mcbridematt

Some employers "force" their employees to use a portion of their annual leave during the Christmas / New Year shutdown period (usually 24 December -> first full week after New Years Day, if not longer). So you might not be able to use the full 4 weeks continuously.

This can be an unwelcome feature for some people, for example, if you want to have a vacation in the northern hemisphere summer season instead and/or maybe you don't have substantial family in Australia (or at least, those you actually want to see).

The auscorp reddit has a yearly thread on this issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/auscorp/comments/1mw6pqt/end_of_yea...

Those with school aged children might also want to save some of their annual for the mid-term/mid-year breaks as well. (Our academic years are aligned to calendar years)

Ah, that explains this patchset that was submitted to the Linux kernel today

"KVM: s390: Introduce arm64 KVM"

"By introducing a novel virtualization acceleration for the ARM architecture on s390 architecture, we aim to expand the platform's software ecosystem. This initial patch series lays the groundwork by enabling KVM-accelerated ARM CPU virtualization on s390....."

https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/cover/...

IIRC Qualcomm smartphone SoCs have always run some kind of hypervisor, I believe it's to allow partitioning of the CPU cores with the modem/DSP.

They used to (mid-late 2000s) use an L4 derivative ("REX"?), with the more recent chips (including the 'X' series for PCs) using their homegrown "Gunyah" hypervisor (https://github.com/quic/gunyah-hypervisor)

I have a similar Windows Arm64 machine (Lenovo "IdeaPad 5 Slim"), RDP into it works OK.

There is one issue I ran into that I haven't on my (self-built) Windows desktops: when Windows Hello (fingerprint lock) is enabled, and neither machine is on a Windows domain, the RDP client will just refuse to authenticate.

I had to use a trick to "cache" the password on the "server" end first, see https://superuser.com/questions/1715525/how-to-login-windows...

Aside from the changing pint glass color and level, the Sky set top box / decoder, will also overlay the subscription ID at random intervals and locations.

I don't know if Sky does it, but Foxtel in Australia, in addition to the pint glass watermark, have a separate set of channels for public venues, which have different ad breaks/content to residential subscriptions. (https://www.foxtelmedia.com.au/foxtel-media-network/fox-venu...)

The Cypress chipset used to be a Broadcom product. Broadcom decided to sell the 'IoT' side of their WiFi/BT product line.

dsl (Dmitry) is the main developer behind the DPAA2 drivers for FreeBSD and he's done a fantastic effort so far. Myself and Bjoern (bz) have also written bits of it.

The performance has improved compared to how it was a year ago (e.g struggling to get 400mbps throughput) but there are some severe issues in -CURRENT :( I believe dsl is trying to get them fixed by 14.0-RELEASE.

No, we haven't bought any ASKs. We have worked with them on a DPDK project and they were quite helpful when it came to debugging difficult bugs with it.

Improving the routing performance in Linux is near the top of my TODO list, however. XDP is one candidate (see https://forum.traverse.com.au/t/vyos-build-my-repo/181/5 for some results) and using the LS1088's AIOP is another possibility.

Hi, I'm the person behind the Ten64.

Ten64's have been shipping for a while now, though you are best to ask in our support forum: https://forum.traverse.com.au/ . We haven't posted much on Crowd Supply as it's a very manual process to get stuff up on there.

I'm not too familiar with TrustZone, but I'm not aware of any limitations in the secure world. I haven't tried OP-TEE or any similar secure world firmware' simply as no one has asked for it.

You can see all our firmware components here: https://gitlab.com/traversetech/ls1088firmware

It's part of what's called the Universal Service Obligation (USO) for which Telstra (the dominant carrier) is responsible for delivering:

https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/media-technology-communica...

The money comes from a levy on telecommunications carriers (Telstra included, but also most of it's competitors). There was a bit of conjecture in the media that the "free" payphones were really being paid for by the other telcos, once the money Telstra contributes is discounted.

In Australia (Afterpay's home market), credit card merchant fees are tightly regulated (<1% for most transactions AFAIK), so 'cash-back' offers like the US don't exist.

Airline/Frequent Flyer point conversions similarly got nerfed, so much so it's better to cycle cards (credit worthiness permitting) every year to get a point bonus up front (e.g 200K points for spending $X000 in the first 3 months) than trying to earn that amount.

Nice writeup.

Reminds me of a famous 'intentional buffer overflow' by AOL in 1999 to determine if the user was using a 'genuine' AIM client, this came after Microsoft had added an AIM client to MSN Messenger.

https://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/security/aim/index.htm

Intel tried this with the Quark core, which was discontinued in 2019:

Compare the Quark Core Block Diagram: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/pr...

with that of the 486 (Figure 3-2): http://datasheets.chipdb.org/Intel/x86/486/manuals/27302101....

