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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.


  • Apple has a long history of working against right to repair and third party repair shops. This includes making it difficult for third parties to source the parts needed and changing the designs to requiring part pairing in the name of security. It got to the point where repair shops were buying broken Apple products so they could hopefully source the parts needed.

    Looking through what they provided now, it’s basic stuff any third party repair shop could do if they could source the parts. It’s useful. However good electronic technicians can go beyond that and do board level repairs. But that requires schematics and diagrams. A lot of times they would have to get those through other parties who in turn got them through less than official means or violated NDAs.

    Guess what Apple isn’t providing? Board level information. This is just doing the minimum the law requires them to do.

    Bonus: Louis Rossmann talks about Apple’s history of right to repair [10 minute video]





  • 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.



  • 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…






  • This is an FYI for any Tribes: Ascend fans. Tribes 3 is basically being developed and published by Hi-Rez 2.0. Prophecy Games is a spin off of Hi-Rez Studio and is run by the owner.

    For those not familiar with the history of T:A, Hi-Rez released the game as free-to-play, had some of the grindiest of grinds (took forever to unlock the spinfusor for just one class), and a monetization plan that was targeting whales. There were balancing issues that needed to be addressed, promised features left undeveloped like competitive, and they basically abandoned the game within a year. They moved their developers over to Smite while things degraded leaving the player base salty AF. You’ll have to visit that other site for the history, but this is probably a good starting point. And I can’t forget that the CEO never took responsibility for their horrible monetization plan.

    Now I would hope that Hi-Rez Prophecy would have learned from their mistakes because Tribes is one of those games I hold a special place for. However, they released a pair of day 1 DLCs that each costs more than the game itself.