.name Grandfatheredneil.fraser.name · 272 points · 41 comments · 2hpolicywebVerisign has withdrawn its plan to terminate about 22,000 .name domains and email redirects, keeping existing registrations alive indefinitely while closing new third-level .name registrations.
Key points
The original plan would have ended existing third-level .name domains and email redirects, with the reversal announced after a long, expensive campaign led by Neil Fraser and others.
Fraser says ICANN was petitioned formally, with reconsideration requests and supporting letters, and one advocate flew to Bali to make the case in person.
What HN thinks
Commenters say the first plan lacked clear communication about protections or re-registration of the upper-level domain, and note that Verisign had proposed cutting off records on a set date.
One commenter who let a first.last.name registration lapse during the scare was told by others to check registrar grace periods, since some registries allow renewal after expiry.
Smart home devices should work without the internetdocodethatmatters.com · 170 points · 81 comments · 3haitoolsA long-time home automation builder describes ten years of local-first rules, keeping core functions running with the internet down, and the lessons from two talks on the subject.
Key points
Rule one is that core functions must work with the internet unplugged, and Alexa can be a way in but never the only way.
The house uses Tasmota on ESP boards, an MQTT broker, and Node-RED on a Raspberry Pi, with Alexa and some AWS services as optional extras.
Four scheduled triggers all pointed at the same garden pump, showing how automations quietly conflict as a setup grows.
Rules 6 through 11 were added after the house went from one occupant to several, adding requirements like logs on cloud devices and no batteries that need frequent swaps.
What HN thinks
Commenters broadly endorsed local-first buying: Zigbee or Z-Wave, flashing firmware, and Home Assistant were the most common recommendations.
The strongest caveat was that a switch which only sends requests to automation fails the stricter bar, and few devices offer a local API plus full on-device control.
One commenter noted that a cloud service's shutdown can strand a device, and suggested reverse engineering as a fallback, though that takes effort.
AlphaProof Codedeepmind.google · 471 points · 153 comments · 6haisecurityGoogle DeepMind used AI agents to produce Lean machine-checked proofs of security properties for the compiled code of Signal's cryptographic library, in about four weeks.
Key points
Agents generated over six million lines of Lean, with human experts reviewing the specifications and about one percent of the codebase flagged by the agents.
Proofs cover the compiled binary, modeled against Arm instruction semantics, not just the design-level protocol.
Two previously fixed bugs were reintroduced into an isolated copy, and the system produced machine-checked proofs that the buggy versions were insecure.
Stubbed-out crypto and system call routines, plus concurrency and signal handling, are not modeled, so guarantees depend on those contracts holding.
What HN thinks
Commenters stressed that the proofs cover only the stated security goals, not bugs like memory leaks, crashes, or deadlocks, and that the specification itself can be wrong.
One commenter noted that the verified library is only the cryptographic protocol library, not the Signal app or the surrounding operating system.
Several commenters pointed out that a machine-checked proof can pass while the theorem being proved is the wrong one.
Blender 5.3 released with Gaussian Splat supportblender.org · 247 points · 33 comments · 2htoolsdesignBlender 5.3 adds native 3D Gaussian Splat import from PLY, SPZ, and glTF, storing splats as point clouds that can be processed with Geometry Nodes and rendered in EEVEE, Cycles, or Workbench.
Key points
Splats carry scale, rotation, base radiance with opacity, and spherical harmonic coefficients as point cloud attributes.
By default splats render with an emissive shader; swapping the Emission node for a Diffuse BSDF gives rudimentary relighting.
The article warns that sRGB versus linear color differences can cause rendering inaccuracies, especially at low opacity and high radiance.
Other 5.3 changes include Principled BSDF dispersion, DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction denoising, and projects support.
What HN thinks
One commenter reported running a 4M-splat scene on an M4 beta build and finding the support mature and well integrated.
Commenters noted Gaussian splats are poorly suited to producing clean, low-vertex meshes for typical game pipelines.
Several commenters pointed to triangle splatting and other alternatives as options worth considering alongside Gaussians.
