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I am German but the test says I'm neither (31%/36%). I will now think about this result for a few days, if not weeks.....

Neat! Too bad it's proprietary closed-source though (at least the daemon is).

you can always either disable secureboot and driver signature verification, or (the better solution) just enroll your own certificate in your TPM and sign the driver with that...

Ah, yes, the [insert super inconvenient and complex thing to do that most people don’t know, want or should do] will solve it! And when that fails, surely the user can just write their own OS, right? Bunch of skill-issued complainers we the users are.

Well, the hope was always that those of us inconvenienced by M$ would all collectively contribute to making Linux distros more convenient for everyone. But we can't ever seem to get inconvenienced enough to actually sufficiently mobilize and/or coordinate such an effort.

It does seem like linux is having its moment right now. there's the money and effort valve is putting into KDE making the steamdeck and steammachine polished for their hardware which helps all users of KDE. cachyos is making having a rolling distro really smooth and snappy on old hardware and making games work mostly ootb. stuff like winboat and wine will let you use the few windows apps you need. you are kinda stuck though if you want to use something like fusion360 or solidworks. freecad has improved quite a bit but it's still like gimp where it's slightly worse UX in a lot of ways.

Valve is doing great work.

Now… maybe we could condense the 10,000 pointless distros down to a dozen? Oops, nope. Now 10,001, except this one has the menu bar in the middle of the screen and it moves around.


The distros are not pointless. For every one of them there was a human being that wanted something to work differently and the nature of open source let them do it. That should be celebrated and the day we loose that flexibility would be a very sad day.

This. Not to mention that for the mainstream users there are mainstream distros that are largely the same they have always been: Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, so I never really understood the issue of having tons of distros out there for enthusiasts.

I think that both perspectives are right. We should celebrate diversity, but there's also power in consensus.

There needs to be some competition between ideas, but if every bit of disagreement about direction ends in "I'm going to build my own distro, with blackjack and hookers", then we as a community won't ever end up building something that can compete with the megacorps.


This.

It takes leaders. And people with vision. It seems the lack is there, and not at technical makers.


I mean, the super-easy option would be to just use BitLocker for FDE. No hassles, just works. But I fugured since everyone here on HN hates MS I wouldn't even bring that up. Don't trust MS? Enroll yourown keys

Yes use Bitlocker, the thing that uploads the encryption key to OneDrive "for convenience" thereby negating the whole point of FDE in the first place

by default, yes. Can be disabled with a single click. That's something that even your Grandma can do, as opposed to installing VeraCrypt (with dozens of options on what to encrypt, and how, and when, ...)

Well no actually I do not think either of my granmothers could have done that, nor would they have even known (or cared) what a Bitlocker even was.

> or (the better solution) just enroll your own certificate in your TPM and sign the driver with that...

I'll tell Grandma that's what she needs to do.


Make sure that she setup a PKI infrastructure to manage certificate revocation as well, wouldn't want a bad grandson to mess with it.

Why would you put Grandma on VeriCrypt in the first place? It's the more 'difficult' option for FDE.

What's easier, and bitlocker doesn't count. I want my FDE to be based on a password or a keyfile, not simply by some code in the motherboard. I want it encrypted until I, the operator, provide some data to unlock.

In my limited experience with bitlocker, the disk is decryptable automatically as long as it's in the original motherboard.


> and bitlocker doesn't count.

Wat? Bitlocker is the answer to your question.

> In my limited experience with bitlocker, the disk is decryptable automatically as long as it's in the original motherboard.

It's unlocked (not decrypted) when the OS boots, yes. You can optionally enforce (not on Home) other unlock methods, such as PIN before the OS boots.

> I want my FDE to be based on a password or a keyfile, not simply by some code in the motherboard.

That's less secure than TPM.


If someone steals my laptop, and there is no factor of decryption requiring something I possess or know, then the only use of that disk being encrypted is that I can throw it out more safely at end of life. Thieves/LEO has the data because they have the motherboard.

If bitlocker has a PIN/passphrase decrypt option, then I missed it.


While a thief or LEO could boot the OS, just having the motherboard doesn’t give them access to the underlying data. They would need to have a valid user account.

you should protect your account with a password of course. that will be used to decrypt your drive/data

It was not made clear to me that my username/password was the decryption method! I was expecting something like Linux where a separate password is needed.

Furthermore it wasn't intuitive to me that my user account would decrypt more than just my home directory.


your grandma is probably fine with BitLocker....

And they say Linux is inconvenient because you have to open the terminal every once in a while.

