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quacktopia

14 karma · joined September 22, 2026

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quacktopia··on Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?
The low bandwidth always on kindle modems could also be feasibly built into TVs for telemetry, and may be cheaper than the money they could get from selling the data.
quacktopia··on Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone
The country I live in (VN) recently banned online banking without using a mobile app and biometric verification via selfie. The sites had to withdraw access.
quacktopia··on WhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulator
It may be technically difficult / expensive / annoying if it was not designed into their system. Your linux box doesn't has hordes of peers / backup mechanisms and cross references to users, to a point that it may be impractical or not cost effective to conclusively prove that a user is deleted everywhere

Deletion may not have been in the original spec or in any of the specs that were bolted on.

quacktopia··on Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts
Lots of security relies on potential attackers being lazy and relatively 'sane'.

There are lots of security measures you can bypass if you pretend to be crazy within given bounds or simply stop acting sane.

quacktopia··on The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s
I wonder if this will become increasingly niche if people grow up with systems that can spoon feed tailored content and monitor feedback
quacktopia··on Passkeys are a trap
I believe passkeys can be made phishing resistant, as they can be cryptographically bound to a given application, and the application has to attest itself to your system too.

You won't be able to use your google account passkey to log into the perfect clone of "gmail.com" where the 'a' is actually a greek or cyrillic letter or something, and neither will your ageing parents. You could still paste your password into the fake site from your password manager, or the spyware on your computer could still sniff it from your clipboard.

quacktopia··on Sharing AI progress in mathematics
I regularly heard lots of names during my 3 year math undergrad degree. I couldn't remember how to spell many of them then and can spell fewer now. I imagine most people on the course were similar, and me nor no one I knew were dyslexic.

Mostly we wrote initials in our notes and the exams didn't ask about them. The lecturers only wrote initials on the chalkboard after maybe writing the name once when introducing it the first time. We weren't there to do mathematical history and remember names or something.

Google existed then and now and we could look them up if needed.

quacktopia··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
Power averages $0.30 to $0.45 for a business in the UK if you convert it to dollars. Smaller businesses without load shedding agreements are at the middle / top of that. (there are lots of people complaining about it). Maybe I just have expensive power, but $0.12 per kWh is pretty cheap.
quacktopia··on Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
Why not towable gas generator trailers that you can rent for long trips.

Hook it on, plug the connector up and attach your license plate to the back (or use eink).

quacktopia··on Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
I just had to use teams to speak to the British government to get a passport. I don't think there is another option.

Maybe they should stand up their own gov jitsi or something, but then the public may not be able to work out how to use it.

quacktopia··on Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
Don't most people use git for their latex (or even markdown) version control? All the tools that have been developed for code collaboration work really well for documents compared to messing around with word's undocumented format and binary blobs.