Google just pulled uBlock Origin from the Chrome store for good, and Firefox is having a moment because of it.
What the article says
- Google finished killing off the old extension format, and every extension still using it, including uBlock Origin, has been removed from the Chrome Web Store.
- Extensions already installed keep working for now but can never update again and can't be reinstalled once removed.
- This hits more than Chrome itself. Other browsers built on Chromium, like Brave, also rely on that same store, so their users lose access too.
- Brave is getting around this by hosting a handful of the banned extensions itself, including uBlock Origin and NoScript.
- Google's official reason is that the new format is safer and gives it tighter control over what extensions can do.
What HN is saying
- The dominant reaction is simple, switch to Firefox, repeated by dozens of commenters as the obvious fix.
- Several people argue this is now a safety issue, not just annoyance, since ad blockers protect less tech savvy relatives from malicious ads and scams.
- There's real nostalgia and anger here. Longtime users recall loving Chrome when it launched, and now actively steer friends away from it.
- A pushback thread argues most Chrome users won't notice or care since existing ad blocking still mostly works for now.
- A side gripe surfaces too, some commenters are annoyed at Mozilla itself for adding AI features and integrations instead of just keeping Firefox lean.
A guy rewired a real phone booth at Burning Man so strangers anywhere can call it and chat with whoever walks by.
What the article says
- A phone booth sits on a dusty corner of Black Rock City all week, free for anyone to use.
- Dial the number and you get five free minutes to call almost anywhere in the world, or you get a random burner who happens to be walking past.
- If it is busy you get a busy tone, and six unanswered rings means nobody picked up, so you may need to try again.
- The builder swapped out the guts of an ordinary payphone to skip coin payment and route calls over the internet instead.
What HN is saying
- The builder showed up in the thread to answer questions directly, which people loved.
- Commenters shared warm stories from calling it, including one couple who got an impromptu wedding at a nearby camp after stopping to use the phone.
- Someone noted a similar phone booth existed twenty years ago, and the builder said his own has run most years since 2013.
- A tangent debated whether Burning Man is really just a rich tech crowd, with longtime attendees pushing back that most people there have nothing to do with tech.
- One person joked their ISP flagged the site as dangerous, which puzzled others since ISPs do not normally push notifications like that.
The free video editor everyone forgot about just shipped color grading and screen recording good enough to matter.
What the article says
- OpenShot 4.0 adds a real color grading view, with wheels, curves, LUT support, and scopes like waveform and vectorscope, so you can fix and stylize footage without leaving the app.
- A new recording mode lets you capture your mic, webcam, screen, and system audio at once, each kept as a separate editable clip, useful for tutorials and voiceovers.
- Object masking now runs locally using downloadable AI models, so you can select and track a subject through a clip with no cloud service or subscription.
- The timeline has been rebuilt natively for smoother zooming and editing, and core effects like blur got dramatically faster.
- The whole editor moved to a more modern foundation, including early groundwork for an eventual Android version.
What HN is saying
- Commenters mostly compare OpenShot to rivals rather than praise it outright, with LosslessCut, Shotcut, and Avidemux coming up as go to tools for simple lossless cutting.
- Several people say they still prefer DaVinci Resolve for serious color work, though they admit OpenShot and Kdenlive have gotten easier to use over the years.
- The sharpest gripe is a cookie banner on the OpenShot website, with one user refusing to even look further, though others point out you can just install it from Flathub and skip the site entirely.
- One commenter is impressed the app looks this polished while built in Qt, and another asks why open source software so often lags on design, sparking a short debate.
- A few people flag it as one of those releases better shown than described, wishing for a demo video instead of just screenshots.
A guy pointed his security camera mics at the yard and now gets alerts every time a new bird species shows up.
What the article says
- A blogger ran his existing security camera microphones through BirdNet-Go, an open source tool that listens nonstop and identifies birds by their calls.
- It runs entirely on his own hardware, so nothing gets sent to the cloud and there is no subscription.
- It flags brand new species the first time they show up, so watching the list grow became a genuine daily habit for him and his wife.
- It also picks up bats and frogs, and once memorably flagged a passing neighbor's fart as a mystery sound.
- A newer detection model roughly doubles how many species it can recognize compared to the one it shipped with.
What HN is saying
- Tons of people have built their own version of this, swapping in different cameras, dedicated microphones, or e-ink displays to show the day's sightings.
- The recurring gripe is false positives. Several commenters say the tool confidently misidentifies calls, especially with mimics like mockingbirds or in less common regions like Australia.
- One commenter shared the surprisingly winding origin story of Merlin, the popular Cornell bird ID app, including a funding fight over whether it was too easy to be educational.
- A few people took the same idea sideways, using cameras for tracking individual animals or even reviewing their kid's soccer games.
- General consensus is that this is a rare hobby project that keeps paying off daily instead of being abandoned after a week.
Twelve terabytes of decade old Steam files just leaked, including cut Portal 2 content and lost games.
What the article says
- A massive dump of Steam's old file distribution system just spread across the internet, covering nearly every game and version uploaded between 2003 and 2013.
- It includes public releases but also pre release builds, prototypes, and playtest versions from Valve and other publishers that archivists had long assumed were gone for good.
- The leak stops at 2013 because that is when Valve switched to its current, more locked down distribution system.
- People close to Valve say the files were not stolen through any hack. They sat on a public server endpoint with no password or protection at all.
What HN is saying
- Commenters are digging through the trove for specific finds, like a long forgotten Steam release of League of Legends and beta footage of Portal 2 that had a scrapped time slow mechanic.
- Some think the leak could let people revive old multiplayer servers and run retro LAN parties on original era hardware.
- A few push back on nostalgia for its own sake, arguing a game designed for its intended audience does not need to be made easier for everyone.
- There is debate over how the hosting site avoids legal trouble, with guesses ranging from an untouchable jurisdiction to simply indexing files rather than storing them.
- One commenter wrote a quick script to make sense of the leak's file listing and shared it, while others flagged this as a repost of an earlier thread.