aselzer

There are two types of "Lithium Polymer" batteries:

> Originally, "lithium polymer" stood for a developing technology using a polymer electrolyte instead of the more common liquid electrolyte.

> The second meaning appeared when some manufacturers started applying the "polymer" denomination to lithium-ion cells in pouch format.

The first one (polymer bag around a lithium ion battery) is currently used in many devices, but the second (polymer electrolyte) is not commonly used and seems to be an active area of research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_polymer_battery

The (common) Lithium Polymer batteries are, according to the Wikipedia page, as safe (or unsafe) as Lithium Ion batteries.

> "free"

I'd suggest an OpenWrt compatible router. It's actually free (open source) :)

Great support for dynamic DNS too (obviously, it's just Linux): http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/ddns.client

And it turned out the thing I was describing (easy port forwarding for home servers) exists and is also supported by OpenWrt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_Port_Mapping_Protocol

Hopefully this trend will pass at some time.

I wouldn't save my photos on a platform that changes every few months (Google Photos/Plus/Drive), might be gone in two or three years, analyses images, builds face databases, and keeps your pictures ready for the NSA to access, for any purpose other than sharing images with other people.

I'd just use an SSH tunnel to connect to my server at home. That's fast and secure (but obviously too complicated for most users).

"Home server compatible" routers would be nice. Devices could request opening a port, and you verify the action on the router GUI. Then some dynamic DNS server assigns you a nice name.

I have a huge (250GB+) iPhoto library, and it is what is holding me back from installing Linux on a MBP and wiping Mac OS.

Now it would be possible to just copy all photos to my LAN server with a few terabytes and Gigabit ethernet, but that would make looking through and at the photos terribly inconvenient.

Even worse, parts of my photos were imported as RAW and iPhoto was doing its own magic to convert them to JPEG.

iPhoto was not bad a bad program, I actually liked it, but relying on it was a lesson for me to never again store my photos in a closed-source program.

Currently I'm still looking for alternatives, Lychee (http://lychee.electerious.com/) looks nice at first sight, but I don't want a PHP server with MySQL managing my photos.

IMO the nicest solution would be a well-defined photo directory format that gets indexed by a fast server implementing an API that you can use to access all photos through client programs. It could keep an SQLite database in the directory to store metadata, but if it is gone, the directories should still make sense.

Cool, didn't know that.

Seems like the hardware has to be modified and it only supports 0-1V though: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/8757/using-pi...

also: 7 hardware PWM outputs (the Pi has one)

That's basically the only way to do it. If it were really clever, it could ignore packets based on vendor extensions and device characteristics. They are not that easy to spoof (you would have to modify the driver, as opposed to just changing the MAC).

I actually use this method to use school WiFi anonymously (or rather, as someone else).

Can confirm that this is indeed very creepy. I'm currently making a WiFi probe visualizer (for fun, with GPS, maps and stuff like this).

The amount of data you can gain from WiFi probes is extremely high.

I can imagine market researchers using this to measure phone brand usage in places, travel statistics (Airport WiFi), coffee shops.

Some phones (many) even add extended attributes that directly identify the phone model.

For example, take this guy (actual data from Postgres aggregation Query):

{bwin_ICE,"City Hotel","_Heathrow Wi-Fi",hhonors-public,HolidayInn_Guest,HotelCityNewFloor_1,HP_WL_01,Kramola456,Mani_Chrisi,"O2 Wifi",OEBBfree,OpenNet,"Sofia A irport Public","The Diner",WirelessViennaAirport,wonderland,NULL}

I know he was in London, at the Airport in Vienna, in a German Train, in Sofia, in a specific hotel.

Use SSH as a SOCKS proxy on port 80 / 443.

If you want a Google Server, use Google Compute Engine :)

Seems like my Macbook Air 2014 is not affected (with a high probability)

here's the test: https://github.com/google/rowhammer-test

Did the author actually verify this with strace (or the mac/windows equivalent)?

It sounds like he guessed this based on I/O activity of the process. It could be enough to hash the beginning of the files, and compare the rest if a match is found in the database.

He probably just created a redirect in the domain host's web interface.

Just checked, and xkcd runs lighttpd.

dig companyname.website

companyname.website. 3217 IN A 184.168.221.2

curl -i -i http://companyname.website

Location: http://xkcd.com Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

Yes, it's a redirect. The domain is registered on GoDaddy and uses a domain anonymizer (you can't see who really registered it).

It's probably the same difference as <b> vs. <strong> and <i> vs. <em>, so yes, sematic reasons

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/271743/whats-the-differen...

And if you just want a flexible ORM without models, knex (http://knexjs.org/), which bookshelf uses.

I found knex + Postgres to be a great combination.

I heard cars use a network of microcontrollers because operating systems are not real-time enough (process timesharing).

They would probably only use an OS for the in-car display, like Tesla does (Ubuntu), which obviously isn't (shouldn't be) critical for the other functions of the car.

