Hacker News: oddlama

New comment by oddlama in "OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine"

oddlama — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 19:25:59 +0000

I've written something like this for NixOS a while back [1], which generates infrastructure diagrams directly from the source of truth (albeit not as pretty as isoflow). I'm sure this could be applied to other declarative tech stacks aswell!

[1]: https://github.com/oddlama/nix-topology

New comment by oddlama in "Bypassing disk encryption on systems with automatic TPM2 unlock"

oddlama — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 12:20:31 +0000

This is great if you only have a single disk, but if you have multiple encrypted disks that are unlocked in the initrd this way, then if you can gain control flow by faking data on the last decrypted disk you can still gain access to all the previously unlocked partitions.

Of course you cannot unseal the secret from the TPM anymore.

Bypassing disk encryption on systems with automatic TPM2 unlock

oddlama — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:44:08 +0000

Article URL: https://oddlama.org/blog/bypassing-disk-encryption-with-tpm2-unlock/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42724456

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by oddlama in "Variadic generics, again"

oddlama — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 02:15:55 +0000

I can think of plenty real world usecases. Take for example a network interface that can send or receive predefined packet structs.

Imagine each packet requires a size header. When you want to send multiple packets at once, you now want to optimize that and only write a single initial header to the interface, preceding the data.

With variadic generics, you can enable a syntax like `interface.write_packets(packet1, packet2, packet3, /* ... */);` which writes the packets in the desired optimized way. It can internally construct a serializable data tuple from the variadic generics and add the correct header only to the beginning.

Without variadic generics a similar syntax is only possible with macros, which means that it cannot be implemented as a reusable trait.

> It would seem to me, you're just skipping the part where you give your tuple a name, but is that even a good idea to do?

Sometimes you explicitly don't want to require naming the tuple for flexibility, like in the example above.

New comment by oddlama in "Stanford researchers find only 3% of HTTP runs on port 80 [pdf]"

oddlama — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 03:06:10 +0000

And additionally I would't want anyone on my network path to be able to read what data I exchange - even if it is a static site.

New comment by oddlama in "The IAB loves tracking users but hates users tracking them"

oddlama — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 13:43:13 +0000

Not parent, but I'm doing the same thing and I have had 5 leaks out of (currently) 387 accounts over the past 4 years (which is when I started doing this).

Oh and none of the involved entities ever acknowledged the leaks. I'd also be highly interested in the rates other people encounter.

New comment by oddlama in "Finding Nice MD5s Using Rust"

oddlama — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 02:08:19 +0000

I haven't looked at the project but would assume that several people generated their wallets by using this tool. The attackers were thus able to generate keys for existing wallets by simply bruteforcing the measly 31 bits that were used in the tool's random initialization.

New comment by oddlama in "Saving power on an ESP8266 web server using delays"

oddlama — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 11:36:55 +0000

Just a battery would be the simplest option. Just measure time until empty.

If you want higher time resolution, there are several fully integrated hall effect current measurement ICs out there, like for example the ACS723.

If you need even better accuracy or resolution and you can spare 100 bucks, just buy one of the Nordic Power Profiler Kits.

New comment by oddlama in "Eufy “local only” cameras upload facial recognition data to the cloud"

oddlama — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 12:57:35 +0000

Nothing here requires uploading the image to some form of cloud service. Do the recognition locally - maybe on a phone connected via Bluetooth. Never have any information leave the device and you will have significantly less privacy concerns.

New comment by oddlama in "GPS vs. Glonass vs. Galileo"

oddlama — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:25:36 +0000

If anyone wants to learn about GPS from the ground up, there's an excellent website with interactive explanations by Bartosz Ciechanowski that I can wholeheartedly recommend [1].

His blog also covers other topics in a similar style - it's a real treasure trove.

[1] https://ciechanow.ski/gps/

New comment by oddlama in "When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”"

oddlama — Sun, 25 Sep 2022 22:58:16 +0000

I for example just wouldn't like anyone to be able to see what data I exchange with any server, be it small profile blog or a login page.

New comment by oddlama in "Ask HN: What are the best-designed personal blogs you’ve come across?"

oddlama — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 01:07:48 +0000

Ome of the best I came across, regarding both readability and content:

https://ciechanow.ski/

New comment by oddlama in "How do I exit Vim?"

oddlama — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 10:27:00 +0000

esc esc esc :qa! (8 strokes)

This is the shortest I can think of right now, 3 esc to exit Ctrl-v, Ctrl-r and insert mode, then :qa! to quit even if there are splits or modified background buffers.

If ^C is considered one keystroke I'd replace all esc by ^C to prevent vim from hanging forever in the following starting situation: 999999999asometext^R^V

With esc it would try to insert a lot of text after the last esc, which will make vim unresponsive for days at least.

Not sure if you want to count this one: alt+sysrq+k (1 stroke or 3 strokes depending on how you count)

New comment by oddlama in "Booting Linux in five seconds (2008)"

oddlama — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 12:45:27 +0000

Yes, and it's quite comfortable. If you don't want to use external media, many boards also come with a builtin UEFI shell which is quite powerful. From there you can simply execute the kernel with the desired cmdline. (like ./vmlinuz root=...)

New comment by oddlama in "Ask HN: Your admittedly useless side projects?"

oddlama — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 13:24:55 +0000

I got fed up with ansible and pyinfra and created a new tool [1] to fix some of the issues I've had. I spent weeks on documentation, yet it is kind of useless. There simply are industry proven tools for the same thing already in existence - so I'm the only one using it.

[1]: https://github.com/oddlama/fora

New comment by oddlama in "Intel's Raptor Lake CPU Appears 20% Faster Than Core I9-12900K on UserBenchmark"

oddlama — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 13:28:01 +0000

Here's some obligatory information about the credibility of UserBenchmark (video form only, unfortunately): https://youtube.com/watch?v=RQSBj2LKkWg

New comment by oddlama in "Bubble Tea: fun, functional and stateful way to build terminal apps"

oddlama — Tue, 10 May 2022 19:09:41 +0000

I'm actually kind of glad that X11 forwarding didn't stick. TUIs are generally efficiently navigatable using just the keyboard, a property I very much enjoy and frequently miss in "real GUI" apps.

New comment by oddlama in "Managing OpenBSD installed packages declaratively"

oddlama — Fri, 06 May 2022 10:07:20 +0000

Neither impossible nor tough, but also not a clean way of managing state. You need to keep track of all past things you once did but no longer need.

New comment by oddlama in "Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy"

oddlama — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 03:14:59 +0000

You can add graphene based technologies to that list.

New comment by oddlama in "How to Prevent the Next Heartbleed (2020)"

oddlama — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 17:25:19 +0000

Then the next heartbleed could be a sidechannel not covered in your theorem. Better prepare in any case.