Hacker News: J0nL

New comment by J0nL in "Ombudsman column: The Pentagon is trying to silence me"

J0nL — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:16:24 +0000

You don't get that job without being the type of person who will only ever respond to coercion attempts with an equal amount of indigance. The sole reason for the position to exist is to act as a canary in a coalmine so to speak

She even admits she was due to stand down at the end of the year, they could have just waited her out. Instead it seems her calling a spade a spade was just too intolerable for them to bare

If that's all it takes to provoke the desired reaction from them it doesn't bode well at all. It's no wonder they were so easily led into a war with Iran on a leash

New comment by J0nL in "UK Lords propose ban on VPNs for children"

J0nL — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 18:08:28 +0000

The only thing I find more suspicous than the sudden global attack on VPNs and privacy is the people trying to hand wave it away as nothing to worry about.

The stasi could only dream of having the tools that are already available today to use.

New comment by J0nL in "Spectrum ISP SSL/TLS Interception Bug"

J0nL — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 14:46:35 +0000

This and similar issues have been an ongoing issue with Spectrum going back to before Congress felt the need to call them (along with the other telcos) out for failing to secure their networks. I've noticed handshake issues at one time or another with webpages, DoH and dnscrypt, and VPN with TLS over UDP on a non-stand port.

During one particularly annoying episode where it effectively became a DOS I had my router log all dropped packets and then rebooted it. Immediately after reconnecting it drops a few incoming martians and invalid packets as if they were still expecting an active connection where there shouldn't have been any. The IPs were mostly upstream endpoints or gateways but at least once it was from a residential IP instead.

Between the weird arbitrary nature of the SSL/TLS handshake issues and the possible spoofing from upstream gateways I get the impression this is much more than just a bug.

New comment by J0nL in "Adversarial poetry as a universal single-turn jailbreak mechanism in LLMs"

J0nL — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 21:17:40 +0000

No, this paper is just exceptionally bad. It seems none of the authors are familiar with the scientific method.

Unless I missed it there's also no mention of prompt formatting, model parameters, hardware and runtime environment, temperature, etc. It's just a waste of the reviewers time.

New comment by J0nL in "Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data, demanding $20M ransom"

J0nL — Thu, 15 May 2025 20:38:07 +0000

I'm having de ja vu here. If they only found out when they attempted to extort them does it mean they don't even bother to log employee access? Is there any means for accountability at all internally?

It would be so simple to have access tracking and flag or lock out rogue employees... I look forward to seeing what the golden parachutes look like.

New comment by J0nL in "Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data, demanding $20M ransom"

J0nL — Thu, 15 May 2025 20:10:53 +0000

The odds are already against their future viability after a breach like this and if they're fumbling the response this bad it really doesn't bode well for them.

They would have been better off not even bringing up their location if they weren't going to be transparent.

New comment by J0nL in "Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data, demanding $20M ransom"

J0nL — Thu, 15 May 2025 19:56:24 +0000

They're not just another free-to-use site where you're the product. Their reputation and viability are on the line.

For a site such as this the odds aren't in their favor anymore.

New comment by J0nL in "On thinkers and doers (2022)"

J0nL — Mon, 12 May 2025 19:33:01 +0000

Being denied satisfaction is the important part but yeah, there are countless circumstances that can result in it. Having to waste all your time fighting for limited resources because a handful of individuals are hoarding them is by far the most common.

In the US the so called "free market" was intended to be a way for people to achieve financial independence in spite of any persecution. Unfortunately regulatory capture has made it exceedingly difficult.

New comment by J0nL in "On thinkers and doers (2022)"

J0nL — Sun, 11 May 2025 20:49:57 +0000

There's a thing in psychology called "Lucky Fool Syndrome" where people tend to take credit for success that was the result of dumb luck. Space-X was one launch failure away from oblivion when they got insanely lucky.

"A lucky fool doesn't know they're lucky."

New comment by J0nL in "On thinkers and doers (2022)"

J0nL — Sun, 11 May 2025 20:39:44 +0000

They're wasted potential. Burnout isn't necessarily from overwork, it comes from pouring your heart and soul into things that you never get the satisfaction of seeing completed.

New comment by J0nL in "Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)"

J0nL — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 20:35:22 +0000

I remember hearing about this in the mid 2000s, someone at Brookhaven (US DOE/Army) jumped on filing a patent for it and dubbed it a plasma window.

They found a use for it in particle accelerators to partition off sections that are under vacuum