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RA2lover

219 karma · joined June 3, 2023

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RA2lover··on An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot
Diego Aranha had found an exploit with brazilian voting machines back in 2017. They scrambled votes whenever every vote was cast using a CSPRNG, but initialized its seed with the time the voting machine had been turned on (rounded to the second), which due to voting protocols at the time meant you only had to have one person vote a specific way and bruteforce 3600 orderings to find that person's vote and destroy ballot secrecy for everyone else who voted on the same machine.

Seems like this is the same mode of failure, which is strange considering diebold made the brazilian machines back then and should have fixed that.

RA2lover··on Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions
I think it's the first one where the Chrome version fixing it has no Manifest V2 support at all.
RA2lover··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
Does this happen in the absence of light sources? I believe i have aphantasia but can still see those when one is present.

My guess is my eyelids don't block off enough light. Coincidentally, i have some trouble sleeping with light sources present.

RA2lover··on Quantum battery upends the rules of charging
Can it be scaled small enough to replace capacitors in DRAM?
RA2lover··on Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended
two-letter TLDs are reserved for country codes and not available for private use.
RA2lover··on Soviet Tractor Factory Simulator
Had a run where i've rolled the interview as the first phase 2 event and got the conveyor on turn 50 with exactly 300 rubles at 40 morale, 30 party favor, +4 click and +1 auto/turn, only to fail by show trial because i didn't get the thief event by the end of turn 60 to get party favor up.

I think i found a winnable, if heavily RNG-dependent strategy:

- Work 5 days. Buy tools 1.

- Work to turn 14's event. Take inspector padded numbers choice. If not inspector event, reroll.

- Keep working, buy tools 2 on turn 18. If the broken machinery event triggers on the turn you bought the tools or the turn after, buy german tools. Otherwise, reroll. (or go shock brigade, but that really reduces the chances of the run succeeding because you hit phase 2 a few days later with this and it depends on multiple phase 2 events before day 60)

- Buy tools 3, then assistant 1.

- Keep working until phase 2, hope you get the interview by turn 50/51 so you can buy the conveyor.

- Pray that the other events trigger fast enough to avoid the deadline. You want to have at least 35 party favor and 20 morale by day 60, but can only afford a single day of rest at this stage. This requires the thief event and some accounting for the winter crisis event. If you're lucky, you can buy coal without funds just after buying an upgrade, but most likely you'll have to overwork and rest for a day.

Having survived day 60, you now need to get production up as quickly as possible, and going for a workshop delays you too much at this task. I've been buying tools 3 then assistants 2,3 and 4 before focusing on getting morale and party favor high enough to survive the penalty of immediately failing phase 3.

On that run i've cleared phase 2 in turn 119, then completed turn 120 by resting on double shift with 1042 tractors produced.

RA2lover··on Soviet Tractor Factory Simulator
Best i could achieve while surviving the instant phase 3 failure penalty was 1004 which i've only done once. Can't remember what i did but IIRC i tried to rush the conveyor before turn 60 or a workshop, taking both cash infusion event options, rerolling so the first one is the first event, and resting/cracking down to try to get morale/party favor to acceptable levels near the end.
RA2lover··on A Matter Wi-Fi Light Bulb in Rust on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W
Thread isn't interested in hobbyists.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40326269

RA2lover··on Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8)
Every outbound connection needs a DNS8 lookup. What prevents this from being abused for censorship?
RA2lover··on The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode
There's a more worrying part: It refers to unreleased versions of Claude in more detail than released versions.

For a company calling chinese companies out for distillation attacks on their models, this very much looks like a distillation attack against human maintainers, especially when combined with the frustration detector.

RA2lover··on Tesla ending Models S and X production
YC3.
RA2lover··on SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
probably mentioning on PJRC's forum they're making their own teensy compatible because sparkfun(Under contract by PJRC as the exclusive teensy manufacturer) cut them off.

https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...

RA2lover··on Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement
Only if WW3 happens during a transfer window.
RA2lover··on Minesweeper thermodynamics
How could this be extended to a negative bomb space like in Bombe (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/)?
RA2lover··on Making Minecraft Spherical
I don't find it to be a problem as planning a route from A to B isn't done by looking directly for it, but by subconsciously referring to and plotting a path through landmarks along the way that aren't close to antipodal.

One of the worlds i played on had road planning from the start and a set of roadways covering the entire world in a 4x4 square grid. Pathing to point D was just a matter of going 2 blocks in one direction, and 2 blocks in an orthogonal to it.

In a world without such roadways, you'd look for landmarks such as oceans and continents instead.

Ultimately, you don't care if somewhere is antipodal or not because you never see the antipodes to where the globe is currently looking at without rotating the globe.

RA2lover··on Making Minecraft Spherical
My understanding is Space Engineers takes the "blocky sphere" approach mentioned early in the post, works around the "walk along its surface" part of the problem by making gravity direction point towards a fixed point, and bypasses the "trying to build 'upward'" part of it by not allowing voxel construction. It doesn't use a quad-sphere at all.
RA2lover··on Making Minecraft Spherical
Eco: Global Survival (https://play.eco/) bypassed the distortion problem entirely by using an undistorted flat voxel grid, but rendering the globe view as a torisphere.

