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Period: 2025-03-10 18:01 - 2025-03-17 10:02 📚 All Digests

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  • New comment by Tarball10 in "Sunsetting Whois"
  • Content:

    This is about sunsetting the WHOIS protocol in favor of RDAP, not doing away with domain owner registration data.


  • New comment by nchagnet in "Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline"
  • Content:

    This is a really great project from both the French and German governments.

    I think state-funded open source solutions to digital platforms is a fantastic opportunity to get away from the big tech walled gardens. Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes unmaintained in the future, but the community at least can take over. But until then, it's a nice platform and a nice contribution to the community.


  • New comment by thomassmith65 in "Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web"
  • Content:

      Google is a web business, that’s their whole thing. They made a browser to invest in the web itself because what is good for the web is good for Google, and happens to be good for all of us.
    
    This is a panglossian take that belongs in the year 2005.

    Google is less a 'web business' than it is an 'advertising business', a 'surveillance business', and a 'finance business'.

    Consequently, it is false that 'what is good for the web is good for Google'. AMP, and the Ad-blocking prohibition are evidence of this.


  • New comment by WiSaGaN in "OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules"
  • Content:

    Before Deepseek, Meta open-sourced a good LLM. At the time, the narrative pushed by OpenAI and Anthropic was centered on 'safety.' Now, with the emergence of Deepseek, OpenAI and Anthropic have pivoted to a national security narrative. It is becoming tiresome to watch these rent seekers attacking open source to justify their valuations.


  • New comment by jaggederest in ""Normal" engineers are the key to great teams"
  • Content:

    I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people looking to employ people in the field.

    These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor.

    It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the rest of your life, and working "extreme" hours is both a bad policy and a bad sign that the system you're operating in is brittle. Nothing that we do is so unique that another competent engineer shouldn't be able to fill in for you when you are having an off day.

    The effect of consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time trumps any number of crunch weeks and burnout episodes, to an almost absurd degree.


  • New comment by svilen_dobrev in "OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules"
  • Content:

    > ask for regulation then ask for exempt

    That's exactly what has been happening:

    Ask HN: Why is OpenAI pushing for regulation so much - 2023

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36045397


  • New comment by pr337h4m in "OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules"
  • Content:

    >Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, said in an interview that the US AI Safety Institute – a key government group focused on AI – could act as the main point of contact between the federal government and the private sector. If companies work with the group voluntarily to review models, the government could provide them “with liability protections including preemption from state based regulations that focus on frontier model security,” according to the proposal.

    Given OpenAI's history and relationship with the "AI safety" movement, I wouldn't be surprised to find out later that they also lobbied for the same proposed state-level regulations they're seeking relief from.


  • New comment by ethagnawl in "'Uber for nurses' exposes 86K+ medical records, PII via open S3 bucket"
  • Content:

    I'll need to dig up a source but I recently heard about this company and, apparently, before offering gigs they do a credit report to determine how much debt the person is carrying (i.e. how desperate they are) and they use that information to _round down_ the hourly rate they offer them.

    In the unlikely event that there are any negative consequences for this breach, they deserve every bit of them and more.


  • New comment by themcaffee in "Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died"
  • Content:

    That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.


  • New comment by kstrauser in "Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died"
  • Content:

    Nooooooo! He was my next door neighbor a few years ago, and I knew him as a person before I realized that I knew him as a hero.

    His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html


  • New comment by DoingIsLearning in "Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google"
  • Content:

    Not looking to grind an axe but facts matter in this case.

    Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]:

    > Expenses

    1. Program 'Software Development'

    2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M

    2. Management 'General and Administrative' :

    2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M

    I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses.

    Let's ignore inflation and COL and ballooning costs, etc. If we look at just the ratio of expenditure. We have an NPO (on paper at least) that just went from spending a ratio of 4 to 1 between developers and managers to spending a ratio of almost 2 to 1.

    I am not familiar with what is typical in American NPO's but I can't help but feel that my money will not be spent on the right stuff.

    [0] https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2007-audi...

    [1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...


  • New comment by DanRosenwasser in "A 10x Faster TypeScript"
  • Content:

    Hi folks, Daniel Rosenwasser from the TypeScript team here. We're obviously very excited to announce this! RyanCavanaugh (our dev lead) and I are around to answer any quick questions you might have. You can also tune in to the Discord AMA mentioned in the blog this upcoming Thursday.


  • New comment by nyx in "YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients"
  • Content:

    In summary, YouTube is A/B testing a change where specific clients receive only DRM-locked video streams. This is notable because yt-dlp impersonates those clients during normal operation. Since yt-dlp won't support decrypting DRM-locked videos, this change breaks yt-dlp's ability to download any videos.

    To respond to your specific questions:

    - innertube is the name for private YouTube APIs. (Here's a library that talks to innertube https://github.com/tombulled/innertube/, although yt-dlp has its own separate client code.) These APIs are intended for consumption by the various types of YouTube client software.

    - The "tv" client is one of the types of client (see other examples here: https://github.com/tombulled/innertube/blob/main/innertube/c...)

    - TVHTML5 is the specific client (as opposed to e.g. TVLITE or TVANDROID)... presumably different TVs run different specific TV clients, with consumption of different specific TV APIs.

    - When yt-dlp downloads a video, it roughly performs this sequence of steps: pretend to be one of the types of clients supported by innertube; download the top-level video object; parse out the list of possible formats. These formats are like "MP4, 1080p, with AAC audio" or "Ogg, audio only". (The original issue report shows a better example in the verbose output dump.) By default, yt-dlp just grabs the best quality audio and best quality video stream, downloads them, and muxes them together into a single file, but you can configure this behavior. DRM formats are formats that are protected by (presumably) Widevine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine, the decryption of which yt-dlp has stated will not be supported.

    - Available means they're an option for our yt-dlp client to download. Videos don't necessarily have all formats for all clients; for instance, a video might not have a 4K option, because it was never uploaded in 4K. Or it might have a 4K upload, but YouTube won't show 4K options to a client that doesn't support 4K decoding.

    - In this case, it means this specific internal client type can't download the video, because when yt-dlp reaches out, it gets ONLY formats that are DRM-locked. This is of note, I think, because the TV client is a way to get high-quality video from the YouTube API without having to pass it a valid YouTube login token (further down the issue, the reporter says providing a token allows the "web" innertube client to work).