Hacker News: saljam

New comment by saljam in "Map of Near and Middle East Oil 1965"

saljam — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 14:13:33 +0000

the arabic writing is also crazy, so i have no idea what author was going for.

New comment by saljam in "Map of Near and Middle East Oil 1965"

saljam — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 14:11:31 +0000

have you actually looked at the map?

there a whole inset panel for israel, and not a single mention of palestine.

New comment by saljam in "Is a movie prop the ultimate laptop bag?"

saljam — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 22:14:55 +0000

i used to slip mine in a manilla envelope whenever i needed to take it home from the office and i hadn't brought my backpack with me. our stationary cupboard was well stocked with these!

New comment by saljam in "Peer-to-peer file transfers in the browser"

saljam — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:03:56 +0000

i'm the author. i keep a close eye on it for any security issues but i'm not adding any new features, hence the lack of commits.

i also obviously maintain the instance on https://webwormhole.io/.

New comment by saljam in "Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row"

saljam — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 21:11:23 +0000

i mainly use apple devices, but never put anything on icloud before adp came out.

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

saljam — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 11:27:21 +0000

yes of course - but in this case the "unexpected" prompt is presented to the attacker, not the user.

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

saljam — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 08:19:28 +0000

> You can mitigate this by including PCRs that sign the kernel and initrd

nope! the trick the article is describing works even if the kernel and initrd is measured. it uses the same kernel, initrd, and command line.

the reason this trick works is that initrds usually fall back to password unlock if the key from the tpm doesn't work. so the hack replaces the encrypted volume, not the kernel, with a compromised one. that is:

1. (temporarily) replace encrypted volume with our own, encrypted with a known password.

2. boot the device.

3. the automated tpm unlock fails, prompting for a password.

4. type in our password. now we're in, using the original kernel and initrd, but it's our special filesystem, not the one we're trying to decrypt.

5. ask the tpm again for the key. since we're still using the original kernel, initrd, and command line, we should now get the key to unlock the original encrypted volume.

the way to fix this is to somehow also measure encrypted volume itself. the article points to suggestions of deriving a value from the encryption key.

You should probably be building a web app (on PWA vs. Electron apps)

saljam — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 12:02:57 +0000

Article URL: https://recursiverelay.net/electron-lifecycle/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29873495

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by saljam in "The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall"

saljam — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 01:02:02 +0000

some years ago i played around with something similar: https://sa.lj.am/sun/

source is linked at the bottom. much of it was written in elm and i no longer understand how any of it works.

New comment by saljam in "WebWormHole: Send files quickly using WebRTC"

saljam — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 00:32:52 +0000

I developed it mainly on Firefox on macOS. I'd love to figure out why it didn't work for you. Do you get anything on about:webrtc while trying to connect?

New comment by saljam in "WebWormHole: Send files quickly using WebRTC"

saljam — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 00:24:06 +0000

The command line version shouldn't have any trouble with large files. There's https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole/issues/4 to fix the web version. :)

New comment by saljam in "WebWormHole: Send files quickly using WebRTC"

saljam — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 23:10:23 +0000

The QR code is generated client side.

New comment by saljam in "WebWormHole: Send files quickly using WebRTC"

saljam — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 22:32:14 +0000

The website uses Google's.

On command line it's an option and Google's is default. I'd like to make the signalling server also a STUN server at some point.

New comment by saljam in "WebWormHole: Send files quickly using WebRTC"

saljam — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 22:28:24 +0000

Absolutely true for the web interface if loaded from https://webwormhole.io. I'm open for any more suggestions here! https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole/issues/13

Someone mentioned the command line client. One can also build and serve the html/js/wasm from anywhere and it should still work, even with the same signalling server. It has pretty lax CORS for this reason.

New comment by saljam in "WebWormHole: Send files quickly using WebRTC"

saljam — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 21:29:51 +0000

Pion is great. Thanks for making it!

Definitely give a talk if you can. It's all remote currently!

New comment by saljam in "WebWormHole: Send files quickly using WebRTC"

saljam — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 21:26:37 +0000

This uses STUN servers to help it poke through NATs. (That's what I mean by "WebRTC's NAT traversal tricks")

There's no TURN server set for this, but it shouldn't be hard to add one. There are NATs where you'd need one to relay all the traffic, but these seem to be relatively rare nowadays. If anyone has any actual statistics on these I'd appreciate it!

New comment by saljam in "WebWormHole: Send files quickly using WebRTC"

saljam — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 21:10:05 +0000

Codes are intentionally single use, to limit the bruteforce vector. And only two peers can connect any given time currently. It would be interesting to figure out how to make it work with more than 2 peers!

New comment by saljam in "WebWormHole: Send files quickly using WebRTC"

saljam — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 21:05:46 +0000

Thanks! There's already a Go client: https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole

New comment by saljam in "Right-to-left-language-induced GUI bugs"

saljam — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 14:42:20 +0000

Making usable interfaces that work in a single directions is really hard. Making them work in both is much much harder.

The bugs might be funny, but I have great respect for the programmers trying to make their applications more accessible, be it for right-to-left languages or otherwise.

(I wrote the linked tweets.)

New comment by saljam in "China Muslims: Xinjiang schools used to separate children from families"

saljam — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 06:27:42 +0000

The sheer scale of this is facilitated by technology. We should all be wary of what we build.