Hacker News: xxmarkuski

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Dumping Lego NXT firmware off of an existing brick (2025)"

xxmarkuski — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:49:53 +0000

I had so much fun with Lego Mindstorms as well, we had a team at my school and we competed in First Lego league and in regional competitions. We also wrote our software in Java using LeJos one time. Because of it, I got to use git and GitHub.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

xxmarkuski — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 14:36:40 +0000

When you have a simple journey and no interruptions DB in long distance is pretty good, not excellent but solid. But with more complicated things traveling with DB is not well thought out and they don't see what could be possible. Changing a platform should show you in-station navigation door to door. DB navigator should not show you impossible journeys, it presents you with train switches where the second train already left once you arrive or displays the stop is canceled entirely. DB Navigator and bahn.de have a monopoly over german train routing and ticketing, but are not subject to anti-trust regulation enough or run by the government directly (dataquality issues, etc). DB is very much against grassroots movements trying to improve customer experience and quality, like community built ticket stores or wallet and calendar integration. I also think the ministry of transportation and politicians are at fault for not getting DB to step up their game. Trying to privatize DB, rigid regulations for how DB has to run and not enough attention to rail as a whole for example. I would consider the "ampel" (21-24) to be one of the better ones. After some reforms, the government is still not in a position to control the monopolist enough.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "We are discontinuing the dark web report"

xxmarkuski — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:43:46 +0000

I set it up for an old Google account that has been breached. It did a relatively good job, but HIBP has more data in my experience, albeit it mainly looks at emails, whereas Google's report can do lookups by full name, address, and phone number. I think it was useful, but did not get enough love to be like a second HIBP.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "An SVG is all you need"

xxmarkuski — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 21:01:40 +0000

I use ChatGPT to compress SVGs, in particular QR codes. Many QR code SVG generators produce inefficient SVGs, and conventional SVG compressors often lack the understanding required for some compression techniques. ChatGPT can replace alignment indicators with elements.

Is there a way to embed the data encoded in the QR code directly within the image? This would allow the data to be parsed directly by the browser, eliminating the need for computer vision to decode it again. Going further, for web images QR codes could be efficiently encoded and rendered by the browser.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "10 Years of Let's Encrypt"

xxmarkuski — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:31:40 +0000

I have heard, but do not aggree, that Let‘s Encrypt is risky, because phishing sites use it. It’s implied that other CAs do checks against it.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches"

xxmarkuski — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 17:23:44 +0000

Graphene OS provides advanced security capabilities and a thorough defense-in-depth approach including a hardened supply chain. GOS aims to provide mechanisms to protect against 0day attacks. For example Celebrite can not open up GOS. GOS relys on hardware support provided by Pixels. Graphene OS works on getting their developments upstream.

For a list of security features see here [0].

[0] https://grapheneos.org/features

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition"

xxmarkuski — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 17:13:36 +0000

Minecraft modding has done so much to get young people into CS. I started learning Java when I was 10 because I wanted to do modding. At university, I met so many people who had the same experience. The tooling developed for Minecraft modding is world-class and better than what is developed during PhDs. It's very advanced, and people internalized the JVM and Java spec. One problem, though, is that Mojang's updates often change much of the foundation, and upgrading mods is very time-intensive. Mojang announced in 2012 that an official modding API is in the works. This is another step.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site (2023)"

xxmarkuski — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 06:52:36 +0000

Maybe look into Eleventy [0] or Zola [1]. Both are relatively recent developments and have a skilled and forward thinking userbase.

[0] https://11ty.dev/

[1] https://getzola.org/

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Google CTF 2025 – webz : Exploiting zlib's Huffman Code Table"

xxmarkuski — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 13:52:04 +0000

The best teams from Google CTF were invited to compete in Hackceler8, a combination of speedrunning and CTF, this year on a SEGA Genesis. Today are the finals, which are steamed and commented on YouTube. See this teaser [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/QQjxHBW7wSQ?si=ElmaUomuFnVx043T

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Pixel 10 Phones"

xxmarkuski — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 19:14:33 +0000

Android is not just Android. The device vendors have to customize it to fit their devices by including drivers for example. Device vendors have the option to change the look pretty heavily, Samsung TouchWiz was infamous, Chinese vendors also offer very customized versions, including making it look like iOS. What you are seeing is material design 3 "expressive" which will be rolled out in the next minor Android version and Google apps

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Vaultwarden commit introduces SSO using OpenID Connect"

xxmarkuski — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 21:17:27 +0000

How secure is Vaultwarden?

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Tram Trains"

xxmarkuski — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 17:24:23 +0000

> This caps capacity and reliability.

