Hacker News Reader

microtonalon It wasn't AI that flipped Proton's charge

As a paying customer, I wish they would first the products they already have. E.g. shortcuts rarely work in the Proton Mail web interface last time I tried it. Or if I share folders with a family member, they don't get actually synced by the Proton Drive client (they can only be accessed through the web interface).

microtonalon Smear Campaign Towards GrapheneOS

Likely intended to promote the less secure devices and get them in the hands of those the state would like to target.

I think the whole thread misses the mark a bit, because the source that the GrapheneOS account used (Algemeen Dagblad) did not properly research this. For Dutch readers, this is not really surprising, since the AD is not known as a quality newspaper and tends to go for sensationalism (though slightly less bad than De Telegraaf). Other sources are much more detailed:

According to our information, the reseller did not distribute official GrapheneOS. Using AI tools, he had built his own fork and added mobile device management (MDM) for remote administration. The result was a separate operating system that lacked, among other things, the security updates of the original project.

His signing keys for that system were probably compromised. Anyone holding those keys can build an update that the phones accept as genuine. Such an update was apparently installed on seized phones via ADB (Android Debug Bridge), an interface that requires a USB cable connection, and probably removed the screen lock. The phones could then be examined forensically. On our information, the authorities again needed the phone in their hands. On official GrapheneOS, the same approach would require the project's own signing keys.

https://www.joint-defense-team.com/post/grapheneos-cracked-p...

AD could have written something similar if they did their homework in understanding the case.

tl;dr mostly shoddy journalism from AD.

microtonalon Smear Campaign Towards GrapheneOS

/e/OS rarely updates Linux kernels or firmware, even though they have a continuous stream of CVEs. For instance on Fairphone 6 (which is one of the better /e/OS devices when it comes to updates) is still on Linux 6.1.138 from May 2025. The firmware blobs, including Qualcomm firmware blobs are from April 2026, so missing six months of fixes for high/critical vulnerabilities:

https://docs.qualcomm.com/securitybulletin/october-2026-bull...

Then, they only roll out ASBs, which fixes vulnerabilities that have been known for up for six months, because they don't roll out embargoed patches like e.g. GrapheneOS does (and these vulnerabilities have been known for months through reverse engineering).

If that wasn't bad enough, ASBs only fix vulnerabilities high/critical, for all other fixes you need QPRs and major releases, but /e/OS is behind major releases. If you are still running Android 16, your phone has vulnerabilities that are known for up to two years. Yes, they are low/medium, but they are used in exploit chains. This recently got worse, because Google recently started only rolling out some high/critical fixes to Android 17 and not older Android versions.

Then there is all the shady stuff that Murena doesn't tell you about, like running Google's proprietary DroidGuard blobs in a privileged process on Play Integrity requests. Giving certain Google apps higher privileges than the normal Android app sandbox. Installing F-Droid packages through a proxy (CleanAPK), that they do not want to reveal the owner or purpose of, etc.

Why don't the GrapheneOS developers like Murena? Because Murena often instigates in interviews that GrapheneOS is for criminals, etc.

If you care about security (or privacy) at all, don't use /e/OS.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the GrapheneOS project in any way. If you don't like GrapheneOS but care about having some basic security, then get an iPhone.

microtonalon Norway makes shithouses great again

Similarly cool reprisal from Trump 1 (made by a Dutch comedian, which was then many countries copied): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELD2AwFN9Nc

microtonalon TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8

If you wants something with a nice web interface, probably OpenWrt [1] or OPNsense?

[1] Yes, it seems that they are still on 6.12.112, but they'll probably roll out an update quickly. Also see: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/cve-2026-98432-kernel-update-or-...

microtonalon TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8

You would be surprised. A lot of cheap consumer routers are have two or four ARM cores. The bigger issue is that they are typically running a kernel from the stone age (< 6.0.0). Sometimes a still-supported LTS kernel like 5.10 or 5.15, but then they stopped at an old patch level.

Heck, apparently even the new Unifi UCG Fiber is running 5.4.213 (September 2022), but maybe they backport some fixes?

[1] https://community.ui.com/releases/dd0283dc-bf71-4140-ae1d-c1...

microtonalon Molly (Signal fork) has not been updated since 3 months and is vulnerable

That doesn't address the criticism that this thread started with:

Unified Push, which works flawlessly on Molly, could easily be implemented in the regular client.

microtonalon Tomáš Mikolov awarded the Medal of Merit by the President of the Czech Republic

Thanks. I misused the idiom as a non-native speaker, well try to remember next time!

microtonalon Tomáš Mikolov awarded the Medal of Merit by the President of the Czech Republic

Not to downplay his accomplishments (I have sung my praises in another comment), but even vector models were already around and somewhat popular before. Much of it started in Information Retrieval with things like TF-IDF vectors and later PPMI matrices that were converted to small, dense matrices with SVD. Of course, later Yoshua Bengio et al. introduced neural language models for training embeddings.

There is even a paper by Levy & Goldberg from 2014 that shows that skip-gram with negative sampling implicitly factorizes a PPMI word-context matrix.

But Mikolov's formulation is very nice in that it is a simple linear model that allows for a very simple Hogwild optimization that worked very well/fast on multi-core CPUs of the time.

microtonalon Tomáš Mikolov awarded the Medal of Merit by the President of the Czech Republic

Well-deserved. Even though more complex language models won in the end, his stripping down of word embedding training from RNNs/convolution models to a simple linear model was the thing that was needed for compute at the time and completely dominated the field for five years or so. I do miss the times a little where you could train a cutting-edge model with a reasonable CPU (for training embeddings with word2vec) and a single GPU (some BiLSTM or transformers before BERT).

If I remember correctly, I read somewhere he initially had a hard time getting the word2vec paper accepted at a conference.

microtonalon MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch

And the first iteration did not have a physical Esc key (which they brought back later).

microtonalon Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates

Maybe you have another curl in your path?

    $ uname -a
    Darwin MacBook 27.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 27.2.0: Wed Oct 14 23:47:21 PDT 2026; root:xnu-13432.41.4~25/RELEASE_ARM64_T6030 arm64 arm Darwin
    $ which curl
    /usr/bin/curl
    $ curl https://dv-g3b-emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/
    Your client successfully connected to the site. That's bad!

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.