dbrgn

Ah, that makes a lot of sense!

So what's 0x89 at the start? It's outside the ASCII range.

Due to the PNG signature ("magic bytes"), every PNG file starts with the sequence "89 50 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A".

In ASCII: "[\x89]PNG\r\n[SUB]\n"

Is there any information on the origin of these bytes? Why were they chosen like that?

My dentist does the same. When I first went there (after not having gone do the dentist for 3-4 years, because I never had any issues with cavities) he told me that there are 4 cavities I need to get fixed. I was very sceptical at first, but agreed to get them done.

He fixed all 4 of them in 20 minutes. When he drilled open one of the teeth, he showed me how it looked with one of these small cameras that you could see live on the screen. It was absolutely obvious that there was a considerable cavity.

Explaining to your customers what needs to be done, proving it with pictures and/or x-rays, and explaining the different options generates a lot of trust.

You mean the congress? It's not taking place this year: https://events.ccc.de/category/37c3/#no-congress-2022-en Instead they defer to decentralized events across Europe: https://events.ccc.de/ Many of them offer livestreams.

I did that a while ago (with more professional tools though):

https://www.coredump.ch/2017/04/13/lorawan-868mhz-antenna-te...

https://www.coredump.ch/2017/04/30/lorawan-868mhz-antenna-te...

Are you saying that hot water based central heating systems with radiators should be replaced by throwing an electric heater in every room? You can't be serious.

There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.

Why do you think Switzerland doesn't need solar plants? We're still in the middle of an energy crisis: While we have more than enough energy in spring and summer (lots of hydroelectric power plants), we don't have enough storage capacity to make it through winter with renewables alone. And plans to make an energy deal with the EU have failed so far.

Alpine solar power plants are a huge deal right now, and cause a lot of discussions. They provide big benefits over solar on rooftops in the valley, because they are usually above the fogline and provide better efficiency during winter.

This is the first alpine solar power plant that's fully operational since August: https://www.axpo.com/ch/en/about-us/energy-knowledge.detail.... It's mounted on a dam and thus had less issues with permissions (as it's mounted on an already existing structure with existing power infrastructure).

Here's an English article about two big planned projects in Gondo and Grengiols: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/mountaintop-solar-farms-spark-t...

Some nice espresso machines and grinders listed there. I assume those won't sell for 25$.

"btleplug is a pleasure to use". I see what you did there :)

Yep, I'm aware of that and usually have my camera set at DR200. But of course it's still not close to the dynamic range that HDR+ creates on a smartphone.

Here's an early-morning photo taken with the Fuji: https://tmp.dbrgn.ch/DSCF7064.JPG (Either DR200 or DR400, not sure anymore). And here with the Pixel 3a: https://tmp.dbrgn.ch/PXL_20220709_033446459.jpg Of course, the photo taken with the smartphone has lots of artifacts, looks mushy when zoomed in, and the optical quality is far from the Fuji. In other words, it looks good on the phone, but not on a computer screen. But considering the differences in sensor size, it's still very impressive. (Fuji also has a built-in HDR mode, but so far I wasn't fond of the results.)

Would you mind sharing such a photo? I'm interested in how good it looks on a large computer screen.

I have the Fuji X-S10 and the fantastic XF 56mm f/1.2. I love the sharpness and bokeh that this combo delivers. Definitely no match for a smartphone.

On the other hand, my old Pixel 3a delivers much better dynamic range in low-light situations with its HDR mode. (Of course, it only looks good on the phone, not on the computer screen, but I sometimes wish the Fuji hat better HDR.)

If you need OSM on Android, I can recommend:

- "Organic Maps" (a fork of the old MapsMe codebase) if you want a clean, simple user experience

- "OSMAnd" if you want a very powerful, highly customizable map application, which comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve

Both apps are open source and support navigation, offline maps and POI search.

The things I miss most compared to Google Maps is live traffic information and the powerful search. However, this has a privacy cost, so I generally try to use OSM first, and only fall back to Google Maps (in the browser) if I really need to.

"My honey would cost over €10 a jar if I'd pay my time."

Locally made honey (i.e. not from South America) in Switzerland usually costs significantly more than 10€ :)

I assumed that not every Facebook employee is a senior software engineer in California, but that they must have a lot of lower wage employees in non-tech jobs on other continents as well (e.g. for content moderation).

If 11k employees are 13% of the workforce, then Meta employed roughly 85k people.

Holy moly, what do all these people actually do all day long?

Also, assuming an average annual wage of 80k USD, that would mean 6.8 billion USD of wage costs every year. That's quite something.

