rOOb85 (u/rOOb85) - Readit News

rOOb85 commented on Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use? · Posted by u/rickybule

cheeseomlit · 6 months ago

Wasn't the conspiracy theory that truecrypt got shut down because it was 'too effective', and the successor projects presumably have intentional backdoors or something?

rOOb85 · 6 months ago

Truecrypt was likely developed by only 1 man, Paul le roux, who likely shut it down because he was on the run for being an international drug/human smuggler/cartel member. It’s kind of a crazy story.

But either way both truecrypt and veracrypt were independently audited and no major flaws were found. Not sure when the last veracrypt audit was done.

rOOb85 commented on CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use blog.jetbrains.com/clion/... · Posted by u/AlexeyBrin

FergusArgyll · 10 months ago

I don't know how anyone can still say Crypto was "hype". Sure the vast majority of it is but USDC alone market cap is north of 60 Billion, there is nothing speculative about USDC. You can't make money by someone else losing etc etc. Tether stablecoin is ~150 Billion. Just those two, means the value of Crypto minus rug pulls, scams or anything else is over 200 Billion - more than the value of OpenAI

rOOb85 · 10 months ago

I for a while was completely into crypto and really hoped it would replace a few mega corporations and enable easy convenient transactions… but that never happened. I can’t buy groceries or pay rent with any crypto. Infact In fact I regret spending the crypto I did have on the very few things or places I could spend it. Crypto(at least imo) went from something new and exciting and limitless to now being only something you buy and then hope the value goes up. It’s useless as anything else. It’s now all snake oil salespeople trying to pump up some shitty crypto that has 0 new features and was created to pump and dump.

rOOb85 commented on AT&T Email-to-Text Gateway Service Ending June 17 att.com/support/article/w... · Posted by u/m463

somenameforme · a year ago

Why would you or any customer want to receive SMS instead of email when most/all phones, even brick phones now a days, have internet? SMS, to me, feels like a way less secure, less functional, less portable, and more expensive email. It made sense back before basically every plan had a high/no limit internet plan, but now..?

The only real positive, so far as I can see, is the 'instantaneous' send/receive, but again thanks to big plans now a days your email checking every 5 seconds or whatever is basically free, making that benefit more of a technicality than reality.

rOOb85 · a year ago

iOS doesn’t support email encryption. My provider(mailbox.org) offers an option to automatically encrypt all incoming email.

rOOb85 commented on School did nothing wrong when it punished student for using AI, court rules arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/Tomte

hackernewds · a year ago

so they were caught due to the citations to non-existing books. it seems fine and unconnected to all of the controversial news stories of using AI detection, which has a high rate of false positives

rOOb85 · a year ago

The teacher noticed a few irregularities such as the time the student spent inside the submitted project. The cheater student only had around 55 mins logged whereas everyone else had 7-8 hours. That set off alarm bells for the teacher who then actually looked into the paper more and noticed fake citations and it was flagged as “ai” generated when they ran it through a few ai detectors.

rOOb85 commented on Gemini Pro refuses to acknowledge yt-dlp twitter.com/adocomplete/s... · Posted by u/ado__dev

xnx · 2 years ago

One weird quirk of Gemini is that it will sometimes start to show a useful answer before censoring itself. When I asked "What tool can I use to download YouTube videos?" I got the response: "There are several tools..." before the answer disappeared.

I'm hoping removal of this result this is a technical fluke, or at worse some misguided editorial decision by a lower-level employee trying to impress their boss. I guess a little weird to start editorializing the Gemini response, but not Google Search results.