Ableton Live 13ableton.com · 172 points · 206 comments · 5htoolsgamingAbleton Live 13 adds a step sequencer, ARA 2 plug-in support, Drum Synth, Capture Automation, Multiband and Mid-Side Racks, and five Softube effects, with release slated for early 2027.
Key points
Live 13 Intro is limited to 16 tracks and Scenes, while Standard offers unlimited tracks and adds many more instruments and effects.
Pre-orders are discounted 20% for Live 12 owners, and Live 12 buyers can get the matching Live 13 edition free at release.
Rack Updates raise the Macro limit to 32 and add custom mapping curves; Transient Shaper and Clipper are bundled in Suite.
Push 2 gets the Step Sequencer but not Custom Layouts or the Performance Mixer, which are Push 3 only.
What HN thinks
Commenters repeatedly raised collaboration as Live's biggest gap, with users sharing stems or freezing projects because project files break across differing plugins.
Several commenters called the update incremental and said the new features should have arrived in a free update, though others pointed to frequent 12.x point releases.
Commenters widely praised Live's UI, and the website itself drew many reports of crashing mobile browsers.
The Hardest Tarball?stoppels.ch · 117 points · 13 comments · 3hsystemssecurityA single GNU tar command can produce a tarball that 8 common tar implementations extract in different ways, some yielding different files, others rejecting it outright.
Key points
The archive uses a hard link whose pax header sets size=512, the size of one tar header, so the following 512 bytes are read as its data.
bsdtar writes those 512 bytes into the hard link, so file ends up containing the tar header of empty.
7-Zip, node-tar, tar-fs and Rust's tar crates skip the 512 bytes and extract only file and café.
Java Commons Compress creates a separate café file holding the header of empty as data, while file keeps its original contents.
What HN thinks
Commenters note that POSIX's wording on data blocks for hard links is vague, and one maintainer of several parsers disputes the claim that the behavior is straightforward.
A commenter argues that failing outright is the safest option but the least helpful for users recovering data, suggesting modes for untrusted input versus manual extraction.
One commenter notes tar serves both backup and software distribution, which have different threat models, so best-effort extraction suits backups but is risky for distribution.
AMD's Zen 6 Family: Feeding the Beastchipsandcheese.com · 42 points · 13 comments · 1hhardwaresystemsChips and Cheese finds Zen 6 reworks parts of the core, with Zen 6c diverging from Zen 6 in out-of-order structure sizes rather than just cache and core count.
Key points
Zen 6 reorder buffer is 576 entries and Zen 6c's is 640; integer register file grows from 288 to 352 and load queue from 280 to 330 on Zen 6c.
Zen 6 doubles VNNI units from two to four, raising a 512-bit VNNI test from 1.99 to 3.88 instructions per cycle.
Zen 6 L3 latency is 10.7 ns versus 10.3 ns on Zen 5, but Zen 6c rises to 16.4 ns due to its lower clock and larger CCX.
Zen 6 drops integer multiply units from three to two, with AMD saying the third did not justify its area cost.
What HN thinks
Commenters noted the Zen 6c L3 latency jump and speculated that future chiplets may need costlier interconnects or partitioning.
Several commenters argued memory bandwidth rarely limits workloads, so latency matters more than adding memory controllers, though AMD's newer EPYC parts already have 16 channels.
I deleted all my SSH keysblog.infected.systems · 76 points · 19 comments · 5dsecuritytoolsThe author deleted all their SSH private keys and switched to hardware-backed alternatives, according to the thread; the article itself could not be fetched, so details are unverified.
What HN thinks
Commenters describe several replacements: FIDO2 -sk keys on YubiKeys with touch required, ssh-tpm-agent using a laptop TPM, and PIV or PKCS#11 setups.
A caveat raised is that ssh-tpm-agent stores encrypted private key files on disk, with the TPM only doing decryption, and a TPM owner password matters for security.
One commenter notes that FIDO2 -sk keys can be forwarded with ssh -A for multi-hop access, while hardware resident keys are reportedly of little use under Qubes.
