spotify then pays them a lower royalty rate than they do major labels and artificially promotes it to increase its margins. They can then use that leverage to force actual artists to accept lower royalty rates to get access to the same promotion.

Spotify is definitely at the labels' mercy, but its "success" (if you can define being unprofitable but monopolizing a market as that) directly comes at the expense of artists. It can't negotiate better rates with labels but it does have the ability to stop engaging in payola and prioritizing fake content mill playlist "artists" over real artists.

There's also the fact that royalty payments are zero sum game where a huge artist can reduce payments to smaller ones. In fact, it's a huge problem on Spotify that people upload fake "music" (faker than the content mill playlist artists) that they then stream with phone farms and steal money from real artists via fraud. Spotify is well aware but don't really care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whQ8UBoz-To

4oo4on Panic Among the Streamers

You can if you are constantly controlling what comes up next, but is there a way to automatically stay listening to an artist after an album ends?

What I'm talking about is that I put on a certain album on Spotify, and as soon as that ends it immediately goes to the algorithmic anonymous playlist, if you have the Autoplay setting on.

It really comes down to that I'm against the norm in that I prefer albums as opposed to individual tracks like the vast majority of Spotify listeners do, and the effect of having randomized playlist hurts being able to know what artist you're listening to at any given moment unless you're constantly watching the tracks change (which probably no one does).

I want an algorithm that can slow down slightly and recommend me a series of albums so I can get a good sampling of similar artists, but also have enough time to see who I'm listening to and listen to the work as the artist intended, instead of just a random smattering of faceless "content".

4oo4on Panic Among the Streamers

This articulates really well all the things I don't like about Spotify.

I've always been someone that reads liner notes and researches a band I like and I really hate when I hear a cool song and want to listen to the rest of the album or more from the same band but Spotify forces me into some bland anonymous algorithmic playlist. I'm happy for the algorithm to show me things but I want to actually know what I'm listening to and listen to a whole album at a time.

What's even more frustrating is that Plexamp is stealing all of Spotify's design cues and has similar algorithmic playlist creation. I do get more control over sticking with the same band but it doesn't always respect this setting and it still tries to give me anonymous playlists I didn't ask for. It is my library and I have a decent familiarity with what's in it, but I use Plexamp specifically to avoid all the things I hate with Spotify instead of just a private Spotify.

I never thought about Spotify's search feature being shitty on purpose but it makes perfect sense. Despite all this and how terribly it treats artists I still pay for premium because of peer pressure, so I can share Spotify links with friends and play Music League.

Every time I've tried to explain my reasons for barely using Spotify to them I always sound like an entitled crazy person. I just hope something better replaces it in the near future, since they will never be profitable, but I'm not optimistic.

4oo4on Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

I'm not extremely optimistic either but at least in the US Lina Kahn is already on the right track with antitrust and the FTC already has two antitrust cases against Google in process. However, it's still an uphill because antitrust enforcement was either asleep at the wheel (or corrupted, depending on your perspective), which is partially why Google is in such a dominant position to begin with.

IANAL, the EU is also on the right track with antitrust but unfortunately seems very weak in terms of penalties and enforcement.

At this point, anything we can do to slow them down in any jurisdiction in a win. Even if antitrust enforcement is weak making Google at least have to defend this in a pro-forma way I think helps.

4oo4on Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

This is what I sent, feel free to use and customize:

    I would like to bring your attention to Google’s recent proposal to add a feature to its Chrome (Chromium family) of browsers called Web Environment Integrity. This provides a mechanism to reinforce Google’s already dominant browser market position by creating a technological control that can be used to nullify a user’s choice of browser, device and operating system. This technology also has the potential for abuse by preventing users from using browser extensions that can enhance security by blocking unwanted and potentially malicious content, as well as browser extensions that help vulnerable users with enhanced accessibility needs, such as color blindness and visual impairment.

    Google’s dominant, near-monopoly position in the browser market already harms me as a consumer by reducing browser choices and preventing a competitive market for developing new browsers. Allowing Google to include this feature will reduce my browser choices and consolidate the browser market even further, and it is incumbent on [INSERT AUTHORITY HERE] to take action against this abusive behavior.

4oo4on Google vs. the Open Web

    I would like to bring your attention to Google’s recent proposal to add a feature to its Chrome (Chromium family) of browsers called Web Environment Integrity. This provides a mechanism to reinforce Google’s already dominant browser market position by creating a technological control that can be used to nullify a user’s choice of browser, device and operating system. This technology also has the potential for abuse by preventing users from using browser extensions that can enhance security by blocking unwanted and potentially malicious content, as well as browser extensions that help vulnerable users with enhanced accessibility needs, such as color blindness and visual impairment.
    
    Google’s dominant, near-monopoly position in the browser market already harms me as a consumer by reducing browser choices and preventing a competitive market for developing new browsers. Allowing Google to include this feature will reduce my browser choices and consolidate the browser market even further, and it is incumbent on [INSERT AUTHORITY HERE] to take action against this abusive behavior.

4oo4on Google Web Environment Integrity draft draws developer rage

Contact your antitrust authority today to fully voice your opposition:

US:

- https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation

- antitrust@ftc.gov

EU:

- https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en

- comp-greffe-antitrust@ec.europa.eu

UK:

- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition...

- general.enquiries@cma.gov.uk

India: