• 11 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The right to repair. It’s going to require the ability to make changes to the software on the vehicle. At a minimum the ability to replace the public encryption keys used to communicate with the servers. The bootloader and software is probably locked behind signing keys; so you need to be able to disable or add your own keys. I doubt anyone has access to the full protocols used to communicate with the servers. So, the full technical standard need to be released (which is never going to happen) or reversed engineered through unencrypted traffic analysis and reverse engineering the software.

    A good right to repair law could require some of that be releasable while the company is still active or all if the company goes belly up. IIRC there was a smaller EV company that went bankrupt and there was a concern that once the servers were shutdown the vehicles would be bricked. Not sure what happened in the end. In any case, cars as IOT is the stupidest idea ever created.








  • I don’t know if there is a polite way of putting this, but 3rd parties are a bit crazy. It’s not that 3rd parties are inherently bad, but we’re a first past the post system. 3rd parties tend to act as spoilers to whichever party they are closer to. Until the spoiler effect is fixed, you have to be a little crazy to run as a 3rd party candidate.

    And like you mentioned, ranked choice is one of the options to making 3rd parties viable. But the leadership for the democrats is luke warm on it and republicans are actively working against it. It’s going to take a bipartisan grassroots effort to drag these curmudgeons into a better system.







  • That depends. Are you looking at preserving the music without loss of information? Then you need to use a lossless format like flac. Formats like aac, mp3, opus can throw away information you’re less likely to hear to achieve better compression ratios. Flac can’t, so it needs more storage space to preserve the exact waveform.

    You can use a lossy format if you want. On most consumer level equipment, you probably won’t notice a difference. However, if you start to notice artifacting in songs, you’ll need to go back to the originals to re-rip and encode.



  • Bluetooth has one of the largest network stacks. It’s bigger than Wifi. This means some parts of the stack probably aren’t tested and may have bugs or vulnerabilities. It has duplicate functionality in it. This opens up the possibility that flaws in how different parts interact could lead to vulnerabilities or exploits.

    A number of years ago some security researchers did an analysis of the Windows and Linux stacks. They found multiple exploitable vulnerabilities in both stacks. They called their attack blue borne, but it was really a series of attacks that could be used depending on which OS you wanted to target. Some what ironically, Linux was more vulnerable because the Linux kernel implemented more of the protocol than Windows.


  • There’s talk on the Linux kernel mailing list. The same person made recent contributions there.

    Andrew (and anyone else), please do not take this code right now.

    Until the backdooring of upstream xz[1] is fully understood, we should not accept any code from Jia Tan, Lasse Collin, or any other folks associated with tukaani.org. It appears the domain, or at least credentials associated with Jia Tan, have been used to create an obfuscated ssh server backdoor via the xz upstream releases since at least 5.6.0. Without extensive analysis, we should not take any associated code. It may be worth doing some retrospective analysis of past contributions as well…







  • We have a very large christian population, and they all don’t behave in a monolithic manner. For surveys it makes sense to ask which denomination or type of christian they are. Some will response Catholic, Baptist, Protestant. Some will respond christian, sometimes non-denominational christian. It improves the survey results. For example, you might find differences between Catholics and Baptists that wouldn’t show up if you grouped them all together under a christian category.



  • Digging into the FCC’s website reveals that robotexts are illegal without prior consent. However, if they hand enter the message, that’s legal.

    That lines up with my experience the one time I kept getting annoying political texts. There was a human at the other end. They happily removed my number from their list after I threatened to vote for the other team if they kept harassing me. But that was the Democrats.

    You can try some of the FCC’s recommendations, but I would generally assume malice in this instance. The political entities will probably disappear before anything can be done.

    Report Unwanted Calls and Texts

    If you think you’ve received a political robocall or text that does not comply with the FCC’s rules, you can file an informal complaint with the FCC at fcc.gov/complaints. If you are receiving texts that you didn’t ask for, report the sender by forwarding the texts to 7726 (or “SPAM”). Campaigns should also honor opt-out requests if you reply “STOP.”