jeffwass (u/jeffwass)

jeffwass commented on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle dmitrybrant.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/zdw

ruleryak · 10 days ago

Many a crack back in the day was even more simple still, we'd just find and alter the right JE or JNE into a JMP and we're off to the races. As the author found, the tough part is just finding and interpreting where and how the protection was implemented. If throwing the exe in a hex editor gave you access to String Data References (not always the case, but more common than not) then you'd just fail the check you were trying to skip, find that string, hop over into assembly to see what triggered loading that, and then just alter the logic to jump over it when the time comes.

jeffwass · 10 days ago

I was wondering this actually, why not just skip past the check entirely instead of going through the effort to pass the check without the dongle?

jeffwass commented on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle dmitrybrant.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/zdw

jeffwass · 10 days ago

Really interesting read, wonder how many other installs are using (and trapped into continuing to use) such obscure legacy software.

jeffwass commented on Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All aashvik.com/posts/555-rev... · Posted by u/MonkeyClub

stackghost · 13 days ago

Obviously TFA is satire/tongue in cheek and while you can do all sorts of awesome stuff with a 555 you can't patch those implementations without physically rewiring them which in many cases means throwing out the board and fabbing a new one, whereas a microcontroller-based board can often be fixed with a simple jtag debugger.

So, yeah, 555 timers are cool and doing things with analog ICs is groovy but there's a reason everyone just stuffs a small microcontroller in places where we used to just stuff a 555, and it's maintainability.

jeffwass · 13 days ago

Two thoughts on situations where the 555 may be preferable, if anyone has experience how these compare :

1. Low-noise applications. I’d naively expect the 555 to be less noisy than a clocked digital microcontroller, though it’s been awhile since I’ve worked in this space.

2. Low power applications. How does latent power draw compare between a 555 and a typical low power microcontroller?

jeffwass commented on I stopped following the news mertbulan.com/2026/01/28/... · Posted by u/mertbio

jeffwass · 15 days ago

At my cousin’s company there are TV’s in the lobby.

They used to show news channels.

He said clients would come in all stressed out. So they changed to a home improvement channel.

jeffwass commented on Heathrow scraps liquid container limit bbc.com/news/articles/c1e... · Posted by u/robotsliketea

michaelt · 16 days ago

Airport prices in the UK for recreational travel work like so:

Flight from London to Barcelona: £16

Bottle of water past security: £5

Train to airport: £26

Taxi enters drop-off area for 30 seconds: £7

A person who wants to get the advertised flight at the advertised price has to be very careful.

jeffwass · 16 days ago

Even in your own car dropping off your friends or family at a UK airport (at least the London ones) requires paying a £6 fee now. Just to get to the dropoff area, even for 30 seconds as you say.

But hey, at least the luggage carts are free…

jeffwass commented on Ask HN: DDD was a great debugger – what would a modern equivalent look like? · Posted by u/manux81

martijnvds · 17 days ago

printf("Got here, x=%u"\n", x);

jeffwass · 17 days ago

“The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.”

- Brian Kernighan

jeffwass commented on Project SkyWatch (a.k.a. Wescam at Home) ianservin.com/2026/01/13/... · Posted by u/jjwiseman

ianservin · a month ago

Hey HN, thrilled my silly little project was posted here. I had been noodling on this idea for quite some time and ran into a bunch of roadblocks early on that prevented me from getting reliable control over the PTZ camera. Once those were overcome, it came together fairly quickly.

I'm looking forward to doing more experiments including integrating my own payloads (thermal and optical) with an off the shelf motion control system. I also have an automotive radar unit coming which may provide some interesting options for cueing without using ADS-B in some situations (with relatively close targets).

jeffwass · a month ago

This is pretty cool project. Have you been able to track satellites with it, eg an ISS flyover?

jeffwass commented on Contact the ISS ariss.org/contact-the-iss... · Posted by u/logikblok

rafram · a month ago

An “aural” deaf school? This seems like a fairly harmful approach. I know that approaches to deaf education are quite fraught, but pushing students to communicate orally and not allowing sign language in the classroom seems like it’ll set a lot of students back educationally. It essentially turns deafness into a learning disability, which it doesn’t need to be if you just allow sign language. (It also shuts the students out of mainstream Deaf culture, which I imagine a lot of them will resent later in life.) I am surprised that a school with this philosophy still exists, frankly.

jeffwass · a month ago

They’ve been doing this for over a century, it’s probably the top deaf school in the UK, and has the support of nearly the entire deaf community.

Most of the students have either some degree of hearing or use cochlear implants. I think nearly all, if not all, students use either hearing aids or cochlear implants.

The classes are very small (eg 5-6 max usually), students are arranged in a U-shape around the teacher so they can read lips. And there’s a special wireless broadcast system so the teacher wears a microphone and sends the audio directly to hearing aids or cochlear implants.

Regarding deaf culture, most of the students use BSL on their own outside class, and my daughter learned BSL from her friends there that grew up with it. Coming from a mainstream primary, she found “her people” here, discovered deaf culture and a community that shares the same struggles she faces.

The idea is that by teaching in BSL the students are further restricted in their ability to function in a hearing society.

I’m curious if you are deaf yourself, or work with the deaf. All the teachers at the school are trained teachers of the deaf, some are even deaf themselves. And I haven’t heard any complaints about the aural nature of the learning (except from the reservations of a few parents before sending their kids there, and I don’t think any of these parents regrets this after their children started there.)

jeffwass commented on Contact the ISS ariss.org/contact-the-iss... · Posted by u/logikblok

jeffwass · a month ago

My daughter is deaf and goes to a specialist deaf secondary school in the UK.

Five years ago ARISS-UK pre-arranged a connection between the school and astronaut Mark Vande Hei on one of the ISS flyovers. Various students got to ask questions directly to Mark in orbit. It was the first contact between ISS and a deaf school.

https://www.arrl.org/news/ariss-confirms-october-12-as-date-...

jeffwass commented on UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating theguardian.com/business/... · Posted by u/beardyw

chollida1 · a month ago

My wife is a teacher of physics and math for an online highschool. Its very common for kids to go into the in person exam with a mark in the 80s and 90s and get a failing grade on the exam.

The web wasn't alwasy that useful for cheating on timed exams as it was essentially like being able to bring in a formula sheet.

LLM's changed this such that you can type in the question and get a fully correct answer in a lot of cases.

The only solution that I see in education is that in person exams start to represent a larger and larger portion of a students grade such that the mid term and final will be more than 50% of a students grade for most classes going forward due to the gratuitous use of llms by students.

jeffwass · a month ago

This was going on long before LLMs.

When I took quantum mechanics in grad school, I struggled through the weekly (and intense) homework sets. My TA was a hardass, I’d spend hours on some problem, several few pages of math work just for one problem, and make some dumb mistake in an integral somewhere, being off by a factor of 2 at the end and only getting 2 of 4 points.

It was painful, and I felt like a dumbass seeing the other kids regularly getting perfect scores.

Then the midterm came and I blew them all out of the water. I hadn’t realised they somehow had the solutions manual so just got perfect scores all along but clearly didn’t learn the material like I did.