Hacker News: mkup

New comment by mkup in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

mkup — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:00:08 +0000

Pure hosts file solution won't cut it for several reasons:

1) certain domains (the most offensive privacy infringers) are whitelisted by Microsoft's DNSAPI.DLL to always bypass hosts file lookup (DNSAPI.DLL is a place where hosts file parser lives on Windows, so this parser just ignores hosts file records which don't align well with data vaccuming purpose of modern Windows versions)

2) hosts file can't blacklist domain hierarchies (domain + all subdomains), it can blacklist only apex domains

3) some domains to block are not quite domains, rather domain names regexps (set of domain names to block is not finite)

So, I would say it's rather list of regexps to block than list of domains to block (in our product it's compiled to highly efficient finite state machine in C, plus a user-friendly list of categories to choose blocking preferences from); but in principle you are right: all of it currently boils down to DNS packet interception.

New comment by mkup in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

mkup — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:59:07 +0000

Shameless plug: My products (FlashBoot and Emergency Boot Kit) can filter all types of potentially unwanted traffic from your Windows PC to Microsoft cloud: namely, Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and many more — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools (e.g. various GitHub scripts) can’t achieve. https://www.prime-expert.com/

New comment by mkup in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"

mkup — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:29:30 +0000

I also bring in the old paint from Vista. I never liked the new ribbon-based design from later version of Windows.

New comment by mkup in "Windows 11 October 2025 Update Triggers Major Gaming Performance Regression"

mkup — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 23:39:25 +0000

Shameless plug: I've developed and maintain a couple of tools to control Windows 10/11 updates, telemetry and other potentially unwanted network traffic: FlashBoot and Emergency Boot Kit. Using these tools you can make Windows 10/11 completely silent online if you want to (akin to Windows 7 or Windows XP).

https://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/

https://www.prime-expert.com/embootkit/

You are welcome. One-time purchase, lifetime updates. Not a subscription.

New comment by mkup in "Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z"

mkup — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 20:09:52 +0000

Microsoft has dropped 16-bit application support via builtin emulator (NTVDM) from 64-bit builds of Windows, whether it happens to be Windows 10 or earlier version of Windows, depends on user (in my case, it was Windows Vista). However, you can still run 16-bit apps on 64-bit builds of Windows via third party emulators, such as DOSBox and NTVDMx64.

New comment by mkup in "OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030"

mkup — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:54:35 +0000

I can reset my advertisement profile by creating a new account on ChatGPT, for Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) this is not the case.

Malicious-Looking URL Creation Service

mkup — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 12:30:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/malicious-looking-url-creation-service.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372010

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mkup in "Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android"

mkup — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 11:38:23 +0000

I maintain a software to aid in installation of Windows 7 to new PCs (FlashBoot Pro): https://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/ . Recently there was a reduction in sales. You are welcome.

New comment by mkup in "Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site"

mkup — Sat, 24 May 2025 11:28:53 +0000

Could you please provide more info on this topic, e.g. a link? I intended to buy EV code signing certificate as a sole proprietor to fix long-standing problem with my software when Windows Defender pops up every time I release a new version. Is EV code signing certificate no longer a viable solution to this problem? Is there no longer a difference between EV and non-EV code signing certificate?

New comment by mkup in "Microsoft working on 'far larger' in-house AI model"

mkup — Tue, 07 May 2024 13:20:23 +0000

This remind me of when everybody and his dog was shoehorning blockchain into everything. Blockchain-based pet platforms, pet owners earning tokens for participating in community, pet care services fueled by smart contracts, and the like.

New comment by mkup in "Clang’s -O0 output: branch displacement and size increase"

mkup — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 10:31:23 +0000

NASM has an option (-Ox) to specify how many passes it should take trying to optimize near jumps for short jumps. I usually specify -O9.

New comment by mkup in "XZ backdoor story – Initial analysis"

mkup — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 18:11:00 +0000

I still want sshd updated by my OS package manager. Statically linked spiped, which is out of scope of my OS package manager, is just a second line of defense.

New comment by mkup in "XZ backdoor story – Initial analysis"

mkup — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 10:44:25 +0000

My idea of getting one step ahead of similar backdoors is to wrap sshd traffic into a spiped tunnel. Spiped is compiled from source and linked statically (last stable version from 2021).

New comment by mkup in "Why does part of the Windows 98 Setup program look older than the rest? (2020)"

mkup — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 10:53:51 +0000

There's no Win 9x phase in Win XP setup, of course. :) There's optional DOS phase, then text-mode phase (running NT kernel under the hood, but UI is in VGA text mode), and then finally GUI phase of the setup.

New comment by mkup in "Algebra problems selected from the Romanian Olympiad (Part 2)"

mkup — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 11:29:27 +0000

Problem 5 has a simpler geometric solution, it's enough to plot circle of radius sqrt(2) on the Oab plane and a few lines b=-a, b=-a+1, b=-a+2, b=-a-1, b=-a-2 to observe the intersections. The rest of the lines are too far from this circle to intersect with it.

New comment by mkup in "Tell HN: "Default" FileZilla download bundled with adware"

mkup — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 10:16:31 +0000

Did Mozilla really came from Godzilla? I've always thought it was short form of 'Mosaic killa' (Mosaic killer). Original code of NSCA Mosaic was licensed by Microsoft Corp from Spyglass, Inc. (and so become a part of first version of Internet Explorer); while team which had written this code (Marc Andreessen et al) got venture funding from James Clark et al in 1994 to form Netscape Communications Corp and basically rewrite the browser from scratch. I.e. initial goal of that team was to kill NSCA Mosaic, their previous creation, hence the name.

New comment by mkup in "Supermium – Chromium fork for Win 2003/XP and newer"

mkup — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 16:04:07 +0000

Does GDI/non-GDI distinction really matter if the only job for GDI is to blit already rendered framebuffer after Skia library (up-to-date part of browser) to the hardware? I.e. when GDI is actually not exposed to the fonts and vector graphics downloaded from the web, just pixels? To me it seems highly unlikely that GDI can be exploited via colors of pixels.

New comment by mkup in "Goodbye GUI … Hello NUI (1997)"

mkup — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 14:47:42 +0000

So today we have Google accounts suspended by corporate bots (on the grounds mostly based on output of /dev/urandom), and I wonder (looking at the sales pitch of these ideas in 1997): are we NUI yet? And if yes, can we have our GUI back please?

Frankly, idea of mainframe is much older, and never really appealed to me. I prefer a kind PCs where P is for 'personal'.

New comment by mkup in "Goodbye GUI … Hello NUI (1997)"

mkup — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 09:35:31 +0000

An interesting compilation of buzzwords of that time. Ultimately, almost none of them stuck to the walls. I wonder if today's AI hype will look the same in 27 years?

New comment by mkup in "Make Apps for Linux"

mkup — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 14:12:57 +0000

Stop claiming that I'm spreading FUD and show me at least one Linux app which was compiled to the binary code in 1996 and exactly that binary code still runs under modern Linux desktop environment and has similar visual style to the rest of builtin apps.

Got no counterexamples? Then it's not FUD at all, rather a pure truth.