Hacker News: alibarber

New comment by alibarber in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

alibarber — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:17:25 +0000

Apparently, and I quote from the article (definitely not an LLM):

"Decathlon didn’t just add a new payment button to its German checkout page. It handed European banks their first big-box sporting goods test case at a moment when competition in digital payments is intensifying and the push for EU-made payment infrastructure is growing."

I've been able to make payments for sporting goods shops here in Finland with a push-payment-local-bank-account flow from the checkout for years, but clearly they weren't European enough.

New comment by alibarber in "Kill The Cookie Banner"

alibarber — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:15:42 +0000

* "This proposal for privacy signals is part of an EU law reform called the Digital Omnibus. Most other parts of this reform are problematic and would weaken people’s rights. We want to make clear that we do not support these other aspects of the proposed reform."

Oh.

New comment by alibarber in "Starlink from 1984"

alibarber — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:41:48 +0000

I’ll need a moment to let this sink in.

It’s not just technology, it’s a movement.

New comment by alibarber in "Who's running all those tiny RPKI servers?"

alibarber — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:57:03 +0000

There's another quite good blog from Cloudflare about this here too:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/enforce-first-as-bgp/

New comment by alibarber in "Microsoft turns to AWS as GitHub faces AI capacity crunch"

alibarber — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:24:04 +0000

I was recently looking at a Python project to learn a bit about RTC and just generally hack around and try something out.

https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc

It was fun and I found the code nice and helpful.

I clicked on the PRs to see if there was anything interesting to look at. I started reading one when I just realised I was just reading someone’s Claude talking to GitHub Copilot. That was when I decided that the Dead Internet Theory had already happened.

New comment by alibarber in "Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026"

alibarber — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:25:34 +0000

I remember vaguely from interning at a bank that there you were actually obliged to be totally isolated from the company for a continuous period of time by policy.

The thinking was that if you were cooking the books of doing some dodgy dealing on the side it would come to light without you there to actively 'manage' it.

New comment by alibarber in "Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026"

alibarber — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:33:34 +0000

Yes - and realistically, if you're $BIGCO who's shipped a billion devices with some obscure curl vulnerability you just discovered, then the hard part is going to be rolling out a patch to all of them anyway, which is still a 'you' problem.

New comment by alibarber in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

alibarber — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:12:20 +0000

Such a shame - in America they give you $95 for not getting Siri apparently

https://apnews.com/article/apple-iphone-siri-artificial-inte...

New comment by alibarber in "New Referendum Would Flip Brexit Result 10 Years On, Poll Finds"

alibarber — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:01:38 +0000

I'm afraid that it looks as if there are plenty of other contenders for those who might wish to undermine the EU, now and in the future.

New comment by alibarber in "Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen"

alibarber — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:39:01 +0000

Yes I have also received payments for refunds of PAYE automatically within a month or two of no action on my part.

New comment by alibarber in "Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen"

alibarber — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:37:20 +0000

Some banks in some parts of the EU have - SEPA instant was only mandated in January 2025, only for Euro payments.

New comment by alibarber in "Squillions: How money laundering won"

alibarber — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:16:44 +0000

Selling a car usually does require a report to the government. Why would the seller care what happens down the line to the buyer?

New comment by alibarber in "The UK Government's Low Value Purchase System Is a Waste of Time"

alibarber — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:37:05 +0000

Don’t let facts get in the way of a good narrative it seems.

New comment by alibarber in "The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time"

alibarber — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:34:37 +0000

I’ve never submitted a tax return in the UK as a simple PAYE employee.

In another European country where I work (Finland) it’s as you describe but it’s still more than doing absolutely nothing that I did in the UK.

New comment by alibarber in "Commission fines Temu €200M for breaching the Digital Services Act"

alibarber — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:34:42 +0000

This is about illegally dangerous products (banned chemicals, dangerous baby toys, crappy mains chargers) specifically. The stuff that makes for exciting viewing on Big Clive's YouTube channel.

Local importers, shops and marketplaces selling such stuff do often get hit by national enforcement. Not enough in my opinion - but this isn't about just targeting Teemu for the normal commodities that you can indeed buy anywhere else.

New comment by alibarber in "Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox"

alibarber — Mon, 25 May 2026 08:37:58 +0000

I'm delighted about this and also really hated the debate that had surrounded it.

Bring up WebSerial and WebUSB and oh no, all of a sudden, my 'document browser should not be accessing hardware' - yes we get it, you think the web is a collection of documents and are technically - in the most strictest sense possible correct. Hyper TEXT Transfer Protocol and all that.

Of course I've been watching Netflix and YouTube on my Firefox 'document browser' for years, because if I couldn't then there would literally no hope of anyone using Firefox in the real world, but WebUSB and WebSerial people are nerds who we can argue the toss about document browsers with and prove wrong.

New comment by alibarber in "Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha"

alibarber — Fri, 15 May 2026 10:52:50 +0000

From what I gathered from the article the person who got off was a resident of Tristan? They have such limited shipping options that this might have been the only way for them to travel from any mainland. Not sure though, but I don't think they got off there to seek medical assistance.

New comment by alibarber in "I moved my digital stack to Europe"

alibarber — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:54:41 +0000

> (albeit over Teams)

Would be great if this irony was taken note of at this level.

New comment by alibarber in "Fastmail Down?"

alibarber — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:13:54 +0000

Obligatory 'works fine for me', but I did have an issue earlier with using another ISP (timeouts) but switching to mobile data solved this, so maybe some connectivity issue?

The Fast Way to Sweden – BGP Routing Experiments

alibarber — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:11:59 +0000

Article URL: https://alastairbarber.com/Fast-Way-to-Sweden-Optimal-BGP-Prefix-Announcement/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48105194

Points: 1

# Comments: 0