Looking at you, WebRTC.

A vote is not just "encrypted information going to a server". The law says that every voter must be able to vote once (and only once), and that the vote must be secret, towards other voters and towards the government. A vote must be authenticated, it must be ensured that it's only counted once, but the counting system may not know what you voted (at least as long as the vote is tied to your identity). This means that you cannot use classic encryption algorithms, because for tallying the votes, you must be able to sum up votes for which you're not allowed to know what the vote is. This requires "novel" schemes like homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, etc. (Not novel in the academic sense, but in a practical sense, there is still quite little practical experience with this kind of cryptosystem, compared to TLS for example.)

I have yet to find someone that can explain me how homomorphic encryption works in a way that I fully understand. And I'm a software engineer. I understand RSA or Diffie Hellman. A lot of people understand RSA or Diffie Hellman. Almost nobody understands homomorphic encryption. This means that almost nobody even has the necessary base knowledge to even being able to review an e-voting system.

Without voting secrecy, I'd say that building a robust system would work reasonably well. With voting secrecy, it's a different story.

Even if experts are convinced that the e-voting system is secure, it cannot be understood by laypeople. To a random person on the street, e-voting is absolutely intransparent, it's a magic black box that spits out a result. And as soon as distrust of the government comes up (no matter whether justified or not), e-voting can amplify the allegations of voting manipulation.

In contrast, paper and mail voting are things that are technically less secure than a well-designed e-voting system, but they can be understood by laypeople. In Switzerland, my vote goes into a ballot box, guarded by people from different parties. They are counted by citizens from different parties, with many people in the same room. Manipulation has happened in the past, but it has always happened in a constrained scope (e.g. people fishing voting ballots out of the mailboxes of their neighbors). And if it happens large-scale in a single town, this may be detected by statistical analysis ("the number of votes for a certain party is unusually high or low compared to other similar towns"). If citizens don't trust the count, they can request a re-count of the sealed voting ballots by other people.

Making voting simpler is a good thing. In Switzerland, we have had mail voting for a long time now. Yes, you still need to fill out a piece of paper and bring it to a post box, but the thing that takes the most time is actually informing yourself about the things/laws/referendums you're voting on, not filling out the paper. And the attack vector on mail voting is easy to understand.

The problem with e-voting is not security, it's trust. If we erode trust in our voting systems, we erode trust in our democracy. This has already started to happen in a few places, most notably in some areas in the US where e-voting systems are deployed, and where certain groups of people keep repeating their allegations of voter fraud. (They can claim this about regular voting as well, but it's easier to disprove than with closed e-voting systems that only very few "experts" can understand.)

Well, unfortunately they do plan to relaunch their e-voting system next year, after having "tested their system against more than 60'000 attacks from hackers" (whatever that is supposed to mean)...

https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/elektronische-stimmabgabe-ha...

https://www.heise.de/news/Schweizer-Post-Hacker-konnten-E-Vo...

"Instead of trying to innovate, why don't they just give out their existing products for free to customers that aren't willing to pay?"

Jetbrains make good products. And it's great that they're trying to explore the potential for a more lightweight editor based on their technology.

It's advisable to spell it "PopOS" or "Pop!_OS", otherwise it's the German word for "butts" :)

No, because Dalvik (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_(software)) / ART (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Runtime) are forks of Java. New features need to be re-implemented due to licensing issues. And Google seems to be focussed more on Kotlin than on newer Java features.

Whoa, after about 7 years of writing Rust, I only now learned that Rust's strings can be extended with `+=`.

In any case, a Rust string is inherently a growable data structure. It has a capacity and a size. If the size exceeds the capacity, it is reallocated.

Does Rust for Linux have "mystring.push_str(" and then we ate a whole cake,")"? If yes, why is "+=" implicit and "push_str" is not?

You're right, and I use Kotlin for all new projects. However, when working with legacy code and with teams that aren't familiar with Kotlin, introducing a newer Java version is much easier than introducing an entirely new language.

Nice new language features for Java users! sobs in Android-Java8

Are you aware of Trussed, an initiative by SoloKeys and Nitrokey? https://solokeys.com/blogs/news/trussed-announcement / https://trussed.dev/

From what I understand, this is an API to write applications against a common interface, which can run on different hardware devices. An abstraction layer for security key apps. Similar to Java Card, but in a more modern way. Is this something that would or could be compatible with Tillitis?

I guess GP meant input latency (since there's no input if you're just consuming a video stream).

"During the evacuation many people gathered by the streams of whiskey, filling any vessel at hand with the substance."

Links to such scientific research would be welcome!