Hacker News: m0dest

New comment by m0dest in "A faster heart for F-Droid"

m0dest — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 18:01:18 +0000

Even if it's just the build server, it's really hard to defend just having 1 physical server for a project that aspires to be a core part of the software distribution infrastructure for thousands of users.

The build server going down means that no one's app can be updated, even for critical security updates.

For something that important, they should aspire to 99.999% ("five nines of") reliability. With a single physical server, achieving five nines over a long period of time usually means that you were both lucky (no hardware failures other than redundant storage) and probably irresponsible (applied kernel updates infrequently - even if only on the hypervisor level).

Now... 2 servers in 2 different basements? That could achieve five nines ;)

New comment by m0dest in "Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data"

m0dest — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 03:16:50 +0000

So, product idea: A powered "cold storage box" for M.2 SSDs. 2 to 8 M.2 slots. Periodically, an internal computer connects one of the slots, reads every byte, waits for some period of time, then powers off. Maybe shows a little green light next to each drive when the last read was successful. Could be battery-powered.

New comment by m0dest in "How to fix subsystem request failed on channel 0"

m0dest — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 02:51:23 +0000

Yeah, regardless of how one feels about the design decision to fail without fallback, the messaging seems like an oversight.

New comment by m0dest in "Google flags Immich sites as dangerous"

m0dest — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 13:20:51 +0000

It looks like Mozilla does use DNS to verify requests to join the list, at least.

  $ dig +short txt _psl.website.one @1.1.1.1
  "https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/pull/2625"

Doing this DNS in the browser in real-time would be a performance challenge, though. PSL affects the scope of cookies (github.io is on the PSL, so a.github.io can't set a cookie that b.github.io can read). So the relevant PSL needs to be known before the first HTTP response comes back.

New comment by m0dest in "Why Apple's Severance gets edited over remote desktop software"

m0dest — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:38:25 +0000

These days, if you're just wiring to a single workstation in a nearby next room, 50 meter active optical Thunderbolt 3/4 cables can carry 5K+ DisplayPort video passthrough and data from your USB peripherals.

(It's "passthrough" and not "uncompressed" because DisplayPort may use DSC depending on the resolution and frame rate.)

US$500 for an optical cable can be a lot cheaper than paying for HDMI extender sender and receiver boxes.

New comment by m0dest in "M4 Mac mini's efficiency"

m0dest — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 06:35:58 +0000

With a locked screen, key presses go to the password field. I have twice caused my user account to become disabled due to too many password attempts while cleaning my keyboard.

New comment by m0dest in "FTC's rule banning fake online reviews goes into effect"

m0dest — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 17:42:19 +0000

Yes. Most of the major apps play this review game, and there's no way to compete if you don't play it too.

The major apps typically exploit selection bias to solicit 5-star reviews. They will wait until the user meets some criteria for "having a good experience" and show an app review prompt at that moment.

Then, having amassed thousands of 5-star reviews, they will turn up the threshold so that only a trickle of the most likely 5-star reviews keep on trickling in to negate any negative organic reviews.

There's a related practice of "pre-prompting" where the app first asks the user whether they are satisfied and only solicits a real app review from those who pass the screening question.

It's all quite shady and makes it hard to trust app reviews. But until the app stores solve this, app developers need to play the game.

New comment by m0dest in "Show HN: 1-FPS encrypted screen sharing for introverts"

m0dest — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 11:24:40 +0000

Yep, this is achieved using slices, which can be arbitrary regions of the frame. Each slice can have its own quantization parameters (ranging from highly lossy to perceptually lossless). Each slice can also switch between intraframe prediction (more like still image encoding) and interframe prediction (relative to prior frames).

So, with this, you can have high-quality static text in one region of the frame while there is lossy motion encoding (e.g. for an animating UI element) in another region of the frame.

New comment by m0dest in "Show HN: 1-FPS encrypted screen sharing for introverts"

m0dest — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 02:33:23 +0000

The state of the art here is really Parsec, Moonlight, and Apple's "High Performance Screen Sharing" [0]. All three of these use hardware-accelerated HEVC in some UDP encapsulation. Under the right network conditions, they achieve very crisp text, 4K60 4:4:4 with low latency.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/screen-sharing-type...

New comment by m0dest in "Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election"

m0dest — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 02:54:22 +0000

If you were forced against your will to aid in this type of fraud, might you not intentionally include a subtle error in your work that reveals its illegitimacy to a careful observer?

New comment by m0dest in "TinyPod – Apple Watch case with scroll wheel"

m0dest — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 03:28:25 +0000

From what I can tell, the "Request Ride" intent for Uber is broken (throws error on any request) and has been like this for at least 2 years.

The Ride Request API [1] seems closed off to developers now, too.

[1] https://developer.uber.com/docs/riders/introduction

New comment by m0dest in "Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes"

m0dest — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 02:33:46 +0000

Exactly. The privacy characteristics of government ID cards are worse than any other solution. When sharing such an ID, a person is providing several global, stable identifiers (e.g. ID number, full legal name). For adtech and data brokers, this is the ultimate fingerprint for tracking and matching.

In a perfect world, the digitization of these IDs would come with modern digital privacy and security. Scanning your ID number would only provide a recipient-specific ID that couldn't be matched with other vendors. Age eligibility and driver's licensing status would be presented as separate signed attestations that share no other data.

We aren't even heading in that direction yet.

New comment by m0dest in "Passkeys: A shattered dream"

m0dest — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 16:54:07 +0000

The lock-in situation with passkeys seems far worse than with password managers, though. There is no "export" option for iCloud passkeys - despite being cloud-synced across your Apple devices.

If you decide to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone, you're looking at an arduous process of enrolling a new passkey for every single site.

New comment by m0dest in "The FCC needs to stop 5G fast lanes"

m0dest — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 14:42:31 +0000

iOS 17 added explicit support for 5G slicing for QoS in consumer apps: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/network/nwparamete...

Android 14 added 5G slicing upsell for consumer apps: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/5g-slicing#5g-s...

This is imminent.

New comment by m0dest in "Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise"

m0dest — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 10:45:17 +0000

It probably makes sense to start isolating build processes from test case resources.

New comment by m0dest in "HBO Max new Captcha system"

m0dest — Tue, 30 May 2023 11:21:57 +0000

Only in the US. In all other markets, the HBO Max app still functions, and the Max app will only show a "not available" message.

New comment by m0dest in "Show HN: Beepberry – a portable e-paper computer for hackers"

m0dest — Sat, 20 May 2023 01:35:32 +0000

The trademark issues with the BlackBerry logo on the keyboard, combined with the "Beepberry" name, are going to be a problem.

New comment by m0dest in "AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable"

m0dest — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 06:50:38 +0000

When you tunnel/encapsulate your traffic, many variables change at the same time, such as:

- maximum transmission unit (MTU)

- TCP maximum segment size (MSS)

- different DNS responses leading to different edge servers

- TCP reordering, which may now occur on the tunnel layer

- lost packet retransmission, which may now occur on the tunnel layer

- time to live (TTL) hop count on the packet

- IPv4 may be used for some connections that were previously using IPv6, as some VPN services are IPv4-only

- different peering between the VPN server and the edge server

ISP traffic categorization is only one variable.

New comment by m0dest in "Tell HN: YouTube's web UI just got even worse"

m0dest — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 19:40:18 +0000

(likes / views) is still interesting, but you need to grade on a curve

New comment by m0dest in "Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?"

m0dest — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 16:03:54 +0000

https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#quicktype-ke...

QuickType Keyboard: Multilingual Typing

English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Hindi