Hacker News Reader

bryneton Japan Post launches 'digital address' system

> Their [virtual] addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change.

So they've added an MMU (Mail Management Unit).

bryneton Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)

Making rent this month so I can unslack.. help appreciated. :-)

But seriously, I'm looking for "no-strings" sponsors, if any companies (or individuals) would like to help support me so that I can focus on open source full time. Feel free to email me: https://brynet.ca/

bryneton Ask HN: Do you have a blog you own or follow?

Sort of, it's blog-like! :-)

https://brynet.ca/

bryneton OpenBSD 7.7 Released

Announcement mail: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=174577743904716&w=2

bryneton OpenBSD 7.7 Released

OpenBSD 7.7 release artwork by Tomáš Rodr.

https://www.openbsd.org/images/LifeOfAFish.png

https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy77.gif

t-shirts, hoodies, stickers on openbsdstore.com

bryneton Ask HN: Where are people sharing their blogs these days?

HN.

Mostly a few static articles, my machines (openbsd), mastodon feed, but.. it's blog-like! :-)

https://brynet.ca/

bryneton Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety

I played through the indie game 'Forest's Secret' and its DLC a few years ago, it's a cozy, non-violent, zelda-like game. Definitely recommended.

https://bynine.itch.io/forestssecret

bryneton Ask HN: How do you make a living contributing to and/or creating OSS projects?

I made a wall of pizza, where people on the internet can buy me pizza (but only if they really want to):

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

> How do you make a living ..

Oh. Still trying to figure that part out, this is falling^Wsurviving.. with style. :-)

bryneton Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

But that's not even the heresy bit!

bryneton Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

Committed some heresy last week while testing OpenBSD 7.7-beta snapshots on an Apple M1 MacBook Air.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brynet_openbsd-activity-73074...

https://bsky.app/profile/brynet.ca/post/3lklnbwihpk2d

bryneton Ask HN: What's your blog / portfolio stack?

Static HTML articles + rss embed, handmangled with vi. https://brynet.ca/

OpenBSD, httpd, acme-client.

bryneton OpenBSD Innovations

Why? OpenBSD seems to think execute-only in userland is important. We've had SMAP on x86 for many years, it helped fixed bugs early, these bugs are rare now, so why is everyone concerned about kernel accesses that aren't using copyin(9)?

EPAN is already supported, hardware is now arriving, it's used if available, but the idea that execute-only was less important than PAN was probably misguided.

bryneton OpenBSD Innovations

OpenBSD's pledge(2) was first talked about publicly as tame(2), and was presented in at FSec 2015, it was renamed pledge(2) as mentioned on the OpenBSD 5.9 page.

https://www.openbsd.org/papers/tame-fsec2015/

https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.8/tame

https://www.openbsd.org/59.html

bryneton OpenBSD Innovations

Outdated FUD, OpenBSD's Mozilla port maintainer regularly updates and backports non-ESR Firefox to the -stable tree.

https://freshbsd.org/openbsd/ports?q=firefox

Tor browser bundle is also being updated consistently.

https://freshbsd.org/openbsd/ports?q=tor-browser

bryneton OpenBSD Innovations

> The idea behind Pledge/Unveil was first in Landlock also.

This is so plainly, and verifiably untrue, that it's almost funny. The patch series and kernel commit adding Landlock to the Linux kernel even references OpenBSD pledge(2)/unveil(2) as a source of inspiration.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/17ae69aba89dbfa2139...

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-security-module/20210422154123...

bryneton OpenBSD Innovations

Thanks, very misleading..

bryneton OpenBSD Innovations

> .. wifi as well.

OpenBSD has supported 11ac for several years, and has the iwx(4) driver for modern Intel WiFi cards. There's also support for Broadcom FullMAC, bwfm(4), which is on e.g: Apple Silicon machines.

HaikuOS also has a port of OpenBSD's iwm/iwx drivers.

FreeBSD just recently announced they've started porting the OpenBSD iwx driver.. from Haiku.

https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/laptop-support-and-usabil...

bryneton OpenBSD Innovations

> The openbsd foundation raised around 5 million, half of which has been spent.