Karlsruhe: The local operators have severe quality issues, in part due to this concept. There are like four points in the city where issues impact the whole network. The rolling stock is very bad compared to the other regional trains running in Baden-Württemberg (no/bad ac, flaky internet, no sockets, bad seating). The trains have way too little capacity, I’ve seen incidents, where they run three coaches (which they don’t do often, they are too long to enter the city), where people could not get in anymore. Some of the stations in the surrounding area are absolutely mental (Durmersheim for example), you have to walk over rails where ICEs and cargo goes through. Some trains are split or merged when leaving or entering the city, but it always causes delays. When trains can’t use the heavy metal rails and thus not leave the city due to ICEs getting priority, a lot of inner city traffic can be affected. The cooperation between the different infrastructure operators is also a source of problems.

Do not take Karlsruhe uncritically as an example where this model works well, yeah sure average numbers make it look good, but the reliability is complete ass. KVV always manages to surprise me on how bad it gets.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "The Princeton INTERCAL Compiler's source code"

xxmarkuski — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 07:26:41 +0000

INTERCAL is presented at the Christmas Lecture in Programming at KIT

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)"

xxmarkuski — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 19:25:36 +0000

Just a small hardware project: I am building a cocktail mixer in an old PC case. I saw something similar at a con over Easter and had to build one myself, it had a tap coming out of the 3.5" bay and the ingredients were inside the pc case. It uses peristaltic pumps to move the different ingredients to the cup. It is very simple, but still took a couple of days to complete. In detail it consists of 6 x peristaltic pumps, 3 x L298N motor driver, 3 x PCF8574 io expander and an esp32. The software for the esp32 is very dumb and I actually coded it correctly before I had all the parts, it just enables and sets the speed for the motors and is attached via USB to a laptop. There a webapp is used to manage ingredients and recipes.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Germany creates 'super–high-tech ministry' for research, technology, aerospace"

xxmarkuski — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 20:04:03 +0000

Thank you for the background explanation and the link. KIT is actually my Alma Mater (cs). You are right the overlap is not that large. I was thinking about the WissZeitVG, Exzellenzstrategie, Tenure-Track-Program. As for the Länder, I personally think the transition between the Abitur and university could benefit from stronger collaboration between the involved ministries. For example by better aligning the educational goals of high school to the demands of universities and by integrating education research into schools. By this I mean the continuous application of the results of educational research to schools and the constant monitoring of schools.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Germany creates 'super–high-tech ministry' for research, technology, aerospace"

xxmarkuski — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 07:52:51 +0000

I agree that merging the technology division from the ministry of economic affairs (BMWK) to the new research ministry is a good step as both ministries have been large providers of funding. The BMBF funds DFG, as well as the large science organizations in Germany (Fhg, Mpg, ...), the BMWK has funded research which is closer to applications, of course looking to enable economic activity. I'm unsure why the ministry gets a special focus on aerospace, this topic is being worked on by the DLR, funded by BMBF. I'm also not yet sure what to think about splitting education and research. It goes against the Humboldtian Ideal, especially in the universitys both topics are connected. On the other hand, it might enable the ministries to be more focused and do reforms that don't depend on each other to be performed more quickly. The research ministry will go to CSU, the bavarian sister party of CDU. While it may not be very popular amongst many Germans, because CSU is seen as conservative and individual CSU politicians are not famous science policymakers, Bavaria is a successful science hub. Munich is home to international leading institutions (TUM, MPG, FhG). Bavaria is also a hub for aerospace with Aibus and MTU and startups like Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg. Maybe repeating what bavarian policymakers have done regionally to the whole of Germany will be good.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "The SeL4 Microkernel: An Introduction [pdf]"

xxmarkuski — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 17:43:12 +0000

Jochen Liedtke became a professor in 1999 in Karlsruhe, sadly he passed away only shortly after in 2001. I don't know if his successor Bellosa still does research on L4. There was the L4Ka project which appears to be completed. In the bachelor lecture on OS by him it's not part of the curriculum.

Rittinghaus, alumni of Bellosa, is involved with Unikraft [0], which was featured a couple of times on hn, and is using unikernel technology.

[0] https://unikraft.org/

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law"

xxmarkuski — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 21:07:21 +0000

DNSSEC is the actual solution, providing authenticity and integrity for DNS records. The DNS client can verify that the received DNS response is what the zone admin intended. Additional records (NSEC / NSEC3) are used to provide a proof of non-existence, preventing suppression from a mitm attacker. But if your government is mitming you, you don't want them to see you use DNSSEC. DoH is useful in that case, because a mitm sees only https traffic, which is less suspicious than DoT.

New comment by xxmarkuski in "Reverse engineering the Ravensburger TipToi pen"

xxmarkuski — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 15:22:58 +0000

Entropia is the local chapter from Karlsruhe of the Chaos Computer Club. The Gulaschprogrammiernacht (GPN) is their local version of Congress located in HfG and ZKM, a college and a great museum.

Coding My Way Out of Here: C2 in Browser Isolation Environments

xxmarkuski — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 17:23:17 +0000

Article URL: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/c2-browser-isolation-environments

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42319662

Points: 1

# Comments: 0