Posts by Kevin McMurtrie 3558 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007
I'm not nostalgic for old cars. Get yourself a carbureted car with emissions controls and try to drive the width of California. -100 to over 9000 feet altitude and 20F to 120F temperature in one day. Better bring a tool bag, a can of WD-40, and very carefully choose the octane at each fill-up.
My modern car does it with nothing but varying turbo lag to worry about. (This is also why All-Season tires exist)
A long time ago, I could see that AM radio would give you the best performance on a limited budget or an improvised setup. You could go to any appliance repair shop and build a transmitter or receiver from spare parts. You could even make a Morse code transmitter from hardware in a pub. It could serve for emergency communications in a small town.
I doubt that's true today. You don't see many electronic components these days that can be soldered together free-hand, and they're definitely not at the appliance repair shop. Most people are living in cities far too big to gather around The Professor's radio made from shipwreck bits and coconuts. There are working radios and transmitters lying around all over the place. Now it's a matter of selecting the band. 1 MHz AM is probably the worst out of a list of 27 MHz CB, 100 Mhz FM, 600-700 MHz cellular, 900 MHz walkie-talkie, and even 800 MHz DTV. Even "good" modern AM radios usually don't burden consumers with a full-size bar/loop/wire antenna.
Plenty of people still have long-range ham radio kits. There must be 10 houses in walking distance with a massive Yagi on a hand-crank telescoping tower.
There are plenty of laws already around the world. They're just not enforced on any level of operations.
I've played the whack-a-mole game at home and at work to stop hackers. You block a user ID, you block their activity pattern, you block their new activity pattern and new user ID, you block their network, you block their new activity pattern and new network and new user ID... It never ends. I care little about false positives on network blocks (go find a clean ISP) but blocking activity patterns over and over harms legitimate customers too. It's no wonder that the PyPi admin needed a break.
I still don't understand the social and government tolerance for hacking. Somebody can spend all their time crafting attacks and it's everyone else's job to spend all their time on defenses. The government doesn't care. The hosting provider doesn't care. The network peers sell DDoS services so they're definitely not going to interfere.
I'm all in favor for good security but at today's levels the attacks are a continuous drain on good resources. Any automation to prevent abuse is met with new automation creative abuse.
4G/5G Bands & Combos says they're using the Qualcomm Snapdragon X65.
Very tight beamforming and big antennas on the satellites is required. Last time I checked it wasn't clear if there was a single beam or if a satellite could track clusters of phones.
The argument about interference is probably BS meant to stall competition. It's not like the sats are beaming down microwave death rays. Everything has to be efficient so return signals from ordinary phones can be heard.
My Galaxy S9+ was sometimes a very good phone. Samsung would occasionally kill off some major feature with a bug and not fix it until whenever they felt like rolling out another security update. There were a couple of months where it had an unstable signal, a few months where WiFi cycled constantly, and I finally quit using after a couple of months with intermittent GPS.
So the big question is: Can you unlock the bootloader?
Android really is a mess. It started out as a way to have a flexible and powerful computer in your pocket but now Google wants to dumb it down to sell more cloud crap. A few updates past made Google Drive the only backup option for Android phones. Today I found out that those backups are impossible to restore without a Google Pixel phone. Google Support said it's not a bug; it's a feature.
It feels nice when your phone reaches that age when you can install LineageOS on it. Enable ADB shell as root. Do magic.
OsmAnd~ maps
FLAC music
Kiwix offline reader with Wikipedia and a few miscellaneous book collections
Backup of mirrorless camera storage to rsync home later
Yeah, 1 TB is about the minimum for traveling. I don't want to screw around with cloud storage or impromptu file shuffling. Now it just needs a headphone jack for those FLAC files. Too bad the stylus doesn't double as a headphone jack. It would probably be a mechanically trivial trick to build.
So many downvotes? I've honestly never seen calendar spam that doesn't come from Google. Sometimes I reject everything from 2607:F8B0::/32 and 2a00:1450::/29 for a week when Google's spam gets totally out of control. Even the linked Reg article says it's Google: https://www.theregister.com/2019/06/11/google_kaspersky_gmail_spam/
Yes, a few legitimate e-mails get blocked. I remind people that Google has spam problems and that's the way it is when you're using them.
#1 worst: Various useless gifts reminding you to take care of your mental and physical health, care for the environment, and be at one with nature. I only open the box to remove the plastic bits before dropping the whole thing in the paper recycling bin. Real mindfulness would have been hiring more people to stop the burnouts.
#2 worst: Tickets for free "memorable" activities. Cave tours, whitewater rafting, zip-lines, balloon rides, classic car drives, etc. The ticket usually buys 1/10 of the normal event so it's something like 2km of Sherpa through Tibet. Tibet? Oh, yes, it's a global catalog. With blackout dates. Thanks.
