jrexilius

This is a great utility and has a lot of meaningful use-cases. Thanks for puting this out there!

This is a very good take on the topic, and makes a key point: "people expect one blanket and grand explanation for the entire UFO mystery to one day emerge. This is flawed thinking at its core. This issue is clearly one with multiple explanations due to the wide range of events that have occurred under a huge number of circumstances."

There is a very high likelihood that Russia and China have been employing UAS's to gather intel on our training exercises, and they do not have to have cutting edge technology to do so.

I've gone back and forth on using external resistors for I2C and have read a lot of conflicting views on it. I think this is another to add to the pile, but I'm leaning towards putting them on PCB designs by default now..

Verify operations when space becomes a denied environment due to debris field...

(edit to add: i.e. field test planned comms and sensors platforms for use in future conflict scenarios)

The revenue from TikTok is minscule compared to losing access the Chinese market. That is the bigger risk they face.

A good, albeit somewhat impotent, move. The companies wont yank it from the app stores in the US for fear of reprisal, but that is the better next step.

I wouldn't go that far. Rather I'd say that it opens up the risks and abuses to a much wider audience. I think the fact that there is no open source baseband firmware or open hardware for the GSM/LTE stack makes it even worse. There is no escape valve for consumers to exercise control over their privacy, and the technology doesn't care about regulatory boundaries, not that _any_ countries government actually wants that.

This sounds to me like a single, global, commercial IMSI catcher that can track international movement of cell phones.. I guess the question is how good their triangulation will be, but I imagine the back-end data market for this will be fairly lucrative for them. And they don't really need any countries permission to _listen_ from space... .. .

Have you considered that your reaction may be out of sync with the rest of the adult world that worked pre-covid? Your fear is likely a hieghtened reaction due to your life stage development at the time of a pandemic. Coming of age during something as life altering, albeit temporarily, as the COVID lock downs will have a more dramatic impact on your world view than those who grew up prior to it.

I wish the minority were larger, or large enough to have some market impact. Although it is perhaps growing in recent years to due fairly blatant abuses of power to push agendas.

He's absolutely right and it is a very bad place to end up, despite the supposed convenience for consumers. There are a number of problems that create a bit of rock-and-hard place.

We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism, and various other centralized exercises of power that align with personal political whims. We want convenience and constant new features. We want things to work smoothly. We sorta care about security, as long as its not inconvenient. And we don't want to pay up front for any of it. Better still for it to be free with some ads.

Governments are legitimately concerned with terrorism, nation-state influence campaigns, industrial espionage, and law enforcement. They have to solve these problems, with constrained resources, in a technology environment that moves far faster than they can. They will push the regulation tools they have, as hard as they can, to solve these problems, if we let them.

There are almost zero short-term consumer/voter/elected-offical incentives for free, open, secure, interoperable systems. In fact consumer, political, and financial incentives are all aligned, currently, towards centralization of power and walled gardens. And the Silicon Valley model really is eating the world.

This is why open source has become so incredibly important. Open source hardware and networks doubly so.

The trend seems to correlate with drug use in society. Not sure which is the chicken or the egg, but from personal observation of people I grew up with, I'd say its worth examining drugs as potential causation.

In case anyone is curious, you can remove trusted root CAs from firefox:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Changing_Trust_Settings#Changing...

I've become very excited about hardware. More specifically building real things that are fully integrated and optimized solutions. Purpose built hardware and software have brought back the wonder and joy of creating something from nothing that I felt in the late 90's on the web..

That was our approach. Build it into the keyboard, do all the various secrets management (passwords, TOTP, et al) and message encryption behind a data diode (sorta air gapped). And RPi isn't the ideal compute module for it as you don't want a wireless chip on the inside of the "airgap". https://www.anomie.tech/

For a mail relay service, I'd probably pay $24-$36/yr. I happily pay Proton $50/yr for quality email service. $12/yr would be a no-brainer.

Dear DuckDuckGo,

Please let me pay for this service. It looks worth having and: 1) I'd like to know that it is funded by users, rather than advertisers and thus can resist privacy invasion presuures. 2) I'd like to have some basis for belief that it will be around longer than it takes the VC money to run out, (or the marketing budget, or whatever non-sustainable pot it comes from).

Almost, I run the Punkt MP02 (dumb phone). I don't feel isolated at all. Laptop works just fine for all my internet application needs. Voice calls and SMS work just fine for chat, coordination, or emergencies.

This line is a bit concerning to me: "and libtls-bearssl, an alternative implementation of libtls based on BearSSL" It sounds like a custom rolled variant of a low-adoption SSL lib that isn't itself very well tested.. It may be better.. it may be horribly flawed or backdoored in a non-obvious way. But I also get how horrible OpenSSL is..

Afternoon delight?...

One issue to note is carrier. ATT is now blocking devices that are not on their "approved" list. You may need to go with an alt carrier like Hologram or TMobile: https://www.hologram.io/products/iot-sim-card

I'm actually building something like this this year. I will likely be open sourcing it so you can build your own as well. But it's worth spelling out _why_ you want that limited functionality set (i.e. threat model, if that's your driver). There are scenarios where you can decouple your physical location and still Tx/Rx text messages, but with some limitations and caveats. But if you are fine with carrier tracking (and everyone else they sell that data to), it may be pretty simple to build yourself today. Ping me if you'd like to keep up with the project or want a data dump of my research thus far.

83 _different_ passwords?.. that seems high. You may want to more closely inspect extensions or plugins you may have installed on your browser and see if you aren't running some form of key logger or cred stealer..

Well done. At first glance the UI looks well organized. Will give a test drive. Thanks for putting your work out there!

First off, congrats and thank you for putting this out there. Its a massive undertaking and I think the niche you are looking at is a valid one. At a superficial first glance, this looks very welcoming, and I'm definitely going to tinker with it. My expected use case will be embedded arm so I'll have to wait for support for that. And as many have expressed, my primary concern is safety and security, so tooling around proof assistants or formal verification are of interest to me. All of that takes time and community effort, I know. Good luck and thank you for giving the world years of your teams work.

Is this a play to drive up chip prices so that EU firms can be profitable? Or just short sighted, poorly timed bureaucratic stupidity? Generally I opt for stupidity, but...

I wish I could be as optimistic as you are about that but looking at Georgia, Belarus, and other recent historical examples makes that hard. China, Russia, and Iran (with hangers-on like Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, et al) have been working hard at building an alternate global trade and financial system for more than a decade now, precisely to remove what little socio-economic leverage the west had. And, it's stil winter in Europe. The Germans and French need to heat their homes, which currently depends on Russian gas.

Also keep in mind that China is working towards this same "resolution" with Taiwan. It's in their interest for Russia to succeed here.

If Putin doesn't care about the opinion of his own voters, the whining of the Western world wont matter (China, Iran, Venzuela and others are not against Russia).

They dont have enough of a military to stop China at this point. They would need assistance. Deterence to avoid a conflict better still.

They do have enough military and citizens, however, who would survive the invasion but not go along quietly to justify a severe crack down as has happend dozens of times in Chinas recent (and distant) history.

You are assuming that its purely a racism thing, rather than an internal security thing. The Chinese have killed way more of their own ethnic kind in the last six decades than they have Uyghurs. All in the name of internal security and cultural leaps forward and such.