coldpie

We had water and traffic control and electricity for decades and centuries before the Internet. It is less convenient and more expensive, but it also means hostile countries can't literally poison your drinking water from across the planet. It's not a difficult trade to consider.

It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security after so many years of nonstop hacks and leaks. If you have a computer and it is connected to a network with access to the Internet, assume that computer is semi-public. Meaning, if someone was interested enough in accessing your computer, they could do it. Do not hook any computer with access to anything that would be devastating if it was made public to the Internet. Do not put anything that would be devastating if it was made public onto someone else's Internet-connected computers.

For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.

The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house.

I had an iPhone 13 Mini. I found it to be much worse about ads.

Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.

Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.

> 3. The default conflict style should be zdiff3.

This one always baffled me. The default conflictstyle is so hard to read it's almost useless. Using diff3 is mandatory.

I hadn't heard of zdiff3, I'll give it a shot.

Many bothans died to bring you that suggestion to make a new emoji of pizzas in a yard.

> the industry is taking a big turn toward stack ranking and implicit or even explicit 996 expectations.

I don't think this is actually happening. Maybe a few high profile businesses trying to burn through and exploit inexperienced workers are doing that, but there's a whole lot of businesses out there that aren't run by sociopaths. You just don't hear about 'em on the news.

Close your laptop no more than 8 hours after you opened it. Never work on weekends. If they need more hours worked than that, then they can hire another person to work them. If they fire you (they won't) then I guess you have your answer.

> the only reward for hard work is more work.

Yup. I work 35-40 hours a week. I do not put work stuff on my personal devices, I do not open my work laptop at home. This isn't something I negotiated or made explicit, it's just what I do. No one has ever objected to my work or output and I keep getting raises every year.

They make sense as a technology for businesses & their users. In that scenario, the owner of the account is not the user, but the business. It makes sense for the business to be able to place strong restrictions on how & where the user may log in, it fixes a lot of real problems businesses may have thanks to sloppy user behavior, and the business is also motivated to provide a way to fix broken logins. It's a good solution for that scenario.

But for regular end users where services are primarily motivated to take money from those users and lock them into their ecosystems, they are a usability disaster and yet another exploitation vector.

It's one solution for two very different usecases, and it just does not work. There is an approach that could work for end users who own their own accounts, but they need to go back to the drawing board and rewrite the protocol with the assumption that the keystore is hostile to the user's interests. That means strong guarantees on key portability so users can migrate away from hostile keystores, and absolutely no ability for services to restrict the user's choice in passkey provider software.

Yeah. My mom hung onto my old school stuff and finally wanted to get rid of it when she moved. I took it graciously with thanks, and then tossed it in the trash when I got home.

YC's finest https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

Yeah, of course. Every solution has pros and cons, you gotta settle on the best one for the world you live in.

CAs are quite distributed already. You probably have a couple dozen or even a hundred different root CAs installed right now, and you can install whatever ones you like if necessary.

> Why do we loathe Oracle again?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...

https://www.patentleaderboard.com/company/oracle

Oracle going out of business would at least be one thing to celebrate in 2026.

Huh, wow. I kind of thought the whole point of CAs was to do identity verification. It they have dropped that entirely, what is the point?

So, you're right that this does work in theory, but it obviously doesn't scale, right? We can't have every person physically go to every storefront they want to purchase something from and then drive home with a USB stick. What if I in Minnesota want to buy something from Florida or France?

The role CAs play is to be a trusted identity verifier so we don't have to have millions of people driving around to do key exchanges in person.

You can go look at them. In Firefox, head to "about:certificate" and click the Authorities tab.

How do I know that the DNS record is owned by the entity they are claiming to be? CAs have nothing to do with caching.

> provide the public keys to my clients

How does this part happen? How does the client know that the entity providing them with that public key is who they claim to be?

> Unambiguously, a system where the only code that runs is code that you explicitly run is more secure.

I don't think so? If I want to run a 3D modeling program and I download their executable and run it, it has access to everything on my system. All my local files, open access to my network connection, whatever's going on with my internal network, etc. If they want to read all my files and upload them, they can just do that. This is not true for web applications.

Programs that run in a browser are sandboxed and only have access to what web standards say they have access to. They can open a file select dialog to get a file from my machine with my permission, but they don't just have access to all of my files like a local program does. Web standards developers put a lot of effort into finding a balance between security and capabilities for new web APIs.

