Hacker News Reader

microtonalon Root shell on Samsung TV

I think it’s not worth it to them as long as 99.9% of the users hook up the TV to their home WiFi. Connecting to other networks without user confirmation probably opens a can of worms in many countries.

microtonalon Amazon's "digital pacifier" for toddlers

Our kid has certainly not had access to tablets/phones the first years of her life and only rarely until she was 9 or 10 or so. We have also banned phones from the dinner table, etc. from the beginning.

Parenting takes time and focus. Putting 0-6 years olds behind a tablet screen is just absolving yourself from your responsibility as a parent. Some TV time can be ok after 3 years or so, but you have to time it strictly (so that it does not become a convenience) and exclude some types of cartoons [1].

[1] https://thesciencesurvey.com/editorial/2024/07/07/the-proble...

microtonalon Root shell on Samsung TV

Disconnect it from the network and hook up a streaming device that is relatively trustable (e.g. Apple TV or an open source alternative).

microtonalon The Lego group reveals collaboration with Daft Punk

I wonder if LEGO is going to follow the same fate, to no longer be of interest to Roblox and Minecraft obsessed kids, to develop an increasingly elderly customer base, ending up with just retirees.

I don't think this is true at all. Our daughter played a lot with Duplo and then Lego from ~2-12. Overall, she must have collected thousands of Euros of Lego from birthday, Christmas, and Sinterklaas presents. When friends were over, they usually wanted to play with Lego.

Us older people who remember the days of Lego without franchises and a focus on your own creativity/imagination might be grumpy about modern Lego (though they have been good at making adult Lego sets as well). But Lego is still wildly successful because they found ways to connect with younger generations and the franchise-based Minecraft/DC Comics/Star Wars/Harry Potter/etc. Lego is exactly one of the ways they have managed to do this, along with Lego for specific focus groups (e.g. Lego Friends).

microtonalon Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism

The daily fine is so meaninglessly small ($99,000 per day) that there is very little incentive to do anything.

microtonalon Meta employees say Lula’s accounts restricted in Brazil election: Report

I think it's more that they happen to be aligned. Left-wing parties are more likely to tax and regulate Meta than radical right parties. So it's for their own profit. But Trump is also mostly there for enriching the oligarchy, he often has the same priorities.

microtonalon Meta employees say Lula’s accounts restricted in Brazil election: Report

They also repeatedly suspended Dutch LGBTQIA+ accounts:

https://nltimes.nl/2026/04/23/meta-suspends-dozens-dutch-lgb...

It's time countries started suspending Facebook/Instagram for meddling in national affairs.

microtonalon Apple Music 404 Not Found

Galaxy Watch Classic models still have a wheel and it's a very nice way to flick through interface items, especially in situations where a touch screen is not really accurate (e.g. when cycling or running).

microtonalon Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner's phone

The scarier thought is that the russian government did not even have to do that - agent Krasnov works for them as-is.

But they need kompromat to make them Krasnovs.

microtonalon Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner's phone

The part of the story I actually care about is two governments hoarding an iphone zero day, and using it to secretly hack iphones. I condemn it.

Sorry, but the US threw this out of the window starting with the Patriot Act. Many tech companies were in the NSA PRISM program and the program probably still exists today. Common US E2E encrypted messengers can be read out by US services through weak defaults (e.g. iMessage in iCloud is encrypted at-rest unless ADP is enabled both sides of the chat, similarly, WhatsApp only encrypts backups at-rest by default).

The US can grab all that data from US companies, regardless whether the person regardless of whether the person is inside or outside the US thanks to the CLOUD Act.

microtonalon Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier

Meanwhile YouTube Morphe on Android gives you no ads at all and improves the app a lot.

I know that they are probably going to roll out remote attestation at some point, but I cancelled YouTube Premium the last time they did an insane price raise.

microtonalon Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner's phone

Various sources also claim that Dutch intelligence deployed or was involved with deploying Stuxnet in Iran.

In 2019, it was reported that an Iranian mole working for Dutch intelligence at the behest of Israel and the CIA inserted the Stuxnet virus with a USB flash drive or convinced another person working at the Natanz facility to do so.

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

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

microtonalon MicroG: Free-libre re-implementation of Google's proprietary Android user space

Yes, which is why I also mentioned the more nefarious reading of it. Making a large API surface use closed-source code gives them control.

microtonalon MicroG: Free-libre re-implementation of Google's proprietary Android user space

This about Play Services and not the Play Store. Play Services are a bunch of extra APIs/services that Google does not make available as part of AOSP. The non-nefarious reason is to make it possible to fix bugs and roll out features faster because the OEMs are terrible at rolling out new Android versions. The possible nefarious reason is to make more of Android closed-source.

At any rate, microG is a reimplementation of Play Services.

You can directly download the Telegram APK from: https://telegram.org/android

(Or using the app store that is part of /e/OS and serves as a front for both the Play Store and F-Droid.)

microtonalon AfD Leak: What 421,179 Hacked Emails Show about the German Far Right

The PVV in The Netherlands twice (once as a coalition supporter, once as part of a coalition). Both times were a disaster. People just go to the next populist right-wing party (e.g. FvD, which is more extreme right than the PVV, pretty similar to the AfD) and then after a few years they come back.

I guess the upside is that in countries with a multi-party system (happens more frequently without first-past-the-post), they virtually always have to form a coalition, which typically ends up in infighting within a party or between parties. E.g. in The Netherlands you typically need four parties nowadays to form a coalition.

microtonalon AfD Leak: What 421,179 Hacked Emails Show about the German Far Right

I think both can be true: there are issues with affordable housing and integration of immigrants. But at the same time parties are poisoning minds with mass-scale disinformation, propaganda, trolling, through social media. These are even more effective when issues already exist.

Sadly, some of the parties that are involved (tech bros, Russia, etc.) are not going to do any good when it comes to these issues. They'll only make the housing issues worse (by accumulating even more wealth and invading your country, respectively). But blaming everything on immigrants and elites has always worked extremely well, in-group vs. out-group is something that our brain needed for survival in the past, so it is very easy to trigger.

The saddest part is that those that push the anti-elite narrative (Trump, Musk, etc.) are often the elites themselves.

microtonalon AfD Leak: What 421,179 Hacked Emails Show about the German Far Right

Probably Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW? Ticks many of the same boxes: anti-immigrants, anti-EU, nationalist and pro-Russia. The primary difference is that they are socialist. So probably the techbros wouldn't be as happy.

microtonalon AfD Leak: What 421,179 Hacked Emails Show about the German Far Right

Added to that, these parties often get helped by Russian troll farms. A divided Europe that is occupied by infighting is great for them.

microtonalon AfD Leak: What 421,179 Hacked Emails Show about the German Far Right

I think they are worried by the wrath of AfD voters. Would've been easier if they had done it years ago, I think there has been a lot of evidence that they are unconstitutional in Germany for a long time?

microtonalon macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL

SwiftUI and probably Liquid Glass preceded slop. It's a larger cultural/management issue within Apple.

microtonalon macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL

The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating.

The iPhone 18 Pro has been out exactly a month now and they still haven't pushed a fix for the popping/crackling speaker issue:

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/iphone-18-pro-speaker-c...

I still get crackling or popping many times a day.

Also, the annoying render stutters during scrolling across many apps haven't been fixed since iOS 26 was introduced (they were probably there before, but Liquid Glass made it worse). Even the iPhone 18 Pro suffers from it (also checked on iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air).

Meanwhile, my underpowered P10P with GrapheneOS renders scrolling super smoothly.

microtonalon DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests

People said the same for 5.0, 4.8, 4.7, and...

I am not disputing that the models are getting better for vibe coding. But I think people have very different standards of what a 'big mess' or 'maintainable software' is.

microtonalon AOSP Source Releases Are So Late Developers Disassemble Libraries to Report Bugs

QPR and security updates are different things.

