Hacker News: brendank310

New comment by brendank310 in "MXC - a sandboxed code execution system"

brendank310 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:45:48 +0000

Not associated with the project but have been following the development, https://5bsd.org/ could be a good answer. Kory’s been adding capability enforcement for the Linux APIs on top of BSD kernel (among other cool features).

New comment by brendank310 in "Show HN: Terminal UI for AWS"

brendank310 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 21:03:25 +0000

Nice! A while back I had started something similar for Azure but it never really got traction (or nearly as polished as this!). It's a rough proof of concept but maybe it'll be useful to Azure users:

https://github.com/brendank310/aztui

New comment by brendank310 in "DARPA project for automated translation from C to Rust (2024)"

brendank310 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:41:25 +0000

Past work in the area by the folks at Immunant (https://immunant.com/) that appears to be on-going https://github.com/immunant/c2rust. I think the project was also DARPA funded for a time.

New comment by brendank310 in "When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail""

brendank310 — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 01:53:05 +0000

I got a panicked call from my parents when Facebook deleted my brother's profile, probably 5 or 6 years after he passed away. After looking into just trying to get the profile restored, I came to the same conclusion as the title essentially. The "memories" feature frequently shuffled posts and pictures of him and had become a comfort for them. They bring it up every now and then, maybe some day I'll find a way to sort it out.

New comment by brendank310 in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"

brendank310 — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:05:00 +0000

I've been off work for two weeks to recover from surgery, and have been playing with a couple projects throughout the day between rest and physical therapy:

- A home-rolled router/firewall: Using yocto to create a distribution for a router/firewall for my home network. It started as an exercise in wanting to have more control over the security of my home network, as well as see how nice of a UI/UX I can tease out of an LLM. It's also part of a (seemingly never ending) consolidation of homelab services.

- A SNES Reverse Engineering setup: A nephew of mine is starting to get into video games and is starting with a SNES but his system broke. I'm working on helping repair the console, but am also trying to set up an effective "LLM + Ghidra + SNES emulator + image generation AI + asperite plugin" to allow him to swap sprites and text in games to add some creativity and learning to the experience.

- A personal assistant system: Experimenting with agents to create a personal assistant for our house, and seeing to what extent the agents can be helpful and how much hardware is required to run something like that in-house.

- aztui: A TUI for exploring and interacting with Azure resources. I'd like to add some caching/pre-fetching logic to make the interaction with the interface snappier (one of the main motivators to create it).

I've been using GPT pretty heavily throughout, and it has been a lot of fun both using it, and spending some dedicated time looking at the models themselves along with the frameworks that support running and integrating them.

New comment by brendank310 in "Discrete Mathematics – An Open Introduction, 4th edition"

brendank310 — Sat, 17 Aug 2024 14:58:06 +0000

Yeah it's a building block for understanding number theory well, which is important in cryptography.

New comment by brendank310 in "NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules"

brendank310 — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 13:34:46 +0000

Relatively common nowadays. It used to be delineated as a feature in Intel chips as part of their vPro line, but I think it’s baked in. Generally an IOMMU is needed for performant PCI passthrough to VMs, and Windows uses it for DeviceGuard which tries to prevent DMA attacks.

New comment by brendank310 in "Things I learned while writing an x86 emulator (2023)"

brendank310 — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 13:31:27 +0000

It's probably no longer maintained, but a former colleague of mine did some work on this for C++: https://github.com/ainfosec/shoulder. Obviously if the docs are lying it doesn't help much, but there was another effort he had https://github.com/ainfosec/scapula that tried to automate detecting behavior differences between the docs and the hardware implementation.

New comment by brendank310 in "TPM GPIO fail: How bad OEM firmware ruins Intel TPM security"

brendank310 — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 10:52:09 +0000

I get the reaction, but what about the trust factor of a box you own and have running on the other side of the world? TPM isn’t an evil concept, it’s fairly useful for some scenarios. Coercion to use TPMs, that sounds evil.

