Hacker News: bigfatkitten

New comment by bigfatkitten in "Introduction to UEFI HTTP(s) Boot with QEMU/OVMF"

bigfatkitten — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:08:08 +0000

The IP stack and HTTP clients are problematic enough without adding the enormous complexity of a TLS implementation on top.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "New privacy frontier: Europe eyes crackdown on smart glasses"

bigfatkitten — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:08:20 +0000

I want to see the original memo just so I can put a name and a face to the utter ghoul responsible.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

bigfatkitten — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:30:55 +0000

They placed a lot of importance in realism, and the show had top notch advisors.

https://onlinegrad.syracuse.edu/blog/mr-robot-cybersecurity-...

New comment by bigfatkitten in "Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC"

bigfatkitten — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:03:45 +0000

My point is that Google’s enormous talent and resources often fails to translate into an ability to execute.

In fact, they probably see major success with new products less often than not.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC"

bigfatkitten — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:41:08 +0000

> I fear that OpenAi and Anthropic would not be able to compete against an adveserial Alphabet which owns it's own models, hardware, large corpus of data, talent and network effects.

Many people thought Google+ would stomp all over Facebook, and that GCP would kill Azure and AWS for most of the same reasons.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "Fooling Go's X.509 Certificate Verification"

bigfatkitten — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:22:28 +0000

Even outside of the web PKI, the requirement for identical encoding is also often found in certificate policies used within closed communities.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

bigfatkitten — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:45:50 +0000

> How can a vassal state with 1/60th your GDP 'influence' your nation into a war ? It's a rhetorical question. It can't.

You don’t need to influence a nation, you only need to get one guy on board.

When you have ready access to the ego-driven and cognitively limited man in charge, either directly or through his sycophants, and that man has enormous executive authority to do mostly whatever he wants, this becomes very straightforward.

Israel has been looking for a sucker in the White House for 40 years, and they finally found one.

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

bigfatkitten — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:16:31 +0000

They do, but with the redemption value I still end up ahead.

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

bigfatkitten — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:34:42 +0000

> Small beer anyway, it's not like people are paying taxes via card.

I do. If I’m going to give the government a big pile of money, I may as well earn some points for my trouble.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

bigfatkitten — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:06:19 +0000

JMAP.

Modern authentication.

S/MIME with cryptography that isn’t RSA.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "GoPro warned it may not survive"

bigfatkitten — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:13:26 +0000

I worded that inarticulately. Some of those first movers were absolute trash, though I agree that later and more commercially successful products are not always better.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "GoPro warned it may not survive"

bigfatkitten — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:50:57 +0000

I’d suggest that a whole bunch of those were not improvements.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building"

bigfatkitten — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:28:10 +0000

Because decades ago, applications didn’t waste anywhere near the absurd amounts of screen real estate that they do now.

Look at how much you can fit onto a 1920x1080 display running Windows 2000 compared with a recent release of GNOME.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "Retired SF firefighter dies from lung cancer after Blue Shield denies claims"

bigfatkitten — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:59:49 +0000

This is inhumane.

I’m a volunteer firefighter in Australia. I am covered by legislation that says that if I contract any one of about 12 different forms of cancer, there is an automatic legal presumption that it was the result of firefighting, and the state government (and its insurers) are automatically on the hook.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt"

bigfatkitten — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:33:49 +0000

If we take near term to mean “while any of the participants in this thread are still alive”, I think we’re going to be safe for a while.

https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/bollocks.pdf

New comment by bigfatkitten in "A self-powered computer in actual credit-card size (~1mm thick)"

bigfatkitten — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:53:23 +0000

I really wanted one in the late 90s. They’re still available in sealed boxes on eBay, amazingly enough.

I’m tempted to pick up one and see if I can reverse engineer the serial protocol, to make it interoperate with something more modern.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits"

bigfatkitten — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:40:02 +0000

Not if they can’t gain or maintain a security clearance.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees"

bigfatkitten — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:14:05 +0000

I am in the “I will use AI where it makes sense to make my job easier” camp. This approach was unfortunately incompatible with my SVP’s “we need to 10x AI” goal.

I found ChatGPT to be a never ending source of ideas for how to light tokens on fire as fast as possible in order to hit my target.

New comment by bigfatkitten in "A self-powered computer in actual credit-card size (~1mm thick)"

bigfatkitten — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:31:57 +0000

Reminds me of the REX PDA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REX_6000

New comment by bigfatkitten in "The DOJ Wants to Know Who on Reddit and X Is Criticizing ICE's Tactics"

bigfatkitten — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 06:37:09 +0000

“Think of the children” is the excuse, but it has never been the intent.