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binaryturtle

539 karma · joined January 3, 2025

Two Turtles, One, and Zero.
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binaryturtle··on Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates
Interestingly on a much older OS (Yosemite) cURL, etc. links to Security.framework which uses the system's trust store instead a separate .pem file in /etc/ssl (I can't find any .pem inside /etc/ssl)

I wonder why they stopped doing that and now just seem to do "standard" builds and end up with this (at least) 2 separate trust store situation.

binaryturtle··on The St. Helena 5 pence coin shows Jonathan, a roughly 190 year old tortoise
Shouldn't it be easy to attach a sensor at the belly of the turtle that alarms staff when it happens. Sounds like an actual no-brainer use for modern technology.
binaryturtle··on eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business
Most of the stuff just seems/ feels to be (security) theatre. I actually disabled most of my OSCP, etc., for privacy reasons. No need to permanently send requests out to the web, when it won't help anyway when really required. I read HN to stay up-to-date and manually manage the certificates.

(Even with all the related options disabled, e.g., ocspd on OSX still regularly connects to random certificate related services to "check" on things. Something related to random root certificates I don't have in the system trust store or such, Not entirely sure what this is about and how to get rid of the requests in any other way than blocking things with Little Snitch)

binaryturtle··on Making big downloads resumable in Firefox
I never heard of axel. Seems to be an interesting project. And it's coded in a properly supported language, so I can try it on my ageing OS X installation. :) Thanks for the tip.
binaryturtle··on A Modern Web App in C
Wouldn't it be even more ideal to have the webserver and app be one and the same binary, all bells and whistles included? No need for CGI at all. Just one static binary, no extra disk I/O needed to load resources (all compiled in statically). Basically you can make the OS deny this app any additional disk access for additional hardiness.
binaryturtle··on 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit
I like how the status reports are informative and rater detailed. I recently dealt with outages of my own German webhoster and they didn't even have a status page. I had to email their support to get some details (at least they replied very quickly :) )
binaryturtle··on A 100x faster* alternative to homebrew
Homebrew links everything by default (at least that's how it was), so you ended up with all kind of extra junk files all over the place you never needed that comes with some packages... all cluttering up things in the /usr/local main directories and the PATH.

Homebrew additionally also had bunch of other directories, a huge git checkout, etc. then add the weird permission restrictions/ limitations on top of it… many packages then stopped supporting the customisation options at some point, so you were forced to rebuild half of them yourself anyway, if you needed the respective options. Now you had even more mess in /usr/local. :-)

It may work for some, but it wasn't for me anymore (and I used Homebrew for many years before that.)

binaryturtle··on Zerobrew: A faster alternative to Homebrew
I don't think MacPorts users have those kind of problems.

Personally I was burnt by Homebrew many years ago already. I lost trust in any such package managers. Since then I went back to just compile everything myself (I manage about 300 packages like that in my installation.) It's not that a big of problem. Only initially when you need to bootstrap everything to replace Homebrew it was quite the time investment, of course. But now you compile like a package here or there… just follow the script. It's very quickly done.

The best thing… no clutter. Every package has its strict directory. I only symlink from that what I need into /usr/local/bin.

binaryturtle··on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
I don't see any advantage of any of the new formats over the good old and proven formats, so I stick with PNG and JPEG (properly optimized.) I can fire up any old browser and it will just work.
binaryturtle··on When random is not actually random enough
`man random` has no such disclaimer here on OS X. I guess this refers to a Linux man page?
binaryturtle··on Aweb – Communication for AI Agents
For the fun of it: I asked Google Gemini and ChatGPT (OpenAI) "What is AWeb?" and they both gave me the amiga browser as answer. No idea if they just know, or did a similar lookup as I did? :)
binaryturtle··on Aweb – Communication for AI Agents
What a weird name to choose. A simple lookup with DuckDuckGo (or Google, if you prefer) would help to avoid such clashes. Probably any of the so called "AIs" could have pointed that out too.

AWeb is already a well-known web browser for Amiga systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWeb

binaryturtle··on SDF Public Access Unix System ... est. 1987
They allow port scans?

I did use nmap on a Linux VM going over the free ProtonVPN for this purpose, but at some point Proton broke something (it may be related to their VPN accelerator feature) and checking any port always reports "Open" (even if it's not), so sadly that made this cool use case entirely useless for me. It definitely was nice to know you had no open ports other than the ones you purposefully opened. :)

binaryturtle··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
Occasionally drag'n'drop failures —where it just stops working— I experienced already with Yosemite, so it may be a VERY old bug. :) Usually you would see "CoreDragError" codes popping up in the system.log

Rather than rebooting, I just kill "pboard" in Activity Monitor, and afterwards restart a few GUI programs that were directly affected (including Finder and Dock.)

