Hacker News: afarah1

New comment by afarah1 in "Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting"

afarah1 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:52:13 +0000

https://www.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-...

New comment by afarah1 in "Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit"

afarah1 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:42:18 +0000

They want to make money. Their buyers want a closely surveilled world with no exits.

New comment by afarah1 in "LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices"

afarah1 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 13:26:48 +0000

Legislators in every jurisdiction seem to have more to gain with the data collection than without.

New comment by afarah1 in "216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]"

afarah1 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 13:14:59 +0000

I think the insane part is that this is not criminal and the executives are not jailed for it.

New comment by afarah1 in "Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board"

afarah1 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:34:01 +0000

Just call it war and it's no longer criminal. Perhaps on terror, or whatever.

If one is concerned with this sort of scenario, this talk about corporations and regulations is really short sighted.

New comment by afarah1 in "Yen weakens past ¥160 per dollar, eroding intervention gains"

afarah1 — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 01:38:11 +0000

Most large companies hedge their exposition to FX rates.

New comment by afarah1 in "Creepy Crawlies"

afarah1 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:14:22 +0000

Why not aggressively rate limit? Legitimate use of HTML rendered commits should be largely unaffected, and crawlers slowed to a halt. You can even jail after a number of 429's...

New comment by afarah1 in "Stopping the smart TV from being used against you"

afarah1 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:32:20 +0000

Well, nowadays the purpose of a TV is usually to watch content over the internet, so I wouldn't call it "stupid" to connect the TV to the internet.

You might say it's naive, but is it really naive to buy a TV and expect it to be a device to display audiovisual content and not a spyware/adware machine?

I feel like it's not the user's behavior that should be put into question here, but the borderline criminal behavior of the manufacturer.

New comment by afarah1 in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

afarah1 — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:37:02 +0000

Yeah... Original and clever, and a great read! But it seems mostly useful to the handful of people dealing with ELF internals, than to the vast majority of people executing ELF blissfully ignorant of its internals... Maybe if the latency and size trade-offs were the other way around it would be more appealing to the masses.

New comment by afarah1 in "How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)"

afarah1 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:20:40 +0000

Correct, but there are no better non-root alternatives as far as I know. Would love to be proved wrong. There are some workarounds to use NetGuard with a VPN based on a work profile or something, but I haven't personally tried them and cannot attest to them working.

New comment by afarah1 in "How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)"

afarah1 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:10:11 +0000

Worth the shout-out to the open source NetGuard app which allows you to block internet access for select apps without root, using Android's always-on VPN feature as a firewall. This is useful to prevent this and any other apps from talking to the network in a way external to the app itself.

New comment by afarah1 in "Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available"

afarah1 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:10:12 +0000

>the .NET developers magazine.

Surely it's online? Such magazine still being in issue would be equally surprising to me.

New comment by afarah1 in "Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's"

afarah1 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:52:49 +0000

If there is a sustainable market for higher volume/quality/durability products for a higher price, it is in the interest of companies - new and existing - to capture it, as by definition they would profit from it.

Consolidation alone is insufficient to explain such a gap under the assumption of profitability.

New comment by afarah1 in "Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed"

afarah1 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:18:01 +0000

It prevents event dispatch, upon which this exploit relied. The same could be achieved without listening to clipboard events, in which case the setting would be insufficient. I'm not sure there is a way to fully prevent clipboard manipulation in the browser.

New comment by afarah1 in "FIPS 140-3 is not a security guarantee, and auditors know it"

afarah1 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:11:03 +0000

Huh, I don't know about the world of HSMs or crypto and their audits, but in FedRAMP SaaS, you absolutely have to run everything with FIPS mode enabled, there are strong guarantees that need to be in place and audited.

New comment by afarah1 in "Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed"

afarah1 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:27:57 +0000

You can disable it on Firefox by setting dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to false. I haven't had any issues with it.

Someone shared the code in the comments, it uses 'copy' and 'cut' event listeners, so disabling this setting would have prevented the exploit regardless of an adblock.

New comment by afarah1 in "Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time"

afarah1 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:25:27 +0000

Also interesting to look at the chart per country. [2] US fossil fuel is 4x entire Germany, while for China just coal is over 8x all of Germany. So good and relevant news at a local scale! But pretty irrelevant at a global one... A scale at which there is more talk than action in parts of the world, probably because it would be too economically painful if not unfeasible to e.g. limit or tax imports, outsourcing etc by emission source.

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-source-bar...

New comment by afarah1 in "Critical CVE issued for hallucinated SQLite vulnerability"

afarah1 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:50:24 +0000

Nothing new about that

New comment by afarah1 in "The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel"

afarah1 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:59:57 +0000

The same can be said about Flock, or other surveillance state mechanisms.

It's good for security, it's more convenient than police doing police work.

Until it's not. Until it's hacked or abused as powerful mechanisms commonly are.

New comment by afarah1 in "Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list"

afarah1 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:57:56 +0000

Yes but also as always a people problem. People put the cameras and monitoring systems in place and operate them, to govern other people who ultimately yield to be governed, as the alternative is made too costly / dangerous by the governors.