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5,000$ dollars! Do you mean to tell me that most people do not have any spare space on their electric panel for an extra 220v plug? I didn’t but that’s because my house was owned by cheapstakes who saved 100$ by installing a slightly smaller panel that few electricians I talked to had ever seen. That can’t be most people?!

Sadly it's fairly common in the Northeast as far as I could tell while househunting in the 2010s and 2020s

Places with natural gas heating/stove are more likely to run into the issue because the builders never planned for any of the 'important' appliances to need 240V plugs. My new (old) house had exactly that problem once I started looking at replacing some older gas appliances.

The creator can maintain anonymity. The creator does not deserve to continue being celebrated when they embarked on a DDOS campaign using the traffic of archive.is against a journalist trying to uncover their identity. By these actions, they have shown to be capricious, vindictive, and willing to ensnare their users in their DDOS of others. Whoever they are, they’re terrible.

If there's ever something a journalist would never ever do, it's destroy someone's life for a headline. Never ever. Totally impossible.

I had no idea that was the actual situation (journalist trying to hunt them down). Sorta changes the moral calculus, I'll allow it

This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls.

Soon the news and the historical facts will be unnecessary. You can simply receive your wisdom from the AIs, which, as nondeterministic systems, are free to change the facts at will.


>This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls.

You are deliberately misrepresenting the situation. The journalists who block archivist traffic are not in any way connected to the blogger who was attempting to investigate the creator of archive.is. You have portrayed them as related in an attempt to garner sympathy for the creator of archive.is.

Here is an account of the facts: https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...


Indeed. I am highly supportive of archive.is, but let's remember that he hijacked his own users to become a bot net. That should make all us hackers furious. Is a complete violation of trust. Our residential IPs were used to attack someone, meaning he put us all at risk for his own personal goals. It's disgusting behavior and he should be called out for it. But we should also realize he's offering an important and free service to us all. I support him, but this is not something we should just ignore. Trust is very important.

Review the definition of botnet. That is not what was done.

[flagged]


> Being left beaten and bleeding in an alley to get a small taste of what life has to offer would do him a lot of good

This is unhinged.


Start shit, get hit.

I didn't think I was going to side with the DDoS-er, but considering what happened with Aaron Schwartz, that blogger was trying to get them killed or put in a box forever.

Thanks for this. I didn’t know about the details, and there are probably mor... but this gyrovague person is clearly being a privileged trouble. Their “boringly straightforward curiosity” is an admittance of their shallow thinking. When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.

You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.


> When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.

> You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.

To be clear, are you talking about the harm of commanding a botnet (which includes you and me) to attack an investigative journalist for investigatively journaling?


Their life is in danger and one particular journalist is making it so

They're terrible for not wanting to be dox'd?

They’re terrible for turning all of us into parts of a botnet DDOS someone doing their job. I don’t understand how DDOS is the correct tool for anyone to protect their anonymity.

It sounds like DDOS is the tool they had available. I'm currently ambivalent on using user traffic to perform a DDOS.

Well, if they deserve anonymity, they also deserve to be able to protect it, and they have really few tools against a doxxing, the DDOS was one of them, corrupting the archived article was another, albeit dangerous for their own reputation as an archiver.

The crux of the problem was the doxxing, not the defense against it.


You don’t think leveraging your site to DDOS someone is a problem?

Do people not also deserve to be protected from being DDOSed? Do people also not deserve to not have their internet traffic be used to DDOS someone?


> You don’t think leveraging your site to DDOS someone is a problem?

It is, but it's one of the only tools they have to prevent the doxxing site to being reachable.

> Do people not also deserve to be protected from being DDOSed?

You mean the person doing the doing should be protected ?

>Do people also not deserve to not have their internet traffic be used to DDOS someone?

Yes, it should have been opt-in. But unless you doesn't run JS, you kinda give right to the website you visit to run arbitrary code anyway.


Not defending any party, it's basic ethological expectation: a creature that try to beat an other should expect aggressive response in return.

Of course, never aggressing anyone and transform any aggression agaisnt self into an opportunity to acculturate the aggressor into someone with the same empathic behavior is a paragon of virtuous entity. But paragons of virtue is not the median norm, by definition.


> Not defending any party, it's basic ethological expectation: a creature that try to beat an other should expect aggressive response in return.

Another basic ethological expectation is that the strong dominate the weak, but maybe we shouldn’t base our moral framework around how things are, and rather on how they should be.


You don't think non-consensually revealing somebody's identity is a problem?

Resorting to DDoS is not pretty, but "why is my violent behavior met with violence" is a little oblivious and reversal of victim and perpetrator roles.


If it's information that's medium-difficult to get, and the only people that would use the information to cause harm can easily put in more effort than that, then I don't think it's "violence" to post that information.

> You don't think non-consensually revealing somebody's identity is a problem?

I do think it’s a problem. You are the only one excusing bad behavior here.


