Hacker News: Hackbraten

New comment by Hackbraten in "New to Hackerview"

Hackbraten — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:29:15 +0000

Thanks for the heads up. Gotta be even more cautious with green accounts.

New comment by Hackbraten in "New to Hackerview"

Hackbraten — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:20:15 +0000

Welcome!

New comment by Hackbraten in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

Hackbraten — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:57:58 +0000

Telecoms shut down 3G once 4G had rolled out. TV networks killed DVB-T after DVB-T2 went live. Banks have abandoned FinTS for app-based 2FA.

Your comment compares a paper-based, non-digital process with a digital one. My criticism, however, is about abandoning an old digital (but vendor-neutral and inclusionary) process in favor of a new (and discriminatory) one.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Linux 7.1 Expected to Begin Removing I486 CPU Suppor"

Hackbraten — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:36:17 +0000

Understandable move. Still a sad day for retrocomputing, because once Linux drops support, compilers such as LLVM and GCC will soon follow suit, and soon there will be no way to write DOS or Win16 programs in Rust.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Private Files on a Static, Open-Source Website"

Hackbraten — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:22:07 +0000

I love little practical hacks like that.

New comment by Hackbraten in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

Hackbraten — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:23:57 +0000

Government services are going to drop support for the old scheme the minute they start supporting the new one.

New comment by Hackbraten in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

Hackbraten — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:23:16 +0000

Currently, the card reader is the only thing that allows me to do banking and use government services on Linux. If at some point, governmental services decide to drop support for the physical-card-plus-reader systems and move everything to mobile wallets instead (like many banks already did), then I can’t do shit anymore without Apple or Google.

New comment by Hackbraten in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

Hackbraten — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:17:22 +0000

> Nope. This is eID and verifies your identity, it does not attest the security of your hardware.

The reader and its firmware is already certified by the federal IT security agency BSI for use with eID and banking. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to use that for whatever digital identity wallet thing the EU is cooking up?

New comment by Hackbraten in "My Google Workspace account suspension"

Hackbraten — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:37:59 +0000

> The problem is the rapid succession of changes to recovery phone number, country, cellular provider.

Aren't cellular providers inherently tied to the country they're in?

How do you move to another country without changing cellular providers at the same time?

New comment by Hackbraten in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

Hackbraten — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:11:54 +0000

I think your analogy is flawed. I can be part of the losing 49% and still be entitled to receive the same services as the 51%, whereas people who chose a privacy-oriented OS are essentially going to be excluded from essential governmental services. That's a whole different kind of thing.

I'm not going to replace my 1200 EUR smartphone with a device that forces me to have an account with Apple or Google. I've been issued a German identity card, which is its own computer that includes a digital identity already. I also own an expensive card reader, which together forms a system that is completely capable of supporting any attestation anyone would need. They should just stop excluding me already.

New comment by Hackbraten in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

Hackbraten — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:59:19 +0000

> in the real world all smartphones are either Apple or Android...

So you're claiming that Mobian doesn't exist? PureOS doesn't exist? PostmarketOS doesn't exist? Ubuntu Touch doesn't exist? SailfishOS doesn't exist?

New comment by Hackbraten in "My Google Workspace account suspension"

Hackbraten — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:52:44 +0000

They didn't willfully delete their recovery phone number. They tried to delete a shitty, known-broken 2FA mechanism after they had set up passkeys. Poor UX conflated the two things, so their recovery phone number ended up being deleted. This is 100% on Google.

Why the fuck would Google care in which country I live? It's a personal decision, and no corporation should have any say in this. They certainly don't have to flag an account for that, especially not if the account has 2FA enabled. This is on Google, too.

Your comment is victim blaming.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Ask HN: Which CLI tools do you use daily?"

Hackbraten — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:36:10 +0000

Completely boring technology: aurutils, bash (with bash-it), bat, cp, git, grep, head, man, mv, pacman, rm, rsync, ssh, sudo, tmux, tree, vim.

New comment by Hackbraten in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

Hackbraten — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:33:46 +0000

On what would the browser user base their decision?

If an extension injects an icon into the DOM of the page, then the resulting `img` tag needs to put something in its `src`.

The extension author may choose to use the `data:` scheme, but that's a development-time decision.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one"

Hackbraten — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:26:40 +0000

Back then, many programmers originally learned their ropes in an 8-bit home computer era (or earlier), where it used to be completely normal and even necessary that you used whatever memory region you got away with.

For example, on the C64, you would get away with using the memory locations $02, $2A, $52, $FB to $FE, $02A7 to $02FF, and $0313 as scratch space for your own programs. Memory was incredibly scarce. I can’t blame programmers for sticking with their habits and for taking several years to unlearn and adjust their misconceptions about who owns what if they came from a home computer era where that pattern used to be the only way to get stuff done.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one"

Hackbraten — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:06:13 +0000

> Those can all be filed under Not My Problem (as in, Microsoft's problem,) and safely ignored.

It was absolutely Microsoft’s problem. Had it ignored compatibility issues, what incentives would users have had to buy Windows 95?

New comment by Hackbraten in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

Hackbraten — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:28:18 +0000

I am now migrating all my unencrypted secrets on my machines to encrypted ones. If a tool supports scripted credential providers (e.g. aws-cli or Ansible), I use that feature. Otherwise, I wrap the executable with a script that runs gpg --decrypt and injects an environment variable.

That way, I can at least limit the blast radius when (not if) I catch an infostealer.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

Hackbraten — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:21:58 +0000

Defending against a targeted attack is difficult, yes. But these recent campaigns were all directed at everyone. Auditing and inspecting your dependencies does absolutely help thwart that because there will always be people who don't.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

Hackbraten — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:21:01 +0000

If I have two functions `GetCurrentBaz()` and `GetPreviousBaz()`, then I’m certainly not going to register `CurrentBaz` and `PreviousBaz` subtypes.

Those semantics are not properties of the type.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars"

Hackbraten — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:02:32 +0000

And, of course, Germans have a dedicated composite noun for it: Kabelbaum (literal translation: cable tree).