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Notepad++ might be too much for a simple utility.

Plus for many years Word was one of the main cash cows for MS, so they didn't want to make an editor that would take away from Word.

And you could see how adding new things adds vulnerabilities. In this case they added ability to see/render markdown and with markdown they render links, which in this case allowed executing remote code when user clicks on a link.


> Plus for many years Word was one of the main cash cows for MS, so they didn't want to make an editor that would take away from Word.

Wordpad was the bundled rich text editor and was also a mess

I don't think an improved notepad could have cannibalized Word


I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did some optimization - namely turning off some services.

AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things.

They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.


This is why I don't get so many of the "windows is fine" arguments here. It's always "Windows is fine if you run LTSC and dick around with the registry and disable these 37 specific services." If I'm going to have to futz with it constantly, why would I pay money for the privilege?

nowhere near to China.

In US almost anything could be discussed - usually only unlawful things are censored by government.

Private entities might have their own policies, but government censorship is fairly small.


In the US, yes, by the law, in principle.

In practice, you will have loss of clients, of investors, of opportunities (banned from Play Store, etc).

In Europe, on top of that, you will get fines, loss of freedom, etc.


Others responding to my speech by exercising their own rights to free speech and free association as individuals does not violate my right to free speech. One can make an argument that corporations doing those things (e.g. your Play Store example) is sufficiently different in kind to individuals doing it -- and a lot of people would even agree with that argument! It does, however, run afoul of current first amendment jurisprudence.

Either way, this is categorically different from China's policies on e.g. Tibet, which is a centrally driven censorship decision whose goal is to suppress factual information.


> Either way, this is categorically different from China's policies on e.g. Tibet, which is a centrally driven censorship decision whose goal is to suppress factual information.

You'll quickly run into issues and accusations of being a troll in the "free world" if you bring up inconvenient factual information on Tibet. The Dalai Lama asking a young boy to suck on his tongue for example.


Pretty sure that event was all over the western web as a gross "wtf" moment. I don't remember anyone, or any organization, that talked about it being called a troll.


It was only surprising to people because he was hyped up as a progressive figure in a liberation struggle, not a deposed autocrat.


I see you trying to equalize the arugment, but it sounds like you are conflating rules, regulations and rights versus actual censorship.

Generally the West, besides recent Trump admins, we aren't censored about talking about things. The right-leaning folks will talk about how they're getting cancelled, while cancelling journalists.

China has history thats not allowed to be taught or learned from. In America, we just sweep it under an already lumpy rug.

- Genocide of Native americans in Florida and resulting "Manifest Destiny" genocide on aboriginals people - Slavery, and arguably the American South was entirely depedant on slave labour - Internment camp for Japanses families during the second world war - Students protesters shot and killed at Kent State by National Guards


> In Europe, on top of that, you will get fines, loss of freedom, etc.

What are you talking about?


I had prepared a long post for you, but at the end I prefer not to take the risk.

You may believe or not believe that such exist, but EU is more restrictive. Keep in mind that US is a very rare animal where freedom of speech is incredibly high compared to other countries.

The best link I can point you to without taking risk: https://www.cima.ned.org/publication/chilling-legislation/



Not really, I was thinking about fake news, recent events, foreign policy, forbidden statistics, etc.

The execution is really country-specific.

Now think that at the EU-level itself, they can fine platforms up to 6% of the worldwide turnover under the DSA. For sure they don't want to take any risk.

You won't go to jail for 10 years, it's more subtle, someone will come at 6 am, take your laptop and your phone, and start asking you questions.

Yes, it's "soft", only 2 days in jail and you lost your devices, and legal fees but after that, believe me you will have the right opinion on what is true/right or not.

For what you said before, yes, criticizing certain groups or events is the speedrun to get the police at your door ("fun" fact: in Greece and Germany, saying gossips about politicians is a crime).

The US is way way way more free. Again, it's not like you will go to jail long time, but it will be a process you will certainly dislike, and that won't be worth winning a Twitter argument.


Gossiping about politicians isn't a crime.

Spreading fake news (especially imagery) or insults fall in defamation cases, politicians or not.

Germany is indeed a bit harsh on that.

But in any case you're really cherry picking very very rare examples, if you want to feel the US is "way way way more free" and you're convinced about that good for you.


This assumes zero unknown unknowns, as in things that would be kept from your awareness through processes also kept from your awareness.

This might be a good year to revisit this assumption.


Oh yes it is. Anything sexual is heavily censored in the west. In particular the US.


Funnily enough, in Europe it's the opposite: news, facts and opinions tend to be censored but porn is wide open (as long as you give your ID card)


>Private entities might have their own policies, but government censorship is fairly small.

It's a distinction without a difference when these "private" entities in the West are the actual power centers. Most regular people spend their waking days at work having to follow the rules of these entities, and these entities provide the basic necessities of life. What would happen if you got banned from all the grocery stores? Put on an unemployable list for having controversial outspoken opinions?