Citation needed, they've raised nowhere near that amount.

https://github.com/bob-beck/foundation-web/commit/483266cece...

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2024.html

bryneton OpenBSD Innovations

It depends on what you need for your daily use, OpenBSD has ports of common desktop environments, KDE Plasma, GNOME. In fact, thanks to KDE and GNOME port maintainers, Rafael Sadowski, and Antoine Jacoutot, respectively, OpenBSD 7.6 -current has the latest versions of both (KDE Plasma Desktop 6.3.1, GNOME 47).

I recently checked out KDE 6 for the first time last year, it really is as easy running as 'pkg_add kde kde-plasma kde-plasma-extras' and then reading through the local pkg-readme file, that said if you're not familiar with OpenBSD it won't be like other systems where it comes preinstalled and preconfigured.

https://brynet.ca/article-l13gen2.html

There's many popular window mangers and applications you can install using the package tools, as you'd expect, including Chromium and Firefox, but you can quickly search here: https://openbsd.app/

bryneton OpenBSD Innovations

https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/lib...

Many things, retguard uses this for per-function random cookies, for instance.

The bootloader uses this mechanism to pass data to the kernel.

https://www.openbsd.org/papers/hackfest2014-arc4random/mgp00...

bryneton OpenBSD Innovations

In addition to work pioneering privdrop/privsep design for network daemons, and the almost ubiquitous adoption of pledge(2)/unveil(2) across the base system, I think people are missing out on much more recent mitigation work, such as mimmutable (which Linux is just beginning to land with mseal), on OpenBSD, most of a programs static address space (.text/ld.so's .text/.bss/main stack) is now automatically immutable.

There's also execute-only memory and BTI/IBT on modern Intel/AMD, and ARM machines, enabled by default. Including a significant amount of ports development work to make the larger software ecosystem ready for this.

bryneton Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

I finally get adopted by a nice family of sentient pizzas in 2025.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton First Impressions: Lenovo T14s with Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM64 CPU

OpenBSD has support for a number of Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite machines.

A bit more works on the T14s Gen 6 too, such as the keyboard! ;-)

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=172925590407875&w=2

bryneton QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

Your school might have had a PET or something, the ICONs were Canadian machines.. software had to be obtained from the government.

These machines didn't work at all without a server to network boot from, aka the LEXICON machine, so it's not likely some teacher squirreled all that across the border.

They were not commercially available.

bryneton QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

I don't have great expectations for this, we've been rug pulled before.

https://www.osnews.com/story/23565/qnx6-is-closed-source-onc...

They then killed the self-hosted QNX entirely, no downloadable .ISOs after 6.5. No working toolchain, so porting software became difficult, pkgsrc abandoned.

They are completely noncommittal, nothing short of actually open-sourcing it, MIT/BSD, would convince me otherwise.

bryneton HardenedBSD Feature Comparison with OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD

It's easy to invent a chart that only you can get a nearly perfect score on.

This does nothing to explain what any of these features are, what are "Boot hardening" and "sysctl hardening"?

At least OpenBSD's innovations page makes an attempt to explain new concepts and features that have been developed over the years, and people can make any comparisons for themselves.

https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html

bryneton FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

This seems very "project focused" rather than developer focused, many people contribute to open source projects but don't necessarily represent their project or don't wish to take away funding from those projects, but could still desperately use funding for their work.

I have a personal donation page but I'm struggling to get and retain funding, especially monthly donations, which would make it easier to spend time on the projects I contribute to (either my time highlighting the work of others on social media, or writing code).

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton OpenBSD 7.6 released

OpenBSD 7.6 release artwork by Sue Doeksen

https://www.openbsd.org/images/LifeIsButADream.jpg

https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy76.gif

https://www.openbsd.org/76.html

bryneton OpenBSD 7.6 released

Yeah, freshbsd.org is useful for linking to searches publicly, I seem to recall GitHub requiring you to be logged in.

bryneton OpenBSD 7.6 released

Support was added to existing drivers for similar hardware, a number of commits mention the Milk-V Pioneer board, I can't comment on how well it is supported, though:

https://freshbsd.org/openbsd/src?q=Milk-V