Hacker News: upofadown

New comment by upofadown in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

upofadown — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:17:35 +0000

Putting on my user hat...

"OK. Signal has forward secrecy. So messages are gone after I receive them. Great!"

Oh, you didn't turn on disappearing messages? Oh, right, then forensic tools like Cellebrite can get them. You have to turn on disappearing messages. The default is off.

Oh, you did turn on disappearing messages? We send the messages in notifications. So the OS can keep them. Turns out Apple was doing that. There is an option you can turn on to prevent that. It is off by default.

"I'll just delete the entire app!" No, sorry, the OS still has your messages...

At what point does the usability get so bad that we can blame the messaging system?

This same app had a usability issue that turned into a security issue just last year:

End to End Encrypted Messaging in the News: An Editorial Usability Case Study (my article)

https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg

New comment by upofadown in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

upofadown — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:30:05 +0000

They are an entity separate from Mozilla:

* https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

New comment by upofadown in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

upofadown — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:58:09 +0000

Seems to be some misunderstanding of what bike bells are for here...

A bell is helpful in a situation where a pedestrian is not aware of an approaching bike. The bell informs the pedestrian of two things:

1. That there is an approaching bike.

2. Roughly were the bike is approaching from.

The hope is that the pedestrian will then behave in a predictable way to allow a safe pass by the bike. In almost all cases the pedestrian will be able to simply continue doing what they were doing before they heard the bell.

If a pedestrian can not hear bike bells, for whatever reason, that is not a problem. They can just stay consistent with the centreline of the path/road/way. They then have a responsibility to shoulder check when shifting from side to side.

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

upofadown — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:19:47 +0000

So this is the exciting paper:

* https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.28627

The new thing here seems to be the use of the neutral atom technique. Supposedly we are up to 96 entangled qubits for a second or two based on neutral atoms.

Shouldn't that be enough capability to factor 15 using Shor's?

Reaffirming our commitment to child safety in the face of EuropeanUnion inaction

upofadown — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:20:10 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-globe/google-europe/reaffirming-commitment-to-child-safety/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47651626

Points: 71

# Comments: 88

"Privacy. That's iPhone." – and Other Things That Need an Asterisk

upofadown — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:21:48 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.ppb1701.com/privacy-thats-iphone-and-other-things-that-need-an-asterisk

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47640440

Points: 18

# Comments: 2

Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

upofadown — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:25:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/iran-strikes-leave-amazon-availability

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632503

Points: 248

# Comments: 123

New comment by upofadown in "Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies Against Quantum Vulnerabilities [pdf]"

upofadown — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:10:17 +0000

I can think of a case where it turned out that there was some aspect of the noise performance that made the technology unsuitable for running Shor's algorithm. So would one of the presented low noise approaches actually work for Shor's?

Why Some Criticisms Matter More Than Others

upofadown — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:53:27 +0000

Article URL: https://gnupg.org/blog/20260320-some-criticism-matter.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47593976

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by upofadown in "Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies Against Quantum Vulnerabilities [pdf]"

upofadown — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:14:39 +0000

You can save time by first looking at the required noise performance of these schemes. From the abstract of the paper:

>On superconducting architectures with 10−3 physical error rates...

So good old 0.1% noise performance again. That seems to have come from the "20 million noisy qubits to break RSA" scheme[1] from back in 2019. That level of noise performance is still wildly out of reach and for all we know might be physically impossible.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09749

New comment by upofadown in "Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables"

upofadown — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:57:32 +0000

Things like freezers don't take a huge amount of power. It's definitely about things that do space heating/cooling. The traditional approach is to put your electric water heater on a timer. That way you can schedule your hot water use on a consistent schedule but only heat the water at night when you can be sure the rates are lower.

New comment by upofadown in "Hold on to Your Hardware"

upofadown — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:14:45 +0000

An interesting point. Some random measurement gets 49W idle[1] which is probably close enough. I don't constantly compile stuff or stream video. At my local electricity rate of $0.072/kWh that works out to $31USD/year.

New systems idle at something like 25 Watts according to a lazy search. So 49-25=24W. That works out to $15/year hypothetically saved by going to a newer system. But I live in a cold climate and the heating season is something like half the year. But I only pay something like half as much for gas heat as opposed to electric heat. So let's just knock a quarter off and end up with 15-(15/4)=$11.25USD hypothetically saved per year. I will leave it here as I don't know how much the hypothetical alternative computer would cost and, as already mentioned, I don't care.

[1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/athlon-ii-x2-250-vs-ath...

New comment by upofadown in "Hold on to Your Hardware"

upofadown — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:41:26 +0000

Well it has a SSD in it now so it must have gone through at least one actual hard drive...

New comment by upofadown in "Hold on to Your Hardware"

upofadown — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:00:07 +0000

This article inspired me to look and see what this computer is. Apparently it is a "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor" from 2009. So 17 years old. It has 8 GB of DDR3 memory and runs at 3 GHz. It currently has OpenBSD on it, but at least one source thinks it could run Windows 10.

The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It really doesn't matter any more. Don't get my wrong, I am as nerdy as they come. My first computer was a wire wrapped 8080 based system. That was followed by an also wire wrapped 8086 based system of my own design I used for day to day computing tasks (it ran Forth). If someone like me can get to the point of not caring there is no real reason for anyone else to care.

RustSec Integrity Breach Hides Dangerous Crypto Flaw

upofadown — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 11:14:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/rustsec-integrity-breach-hides-dangerous-crypto-flaw/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47515812

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Former Uber self-driving chief crashes his Tesla, exposes supervision problem

upofadown — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:22:05 +0000

Article URL: https://electrek.co/2026/03/17/former-uber-self-driving-chief-tesla-fsd-crash-supervision-problem/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427704

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)

upofadown — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:59:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/24/nx-s1-5332209/digikey-tariff-small-minnesota-town-big-company

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47386993

Points: 62

# Comments: 41

New comment by upofadown in "Using Thunderbird for RSS"

upofadown — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:44:15 +0000

I sync up my newsboat feed reader with syncthing so I am up to date on multiple devices. I wonder if Thunderbird could be made to work in the same way...

IMs Come, IMs Go

upofadown — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:19:52 +0000

Article URL: https://mov.im/blog/debacle/76bf90a4-5f59-4962-92db-6cd859f42ec9

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286997

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by upofadown in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

upofadown — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:12:53 +0000

I actually got a job for deleting code. I was fixing a problem on a contract and noticed that I could fix the problem by getting rid of the section that contained the problem. The functionality could be provided in a much simpler way. Later the company created a position and I was given first refusal before they interviewed anyone.

It was a 8 bit embedded application in something like 10k of code. When I left I generated a short and clear explanation of why what I had done was awesome in terms of their future business ... because that is what you have to do if you work contracts. Which is the real message of the article. You have to write things up.