I think this is a weak framing. Lots of things are moral or immoral under specific circumstances. We should protect people from being murdered. I think murder is usually wrong. But we also likely agree that there are circumstances in which killing someone can be justified. If we can find context for taking a life, I'm quite sure we can find context for a DoS.

And what’s the context for using the internet traffic of your unsuspecting users to accomplish this?

Using the internet trafic of the persons using your service to protect your anonymity and thus, protecting the service itself.

So you shouldn’t have to inform your users that their traffic will be used in a cyberattack?

In most jurisdictions informing them would potentially make them legally liable. The fact they had no knowledge shields them from liability.

So their desire to not be used to commit a cyberattack doesn’t factor in? As long as they aren’t legally liable, it doesn’t matter?

Also a checkbox that says something like “I would like to help commit a crime using my internet traffic” would keep people from having their traffic used without consent.


Unfortunately “consent” is a difficult to understand concept for a lot of the web and Silicon Valley.

I don't have strong feelings about that one way or the other, honestly.

There's an old legal maxim "in pari delicto potior est conditio defendentis", that is "in a case of mutual fault the position of the defending party is the better one."

That works better when there is a defendant.

There's an archivist, and a journalist who is trying to kill that archivist. Which one is attacking and which one is defending?

I can't really be mad about someone DDoSing someone who's trying to kill them.

People do not ever have any sort of moral or natural right to not get hit after starting shit.

Even if this were true, this does not justify any particular type of action, except maybe an in kind response.

For example, would they have been justified to murder the blogger?



You're right, but it's nowhere near as polished or powerful as W11's window management. You can get there with Rectangle or Raycast though.

It's death by a thousand cuts for Windows.

- The OS is getting buggier, with every large update getting press coverage on scary bugs.

- The OS is getting overbearing; constant nagging for upsells on Microsoft products with terrible attach rates.

- The OS is getting focused on hype; the latest trend is AI?Let's force a new button on people that will break decades-old workflows. Let's put AI everywhere.

- The OS is getting slow; there's no focus on speed and the place where 85% of the market resides (laptops) is getting completely trounced by Apple Silicon.

- The OS is getting squeezed; under 300$ it's all terrible e-waste in six months Chromebooks. Over 500$ Apple is aggressively entering the market with the Neo. Over 1,000$ Apple has owned a commanding share of the profits there for decades.

There are 994 more problems with Windows but I've made my point; there's just no end in sight to the problems with Windows. I haven't mentioned it's become a minor part of Microsoft's profits!


That is exactly why this is a success.

People tend to distrust websites. URLs are also an immutable ledger that guarantees you’re in the right spot. The web is surprisingly robust for security.

What guarantees your banking app is the right one? A PNG and an app name with no security whatsoever.


Isn't that more reason to go to your bank's website: to download the apk and then verify the hash of the downloaded apk before installing it? That would make me way more comfortable than the current system of "pray this app on the play store is actually my bank's".

> People tend to distrust websites.

How did the world come to this when the internet long predated smartphones and so many "apps" are little more than bookmarked wrappers around websites?


But that doesn't guarantee anything? Even if the official banking app requires tons of verification, that doesn't prevent me from modding their banking app and redistributing the modded version to up to 20 people.

> People tend to distrust websites. URLs are also an immutable ledger that guarantees you’re in the right spot.

Typosquatting would like to have a word with you.


Open source is a culture that includes its users. Open source is getting screwed over because at the first whiff of a capitalist losing a buck open source retreated and hid.

The game is still distributed freely through the internet, only restricted within the main commercial platforms. I think that commercial platforms and "open source culture" will sometimes inevitably clash. Open source culture requires de fact non-reliance on such platforms anyway.

OpenTTD has an automatic update mechanism already and its installation is as simple as could be.

Steam succeeded because of its store, which still has the best prices on the market. That’s their original moat. Their current moat is sunk costs. People have thousands of dollars in their Steam Library. At this point Steam’s advantages as software are negligible, especially considering its poor performance.


Steam, and Valve are solely responsible for me never having to deal with Windows, because they’ve made linux gaming easy. I’d use steam just for that.

>Steam succeeded because of its store, which still has the best prices on the market. That’s their original moat. Their current moat is sunk cost.

Then how come epic games store is not able to get a foothold for years despite offering literally free games? Not even children which are most likely to use it because of Fortnite use it for anything but that. Steam is objectively the better store and game launcher regardless or price or "sunk cost".


They're not going to bring over Xbox 360 emulation. This thing is dependent on the specific CPU and GPU of the Xbox One and Series consoles. They've lost their appetite for emulation and have reassigned the whole team dedicated to it.

They announced a new effort at GDC.

You are 100% correct but they started clamping down on people using Dev mode strictly for emulators and homebrew. So here we are.

In their defense, they clamped down following lobbying (and pressure) from Nintendo IIRC.

Part of me also thinks that Microsoft were so forward with offering what was basically a test kit because they were confident in their security.


