Hacker News: mzajc

New comment by mzajc in "Show HN: Laptop is the last place your secrets are still in plaintext"

mzajc — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:32:49 +0000

Most of your comments on this site, including both of your comments on this thread, are differently-worded promotions of this one product. Please don't use the forum exclusively to advertise.

New comment by mzajc in "Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin"

mzajc — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:33:38 +0000

Because security is the pretext, not the goal here. I'm sure browsers could have better security controls for extensions, but giving users extra control over software doesn't seem to be very popular among corpos nowadays.

New comment by mzajc in "Single log line is 49KB+ (ext4) / 110KB+ (btrfs) of systemd-journald disk writes"

mzajc — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:14:20 +0000

If you have systemd>=253 you can make use of LogFilterPatterns[0] (in .service files), but it's really unpredictable, cumbersome to work with, and does not work with user services or non-service log sources.

[0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

New comment by mzajc in "Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot"

mzajc — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:41:43 +0000

> The easiest way to deal with the usual suspects is to just block the entire countries network range(s).

Keep in mind that this should be paired with an ASN blacklist - MaxMind also has an ASN mmdb for convenience - because IP address to country maps are almost entirely self-declared[0].

For example, Tencent (AS132203), which you almost certainly want to block, has ranges in 73 different countries per [1].

[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8805

[1]: https://bgp.tools/as/132203#prefixes

New comment by mzajc in "Let’s take apart your phone"

mzajc — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:10:01 +0000

This is essentially just LLM output listing common smartphone components and various vaguely related trivia. Most of the "navigation" section isn't even about machine navigation for crying out loud, and the 10 second/week drift figure seems completely hallucinated.

New comment by mzajc in "I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux"

mzajc — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:39:13 +0000

"Bang-up" is a good description of what Seedvault does, because your backup will have holes in it. Anything made with Android's backup system has the same problem.

Applications can specify that they can't be backed up, and you as a user have no way of overriding that. Highlights on my smartphone are Fennec (Firefox), Termux, Cromite, Element, Syncthing, various videogames and other utilities.

I absolutely want these backed up, and on any sensible system I'd just point restic to their storage locations and be done. On Android I need an arcane mess of Titanium Backup and TWRP, and god help me if I ever have to recover from a backup.

New comment by mzajc in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

mzajc — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:29:34 +0000

This is nonsense; GOG has a very simple API to list and download games you own, and all you have to do is run a downloader script (many are available online, including mine) in a cron job to keep the latest versions of games on your disk.

New comment by mzajc in "1,741 "informed" consents with one click? GDPR complaint filed"

mzajc — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:48:19 +0000

I think it's closer to a bartender mixing you a drink with 30 (hundred) different poisons and hoping you get tired of saying "no" every time.

New comment by mzajc in "Kill The Cookie Banner"

mzajc — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:25:39 +0000

Unless disabling cookies means treating all cookies as session cookies (meaning you can still be followed within a session), this has the fun side effect of breaking pretty much every CAPTCHA firewall like Anubis, Cloudflare Turnstile, and any other that relies on cookies.

Unfortunately this means you have to view a lot of the web through archive.today or web.archive.org - I would know because I have uMatrix configured this way.

New comment by mzajc in "Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended"

mzajc — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 09:19:01 +0000

Curiously enough, .me's whois record does not list Identity Digital as a contact (as seems to be standard practice with externally-managed ccTLDs, such as .gi), and .me is not listed on Identity Digital's "TLD Portfolio"[0]

On the other hand, all of their infrastructure (registry websites, nameservers, whois server) are hosted on Identity Digital, Godaddy, and Afilias IPs. Does anyone know what the relationship between .me and Identity Digital is?

[0]: https://identity.digital/tld-portfolio

New comment by mzajc in "Zo Computer"

mzajc — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 01:24:57 +0000

This is just an advertisement.