Not completely. Android Security Bulletins only have fixes for vulnerabilities marked high/critical in resent years. To get all other security fixes, you need QPRs and major releases.

microtonalon Do dentists know what they're doing?

Not going to the dentist for checks for over 7 years is a terrible idea though.

microtonalon Do dentists know what they're doing?

It’s interesting how many people report issues with drills + fillings. I’m 44 and had my share, but never had a single issue. Had three dentists in my life (due to moving). I don’t have anything negative to say, except for the German dentist I had for a few years, because he never did anything, not even a good cleaning, only checks.

microtonalon Do dentists know what they're doing?

Where we live (somewhere in Europe), all the costs, procedures, etc. are standardized by the health insurance companies (which are in turn strongly regulated), so it is really hard for dentists to overcharge without getting in hot water with the insurance companies. The insurance also pays a good chunk of the ongoing dentist costs (though IIRC we have some extra dentist insurance). We go twice a year for a checkup and cleaning (last few bills were 12 Euros after the insurance paid the rest). Drilling (with anesthetic) and filling with a composite is typically 25-30 Euro out of pocket after insurance.

Going every six months for a checkup is really nice, because thing rarely get out of hand (+ you have whiter teeth after cleaning, which is especially nice for tea addicts like me :)) and they x-ray every two years or so.

microtonalon AOSP Source Releases Are So Late Developers Disassemble Libraries to Report Bugs

The QPRs are in the same repo they're getting their security patches from.

That doesn't mean that they are actually allowed to release them. Big difference.

microtonalon AOSP Source Releases Are So Late Developers Disassemble Libraries to Report Bugs

What does "timely" here mean? A lot of security patches for all these companies take ~weeks+ to actually make it to customers

Google has an embargo period of up to 6 months on AOSP patches. This is why GrapheneOS already has April 2027 AOSP security patches now. Even though some patches are already known for 6 months, they still manage to ship it 1-3 months late. 7-9 months after they got the patches already from Google.

due to things like QA testing, carrier testing and release processes.

Carrier testing is mostly a US thing. If you cannot roll out security patches within a few days, your QA and release processes are just totally broken. GrapheneOS can do it and they generally have far fewer regressions than Android OEMs.

Major releases and QPR2 take some time for testing, but they already have the access to sources months before they are released. Heck, Samsung releases major release betas and QPR2 betas quite a while before Google releases it as stable.

The problem is that the OEMs made a mess. First they just dropped phones on the market without doing any updates at all. Mid 2010s it was very normal for an OEM to do maybe one or two updates. Then Google had to push them to do better, among other reasons because Apple does much better and there were really big fails like Stagefright. Plus users wanted new Android releases. Then they did only 2-3 updates with very irregular software updates. Now they are under pressure from EU regulations and they actually have to support devices for a long time and do regular updates, but they just don't have good release processes. Plus they made their own 'skins' on top of it that they have to rebase, etc.

Companies that have their ducks in a row better, abuse the release process to push sales of new devices. E.g. Samsung withholds major/QPR releases for a while so that only their latest device have it, e.g. recently Fold 8/Flip 8.

People should stop beingapologists for multi-billion dollar companies.

microtonalon AOSP Source Releases Are So Late Developers Disassemble Libraries to Report Bugs

Nothing of that has to do with OEMs being forbidden from shipping QPRs though.

Are reading the same post?

“ The new APIs are currently exclusive to the Pixel OS and aren't available to other Android OEMs. […] Non-Google Android OEMs and AOSP-based projects can ship yearly and QPR2 releases.”

the person running it has a penchant for overexaggeration and selective truth telling when they feel aggrieved.

Here we go again…

microtonalon AOSP Source Releases Are So Late Developers Disassemble Libraries to Report Bugs

I have read in multiple sources that OEMs cannot roll out QPR1/3. E.g. see this thread:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576

Since they are working with two OEMs (one for GrapheneOS support and one for getting embargoed security patches), I think they know what they are taking about.