negative_zero

Agree on your comments about amateur hour.

I've worked in payment terminal hardware security and this is not surprising to me at all.

This attack on the Ledger wallets would definitely rate as amateur in terms of sophistication in that world.

Thanks for those links I will check them out.

I hope it's at least "probably fine". I've seen some pretty shoddy electrical work in my lifetime (including new installs) and am now of the mind that the deep-defense-in-depth of electrical safety we have these days is to also "cope" with shitty electrician work.

I would contest it's without incident. The US is higher risk since it uses 120V => the currents are x2 higher and US electrical safety standards are an eclectic mess of: world leading and 3rd world.

Not picking on the US though. These panels in their current incarnation, are lowering the level of safety of electrical everywhere.

This is all just my opinion though. A lot of my background is in compliance. I've been frustrated by some obvious electrical safety advancements that are STILL not being implemented. I also have first hand experience with many many signed off electrical systems which were death traps. This all biases me heavily towards not compromising on electrical safety. But maybe I am overreacting.

In my view it's more that: electrical safety has advanced to it's current "version" and allowing these panels is a regression in safety. There's already plenty of products/theoretical-products that are banned and/or tightly controlled for electrical safety sakes (suicide cable is the poster child).

To use your car analogy, we're not banning vehicles. We're disable one of the airbags when enabling fuel economy mode.

Yup. Worst case scenario is indeed mixing generation and load on the same circuit. And you have to assume that some number of people will manage to do that and create a fire hazard. To connect it safely, you need to know the circuit layouts and the rating of the cables. This is not something solvable with a safety sticker and safety instructions. A huge amount of effort has gone into making domestic electrical installs as inherently safe as possible and these panels are a back door to that.

Don't get me wrong, I think they're a spectacular idea, especially for renters. But you'd need an electrician to check the circuit and maybe even have a special balcony-solar-plug to prevent people plugging in too many panels in the wrong locations.

Quick edit: Random idea. I guess if the panel could communicate with the RCBO it's connected to and that RCBO can dynamically alter it's trip current could also solve it. But again, that's an electrician call and new thing installed.

You cannot rely on that limit though. People WILL plug in more than that. The whole system has to be kept inherently safe. All other concerns are solvable, but I don't see how you solve this, bar having a special balcony-solar-socket installed where an electrician has verified that it will be safe in all scenarios.

EEE here. I've not looked at these in detail myself as they are illegal in my country. Off the top of my head, the big problem I see is that, since you are injecting power BEHIND the circuit breaker an end-user can overload a circuit.

i.e You have a circuit with max current 16A; clever end-user plugs in 3 x 800W panels into different sockets BUT they are unfortunately on the same circuit; now 26A can be potentially drawn through a single cable IN THE WALL without tripping the breaker. This is a BIG fire hazard.

And you can't wave this away with instructions. It has to be 100% impossible for an end-user to do this.

Odd. Google Pixel 7 with GrapheneOS here. OsmAnd works perfectly fine for me without disabling any exploit protection options.

Now get it through compliance :)

Obligatory link to an interview with three of the Goldeneye developers about the development of the game. I found it very fascinating.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bNN9XhGZ3Yw

(Also The Centre for Computing History YouTube channel is seriously underrated)

As usual for these posts. No certifications. No proper markings. Probably non compliant. Will probably go unpunished.

Modular Approval is an FCC thing only. CE doesn't have it.

It always seems wild to me how, in the US, something like the grid is just a wild west.

"ERCOT said it is reviewing the test failures and drawing up plans to protect the grid from disruptions."

Why are they even allowed to connect? / Why are they not kicked off? / Why aren't they being forced to add their own grid inertia?

Any chance of having a finger print scanner on the back of the phone?

I personally really dislike the screen ones. They're slower, less reliable and the location is unnatural.

So if I am a small open source developer or run small website, this could be added to my AI scraping defences?

If something like Nepenthes added poisoned pages to it's tarpit then a small number of users can just poison all LLMs?

Network people: Do we even need MAC addresses anymore? Can we not just have a UUID that the device generates?

They seem to get more abuse over time i.e. MACs are how a car is uniquely identified and authenticated with fast charging CCS networks for Autocharge.

I've also had APN issues with physical SIMs, they are definitely not perfect. But I have never had an unusable "bricked" physical SIM. My eSIMs gripes are from being unable to use the eSIM at all. It's essentially a brick at that point.

I did not know that. It's amazing how the usability and utility has taken such a big hit.

Calling it "eSIM" is BS marketing. Every time I've used them it's been painful. I don't know the details but it absolutely is not "SIM technology". "eSIM" is something completely different.

A regular SIM: you just pop a SIM card into your phone and it just God damn works.

But eSIMs? I've used eSIMs from five carriers in three different countries and every time there is some issue:

* "Oh you need our god awful app to install an eSIM" (of course I couldn't easily download it because Google play geo hides apps).

* "If your phone is stolen overseas you can simply use this QR barcode again to register an eSIM to a new phone" (I couldn't).

* "Works with all phones". (It didn't because phone manufacturers have to bake Telco specific data into your phones firmware. Not supported? You're shit out of luck).