I cleaned out a MBP of similar age while replacing the battery. There was quite a bit of dust trapped in the CPU fan, as well dried out thermal paste. Between new battery + cleaned fan + new paste it runs 'like new'.

(Unfortunately the dGPU on the machine appears to have developed a fault which might put it into retirement for good)

It's not as customizable under the hood as Home Assistant, but it's much easier to setup than HA.

Mozilla was attempting to market it to telcos and home router manufacturers as a IoT addon for a while (in competition with stacks such as Samsung's SmartThings) so they did do quite a bit of working making it usable for the average person.

The software and/or device you are trying to trick would be able to determine it's true location using the MAC address of other WiFi APs in its vicinity - the same way a map app on your smartphone can without GPS and cellular network assistance.

If you can use Ethernet (e.g with a dongle on the Fire stick) and turn all the device radios off then there are less inputs available for the device to determine it's location.

Azul Systems (who today are mainly a JVM vendor) started by building large multicore boxes (Vega) to do Java workloads - there is an interesting tech talk about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uljtqyBLxI (2009)

They built a "really good JIT target" rather than direct bytecode for reasons explained in the video. Curious to hear from anyone who ever used one...

The BBC ran a service called BBC Select in the early 90s with a VideoCrypt derivative, rather than line cut they shuffled blocks of lines around the screen - which worked better over more lossy and interference prone terrestrial transmissions.

The technical paper from BBC R&D is quite interesting: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1995-11.pdf

There are a couple of captures of the scrambled transmission on Youtube - it's definitely far more advanced than the earlier Canal method https://youtu.be/HcCdw97_ESA

Also prior to the NBN (wholesaler) taking over the network, "take rate" (number of homes actually connected to the cable) was ~30%. Changing a network designed around that to 80% is quite a task

I can't see this being true for IoT/M2M either, sorry. There are a couple of small MVNOs on Vodafone but nothing that would bridge the gap between them and the other players.

_Maybe_ they have a good share of multinational contracts from their parent company, that is the only area I can see this statement being true.

Vodafone are doing some work with NB-IoT but the general market for this are metro utility companies - the coverage doesn't exist out of these areas to be taken seriously for a nationwide fleet.

I would put good money on the number of payment card terminals and power meters alone on Telstra being bigger than Vodafone AU's entire M2M business.

Whoever told you that was being very liberal with the truth, Vodafone has always been #3 in the Australian mobile market since they started, they were hemorrhaging subscriptions for most of this decade due to underinvestment (known as "Vodafail").

They only started providing wireline services very recently, one of the few "western" markets they were not a full telco player in.

Yes, it is possible to get 600Mbps from LTE, but you need lots of mid-band spectrum - the US operators are quite challenged in that respect, plus CPE capable of carrier aggregation + higher MIMO ('flagship' smartphones generally).

This article provides a good overview of how the Telstra deployment works: https://cellularinsights.com/telstras-gigabit-class-lte-netw...

You will probably need a true SD/MMC controller to use any "new" commands, such as a smartphone or embedded target (such as the RPi). USB or other bridges used on notebooks are unlikely to have support for it (especially as they convert MMC/SD to a USB-storage class device)

Also note that LTE and cable modems both came to Intel as a result of acquisition (LTE from Infineon and cable+DSL from Infineon via their Lantiq spinoff).

Both times they have tried to put an x86 core around the modem part with varying success.

Further to this, I recall Darwin (the BSDish system running under OS X) x86 images being available to download from Apple up until Intel Mac's became available.

Didn't we (sort of) try age restriction metadata during the '90's with P3P? (or a closely related technology.. the name escapes me)

If you tightened the settings in Internet Explorer it would only allow you to access sites with P3P data - which was pretty much _nothing_ on the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

Mobile/Cell technologies work better when not all stations are "visible" from each other - as the channel access control in 802.11 is fundamentally peer-to-peer (even with an AP)

Some of the major outdoor WiFi companies (Ubiquiti, Miktrotik) etc started out with 802.11 then moved to cellular-style (TDMA etc.) methods for this reason.

I'm not sure how the SanDisk one works, but other verification checkers in China have 'this code has been viewed X times' on the result page.

So if the counterfeit product has copied a real code, you might see 'this code has been viewed 33000 times' instead of 0.

The phone OS itself would actually use something like the QMI (Qualcomm management interface) protocol or MBIM for modem cards.

The Hayes/AT commands are still used either for debug purposes, or for non-smartphone use cases like IoT.

Bitcoin was floated as a solution for people who were wronged by PayPal and the banks, before the speculators moved in.