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dbrgn

3,927 karma · joined October 30, 2012

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dbrgn··on Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains
A lot of people doubted this could work. After all, railway tracks are a dusty, hot environment with tons of vibrations that could cause microcracks.

I was in the doubter team too, but if this really worked out, that's great news. Congrats to the project team! Will be interesting to see if this scales well.

dbrgn··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
Latency doesn't matter for music and Fiio supports both LDAC and aptX.

Keeping the battery charged is a weak point though, agreed.

dbrgn··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
An alternative to a wired dongle is a high-quality bluetooth amp, e.g. from Fiio. It's reliable, keeps your phone free from cables, but you can keep using your high quality wired headphones.
dbrgn··on Proton CEO Andy Yen Explains the Withdrawal from Switzerland with the VÜPF
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329654
dbrgn··on Swiss voters back e-ID and abolish rental tax
Fair, this may be a legal option for ordering alcohol. I really don't see the pure cryptographic hash "is older than 18y" as a big privacy issue though, as long as it is properly salted, does not provide other information on my identity and is unlinkable (i.e. multiple such signed claims are different).

The last time I opened an account for a financial service, as well as when creating an account with a service for digital document signatures, I had to do a video ident process with a private third party company. There was no other option, and I felt quite uneasy about it. I would have preferred the E-ID by far in both cases.

Both companies will inevitably store information about me to provide their service, independently of the identity verification. That is legitimate and inevitable for their service. That other, third party company storing a video of me holding my ID and my face into the camera is now not inevitable anymore.

dbrgn··on Swiss voters back e-ID and abolish rental tax
Quite a few actually do require ID-scan-through-email (which is horrible). Or, they simply delegate to a third party video ident service, often in another country (because cheaper).

How exactly is the status quo not much worse than "I give you a cryptographic hash proving that I am over 18, but nothing else, and without the state knowing that this transaction happened"?

dbrgn··on Swiss voters back e-ID and abolish rental tax
Companies can already request and will still be able to request a PDF scan of your ID. Or worse, video ident through a private third party.

This is the status quo for ordering alcohol online, or if you want to open a bank account.

The new E-ID based on SSI (self-sovereign identity) is so much better than the status quo from a real-world privacy perspective towards companies that must verify your identity or age.

dbrgn··on Swiss voters back e-ID and abolish rental tax
The Swiyu team dropped the Play Integrity requirement on Android: https://github.com/swiyu-admin-ch/eidch-android-wallet/issue... This means that the E-ID will be officially supported on AOSP based secure ROMs like GrapheneOS, without any requirement for Google services.
dbrgn··on Show HN: A website for comparing Nespresso capsules
This is interesting.

How did you measure the caffeine content in the capsule? Also, I assume that is the total amount of caffeine present in the capsule, and not the caffeine dissolved in a cup of coffee (since that would depend on the amount of water running through it, and possibly on temperature and mineral contents as well.)

dbrgn··on Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law
Downside: Sometimes laws can be delayed for 1+ years due to a referendum. The political process is slower and big reforms are much harder.

Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.

dbrgn··on I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)
Many people in Switzerland love to buy used cars with cash, even if they cost a few thousands.

(But we can also just scan the QR code of the recipient's bank account with the e-banking app and initiate a transfer that way.)

dbrgn··on Frustrated YouTube viewers seek explanation for hour-long unskippable ads
If you look at the price tiers per country (https://www.theworldranking.com/statistics/671/youtube-premi...), you'll be able to see why - as a user in Switzerland - so far I wasn't willing to pay 250$ every year for YouTube Premium, it"s simply not worth the price to me. With less steep pricing, I'd pay.
dbrgn··on LibrePCB 1.1.0 Released
The EAGLE project import is quite relevant, now that this product will be discontinued by Autodesk: https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/future-of-...
dbrgn··on Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia will be completed in 2026
> It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty, let alone an entire neighborhood.

Hold on, we're talking about Barcelona... The phallus tower (Torre Glòries) certainly has a certain aesthetic ;)

A bit on the more serious side: If you ask city planners, they will probably be able to list thousands of examples of beautiful neighbourhoods in modern cities. They do exist, but I agree that a lot of modern buildings appear quite "soulless" and exchangeable.

dbrgn··on The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
The random spin followed by a run reminds me a bit of the first-generation Roomba logic...
dbrgn··on Quantum computers move closer to the assembly line
The main thing that changed "recently" is that NIST standardized ML-KEM (aka Kyber) for post-quantum cryptography, which was important for implementors. However, ML-KEM is still quite new, so it is mostly used in hybrid schemes with the "store-now-decrypt-later" threat in mind.

Other than that, I don't think anything fundamentally changed during the last 10-20 years.

dbrgn··on Ask HN: Are there any good reasons to use C++ over Rust for new projects today?
I can't confirm that. Rust's safety features allow moving fast without fear of subtle bugs.

