Hacker News: jrexilius

New comment by jrexilius in "Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras"

jrexilius — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 01:25:48 +0000

Also Motorola, which is the big incumbent provider for LE systems (911, traffic cams, et al). Axon and Motorola re LOVING Flock taking all the ... flak.

New comment by jrexilius in "ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs"

jrexilius — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 17:42:35 +0000

well played sir.. well played..

New comment by jrexilius in "CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s"

jrexilius — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:55:22 +0000

You understand that there is difference between US law enforcement and the intelligence community? And that all service providers are required, by law in almost ALL countries, to respond to legal requests from their governments? What you are citing is not any serious evidence of some shadowy conspiracy between apple and the "government".. Not that I believe Apple's bullshit about protecting users privacy, but you're grasping at straws there.

New comment by jrexilius in "Everything you do is being recorded"

jrexilius — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:17:00 +0000

The original research project this company looks based on was very cool and way early: https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/jammer/

New comment by jrexilius in "Launch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks"

jrexilius — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:46:30 +0000

I'm super excited to try your service and the KiCad plug-in to move supply-chain dialogue closer to point-of-creation makes a TON of sense. That and the speed seem to be the two points of differentiation from Macrofab, who is my current supplier. They will be stiff competition for you as they are a great shop and have a good software interface and a lot of capabilities. I imagine using you guys for quick turn-around needs and them for production and scale?

New comment by jrexilius in "My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault"

jrexilius — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:24:48 +0000

That is actually what my company built. The primary purpose was for encrypted messaging, but it also acted as secrets store and password manager. The great thing about it being built into the keyboard is there is no chance for a rooted host to intercept passwords/messages etc.

https://www.anomie.tech/

New comment by jrexilius in "My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault"

jrexilius — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:28:00 +0000

Good stuff! If I remember correctly there was company at Defcon selling memory cards that had this feature built into them a couple years ago?

New comment by jrexilius in "30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech"

jrexilius — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 02:39:14 +0000

The wonderful thing about our current culture is that each side thinks that further empowering the federal government is the solution. And it will only be used by their side against their enemies (other american citizens). No thought at all to the fact that the other side will take power in 4 years. No, no.. short term power is all that matters. The Biden administration started targeting "right-wing terrorists", now its Trumps turn to take it up a notch. Can't wait to see what the left does when they take power in a couple years. I think the technical term for this is death spiral...

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.