Hacker News: sllabres

New comment by sllabres in "Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB is just an unencrypted SD card in a case"

sllabres — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 16:14:05 +0000

Was it probably a IronKey? They had a Homeland Security grant, I've used one then. To me software had some advantages. Easy backup of the encrypted data without a dependency to the hardware. IIRC this was somehow solved on the IronKey. Not a black box for the user which have to trust. My main problem with a software solution for me is the entry of the password which I have to do on a probably compromised computer.

The original IronKey (later sold to Kingston) seems to have be cracked. A team / company called Unciphered managed to break a IronKey in a attempt to offer such a decryption to Stefan Thomas who had 7002 bitcoin on this key. This was then worth then 235 million dollar (now >500 million), which is of course a VERY strong motivation. [1]

The Lenovo case of course seems not to be bad implemented security but no security at all, especially if they advertise with encryption, which I found on a Asian Lenovo website where still there are still some specs of the key [2]. A good method if you want to damage your reputation.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/unciphered-ironkey-password-crac...

[2] https://tk.lenovo.com.cn/product/1003497.html

New comment by sllabres in "Zinc creep in cable spelter sockets brought down the Arecibo telescope in 2020"

sllabres — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 14:33:03 +0000

There is a Practical Engineering video [1] discussing the failure. (Just saw that it is not a new one discussing the report, sorry)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oBCtTv6yOw

New comment by sllabres in "Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes"

sllabres — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:45:22 +0000

We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.

I think this is much to broad.

Even the film does not suggest eliminating multiple exits; rather, it points out that it took a long time to replace external fire escapes with better alternatives. Specifically, internal, fireproof staircases that offer greater protection and are used regularly and therefore familiar to those fleeing.

When the redundancy is gone (not available, blocked, insufficient spaced) this can quickly lead to a disaster. Here are some recent examples

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Crans-Montana_bar_fire

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_nightclub_fire

[3] https://gpe.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Johannesburg_building_fi...

New comment by sllabres in "Salesforce Global Outage"

sllabres — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:18:18 +0000

Point Nemo :-D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility

New comment by sllabres in "216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]"

sllabres — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:44:14 +0000

An Apple airtag probably doesn't but it is apparently possible to send some data at a very low rate (the article in [1] says a few bits per hour) over the find my network [2]

[1] https://positive.security/blog/send-my

[2] https://github.com/positive-security/send-my

New comment by sllabres in "Geolocating a random island using geometry and CUDA programming"

sllabres — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:50:05 +0000

People liking this post will probably like this [1] and especially these [2] from the channel. All solved using algorithms and map data.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@colsto

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY-W9gmwxhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzytWZPyuEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkmXs_7hELg

New comment by sllabres in "San Diego photologs from the 1970s"

sllabres — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:22:10 +0000

Nice you could choose if you would like your gasoline with or without service :-) (4:00).

Why was the chain called "Der Wienerschnitzel" and not "Das Wienerschnitzel". It is (was) a proper noun, but why the wrong article? (5:02)

A small part appears twice (from 8:51--9:06).

more cyclists than I see in current streetview footage

Coca-Cola delivery vans where yellow?

New comment by sllabres in "Fwd: [multicians] Peter Neumann has died"

sllabres — Tue, 19 May 2026 05:52:51 +0000

I very much liked reading his "computer related risks" book (multiple times...) more than 25 years ago and after that the RISKS Digest was one of my weekly "go to" for a very long time.

New comment by sllabres in "DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved"

sllabres — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:25:37 +0000

So it seems we need something like this [1] for IT infrastructure? ;)

[1] https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/

New comment by sllabres in "The Visible Zorker: Zork 1"

sllabres — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:50:13 +0000

Or in this case; just click on "map"

New comment by sllabres in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"

sllabres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:20:10 +0000

Saying that (hand)writing is irrelevant is a bit of a strawman implying I said writing hexadecimal numbers big-endian on paper matters for coding.

The second sentence, weather your customers know if they have been in the same room with a big-endian system (CPU alone doesn't matter) is irrelevant when the point is to write correct code. Many of then aren't interested in this or other details and that is ok as they are not responsible for the implementation.

Changing the endianness either direction did have show bugs to me several times, that could be fixed, and it was worth it for that alone.

New comment by sllabres in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"

sllabres — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:38:08 +0000

Not only the System/390. Its also IBM i, AIX, and for many protocols the network byte order. AFAIK the binary data in JPG (1) and Java Class [2] files a re big endian. And if you write down a hexadecimal number as 0x12345678 you are writing big-endian.

(1) for JPG for embedded TIFF metadata which can have both.

[2] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-4.ht...

New comment by sllabres in "My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary"

sllabres — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:58:40 +0000

Congratulations :-)

Very nice shots. It must be a great feeling to see one's own footage in a feature film!

How long do you do astrophotography?

New comment by sllabres in "CT Scans of Health Wearables"

sllabres — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:39:24 +0000

It's always interesting to see how are things build in the Lumafields "Scan of the month". The the most interesting scan from Lumafield I saw was not a Scan of the month, but in "Adam Savage’s Tested: Surprising Flaws in 18650 Lithium-Ion Batteries" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y23nfAOiXQ

PS: Nice company logo btw. ;)

New comment by sllabres in "Felix "fx" Lindner has died"

sllabres — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:13:24 +0000

Thanks for the clarification

New comment by sllabres in "Felix "fx" Lindner has died"

sllabres — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:52:34 +0000

I'm really sad, even if I never met him personally and only knew him from his talks, his software and of course his blog.

I had hoped that after his illness he would be granted some time for personal life and recovery — which makes this news all the more shocking.

New comment by sllabres in "Delphi is 31 years old – innovation timeline"

sllabres — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:08:32 +0000

Sometimes I miss the times where you had a compact development environment, wit one installer. Your source produced a mostly self contained binary in a reasonable size, you had nice debugging support and quick turnaround times for a compiled language even on a small development machines. And all that for attractive price for a perpetual license (Borland times).

Today it seems I have to give the producer my email address for the 'free' "Delphi History PDF". Well, times have changed. :)

New comment by sllabres in "Show HN: Algorithmically finding the longest line of sight on Earth"

sllabres — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:21:01 +0000

Thanks, didn't knew that and 11% further is quite a increase and not too far from the maximum possible.

New comment by sllabres in "Show HN: Algorithmically finding the longest line of sight on Earth"

sllabres — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:56:24 +0000

I think this is the furthest true photography [1] with 443 km distance, into the sunrise (corrected from sunset)

[1] https://beyondrange.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/pic-de-finestre...

New comment by sllabres in "Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years"

sllabres — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:30:24 +0000

So no #includedir, no LDAP integration, no log_input/output, no PAM integration ...?