Hacker News: skibz

What does Lockdown Mode do to keep you safe from spyware? [video]

skibz — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:01:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D3lWDUEJA8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687941

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by skibz in "RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one"

skibz — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 14:15:04 +0000

I miss the days when most people had a vanilla looking computer. You wouldn't have felt out of place at the LAN party lugging in your dad's old Packard Bell tower that you used for your gaming rig.

We still appreciated visually stunning PCs. Not just for the works of art that they were, but also for the DIY skill and ethic you were actually required to demonstrate to build and mod them.

Nowadays, it's all just "RGB by default". By my angry old man standards, it looks gauche. Then again, I suppose it's the new vanilla?

In Search of Banksy

skibz — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:21:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/global-art-banksy/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47371871

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

I Infected My iPhone with Russian Spyware. Here's What I Found [video]

skibz — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 06:00:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQvZ2mLnZVI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361153

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by skibz in "Kuwaiti F/A-18's Triple Friendly Fire Shootdown Gets Stranger by the Day"

skibz — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:24:42 +0000

How much time elapsed between each aircraft being hit?

SchemaSpy

skibz — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:09:09 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/schemaspy/schemaspy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47311922

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by skibz in "My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker"

skibz — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 19:48:03 +0000

It's disappointing to see. It doesn't take much work to configure a MQTT server to require client certificates for all connections. It does require an extra step in provisioning to give each device a client certificate. But for a commercial product, it's inexcusably negligent.

Then there's hardening your peripheral and central device/app against the kinds of spoofing attacks that are described in this blog post.

If your peripheral and central device can securely [0] store key material, then (in addition to the standard security features that come with the Bluetooth protocol) one may implement mutual authentication between the central and peripheral devices and, optionally, encryption of the data that is transmitted across that connection.

Then, as long as your peripheral and central devices are programmed to only ever respond when presented with signatures that can be verified by a trusted public key, the spoofing and probing demonstrated here simply won't work (unless somebody reverse engineers the app running on the central device to change its behaviour after the signature verification has been performed).

To protect against that, you'd have to introduce server-mediated authorisation. On Android, that would require things like the Play Integrity API and app signatures. Then, if the server verifies that the instance of the app running on the central device is unmodified, it can issue a token that the central device can send to the peripheral for verification in addition to the signatures from the previous step.

Alternatively, you could also have the server generate the actual command frames that the central device sends to the peripheral. The server would provide the raw command frame and the command frame signed with its own key, which can be verified by the peripheral.

I guess I got a bit carried away here. Certainly, not every peripheral needs that level of security. But, into which category this device falls, I'm not sure. On the one hand, it's not a security device, like an electronic door lock. And on the other hand, it's a very personal peripheral with some unusual capabilities like the electrical muscle stimulation gizmo and the room occupancy sensor.

[0]: Like with the Android KeyStore and whichever HSMs are used in microcontrollers, so that keys can't be extracted by just dumping strings from a binary.

New comment by skibz in "My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker"

skibz — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 19:06:26 +0000

A lot of BLE peripherals are very easy to probe. And there are libraries available for most popular languages that allow you to connect to a peripheral and poke at any exposed internals with little effort.

As for the reverse engineering, the author claims that all it took was dumping the strings from the Dart binary to see what was being sent to the bluetooth device. It's plausible, and I would give them the benefit of the doubt here.

New comment by skibz in "Hackers (1995) Animated Experience"

skibz — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 20:23:16 +0000

We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless.

New comment by skibz in "Mobile carriers can get your GPS location"

skibz — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 08:27:29 +0000

Stupid question: do carriers have the ability to run AT commands and get their output?

How F1 Bankrupts Cities [video]

skibz — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:24:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yz4tQ6u9DY

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793483

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Commodore 64 Ultimate Review [video]

skibz — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:01:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtLR4nXAm4w

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46721904

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by skibz in "The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button"

skibz — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 08:46:57 +0000

I'm pretty sure it was a sarcastic comment.

On a recent MBP, it's indistinguishable from a vanilla radio button.

The first new compass since 1936 [video]

skibz — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:03:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiDhbZ8-BZI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46525427

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

How Real Satellites Dogfight - Proximity Operations In Space Explained [video]

skibz — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 07:10:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcJMT1rW8Lg

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46430401

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by skibz in "Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm"

skibz — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 08:06:08 +0000

Controllers provide analogue controls (eg. thumbsticks and triggers) that most keyboards don't have.

If, as you suggest, the control schemes of video games are becoming less complex (Forward, down, forward, high punch) then surely the result would be more games that are playable with only a keyboard, not fewer?