I could go on..

The fact that there are now privacy and security issues is not surprisingly at all. This isn't teetching issues. The drafters of the eSIM standard should be publicly flogged.

Well I can say that the update is not going 100% smoothly. I have a pending KEK update in Fedora but it's a test key (bug filed but no progress as of yet).

Why would I use this over PlugShare?

The limitation is both ISS scheduling (it's very busy now and has been for a while) and number of available docking ports.

It's part of why the next crew dragon mission is being delayed, it needs to use the docking port currently occupied by Starliner (and Starliner can't leave until Boeing updates and uploads software for full autonomous operations).

I would add PFASs to the suspect list.

100% agree. IMO, these days it seems like FPTP is more actually a source of instability (than stability it is often claimed is one of it's benefits).

Just want to add some nuance:

STV is used for the Australian Federal Senate.

The federal lower chamber (House of Representatives) uses optional preferential voting for candidates in a federal electorate.

I'm not sure if NZ is a fair comparison as it uses MMP, which is deliberately designed to favour multiple parties forming coalitions, not independents.

Excellent additions. Sadly for Canada, some companies I worked with didn't bother because of these differences. "US market is big enough for launching. Maybe we'll come back to Canada later." They rarely did.

One company I have worked with had an internal rule for "radiated emissions": You had to be 10dB (1 order of magnitude) underneath the limits before going for a formal cert. Non-negotiable.

Part of the reason for this rule was that they:

1) OEMed their products.

2) Sold products that could be used in complex and bespoke CAN networks with goodness knows what else.

3) There was a chance of interfering with Marine VHF radio which is used for emergencies. The EU rules were (still are) not actually strict enough for preventing interference with that band.

There used to be. But they've been almost completely stripped away because of rampant abuse.

Hard agree that pricing for standards is generally insane. IMO if the law requires it, it should be free + maybe a $10 admin. Anything else is BS. Standards bodies already make a killing off their membership fees. There are alternatives and workarounds though, here is one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452660

If you don't want to hire a consultant then don't. You can do it yourself. Go get a EEE degree and then spend 5-15 years working as a EEE in product development and certification. Then you'll be good to go :)

Or just blind self certify and pay the lawyers, Friendly Spectrum Agency and other spectrum users (like cell phone companies) when they come knocking and asking for damages from you.

Here is a free primer I replied with earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40926870

As someone who has built relationships with labs to the point where I had "special privileges" the most important thing you can do is:

Make your test setup as easy as possible.

To expand on that:

1) Realise that you're mostly working with testing technicians NOT engineers. They see all sorts of weird and wild stuff. They often have to parse poorly written and complicated manuals written by engineers who don't have a clue about writing manuals and make poor implicit assumptions about the "target audience".

2) It's frankly, often soul destroying work (hence the churn, especially at the bigger labs). They use the crappy manuals for crappy products (but everyone thinks their product is the bees knees) try and set it all up. Then it doesn't work. Or it fails because the customer didn't do any pre-compliance work and was "hoping it would just pass". Well time is money, now they have to break the setup down because they've wasted 1 hour on the phone to some engineer who doesn't know what's wrong and is trying to trouble shoot through the phone. Now they get to do ALL that again with one else's crappy product.

So how do you make it as easy as possible for them?

1) Your setup should be plug and play and I mean TRULY plug and play. No manual should be required for putting the device into some hacky test state. Get the software engineers to automate it.

Does a button need pushing? Automate it or just remove the requirement somehow.

Does it need wiring up? Nail it all down on a giant piece of ply wood. Zip tie down all the cables. All the dummy loads. Any other devices. The only thing they should need to connect is the power cable.

Does a laptop need to drive it? Automate everything on there. ONE SCRIPT, maybe a menu in there depending on what test they are running. Make the laptop bullet proof. Get a nice laptop that boots and runs fast (not the one at the bottom of the IT donor pile). Give them a mouse to use.

Remove ALL of these barriers. AUTOMATE it ALL. Don't require them to baby sit it. That's a waste of their time.

PLUG AND PLAY.

2) Make it easy for a technician to see if and when the device is working VS it's not working. Don't give them instructions on "open this menu, do this, do that ..." no.

Put a red LED on it and a green one. Don't have one in your product? Be creative, Retrofit something. Have a special test UX on the device. Hell you should have special test firmware as a reference point.

They should be able to, at a single glance, look at the product and know: "Is it still working/running?"

So now imagine you have done all of that effort. Now put yourself in the shoes of that technician. One of the test stands is available early because a crappy product failed. They gaze towards the giant pile of crap they have to get through. Many are a a giant plastic box with tangles of cable, hand written crappy instructions, an IBM thinkpad from 1995 to drive it, no labels on any of the cables ....

... but amongst it they see your PLUG AND PLAY testable product. It's all mounted on a plywood stand, ready to go. There is almost a light from heaven illuminating it, it's so beautiful, it's so easy throw on a test stand and GO (and then do something else).

Guess which one is jumping the queue and going on that test stand? (And time is money remember. A test stand not testing is loosing money).