How they pulled that off on a stock A500 (okay, a stock A500 with 512kb RAM expansion, but still) is far beyond me. It's pretty awesome and really deserved the 1st place

It's a really uplifting break compared to all the other news coming out now.

or you can unpack the executable (it's packed with UPX) and extract the MP3 from that ;-) You can also get high-res PNGs of some of the scenes that way (e.g. the floppy disk pan, or the fake Windows desktops)

because then it will never get done. There are still people using old Nokia phones, for those there will never be a solution.

The usual 80/20 rule applies here as well.

And if you really are a German citizen, you know how slow the wheels of government already turn in Germany, I assume next week you would be the one complaining that "Germany is so far behind" and that "other countries are so much faster at implementing stuff" :)


Nah, I'm that one idiot who uses alternative open software and just accepts when services aren't offered to me. The older I get, the easier it feels to not give a fuck anymore.

Can't buy any single fare public transport tickets online here in Stuttgart? Sure, I'll use the DeutschlandTicket NFC card. Can't view the EPA? Fine then I don't. Can't pay with Wero? Fine, I don't actually need to use shops that don't offer SEPA Vorkasse or Lastschrift (only without a dodgy "identity verification" fintech startup of course.


You are not alone.

We are not talking about old Nokia phones, but perfectly modern phones like those with GrapheneOS, that can be run on cutting-edge hardware, with a secure enclave, does not use Google Play Services by default, and has a high probability of being more secure than iPhone or any Android phone.

It is exactly the kind of alternative that European countries should embrace to become less dependent on US tech.

I am not sure if you are European, but why people are still supporting the GMS Android/iOS duopoly after the US revoked the Google accounts, Office 365 accounts, credit cards, Amazon accounts, etc. of ICC judges is beyond me. Supporting only iOS/Google GMS Android in a government app basically gives the US all the means to blackmail you and/or disrupt your digital infrastructure.

It seems there are still people working for European governments (including developers) who seem to have missed 2025 and the first few months 2026?

We are repeating the same mistakes as depending on Russian oil/gas again.


Then maybe it shouldn't be done? What??

Yeah, let's burn the witches who care about privacy! Jokes aside, in a democracy, the systems must be designed so that everyone can participate. We manage to do it with voting, with income tax declaration, but for some strange reason, with ID we want to achieve 1984 nirvana, and crush the voices who tell us that the surveilance society we are building is just setting us up for the next Hitler.

> There are still people using old Nokia phones

No one wants support for toasters and washing machines. We're talking general purpose compute hardware. TCP is also supported on all these devices. Quite frankly, it's probably easier to implement, if you are not fighting a locked-down OS like iOS.


The more I think about this, the more it seems they're not talking about linker map files[1]....

[1] https://www.tasking.com/documentation/smartcode/ctc/referenc...


systemd also stores the real name of the user using this computer in the same user record. Why not remove that as well, as it could uniquely identify the user of the computer? Or the uuid field...


Because the law requires the operating system to take proactive measures to ensure the age is correct.

You can put "Luke Skywalker" into the name fields, or even nothing at all, and there's no legal mandate that those fields be filled in or accurate.

The birthdate, however, has a legal mandate to be correct and checked for correctness by the software developers of the OS.

For example, if you visit facebook, tinder, or your bank and any of them store and communicate your actual age, the OS is mandated that it must update that field. Google's creepy analytics would also get involved here as if you put your age as a 99 year old, but google analytics show you are more likely to be 20->25 then the OS is supposed to update that age field with the better information from google.

And of course, facebook, google, and every other website can ask your browser for an age range and they are required to report it. Which makes this a symbiotic leaking of information.

All of this is about destroying anonymity on the internet. Today it's the age that needs to be perfect with communication efforts. Tomorrow it'll be the name. And of course, that will all be linked to every social media account.

Why is this bad? In many governments, it isn't. However, this presents a clear mechanism to track and monitor people who dissent with the government.


> The birthdate, however, has a legal mandate to be correct and checked for correctness by the software developers of the OS.

please tell me which law mandates that the birthdate that I put in a config file on my PC has to be correct?


It doesn't mandate that you correct it, it mandates that if something is more certain that the OS must update that field.

It's in both the Colorado and California laws.


so what will keep you from just doing "sudo vim" on that config file afterwards? Right: Nothing


You're right, you can go in and reset that field. You can also patch systemd to ignore requests to update the field. Nothing stops you the individual from bypassing the law.

