Hacker News: mgulick

New comment by mgulick in "GCC steering committee announces AI policy"

mgulick — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:02:57 +0000

The GPL relies on copyright ownership for its effectiveness, and copyright ownership of LLM output is a legal gray area right now.

"...prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output." [https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10...]

If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away.

Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.

New comment by mgulick in "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark"

mgulick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:06:05 +0000

I get an IPv6 address from my ISP (a /56 I believe), but I wish there was some good information on how to update my OpenWRT VLAN configuration, routing, and firewall rules to be able to support native IPv6 on my devices. Would love to be able to have direct IPv6 connections to the internet from my devices, but I want to make sure I can do it safely.

New comment by mgulick in "Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run"

mgulick — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:31:41 +0000

From https://opensource.org/osd:

> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

A non-commercial clause is a discrimination against a field of endeavor and thus non-open-source. The license cannot restrict how the user is able to *use* the software and still be open source. There can however be requirements to distribute the source code when distributing the software, ala GPL.

New comment by mgulick in "Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill"

mgulick — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:27:26 +0000

The power of correlating your real ID with your browsing activity on the internet.

New comment by mgulick in "No right to relicense this project"

mgulick — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:06:19 +0000

They also have the guarantee that the code licensed under the GPL, and all future enhancements to it, will remain free software. The same is not true of the MIT license's weak-copyleft.

New comment by mgulick in "Passkeys and Modern Authentication"

mgulick — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:36:02 +0000

My keepass database has around 400 different entries in it. If I needed to transfer to a new password manager, it's not feasible to go around to 400 different sites to register new passkeys. In case one might say the answer to that is oauth, I'm also not interested in putting my faith in Google/Microsoft/Apple being benevolent arbiters of my ability to access my accounts.

New comment by mgulick in "Beej's Guide to Git"

mgulick — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 21:06:44 +0000

It's great to see more git documentation, and I have a lot of respect for Beej's Guide to Network Programming. However he really needs to work on his commit hygiene. I get that this is a one-man project, but still it's pretty atrocious: https://github.com/beejjorgensen/bggit/commits/main/. This does not set a good example.

I usually refer people to https://cbea.ms/git-commit/.

New comment by mgulick in "Microsoft Confirms Password Deletion for 1B Users"

mgulick — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 19:33:10 +0000

I think technical people understand the mechanics of using Passkeys, having them backed up to multiple devices etc, but there's no way my 70 year old father is going to be able to understand that. He barely knows the difference between the computer login and his gmail login. My parents are also not wealthy-enough to have Apple take care of all of this for them. He has a hand-me-down Linux laptop because all he needs is Google Chrome. Thankfully I've been able to teach my parents to write down their passwords in a password book.

I can't tell you how many times I've ask my father "what's your google password" and he says "I don't have a google password". I like the idea of eliminating passwords, but inevitably his phone is going to break or his computer is going to crash and he needs a way to recover.

New comment by mgulick in "Microsoft Confirms Password Deletion for 1B Users"

mgulick — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 19:21:47 +0000

So do I, but this is annoying because I need to have physical access to both of the keys when setting up 2FA on an account, or hope that I remember to add the backup yubikey when I get back home.

New comment by mgulick in "Akaunting is free, open-source online accounting software for small businesses"

mgulick — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:05:14 +0000

Bah, not open source, rather BSL licensed. Stop it with the open-washing already!

New comment by mgulick in "Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates"

mgulick — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 18:02:18 +0000

Computer security is hard, and I think a "security label" would give a false sense of safety. Requiring manufacturers to respond to critical security vulnerabilities for a given period of time sounds like a good idea, but such rules often have unintended side-effects (like impacting startups, who maybe couldn't afford the certification or can't guarantee long term support). What we really need is local-only device access, so that I can firewall a device off completely from the internet, and still make full use of it with a local controller like home assistant. Locking down devices with the threat of DMCA violations to reverse-engineers actively reduces device security, and takes away my ability to fix devices myself.

This overall strikes me as much lower priority than the currently ongoing ATSC 3.0 DRM doom. Please please please do something about this nightmare that broadcasters are imposing on the public. Don't let broadcasters take away my ability to watch live TV without an internet connection (resulting in a complete emergency broadcast system failure?). Don't let broadcasters take away my ability to record/time-shift live TV using software-based DVRs (e.g. Plex, Jellyfin), which could never possibly meet the "Nextgen TV" certification requirements!

New comment by mgulick in "The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you"

mgulick — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 20:11:42 +0000

Up until 2 years ago, I used to use an HDHomeRun Prime with a cablecard for just basic cable (only a dozen or so channels) because I had terrible antenna reception in my apartment (I was only about 2 or 3 miles from the transmitter, but with a hill in-between). It cost me something like $60/month for just the basic cable (from RCN). Fortunately I've now moved and have great OTA reception on ATSC 1.0 so I was able to ditch the expensive cable service.

I really think the basic broadcast channels should be free to watch on whatever medium you choose. These should be free on clear QAM cable without needing a cable card.

New comment by mgulick in "The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you"

mgulick — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 20:04:17 +0000

This has already happened unfortunately. In my area (Boston) nearly all of the ATSC 3.0 channels were encrypted the day they went on the air (CBS, ABC, NBC). As a result, they are unwatchable. We need to petition the FCC to force broadcasters to remove the encryption.

New comment by mgulick in "The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you"

mgulick — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 18:57:50 +0000

For anyone using an HDHomeRun or any other OTA capture card, this effectively kills the ability to watch and record content using Plex/Jellyfin/Emby/etc.

Only "certified" devices are allowed access to the encryption keys. Only closed, fully locked down black box recording systems will ever be "certified". Don't have a Windows machine with a fully verified HDCP chain? Sorry, you can no longer watch OTA TV.

New comment by mgulick in "$50 Odroid-C4 Raspberry Pi 4 Competitor Combines Amlogic S905X3 SoC with 4GB RAM"

mgulick — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 14:06:05 +0000

Maybe, I don't have another eMMC board to test with, but compared to my RPi 3 with an SD card, the eMMC feels way faster. Very noticeable doing an apt upgrade. Note I use all of my boards headless.

New comment by mgulick in "$50 Odroid-C4 Raspberry Pi 4 Competitor Combines Amlogic S905X3 SoC with 4GB RAM"

mgulick — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 13:37:53 +0000

Having eMMC support is a game changer over a microSD card. It makes it feel like a real computer.

New comment by mgulick in "$50 Odroid-C4 Raspberry Pi 4 Competitor Combines Amlogic S905X3 SoC with 4GB RAM"

mgulick — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 13:35:46 +0000

My Odroid-C2 runs a mainline kernel. I use it headless, so I'm not sure about graphics support, but its been otherwise extremely stable. It did take a year or two after release to get full upstream support. I'd imagine this new board will follow a similar trajectory.

New comment by mgulick in "Use plaintext email"

mgulick — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 12:42:00 +0000

I'm surprised by the recommendation to use format=flowed. I set up thunderbird a while back to use the recommendations from the LKML: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/email-clients.... Doesn't format=flowed mangle patches?

I've also disabled wrapping (as recommended in that document), however I'm not a big fan of it. I do think that plain text wrapped at 72 or 80 characters looks much nicer. I wish thunderbird allowed me to select portions of the text to wrap, or to disable wrapping for selected portions (e.g. a code snippet). Is this handled better in other email clients?