Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

The question is

How fast will the chips still be in two years when vulnerability mitigations are in place?

Regulating the fashionable crimes

RETN.net looks like it just reconnected every single hostile network in Russia to the Internet. Constant app attacks, brute force login attempts, and not a single working network contact in sight. None of that is blockchain, so whatevs.

The only right thing to do

Time to set up a Premium NFT vending machine next to it that charges more money. If the goal is spending money on nothing, it's clearly the better value.

What's on the local TV station?

Nobody knows because the commercials are intolerable.

Automotive audio specifications

I presume that 300W means, "rail-to-rail output swing against a speaker cone moving in the opposite direction during an overvoltage condition, then rounded up to the nearest 100."

And made of thin stamped rusty stainless steel, the rare but preferred material of the very finest speakers, combined with audiophile Bluetooth transport.

Stagnant

The latest fad is cutting features and raising the price, so duh. No headphone jack, no microSd slot, no FM, no SA 5G, stagnant camera tech, stagnant display tech, stagnant or even rotting OS, no third party ROM support, no variation in form factors, and storage has regressed to only 256 GB. Almost every phone is indistinguishable from all the other phones made in the last 2-4 years.

Replaceable

I've never had any interest in investing in Twitter because their service is so simple. It's pub/sub WORM of very limited data types. An AI/ML engine categorizes pubs and subs to provide recommendations. No calculations are critical or highly time sensitive. It's all a classic example of an easily scalable system. Anyone can implement it. Most startups can probably make up the operational logistics as they grow.

Twitter's only unique product is their brand and Musk will burn it to the ground.

Still barely works

There are only a few permutations where 5G is really working. Most phones show "5G" even when they are not capable of using it. My Xperia 1 III will show 5G even though it is kicked off the network for trying to use a SA 5G band without having any working SA support.

It's the Zuck

I'm betting most of the world would like to experience an immersive virtual world, but not from Meta. An immersive world is an intimate environment - sensors that know your emotional state at every moment. We all know Meta plans to leverage that information for profit, even to potentially hostile clients. Imagine a Metaverse entity probing you for secrets and watching your biometrics. What's far worse than the truth is an incorrect inference.

Nope.

Premium boring slab

I applaud them for breaking the unwritten rule that Android phones can't store more than 256 GB, but a phone claiming premium security and performance needs a headphone jack. Bluetooth might only enable difficult attacks, but the prize is bigger here.

Endless brute force attacks from GCP

One think Google's policy is "Always Not Us Security"

Junkyard EMP

Really? I've not seen anything online with a range better than a handheld hammer. Even something more sophisticated with a magnetron would need a window, which puts it back at not being more effective than a hammer.

Making things harder

I have two keychains: House + bicycle key, House + car key. It's easier to carry one of those than a phone.

Nobody cares

Kaiser Permanente has been doing this for a very long time. I reported it as a HIPPA violation and nothing happened. That had followed nothing happening when I reported Kaiser Santa Clara for giving my personal information to an SMS scammer, which they admitted to be doing.

Poof, gone

Well, there goes the self-driving car. Google just wanted those to be the physical equivalent of their search engine. Investors wasted billions of dollars thinking the technology must be ready because Google said they were doing it. Uber can do it now and cheaper exploiting humans.

Must be a mistake

"Qualcomm has painted Arm as a greedy, capricious bully that's fixated on extracting more and more licensing fees for its designs."

Somehow "has painted Arm as" replaced the word "is".

Show me the setup

The non-car applications are the real game-changers once they get big enough.

Power companies are trying to increase home hookup fees to offset cheaper energy from solar panels. Existing battery systems won't comfortably carry you through a week of cloudy weather. You'd need to be in the 200+ kW/h range or stay connected to the grid and pay the hookup fees. At the moment, storage is at least 10x the hookup costs.

The interesting question is: When do increases in hookup fees meet declining costs of big batteries? That's when the power grid collapses into small co-ops everywhere you can place solar panels.

Fine

Another good argument for unplugging sections of the internet that host attacks. Amazon, Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, and Google are practically replaying the Yahoo and Cyberpromo days of thinking that you can do anything you want because you're too big to fail.

Easy fix

Add a feature where the tracker can be disabled for a specific amount of time by the owner. You check in your bag and show that you've disabled it until after the plane lands. End of argument.

The might technically be interference from the CPU clock and the Bluetooth IF tuner stage. If it has a 32Khz clock while it sleeps it wouldn't be any different from everyone's wristwatch. Considering how long a tracker runs on a battery, 400 of them put together doesn't likely amount to much.

The simpler answer is that the trackers are difficult to find before stealing luggage. They'd be even harder to find if they were temporarily sleeping.

Another slab

Zero deviation from the norm? Just a Google chip that lets Google do Google things faster? A headphone jack is out of the question because Bluetooth beacon scanning is a great backdoor for location data. It can't have much storage or nobody will pay for Google Cloud. It can't be super performant or people won't pay for Stadia...oops.

I'm not a nuclear physicist

Curious - 10 MW is more continuous power than the burst of heat from a crushed Tesla. When it's said to be meltdown proof, does that mean a yellow hot core sitting on a burned-out platform but not immediately leaking? How much time do you have before impurities in the salt become a problem with a failed reactor?

I like the idea of easy nuclear power but know that PG&E would need extreme idiot proofing if they decide to operate them.