It still has the tradeoff of making travel close to the center take longer than it should on a sphere (worked around by limiting diggable height), but i find it a more elegant solution.

RA2lover··on Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
It's 10% of natural mercury. you're looking into separating it cheaply instead, or at least hope the other naturally occuring isotopes don't cause too many problems.
RA2lover··on Why the Art World Hates Banksy (and why they can't say it out loud)
What are the banksy-equivalents of other worlds?
RA2lover··on iPhone 6 bending debacle forced Apple to re-evaluate using 7000 series aluminum
as someone with little knowledge on materials science, what managed to convince apple this wasn't feasible the first time around?
RA2lover··on Solving TSP: From Heuristics to a Potential Polynomial-Time Breakthrough
What's with the 12-34-21-33 loop shown on Concorde's st70 path as shown on OP's article? You'd expect it to avoid intersecting routes in a final answer to a given problem.
RA2lover··on Feed readers which don't take "no" for an answer
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42470035
RA2lover··on The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530
RA2lover··on Ukraine's three nuclear power plants have restored electricity production
Cruise missile dives into water near dam base, creates a large bubble with slow explosives, and the subsequent collapse results in a water hammer against the structure.
RA2lover··on Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US
I own a Guangzhou Sanjing R5-8K-S2 inverter that had issues shortly after installation where it was generating far less power than expected.

The web telemetry panel had multiple gaps throughout the day where energy generation dropped to 0, but having datapoints logged every 10 minutes didn't give out enough information to determine why that was happening.

It also had a current status endpoint which updated every 10 seconds. I wrote a python script to log those updates into a file, and eventually discovered the inverter was shutting down itself and waiting 5 minutes every time it found its grid voltage to be greater than 241V.

Installer wanted utility to lower the house's grid transformer tap, but needed authorization from Utility, who declined claiming it was already on the lowest tap possible. Cynically, i think they declined because lowering further would lower grid voltage at night below minimums they're contractually required to maintain.

Tried going into the manufacturer's website to see if a firmware update could solve this. Couldn't find firmware updates, but i did find a manual for their local monitoring app, including a password for installer-only settings, set to "123456".

The app doesn't include any functionality to change said password to something else, so i assume it's hardcoded. There was one change i could still legally do without violating anything - raising the grid shutdown threshold voltage from 241 to 242V. This change did get reflected in subsequent logs, so the settings panel is functional. I could technically increase that further (to a maximum of 275V), but that would expose me to liability.

Parents suggest contacting the inverter's distributor for support, and they asked for a password i was never given. Apparently the manufacturer is suppopsed to create accounts for installers/distributors buying directly from them, and i somehow bypassed that process when creating an account for myself, without even realizing it.

Some more clarification later, it turns out they can still remotely access the inverter with its serial number. After doing so, they "fixed" the issue without explaining how. Checking the installer settings interface, it turns out they just increased the grid overvoltage shutdown threshold to 275V right off the bat.

At least i got them on record saying they did that, so i'm technically in the clear. Still, having that kind of access was scary enough to want to make me disconnect the inverter from the internet.

Turns out its warranty (which only expires in 2036) has terms requiring it to stay connected to the internet. That's enough time to trigger WW3 and a resulting horus scenario (https://horusscenario.com/).

Until then, the best i can do is to throttle the inverter's internet connection to something like 10kbps, which isn't enough to prevent someone persistent enough from uploading new firmware.

Stories like this make me reconsider keeping it connected. I'm surprised we haven't seen inverter ransomware yet.

RA2lover··on US Navy Patent №_3045596 R.S. Rae's Guided "DS-40" Missile / the Cannonball[PDF]
Patent text [pdf]: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/f1/72/89/634aacb...
RA2lover··on The Deterioration of Google
The capability of A/B testing should have made this experimentation a one-armed bandit problem, which is far more ammenable.
RA2lover··on Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video, demonstrated on ThinkPad X230
The trick is to keep using the camera until that capacitor is discharged. I'm pretty sure most cameras can run at voltages below a LED's forward voltage nowadays.
RA2lover··on DEA passenger searches halted after watchdog finds signs of rights violations
The DOJ report on the findings (https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/25-005_3...) mentions multiple airline employees were being used as confidential sources, so you might be right.
RA2lover··on Bluesky and Enshittification
There are varying extents for ulysses pacts that can be taken as a project owner, though.

Tuxedo screwed themselves silly by taking too strong of a pact with their drivers, for example. Instead of going all the way with a CLA that effectively transfers copyrights to the project owner, you could go for a DCO under a less-restrictive, but still copyleft, license. For example, on an AGPLv3-only project, the DCO would require contributors to state their contributions are under GPLv2+ or maybe LGPLv2.1+.

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