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dbmnt

138 karma · joined October 5, 2013

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dbmnt··on Affinity Studio now free
It's right there in the FAQ.

"Your Affinity V2 license (via Serif) remains valid and Serif will continue to keep activation servers online. But please note that these apps won’t receive future updates."

dbmnt··on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says
It's an annual fee. It would raise the cost to $300k/yr.

https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-trump-immigration-8d3969...

dbmnt··on Show HN: NextDNS Adds "Bypass Age Verification"
Ah, ok... a transparent proxy just to hide the origin IP. Thanks for clarifying. A lot of people are assuming full proxying, but I understand you were describing a hypothetical.
dbmnt··on Show HN: NextDNS Adds "Bypass Age Verification"
This is wrong. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how certificate authorities (CAs) work.

A certificate has to be signed by a trusted CA (one your browser already trusts).

A DNS provider could mint a self-signed cert for pornhub.com, but your browser would reject it immediately.

Even if they tried to trick a real CA, Certificate Transparency (CT) would expose the bogus certificate:

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

Instead, NextDNS is very likely abusing the EDNS Client Subnet feature to provide website operators with a spoofed client location. Much more simple and less nefarious.

dbmnt··on Show HN: NextDNS Adds "Bypass Age Verification"
They're (ab)using the EDNS Client Subnet feature:

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

dbmnt··on Show HN: NextDNS Adds "Bypass Age Verification"
No, I don't think they are proxying traffic. They are giving the website operators a spoofed EDNS Client Subnet which tricks them into thinking the traffic is coming from a different geolocation.
dbmnt··on Show HN: NextDNS Adds "Bypass Age Verification"
Parent might also be getting bit by Apple's iCloud Private Relay and/or the "Hide IP Address" feature of Safari.
dbmnt··on US Justice Department settles antitrust case for HPE's $14B takeover of Juniper
I’m also puzzled by the Instant On divestiture. In the original filing and press release the DOJ does call out SMB, even though most of the discussion is about enterprise markets:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-block...

My guess is that by forcing HPE to spin off Instant On, the DOJ hopes to score a modest PR win by claiming it protected small businesses, by preserving one of the few turnkey, cloud-native wireless solutions for SMBs. Since Instant On represents only a tiny portion of the deal, though, it seems odd that it was singled out.

dbmnt··on US Justice Department settles antitrust case for HPE's $14B takeover of Juniper
Acquisitions have been central to Hewlett-Packard’s strategy since the mid-1980s. Just look at this list:

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

HPE consistently struggles to retain talent and foster growth post-acquisition. Integration is hampered by decades of IT cruft, leading to a sluggish tech stack and a deeply bureaucratic culture. Like many public companies, they also suffer from a lack of long-term focus.

dbmnt··on US Justice Department settles antitrust case for HPE's $14B takeover of Juniper
Aruba Networks (acquired by HP in 2015, right before HP split into HP/HPE) has approximately 5% of the market for switching outside of the datacenter segment. They aren't a big player in the DC, you're right about that.

Google used to use HP (pre Aruba) switches in the DC in the early days. Not many though. Mostly for OOB access. I doubt they still do.

dbmnt··on Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference
> Google's non-AI efficiency is not much better than Amazon or anyone else.

I don't think this is true. Google has long been a leader in efficiency. Look at the power usage effectiveness (PUE). A decade ago Google announced average PUEs around 1.12 while the industry average was closer to 2.0. From what I can tell they reported a 1.1 average fleet wide last year. They've been more transparent about this than any of the other big players.

AWS is opaque by comparison, but they report 1.2 on average. So they're close now, but that's after a decade of trying to catch up to Google.

To suggest the rest of the industry is on the same level is not at all accurate.

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

(Amazon isn't even listed in the "Notably efficient companies" section on the Wikipedia page).

dbmnt··on Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
I'm using Kagi as my default, falling back to Google (typically via '!g' in Kagi) for some technical queries. I use ChatGPT 4o several times a day, but typically not as a 1:1 replacement for web search.
dbmnt··on Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
In the last paragraph you describe the overwhelming majority of humanity, seemingly without any sense of irony. What outcome do you expect here?
dbmnt··on FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
My guess after reading the same -- the bot traffic comes in bursts and targets a specific commit hash for a while. Users are unlikely to need that specific commit, and even less likely to need it at the same time a bot is bursting requests for it. There's probably a small risk of denying a real user, but there's a large reduction in traffic from the bots making it to git; a worthwhile trade.
dbmnt··on FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
Put simply, most bots just aren't designed to solve such challenges.
dbmnt··on HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere
Caddy
dbmnt··on Operator research preview
$200/mo. It's only in the new Pro plan at the moment.
dbmnt··on Show HN: I built an active community of trans people online
Parent didn't say anything about complete protection? An LLC does offer some level of protection, albeit mostly liability protection (as implied by the name, Limited Liability Company), and in this case I would be more worried about the need to defend against overzealous law enforcement requests. I'm not sure an LLC really helps much in that context. It's more about being able to afford a good legal team.
dbmnt··on TikTok tells staff impacted by wildfires to use sick hours if they can't work
It was the former, a unique ID per recipient.
dbmnt··on TikTok tells staff impacted by wildfires to use sick hours if they can't work
iPhones, Pixels, and Samsung phones have been defaulting to HEIC for around five years now, so it’s unlikely that compression alone would prevent tracking dots or other unique noise or patterns from being preserved. Steganography is a well-established technique that can definitely survive through photographs, even under compression. Variations in fonts or typography could be used for tracking too. There are plenty of creative ways this could be achieved.
dbmnt··on TikTok tells staff impacted by wildfires to use sick hours if they can't work
Holy shit though, who thought this email (or Slack message or whatever) in the middle of an ongoing disaster was a good idea? This is the equivalent of asking you to make sure you file your TPS report. Honestly why do they give a shit about the knobs in the RTO portal? They can see if people are based in LA already. Benefit of the doubt, etc.
dbmnt··on TikTok tells staff impacted by wildfires to use sick hours if they can't work
Google used to watermark internal emails using non-visible Unicode. It would catch people copy-pasting things to the press. (This was circa 2010; I don't know if they still do it.)

Printers and copiers have hidden "tracking dots" that can ID the specific device used. Introduced by Xerox in the mid 80s and not known to the public until 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

Sorry but this wouldn't be "next level" spyware.

dbmnt··on Orbit by Mozilla
I mean, the iPhone 16 is already running LLMs locally. So yeah.
dbmnt··on Orbit by Mozilla
Someone provided the solution in another comment.

After pinning the extension, click on it and deselect the "enabled" option (the line with the purple X). This will kill the floating orb UI but you can still click on the extension in the toolbar to use it.

dbmnt··on Orbit by Mozilla
Wow, that's really not intuitive, but it works. Thanks!
dbmnt··on Ghostty 1.0
But... don't you want people to use it? You seem passionate about it otherwise.

I'll admit, I almost didn't click past the animation either. I did, and the doc quickly answered "what is it?", but why not just put that sentence on the landing page? I don't get the unnecessary obscurity either.

dbmnt··on Ghostty 1.0
https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming
dbmnt··on DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
Given the current political climate, this is incredibly unlikely. Reference the situation with TikTok and the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" which became US law earlier this year.
dbmnt··on Francois Chollet is leaving Google
This says more about the cost of rent than it does the compensation of FAANG.
dbmnt··on End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit
Probably not news to you, but those are completely different departments within the company with opposing goals.
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