The nasty part of the law isn't that a technically minded person can easily circumvent it. The nasty part is that you have to circumvent it and a lot of people likely won't. You circumventing it makes you stick out more than if you just leave it in place as is as the majority of people won't be doing that.

The point I and others are making is this is a law designed to track individuals and it only ramps up from here. And with this being the intent of the law, it's really only a matter of time before "sudo vim" becomes an illegal act. (or an act these governments attempt to make illegal).


but nobody is tracking anyone yet. The API is not yet in place, in fact there isn't even any idea on how that API should look like. This will likely take a few years to finalize (if ever).

Right now this is just one more field in a database (config file), nothing more and nothing less. Claiming it's the first step to "making sudo illegal" is quite a large stretch, don't you think? If that were the case, Windows DRM, Denuvo, and all those would also have been "the first step in making sudo illegal". Remember, circumventing DRM is against the law for ages now


The FBI for years has had teams of people navigating forums and derailing discussions. The people doing this are paid. Assuming you aren't a fed, you are not paid. Respect yourself and don't do their work for free.


Because this is a reactionary political statement and not a well thought out privacy project


Funny that the supposed “reactionary” statement is the one opposing bills backed by anti-porn activists and the Heritage Foundation.


Yeah, that's what reactionary means. Just blindly opposing things.


The problem is the law itself not whether a software package complies with it. Let me rephrase: people like you are the real problem, rather choosing to harass software maintainers that are merely following a ridiculous law instead of harassing your government to not implement it.


"Just following orders"


The thing is you can do something against these orders like we in the EU do every year against chatcontrol and other ridiculous laws. It's in your hands... stop sitting on them and stop moralizing other people's behaviour if you do jack shit yourself. If we will ever see the problem that some software mantainers have to comply to a law that will directly kill people you can bring your nazi talking points back to the table.


Like OpenAI and drones, for example?


Despite the name OpenAI is not an OSS Project.


Yet OpenAI has programmers implementing integrations with military technology. Those programmers are "just following orders." Nazi Germany weaponry was not an OSS project, it still killed millions.


guys, it's just a friggin data field in a local config file! Nothing that will end the world.

You can all come back when that supposed "law to force OSS to implement an actual age verification" is being discussed.

Otherwise, please get rid of all your knives (those are used to stab people by the thousands RIGHT NOW!) and your guns (those are used to shoot people by the thousands RIGHT NOW!) before complaining about a feature that is killing nobody


It goes nowhere of course, but people seem to think that the age verification laws that are currently being drafted everywhere somehow make this the obvious next step.

They don't understand that it's still all on your computer and you can of course set the birthdate to whatever you want (or not set it at all).

tl;dr: it's a tinfoil hat fork


So what’s the point of the “feature” then?


To make it easier for software to get a sane default? Same as why you put in your real name, it'll be used as default. For example I don't want to have to select my birth year on every website I visit. If there's a way for the browser to get a default year, then that's good for me.

Steam also asks you for your birth year all the time when visiting some of their pages, it's annoying as hell because you can't just type the year, you have to select it from a drop down list. They store it in a cookie, which is cool as it makes the process more streamlined. So you're also saying that this is a bad thing?

There is no law requiring you to put the correct birth date in a config file on your PC, the same as there is no law requiring you to write the correct birthdate on your wall calendar or whatever.


Tried it. Doesn't work. Does not show any vessels for me, list (and map) stays empty, console is full of "WS closed: no close frame received or sent. Reconnecting in 10s"

HN hug of death?


You got an aisstream.io key and set it before launching? Check the README.You can hard code it in shadow_tracker.py too

Bedtime in Sweden. Back tomorrow if you need support.


yeah, seemed I had an error in that key, it cut off 2 characters at the end. Works fine now, thanks!


Good!

Tried to do onboarding guide as proper as possible with the scripts and for different OSs. Many OSINT hobbyists/enthusiasts out there, but not all of them are familiar with installing dependencies/launching Python etc

It takes a few 3 min runs to render/populate the map.

Happy tracking!


Feels like that could be the point of the site. It's a shadow fleet where the ships are trying to stay hidden from tracking. That would be a great site.

Kind of like my favorite book on my self title "Everything I Know About Women". It's a hard cover book with hundreds of pages. Every one of them is blank.

I guess I find dumb things funny


:)

A hybrid war going on in the Baltic region. Women involved too

We have been running the main system a year. Loads of data, less women

Now there is this light version for the hobbyists, onboarding tricky for some users, but README covers it all


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