Hacker News Reader

mmscon Installing every* Firefox extension

The website of this blog and their connections listed are a sight to behold. I miss that version of the internet.

mmscon Filing the corners off my MacBooks

As long as it's not hydrofluoric acid...

> You say "works perfectly". I do not think it means what you think it means.

Copying some files from a different machine is not that burdensome. The point is, it works.

FreeBSD works perfectly on intel MacBooks if you've got one laying around: https://joshua.hu/FreeBSD-on-MacbookPro-114-A1398

mmscon Email obfuscation: What works in 2026?

> Also, a note to those who make fancy "me+someservice@somedomain.com" addresses:

Just wait until one of these companies demands an email from the registered email address of your account!

mmscon Hong Kong police can now demand phone passwords under new security rules

Ah, finally catching up to ... The UK, Australia, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, and probably a lot more.

mmscon A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)

  こすり箸 Kosuribashi:
 To rub waribashi (disposable chopsticks) together to remove splinters.

I don't know about Japan, but everybody does this in Taiwan.

mmscon Aquasecurity/Trivy GitHub Repository and Homebrew Cask Compromised (again)

The offending commit seems to be: https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/commit/1885610c6a34811... which updates the action to `actions/checkout@70379aad1a8b40919ce8b382d3cd7d0315cde1d0 # v6.0.2`. https://github.com/actions/checkout/commit/70379aad1a8b40919... is not actually in `actions/checkout` but a fork, and it pulls malicious code from the typo-squatted "scan.aquasecurtiy.org" (note the _tiy_).

Any system with Trivy 0.69.4 on it (and being run) can be assumed to be compromised.

mmscon Glassworm is back: A new wave of invisible Unicode attacks hits repositories

GitHub advertises itself as warning about those Unicode characters: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-01-github-now-provides...

Of course, it doesn't work though. I reported this to their bug bounty, they paid me a bounty, and told me "we won't be fixing it": https://joshua.hu/2025-bug-bounty-stories-fail#githubs-utf-f...

The exact quote is "Thanks for the submission! We have reviewed your report and validated your findings. After internally assessing your report based on factors including the complexity of successfully exploiting the vulnerability, the potential data and information exposure, as well as the systems and users that would be impacted, we have determined that they do not present a significant security risk to be eligible under our rewards structure." The funny thing is, they actually gave me $500 and a lifetime GitHub Pro for the submission.

mmscon Iran-backed hackers claim wiper attack on medtech firm Stryker

Require dual sign off

mmscon The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025)

> an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed.

An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc)

There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt

mmscon Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config

https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Please consider reading.

mmscon Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team

It's cool that Mozilla updated https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2026-1... because we were all wondering who had found 22 vulnerabilities in a single release (their findings were originally not attributed to anybody.)

mmscon Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config

> Did you really make a blog post to tell the world that you don't know some things? That's not usual

You are focusing on 5 words out of a 1000-word post. Get a grip lol.

In a world of usual, I like to be unusual.

mmscon Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config

> Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by default

You can run the following and try it for yourself. Don't forget to highlight some text before right-clicking an image (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook)

  TMPPROF="$(mktemp -d /tmp/ff-tmp.XXXXXX)"
  /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -no-remote -profile "$TMPPROF"

mmscon Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config

It's gleaned from my locale. .hu is irrelevant; my alternative keyboard on my system is Polish

mmscon Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config

You're right, I didn't know about what that "..." meant. It's kind of obvious what I meant though: "I don't know why all of these have ..." I've added that information to the post.

The greyed out options have no point because 99.99% of the links I click are already clean. Like so many of the other privacy enhancing options, just provide an option to "clean links automatically."

mmscon Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config

loael

mmscon Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

Also forgot `browser.ml.chat.menu`, `browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled`. If only there was a way to get rid of "Email image", and "Set image as desktop background".

mmscon Emails to Outlook.com rejected due to a fault or overzealous blocking rules

I wonder if Microsoft actually likes running their free email service still. They wiped a ton of old Hotmail and Live.com emails some years ago (and then allowed new people to register those deleted names). I imagine they don't get much out of it anymore.

mmscon Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

That's because it was generated by an LLM.

mmscon Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

Try disabling widget.macos.native-context-menus

mmscon Georgian wine culture dates back, uninterrupted, approximately 8k years

Yes, that's why it's great. They have the best of everything around and have imo perfected it. It's difficult to think of certain foods that are actually unique to any "country", tbh.

mmscon Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

Thanks! I didn't know that.

I think that's a good workaround, but I'll have to re-enable it when I actually need to print something.

mmscon Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

I'm also missing:

  dom.text-recognition.enabled
  browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate
  extensions.formautofill.addresses.enabled
  extensions.formautofill.creditCards.enabled
  widget.macos.native-context-menus

The last one removes the "Services" option when right-clicking an image or highlighted text.

mmscon Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

`dom.text_fragments.enabled` to remove "Copy link to highlight" on right-click. Yes, it can be useful, but I never use it and the very rare occasion of needing to use it when opening a page, I can just search it myself.

`privacy.query_stripping.strip_on_share.enabled` to remove "Copy clean link". I would rather it just did that clean link thing automatically, but I don't actually care about clean links -- it's just annoying having two "copy link" next to each other (especially with one which is greyed out 99% of the time!)

mmscon Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

In addition to completely disabling AI, I found the following setting extremely convinent to disable in about:config. They clutter up my right-click on a link or on text selection.

  browser.translations.select.enable
  dom.text_fragments.enabled
  privacy.query_stripping.strip_on_share.enabled
  devtools.accessibility.enabled

Now if only I could get rid of "Print selection" and "Services" when right-clicking, too (on MacOS)

mmscon Writing code is cheap now

Spaghetti code was always a thing though

mmscon Carelessness versus craftsmanship in cryptography

This argument doesn't hold because paid cryptography libraries aren't any better and equally provide their code as-is.

mmscon Instagram's URL Blackhole

Instagram blocks me from sending Facebook.com in DMs to people. No idea why and support doesn't help.