Hacker News: mstef

The Most Privacy-Respecting Search Engine

mstef — Fri, 01 May 2026 11:03:24 +0000

Article URL: https://hister.org/posts/hister-the-most-privacy-respecting-search-engine

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47973337

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

Hister: Full text search for visited websites

mstef — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:32:33 +0000

Article URL: https://www.xda-developers.com/hister-indexes-every-page-visit-search-full-text-browsing-history/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47399572

Points: 11

# Comments: 0

New comment by mstef in "I Cut My Google Search Dependence in Half"

mstef — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:35:36 +0000

sure all data collected is of value to someone, browsing history is definitely. however this is decentralized, and needs targeted attacks, so depending on your threat model, this might be bad, but for most of the users it's probably better than giving a search engine your search queries for pages you visited earlier.

I Cut My Google Search Dependence in Half

mstef — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:37:32 +0000

Article URL: https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependence-in-half/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46959554

Points: 25

# Comments: 9

"Hister – fast, content-based search for visited websites"

mstef — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:25:42 +0000

Article URL: https://hister.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898882

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mstef in "Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots"

mstef — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 13:59:04 +0000

sure, for bookmarking that's fine. but it does not help against linkrot, or censorship, or pages changing with time.

New comment by mstef in "Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots"

mstef — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 13:57:28 +0000

btw it is perfectly fine to circumvent a paywall with archive.ph and then to snapshot it with omnon so your bookmark never linkrots away. also when i say "js manipulation" i also mean stuff like captchas, or dynamic documents that you change by interacting with it, or even private services like e.g. rocket chat hidden behind some barrier like http auth, or private vpn. archive.ph will never have access to what your browser might have access to.

New comment by mstef in "Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots"

mstef — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 13:12:48 +0000

looks nifty, but does it do snapshotting?

New comment by mstef in "Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots"

mstef — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:59:28 +0000

omnom is for snapshotting, not for circumventing paywalls. i'm merely comparing the snapshot feature of the two projects. circumventing paywalls is out of scope.

your bookmarks will never linkrot away.

New comment by mstef in "Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots"

mstef — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:47:25 +0000

the difference is, that archive.ph snapshots something in headless. omnom snapshots the exact same state that your browser is displaying you. so if there is js interactions that change the dom, those will be snapshotted, unlike with archive.ph.

also lets not forget that archive.ph wraps everything in their own frame and has their own way of mangling the result. not in a bad way, it's just not the original as it would have been rendered in your browser.

New comment by mstef in "Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots"

mstef — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:17:07 +0000

btw if you want to have a look at more than a decade of snapshots, try https://links.ctrlc.hu/ my private and membership invitation-only instance.

Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots

mstef — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 11:42:13 +0000

a bit of background. this is a rewrite of omnom by asciimoo - the guy who also made searx. originally i wrote omnom, back in the days when del.icio.us was enshittified and gone down the drain. instead of complaining i was taking the opportunity to write a replacement that i would want, it became omnom, and for many years me and a bunch of users were very happy with it.

but the fast moving world of browser extensions made maintenance (for a non-commercial free software side project) too expensive, so the extension support became erratic, until it died completely. for a year or two i didn't use it.

but then asked asciimo if he could have a look a the extensions (since he was recently working on another extension, so had some experience), he looked at it, and rewrote the whole thing in go and fixed the extension. he even got support from nlnet/ngi0.

if you want to have your own self-hosted libre software bookmarking service for you and your community, give it a go, it's very simple, privacy respecting and most robust when it comes to snapshotting. asciimoo did a great job.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680232

Points: 214

# Comments: 59

New comment by mstef in "The European Union must keep funding free software"

mstef — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 18:10:07 +0000

this is a recent (1-2 months old) report on the impact of the NGI0 programme:

https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/257...

there was also a fosdem talk about this, if you prefer AV to text, finding it i leave as an exercise to the interested parties...

New comment by mstef in "Zig vs. Rust at work: the choice we made"

mstef — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 14:57:05 +0000

besides the docs, there is also all the source code in /usr/lib/zig/std... very useful to learn zigisms and the API of the std library itself...

New comment by mstef in "Memory-safe, clean implementation of classic Posix "BC" calculator"

mstef — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 14:06:05 +0000

what's next that urgently needs mem-safety? /bin/true?

New comment by mstef in "Memory-safe, clean implementation of classic Posix "BC" calculator"

mstef — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 13:42:02 +0000

this must be parody. what exactly is the threatmodel where memory-safety matters for a calculator? did these devs miss the point of popping a calc.exe? surely no bc has ever been used for LPE or RCE.

New comment by mstef in "Ask HN: What's the best book you've read so far in 2024?"

mstef — Tue, 21 May 2024 17:23:45 +0000

john scalzi: starter villain

note, if your wife doesn't like to be woken up, do not try to read this next to her in bed. you will LoL, and wake her up.

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

mstef — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 14:40:42 +0000

this backdoor had nothing at all to do with memory safety.

Ross Anderson has died

mstef — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 14:01:13 +0000

Article URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/109513

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39864210

Points: 312

# Comments: 35

New comment by mstef in "A brief history of the U.S. trying to add backdoors into encrypted data (2016)"

mstef — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 12:31:39 +0000

i believe the cryptomuseum has a more extensive list than the one in the link: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/intel/nsa/backdoor.htm particularly one is interesting as i have reverse engineered and proven its existence: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/philips/px1000/nsa.htm