grishka

Instagram is blocked in Russia so everyone here uses it through some sort of VPN. No one I know has ever got banned for that.

HN has this thing where it would automatically "fix" submission titles.

I always enjoy it when someone makes "obsolete" hardware natively talk to modern network services that it was never meant to talk to. And bringing an entire browser to a system this old is a serious achievement. I don't own any hardware that can run classic Mac OS, but I'm gonna try it on an emulator later, really curious how it handles several of my own websites.

Though the fact that the author uses AI is kinda meh.

Or Alisa

Thankfully, once something is on the internet, it's here forever.

So is it really a book about something like

    #включить <стдвв.з>
    
    цел главная() {
        печататьф("Привет, мир!\н");
        вернуть 0;
    }

I've seen a meme where someone did that with a bunch of #define's

I've been using Mac for ages but I use the layout Apple calls "Russian — PC". These characters are still not really that available. There are some alt-shift-whatever contortions you can do to type them, but it's easier just to switch to English and back again. Apple's default Russian layout is even worse at the very least because the period is shift+7 instead of the key between Ю and shift.

My notification setup is more elaborate (for one, I do keep social media notifications on, but silent) but yeah I agree in general. It frightens me seeing some other people's notification shades where they have 20+ spam notifications from all kinds of things that I wouldn't even consider installing an app for, and they're somehow fine with it.

Hm. That must be new, I was taught Turbo Pascal

By the way, there's one Cyrillic programming language still in wide use today. It's part of 1С (1S), an ERP system that's absolutely everywhere in Russia.

The language itself is quite similar to Visual Basic. It's awkward to write with a regular Russian keyboard layout, but I was told that there exist special layouts just for it.

You still sit at home, alone, in front of a screen to talk to these people. It's still really depressing.

I sincerely miss working in an office, but with my current job it would've been impossible anyway (everyone is remote in different countries). I've only once met some of my coworkers irl a few years ago when we went to a conference together.

Smithereen, my fediverse server, contains a bytecode VM for the `execute` API method: https://smithereen.software/docs/api/methods/execute

I plan to eventually use it for things like automatic spam filtering as well.

Indeed, but there are counterexamples as well. In the UAE you enter as a tourist and get a resident visa while you're there. They take away your passport for at least a couple of weeks so you can't leave either.

Long-distance trains in Russia are still like that. They often have a dedicated restaurant carriage.

Though I don't know who would want to spend a week traveling from Moscow to Vladivostok on a train when you can just fly, and that'll be cheaper as well.

That's an excellent talk, thanks for sharing it.

And yes that USB gadget thing. I had to use it recently to turn a RPi Zero into a parallel -> USB converter. It's impossible to debug and sometimes makes you question your own sanity. Here's my script that does it: https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/blob/master/AVDecod...

I know and I don't like that either. But at least I don't have to touch the Unix layer too often.

Not yet but it seems like they've finally started working towards that. Driver compatibility has improved dramatically over the last few years, for one.

As someone who very much dislikes the Linux/Unix philosophy, I'm happy to see diversity.

None I'm aware about. But there's a growing list of things that the government itself considers straight up "extremist" or other forms of forbidden, so it doesn't get to the payment processor banning them.

We have one in Russia, called Mir (world/peace, somewhat ironically). While, yes, there was literally zero downtime on card payments when Visa and MC left the country, they are still irreplaceable for international payments. As a result, everyone who needs to make them or travels a lot has a foreign bank account now, with, you guessed it, a Visa or MC card.

Edit: forgot to say, Mir cards used to work in a few other countries, for example, Turkey and Armenia. But eventually the US government pressured the banks in those countries to stop accepting Mir, because apparently that would somehow help defeat Putin or something.

That'll also work somewhat, but the problem would remain that even if it's legal to break the DRM, you can't exactly break it when it's assisted by hardware and there are no vulnerabilities in the "trusted" code.

What if you can copy someone else's SoC including their keys?

And what code will verify the signature of the initial bootloader? As far as I know, in every modern implementation of secure boot that is done by that very bootloader, which is burned into the CPU/SoC. I can imagine someone implementing some sort of fixed-function block to do that, but see my sibling reply about that.

Also, governments are supposed to act in the interest of people.

Then also make it illegal for the SoC to contain any cryptographic key material.

My intention with this is to make sure that if someone were to desolder the flash chip and reprogram it, they could completely own the device without the device or SoC manufacturer having a say in it or a way to prevent or detect it.

It's not asymmetric cryptography itself. It's the fact that it takes enormous resources to manufacture modern SoCs, such that the economy only makes sense if you're churning them out by millions at least. It's also the fact that they can't be modified after they've been manufactured.

It's basically those people who can manufacture chips having technological supremacy over the rest of the humanity.

Our civilization desperately needs a method to modify modern microelectronics after manufacturing that can be used at least in a well-equipped repair shop, and it needs it yesterday.

Alternatively, just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader as part of a CPU's/SoC's mask ROM in any computing device that is marketed as a general-purpose one. I.e. the first instruction that the CPU executes after reset must come from a storage device that is physically external to the CPU package.

"Transfluxor" sounds like something straight out of science fiction.

VK has been digging its own grave for quite some time now. Hardly anyone uses it any more. It's speedrunning enshittification with that registration thing but also with the very unpopular post redesign, the removal of custom news feeds, and most recently with shutting off most of the API access for third-party apps, including popular client apps like Kate Mobile.

A simple captcha with distorted characters + some hidden form fields would stop every single "opportunistic" bot.

There's hardly anything you can do to stop someone determined enough to spend money to spam your specific website. These kinds of captchas do raise the bar somewhat, but every single one of them is ultimately bypassed by paying people to solve them for you.