New comment by mzajc in "Choosing a Public DNS Resolver"

mzajc — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:12:07 +0000

This is great, thanks for the correction! I tried resolving dnssec-failed.org and it does indeed fail with EDE 6 (DNSSEC Bogus). I'm not sure why this hasn't been updated on the info page[0] yet, given that the change is about three months old.

[0]: https://quad9.net/service/service-addresses-and-features/

New comment by mzajc in "Choosing a Public DNS Resolver"

mzajc — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 01:52:09 +0000

Be cautious with Quad9; their main address (9.9.9.9) has a "malware" blacklist that has misfired several times already: twice for a private torrent tracker, once for gist.github.com, issue was resolved within minutes to hours. They have a non-filtered address (9.9.9.10), but it doesn't do DNSSEC verification. IMO they're too unreliable to be worth the hassle.

New comment by mzajc in "PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts"

mzajc — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 03:48:18 +0000

"Rent for 48h", and... "Rent until we say the time is up"?

New comment by mzajc in "FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model"

mzajc — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:00:38 +0000

The clause you cited as well as the "Termination" section and the non-commercial restriction make it a non-free license. Besides the direct issues with that, it also means all software covered by this license is unsuitable for FOSS-only distributions like Debian or F-Droid. It's not entirely clear to me if the license is copyleft; derivative works have similar problems if so.

As an aside, Eron Wolf, the billionaire behind FUTO, has some rather... out of touch views[0] on the meaning of open source, and seems very committed to diluting the term to mean something closer source-available by removing the most of the rights granted (as defined by FSF, OSI, DFSG and others).

[0]: https://gitlab.futo.org/eron/public/-/wikis/Thoughts-on-Open... - please keep in mind that the RMS quote at the top is taken out of context; he is arguing for more freedom, not less

New comment by mzajc in "What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance"

mzajc — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:25:15 +0000

If the website sees (and possibly stores) the e-mail address, and the government or another party knows who it belongs to, the scheme is anything but privacy-preserving.

New comment by mzajc in "Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia"

mzajc — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:51:21 +0000

I encourage people to read through his proposed WikiProject's page[0] and the related discussion.[1] Important context is also that WikiProjects are exempt from canvassing rules; members are free to notify each other of ongoing policy discussions with the goal of influencing the outcome.

This is usually not a problem, but given how aggressively vague the WikiProject's goals are (eg. "We hope to open Wikipedia up to using more sources" - which?) and Larry Sanger's prior conduct (eg. advocating for whitelisting of sources like Fox News[2]), it seems the real goal was organizing conservative editors. I'm not sure whether the fact that this is not clearly written is deception or trolling, but it's not a good look for Sanger either way.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/WikiProject_...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Cou...

[2]: https://san.com/cc/wikipedia-co-founder-says-site-has-libera...

New comment by mzajc in "Thunderbird Littering My Home"

mzajc — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:34:53 +0000

There's more! On my machine it creates an empty ~/.mozilla/extensions directory every time it starts, and I have no idea why it does that or how to make it stop.

New comment by mzajc in "Show HN: Ironwall, a safety-first native programming language and compiler"

mzajc — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 01:13:39 +0000

ETA: Turns out ryanmerket is associated with runtimewire.com, and is likely posting this as self promotion.

Please verify your sources; the linked article is unfiltered LLM output. I assume whatever model hallucinated this has confused one person[0] with another[1] because they share the same name, but there is otherwise no indication that they're the same person.

[0]: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eWow24EAAAAJ&hl=en

[1]: https://ironwall-lang.dev/en/about

New comment by mzajc in "Ad Blocker Test – Check If Your Ad Blocker Works"

mzajc — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:04:13 +0000

From Raymond Hill, the author of uBlock Origin:

  Please do not use those online tools which claim to measure how good is your content blocker, they are often flawed.[0]

I don't know how much that applies to this particular tool, but I did notice that it's flagging requests as 'not blocked' even though they're blocked with uMatrix.

[0]: https://xcancel.com/gorhill/status/1583581072197312512