Hacker News: ZoneZealot

New comment by ZoneZealot in "Adobe wrote to my hosts file. I've never had an app do this before"

ZoneZealot — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:52:58 +0000

Next they'll be installing a font like TeamViewer did... https://community.teamviewer.com/English/discussion/124507/s...

New comment by ZoneZealot in "Confusables.txt and NFKC disagree on 31 characters"

ZoneZealot — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:26:48 +0000

I think we're expecting too much from an LLM generated article from a user that has been spending a lot of time spamming their content across multiple platforms and websites.

New comment by ZoneZealot in "Show HN: CIA World Factbook Archive (1990–2025), searchable and exportable"

ZoneZealot — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:26:06 +0000

Yep, all their comments are LLM output. As well as their alt https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ruhith

Both accounts are used to advertise their website.

New comment by ZoneZealot in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

ZoneZealot — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:40:09 +0000

They mean to send an email in advance, with a message ID that would later be used in the target email. First email gets ignored, moved to spam, or not read yet. Then the target email gets sent with the predicable message ID, and gets bounced.

Comments on issues use the format <[OrgName]/[RepoName]/issues/[IssueNumber]/[CommentID]@github.com>

A mitigation to this would be to take the combination of message ID and the sending domain and use that as the unique value, because message ID is not guaranteed to actually contain a domain label that's owned by the sender.

For example SendGrid's message IDs are <[RandomValue]@geopod-ismtpd-[Integer]>.

New comment by ZoneZealot in "Railway (PaaS) global outage"

ZoneZealot — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:39:42 +0000

That's a big yikes just after promoting themselves in the Jmail thread yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966562

Of course every service will have outages, it's just funny to see it so soon after saying:

> We're nuts for studying failure at the company [...]

(albeit a different 'failure' context)

New comment by ZoneZealot in "What came first: the CNAME or the A record?"

ZoneZealot — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:19:26 +0000

> People configure things similar to https://mxtoolbox.com/dmarc/dmarc-setup-cname instructions (which I find in conflict with RFC1034).

I don't think they're advising anyone create both a CNAME and TXT at the same label - but it certainly looks like that from the weird screenshot at step 5 (which doesn't match the text).

I think it's mistakenly a mish-mash of two different guides, one for 'how to use a CNAME to point to a third party DMARC service entirely' and one for 'how to host the DMARC record yourself' (irrespective of where the RUA goes).

New comment by ZoneZealot in "All my new code will be closed-source from now on"

ZoneZealot — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 14:01:06 +0000

It's almost like the kind of extra filler that an LLM adds because it doesn't understand the meaning behind the words...

New comment by ZoneZealot in "All my new code will be closed-source from now on"

ZoneZealot — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 13:56:26 +0000

It's an incredibly complex topic, and I do feel for people who are now seeing a massive disruption to the existing ways to monetise their own work (they should be able to live comfortably).

It's quite ironic that they used an LLM to write or at least entirely re-format their post, when their topic is about the impact these systems have on the ongoing sustainability of the humans behind the work.

I personally don't use LLMs and generative models, I find their output way too untrustworthy and their practice of mining the data of others unsettling. Not that anything on the internet can be inherently trusted anyway.

New comment by ZoneZealot in "SendGrid isn’t emailing about ICE or BLM – it’s a phishing attack"

ZoneZealot — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 12:48:34 +0000

None of the examples in the article exhibit the 'via' UX. They were all sent with an aligned RFC5321.MailFrom and RFC5322.From (i.e. domain name used in both of those values is the same), those not matching is the most common reason to have the 'via' displayed [0]. They do have display names which pretend to be SendGrid.

0: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182#zippy=%2Ci-ca...

New comment by ZoneZealot in "SendGrid isn’t emailing about ICE or BLM – it’s a phishing attack"

ZoneZealot — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:31:04 +0000

SendGrid's platform doesn't need to be the sender of these emails at all. It's just classic phishing, the emails can pass SPF, DKIM and DMARC as all of these rely on DNS resource records to be created on the RFC5321.MailFrom and/or RFC5322.From domain. Which is under control of the spammer. It's not pretending to be from sendgrid.com, if it was then these measures would help.

New comment by ZoneZealot in "AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention"

ZoneZealot — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:53:13 +0000

Keeping in mind the consumer space will see minimal trickle down from used datacenter electronics in ~3-5 years from this boom.

The GPUs are generally rack-scale integrated units rather than PCIe. The bulk of the GPU RAM is HBM, so not very scavenge-able for consumer GPU mods. Power consumption of the blackwell GPUs in most solutions like the DGX B200 isn't really viable for home use even if you had the space and hookups for a fraction of the original 10ru system. The hard drives and SSDs will be likely be shredded on site and never re-sold as used. RAM will be registered ECC, only suitable for server-class motherboards.