A man was just shot in the street by the US government for filming them, while he happened to be carrying a legally owned gun. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/man-shot-and-killed-by-f...

Earlier they broke down the door of a US citizen and arrested him in his underwear without a warrant. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f...

Stephen Colbert has been fired for being critical of the president, after pressure from the federal government threatening to stop a merger. https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/ste...

CBS News installed a new editor-in-chief following the above merge and lawsuit related settlement, and she has pulled segments from 60 Minutes which were critical of the administration: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/22/g-s1-103282/cbs-chief-bari-we... (the segment leaked via a foreign affiliate, and later was broadcast by CBS)

Students have been arrested for writing op-eds critical of Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_R%C3%BCmeysa_%C3%...

TikTok has been forced to sell to an ally of the current administration, who is now alleged to be censoring information critical of ICE (this last one is as of yet unproven, but the fact is they were forced to sell to someone politically aligned with the president, which doesn't say very good things about freedom of expression): https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a70144099/tiktok-ice-c...

Apple and Google have banned apps tracking ICE from their app stores, upon demand from the government: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/03/nx-s1-5561999/apple-google-ic...

And the government is planning on requiring ESTA visitors to install a mobile app, submit biometric data, and submit 5 years of social media data to travel to the US: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-12-10/pdf/2025-2...

We no longer have a functioning bill of rights in this country. Have you been asleep for the past year?

The censorship is not as pervasive as in China, yet. But it's getting there fast.


Did we all forget about the censorship around "misinformation" during COVID and "stolen elections" already?


Right. Plus often the tax is paid out of RSUs given, you just get less in RSUs, some is subtracted to pay tax.


this only works for manually typed text, not computer to computer communication where you can't deduce much from what is being "typed" as it's not typed but produced by a program to which every letter is the same and there is no different delay in sending some letters (as people have when typing by hand)


Well not necessarily. That's the thing. It's not the timing attack that makes data leak for automated/noninteractive tunnels. Well technically there is still some potential leak but the issue is more about if the data being transferred is predictable then you have the plaintext.

So for a contrived example: Say I know a tunnel is transferring a sizeable dataset starting at a specific time before performing some other tasks (say a data sync before doing XYZ). I know when the connection started and I have snooped on the entire connection.

I know the initial handshake and I know the exact plaintext being transferred. That's a lot of information that can be used to grind the keys being used. That then risks that you can extract whatever information that follows after your initial dataset and potentially impersonate a participant and inject your own messages.

It's unlikely to be exploited in practice because it requires a very particular set of circumstances but it's essentially a modern, more expensive version of the attacks used on the enigma machines back in the day. It's unlikely to be exploited on random people but it isn't out of the realm of possibilities for targeted attacks on particularly juicy adversaries or between nation state actors.


One Claude agent told other Claude agent via CLAUDE.md to do things certain way.

The way Claude did it triggered the ban - i.e. it used all caps which apparently triggers some kind of internal alert, Anthropic probably has some safeguards to prevent hacking/prompt injection and what the first Claude did to CLAUDE.md triggered this safeguard.

And it doesn't look like it was a proper use of the safeguard, they banned for no good reason.


You are confused because the message from Claude is confusing. Author is not an organization, they had an account with anthropic which got disabled and Anthropic addressed them as organization.


> Author is not an organization, they had an account with anthropic which got disabled and Anthropic addressed them as organization.

Anthropic accounts are always associated with an organization; for personal accounts the Organization and User name are identical. If you have an Anthropic API account, you can verify this in the Settings pane of the Dashboard (or even just look at the profile button which shows the org and account name.)


I've always kind of hated that anti-pattern in other software I use for peronal/hobby purposes, too. "What is your company name? [required]" I don't have a company! I'm just playing around with your tool on my own! I'm not an organization!


The thing is - Britannica is a lot smaller. Also - wikipedia is updated almost immediately for significant events where Brittanica would only be updated sometimes.

Wikipedia is uneven, some popular topics are well covered and have good info, others are outdated, biased, often written by one person with agenda.


the commercial company I worked at had a contract with Palantir - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220817005178/en/Bet... .

From what I understood they were to read our data and provide some kind of insights. I don't think any of this happened, at least while I was there.

They talk about government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) - it's most likely the reason the company got into this contract, so Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac get some kind of data that they need in their systems.


pull vs push. Plus if you start storing the last timestamp so you only select the delta and if you start sharding your db and dealing with complexities of having different time on different tables/replication issues it quickly becomes evident that Kafka is better in this regard.

But yeah, for a lot of implementations you don't need streaming. But for pull based apps you design your architecture differently, some things are a lot easier than it is with DB, some things are harder.


Funny you mention that, because Kafka consumers actually pull messages.


What is the reason for using Kafka then, sorry if I'm missing something fundamental.


A Kafka consumer does a lot of work coordinating distributed clients in a group, managing the current offset, balancing the readers across partitions, etc which is native broker functionality. Saying you can replace it all with a simple JDBC client or something isn't true (if you need that stuff!)


Not by busy waiting in a loop on a database query though.


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