> What is the "Security Model" of the web

Unlike locally running programs, web applications don't have access to everything on the system by default. Interactions with the local system are intermediated by the browser. Usually the user has to approve access, or there are limitations on what types of access a web app can have.

If you head into your Firefox settings and select "Permissions and data", you can see what kinds of things given websites are allowed to access. Usually when they first try to use one of those APIs, the browser will pop up some kind of browser-level dialog asking the user for permission to perform that type of action (eg "access local devices" or "show notifications"). These are all examples of the web app security model (and there's a whole lot more that is not as user-facing).

Local applications on the other hand, do not have any kind of security model. The 3D modeling program I downloaded can just package up all of my files and upload them to their server, completely silently. That's way worse than what web applications can do!

> It's fine to just not have "Web bluetooth" actually. 800 "Partners" just don't need to be able to access that.

In fact, they don't have access to that unless you give it to them. Bluetooth access is gated by a permission: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Permissions...

Here's an extension I wrote to do the same idea, except it clicks the Hide link for each AI submission instead of just nuking the DOM node. This means when you load the front page again, HN will fill it in with articles from the 2nd page. Works pretty well. https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn

I can't solve all of the world's problems, but I can solve the problem in front of me and share my solutions with others who have the same problem.

I maintain a simple browser extension to auto-hide AI news stories: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ It just scans for keywords and clicks the Hide button. Doesn't catch everything, but cuts out a ton of the noise. You can go hit the Hidden page in your profile sometimes and scan for highly-upvoted stories to see the couple that are maybe actually worth looking at.

So, I kind of agree, but I don't know what a better solution looks like.

Is it really better for users to download and run straight up executables with no security model? We tried that in the 90s and 2000s and it was pretty bad. We can have OSes introduce a security model, like Android and iOS do. But then what about desktop Linux users like myself? Am I just to be excluded because I don't use a popular (and proprietary) operating system?

Okay, we can invent a standard, cross platform app distribution mechanism with a security model. And that's... exactly what web browsers are. In the end it seems like the least-bad solution to me. I quite like that I can run GPU accelerated programs without the dev having to put in special effort to support my Linux distro.

I dunno, maybe I'm missing an option?

The comment I was replying to said:

> I’d love a phone that was roughly normal iphone sized when unfolded but was a flip phone à la Motorola razrs in years gone by.

So the Razr does seem pretty comparable to what they were requesting.

Have you looked at the new Motorola Razrs? They're great. 4" external display that is easy to use one-handed and can run any Android app (though some apps and websites struggle with a screen that small), and it unfolds into a phablet for when you want a huge display.

I believe Samsung has a new one with a similar form factor too, though I haven't looked into it.

I think that's a poor analogy. I think the better comparison is it's 50% of the quality for 20% of the cost. Is that a win? I dunno.

I work at a significant computer security software vendor with 5-digits of employees. They provide AI tooling and training and encourage people to use it, but it's not like "use this or we will fire you and kill your children" like you hear from other companies. I use it a couple times a week, mostly for code review and sometimes boring boilerplate-type tasks, but it hasn't been a major overhaul in how I work. People here who obviously outsource their brain to the AI get negative reactions to that behavior.

If the company does try to turn the screws and force me to use it more, I'd rather exit the company (and maybe the industry entirely) than become a slop slinger. We'll see how it goes, but for now at least, I think this company has been handling it well.

Partly it annoys me because the answer to the question "how do I protect myself?" is simply "don't connect it to wifi" and that's it. These rumors make it all complicated to answer when it's really not that deep. This isn't deep NSA spy craft, it's shitty software uploading logs and half-assed data collection to the Internet. That's it.

But if I'm honest, it's mostly because I'm disappointed that they don't do this. It'd be a fascinating story. Imagine the braindead balls it'd take to make a feature that insanely abusive, and how good the outrage out it would be to read. That'd be a killer story for someone to break, it'd be like the xz backdoor or the Snowden NSA leaks. Instead we get these dumb "Mew under a truck"-quality grade school rumors in comments sections and it's just so stupid and disappointing.

(And honestly-honestly a tiny part of it is trying to goad one of these commenters into actually doing the work to find someone who really is doing this, so I can read that story.)

I'm not.