A hacker bought an expired domain for five euros and ended up secretly logging phone calls to military bases.
What the article says
- An old phone routing system called ENUM is basically dead, but a few country zones still quietly exist in the internet's DNS.
- She found that the zones for Saint Helena, Diego Garcia, and Ascension Island pointed to a nameserver domain that had expired, so she bought it herself.
- That handed her control over call routing for those territories, meaning she could have silently listened in on any call going through.
- She reported the flaw and got ignored, so she set up logging out of curiosity and later found hundreds of thousands of real calls, mostly to military bases.
- Nobody in the UK government took it seriously until she mentioned military bases, after which they finally took the domain off her.
What HN is saying
- Commenters are stunned she avoided legal trouble, given this touches national defense infrastructure.
- Some explain the old system isn't fully dead, telecom carriers and number porting services still use it privately behind VPNs.
- Several find it darkly funny that nobody cared until the words military bases entered the conversation.
- One reader questions a technical detail, asking how outgoing calls would avoid the same interceptable lookup.
- Others just enjoy the old school internet vibe, from the domain's webring style homepage to nostalgia for early web culture.
Someone built a real app store for Kobo e-readers, and the comments are a fight over whether that's a good idea.
What the article says
- Cobalt turns a Kobo e-reader into a small open platform. It adds a launcher, an app store, and a way for developers to build apps in Rust.
- Each app runs sandboxed, so nothing can mess with the rest of the device.
- You install Cobalt once by plugging into a computer. After that, new apps download over Wi-Fi, no cable needed.
- A simple reboot puts the Kobo back to its normal reading mode, so nothing is permanently changed.
What HN is saying
- Plenty of people are excited. They want manga readers, note-taking apps, and ways to pull in articles and books from other services.
- Just as many say they specifically want their e-reader to do nothing but read books, and worry an app store ruins that focus.
- A recurring correction: much of this is already possible with existing tools like NickelMenu and KOReader, so Cobalt isn't entirely new ground.
- The sharpest pushback has nothing to do with the software itself. Several commenters say the project's own website reads as obviously AI written, and that it undercuts trust in the project.
- One practical warning from an owner: only the color Kobo models have the faster dual core chip, which matters if you're buying one specifically to run apps.
Dan Luu argues coding agents have made performance work so cheap that slow software is now a choice, not a constraint.
What the article says
- Optimization used to need rare, expensive expertise. Now an agent can do days of profiling and tuning work in minutes, so it makes sense to try far more of it.
- He tests this on his own regex engine and ripgrep setup, and gets real speedups just by asking an agent to optimize for his own usage patterns rather than generic benchmarks.
- A friend's agent beat a human performance expert on a bounded optimization test, though agents still struggle with open ended problems and picking good experiments to run.
- His takeaway is that decent performance no longer requires specialized skill, it just requires someone willing to ask an agent to do the work and check the results.
What HN is saying
- Big split over whether the premise is even true. Some say software feels faster than ever thanks to agent driven rewrites, others say everything from Windows menus to ChatGPT's Mac app feels more bloated and crash prone than ever.
- Several commenters push back that speed was never really about hardware or language, it is about avoiding wasteful patterns, and most programmers never learned the basics regardless of tooling.
- A detailed account describes rewriting scientific code from Python to Rust with an agent, getting several times the speed and a tenth of the memory, calling the workflow excellent.
- One reply memorably notes agents are great at optimizing already sloppy code but weak at finding genuinely novel improvements to code that is already well tuned.
- Others blame web based apps, ad bloat, and companies with no competitive pressure for slow software, arguing the real problem is incentives, not agent capability.
Trade talks with the US collapsed, so Canada is hitting back tariff for tariff. Here's what broke it.
What the article says
- Talks fell apart at the last minute over US demands to weaken Canada's French language and cultural protections, which Carney called a dealbreaker.
- New US tariffs of fifty percent now apply to Canadian wine, dairy, cement, clothing and hockey gear, stacked on top of existing steel, auto and lumber tariffs.
- Economists warn the standoff could cost tens of thousands of Canadian jobs and shave a real chunk off the country's economy.
- Provincial leaders in Ontario and British Columbia are backing a hard line, framing it as standing firm rather than caving like other US trading partners.
What HN is saying
- Many commenters cheer Canada for holding the line, contrasting it with the EU, Japan and South Korea, which they say folded and lost leverage.
- A recurring argument is that trust in US trade deals is now broken for good, so retaliation matters less for this fight than for future ones.
- Some push back hard on the idea tariffs help Canada at all, pointing out they mostly tax Canadians themselves and won't hurt US exporters.
- A few suggest sharper countermoves, like taxing electricity and oil exports or gutting digital copyright law to squeeze US tech and media instead.
- One thread turns skeptical of the framing itself, noting the speech excerpts are just transcribed pauses in Carney's spoken remarks, not fragmented writing.
DeepSeek finally added vision to its cheap flash model, and HN immediately started testing it with clock photos.
What the article says
- DeepSeek's flash model can now take images alongside text, so it can describe pictures, read text from screenshots, and analyze charts.
- You can send images as embedded data, as a link, or by uploading them once and reusing them across requests.
- Every image gets resized before the model looks at it, so a huge photo and a small one end up costing roughly the same.
- There are hard limits on file size, image count, and dimensions, and images only work in user messages, not system or assistant ones.
- It also works through DeepSeek's Anthropic compatible endpoint, so tools built for Claude style image blocks should carry over with small tweaks.
What HN is saying
- Commenters mostly welcomed the update, since DeepSeek without vision had been forcing the model to awkwardly pretend it could see things.
- People ran their own tests with mixed results. One clock reading test failed at first then succeeded nine times out of ten on a retry.
- A landmark recognition test went worse, with the model confidently naming the wrong cathedral or bridge more often than a rival model.
- Someone pointed out the resolution cap is fairly low, about the same as a computer screen from the nineties, which limits fine detail work like reading a full page of text.
- A few asked whether the model will be open weight, and others debated whether DeepSeek had previously said it would skip multimodal entirely.