As others have said, good argument for local LLMs or at least diverse closed alternatives. Has a good meta-LLM frontend emerged?

rOOb85 · 2 years ago

A year or two ago I was writing a plug-in for yt-dlp for a new site and I don’t really know python that well so I popped into a python irc support room and was getting some help when the user asked what I was ultimately trying to do. When I mentioned yt-dlp the user said he could not help me any longer since he was employed by Google and continuing to help me was in violation of his employment agreement. He even linked some document from corp.google.com(or something along those lines). I was pretty surprised and even a little annoyed because after saying all that he framed me/yt-dlp as being piracy…

rOOb85 commented on MapSCII – A Braille and ASCII world map renderer for the console github.com/rastapasta/map... · Posted by u/itherseed

rOOb85 · 2 years ago

I love stuff like this!

rOOb85 commented on HiddenVM – Use any desktop OS without leaving a trace github.com/aforensics/Hid... · Posted by u/paravirtualized

_boffin_ · 2 years ago

After truecrypt 7.1a (I think), the canary vanished. After that, didn’t it become veracrypt? Did they ever add a canary or has there been research in showing it’s not backdoored?

rOOb85 · 2 years ago

While it’s never been officially proven, there is a interesting story behind truecrypt. It was allegedly written by one guy (Paul Le Rou) who was a programmer turned cartel boss/gun/drug runner.

But back to your question, truecrypt was professionally audited and deemed “secure”, some issues were found but none that were back doors or significant. Shortly after(might have even been during) the audit truecrypt deleted all old versions and posted a weird message telling people to use bitlocker.

After some time veracrypt picked up the torch and has continued developing what was truecrypt.

rOOb85 commented on Signal commit Username Integration Test github.com/signalapp/Sign... · Posted by u/robertjglick

sshine · 2 years ago

You can’t have a social network without usernames!

rOOb85 · 2 years ago

Signal isn’t a social network… it’s a messaging app.

rOOb85 commented on Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust linen.dev/s/linen/t/12647... · Posted by u/cheeseblubber

mike_hearn · 3 years ago

OpenJDK doesn't do the AOT compilation part, you have to use GraalVM native-image for that and it's somewhat experimental for desktop apps. But otherwise it's pretty easy to bundle stuff up.

1. Go grab https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/ (disclosure: my company makes that)

2. Run `conveyor generate {javafx,compose} my-test-project` (pick your preferred UI toolkit). You now have a JVM desktop project.

3. `./gradlew jar; conveyor make site`. You now have a directory with self-updating platform native packages for Windows, macOS (ARM/Intel) and Linux that you can upload to a web server of your choice. Or supply upload creds and it'll do that step for you. Provide certificates and it'll also take care of signing.

That's all it takes to get a self-updating JVM desktop app these days. The same tool can do Electron, Flutter and native apps too (i.e. C++/Rust), so you could also use it with Tauri, but the nice thing about the JVM support is that it'll both strip down and bundle the JVM for you whilst cross-building/packaging so you don't need CI to do releases. From the user's perspective it's a normal app, from the developer's perspective you just hack on your local dev laptop like you could for a web app.

Binary sizes depend on how much functionality you use and how much effort you put into minifying. With the default level of effort (i.e. none) a simple hello world JavaFX desktop app will be about 33mb and a simple compose app will be about 52mb for macOS (skia is a very large graphics library). However, the Mac versions are larger than those for other platforms, and these sizes are still quite wasteful. There's a lot of low hanging fruit. You could make it a fair bit smaller by using ProGuard and other more aggressive dead code elimination techniques, as well as more heavily compressing bytecode. There's also plenty of fat to trim on the native code side.

GraalVM native images are interesting because they have much faster startup time and low memory usage - competitive with C++ apps, even. They take more work to create though. You can see a robotics app that's natively compiled here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxVoG1ft7w8

rOOb85 · 3 years ago

I’ll have to check this out.

rOOb85 commented on The Mullvad Browser mullvad.net/en/browser... · Posted by u/Foxboron

kulahan · 3 years ago

Tor is borderline useless for privacy. It was literally built for the government [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)#History

rOOb85 · 3 years ago

You do realize that tor is open source and has been under scrutiny by some of the worlds leading security researchers? It may not be 100% perfect, but claiming it’s useless and ineffective simply because it was born out of government research is completely asinine.