New comment by ZoneZealot in "RevisionDojo, a YC startup, is running astroturfing campaigns targeting kids?"

ZoneZealot — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:30:42 +0000

The funny thing about that is it's extremely simple to bypass. On old or new reddit, search 'author:example' to find posts by /u/example. Or to see both comments and posts, on new reddit go to the user profile and do blank search like a single space character.

That's using reddit's own site, of course there are other methods like Google dorks.

New comment by ZoneZealot in "Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers"

ZoneZealot — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 23:01:22 +0000

For context, Ben Edelman the author of the blog post was in the video at https://youtu.be/qCGT_CKGgFE?t=1980

Their personal site is also linked in the video description https://www.benedelman.org/honey-detecting-testers/

New comment by ZoneZealot in "I have to give Fortnite my passport to use Bluesky"

ZoneZealot — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:30:04 +0000

'Kids Web Services' is a subsidiary of Epic, the makers of Fortnite.

https://www.kidswebservices.com/

New comment by ZoneZealot in "Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business"

ZoneZealot — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:04:48 +0000

Micron are estimated to have 23% and 21% of global revenue for DRAM and HBM in Q2 2025.

Their 'smaller' market, SSDs - has an estimated 13% of global NAND revenue.

https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-dram-and... https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-nand-mem...

I don't know their breakdown for consumer vs enterprise, but the Crucial brand is consumer focussed. Obviously enterprise at this point is incredibly lucrative.

We're gonna need a bigger pin.

New comment by ZoneZealot in "WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]"

ZoneZealot — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:31:00 +0000

I agree, and I also am familiar with how WP Engine's 'GES' (global edge security) works. obr.uk points to two IP addresses held in the name of WP Engine, but they're actually BYOIP with Cloudflare. Cloudflare act as a caching layer, DDOS mitigation and WAF.

Note that GES works a bit different to traditional Cloudflare implementations, HTML requests are basically passed through to the WP Engine NGINX reverse proxy server that's in front of the WordPress site (as opposed to being heavily cached with Cloudflare). Static assets, like a PDF - would indeed be cached with GES.

New comment by ZoneZealot in "Samsung now owns Denon, Bowers and Wilkins, Marantz, Polk, and more audio brands"

ZoneZealot — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 20:36:24 +0000

You can even go all out with making custom enclosures, DIY Perks has some great videos on DIY audio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEspOD1NHr0&list=PLOJU8YJjFw...

New comment by ZoneZealot in "DNS piracy blocking orders: Google, Cloudflare, and OpenDNS respond differently"

ZoneZealot — Mon, 12 May 2025 09:18:26 +0000

Cloudflare have only ever been able to do their job (on the reverse proxy CDN/WAF side), by doing full TLS interception. They see the session in plaintext.

The customer grants Cloudflare a TLS certificate for their site either by uploading a cert manually, or letting Cloudflare issue a cert via the ACME protocol. They use that to present the site to the world. Cloudflare connects back to the origin site, and the origin either uses HTTP (bad! but possible), HTTPS with a self signed cert, HTTPS with another publicly trusted cert, or a cert that Cloudflare issues with their own (not publicly trusted) CA called Origin CA.

As the visitor, you there's no big sign saying 'Cloudflare can read this content as well as the origin website'. They're trusted to not be malicious sure, but there's a massive risk with using any sort of service like this that you don't control.

One of those massive risks turned reality with Cloudbleed in 2016/2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed

https://project-zero.issues.chromium.org/issues/42450151

https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-c...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/quantifying-the-impact-of-cloudb...

New comment by ZoneZealot in "DNS piracy blocking orders: Google, Cloudflare, and OpenDNS respond differently"

ZoneZealot — Mon, 12 May 2025 09:07:38 +0000

You're right, I was mistaken. Using a CNAME or A record as the only method to direct traffic at a label towards Cloudflare's reverse proxy is not available on the Free or Pro tier.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/zone-setups/partial-se...

New comment by ZoneZealot in "DNS piracy blocking orders: Google, Cloudflare, and OpenDNS respond differently"

ZoneZealot — Sun, 11 May 2025 22:42:58 +0000

The trust we have in the CAs who are embedded in our root stores is very important - yes.

Thankfully, in this case the issue at hand is entirely unrelated to TLS, rogue CAs etc. Or even DNS record manipulation (for now)...

Cloudflare put a 'You're blocked' page, on the web server that Cloudflare are already running for their customer. The customer being the website that Cloudflare is being ordered to block (for users in certain countries).