<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: ntauthority</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ntauthority</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:49:33 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=ntauthority" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "WinPE as a stateless harness for Windows driver testing and fuzzing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>for newer Windows versions, Microsoft also offers a PE-like customizable image for validation purposes explicitly: <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/validation-os-overview?view=windows-11" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:43:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763293</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763293</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763293</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "The Windows 10 emoji picker has been broken for a month"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> because this policy only applies for non-security bugfixes, and almost all patches these days claim to just be security fixes, including the one which introduced this bug<p>There's <i>numerous</i> feature flags that seem to just be 'MSRC_[id]' (for the Microsoft Security Response Center), and anecdotally looking through Windows 11 a lot of actual bugfixes (various ReFS driver crashes, for example, have feature flag checks around their fixes) are feature-flagged as per usual with both global (for the whole batch of fixes) and per-feature flags, so this is a bit of an incorrect assumption.<p>Things breaking downlevel is pretty common anyway, and the emoji picker has been in a pretty bad state since the original picker IME (introduced I believe in RS3, ~2017) was replaced with 'Expressive Input' which also allowed adding GIFs and a few other things but relied on a new UI framework that I suspect was tied to an unrelated internal effort culminating in the '10X' product which only got canceled.. right before Windows 11 development started, and therefore pretty much bitrotted.<p>Windows 10 was left on a fairly 'bad' release, the 'Iron' semester which was used as a baseline for Server 2022 was still like 10 from a UX perspective (10X was only canceled between that and 'Cobalt', where the Sun Valley work which led to the Windows 11 product happened) but had a fair few bugfixes that didn't get backported to 10 'version 2004' ('Vibranium', I believe, as otherwise the codename would've been 'Chromium' which is bad).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 Aug 2025 14:36:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837507</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837507</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837507</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "AMD Ryzen 5 8500G: A surprisingly fascinating sub-$200 CPU"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The reserved memory would show up as 'dedicated' memory. Shared is just the amount of host memory that can be assigned to graphics resources, which usually equals the system memory or some amount derived from it.<p>If the full amount of system memory isn't showing on Windows that's likely an unrelated issue you're experiencing (for example with UEFI/BIOS memory mapping mismatching whatever else) and it working on Linux implies that either Linux gets fed different memory layouts or it parses this broken case fine unlike Windows.<p>If applications aren't using all the memory, and it's also not showing up as cached, that's odd as Windows usually tends to target around 80% of physical memory usage (unless you're really not using that many apps or there's another driver issue going on). Different OSes account for memory usage differently, and there's rarely one single 'memory used' indicator in modern operating systems.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Feb 2024 22:28:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295174</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295174</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295174</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Beeper vs. Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Notably so, I believe Trillian was a paid product and Meebo was actually treated like a real tech startup. Interesting, indeed, how much the sentiment has shifted over the course of 10-15 years...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Dec 2023 15:39:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38683902</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38683902</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38683902</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Qualcomm actually started offering LTS (long-term support) BSP (board support packages) to device manufacturers for a fee. This is why some vendors like Samsung and Microsoft started providing updates for phones with older SoCs for longer than usual: they're paying the additional per-product license fee for being allowed to ship updated firmware.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 30 Jun 2023 16:00:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36537357</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36537357</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36537357</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "What happened with ASUS routers this morning?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Many fiber ISPs here in Europe seem to share the backend infrastructure between DSL and FTTH subscribers and that sadly also involves PPPoE encapsulation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 May 2023 18:12:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35991893</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35991893</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35991893</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "What happened with ASUS routers this morning?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I actually switched <i>away</i> from a UDM after finding out that I could only hit 500 Mbit/s uplink (out of ~930) due to a PPPoE performance bug as there's no hardware offloading and the old Cortex-A57 cores (in a SoC from a vendor now owned by Amazon, so extremely end-of-life) just couldn't handle that.<p>Now I'm running a Turris Omnia with the bundled OpenWRT fork for router tasks and that seems to work fine.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 May 2023 12:58:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35987230</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35987230</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35987230</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "What happened with ASUS routers this morning?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FYI: OpenWRT is just Linux and will run fine on x86 hardware as well.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 May 2023 12:55:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35987190</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35987190</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35987190</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "iOS 17 app sideloading might only be available in Europe"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I don't have much choice - it's not like there would be five competing apps serving the same purpose (connecting to the people and communities on Facebook).<p>The same legislation that is requiring Apple to allow sideloading also requires other large players (like Meta) to open their communication platforms up to other service or application developers.<p>In this hypothetical case, there actually would be five competing apps, some even still distributed on the App Store.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Apr 2023 08:33:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35674463</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35674463</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35674463</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Windows on Btrfs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It was introduced in Vista, deprecated for external use a bit later but the servicing system is still a heavy user of it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 22 Apr 2023 17:11:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35668730</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35668730</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35668730</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Titanfall <i>did</i> work this way on the EA launcher. There was a tool that it'd run on first launch to decompress the compressed audio files.