Interestingly it is disabled for Google services (making the article's image irrelevant :). If this regex matches, `nofish` is set true, which disables superfish:

/^https?:\/\/(www|play)\.google\.(?!com\/analytics\/)/i

Also, if you add a <meta name="superfish" content="nofish"> tag, it gets disabled as well.

Possibly some agreement with Google, like the ones they tend to make with ad-blockers? (http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/2/7963577/google-ads-get-thro...)

Documentation for Miracast in Android seems very lacking. According to Wikipedia, Google decided not to support Miracast on the Chromecast, probably because it is an open standard that would have made the effect of selling the Chromecast cheaply weaker on their goal of raising Android adoption and locking in customers. I don't think that all commands are relayed over Google, since if that were true, Android should be clever enough find my Chromecast if I was connected to another WiFi network. The delay would also make it impractical for quite a lot of people. IMO chromecast should have been based on open standards.

Android Wear would be just be as heavily "reliant" on Google Now as Android is. Google just decided to give it a proprietary version of Android that is heavily integrated with Google Now. Android Wear could do quite a lot without access to Google Services. It is actually pretty pleasant to use without talking to your watch.

It seems like we both have different points of view on this, but in my opinion Google has acted in a way that favours their interests over their customers' freedom.

> it doesn't contain anything that is not a client of Google's cloud services

What about the Chromecast and Android Wear APIs?

I know that Chromecast OS and Android Wear they are both (sadly) based on closed operating systems and somewhat rely on Google APIs, but that shouldn't be an excuse to prevent people that don't want Google Services on their phone from using smartwatches over bluetooth or mirroring the screen to their TV in their own local network.

Here's what Google says about the location API:

> This API is not the recommended method for accessing Android location.

> The Google Location Services API [...] is the preferred way to add location-awareness to your app.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/pack...

It seems like Google is intentionally encouraging developers to switch to their closed APIs. Most developers will probably follow what the red warning message says instead of spending more time building another solution.

Google wants to keep control of all Android clone OSs, so they add convenience features to their closed-source libraries, encourage developers to use them, and force phone manufacturers to bundle them with their OS.

Bundling an alternative implementation of the API is probably a bad idea because of copyright.

The site shows a PHP script targeting vbulletin. Obviously there are lots of ways of attacking servers, especially if they run PHP applications and such.

There was once a PDF exploit for iOS that made it possible to jailbreak the phone (or run any code) if the user opened a PDF, so the PHP program could have been redirecting to something like this.

Linux malware would probably have a much lower effectiveness / $, so it doesn't pay off for them.

While this is undoubtedly scary, it looks very Windows-specific and would seem unlikely to affect a somewhat security-conscious Linux user.

Java and IE exploits, autorun files, NTFS...

> The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survive

> military-grade disk wiping and reformatting, making sensitive data

> stolen from victims available even after reformatting the drive and

> reinstalling the operating system.

And that's why it's possibly not the greatest idea to replace simple firmware and drivers with small operating systems (Intel AMT, microcode, SSDs, Smart TVs etc.).

I believe the comment meant V8 and {Spider,Trace,Jäger}Monkey (the Mozilla JS engine), which nowadays even beats V8 in some benchmarks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey_%28software%29#Tra...

FreeBSD running in a VM on Linux on a Macbook.

I argued that you can install Linux on the MacBook, which gives you the advantage of good hardware support and a non-Apple and open-source OS, on which you can in turn run FreeBSD using a VM. And since MacBooks support Intel's VT-x which Linux KVM uses, virtualization actually works very well with this setup.

Obviously, when possible, buying a laptop with good FreeBSD driver support is the superior choice.

how about MacBook + Linux + QEMU/Virtualbox?

which works great for me BTW

Runs pretty fast with Chromium on Linux, but in Firefox it's pretty slow as well. That's with a 2-core 1.7GHz i7

It's probably the physics simulation. Though random JS benchmarks show Chrome and Firefox to be approximately equal in JS performance on my computer, Chrome beating FF slighly on sunspider and the other way around with Octane.

I also think it doesn't have to be that complex.

I once scraped Google Search a few thousand times, in a few seconds, a few times, just for fun, and in a school (1000+ people). It was quite funny when everyone suddenly saw a captcha.

Then a month ago or so I scraped Google+ for some statistics, maybe 1-3k times in 2-3 minutes and nothing happened.

The point is that my node.js scraper was far from perfect. Just a fake Chrome user agent, nothing else.

If a large organization with a static IP has a lot of users, Google is clever enough to figure out that it is large and has a high average number of requests by e.g. seeing that many people use their distinct Google Accounts.

It's funny that "gel", which you hear pretty often in Austria (and probably South Germany), means the same as well.

It's approximately the same as "nicht wahr?", or "oder?", which can't really be translated, but suggest wanting some kind of verification for what was said.

It doesn't need it, it stores the User Agent beside the unique fingerprint to tell people with the same fingerprint what browsers they (probably) have. If it really doesn't work without UA, then it's just the website not expecting someone to have disabled it.