Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

outbound cyber attacks

Why were they OK before and why are they still OK from non-Russian networks? What about American hostile networks that are popular with Chinese and Russian hackers?

Another F-Droid vote

Plenty of apps already moved to F-Droid because they literally don't run under recently Play Store restrictions for Android 11+ file permissions. Google's FUSE mounts and file APIs have up to 10000 times slower performance than native filesystem access and they're plagued by bugs. No direct access permission might mean not working.

Yes, F-Droid fully supports donations to developers.

The path to here

Let's recount how we got here. In the early days, Apple came up with QuickTime. It was both a MooV container format and a rich, extensible toolset for operating on multimedia. Apple put a lot of effort into maintaining it an it was glorious. They had codecs that supporting prioritized screen writes to get 30 fps on hardware that can normally only manage 15 fps. The API was a bit cryptic but easy enough to integrate into any typical Mac Pascal app. I wrote one of the first two multimedia plugins bringing video support to browsers.

As time passes, video becomes less of a cool trick and more of a natural media format. The MooV container was starting to show its age at this point. It was a big bag-of-anything with an index in front of the data for fast loading of small videos. The complexity of figuring out what everything meant in a container exploded as QuickTime component plugins started being published. That up-front index meant that encoding always needed a minimum of two passes. Apple pressed on and convinced MPEG to make MooV the foundation of the MPEG4 container anyways. MPEG4 became the golden standard for poor compatibility.

Now enter the x86 Macs. At this point the QuickTime native API is a mix of 68K stack params and PPC register params moving data in Pascal and C formatting. The contents of old MooV files is completely indecipherable. A MooV can contain PICT, which means that a big-bag-of-everything can contain more big-bags-of-everything. A PICT can contain a MooV that contains a PICT, and on forever. That up-front index is getting in the way of long recordings and streaming.

Solution... None. Apple abandoned QuickTime as an incomplete system component but never admitted it. The APIs were required for developers yet left to rot. Only mega-corps could afford to build Mac multimedia apps by implementing the entire multimedia codebase in-house and then working with Apple to make it perform well in an OS that didn't want to support it. To make matters worse, Apple decided to do it all over again starting from the iPhone side. Most of that work was closed-off secret sauce that nobody could touch. So they didn't. To top it off, Apple went back to the dark days of soldered-in graphics cards for desktops with non-standard drivers. A 4 year old Windows or Linux box might have a brand new video card, but a 4 year old Mac has a 5 year old video hardware for certain.

So here we are today. If there's a cool new video app it's going to hit Windows first. Does anyone want to work with Apple to completely rewrite the graphics driver interfaces? Will you have to tell customers that they need a new computer if it's just a little old? Do you trust Apple to maintain the APIs if you use them?

Weird synergy

I'd think that a good anti-phishing strategy would be blocking e-mails with links eventually leading to a website hiding behind Cloudflare.

Training

I imagine PG&E using this and having it flag repairs as extreme anomalies. Sure, they cover some rugged terrain, but they also have disasters where extreme weather means adding a hoodie to your shirt and jeans before going for a walk.

And yet

There are plenty of openly hostile networks in the world. They have completely fake registration data, they operate systems that seem to have no purpose but to be infected with malware, and they run brute-force attacks 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, year after year. Some can argue that these are not the exact point from where an attack is deployed but you better believe that they gathered the targets.

Yet Cogent, AT&T, Level 3, Telia, NTT, GTT and all the others have no problem peering with these networks. This needs to stop.

https://www.abuseipdb.com/statistics <-- almost always the same networks in the top 10. Russia has recently stepped up their game and knocked scum-host Frantech out of the list, but that one's still going at it too.

Anti-static

I wonder if needles with high voltage AC could bleed some charge out of the dust. It might suck up a precious 20W or so but maybe it only needs to run for a few seconds after a dust storm so that the dust can be shaken off.

The self-cleaning reflectors along roads are brilliant but I suspect that wind powered brushes are more like wind powered grinders on Mars.

Google says

LOL!

