@night-rider | Hacker News

6 days ago • Comments on a post

I am skeptical of any locally hosted media streaming setup, since I once got a NAS device hacked about a decade ago. Checked the logs and there was shady connections in it. Not sure what vuln they were using, but all my media was exposed to the public facing Internet, which was embarrassing.

Now I just pass files into VLC and watch them at my leisure. Secure NAS is a hard problem, and there’s plenty of articles over the years that talk about NAS systems getting hacked. Even though vendors claim the devices will be secure, there’s no way of knowing, and once it can talk to the public facing Internet, assume all the contents are up for grabs.

6 days ago • Comments on a post

I was referring to hacker.news

Is that an official YC owned domain?

6 days ago • Comments on a post

I don’t understand the register and login part. Does creating a new account here mean this is some splinter project that has its own separate account system or is it tied to an actual HN account?

6 days ago • Comments on a post

Is that an official YC domain owned by YC? Checked the Whois and it looks like it is, but I could be wrong

7 days ago • Comments on a post

I used to ask for donations but it was too unreliable and largely hit and miss. I pivoted to Patreon and it wasn’t as random, but still people only sub’d for a few months then cancelled, but I have a few super fans who are with me to the end.

7 days ago • Comments on a post

I only recently learned that people like to tab-hoard, hence addons like one-tab that collapses your tabs into a neat page for revisiting later. That’s just how people use their browser. They assume their machines can hold all those tabs in the background but are then shocked when their CPU fan whirs violently. Remember a browser is the most complex piece of software on your system apart from the OS and has to do many things simultaneously.

7 days ago • Comments on a post

Yeah does every site need Gmail levels of complexity when simple HTML and a sprinkling of CSS will do the trick instead? There are people who disable JS for accessibility reasons and are locked out of reading certain text just because it requires JS. Then there’s the remarkable low effort of what’s put into the <noscript> tag. No description apart from the familiar: ‘This page requires Javascript’

7 days ago • Comments on a post

I’m repeating myself here incase you didn’t read my comment, but this is exactly what happens to me. Google has a decade’s worth of my browsing history but can’t make the basic assumption that I am male and serves me ADs for tampons.

$hasCervix: falsey

7 days ago • Created a post

Ask HN: Cool gTLDs?

1 points • 0 comments

7 days ago • Comments on a post

$hasCervix: falsey

7 days ago • Comments on a post

Yet targeted ADs get it wrong. A lot. I’m male and still get ADs for tampons in Facebook and YouTube. Google and Facebook have a whole decade of my browsing history and still can’t infer I’m male.

7 days ago • Comments on a post

Valid point.

7 days ago • Comments on a post

Your concerns are valid but from the article:

> Firefox security patches are applied to prevent vulnerabilities

You are right about the reputation of the maintainers of LW though. The second this becomes abandonware I will ditch it.

7 days ago • Comments on a post

This saves a lot of time. I tried hardening Firefox and it took more than a day to get everything sorted. I added a few policies and about:config tweaks yet with each new release of Firefox some new stuff has to be disabled or tweaked for hardening purposes. I always wondered why Firefox doesn’t just do all this anyways and be more privacy-aware. Their data grab in recent years has gotten worse. Forks like LibreWolf are a godsend and I am glad it exists. My only issue with it is that it causes sites to have a CAPTCHA interstitial due to all the fingerprinting mitigations it does, and it doesn’t play nice with e-commerce since those sites do a lot of KYC and fraud prevention and flag browsers which are trying to blend in.

7 days ago • Comments on a post

You could also disable JS in Safari but with the caveat you would stand out among the masses who have it enabled. However like you said, the more people that disable JS in Safari, the easier it is to blend in, but we’re far away from that happening. As regards unique fingerprints, no JS mitigates things like canvas fingerprinting and other factors like time zone, battery charge level etc

7 days ago • Comments on a post

Author mentions Tor, yet Tor can make you stand out just by mere use of it, unless you use pluggable transports/ bridges to hide the fact you’re using Tor.

Also you could hide in plain sight by using Safari on iOS with a generic mobile Internet IP. Generic useragent and generic IP. What’s wrong with that? Bonus points for browsing in a private session to stop cookie tracking.

8 days ago • Comments on a post

Kagi & Brave’s new search engine look promising. And there are many other alternatives like Marginalia, Yacy, Swisscows, Ecosia, Bing, DDG, Mojeek, Qwant, Startpage, etc

8 days ago • Created a post

Ask HN: Dealing with Tool Fatigue?

4 points • 5 comments

8 days ago • Comments on a post

Can you share some of your goals? I use my phone to seek for information that would help me achieve goals. Train your feeds to be nothing but positive and high signal and bookmark anything you find useful going forward. Ignore the Internet Hype Machine and reframe FOMO as JOMO / Joy of Missing Out.

8 days ago • Comments on a post

So vote out those Eurocrats who implement this. Not hard to do. We do have a functioning democracy in the EU.