Hacker News Reader

If someone is hijacking BGP to MITM the world, how are the old methods any better?

discreditableon Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

Having played the game for a bit, one of the charming things is that the path finding still feels a lot like the original. It's certainly better. As mentioned, the new version fixes a lot of villager collision issues. They preserved the behaviors that made AoE what it was and fixed some of the bad aspects of it.

discreditableon Swype pioneered a new way to type on smartphones–now it’s dead

For me it is cool but (like voice typing) I felt that if I had to correct it once, then I could have typed it twice. For a while I used Swype but with the gestures disabled. Eventually I switched to the stock keyboard, then Gboard (with gestures disabled).

discreditableon Let's Encrypt ACMEv2 and Wildcard Launch Delay

Where are these $3/year certs? Cheapest I've found is about $9.

discreditableon Let's Encrypt ACMEv2 and Wildcard Launch Delay

I've been following progress in their GitHub issue for it: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/issues/2244

Most recent comment:

> We're working hard on it, but will probably not land this in production before the end of February. Still, we are very much aware of the upcoming deadline and committed to meeting it. Thanks for the enthusiasm everyone! :-)

discreditableon Appropriate Uses for SQLite

Maybe when it gets Python support! :)

https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921/suggestions/105490...

discreditableon Cryonics Myths

"Ask a Mortician" just did a video on Cyronics! https://youtu.be/FOZSU0SLNME

discreditableon Show HN: Automatic detection of non-colorblind safe colors

I'm not colorblind and I use colorblind mode just because I think it looks better!

discreditableon 3D Color Print

HP's website is legendarily disorganized and horrible.

discreditableon Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

Not on Google Play music either.

discreditableon Safari Password Generation

I think Firefox's solution is a little better. You can set a master password which is used to encrypt the password database. To unlock you have to enter the password. You can browse without unlocking.

discreditableon No Cutting Corners on the iPhone X

> I couldn't unlock it anymore while pinching it out of my pocket

I don't have that problem. Maybe if I wore skinny jeans. Unlock from pocket is the way I usually do it.

discreditableon No Cutting Corners on the iPhone X

I can unlock the phone as I take it out of my pocket. It's unlocked before I even look at it. I have not used Face ID.

discreditableon No Cutting Corners on the iPhone X

If they had a fingerprint reader on the back of the device it would be even better.

discreditableon About rel=noopener (2016)

> Should we not decide that cross-origin window.opener is now deprecated, show big fat warnings on the developer console when it's used, and remove it in a year or two?

That does nothing for deployed sites that aren't actively developed? Browser devs have decided those sites are worth not breaking.

discreditableon Firefox 58

Nightly is surprisingly stable. In my past few years of using it, there have only been a few days when it has been unusable. On those days I just used Chrome. The e10s transition was pretty rough. It was common for every tab to crash at once, and sometimes there were long delays for tabs to paint when switching.

discreditableon BeyondCorp: How Google Ditched VPNs for Remote Employee Access

> All the corporate resources are behind this uber-reverse proxy. Based on a decision provided by its “trust engine,” the proxy makes the decision of whether or not to provide access to the desired application. If permissions are in place, according to the tiered trust model, it forwards the requests to the application, along with the security credentials.

To me this sounds like a firewall/vpn moved into the application layer.

discreditableon So You Want to Compete with Steam

Blizzard's client is pretty but has its own drawbacks. I uninstalled it recently after it tabbed me out of a competitive match with a UAC prompt to update itself. The Bnet forums are full of people complaining about that particular issue.

discreditableon Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

It's pretty meh. It looks like a simple reskin of Thunderbird which doesn't solve any of its problems if you ask me. Thunderbird could certainly use some design love (a conversation view like Gmail could be neat), but I like TB beta's theme better than this.

discreditableon What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective

Usually system manufacturer's fault. A recent example where I work is Lenovo's recommended Intel wireless driver (the one on the Lenovo site) was over six months old and had known issues with causing machines to not be able to wake from suspend. Installing the drivers directly from Intel resolved the problem.

That's pretty much the best case scenario. A lot of chipmakers (Conexant, Jmicron, Intel in many cases) don't allow you to download drivers directly from them. So you are stuck with whatever the OEM provides. In some cases I've found that newer model laptops by the same OEM use the same audio/media controllers under the hood in some case and I can use the newer driver from the updated model.

discreditableon Intel Security Issue Update: Initial Performance Data Results for Client Systems

It's interesting to think that every CPU comparison benchmark online is invalid now. With these number, I wonder how AMD is shaping up to Intel?

When I bought a 7700k over the summer, I went by benchmarks which showed it over Ryzen for most non-parallel workloads. I suspect these numbers bring Ryzen much closer if not beyond. With all these old benchmarks online, CPU shoppers are likely to be misled.

Thinking further, I wonder how benchmarkers patch machines? Will they keep anti-virus enabled so that they receive the 2018-01 patch?

discreditableon Intel Security Issue Update: Addressing Reboot Issues

AMD is vulnerable to Spectre, but nothing like Meltdown.

discreditableon Issue with TLS-SNI-01 and Shared Hosting Infrastructure

Seems to use tls-sni-01. This is my guess by looking at the certbot-nginx source directory: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/tree/b1826d657ffc7c278041...

discreditableon The Fight for Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won

VP9 is getting a lot better. Since the advent of the -frame-parallel and -tile-columns options, encoding scales well with CPU cores. The only frustrating thing for me is these aren't used by default. The VP9 encoding guide has info on their use: http://wiki.webmproject.org/ffmpeg/vp9-encoding-guide

discreditableon Let's Encrypt tls-sni-01 disabled due to credible vulnerability report

I don't think CF is affected because TLS-SNI-01 has never worked for cf-proxied sites (I've tried). CF doesn't allow clients to use invalid certificates for domains they don't own, which is key for the tls-sni-01 process.

discreditableon Let's Encrypt tls-sni-01 disabled due to credible vulnerability report

I don't think Cloudflare/CDNs are affected since TLS-SNI-01 doesn't work for cf-proxied hosts. (I've tried.)

Reading the detailed report[1], it sounds like tls-sni-01 requires being able to serve an invalid certificate temporarily. As far as I know, CDNs won't let you do that. This problem is probably more related to shared webhosts (which is hinted at in the detailed report).

discreditableon Microsoft disables Windows Update when Meltdown/Spectre registry key isn't set

> The compatibility registry key exists for a reason. I know. I can also see it’s a messy hacky fix. But it needs an end of life date

I couldn't agree more. As I've been devising a patching plan over the past few days I couldn't help but wonder "how long will I have to do this"? My hope is that in future OS releases (say, Windows Client/Server 1803) the mitigations will be default-on for clean installations (minimally).

discreditableon Mailgun Security Incident and Important Customer Information

These sorts of articles always remind me of “We take security seriously”, otherwise known as “We didn’t take it seriously enough”: https://www.troyhunt.com/we-take-security-seriously-otherwis...