Hacker News: janci

New comment by janci in "Full Writeup of the Windows GDID"

janci — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:25:28 +0000

But without an MS accoutn it would not be connected to the browsing history

New comment by janci in "Do you hate XML? (2010)"

janci — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:02:18 +0000

My reasons to hate XML:

- element vs attribute ambiguity

- model of the document does not fit nicely to programming model of structs, dicts and arrays

- too many complexities (entities, cdata, parser directives)

- cardinality unknown without schema (is that a single value, or an array that just happens to have one element)

- order of elements may or may not be significant depending on schema

- not really extensible if the original schema does not explicitly allow for extensibility

- some types of valid XML documents are not representable by a schema (e.g. any number of different elements in any order)

- verbosity

- namespace identifiers being URIs that may or may not be resolvable

What I want for general data exchange is JSON with comments and sane namespaces.

Edit: line wraps

New comment by janci in "Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file"

janci — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:52:12 +0000

I'd love if that UI was part of the file manager. totalcmd.exe or Finder.app or mc or Krusader etc.

New comment by janci in "Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file"

janci — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:06:32 +0000

I never understood why file open/save dialog is a separate thing. I want to use my file manager to open and save files!

New comment by janci in "BadHost – CVE-2026-48710: Starlette Host-Header Auth Bypass"

janci — Wed, 27 May 2026 10:02:10 +0000

path-based auth middleware is a bad practice IMHO

New comment by janci in "Flipper One Tech Specs"

janci — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:26:32 +0000

Why put such crappy display on such a high power device?

New comment by janci in "My Homemade PBX (2002)"

janci — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 06:00:58 +0000

As a kid I was intrigued by telephones. I got hands on two old rotary phones and I wanted them to talk together. I wired them in series with a battery. Despite my dad telling me it never gonna work - it kinda worked. You could hear the other side just well! It just did not ring.

I've made a great effort in making the phones ring. At that time I did not know it needs 90V (fortunately - I'd probably hurt myself). I figured out it needs AC, but how do you produce AC with only a battery? I even made a hack to rapidly reverse polarity using a relay in self-oscillating mode, only to get shocked by the induced voltage by the relay coil and no ring.

(Now I see that maybe if I used the coil voltage it would actually ring!)

This great article brought back nice memories of tinkering with the phones.

New comment by janci in "Cryptography in Home Entertainment (2004)"

janci — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 05:07:05 +0000

How was CSS supposed to protect against copying the encrypted data? We should not need to decrypt the video to duplicate the disc.

New comment by janci in "100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite"

janci — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 20:51:26 +0000

How does SQLite handle HA setups? The minimum I want is reliable automatic failover in reasonable time for user-facing service. Ideally an active-active setup.

New comment by janci in "I have released a 69.0MB version of Windows 7 x86"

janci — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 19:55:37 +0000

Is it just a minimal set of unmodified files and Windows will gracefully degradate to this? Or did he need to patch everything to be able to strip it down?

New comment by janci in "I turned the Lego Game Boy into a working Game Boy"

janci — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:15:57 +0000

Did Nintendo lawyers already get in touch?

New comment by janci in "How Secure is Tor? Not secure at all"

janci — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 21:13:29 +0000

No, the author is presenting an idea that $25 a month can buy you a node. That fits adding a new node to the network, not taking over an existing node.

New comment by janci in "How Secure is Tor? Not secure at all"

janci — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 20:14:28 +0000

The assumption is the adversary controls x of N nodes. When x=N the probability of discovering the onion service IP is 1. But the adversary can not achieve this situation as he only controls the additional nodes. The existing nodes still stay in the network, they do not disappear. The ratio is not x/N but x/(x+N).

The formula is wrong and it all falls apart.

New comment by janci in "Abusing Entra OAuth for fun and access to internal Microsoft applications"

janci — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 05:11:31 +0000

Ohh, that's probably why our integration suddenly stopped working for single-tenant app registrations right before release. We were using the /common endpoint for everyone. That is disallowed now.

Thunderbird started showing donation ads on startup

janci — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 07:41:58 +0000

This [1] opened automatically today in Thunderbird (Windows). It this part of the progressive enshitification of Mozilla products?

[1] https://updates.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/128.0/apr25/donate/?utm_campaign=apr25_appeal&utm_medium=desktop&utm_source=new-tab&utm_content=en-US

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591694

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by janci in "Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance"

janci — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 17:37:32 +0000

I think it is a tradeoff between "everybody can request age verification" and "only state-licensed parties can request age verification". I don't think everybody's ID card should tell anyone if the holder is adult or not, especially wirelessly

New comment by janci in "Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance"

janci — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 21:10:35 +0000

Our state-issued eID cards are supposed to have a function that allows anonymous age verification to a trusted party. It should work like this: a requesting party sends a request signed by state-issued certificate to the ID card, the card verifies the request authenticity and responds with a signed confirmation of legal age and that signature then can be verified by the requester.

No personal information is shared.

While I do not aggree with pervasive age restrictions, this is a nice technical solution to privacy preserving age verification

New comment by janci in "API design note: Beware of adding an "Other" enum value"

janci — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 21:30:11 +0000

How that works when you need to distinguish between "no value provided" and "a value that is not in the list" - in some applications they have different semantics.

New comment by janci in "Mozilla is trying to backtrack on Firefox's controversial data privacy update"

janci — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 21:21:31 +0000

Yet, Google is a lot more specific im what, how and why you license the content to Google. And it is not for anything that Firefox does.

Plus:

> Some of our services are designed to let you upload, submit, store, send, receive, or share your content. You have no obligation to provide any content to our services and you’re free to choose the content that you want to provide.

New comment by janci in "Mozilla is trying to backtrack on Firefox's controversial data privacy update"

janci — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 20:20:37 +0000

Can you quote and link the relevant part of ToS other browsers and MS Office (the one that runs on your computer, not 365 cloud) ?