Hacker News: SpecialistK

New comment by SpecialistK in "Ask HN: Am I being advertised an ARG via user agent logs?"

SpecialistK — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:11:57 +0000

Sorry, should have specified. Alternate Reality Game. One of the most famous was iLoveBees.com before the launch of Halo 2.

Ask HN: Am I being advertised an ARG via user agent logs?

SpecialistK — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:27:56 +0000

I'm here looking through logs on my unnamed reverse proxy and CDN service. The crawler bot swarm has been hitting my PHP application like I've upset them so I'm seeing which weird user agent strings are being allowed to connect. There's "Sogou" and "meta-webindexer" and a small number of requests from "SleepBot/1.0"

What's SleepBot?

The ASN is Google and the UA string is: "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; SleepBot/1.0; +http //sleepbot com/) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" [edited to make link non-clickable]

So I visit the site. And it looks like the homepage of an interesting tech and ambient music guy who is still running a Shoutcast online radio stream but otherwise hasn't been seen online in 5 years. The Wayback Machine shows few changes in over a decade. But the resume link brings up a GitHub account with a different URL and username which reported 1 issue in March of this year. It goes deeper.

What's going on? Is a Google or adjacent employee running a personal scraper or just custom UA string while browsing the web? Did someone make a typo? Or is it some kind of weird security game / ARG ("Alternate Reality Game") and I'm the sap who's taken the bait?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582005

Points: 9

# Comments: 6

New comment by SpecialistK in "Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb"

SpecialistK — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:00:53 +0000

Tasmota on ESP devices have a web server by default for administration.

New comment by SpecialistK in "Alpine Linux 3.24.0 Released"

SpecialistK — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:47:19 +0000

Can you to into more detail on your Steam Deck setup? I have a MSI Claw running Bazzite and I would love to look at some different options, especially Alpine.

New comment by SpecialistK in "Roku LT Operating System open source distribution"

SpecialistK — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:23:19 +0000

Voice command handling, I would suspect.

New comment by SpecialistK in "Separate the Cord from the Device"

SpecialistK — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:02:29 +0000

I'm from the UK (although haven't been there for a decade+) and remember "lead" being used in place of "cable" or "cord" by those around me. Plug would be the other end, which goes into the Mains.

New comment by SpecialistK in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

SpecialistK — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:02:34 +0000

> like Brentwood in Canada's BC... it reminds me of the wonders we can build.

But still can't make a fountain that doesn't destroy the grout on the tiles next to it :P

New comment by SpecialistK in "Separate the Cord from the Device"

SpecialistK — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:10:48 +0000

C13/C14 connectors are even known as "kettle leads" in some places.

New comment by SpecialistK in "Ferrari shares fall after launch of first EV as Jony Ive design proves divisive"

SpecialistK — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:21:16 +0000

Even if it is half an hour, that's half an hour of /no functionality/ - whether that is acceptable to you is a personal decision, but to claim it's not a functional problem is a lie.

My Sony wireless headphones have a similar issue. They cannot be used (with Bluetooth / ANC) when charging. My ReDragon USB mouse does not have that issue - it has a standard USB-C port on the front edge and I only need to charge it every few weeks, which is far less often than I charge a phone, so insertion cycles is not a concern.

New comment by SpecialistK in "Apple Cuts More Mac Studio and Mac Mini RAM Options as Memory Shortage Worsens"

SpecialistK — Tue, 05 May 2026 22:29:57 +0000

They used to. Switched to designing their own with the A11 about a decade ago.

New comment by SpecialistK in "Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan"

SpecialistK — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:01:35 +0000

Keep your eyes open for Sonic R too. Sadly a lot of the online Sonic community has been toxic to the dev for being transparent about using Claude for the majority of the disassembly. Even though he's a very talented developer with lots of credit to his name, and only took a few weeks compared to a year+ if fully manual.

New comment by SpecialistK in "GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation"

SpecialistK — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:16:40 +0000

Interestingly, Cloudflare (don't shoot me for mentioning the name, HN!) identify Porkbun as "GoDaddy-Porkbun" but I don't know the relationship.

Edit: "Top Level Design [Porkbun owners] was the domain name registry for several top-level domains including .wiki, .ink and .design, until the company sold these domains to GoDaddy Registry in April 2023" --Wikipedia

New comment by SpecialistK in "WebUSB Extension for Firefox"

SpecialistK — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:21:56 +0000

I just did a quick test with a N920 on Windows (Zadig installed, WebUSB stub installed) and I get the popup from Firefox and see the N920 in the extension but WMDpro fails with "Transfer error"

I'm pretty sure the lead dev is a Firefox user so he may be interested in getting this to work: https://github.com/asivery/webminidisc

New comment by SpecialistK in "WebUSB Extension for Firefox"

SpecialistK — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:11:46 +0000

https://github.com/asivery/webminidisc

web.minidisc.wiki is the "official" version - lots of clones around.

New comment by SpecialistK in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

SpecialistK — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:43:26 +0000

I saw console-only Wii Us in Book Off in Japan for ~US$30.

New comment by SpecialistK in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

SpecialistK — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:25:41 +0000

By releasing personal information which a reasonable person would expect to be private? I don't know the specifics of this case (only responding to the overly vague question) but information like address, private contact info, details about their families. Anything you would not immediately expect to become public knowledge simply by writing about topic(s).

New comment by SpecialistK in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

SpecialistK — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:38:00 +0000

That's the crux, I think.

Apple even in 2017 had the money and engineering resources to update or replace their flagship computer - whether with a small update to Skylake & Polaris and/or a return to a cheesegrater design as they did in 2019.

But they chose not to. They let their flagship computer rot for over 2000 days.

New comment by SpecialistK in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

SpecialistK — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:15:24 +0000

I'm in the Linux desktop / Mac laptop camp, and it works well for me. Prevents me getting too tied up in any one ecosystem so that I can jump ship if Apple start releasing duds again.

New comment by SpecialistK in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

SpecialistK — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:13:32 +0000

I'll admit that while I've used the trash can but never taken it apart myself. But I can't imagine it would have been impossible to throw 2x Polaris 10 GPUs on the daughterboards in place of the FirePros.

New comment by SpecialistK in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

SpecialistK — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 01:36:49 +0000

When it was introduced, Apple said the trash can was a revolution in cooling design.

Then they said they couldn't upgrade the components because of heat. Everyone knows that wasn't true.

By the time Apple said they had issues with it in 2017, AMD were offering 14nm GCN4 and 5 graphics (Polaris and Vega) compared to the 28nm GCN1 graphics in the FirePro range. Intel had moved from Ivy Bridge to Skylake for Xeons. And if they wanted to be really bold (doubtful, as the move to ARM was coming) then the 1st gen Epyc was on the market too.

Moore's Law didn't stop applying for 6 years. They had options and chose to abandon their flagship product (and most loyal customers) instead.