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I used to be able to reliably BSOD a work computer by doing a largish git pull inside WSL2, with the culprit seemingly being the McAfee realtime scanner. VirtualBox VMs were fine though. Not confidence-inspiring!

An unusually large helium deposit in the US made the news recently, not sure if it's being exploited:

https://www.minnpost.com/other-nonprofit-media/2024/07/what-...


ai; dr

> This isn't a single point of failure - it's a systemic crisis.

> One in seven breaches isn't a sophisticated external attack - it's someone inside the organisation accessing data they shouldn't.

> These organisations aren't browsing - they're buying

https://hackernews.hn/newsguidelines.html#generated


> https://hackernews.hn/newsguidelines.html#generated

As written, the guidelines talk about AI generated comments, not AI generated submitted articles

In any case, just flag the submission and move on


The leading paragraph is obviously AI, also:

> That number isn't a projection. It isn't an estimate. It's the sum total of confirmed individuals affected across 735 breach reports filed with the HHS Office for Civil Rights - and it's growing every week.


Even easier is just using an X server, if you have it set up properly you just need to run the remote app and the window pops up on your machine.

(I think terminal-based GUIs are neat just for fluidity of use- you can pop one open during a terminal session and close it without switching to mouse or shifting your attention away from the terminal. They can also be a nice addon to a primarily CLI utility without introducing big dependencies)


Yeah I love that about X. I remember in the 90s when I first figured that out. I was logged in from a university workstation into my home computer with SSH and I launched my mail client or something and I thought doh, stupid that will only popup locally.

Then colour my suprise when it popped up on my screen right there. Slow as molasses but still. Wow. Magic.

It's a shame Wayland dropped this. Yes I know there's waypipe but it's not the same.


> It's a shame Wayland dropped this.

It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days, there's a reason approximately no one has used remote X after the mid-90s. It's a neat party trick, but I don't blame the Wayland authors for not wanting to support it.


> one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows

In the 80s/90s this wasn't feasible due to network latency and bandwidth, but it's pretty common now to do exactly this, with VNC and other remote desktop protocols.


It is, there were tools like NX that made it entirely usable even latencywise. And these days we're really going more and more to remote computing.

In the time when wayland was invented it made sense because we did everything purely local. But now it's as outdated as X11 was in 2010.

And yes I still use it a lot. It works well. Networks have become a lot better and even most cloud compute I use is geographically nearby.

What made it slow back then was that I only had a 128kbit uplink at home. And the uni had 2 mbit for the whole computer science building :)


> In the time when wayland was invented it made sense because we did everything purely local.

People complained of no forwarding in Wayland when it was invented.


Like what? X forwarding has pretty much always been the thing most likely to work for me and I haven't been able to find any equivalent.

The big obvious one is web-based tooling. Your information & settings are stored on a server and you use a web browser to view it via whatever device you're on. For more locally based workflows, we have networked filesystem protocols, automatic syncing between systems, that kind of thing. It's not a 1-1 equivalent of running a remote program and viewing it locally obviously, but it gets the same job done, in a much more useful & flexible manner than X forwarding did.

For example, the remote mail client usecase I was replying to is simply done with a webmail client today.


I don't really feel like web interfaces or syncing are really a substitute tbh, and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens, and the program itself doesn't need to be designed differently to work

> and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens

But this doesn't work on your phone, or on a Windows or macOS device, right? That's what I meant by flexible, X forwarding fits a pretty narrow set of usecases, while on the other hand keeping programs on the clients and data centrally located on a server allows for a whole lot more options for how to interface with that data.

(To be clear, nothing wrong with X forwarding! It's a cool tech and I'm glad you have a use for it! I'm just arguing that it's fine for Wayland to not try to support that kind of thing, because we've got other ways of working remotely now.)


Phone I didn't know, but the sibling comment interests me. Windows, it works fine on local WSL but for remote yes you do have to have something like mobaxterm running. Not a big deal to me. Mac, I thought it just worked? It used to at least for me, but the last mac I owned was on snow leopard, so I wouldn't be surprised if they decided it wasn't the Mac Way to do things.

Most recently I used X forwarding to manage some LVM disks. I usually like using cli, but for me it's just easier to deal with disks with a GUI. Shy of setting up a full remote desktop, which I've had a lot of trouble with getting to work reliably, what's a better option here for an arbitrary disk program?


X servers are available for phones, Windows, and macOS. X interfaces not designed for phones can be difficult to use on phones. But web interfaces not designed for phones can be difficult to use on phones.

There is not a web tool for every use. And web tools are not better for every use.


IIRC, it's not that secure though.. I'm really surprised people didn't do more things like send animated skulls to people's desktops.

Ps: oh yes and before '93 I've had so much fun practical joking around :)

Xauth fixed that way back in '93. All you have to do is use -Y not -X with SSH.

Waypipe looks interesting.

The main advantage of x forwarding for me was when I'd randomly need it and had nothing set up ahead of time. Hopefully it starts getting installed in distros by default eventually.


suspect this problem is essentially unsolvable. what possible method wouldn't be vulnerable to this? it's fine if it's just a sort of larp but if people think this could actually work... man

Your CED or laserdisc player needs to be smart enough to be able to decode whatever you put on it, which- in the era that they were relevant- pretty severely limited what you could do.

No, it didn't take several days for reporting to show up in major media:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1l7rvqq51eo


Yah that was never on their front pages or on their apps, probably hidden on an archival web page. I looked everywhere. Only found the story in a few places on Feb 28, the day it happened.

This is how they hide stories.


It was on the BBC front page by March 2nd, two days after it happened, probably less than 48 hours.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260302041747/https://www.bbc.c...

The NYT had coverage the day of.

https://archive.ph/CdT2X

You can see it on the front page in their "Live" coverage at the time:

https://archive.ph/sYqKl

I do think it was probably relatively underplayed in Western press, you can eg see it on the front page day-of pretty prominently on Al Jazeera:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260228182044/https://www.aljaz...

But the western press dragging their feet at covering victims of America's foreign wars is not down to being pro-Israel, no.


Iran is not welcoming to Western reporters, so Western press aren't pointing their TV cameras out their hotel windows to show the explosions like in 2003. And locals can't report other than in tiny snatches of text as the internet has been turned off in the country for ages, and one imagines operating a satphone in Iran right now would be a risky endeavor.

As a simple example, read up on Bourdain's fixers/friends from his famous no reservations episode who were arrested by Iran as spies soon after the episode was filmed.


Compared to, say, the coverage from Ukraine during February 2022, actual information getting out from the ground is sparser. Or the opening "shock and awe" campaign in Iraq in 2003, there were Western and international media in Baghdad reporting on it in real time, shooting video from their hotels:

https://youtu.be/m8KimNtB9HI

The reason why isn't really a mystery: Iran has never been exactly welcoming to Western media, and internet access there was intentionally shut off after the recent protests. There's plenty of coverage- it's front page everywhere- but a paucity of information.

It's all over social media, but hardly any of that is from Iranians in Iran, it's just people outside it like you and me mostly just yapping. Occasionally you'll hear something second-hand from someone with family in Iran who managed some brief connectivity.


Don't forget "The Ludlum Delusion"- every header in an article or readme reads like a Robert Ludlum novel title, ie "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]".

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