New comment by brendank310 in "From xz to ibus: more questionable tarballs"

brendank310 — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 12:31:40 +0000

It's been probably 2 years since I've messed with it, but I was still using the tarball download for Xen in OpenEmbedded builds.

New comment by brendank310 in "WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode at home"

brendank310 — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 04:15:00 +0000

As someone noted above the Commercial Solutions for Classified program has been in existence for a long while (probably over a decade). This package is newer but not wildly newer. Installs of the various 'packages' do exist.

New comment by brendank310 in "Adventures in reverse engineering Broadcom NIC firmware"

brendank310 — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 00:47:52 +0000

My old team did some work in this area a few years ago. We got the Talos II BMC code to be binary reproducible, and had a go at automating David A. Wheeler's compiler diversification to stop compiler subversion. We checked the boxes we intended to, though never got enough funding to polish it up. It's probably broken now, but we did post a portion of our work on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/deepthirst.

New comment by brendank310 in "NY Governor vetoes ban on noncompete clauses, waters down LLC transparency bill"

brendank310 — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 04:15:58 +0000

At least in NY (and probably true of state/local politics in general) this is not necessarily true. These third parties often will choose a D or R that align with their policy goals. It helps candidates in that their name is on the ballot more (either multiple rows or listing the parties that they are the nominee of)

New comment by brendank310 in "LogoFAIL: Secure Boot bypass with manipulated boot logos"

brendank310 — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 05:54:49 +0000

SB is definitely imperfect, but a useful tool in moving toward a trusted boot. I think we'd all agree having a trusted boot sequence is desirable, the point of contention being who gets to decide the criteria for trust. It's been a few years since I worked in the space but I think SB gets a bit of an undeserved bad rep (I'm sure because people were vocal early on). There is a SB signed uefi application that allows for enrolling other loaders based on the hash of the loader.

New comment by brendank310 in "CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking"

brendank310 — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 03:51:03 +0000

I think you're largely correct but Google isn't one person so there may be somewhat emergent patterns that work from an SEO standpoint that don't have a solid answer to Why. If I were an SEO customer I would ask for some proof but that isn't the market they're targeting. There was an old saying in the tennis instruction business that there was a bunch of 'bend your knees, fifty please'. So lots of snakeoil salesman but some salesman sell stuff that works.

New comment by brendank310 in "George Church lab creates ovarian granulosa-like cells from stem cells"

brendank310 — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 11:48:40 +0000

What do you suspect will be the practical uses of this? Could it help researchers run experiments to develop better fertility protocols? Or depending on costs, fertility clinics could test various protocols to find the optimal "hormone environment" for promoting high quality egg development? Or is this going to a more "out there" direction as in you could grow an egg entirely in vitro for later fertilization and implantation?

New comment by brendank310 in "“WebAssembly runtimes will replace container-based runtimes by 2030”"

brendank310 — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 19:15:01 +0000

Someone already did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32498435

Overall the timeline doesn't seem implausible to me.

New comment by brendank310 in "Show HN: HN Resume to Jobs – AI Powered Job Matching Tailored to Your Resume"

brendank310 — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 17:04:09 +0000

A friend of mine and I explored a similar offering. We've mostly put it on a shelf as it was very duct taped together and we're both short on time. We don't have any monetization plan but would love to hear any feedback: https://divim.shovelshop.io

New comment by brendank310 in "Meta is about to start its next round of layoffs"

brendank310 — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 18:26:44 +0000

I'm always a little shocked when I see someone who isn't keeping personal and work devices (and accounts) very intentionally separate.

New comment by brendank310 in "Where has all the Chartreuse gone?"

brendank310 — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 14:11:32 +0000

The flip side of that is it does cost some money to run a monastery, and there aren't a lot of a modern opportunities for them to make money. Nothing wrong with them keeping their trade secret, and not being interested in scaling production.