#3 worst: Giant oddly shaped insulated beverage mug that's not dishwasher safe. Can't give these away for free. Can't recycle them.
#4 worst: Company logo clothing in odd sizes. Fleece jacket with extra-large waist and stick-man sleeves. Synthetic, of course. A cotton one could at least be burned for fuel.
Absolutely this.
I've been running a home server continuously since the late 1990s. Improvements in power efficiency and IPv6 simplifies this to the point where the whole "cloud" can be fully personal-owned appliances. I haven't gotten any FOSS AI systems working yet (various software mismatches) but I'll keep trying periodically.
I learned something the last time I bought a "low noise" fan from DigiKey. A trick is to measure the air noise while the fan suspended by its wires. The motor can have violent torque ripple but that sound cancels out a short distance away with nothing to push against. Mount it on a hard surface and it's an air raid siren. Maybe the blades even ring.
You're not seeing it right.
It's all about "what if" scenarios. The Chinese government could force any telco to work for it, just as the US forces its own telcos to. The Chinese government is hostile so that's reason enough to not want their equipment in infrastructure.
That doesn't mean that an American hostile company is right for American infrastructure either. Think of the billions of dollars that could be saved if Oracle was on a no-buy list.
Surgeon using AI trained to look for things that surgery can fix, physical therapist looking for things that physical therapy can fix, pharmaceutical companies looking for things a prescription can fix, and 'merican medical insurance looking for things that Ibuprofen can fix. I bet each offers a solution for whatever ails you.
AI concludes what you train it to. We'll be fine as long as we understand that it delivers knowledge but not truth.
I'm pretty sure this problem has been solved before more easily. The AP has a special SSID that may communicate only with a remote VPN portal. (Bridging+isolation+filtering) The VPN portal handles authentication and use credits.
It requires a moderately beefy AP to handle more than a handful of clients at once. Some are even hardcoded to 10!
Various psychology, illusion, and hypnosis vulnerabilities still aren't fixed in living brains even centuries after being exploited in the wild. All are no-touch, remotely exploitable, 10/10 severity and nobody can find the maintainer. Come on, who leaves a debugging interface like hypnosis running in production?
There was a lot of random innovation going on and no time travelers to say which one was right. Early GUIs needed expensive hardware and time-consuming coding.
The PARC/Mac GUI was ported to the Apple ][ series and it was a failure. That GUI needed huge investment and marketing to get going.
How about AI to make their stupid scanner not intercept the same files in the same app infinitely? It makes IDEs, compilers, and data indexing crawl.
I ran a performance test and it's comparable to losing 15 to 20 years of performance in developer apps. I'm not sure how the bean counters justify the waste of hardware and productivity. There are other options.
First, entertainers posting to Twitter was a major source of Twitter traffic and advertising revenue. If entertaining is their day job, you can imagine them not wanting to pay for what they gave away for free. They could post elsewhere and make money from it.
Second, Twitter is no longer trying to be neutral platform. It's Elon Musk's soapbox. Lots of people and businesses want to be associated with it. Or maybe they don't want to pay Twitter's destroyer.
Every Ubuntu desktop major update: Start update, Wait a few minutes, Reboot, Use computer
Every Ubuntu server major update: Start update...
What do you want to do about the modified configuration file [everything in /etc/]?
- install the package maintainer's empty template
- keep the local version that no longer works
- show the differences between the versions with incomprehensible markup and line wrapping
- do a 3-way merge between available versions and crash
...spend rest of day fixing server.
Google thinks AI will replace them but they have it wrong. AI is poisoning Google. While Google search can still generally find websites and restaurants, it has become useless for finding knowledge. Ask it a question and get back five pages of links to rambling, pointless bot generated garbage. Now Google is developing their own AI and feeding it more trash.
Maybe Google forgets that Alta Vista and Yahoo faded away because they had ineffective qualitative analysis of search results.
Much like you'd want to know the ingredients of your food, you'd want to know exactly what has trained your AI. As every AI pusher keeps finding out, letting a bot roam free on the Internet to collect human knowledge doesn't mean it's worth talking to. It wouldn't surprise me if Getty Images figures out how to detect Stability AI and feed it poison.
A single R-C filter isn't good for much and these microphones are only 2 to 8 cubic mm. They're already full of with MEMS hardware, MEMS electrostatic bias, digitizer, and solder pads.
There could be a software fix if it's possible to adjust the sample rate. These digital MEMS mics take samples at whatever speed they're clocked for, so varying the clock rate of the interface would scramble sample aliasing attacks. Of course you'd have to resample the result in software without adding any new aliasing bugs. It's easy math but mistakes wouldn't be audible.
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