My wild theory is that Firefox is the culprit. At least the issues happened more frequently once I had to switch to Firefox for proper content blocking extensions. Anyway… I have no idea how to prove that, so it's just a guess, not a blame.

binaryturtle··on Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service
If you leave that in it's actually worse, since the platform was discontinued. I had to fix all my client's projects to remove this stuff. One of those stillborn ideas of the EU.
binaryturtle··on C*: Unifying Programming and Verification in C (2025)
In my own ranking of favourite programming languages C is at the first place. C++ comes in last. I personally hate it when people write C/C++ as if it's the very same thing. I'm quite sure there's more like me out there. :)

Interestingly Perl comes in second, even I use it rarely (aka not at all) these days. But that's a slightly off-topic side note. :)

binaryturtle··on Audacity 4.0
If they don't have to re-code half the app (new UI kit, not required features, etc.) then what does it matter if they are 10k unrelated commits behind?

I like it's there as a choice for us who prefer the old-timey Audacity for some quick sample editing.

binaryturtle··on I Don't Have a Smartphone
I do not have one (and it's actually true.) And it's not easy. :-(
binaryturtle··on Notes on Private Trackers
The proper way to cheat is to not leave a trace on the tracker where a tracker staff may or may not make correct judgement. It's called "ghost leeching." Basically you directly connect to known peers' IPs (e.g. from some heavy seedbox users) and never even report anything back to the tracker.

Of course, those peers where you ghost leech of then would correctly report the upload they generate (making THEM look suspicious of cheating by "over-reporting" upload.) It's impossible for any tracker staff to properly detect and attribute proper cheating in such cases, unless they can detect a pattern. The tracker staff objectively can only catch people that do really stupid things.

That's just the way BitTorrent and private tracker economics work. A "private" tracker is more like a social contract between its users to do the honourable thing, but you'll always have some idiots that do not get that, of course.

binaryturtle··on MartyPC is a cross-platform emulator of early PCs written in Rust
"cross-platform" and Rust, as advertised in the current title/link label, is incompatible for sure. Can't get that to run on my older OS X machine nor my Amiga. :)
binaryturtle··on hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate
So I guess ram disks are deprecated too? (AFAIR hdiutil was the only way to create them)
binaryturtle··on Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree
Isn't the general separation between species that they no longer can cleanly interbreed (generate fertile offsprings)? I'm no biology expert though, but I always thought this is how to separate things.

Humans of all kinds can breed and make new humans easily. Same for dogs... easily can breed with each other and increase diversity. So in both cases same species. But humans and chimpanzees? Probably not (albeit there are rumours? :) ), so different species.

binaryturtle··on Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
Would it have been different, if they had everyone take the cargo entrance?
binaryturtle··on Rings forged from meteorites may have been fashionable among ancient Greek elite
No. No luck here with any form of settings (I generally use uBlock origin in hard mode by default).

It always loads the 'Just a quick check -- We’re checking your connection to prevent automated abuse' page. Depending on my settings I may or may not load the actual Cloudflare checkbox.

And at that point I just don't want to bother with that site anymore really. Obviously I must be some 11th world country on some random sanctioned list (aka Germany). :-)

binaryturtle··on Rings forged from meteorites may have been fashionable among ancient Greek elite
I can't get past the Cloud<bleep> check. I guess the site/information is for G(r)eek elites only too.
binaryturtle··on Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga
Why did they put it under "dev/basic"?
binaryturtle··on Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot
That's the only advantage of CGNAT I can think of. :D

(You still could get poked from the other users' hosts behind the ISP's NAT, of course.)

binaryturtle··on Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome
PNG supports both, palette based (for 8 bit and less), and just straight direct/true color (RGB or ARGB).

(still different from JPEG's method, of course)

binaryturtle··on Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot
On average about 100 (TCP) requests hit my home router per minute doing various probing and scanning. Lots of checking for the telnet port obviously. Sometimes you can see a swarm of entirely different IPs scanning the full port range (probing the ports one-by-one).

You'll see a lot of deepfield, censys-scanner, visionheight.com, shadowserver.io, etc., but also the usual suspects of Chinese or Russian IPs.

With OpenWRT I use something like this: `tcpdump -i pppoe-wan 'inbound and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) == tcp-syn'`, or alternatively `tcpdump -i pppoe-wan 'inbound and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) == tcp-syn and not port 44000'`, if we have some torrent client running (e.g. here at port 44000) which would mess up the result. I'm not sure it's the best way to handle this, but it's definitely enlightening what bounces off on the router.

binaryturtle··on CSS properties you should know for better text designs
> The common advice now is to only use CSS that is supported in the last two major versions of each major browser.

Browsers seem to release a major new version like every 2 weeks now. So this statement does no longer hold true. You'll have a lot of users with broken results, if you follow that advise (everyone who uses a ESR or is otherwise limited with updates and behind a month)

I'd say for safety one should target the browsers of the last 4 years at least. You easily can write new CSS —or Javascript— and then use a conversion during deployment to target the lower standards. That's more important for Javascript than for CSS though. If only half of the sites would deploy with `babel` and with some compatibility in mind 80% less of the web would be broken for users with older browsers.

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