Why Nintendo? Far as I know, they've never released anything on an xbox console.

Nintendo doesn't want users emulating Nintendo systems in the Xbox is my guess.

Nintendo is notoriouslg very aggressive with their IP. I bet they weren’t happy you could emulate a switch or something.

No, and theyd like to keep their games off of any Xbox.

This is what killed Linux support on PS as well, Sony was disappointed with what was being done with PS2Linux, instead of indie titles.

Hence why PS3 Other OS no longer did hardware acceleration.


The PS3 was incredible value dollar-to-flop, given that it was sold at a loss. This resulted in universities and other research institutes buying them en masse to create supercomputer clusters. Naturally buying thousands of consoles but not a single game puts sony in a difficult position. Although I think it's sad the hardware got locked down in later revisions, I fully understand why they did it.

The US Department of Defense went quite a bit further. They created the Condor Cluster in 2010 which was comprised of 1760 PS3s. At the time it was placed 33rd worldwide for a supercomputer.

https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...


At the time, entire PS3s were cheaper than what it cost to get the CPU from IBM.

they couldn't have gone for 1776 of them?

at some point it was claimed that the reason sony removed the ability to run linux was because, literally, Saddam Hussein (maybe not) was using them to pilot jets or somesuch.

I haven't looked, but I am pretty sure that Saddam was dead before the ps3 launched. At the very least, his 2003/2004 ouster was before the ca 2007ish (I think) launch date.

Ok, I looked it up; Saddam Hussein was executed on December 30, 2006 and the ps3 launched on Nov 11, 2006 in Japan and Nov 17, 2006 in the US. So, technically, he was alive for the launch.

That factoid has the ingredients for an awesome conspiracy theory ;-)

in case you don't check up again, i did find this https://web.archive.org/web/20041120084657/http://arrakis.nc...

And in my mind the whole story was a publicity stunt, considering the political wind at the time and the place that broke the story; which was then quoted at me in college.


I said the word claimed. in the past. And it was more like: thousands of PS2 because sony/japan marked them dual use because they "were so powerful." So probably astro-turfed or even native advertising (considering the place that "broke" the story.)

buuuuut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster the US government went ahead and did make a supercomputer out of PS3s.

anyhow thanks for helping me confirm my memory is functioning perfectly.

ETA: https://web.archive.org/web/20041120084657/http://arrakis.nc... probably where this "wacky" idea came from...


I would be curious to know more precise numbers. My intuition suggests that when Sony sells millions of them, the number diverted for non-gaming purposes is maybe thousands or tens of thousands.

Nearly 90 million units by the time it was discontinued, but I'm not sure how many were sold at the point they removed Linux support.

The marketing win of being able to say "these are so poweful, the military literally uses them in supercomputers" certainly more than makes up for a hundredth of a percent of consoles having a zero attach rate.

> Although I think it's sad the hardware got locked down in later revisions, I fully understand why they did it.

The PS3 was coincidentally locked down after it was jail broken (broken in Jan, otheros patched out in Mar.


Linux on playstation was a play by Sony not to have customs like on a toy but as a more favorable computer merchandise. They didn't care.

Linux on Playstation was the final hubris of Ken Kutaragi to have his insane CPU design take over computing. Kutaragi envisaged the PS3 becoming a standard hardware platform similar to the PC but fully controlled by Sony. That was their goal with the PS3, they said so themselves time and time again. The second Kutaragi was removed from power over at Playstation, they closed the Other OS function.

It was the last time that a Japanese company made a fundamentally Japanese move.


> fully controlled by Sony.

And Toshiba and IBM, it was a three-way collab. There was even a second-generation Cell (PowerXCell 8i) released in IBM Q Series blade-servers.


Yeah. pretty much PowerPC part two. PowerPC the business move, like the oroginal one.

> It was the last time that a Japanese company made a fundamentally Japanese move.

What do you mean by this?


It's certainly an extremely bizarre and false statement. Curious what he meant as well.

Nope, that was with YA BASIC.

There were different customs for different countries targetted with different tactics.

Ya basic was only one front in that war.


Sure, if we disregard that PS2 Linux came almost two years later, was only sold via Internet, added an extra 500 euros on top, although it got discounted into 300 euros at the end of PS2 lifetime.

I own one such kit.


That doesn't factor into it, because the tariffs, bans, etc they were trying to circumvent weren't dependent on the software shipping with the device in that case, nor the separate price of the software, nor were they even necessarily primarily targeting Europe.

Each of these schemes had different sets of regulatory checkboxes they were trying to tick, and so had very different end products.


Sure as you wish, I was a PlayStation fanboy back then, since Yaroze, and surely remember YA BASIC for PS2 and Other OS for PS 3, being the only ones.

Yaroze and PS2 Linux never had anything to do with tariffs.


Not sure where you're coming from on that since it was a well-known and somewhat mocked at the time fact when Sony argued with UK customs

https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/playstation-2-is-...


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