Hacker News Reader

chasilon Closing the Sea: Lessons from Ancient Mediterranean Blockades

Now I get the Gungan and Naboo reference.

I was never a fan of the prequels. You got me, you scoundrel.

chasilon Closing the Sea: Lessons from Ancient Mediterranean Blockades

As I understand it, the U.S. President engaged in an agreement with the Houthis for mutual non-agression, explaining our refusal to assist the House of Saud and greater Arabia.

I did not know this has a wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States%E2%80%93Hou...

chasilon From confession to conspiracy: How the Wedgewood fake polls story spread

I read a direct account from FiftyPlusOne earlier this week that had been posted to a political site.

Wedgewood was quite abrupt and profanely offensive in their (re)actions in shutting down their operations, if I have read the account correctly.

It certainly appears that they were not expecting to be caught.

The post mentions "Jack Sims and Andrew Prater," whom I assume will now face far more professional review.

https://blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/fiftyplusone-just-caught-a-...

chasilon Closing the Sea: Lessons from Ancient Mediterranean Blockades

Summary...

Samos: An effective blockade must be persistent; distractions imperil the effort.

Syracuse: When the timing is wrong, situations can reverse to shatter your forces.

Rhodes: An incomplete effort can result in stalemate.

Lilybaeum: Replacement forces who are inexperienced are vulnerable.

chasilon Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs

Hard file locking makes Windows Update into agony.

I can see the 70s motivation for it, but it is a terrible burden in modern times.

Hopefully is is not implemented here.

chasilon Internet Security: We're Doomed

PHP is not prominently used in banking.

It is a common technology, well supported in the Red Hat family, and (I would hope that) dnf update will be the proper step for most people.

chasilon What Happened to the Neanderthals?

As I understand it, their mitochondrial DNA does not survive, so they were always the fathers of any hybrids that contributed to the modern human genome.

" recent Science study found evidence that couplings followed a distinct pattern: Neanderthal males with modern human females."

The article links to this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/science/human-evolution-n...

https://archive.ph/9mQKV

chasilon Twelve years of distributed SQLite

I have never examined this in any detail before. It looks far easier than the mass majority of clustered database architectures.

https://rqlite.io/

chasilon We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970

How about this one? It should be a collection of documentaries and reviews.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRjRVyOP5DtHQkX2-K-fTNm0V...

chasilon We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970

This film, Colossus: The Forbin Project, is free on YouTube. I have seen it several times.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qSgsHIj7jpg

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRjRVyOP5DtHQkX2-K-fTNm...

chasilon A whirlwind tour of systemd-nspawn containers (2025)

Eleven years ago, I wrote an introduction to nspawn from a busybox perspective.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/infinite-busybox-system...

I used that for a number of designs before my retirement.

The quality of my writing certainly did improve after that was finished.

chasilon Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone

> I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated.

Several vendors sell Android devices that allow bootloader unlocking, Pixels being the most known.

Once unlocked, Magisk is the current and most used rooting tool.

The procedure is quite straightforward.

https://github.com/topjohnwu/magisk

https://magiskmanager.com/

chasilon PHP2Shell: AI uncovers critical RCE in PHP

For 109619, "Exploitation requires hitting a precise out-of-memory condition during request processing, which keeps this below Critical."

The lower criticality may be wishful thinking.

chasilon PHP2Shell: AI uncovers critical RCE in PHP

Does active SELinux (as used in Red Hat derivatives) limit the damage at all?

I built some rhel7 systems that are relaying user-provided LDAP credentials into a domain controller, and these are probably wide open with these flaws.

I would hope that SELinux would prevent the launch of a shell, at least.

Does PHP built with FORTIFY_SOURCE and other RedHat-recommended compiler flags help?

chasilon Gold is now the top U.S. export

Well, I have just retired, as a millionaire.

My outburst should have been concealed in more diplomatic language, I'll grant.

I am frightened of what I'm doing next (driving to Mazatlan).

Begging your pardon.

chasilon Gold is now the top U.S. export

If I am reading this correctly, then mercury-198 will receive a neutron, decay to mercury-197, then emit an electron to become gold-197.

