Hacker News: 4RealFreedom

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Something is afoot in the land of Qwen"

4RealFreedom — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:33:34 +0000

"especially people already intelligent/capable enough to immigrate anywhere else that doesn't have these issues or stay in their own country" Isn't that the point? Come here legally or don't come at all.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Jimmy Carter has died"

4RealFreedom — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:49:48 +0000

"That's higher than any other president by a massive amount" - Any modern president. Abraham Lincoln had a 2859.40% increase. Martin Van Buren had a 1458.32% increase. We've had quite a few over 200%.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Ticketmaster’s attempt to game arbitration services fails"

4RealFreedom — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 20:30:41 +0000

I'm pretty ignorant about these kinds of things so how does this work? If Valve can specify the court to be used couldn't the company always choose something like Alaska or Hawaii where it would be difficult to show up?

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "California fails to track its homelessness spending or results, a new audit says"

4RealFreedom — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 02:41:23 +0000

24 billion dollars for 184,000 homeless people (United States Department of Housing and Urban Development estimate). That's 135k per person. Where is the money going if not the homeless industrial complex?

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "84% want stronger online privacy laws, but Congress's corruption stalls progress"

4RealFreedom — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 13:41:27 +0000

Why not keep everything transparent and make lobbying illegal? I know neither secret voting or making lobbying illegal will ever happen but it seems like you're just putting a bandaid on an issue without regard for the consequences. People that vote for representatives like to know how they vote. Why even have the theater of a transparent vote that does nothing?

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Ask HN: Why don't banks render numbers as PNGs instead of using HTML?"

4RealFreedom — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 22:42:59 +0000

I don't think we need to do it for every number. Account number, for example, could still be HTML. Balance could be converted, though.

The harder we make it for scammers, the worse it is for them. I'm not claiming this is fool proof - scammers might be able to generate a png on the fly and inject that as the image like solrdev mentioned in another comment. They would still need to match background colors or possibly jump through some other hoops. The more work we make them do, the more likely the are to mess up. It also makes it more obvious to the person being scammed.

In terms of deleting the image and inserting text instead, I've tried it and it's hard to make it look good quickly. You also see instant feedback of the missing element and then the text coming in. It's a cue that something isn't quite right.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Ask HN: Why don't banks render numbers as PNGs instead of using HTML?"

4RealFreedom — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:33:44 +0000

Couldn't alt-text be used to address accessibility?

Web scrapping shouldn't be a requirement of personal banking websites. Am I missing something here?

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Ask HN: Why don't banks render numbers as PNGs instead of using HTML?"

4RealFreedom — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:47:34 +0000

Wouldn't banks have content security setup?

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Ask HN: Why don't banks render numbers as PNGs instead of using HTML?"

4RealFreedom — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:39:11 +0000

I've tried a few different sites and I can't make it happen. I'll keep trying.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Ask HN: Why don't banks render numbers as PNGs instead of using HTML?"

4RealFreedom — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:35:14 +0000

If you're interested, I would suggest watching some Kitboga. I don't actually know anyone that has had this happen but there are plenty of stories around the internet. I will try doing some img replacement with my own text and see how it works out.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Ask HN: Why don't banks render numbers as PNGs instead of using HTML?"

4RealFreedom — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:28:30 +0000

Had to look up FINTS. You are right about accessibility.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Ask HN: Why don't banks render numbers as PNGs instead of using HTML?"

4RealFreedom — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:23:16 +0000

I'll give you accessibility. I tried changing images in the browser on the fly and it just hides the image. That's probably because the browser would need to make a new GET request.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Ask HN: Why don't banks render numbers as PNGs instead of using HTML?"

4RealFreedom — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:21:05 +0000

They ask a person to login to their bank account with screen sharing. They then take control of the mouse and edit the HTML on the fly making it look like they transferred a large amount to the bank account. Now they ask the person to wire money back or they will lose their job.

Ask HN: Why don't banks render numbers as PNGs instead of using HTML?

4RealFreedom — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:11:05 +0000

I've been thinking about scammers lately and thought about rendering numbers as a png in browsers instead of displaying them as HMTL for banks. This would ensure scammers can't just go in and edit the html on the fly potentially saving some people from this kind of attack.

I played around with libvips and can easily create a png with any text.

vips text x.png "1,234,567" --width 100 --align centre --dpi 340

Any thoughts on why this shouldn't be done?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302438

Points: 2

# Comments: 25

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Full text search over Postgres: Elasticsearch vs. alternatives"

4RealFreedom — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:05:46 +0000

Just upgraded an old system to solr 9. I've been very impressed with it.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Third-party cookies have got to go"

4RealFreedom — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 11:16:24 +0000

There's a link in the article where Google says they are not phasing out third party cookies at all - https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update/.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "Demystifying cookies and tokens"

4RealFreedom — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 03:56:00 +0000

Third party cookies are not just used for tracking - they are also any cookies set in an iframe. There are legitimate use cases for third party cookies. Chrome recently rolled out partitioned cookies which addresses part of the problem. If you are trying to authenticate via sso to then show content in an iframe, this just doesn't work, though. There is some behind the scenes trickery you might be able to use with reverse proxies but it's painful. I setup some systems using keycloak and nginx to force the iframe and idp on the same domain. You're out of luck if you're using Azure AD or any third party idp, though.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "People are feeling stuck in their jobs"

4RealFreedom — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 14:22:18 +0000

There will always be "haves" and "have nots". That's been the case since forever. Standard Oil ruled the world. AT&T did, too. I agree that monopolies are bad. We should pressure our government to break them up. Will that help with people trying to find jobs in an inferior job market? That's where this conversation started. We need a strong job market. Competition can help that. We will always have bad job markets, though. It's part of the cycle. Nothing lasts forever.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "People are feeling stuck in their jobs"

4RealFreedom — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 13:23:58 +0000

That could be viewed as a piece of "late stage capitalism" but that's only one part, right? The problem with the term is it's a catch-all for any perceived problem with capitalism. Maybe that issue is just a capitalism speed bump. As I said, we won't know we're in late stage until after the collapse.

New comment by 4RealFreedom in "People are feeling stuck in their jobs"

4RealFreedom — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 12:30:38 +0000

"Late stage capitalism" implies that capitalism is doomed to fail. In reality it is a system of constant change. Wealth inequality has always existed. Some problems like housing are newer problems that require solutions but don't point to an inevitable collapse. Are we also in "late stage democracy" and "late stage big government"? We won't know until after the collapse.