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 22 Apr 2023 07:22:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664166</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664166</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664166</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Windows on Btrfs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Unless it supports the transactional filesystem API, Windows Update won't even work in the first place. ReFS boot in fact is affected by the same issue at this time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 22 Apr 2023 07:19:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664150</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664150</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664150</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Windows on Btrfs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>On Windows, I can enumerate a directory that accidentally got millions of files perfectly fine without the system itself breaking and with results being returned incrementally.<p>On Linux/ext4, it takes an eternity for an enumeration to even start returning results and the entire OS gets stuck on IO while doing so.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 22 Apr 2023 07:18:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664145</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664145</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664145</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Hell Never Ends on x86: The Hyperspace Story, Continued, Sort Of"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Fun thing is that laptop OEMs exposing useful 'value-added functionality' (like custom fan control) via pre-defined WMI ACPI callouts is actually the <i>sensible</i> choice to make.<p>I've seen laptop OEMs that rely on a custom kernel driver for this, and then if you want to reimplement their pile of 'overly modular everything control suite' you're stuck loading a generic read/write-memory driver which is blocklisted by every antimalware and anticheat solution in existence.<p>(In addition, it seems some WMI/CIM/MOF ACPI stuff is supported on Linux fine, too, as long as OEMs try to stick to standard DMTF-spec stuff I guess... so one can also just do 'generic' user-space stuff there if lucky)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Apr 2023 13:22:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511955</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511955</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511955</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Hell Never Ends on x86: The Hyperspace Story, Continued, Sort Of"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was personally somewhat hoping the boot-time portion in this article somehow hijacked a UEFI runtime services[1] function called by the OS to draw to the frame buffer set up by the firmware, since this has some provisions for the OS being in charge of the MMU:<p>> An OS may choose to execute in a virtual addressing mode and, as a result, may prefer to call firmware services provided by UEFI Runtime Drivers in a virtual addressing mode. A UEFI Runtime Driver must not make any assumptions about the type of operating system to be booted, so the driver must always be able to switch from using physical addresses to using virtual addresses if the operating system calls SetVirtualAddressMap().<p>Disappointingly, it's just a 'plain' case of SMM (which is also, funnily, the main target for ACPI callouts to more 'complex' methods, and on ARM has the very fun equivalent called 'SMC/HVC callouts to EL3/EL2 firmware' although that's supposedly a bit better-defined than Intel SMM) and nothing too clever either - an ACPI method hijacking something to then write to the framebuffer?<p>Other than that, the writing style here feels almost.. presumptuous and might've been written for the original audience on the site it's posted on, for example I was left wondering things like 'if the author or their friends have access to a machine with this software on it, why don't they dump the firmware flash storage and decompile the actual images, wherever they might be', though it may be they indeed didn't have access to any such hardware or firmware downloads and are just piecing random puzzle parts together, and the post eventually devolved into a general rant against OEM cleverness that I somewhat skipped.<p>(I'm also mildly torn between 'wow, clever hack' and 'oh lord this would be terrible to diagnose OS boot issues on as you really can't trust OEMs with side effects or long-term maintenance' in this regard)<p>[1]: <a href="https://edk2-docs.gitbook.io/edk-ii-uefi-driver-writer-s-guide/7_driver_entry_point/711_runtime_drivers" rel="nofollow">https://edk2-docs.gitbook.io/edk-ii-uefi-driver-writer-s-gui...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Apr 2023 13:19:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511920</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511920</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511920</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Quite a lot of recent console FPS games just let you plug in a USB mouse/keyboard and you get matched with PC players (or other console users who use the same input method) instead.<p>CoD has supported this since their 2019 release, for example.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Mar 2023 16:05:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35328402</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35328402</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35328402</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> talk to a driver (who usually acts annoyed on behalf of the whole bus that you are holding up)<p>It is still an interesting cultural observation that here in NL, even people who manually buy a ticket at the driver while struggling using the card terminal do not seem to get an annoyed response inherently even on a half-filled bus, whereas in Germany it seemed almost expected to get chewed out for not having exact change or taking more than 10 seconds to gather a pile of coins - in the pre-app era, of course.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Mar 2023 12:13:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028920</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028920</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028920</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Hobby Club’s Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down by USAF"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Germany solved that issue by making owning any device capable of receiving internet broadcasts part of the eligibility criteria. By that point they could just as well make it part of general tax budgets...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Feb 2023 20:29:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34825506</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34825506</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34825506</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> But they'll have no control over what notifications from web pages you've put on your home screen show.<p>They own the browser. They can theoretically maintain a list of bad origins just as much as they can block an app from the App Store.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Feb 2023 20:26:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34825455</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34825455</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34825455</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ntauthority in "Attacker with access to XML config can trigger keepass.exe to obtain passwords"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's a lot of CVE submissions lately that seem badly sourced and derived from 'disagreements' at best.<p>Another recent example is <a href="https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2023-24059" rel="nofollow">https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2023-2405...</a> which is for a purely theoretical exploit - not even a PoC - with the only 'sources' being Reddit/Twitter scaremongering, and 'support forum posts' that quote these exact same Twitter threads.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Jan 2023 13:14:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34545575</link><dc:creator>ntauthority</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34545575</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34545575</guid></item></channel></rss>