Notices by Gus (projectgus@aus.social)

Is there anything more American than designing a beefy power-hungry rip-roaring world-cooking technology and then it turns out someone else can do almost the same thing far more efficiently?

"The auto industry is unique in that an 18-year-old employee from Texas can query the billing information of a vehicle in California, and it won’t really set off any alarm bells."

It seems like nothing in the current set of regulatory schemes or business practices will stop automakers from chucking everyone's detailed car telemetry and other PII into one giant database and then improperly securing it...

https://samcurry.net/hacking-subaru

(This time it was Subaru.)

Note there's no Europe in that database, though. I wonder if GDPR made them take it more seriously, or if there's just a second giant Europe database out there somewhere... (The recent VW experience suggests the latter.)

#privacy

Probably a tired take, but Kaos (2024) is the best bit of TV I've seen for a good while. Well produced and written, solid cast and music choices. Good to see a modern big budget rehash of some properly old source material instead of more superhero minutiae!

When it came out two people at my local cafe recommended it unprompted, and they were both right. 😆

It is violent and gruesome in places, but so are the stories they are adapting. I think they handled that part pretty well.

Encouraging the group chats I care about to move from Messenger to Signal. Its gone great so far, don't know why I left it so long.

Next step is clearing my profile and unfriending everyone. I meant to do this years ago.

I don't know if I will totally delete Zuckerberg from my life, but if I can whittle it down so I only use it to message strangers about picking up car parts, or to check local event details that aren't posted anywhere else, then I'll be pretty pleased with that.

Spending the second day of the year catching up on a job I've put off for almost seven years: sorting through a bunch of Apple II computer bits from when my parents downsized...

Will any of it still work? Will this be pleasant nostalgia or a giant chore? Who can say!

Credit to the good people at TADIRAN for making a lithium battery that lasted over 35 years without leaking

That checkerboard cursor did unearth some nostalgia, it turns out

The Australian government is reviewing Australian Design Rules for vehicles, and our local Automotive Aftermarket Association is pushing for us to harmonise with the US.

*“Consumer preferences have shifted dramatically toward U.S.-style 4x4s, utilities, and recreational vehicles, yet our regulations remain stuck in a European-centric framework that doesn’t align with Australia’s needs.”*

Great, lets adopt the regulatory system where pedestrian and bike fatalities have risen notably since 2010. After all, this way AAAA's member companies can spend less on safety testing accessories for impractically sized utes and SUVs...

https://www.aaaa.com.au/industry-advocacy/addressing-adr-challengesa-path-forward-for-australias-automotive-industry/

"Throughout the history of software development, employers have consistently preferred to fund tools that deskill and attempt to abstract expertise away over tools that genuinely improve productivity and the quality of the output, but also happen to require expertise and skill.

This has worked so far because the software industry is usually flooded with money."

- Catching up with @baldur's essay from earlier this year: *"React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity"*

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

Got pulled in as secondary consultant for a head-scratcher of a problem flashing an ESP32 from a Linux SoC embedded in a product.

The ESP32 flashes perfectly from a USB/Serial adapter, but would never flash from the SoC's onboard UART.

Waveforms on the scope looked absolutely perfect, all the transitions happen at the right time and we see the ESP32 go into its serial bootloader mode. However, it never sends any reply to the packets sent from esptool.

Several hours of head-scratching and triple-checking signals ensue.

Eventually I zoomed in on the packets sent by the SoC's onboard UART. esptool sends these SYNC packets with 0x55 square wave payload, and the ESP32 auto-bauds based on what it receives.

The problem is there, but its not exactly easy to spot...

#esp32 #embedded

There was a pretty tidy looking Apple Extended Keyboard (1990ish vintage) in the same bin. I'm kind of proud I left that there, as I already have an Apple Extended Keyboard II that I should get rid of.

Pleased(*) to see my local tip has reopened their ewaste sorting centre, so I now get to find out what was wrong with this 1000W Corsair PC power supply.

(*) If you ignore the increased hoarding this enables

I have a probably-foolish question about IPv6 and privacy, I suspect something fundamental I don't understand.

My home ISP issues IPv6 ranges that effectively never change. I know there is a spec for how to do automatic rotation, but mine haven't changed in the 9+ months I've been watching them. I think this is pretty common.

A big win if you want to run any kind of server as you basically get all the static IPs that you could want, at no extra charge. Yay!

However, isn't any privacy preserving stuff you do in your home web browser almost a waste of time now? At best, all the internet access from this location is trivially correlated by the IPv6 prefix. At worst, it's trivially correlated per-device if your home router never rotates addresses.

I know dynamic IPv4 isn't "for" privacy, but (especially with CGNAT) I always felt a little comfortable that correlating someone's online activity long term would take at least a small amount of effort (for businesses, not for governments).

(BTW I know that routing all traffic through a VPN provider takes this mostly off the table, similar to CGNAT but you get to solve a lot more captchas. I still feel like I must be missing something, given the overlap between nerds who like Privacy and nerds who like IPv6 rollout.)

#ipv6 #privacy

LOL, I was thinking my solder flux gel is nowhere near as effective as when it was when new.

One syringe is over 10 years old, one is 7 years old. Even the colour difference between the two is telling... 🤦♂️

The manufacturer datasheet says it can be kept unrefrigerated for up to 12 months, "depending on packaging". 🙃

Although it does still work as flux. Not particularly good flux, but still. Honestly pretty impressive.

#electronics

Taobao store that sells tissue box covers modelled like shipping containers.

Most have major shipping brands on them, but one has the docker logo. 😄

Plus, inexplicably, one has the VSCode logo!

(Those two seem to be the most popular according to the reviews.)

So odd.

https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=752110369496

@Unixbigot "Here's your site license, and here's the number of our grief counselling service."

My fridge has a WIFI header and a UART For Test header...

I'm honestly worried about what I might do with this information.

I needed a small Linux computer to run rtl_433 and remembered these Pi Model As, left over from some long ago client's project.

I guess it's admirable that the Pi foundation still supports 10+ year old hardware, unfortunately it's a real struggle in 256MB of RAM.The Debian Bookworm-based minimal install actively swaps to the SD card whenever it does anything at all..

OpenWRT to the rescue! Has pre-built images for the Pi SoCs[*], serial console by default, uses a fraction of the RAM and an impressive amount of software is packaged for it. ✨

https://openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspberry_pi

[*] For Ethernet on the A then you probably need to build a custom image with the right kmod-usb-net-XYZ module for your adapter.

#raspberrypi #openwrt

So impressed with the progress of the ESP32 open source Wi-Fi MAC efforts: https://zeus.ugent.be/blog/23-24/esp32-reverse-engineering-continued/

Had similar long term ambitions on ESP8266 when I started esp-open-rtos a decade ago, but ended up being hired by Espressif instead. 😅

From inside we always had theoretical support for open sourcing more of the WiFi stack, but it was never going to become a priority unless some high tier client demanded it...

I look forward to seeing where this effort lands!

#esp32 #reverseengineering

(In b4 standard Fediverse reply of "piracy has no ads, torrenting everything is the only ethical choice, etc, etc.")