heffer (u/heffer) - Readit News

heffer commented on AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem github.com/kavishdevar/li... · Posted by u/moonleay

egeozcan · a month ago

> when presented with a problem will find every reason to excuse Apple or say "I never do that"

...or maybe you shouldn't do that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45706811

heffer · a month ago

You're absolutely right! Every Apple user knows they shouldn't be holding it wrong.

heffer commented on I Am Mark Zuckerberg iammarkzuckerberg.com/... · Posted by u/jb1991

mywacaday · a month ago

I'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com At some point the head of a national hospital thought he had that address and wasn't using his official email for everything, I got several emails that should not have been for me and some were quiet sensitive, I always emailed back the sender to let them know and eventually I emailed his secretary as it kept happening. I've also received purchase order confirmations from Australia, building contracts from Canada, HR emails from a university to which I had to confirm I had deleted the mail as letting them know led to GDPR investigation

heffer · a month ago

Same here. My Google Account is something along the lines of jose86@gmail.com (a common hispanic first name + birth year; I'm German).

It's unusable. I have received full blown mortgage applications from couples in Mexico (including paystubs, tax forms, credit ratings, phone bills, passports). Mostly, these days, it's transaction notifications for a guy in Nigeria and phone bills for people in South America.

heffer commented on FDA takes action to make a treatment available for autism symptoms fda.gov/news-events/press... · Posted by u/amai

apercu · 3 months ago

Um. This is weird. I know Dan (and the entire Beanfield team, at least the old guard of 10-15 years ago). Do we know each other? I was in 67 Mowat (aka Carpet Factory) off and on for a long while....

heffer · 3 months ago

Pretty sure we don't know each other. I am a fairly recent addition to the country (2019) but we've worked with Dan and Beanfield during COVID when we put together a server for Folding@Home in our office to help them with the huge increase in load due to interest in the COVID research they were doing. Beanfield sponsors the pipe and we donated the hardware and rackspace. That server (the only Canadian one), by the way, is still running to this day. We also came up with the WiFi@Toronto project which a paper says reduced the spread of COVID in those neighbourhoods by 14.4% (https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/f542d219-7abe-4918-846f-...). Again, Beanfield sponsored the pipe to exit all the traffic onto the internet and we sponsored the networking equipment and were the ones installing the APs on rooftops.

heffer commented on FDA takes action to make a treatment available for autism symptoms fda.gov/news-events/press... · Posted by u/amai

incomingpain · 3 months ago

>I'm about 98% certain this is simply a ploy to put autistic people on a list for future abuses.

I'm a foreigner, not even in the USA. Your politics are melting down but I feel like the FDA isn't tracking or seeking to harm you.

>In today's political climate, nobody should be revealing their autism status to anyone remotely connected to any level of government. Nor should one trust any sort of medical advice or reporting from same. Our government is explicitly targeting minorities of all sorts for abuse and persecution.

Pretty strong argument against socialized medicine. Here in Canada the government actively tracks each of these. For example to get the covid shot, they wanted to know about my autism, non-binary/trans etc. They werent just asking everyone this, I didnt bring it up because why would it matter? I was in their system. I also happen to know this data is being transferred out of country to CDSI; ASN 23498.

>Now is, unfortunately, the time to hide and weather the storm. That or flee to another country with a functioning society.

I dont think you need to flee the usa. Canada has drastically reduced migration, you dont want to come here. Europe maybe?

heffer · 3 months ago

> I also happen to know this data is being transferred out of country to CDSI; ASN 23498

CDSI is Cogeco Data Services, Inc., a Canadian ISP, which later became Aptum, which in turn was acquired by Beanfield, also a Canadian ISP (the founder Dan Armstrong is actually well known in the internet community in Canada) that operates AS23498.

So I don't see how this would prove your data is leaving the country.

heffer commented on EFF to court: The Supreme Court must rein in secondary copyright liability eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09... · Posted by u/walterbell

heffer · 3 months ago

Germany had this principle in place for a while for internet. It's called "Störerhaftung". Just google it and see the craziness that ensued. Led to exactly the kind of court cases you'd expect to see: grandmas paying to settle lawsuits for people abusing their misconfigured WiFi, AirBnB hosts paying for their tenants' torrenting. This gave rise to movements like Freifunk which allowed people to share an open WiFi that in many cases just tunnelled back the internet traffic to central exit points using IPs assigned to registered charities that were, for all intents and purposes, classified as ISPs and therefor exempt from this secondary liability. Another nice twist was that German privacy law only requires (and sometimes only allows) ISPs to store information about their customers needed for billing purposes. But because the service is free there is no billing and thus no information about the customer is known and nothing can be provided to courts or law enforcement as a result.

