Hacker News: Mindwipe

New comment by Mindwipe in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

Mindwipe — Mon, 11 May 2026 10:35:08 +0000

Individual self employed photographers successfully use the DMCA to get significant payouts from large publishers and news organisations every single day.

Like literally hundreds of thousands, every day.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected"

Mindwipe — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:47:19 +0000

No there aren't, because having identical builds of games with Denuvo actually removed and present is vanishingly rare.

If you compare a game that's had significant performance patches over a period of years and had Denuvo removed to the launch version (as so many of these videos are) then no shit you see performance differences, but it doesn't tell you anything.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected"

Mindwipe — Sun, 03 May 2026 23:46:26 +0000

That report wasn't suppressed. It wasn't published because the methodology had a 44% margin of error, and subsequently it was totally useless.

(https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...)

It doesn't provide data suggesting that piracy doesn't hurt sales. It literally doesn't provide any data at all.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected"

Mindwipe — Sun, 03 May 2026 23:40:47 +0000

The evidence for this supposed performance hit is basically zero.

New comment by Mindwipe in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

Mindwipe — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:55:43 +0000

That's worrying, because Apple Mpas is still a borderline useless hot mess.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it"

Mindwipe — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:13:03 +0000

That only works in the context of when the sender isn't the adversary, which isn't the case in an age verification system - it very much does treat the sender as the enemy and untrusted. And again, the revocation chain on the backend is not zero proof.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it"

Mindwipe — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:04:58 +0000

> The point of this is that you can use the credentials on your phone to prove that you are an adult to a website using zero-knowledge proofs to avoid disclosing your identity to anybody.

No it isn't.

Literally that is not the scope document, and such a solution would not be permitted by the EU as compliant with the legislation.

The app isn't zero knowledge. A prototype workflow has been designed for a one way transfer to sites that is zero knowledge, but it doesn't actually deliver zero knowledge because it you have to verify your age with an external provider to get the credential (which is not zero knowledge), the app has to be secured with either Apple or Google's attestation services (which are not zero knowledge), and the site has to be able to check with the original external provider that the credential hasn't been revoked (which is in no way zero knowledge).

New comment by Mindwipe in "HBO Obtains DMCA Subpoena to Unmask 'Euphoria' Spoiler Account on X"

Mindwipe — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:19:28 +0000

Twitter only supported 2FA using a mobile number for several years, so they quite possibly have that.

People are not always good at infosec for convenience, and Twitter's design for this was incompetent even before Musk's acquisition.

New comment by Mindwipe in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

Mindwipe — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 10:52:20 +0000

Given how on fire the rest of MacOS currently is I think incompetent management simply not caring about regression testing is more likely.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

Mindwipe — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:38:14 +0000

> The EU has zero knowledge proof age verification systems

No, they don't. And they can't.

New comment by Mindwipe in "The shady world of IP leasing"

Mindwipe — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:00:25 +0000

I hate to break it to you but services have been routinely blocking residential IPs associated with being part of VPN endpoints for the better part of a decade now. Akamai will even sell you (granted they are just reselling another vendors product) a database to do this.

New comment by Mindwipe in "New iPad Air, powered by M4"

Mindwipe — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:22:53 +0000

The Pro really looks like it's struggling for a reason to exist given how much cheaper this will be and the difference in feature set.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Warner Bros signs $110B deal with Paramount"

Mindwipe — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:26:35 +0000

Yes, 100%.

If they wanted the policial platforms and had offered to buy them from Warner as standalone for a tenth of the cost Warner would have snapped their hand off.

They need the IP for scale. That is what this is about.

New comment by Mindwipe in "GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple"

Mindwipe — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:51:17 +0000

You won't pass Google Play hardware attestation that way, and you won't find a bank in Europe or the UK that doesn't require that to log on to their website within five years.

New comment by Mindwipe in "GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple"

Mindwipe — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:40:54 +0000

The DSA European digital wallet spec currently requires Google or Apple attestation, so not for much longer.

And that is mandated by the EU.

New comment by Mindwipe in "News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns"

Mindwipe — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:52:37 +0000

Given the Times and the Guardian are British they will be archived by the British Library, as it's a legal obligation.

That doesn't mean anything American library that doesn't pay authors Public Lending Right fees gets to.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues"

Mindwipe — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:14:38 +0000

Just fucking revert the UI at this point. It's a disaster on macOS.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload"

Mindwipe — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:46:49 +0000

I'll believe it when I see it. Windows many problems are the results of five years of terrible strategy and not caring about if users actually like your platform. It will require sustained effort over a long period to fix.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media"

Mindwipe — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 10:55:08 +0000

> Presentation of someone else's valid credentials is not fixable by any privacy-preserving mechanism.

And that is precisely why governments will never implement a privacy-preserving mechanism, which is exactly my point.

Compromised tokens would be trivially google-able within a day otherwise.

New comment by Mindwipe in "Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media"

Mindwipe — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 10:53:33 +0000

The EU Digital Identity Wallet isn't zero knowledge. I mean it's just not. It relies on Google Play Integrity Attestation on Android and the iOS equivalent on Apple devices because those give it a revocation mechanism, and those aren't zero knowledge.

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic...

It says that it wants to be zero knowledge, but it has no zero knowledge implementation and no plan of how it even possibly could be zero knowledge, and it never will precisely because that is incompatible with the revocation requirements set down by the EU.