Hacker News Reader

botanicalon Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr

How does the bittorrent protocol deal with removing bad torrents? I torrent from time to time, and luckily I've never come across malware; it seems the only way to avoid it is to not download a video with an exe extension.

botanicalon Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif and slab-serif, monospace font

I've been using Iosevka for more than 5 years now, it seems odd using anything else. The author is prolific and has made it really easy to build your own customised version. I don't think I'll ever move from using it.

botanicalon Mozilla met with Microsoft to discuss their harmful design practices

Mozilla Research: Over the Edge 2.0: Microsoft’s Design Tactics Still Undermine Browser Choice - https://research.mozilla.org/browser-competition/over-the-ed...

botanicalon Keep Our Servers Running

I also think archive.today is superior to web.archive.org as it breaks less when archiving sources. It's a shame Wikipedia blacklisted it now as an archive source.

botanicalon AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint

I noticed this on AliExpress years ago with cheaper Bluetooth earphones. Actually, all Chinese e-commerce sites activate audio for some reason.

botanicalon Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

Anytime I go on the website, my fan start going crazy. But it is a good website with the most accurate forecasts, I feel.

Another annoyance is that tree planting initiative, I was able to plant like 10 trees, now they made it very difficult to be able to do 1 in a year. Microsoft, you cheapskates, you're destroying the environment, the least y’all could do is plant more trees in vulnerable areas.

botanicalon YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken

OpenRSS, your website is broken. I get:

> Too many requests are being made from this network, which brings down the performance of feeds for other users. Please try back later.

With regards to the topic, I've noticed this when using FreeTube during certain periods of the day.

botanicalon Iran-backed hackers claim wiper attack on medtech firm Stryker

Sounds like justification for a false flag operation by the US government. How would they transport these massive things and launch them on a different continent? That, or the US is trying to justify that this illegal war is on their doorstep and need to expand their terror.

botanicalon South Africa's one million invisible children without birth certificates

Load shedding hasn't been a problem for a while now. With proper maintenance of the coal stations and investments in solar, we haven't had it in Winter either. But you're right, it's always lurking. With increased renewable energy, and less reliance on coal, hopefully it stays in the past.

https://african.business/2025/10/energy-resources/has-south-...

botanicalon South Africa's one million invisible children without birth certificates

True, but I meant in South Africa, SA is the most used. Less so with RSA or ZAR. ZA is somewhat used but SA (I would say) dominates in conversation and in written text.

botanicalon South Africa's one million invisible children without birth certificates

By what metric is it in "steady decline"? As as South African, it's amusing to see how my country is generalised.

botanicalon South Africa's one million invisible children without birth certificates

ISO 3166-2 code for South Africa. It's from Dutch: Zuid-Afrika. It's used quite often to refer to South Africa; RSA or SA is also used.

botanicalon Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians

Are they going to rehire the employees they fired for being against this and Microsoft's support of the genocide now? It's more than just mass surveillance, and their leaders need to be held accountable.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/microsoft-azure-israel-top-cu...

botanicalon Uruguay ditched fossil fuels for renewables

That's really commendable, but I wonder how to do it on a large scale. Uruguay's installed capacity is 4.6 GW. On a larger scale, batteries can't be the answer as their energy density is quite poor.

botanicalon Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp

WhatsApp's call quality is second to none. Also the fact that it's ubiquitous, and its sync just works, makes it difficult to move to anything else. Everyone's on it in South Africa. I think we can only hope for regulation to keep it safe and force interoperability with other chat apps.

botanicalon WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

As much as I like WhatsApp, I hate that it's been bought by a company like Meta. Its voice-calling quality is the best from all similar apps, companies use it to communicate with people, and my entire family solely uses it.

I just wish there was something else with such far reach and capability. We can only hope for interoperability with other chat apps.

At least the ads are in Updates, where I never bother looking at

botanicalon US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

North Korean and Chinese hackers are soundly shunned but for some reason it's always a "company" from a pariah country like Apartheid Israel that are able to sell their software weapons to indiscriminately target any civilian from any country.

botanicalon Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

This translucent 3D look doesn't feel like they took usability into consideration. They just wanted to force a glass-look. At least the Aero look was frosted, this makes it so you have to strain to differentiate buttons and text on it.

botanicalon OpenAI for Countries

As if Western-backed companies are some type of beacon of light. If news of your company has Trump and Oracle linked to it, you aren't the good guys. This is just the American way of "consolidating power", by "spreading democracy."

Also, it's not like OpenAI responses aren't censored when it comes to "sensitive" topics.

botanicalon Espressif's ESP32-C5 Is Now in Mass Production

I wanted a board with Zigbee support but $21 ($16 plus $5 shipping) is quite expensive for a single board.

botanicalon Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta

If Apartheid South Africa could last just a little bit longer, they would still be an apartheid state like Israel is today.

Western media is just as complicit in this genocide as the fascists in charge of the Israeli government. And media are self-censoring which is reprehensible.

The idea of Hamas wouldn't exist if Gaza (and the West Bank) wasn't occupied by land, air and sea; their land stolen on a daily basis, and Palestinian people treated as subhuman animals.

botanicalon AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50%

It's such madness that all this resource usage is for LLMs that are barely useful (at least for me). So many billions in resources wasted for machine learning systems that mimic human speech, it's not intelligent in any sense.

Now we see models showing the user it's "thinking" as some sort of intelligent agent, when really, ploys like that is to prop up the AI sector's stock price.

Surely LLMs in this form can't be the future of AGI?

botanicalon Blasting Past WebP - An analysis of the NSO BLASTPASS iMessage exploit

NSO Group are a terrorist group for hire. This 0-click, 0-day exploit was found targeting civil society. Any one can pay to target journalists, NGOs, politicians. This is why open-source is paramount to security, and having code out in the open.

botanicalon Achieving Great Privacy with Safari

If I'm not mistaken, all Firefox tabs are cookie isolated:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cooki...

Containers are no longer necessary unless you're logging into the same site with multiple accounts.

botanicalon Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?

It's funny how Mozilla is being vilified non-stop this past week when nothing's really changed (only their legal wording). Whereas Google are literally personal information vampires; they make the web a worse place for people and their freedoms.

I will continue supporting Mozilla and using Firefox.

botanicalon 'Trump Gaza' AI video intended as political satire, says creator

The idea of Hamas will never be eradicated for as long as Palestinians live under occupation and dehumanisation. Hamas came to be after Palestinian land was occupied, large swathes stolen and its people killed by Apartheid Israel.

There already are 5.6 million refugees in Jordan and neighbouring countries, created by Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians; that's almost half the population of Israel. Why should Palestinians forcibly leave their own land?

botanicalon Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

When people ask how could IBM facilitate in the Holocaust, this is how it happens.

Google rushed to sell AI tools to Israel’s military after Hamas attack:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/21/google-...