Hacker News: jrexilius

New comment by jrexilius in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

jrexilius — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:31:25 +0000

I can't agree with this enough and yet I think the long term danger is masked by the current problems for the majority of voters. I'm not hopeful.

New comment by jrexilius in "Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept"

jrexilius — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:51:45 +0000

If I remember correctly, ADP and the other big payroll processors sell your income data, as do many of the finance apps that get access to your bank account data. They also have your rent and mortgage payments typically. It's not always a line item in your official credit report, but the data leaks (and is sold) everywhere. Probably the more correct phrasing would be "in your financial target data profile as sold by [credit agencies, et al]"?

New comment by jrexilius in "We broke 92% of SHA-256 – you should start to migrate from it"

jrexilius — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:12:42 +0000

Is a partial collision an indicator that it could be broken? The "we broke it" seems an exageration, but maybe that's a failure of my understanding.

New comment by jrexilius in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

jrexilius — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:41:09 +0000

yes, because the last century of communism showed that it was really just capitalism where centralized power corrupts..

New comment by jrexilius in "Migrating to the EU"

jrexilius — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:43:59 +0000

If your threat model is the NSA, moving to non-US providers actually lowers the barrier as they no longer have to deal with the US constitution and US citizen data. If your threat model is law enforcement (or border/customs, et al), moving to EU really doesn't cause much in the way of speed bumps.

In my opinion though, the real threat model is not the actual government, its the US corporations. The NSA wont sell your information to any bad actor with a credit card and, realistically, doesn't care about you. But there is much that can be stolen or exploited for financially-motivated bad-actors from non-extradition countries or others with differing interests than your own.

New comment by jrexilius in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

jrexilius — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:36:54 +0000

A sort of related question, is the user able to actually power-off the baseband carrier chip and still keep the phone powered on? I seem to recall there being some 911 regulations around that topic. But it might be a way to enable the user to at least disable that tracking vector, while still using the phone offline or via wifi?

New comment by jrexilius in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

jrexilius — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:21:33 +0000

You don't need an ID to buy a SIM in UK? I remember not needing one a long time ago but in recent years was asked for one.. maybe not a law? irregularly applied?

New comment by jrexilius in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

jrexilius — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:18:29 +0000

I think the regulations have some loopholes for domestic use, but one I don't know how they can really get around is for international roaming, as other countries have far stricter KYC laws.

Domestically you can buy a Tmobile or Cricket with a pre-paid visa cash card and a gmail address (no ID required), but they won't work outside the US.

New comment by jrexilius in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

jrexilius — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:12:25 +0000

Good luck! It's a tough sell and some people won't accept that there are people from the defense sector that really care about the Constitution. Transparency is proly your best friend. But once you sign a Qualcom or carrier NDA, you are pretty tied-up as far as open-sourcing things or transparency, I'd imagine. Still, keep up the good fight!

New comment by jrexilius in "Gnome and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux"

jrexilius — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:41:50 +0000

This is an very user-powerful feature. WHY the fuck would they disable it? It basically gives you two buffers, middle click for dynamic selection-paste. repetitive-chunks of text can use the more cumbersome ctl-c/v. I've been using this feature since before linux was a thing. When I teach it to young engineers now they find it quite useful. STOP trying to turn everything into a mimic of a damn smart phone OS!

New comment by jrexilius in "OpenMANET Wi-Fi HaLow open-source project for Raspberry Pi–based MANET radios"

jrexilius — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 23:44:18 +0000

Last time I played with Moremicro they didn't work with real 802.11s and had some hokey proprietary hierarchal tree topology that required a main basestation gateway. ad-hoc, peer-to-peer was broken. They finally fixed their driver?

New comment by jrexilius in "I Want You to Understand Chicago"

jrexilius — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 23:23:10 +0000

I live in Chicago and it is a BIG city. I've seen, in real life, none of this. But the online reports are legion. I think, like a lot of things, you can choose what reality you want to inhabit and find anecdata online to support any of it. During the Obama adminstration the right wing whackos came up with theories about black helicopters and UN camps and the rest. This may be _slightly_ more factual as the Orange Troll is more purposefully playing a media game, but I'd still take these reports with a grain of salt.

New comment by jrexilius in "Gilded Rage – Why Silicon Valley went from libertarian to authoritarian"

jrexilius — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 14:12:11 +0000

I'm confused, is the assertion here that this is the first time silicon valley tech people and their companies got involved in partisan politics? Is it really short memory or selective memory?

example: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-...

New comment by jrexilius in "How I ditched smartphones"

jrexilius — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 14:54:59 +0000

No, most don't. I've used that approach in the past for privacy and in recent years most services started blocking it with no alternatives.

New comment by jrexilius in "How I ditched smartphones"

jrexilius — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 14:51:45 +0000

The easiest, fastest way to hack this together would be a raspberry pi zero with a display hat. It'd be chunky, but it would keep all the TOTP shared secrets off of other less reliable devices.

New comment by jrexilius in "Pharma is a small component of US health care spending"

jrexilius — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 02:02:08 +0000

I'm a bit confused.. are people suggesting that the poor pay in the EU is a _good_ thing? These aren't lawn maintenance or car mechanics here. We're talking about saving peoples lives. I would think the people in the EU would feel a bit of shame for paying them so poorly..

[disclaimer] my wife works in pediatric cardiology and saving kids lives seems worth a hell of a lot more than a software jockey job. The dead baby days are the worst and make a rough merge or code deployment appear as trivial as they really are. The EU should be ashamed of paying their people so poorly. None of that is to say that our system isn't broken and wasteful. It certainly needs fixing. But paying critical care givers less is a really bad suggestion.

New comment by jrexilius in "To AI or not to AI"

jrexilius — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 14:53:20 +0000

I have taken to appending "DO NOT START WRITING CODE." to almost every prompt.. I try to get it to analyze and ask questions and summarize what its going to do first, and even then it will sometimes ignore that and jump into writing (the wrong) code. A big part of the wrangling seems to be getting it to analyze or reason before charging down a wrong path.

New comment by jrexilius in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

jrexilius — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 05:34:21 +0000

This is such an important distinction that gets lost so often...

New comment by jrexilius in "WhoBIRD is now deprecated on certified Android devices"

jrexilius — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 22:07:35 +0000

Graphene has been the best alternative I've found so far.

New comment by jrexilius in "Gartner's grift is about to unravel"

jrexilius — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 21:51:26 +0000

yeah, had no idea what that word jumble was meant to convey..