Hacker News Reader

Enderboion Dethrace: Reverse engineering the 1997 game "Carmageddon" (2023)

And that dedicated soul (dreammaster) would really like to know who wrote the final star map puzzle, because there was sooo much matrix math his head almost exploded :)

Enderboion Show HN: I made an open-source Loom alternative

This is the comment I came here for :)

Enderboion Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP credentials

We first discovered this while troubleshooting why we were receiving logins with an old password.. after updating the settings in Outlook. They had no other email clients, but the 'New Outlook' didn't actually send the updated password to the Microsoft cloud due to a bug :P

Imagine my surprise discovering that this little banner in their Outlook settings that said "Using Microsoft sync technology" actually means "This is no longer really a local IMAP client".

Enderboion Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP credentials

As an email host... I've been turning New Outlook off for clients for weeks trying to explain this.

Apart from the security issues, it's also very annoying to have to explain that I can't actually troubleshoot any IMAP connectivity issues when your machine isn't the one thats actually making the connection.

Now we've been internally discussing whether we should just firewall off whatever Azure ranges are connecting to our IMAP backend servers and intentionally "break" the functionality. Not my first choice, but users keep seeing the "New" toggle and turning it on, causing all sorts of other uncontrolled chaos!

Cloud-first, in all the wrong ways. It's supposed to be a local app..

Enderboion Porting Stunt Car Racer to the Commodore Plus/4

But my Commodore 16 probably still doesn't have enough memory to run this :)

Back to playing Berks I guess :P

Enderboion Danish cloud host says customers ‘lost all data’ after ransomware attack

I often have people complain after comparing my works instance pricing to other cloud providers...

Then try to explain that rotating a few dozen TB of data offsite to cold offline storage every week isn't cheap. Because unlike some vendors, we take pride in data integrity and ensuring that our DR plan is actually.... you know, recoverable :P

Enderboion A Day in the Life of an IPv6 Packet on Illumos

Literally just deployed a pair of new OmniOS NFS servers last night, for high-availability hosting. We also serve VM storage from a pair of Illumos ZFS boxes over iSCSI.

We switched most of our primary NFS storage pairs from Linux to Illumos a good five years ago due to a bunch of locking issues and race conditions with high-volume NFS traffic. Solid as a rock as long as you have the right HBA heh

Enderboion Hobby Tunneling

Colin Furze has a fun series where he tunneled around his yard a bit :)

Supercut video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RVLim5tVwU&ab_channel=colin...

Enderboion How Cloudflare Images addressed the aCropalypse vulnerability

FTA: // Infallible: We've definitely consumed 4 bytes

... erm, wasn't the original issue created by an undocumented change to File API semantics?

Not that I know how their backend works, and I'm sure their consume function is all super robust with every edge-case possible covered in the test suite..... but "Infallible" oh dear... :P

Enderboion LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction (1992)

Ah the good ol' New Direction announcement.

Immediately following this was one of the most chaotic times to ever post on an LambdaMOO ARB (Architecture Review Board) *Ballot.

(Mines the one with the prog bit stucking out of the pocket, and 50 poorly parented instances of yduJ's Rubber Duck Tutorial in my inventory).

Enderboion Our Amiga Demo-Creator Turns 36 Years

I was more of a TRSI Demo Maker kinda guy :)

Enderboion Tell HN: Nokia G22 Beware

First, tell Nokia you intend to contact the ACCC about this refund, as the device isn't "fit for purpose" if it can't store files greater than 4GB.

If they don't instantly change their tone (as many vendors do once you mention certain four-letter agencies like ACCC or ACMA...), then lodge a complaint with the ACCC.

Ingram in this case are just acting as a warehouse/drop-shipper, same as they do for Microsoft and various other OEMs.

... although our (Australias) Data Retention and 'Lawful Access' legislation is crap, at least the Consumer Guidelines still generally favour the public! :)

Enderboion Mattermost Cloud Free will no longer be offered after July 26, 2023

Phew.

I'm happy they're just discontinue the free Cloud version, rathert than changing the licensing for On-Prem :)

... better than Atlassian!

Enderboion Clifford Stoll beat the Russians, then made useless, wondrous objects (2016)

Every few months I keep telling myself I need to buy one of Cliff's Klein bottles to go alongside my (very dogeared) paperback copy of The Cuckoo's Egg :)

Learning all the default VMS passwords definately didn't get me in trouble during High School with the state's herd of Vaxen... I mean the book was right there, in the library! Wink wink :P

Enderboion An aggressive, stealthy web spider operating from Microsoft IP space

This bot is stupidly broken - we've had to block a whole swathe of Azure ranges on our load balancer.

This particular 'bot' would start crawling in-line Javascript on a customer site, and then get stuck in an infinite loop requesting things like:

  /page/window.open
  /page/window.open/page/window.open
  /page/window.open/page/window.open/page/window.open

We opened an abuse report with Microsoft last week, but haven't really heard anything back. Over 500 IP addresses involved hitting dozens of our hosted sites, le sigh.