It's a good time to be a billionaire

I have product shortages from my employees quitting? I guess I'll need to raise prices.

Lights on, sun out

When they say "UPS" I assume they mean batteries and generators, because batteries are insignificant on a grid scale. Most of those generators are NOT clean. They make "rolling coal" redneck trucks look like toys.

Retro

I can't help thinking that we've skipped over much easier steps like analog computing chips (analog units linked by analog flash memory). I see it pop up every now and then in the news but it doesn't get cash shoveled into it like quantum computing.

It makes me think that quantum computing gets all it's money for cracking crypto algorithms where at least 2^4096 numerical precision is needed.

WiFi infinity

Customer: What I really want is low packet loss and jitter through walls so I can video conference

Wi-Fi Alliance: Line-of-Sight speeds are going to be faster than your cable!

Forgot...

Buy the upgrade. It's fixed there. No, we swear this isn't an infinite loop. We value our customers. Anything else I can do to give you excellent service today?

Olympic coverage?

I've noticed that there's almost zero Olympics new coverage in the US. Maybe it's lack of interest this time around but I imagine the best reporters don't dare publicly appear in China these days. Maybe you said something sometime that angered somebody and now you need to be "re-educated."

Not that the same reporters would want to be anywhere near a redneck party in the US either. Reporting is more dangerous, less honored, and less paying than it used to be. What's left is essentially paid advertising and clickbait.

Back here in the old US of A

Usps.com, the government selected shipping service, still allows itself to be embedded in a web page that adds a payment form. No proxies needed for phishing. Cloudflare is still there for obfuscation, of course.

Now with authenticity chips

CP - No plastics

HP - Yawn

CP - Eco friendly

HP - Whatevs

CP - Non-refillable

HP - Take my money!

Why CSAM?

There are an enormous number of internet providers that absolutely do not care if their customers are using services for criminal purposes. Not just obscure /24 resellers, but big name providers too. They will peer with openly criminal networks too - no problem.

I'm always suspicious of "think of the children" selective law enforcement. I can only assume it's driven by ignorance, greed, laziness, guilt, or bribery intense lobbying.

nm != state of the art

TI has some amazing chips in the tiny part of their catalog that I'm familiar with. Vast expanses of traditional supporting components have become unnecessary. Sometimes the magic comes from an internal microcontroller that performs adjustments and dynamic configurations to virtualize physics-defying perfect systems.

Some other chip makers are still selling analog chips with early 1970s or 1980s architectures. They're essentially a bunch of darlington and long-tailed pair transistor clusters with taps for vast expanses of external supporting components.

Illegal?

I know Sony and Samsung do this for their cellphones. 1-star reviews like "It haz good b 2 thic" are published but critical reviews with details and examples vanish.

upgradeable to take on new advertising

There, fixed the title. I never use the shovelware in my LG TV yet it keeps downloading more and more of it. It's best to turn it on early so it can finish flashing messages about everything new. It's getting unplugged as soon as the core software is stable because I stream from a much less annoying external HDMI device.

Air gapped

Admin: You need the change your access group for that door. Security's tight now.

Me: (clenching fist between door frame and door handle while sliding badge up the door's gap): Nah, it still lets me in.

Wired speeds*

* Wired speeds when you're in less than 1m away and there are no obstructions. The only advantage I see in WiFi is not tripping over a patch cable. I still need lots of Ethernet cables to keep the WiFi APs in close range.

Sorry to change topic

Doesn't APNIC have better things to do? They have multiple major countries in their jurisdiction that are part of global IP addressing but don't use APNIC. Japan has JPNIC, Korea pretends to use KRNIC, and China and Vietnam have been recycling the same dummy registration templates for maybe 15 years now.

Handed it to Apple

The worst thing that Google and cellphone makers did was copy Apple style. Apple is always going to win in that competition. In the meantime, everyone that hates iPhones can find little that's worth buying. Your average premium Android phone is like an iPhone that doesn't work correctly.

Google has really gone out of their way to break Android in the past few releases. Amazon, Samsung, and Chinese phone makers could release their own variants that outsell Google's certified Android in 5 years.