Notices by Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange)

@wb2ifs @EndemicEarthling @pteryx @pluralistic There are legitimate technical reasons there WRT mixer tuning ranges etc. Something meant to run at carriers in the 1-2 GHz region might well have trouble tuning down to 100 MHz - much less 1 MHz for AM - without that being an explicit design requirement (perhaps involving extra hardware to bypass a mixer etc)

@SwiftOnSecurity I've always considered security to be a subset of reliability, emphasizing on faults triggered by malicious actors rather than random malfunctions.

@0xabad1dea Oh we get that too.

But in a recent project we were promised a bunch of (redacted) in shipping configuration plus a couple with jtag enabled, debug console active, etc so we could poke around and study it more.

Never got that. Or source code. Or unencrypted firmware binaries. Or any of the other goodies we were supposed to get.

@0xabad1dea Story of my life.

Also things like debug edition firmware that half the time we're promised we never get.

@gsuberland @dalias @puppygirlhornypost2 As someone who has experience with esoteric computer architectures, designing password crackers, and memory hardness, I hate argon2.

They seem to have done everything right to make it very difficult to accelerate.

@dalias Most of the random cheap IP security cameras on Amazon have H264 RTSP streams available.

They do usually have horrible firmware full of cloud BS and require some sketchy windows binary for initial provisioning, but you can set it up from a VM then note the URL of the stream, wipe the VM, and just access the raw stream with zoneminder or VLC or whatever.

Put it on a subnet with no outbound allowed and you're good to go.

Finally popped my yak stack enough to be working on the trigger crossbar firmware again. It's good to be back, although I'm gonna have to context switch back to ngscopeclient after the weekend.

I think a good next step, after some planned bug fixes and refactoring, is going to be finally adding IPv6 support to staticnet. Long overdue.

But before I do that I want to replace some of the awkward home grown internal data structures with etlcpp types to simplify things.

@dlharmon Also @g4dbn and @ftg thoughts?

@dlharmon what are your thoughts on direct coax-to-PCB solder connections? Any experience, good or bad? How high of a frequency is it feasible to push this sort of launch to?

I've got several applications in mind, one only needs like 2 GHz of bandwidth while the other would ideally run from DC to Ku band.

The general goal is high density multi signal probing applications using .047" micro coax and jamming them in as tight as possible. Two lanes for initial testing using a GSSG or GSGSG tip geometry. Separate 50 ohm paths usable for either a diff pair or two independent single ended signals.

Right now I'm using SMPM which is pricey (especially for duals) and also still a little bigger than I'd like.

@ftg @dlharmon @g4dbn So slot in the PCB with the center conductor flush with the surface?

I was hoping I could get decent results with the shield soldered to a top side ground layer then the center bent over. KF047 is only 1.2mm OD with the jacket removed, so there's not a whole lot of height variation to deal with vs .086.

@ftg @dlharmon @g4dbn Hmmm. Thinking a bit more, if I were to prototype this on OSHPark 4L...

The outer prepregs are 202 um thick. So if I milled down to L2 I'd be most of the way there.

@ftg @dlharmon @g4dbn Yeah, I get the concept. It's more a question of how bad things would be without it on really-small cable (where you might not even need the bend, just use more solder than usual).

The center conductor is 290 μm, dielectric 920, shield 1190.

So the difference in radius between the dielectric and center conductor is only 315 μm.

I guess the other question is how cheaply I could get my PCB fab to do controlled-depth milling...

@gsuberland @whitequark I mean 1000base-T and all baseT1 use hybrids to bidir each pair. This is nothing new.

Surprised they rolled their own though, did T1 not exist when HEC was created?

Any meteorologists looking for a research project?

Investigate a potential linkage between large earth-directed CMEs and cloudy/rainy weather. I swear every time the aurora forecast is good the weather forecast calls for the worst weather we've had all week :p

Mostly joking but it'd be hilarious if there was an actual causal link even if tiny.

@sertaptap A few months after buying my house I got a postcard from a realtor "recently sold in your neighborhood for $XXX".

It was my house.

@dangoodin Weren't we just talking about why mandatory-internet-connected solar systems are bad like a week or two ago?

@clacke @PhilSalkie Autonomous vehicles in closed environments like rails or tunnels are completely plausible, but I don't see them ever being viable in the general case especially in the kind of lower density / rural areas I spend a lot of my time in.

Last time we had a major snow storm, the public works department ran out of road-closed signs to block off all of the steep hills they lacked the manpower to plow. There's zero chance of them ever getting the resources needed to make and maintain robot-readable markings everywhere.

What we're going to get in the meantime is half-baked solutions made by the same people who think LLMs are going to replace human writers and scientists and who knows what else.

And who are running it all on hardware built by the lowest bidder without any effort put into reliability.

It is indeed "move fast and break things". The cars are moving fast and they're breaking things.

@sun @alan @mapachin The point of the post I thought you were commenting on (sorry) was that I'm far more concerned about corp than gov surveillance.

My own country's spooks aren't (on paper) supposed to be spying on me. Foreign spooks probably don't care as I don't think I'm a national security threat to anyone.

But corps have a fiduciary duty to data mine everything they can learn about me to serve their bottom line. usually to my detriment.

@sun @alan @mapachin Yeah but that also doesn't make me, a private individual in the US, at all interesting to them.

In my threat model US corps > foreign corps > foreign spooks > US spooks in terms of how likely they are to actually be actively spying on me in a manner detrimental to my interests.

How many engineers across the embedded industry do you think have been called into HR for mentioning to a coworker they were "experimenting with MDMA" for solving some performance issue in their firmware?