Hacker News: raron

New comment by raron in "Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering"

raron — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 07:45:13 +0000

Microchip has some "chip-scale atomic clock"s, not much bigger than an OCXO, but a lot more expensive.

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/csac-sa65

New comment by raron in "Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos"

raron — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:35:49 +0000

> They also over index fear of LargeCo stealing IP

That seems to be a bold statement considering the whole business of this LargeCo is based on stolen IP.

New comment by raron in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

raron — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:10:40 +0000

This. If AMD / Xilinx would publish the documentation what you would need to use their chips, probably very few would use Vivado or ISE.

New comment by raron in "OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool"

raron — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:25:19 +0000

Not yet, but it is easy to imagine many ways it would be used for DRM.

New comment by raron in "OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool"

raron — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:16:07 +0000

> The point of SynthID is to make generated images identifiable, in an attempt to prevent 1984-esque situations where you can't believe your eyes and ears.

You can still use traditional methods to manipulate images, too, so I don't think a "does not contain SynthID watermark" means you can trust that image more. In the other hand, encoding a lot of personal and other information in the watermark (136 bit is a lot) that can not be easily removed and most of the people are unaware of it seems really an 1984-like dystopia.

New comment by raron in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

raron — Sat, 09 May 2026 20:39:41 +0000

Maybe that's changes by country, but here bank transfers are basically final and can not be cancelled or recalled. Why would a bank cover your losses from their profits?

New comment by raron in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

raron — Sat, 09 May 2026 20:33:30 +0000

Chargebacks exists for (EU style) debit cards, too. It doesn't need to be simple just available, so if the merchant disappears with your money or someone uses your stolen card, there is a way you can get your money back. With bank transfers that's not possible (at least here).

New comment by raron in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

raron — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:46:42 +0000

> A payment should be a bank transfer. Anything more complicated is just something that is to be exploited by middle-men.

I disagree with that. Payments (especially online and contactless ones) should have some form of buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction, lost / stolen cards, etc.

New comment by raron in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

raron — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:36:59 +0000

It can, in fact there is even an open standard for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code

By the way credit card companies do a lot more than Wero, SEPA or any other similar instant payment solution (e.g. chargeback).

New comment by raron in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

raron — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:42:39 +0000

Wero is just another private company trying get their cut of payment fees. You can do the same thing with SEPA Instant Payment (or some member states outside of the Eurozone have their own similar thing).

I don't see why Wero should exists, their business model seems like "trying to get money for the same service you can get for free".

New comment by raron in "French government agency confirms breach as hacker offers to sell data"

raron — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:25:11 +0000

You could just jail the CEO or who was responsible for the security at that agency / company.

New comment by raron in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

raron — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:29:59 +0000

How big this cached data is? Wouldn't it be possible to download it after idling a few minutes "to suspend the session", and upload and restore it when the user starts their next interaction?

New comment by raron in "A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines"

raron — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:18:06 +0000

AFAIK they did a lot of illegal things in the Snowden-era, too.

New comment by raron in "A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines"

raron — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:05:16 +0000

> Thus succeeding at making the telecommunications vendors used for Top Secret US national security data less secure, the obvious goal of the US National Security Agency

NSA still has the secret Suite A system for their most sensitive information. If they think that is better than the current public algorithms and their goal is to make telecommunications vendors to have better encryption, then why doesn't they publish those so telco could use it?

> Truly, truly can't understand why anyone finds this line of reasoning plausible. (Before anyone yells Dual_EC_DRBG, that was a NOBUS backdoor, which is an argument against the NSA promoting mathematically broken cryptography, if anything.)

The NSA weakened DES against brute-force attack by reducing the key size (while making it stronger against differential cryptanalysis, though).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA's...

Also NSA put a broken cipher in the Clipper Chip (beside all the other vulnerabilities).

New comment by raron in "A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines"

raron — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:25:22 +0000

> Since then, public cryptographic research has been ahead or even with state work.

How can we know that?

> Who knows what is happening inside the NSA or military facilities?

Couldn't have NSA found an issue with ML-KEM and try to convince people to use it exclusively (not in hybrid scheme with ECC)?

New comment by raron in "Case study: recovery of a corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool"

raron — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:21:07 +0000

I think you could use dm-integrity over the raw disks to have checksums and protect against bitrot then you can use mdraid to make a RAID1/5/6 of the virtual blockdevs presented by dm-integrity.

I suspect this is still vulnerable to the write hole problem.

You can add LVM to get snapshots, but this still not an end-to-end copy-on-write solution that btrfs and ZFS should provide.

New comment by raron in "Is BGP safe yet?"

raron — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:25:26 +0000

Why does a routing protocol matter for the banking sector? With proper encryption the route the packets of transaction data takes should not matter at all.

New comment by raron in "End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance"

raron — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:48:46 +0000

Based on EU's public consultation it is not even true (but the number of responses is very small)

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...

New comment by raron in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

raron — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:09:45 +0000

The next SteamOS release will use Wayland by default for desktop mode, too:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1675200/announcements/detai...

New comment by raron in "What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)"

raron — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:42:49 +0000

> I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever.

That's interesting. Even TLC has huge limitations, but QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory.

I wish I have bought a lot of SSDs when you could still buy MLC ones.