Developing in Rust can feel like fighting the compiler though when choosing approaches / architecture that aren't a good fit for Rust. This happens a lot when people only have little Rust experience. For example: Writing a linked list can be quite challenging in Rust due to self-referential types. With more experience in Rust, developer learn how to best structure the code so that it doesn't result in this friction.

dbrgn··on Home Assistant: Three years later
For Zigbee, I can recommend using the Zigbee2MQTT (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/) integration instead of HomeAssistant's built-in ZHA system. It might be a bit more complex to set up, but it's very powerful and works fantastically. (User "simon42" on YouTube has some good videos about the topic, but they're in German.)
dbrgn··on Why you've never been in a plane crash
Just this month, there was a court case in Switzerland where an ATC was charged and convicted because he gave wrong instructions to a military jet, which then crashed into a rock wall. The case was quite interesting to follow, due to the various implications of a conviction or acquittal. It had quite some media coverage.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-military-jet-crash--publi...

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/air-traffic-controller-blamed-f...

(Note that this was a military court, not a civil court. Proceedings might be different in these cases, even though both civil and military ATCs work for the same company - Skyguide.)

dbrgn··on Winding down Google Sync and Less Secure Apps support
I use the standard plan.
dbrgn··on Winding down Google Sync and Less Secure Apps support
I use Fastmail for 5+ years now. Initially I feared that the experience would be worse than Gmail (with regards to the Web UI, to spam filtering, etc). It is not. It really is much better!
dbrgn··on Winding down Google Sync and Less Secure Apps support
There is e-mail, and there is Gmail.

(By the way, there are a lot of great e-mail providers other than Google. Often even with a web UI superior to the one by Gmail.)

dbrgn··on WebRTC for the Curious (2020)
I set up a simple website to stream two webcams in my chicken coop using Janus / WebRTC: https://github.com/dbrgn/chicken-coop/tree/main/rpi-image See README for a quick overview.

Another interesting SFU library is MediaSoup: https://mediasoup.org/

dbrgn··on Do I need to get out the soldering iron again? (2018)
If you want a ready-to-use solution: Fiio makes great MP3 players, and also nice USB- and Bluetooth-DACs.

A device like the Fiio Btr3k makes it possible to use good quality wired headphones with one of those modern smartphones without an audio jack. (And it sounds better than the devices that did have an audio jack.)

Oh, and Fiio also builds some nice IEMs :)

dbrgn··on This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
I was specifically talking about Servo as a rendering engine. Just open their own website in Servo, and look for all the rendering problems present :)
dbrgn··on This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
Quote from the post:

> In a decade that many people feared would become the nadir of browser engine diversity, we hope we can help change that with Servo.

I sure hope so! It might be a good thing that Servo is now independent from Mozilla. We can't rely on Mozilla anymore, and should move on. Maybe someday Servo can become the new Firefox (as in "modern and freedom-respecting browser")?

From testing the current version of Servo, it still has a long long way to go though, until it becomes a usable browser.

dbrgn··on Serbia grants citizenship to Steve Wozniak
I only have some annecdotal stories, from a friend who grew up in Croatia and then had to flee during the Yugoslavia war, where one of the parents is Serbian and the other is Albanian. The stories are both from his childhood (being pushed into the sea as a kid, because they noticed he's from a certain group, not being sold bread as a kid because he used the wrong word when ordering) and from recent years (e.g. getting beaten up at a bar by a group of people, because from his accent it was clear he wasn't from that area).

I'm not trying to say that Serbia sucks, or that Serbs suck, or that all Serbs are like that, or anything in that direction. Almost all people I personally know from ex-Yugoslavia (including Serbia) are great people. But – especially given the conflict-rich history of that area – there are still a lot of conflicts and animosities between ethnic groups, and Serbia also has its fair share of xenophobia (in contrast to what GP suggested in their comment).

dbrgn··on Building end-to-end security for Messenger
I assume users must still be able to send messages from different devices, just by entering their login data into a new Messenger client.

According to their paper, they are doing client fan-out:

"Messenger uses this "client-fanout" approach for transmitting messages to multiple devices, where the Messenger client transmits a single message `N` number of times to `N` number of different devices. Each message is individually encrypted using the established pairwise encryption session with each device."

This means, the system is only as secure as its client registration protocol. They don't write a lot about it:

"At registration time, a Messenger client transmits its public Identity Key, public Signed Pre Key (with its signature), and a batch of public One-Time Pre Keys to the server. The Messenger server stores these public keys associated with the user's device specific identifier. This facilitates offline session establishment between two devices when one device is offline."

If I interpret this correctly, the server can, at any time it desires, silently add new clients. Those devices will receive all messages directed at that user, and will be able to decrypt it.

I guess that's in line with their bla-bla about setting user expectations:

"Our focus is on determining the appropriate boundaries, ensuring that we remain true to our commitments, setting the correct user expectations, and avoiding creating meaningful privacy risks, while still ensuring that the product retains its usefulness to our users."

Don't forget, their commitments are making profit and exploiting user data.

dbrgn··on Gemini AI
United Kingdom, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Norway and Iceland are all part of Europe.
dbrgn··on Serbia grants citizenship to Steve Wozniak
I guess in Germany/Switzerland/Austria he'd be "Stefan Wosniak" :)
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