I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.

heffer commented on Using the Internet without IPv4 connectivity jamesmcm.github.io/blog/n... · Posted by u/jmillikin

xyst · 6 months ago

I run my own tailnet (headscale as the coordinator server). Tailscale stack is essentially built on top of wireguard.

I have an exit node setup with dual stack IPv4/IPv6 addresses. So in theory if my ISPs CG-NAT failed or IPv4 was inaccessible, then configuring my device to use my exit node to reroute traffic _should_ work without having to mess with WG internals like the author in this article.

I suppose there are some caveats here since I have discovered many services do tend to flag IPs originating from VPS ASNs as "spammy" (ie, pretty much any service front loaded by CloudFlare). Maybe Hetzner is better in this aspect?

heffer · 6 months ago

CloudFlare and friends use a multitude of factors, AS being only one of them. I am a TekSavvy customer (Canada's largest independent, i.e. not owned by one of the incumbents, ISP). Pretty clearly an eyeball network, and I get the CloudFlare captcha multiple times per day on different sites. I'm guessing it may have to do with the fact that I use custom reverse DNS entries (instead of their default schema of 127.0.0.1.dsl.teksavvy.com) for my internet facing IPv4 and IPv6 subnet.

heffer commented on Powers of 2 with all even digits oeis.org/A068994... · Posted by u/Hbruz0

heffer · 9 months ago

The link is about 2^n not n^2.

heffer commented on Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges tomshardware.com/peripher... · Posted by u/m463

kbmn · 9 months ago

Personal recommendation:

A while ago I bought a bw laser printer from a brand I've never heard of: "Pantum". Specifically the Pantum P2500W, for 49,95€ (~ 53$). I have never seen them in a store in (western/central) Europe either.

It does not have a display, in general it's the simplest, minimalist printer I've ever owned I'd argue.

CUPS configuration exist in the Arch AUR (for usage with USB), and driverless printing with AirPrint (which also works with CUPS) is supported. This new driverless stuff works really nice in general, glad to use this instead of unreliable driver printers (which sometimes are not even available in low quality for Linux).

It does not require an internet connection and appears to not have any DRM on the cartridges: I use a 20€ (~ 21$) no-name toner cartridge from Amazon, and it works perfectly fine. In fact it doesn't have a display to complain about this (like my 10+ year old HP, which even back then showed me ads for their own cartridges, and HP paper).

heffer · 9 months ago

Pantum is a brand of Ninestar, a group of companies that pretty much make every major component across the entire value chain of laser printers.

They bought Lexmark in 2016 (which is why some Pantum printers look like Lexmark printers).

The company has origins in manufacturing third-party replacement ICs for building compatible consumables and as such has extensive experience reverse engineering many printer designs. Many compatible printing consumables outlets carry Pantum brand printers, as they are essentially buying them through the same channels they buy their compatible consumables.

Pantum has a program for identifying genuine Pantum consumables as well, as any respectable printer manufacturer would ;-) It's a fun little sticker with some tricks up its sleeve: https://global.pantum.com/support/identification/

heffer commented on Avoid ISP Routers (2024) routersecurity.org/ISProu... · Posted by u/dp-hackernews

heffer · a year ago

In similar news: The German regulator (BNetzA) just re-confirmed two weeks ago [0] that passive optical networks are not exempt from § 73 (1) of the TKG (Telecommunication law) which mandates that the interface between provider and customer is required to be a passive interface (i.e. mandating an ONT is already in violation of that). And that is fine. The different PON standards are reasonably well standardized and can operate in these standard modes for most equipment manufacturers. The NSP may lose some proprietary features, but the past has shown that equipment manufacturers have adapted for the German market accordingly. The law does allow exemptions, mainly if required for access technology reasons, but clearly states that even in that case the device that connects the end-user devices to the service (i.e. router) cannot be mandated by the ISP. They can provide one, but they cannot prevent you from connecting your own.

I do sometimes miss living in Germany.

[0]: Press release in German: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...

heffer commented on Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024 elitefourum.com/t/many-of... · Posted by u/grep_it

echoangle · a year ago

I was pretty sure you meant this guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Beltracchi

But he didn't change his name.

heffer · a year ago

That's who I thought as well, but I think it's more likely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Sim