Mercury has seven stable isotopes ranging from 195 to 204, so purifying to 198 is challenging (this isotope is 10% of the metal's occurrence). Would this require centrifuges as uranium does?

The decay chains of the other isotopes would be different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...

"...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."

The above reaction is at the end of the section.

chasilon Nine-Inch Snails

https://archive.ph/CPsFp

chasilon Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled

For as much COBOL as my (former) coworkers use every day, they should bankroll her day.

chasilon Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome

Safari has real problems compared to Chrome on other platforms.

Primarily, incognito mode is difficult to access. Android allows a shortcut to be dropped to start in this mode.

Cut and paste is also awkward and uncomfortable in Safari compared to Android.

My first move on iOS is to install Firefox Focus, to get Safari's history under control.

chasilon A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices

I'm not comfortable giving away time and power consumption on a machine that I own.

I would definitely opt out.

Is Apple going to compensate the owners?

chasilon A Modern Web App in C

I have used ccgi.c when I needed access to system calls and PHP was too much of an attack surface.

https://github.com/moths/libccgi/blob/master/ccgi.c

chasilon No portable way to detect string-to-float conversion errors in standard C

The VAX floating point was advanced as an alternative standards proposal at that time. Intel won the argument.

https://sixlettervariable.blogspot.com/2007/05/vax-floating-...

chasilon No portable way to detect string-to-float conversion errors in standard C

IEEE-754 is a harsh mistress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754

chasilon The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME

My initial syntax does work in dash (and bash), but all these shells appear to rely on expanding ~ inside a word, that your source asserts is not POSIX (which I do not contest).

Perhaps a succinct and compliant expression could be:

  export PATH="$PATH:$(printf %s ~/.local/bin)"

That comes at the cost of forking a subsell.

Edit: 2.6.1 Tilde Expansion in the POSIX standard says that ~ may be expanded "following any unquoted <colon>".

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

That being so, the most succinct and compliant version is my first variant, with the colon moved outside the quotes:

  export PATH="$PATH":~/.local/bin

Thank you for prompting me to look this up.

chasilon The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME

I think the appropriate method by POSIX rules would be:

  export PATH="$PATH:"~/.local/bin

I may be wrong. If I'm not, that works in any POSIX-compliant shell.

Edit: this appears to work properly with mksh on my phone:

  :/ $ export PATH="$PATH:"~/.local/bin
  :/ $ print $PATH
  /product/bin:/apex/com.android.runtime/bin:/apex/com.android.art/bin:/system_ext/bin:/system/bin:/system/xbin:/odm/bin:/vendor/bin:/vendor/xbin:~/.local/bin

chasilon LineageOS 24.0

A plain Lineage install will include "rooted debugging" in the developer options.

This is separate from the Magisk root app.

I don't believe using the ADB root functionality is problematic. The Magisk app also has a hide mode.

chasilon Apple/macOS removed from official Unix registry

If I remember correctly, two Linux variants were on the list at one time.

They were:

Inspur K-UX (expired on 3 February 2019)

Huawei EulerOS (expired in September 2022)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS

These were both based on Red Hat.

chasilon Clinical trial of a prion disease drug candidate begins enrolling participants

Prion diseases include:

-in sheep, scrapie

-in humans, Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jacob

-in cows, BSE ("mad cow")

-in deer, Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)

-in cats, feline spongiform encephalopathy

Scrapie is particularly known, deadly, and long-lived. The toxin proteins can survive for a decade in soil, and infect a new host years after it emerged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...

chasilon Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court

What you will see with a general read of the criticisms in the wiki are indications of bias and several nations in Africa and South America annulling the ICC influence.

The U.S. had peripheral involvement in these actions.

I am upvoting you, as I don't find your line of questioning abrasive enough to warrant down votes.

chasilon Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court

There is indeed a long list of criticisms of the ICC.

The U.S., along with China, India, Russia, and many other nations, are not members and do not grant any weight to ICC rulings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court#C...