Hacker News: VortexLain

New comment by VortexLain in "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

VortexLain — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:08:32 +0000

And which they disable in any country with significant internet censorship, where having a VPN actually matters.

New comment by VortexLain in "Instagram is incorporating users' photos in ads for Meta Glasses"

VortexLain — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:36:11 +0000

Sometimes it seems like Black Mirror screenwriters work at Meta as a side hustle.

New comment by VortexLain in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

VortexLain — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 11:10:17 +0000

Welcome to the permanent underclass everyone.

New comment by VortexLain in "We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme"

VortexLain — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:26:53 +0000

It is better to at least do what can be done instead of accepting a defeat without even trying.

New comment by VortexLain in "Jolla Phone (October 2026)"

VortexLain — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:52:20 +0000

Russian Aurora OS was an official Sailfish OS offspring, focused on MDM devices, but Sailfish cut ties with Aurora in 2022, after the Russia-Ukraine war has emerged. It's now developed independently of Sailfish, although they share the same code since the codebase was unified before the split.

New comment by VortexLain in "Jolla Phone (October 2026)"

VortexLain — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:41:46 +0000

Could you please elaborate, which software is usable on mobile Linux except for Firefox? I've seen multiple people using mobile Linux, and they were using Firefox and webapps for everything, no exceptions.

New comment by VortexLain in "Countries are competing to see which can carry out mass surveillance the best"

VortexLain — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:44:03 +0000

It seems like in 5 years using stolen ID scans as a basic privacy and anonymity tool will be as common as using VPNs today. What a wonderful world.

New comment by VortexLain in "PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s"

VortexLain — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:00:47 +0000

Allowing contributions only from big tech companies sounds ideologically questionable from free/libre software movement perspective, and it emboldens decisions which go against the user's interests, such as removing manifestv2 in Chromium.

New comment by VortexLain in "VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'"

VortexLain — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:09:58 +0000

So every adult citizen is forced to open a credit line?

New comment by VortexLain in "Policy on the AI Exponential"

VortexLain — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:05:56 +0000

Oh yes, let's induce regulatory capture and ban open-weight models in the name of alignment.

New comment by VortexLain in "Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable"

VortexLain — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:38:16 +0000

During Iran shutdowns I've been researching what ways Iranians manage to get to the internet by mimicking as whitelisted resources (such as hcapcha). ChatGPT had refused to lookup information written in Farsi since "circumventing state regulation is a crime".

New comment by VortexLain in "Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]"

VortexLain — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:51:45 +0000

Now this is very bad, as bad as it can get. As soon as all local services will stop working in sanctioned countries, those countries' governments will force all users to either install a root certificate or lose access to all local services and websites. And then it will be possible to use that root certificate for MITM attacks. In the worst case scenario, after the majority of users will install the root certificate, state DPIs will MITM all traffic and will block all un-MITMable traffic.

New comment by VortexLain in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

VortexLain — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:07:09 +0000

I really hope this will have proper GNU/Linux support, otherwise it will end up the same way Qualcomm ARM PCs did.

New comment by VortexLain in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

VortexLain — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:25:44 +0000

Starting with the days of Siri, i've been evaluating all chatbots of that nature by writing them a meaningless string of text and seeing how they answer. GPT-3 was the first system which instead of refusing to answer or answering meaninglessly has identified that the string of text has no sense.

New comment by VortexLain in "GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS"

VortexLain — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:09:59 +0000

You could have told the guard you're going to a competitive programming contest.

New comment by VortexLain in "Changing How We Develop Ladybird"

VortexLain — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:54:10 +0000

Ladybird going source-available is quite unfortunate, seems like Gecko is the only production-ready independent browser engine we're left with.

They may, at this point, go ahead and remove "get involved" block from their website https://ladybird.org/, since it's not possible to contribute anymore.

New comment by VortexLain in "MAI-Thinking-1"

VortexLain — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:34:08 +0000

Recently, GitHub has changed their terms of service to use all user data for AI training unless users explicitly opt out. This is probably the way Microsoft has obtained "appropriately licensed data".

New comment by VortexLain in "Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes"

VortexLain — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:18:16 +0000

Having no GMS implementation at all or using microG introduces compatibility issues for a lot of proprietary software. GrapheneOS is the only ROM which supports running GMS in an isolated manner, without giving it direct access to privileged system APIs such as geolocation (which is sent to Google just because they can).

New comment by VortexLain in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

VortexLain — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:47:53 +0000

> The mechanical actions and the physical presence really helps in retention of the materials. Although this is the case for many people, I personally struggle to process information and write it on paper at the same time. Thus, I strongly prefer digital note-taking and use Obsidian or just vim instead of paper.

New comment by VortexLain in "Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes"

VortexLain — Tue, 26 May 2026 10:20:47 +0000

And the only way to win this lottery is by using an automated script that starts sending automated requests as soon as the new day starts at Beijing time.