Hacker News: the_plus_one

New comment by the_plus_one in "Flipper One – we need your help"

the_plus_one — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:10:54 +0000

In my experience, the bulleted list with emojis is usually a pretty strong tell (the one in the article just after "We call these parts sub-projects"). LLMs (maybe just ChatGPT) love doing that.

New comment by the_plus_one in "LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted"

the_plus_one — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:15:12 +0000

How else would you watch things with other people at home? Are you going to huddle around your desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc.?

New comment by the_plus_one in "Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729"

the_plus_one — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 19:37:53 +0000

Is that necessarily a bad thing? I have older laptops than the U729 that still see some use. If you're not locally compiling a big codebase, running some AI/LLM thing, playing GPU-intensive games, etc., you really don't need much.

New comment by the_plus_one in "Valorant's 128-Tick Servers (2020)"

the_plus_one — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 23:07:20 +0000

I don't think anyone would fight you on that. Inferno cheat plugins looked like 100 bpm Guitar Hero back in the day.

New comment by the_plus_one in "OpenBSD is so fast, I had to modify the program slightly to measure itself"

the_plus_one — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 19:45:46 +0000

Is it just me, or is there some kind of asteroid game shooting bullets at my cursor while I try to read this [1]? I hate to sound mean, but it's a bit distracting. I guess it's my fault for having JavaScript enabled.

[1]: https://flak.tedunangst.com/script.js

New comment by the_plus_one in "Who has the fastest F1 website (2021)"

the_plus_one — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 15:44:58 +0000

As an American that grew up in a rural area, this definitely isn't something that would've been taught in a public school here. At best, we had typing classes in middle school, and the (quite old) teacher insisted on two spaces after the end of a sentence, something that disappeared after we stopped using typewriters.

New comment by the_plus_one in "There is no memory safety without thread safety"

the_plus_one — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 18:40:54 +0000

> or too young to remember former languages.

Do you have any good examples? Not trying to argue, just genuinely curious as someone who hasn't been in this field for decades.

New comment by the_plus_one in "AWS Lambda Silent Crash – A Platform Failure, Not an Application Bug [pdf]"

the_plus_one — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 14:22:23 +0000

It's been several years at this point, but I used to be a cloud support engineer for AWS (i.e. the first line of defense against support tickets). We were trained to always be kind to the customer, even if we're frustrated with them, so a response like "please read how the lambda works" probably would've gotten me reprimanded. Customers can rate your response from one to five stars, and if I remember correctly, anything less than four required a written explanation to your manager as to what went wrong.

That job was a glorified call center; I didn't last very long.

New comment by the_plus_one in "Making a Speedrun Timer in D"

the_plus_one — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 16:44:49 +0000

Very cool post! I enjoy anything that has to do with game hacking, and it's nice to see D, a language I don't have a ton of experience with. Just one note you/the author may be curious about:

> Notably a process_vm_writev syscall also exists, however it adhears to memory page protections - so if I wanted to inject data into a write-protected memory page, it’d fail.

You can work around this by convincing the process to re-mmap() the read-only section with PROT_WRITE. One way I've done this is by building a shared library with __attribute__((constructor)) that gets LD_PRELOADed into the game binary, though you have to be careful with the timing (e.g. your library may start running before the game has allocated the mapping you're looking for). That said, if you've done this, you are also free to just allocate your own memory rather than having to look for unused portions of it.

New comment by the_plus_one in "Rise in 'alert fatigue' risks phone users disabling news notifications"

the_plus_one — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 15:40:24 +0000

We are similar. The only time my phone makes any noise whatsoever is if I get a phone call from someone in my contacts or a Slack ping during work hours. Everything else can wait.

New comment by the_plus_one in "I found a backdoor into my bed"

the_plus_one — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:35:17 +0000

    - They can know when you sleep
    - They can detect when there are 2 people sleeping in the bed instead of 1
    - They can know when it’s night, and no people are in the bed

I'm probably naive, but I'm failing to see how any of this is exclusive to having remote SSH access to the bed. Who's to say this isn't already happening with other binaries in the firmware? Maybe they're already phoning home?

    [...]that bypasses all forms of formal code review process.

How does the author know if anything else in the firmware goes under any kind of code review process?

It's not a bad article, but it does seem to make a lot of assumptions, and you already agreed to let arbitrary code run on your network when you added an IoT device to it.

New comment by the_plus_one in "United States Power Outage Map"

the_plus_one — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 17:30:14 +0000

Can't speak for the entire country, but rural Virginia had a nasty ice storm pass through earlier this week [1]. I lost power for about 40 hours.

[1]: https://www.wdbj7.com/2025/02/12/36k-plus-virginians-lose-po...

New comment by the_plus_one in "Remote code execution via MIDI messages"

the_plus_one — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 03:16:41 +0000

As someone who's reversed some basic MIDI stuff in an old video game and has always wanted to get into hardware hacking, I really enjoyed reading this article. Great work!

New comment by the_plus_one in "Analyzing North Korean Malware"

the_plus_one — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 02:05:59 +0000

This is more on the user end, but there's ways for users to isolate programs in such a way that this malware wouldn't have access to e.g. browser files and cryptocurrency wallets, some more effective/practical than others. Virtual machines, containers, jails, chroots, etc.

I think one example of what you're talking about can be seen on Android. The developer has to explicitly declare permissions (like file access) in the manifiest, and the user has to explicitly approve it.

New comment by the_plus_one in "Welcome to the Antarctic Fire Department"

the_plus_one — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 22:58:53 +0000

I've looked into this before, and it seems like they got Starlink recently-ish (within the past couple years or so). A google search of "inurl:reddit mcmurdo starlink" brings up a few hits from /r/antarctica.

New comment by the_plus_one in "Welcome to the Antarctic Fire Department"

the_plus_one — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 14:49:17 +0000

I mentioned this in another thread, but the website is out of date. The contracts for McMurdo firefighting are currently held with Amentum: https://www.amentumcareers.com/jobs/firefighter-mcmurdo-stat...

New comment by the_plus_one in "Welcome to the Antarctic Fire Department"

the_plus_one — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 14:46:10 +0000

The website is out of date. The firefighting contracts used to be owned by Lockheed Martin, then PAE group, and now Amentum.

(edit: As proof, here's Amentum's listing for a McMurdo firefighter: https://www.amentumcareers.com/jobs/firefighter-mcmurdo-stat...)

New comment by the_plus_one in "CrowdStrike fixes start at "reboot up to 15 times", gets more complex from there"

the_plus_one — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 17:16:14 +0000

I've been wondering the same. I did just see [1], where it's apparently trying to read memory from an unmapped address, but I haven't seen anything about how r8 got to the point of having said unmapped address.

[1]: https://x.com/patrickwardle/status/1814343502886477857

New comment by the_plus_one in "Goodwatch – A Ham Radio Wristwatch (2020)"

the_plus_one — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 15:18:22 +0000

I bumped into kk4vcz at Defcon in 2021. I was standing around, looking clueless, and playing with my Baofeng near the ham radio village. He approached me and asked if I could transmit on a particular frequency to help test his watch. I said something along the lines of "oh that's really cool, I've read that guy's blog and follow him on Twitter." He said something along the lines of "yeah, that's me."

He even gave me a couple GoodWatch boards. Nice guy!

New comment by the_plus_one in "Metabolism of autism reveals developmental origins"

the_plus_one — Sun, 12 May 2024 00:50:58 +0000

Speak for yourself. As an autistic person, if I could get rid of it, I absolutely would.