Unfortunately, we do see enough legitimate requests with that UA that we had to resort to the IP blocking. A bunch of /16's and a few smaller ranges... it feels dirty :(

Enderboion Tomu – A family of devices which fit inside your USB port

Conference Cluedo.

"It was mithro, in the hallway track, with the pogo pin programmer."

Enderboion Leaving the Basement

Yeah, FreeBSD was an improvement with regards to ZFS/NFS integration not having any major issues.

Unfortunately we had some strange HBA issues with our disk shelves, which went away with an Illumos downstream. Since our use case for this was basically an isolated box that just supplied NFS shares, the limited ecosystem wasn't a major concern more so than stability :)

Enderboion Leaving the Basement

Ah yes.

I've also seen NFS/ZFS on Linux have very... bizzare... issues with locking, latency, and poor handling of errors bubbled up from the block layer taking down clients or even the host.

All of these went away when we redeployed everything into a Solaris-based distro (still exporting ZFS shares to Linux clients via NFS). It does seem something specific to the interaction of these two components under load on a Linux kernel.

Unfortunately, it also only happens under real-world production load and was impossible to create reliable test-case with simulated stress tests or benchmarking :(

Enderboion Arduino Make Your Own Uno Kit

Pause the video... it opens a popup and keeps playing the audio

This is horrible, I couldn't even stand staying on the page long enough to figure out what the product is :P

Enderboion Man wakes up after night on sleeper train to find it never left Glasgow

Although it's been done before, I suspect you were reading a M.R. Forbes novel :P

Enderboion My experience writing and selling a short story

I've been reading Jasper's work for a quite a while, and given your brother's very regular output would never have guessed!

It's hard to even visualise the effort it must have taken to overcome those obstacles to become one of the better self-published sci-fi authors. Respect.

Enderboion NFS: The Early Years

The funny thing is that we're running our large NFS servers on OmniOS (with Linux NFS clients), as plugins for a certain large PHP-based blogging platform loves to sprinkle LOCK_EX flocks all over the place.

Sadly with a Linux NFS server, lock state eventually corrupts itself to extinction but OmniOS can tick along past 300 days uptime without a problem.

Of course.... these issues only show up under production levels of load, and have never been able to be distilled into a reproducable test case.

FML, and FNL ( = fricking NFS locking :P)

Enderboion Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

You can't be forced to introduce a "systemic" weakness. On the other hand, a certain four-letter agency can certainly craft a TAN requesting you to, say, weaken your key negotiation for a specific client.

That's targetted, not systemic. And hey, you're not removing the encryption your just making it slightly less secure. Neatly sidesteps a whole bunch of restrictions in 317ZG.

It's only FUD until the policy makers decide it's the norm :P

Enderboion VRoom A high end RISC-V implementation

But can it run Quake? :D

Enderboion Starlink adds another 100Gbps connection to the SeattleIX

Ah yes, good ol Brads Markup Language mmm fun times :)

Enderboion Trailing slashes on URLs: Contentious or settled?

I literally just closed a ticket about this issue yesterday.. 'why are these relative URLs downloading from the parent folder'.

"Because your CMS is rewriting out trailing slashes. Make it stop that, and then you'll be in the relative path you think your in".

The internet uncertainty principle: It's not DNS, it's trailing slashes. (apologies to Herr Heisenberg :)

Enderboion A terrible schema from a clueless programmer

looks at greylisting table schema

looks at Rachel's blog post

looks at greylisting table schema again

Doh! :P

Enderboion ScummVM 2.5 “Twenty years ago today”

Grim Fandango, EMI etc were all part of 'ResidualVM' - a ScummVM sister project. While it shared some framework, at the time it wasn't considered appropriate or feasible to include 3D games in ScummVM proper - and many of the ScummVM port backends had no capability for 3D functionality (like depth buffers, model rendering, etc) required by those engines.

But 20 years later, Residual has been merged back into the main parent ScummvM codebase! This is thanks to both targetted devices being more powerful this generation, and a decision to increase the scope of ScummVM.

See - back in the day there was a more strict scope and titles that were not 'pure' 2D point-and-click adventures were generally not eligible or considered. However 'adventure games' are not aways so easily defined, sometimes leading to arguments, debates and disappointment.

But in the last few years, the project has gradually widened it's scope and begun to accept contributions to engines that may previously have been rejected (for example: being classified as a 'RPG' instead of an 'Adventure', or having non-traditional elements like FMV or pseudo-3D).

... and that - along with lots of hard work from the engine developers and other contributors - is partially why there are so many new engines and games supported in the massive 20th Anniversary release :D

Happy Days!

- Ender, a (long) retired former ScummVM co-lead from the early years

Enderboion Is it true? Can Covid-19 vaccines connect me to the internet?

Post is dated March 30, I'd say sadly this was probably not intended as an April Fools joke.

Unless they're using the 'voltswagen' NTP server :P /lamejoke

Enderboion AROS is a lightweight, efficient, and flexible desktop operating system

I wrote a popular shortcuts plugin for Litestep (EasyCuts) and eventually ended up on the core team for while.

Working on Litestep taught me so much about Windows internals - and I know a few people ended up being poached by Microsoft to work on the Windows shell proper due to their work on LS :)