wallaBBB

Not sure what products your experience comes from, but I am talking explicitly about keyfobs. This is generally produced by Tier 1 suppliers, not the OEMs themselves, and not too many players in the field. With the MCU suppliers it shrinks even more (talking about handsfree models, most common in the market, utilizing LF for localization and standard RF bands for Tx).

MCUs are highly specialized (also not publicly available), and you can play with the tuning registers up to several digits without much performance loss. 3xx/4xx MHz ones you can easily go over the regulation limits (IIRC in JPN occupancy is taken together with the power into the calculations, it's a very crowded spectrum...).

If a spread spectrum is used at 8xx/9xx range, there there is no worry of hitting the limit, here usually battery life and max peak current are limiting, and fine tuning is often done for individual samples at EOL in the plant. It doesn't necessarily mean that all at 8xx/9xx are spread spectrum, but the "premium" (usually half-duplex) are. They provide a lot better performances at low SNR (and thus great range) compared to the standard FSK/Manchester 1 or 2 CH fobs.

There are 2 limiting factors taken into account during design - regulations and peak current that the battery can supply.

The battery thing (usually a coin cell CR2032 that can supply ~13mA per spec) can be a bit mitigated with a beefy capacitor (though RF packet length and space in-between have to be appropriate for the capacitor recovery, not to brown out the system).

Usually the bigger bottleneck is the regulation, so you tune for best performance in a clean environment. Hand and body during operation are really unpredictable to model in/retune, but luckily usually adds for the better. Anyways the range of the classical RF fobs (@3xx-4xx MHz and 8xx-9xx MHZ bands) is well beyond the real world needs that the 10-20% drop of performance due to certain fob positions will make a difference. If it does, you probably have a low battery.

Next gen fobs (if they hit the mass market) are BLE and there the range performance is more critical. Dunno what will be the approach there.

What can cause problems are ornament and the mechanical key insert. It has to be extensively tested that there is no coupling with those metal parts that are close to the antenna. Problem comes sometimes when they decide to redesign a bit the keyfob without going through the tests internally (e.g. oh it's just a minor tweak of the radius of the metal ring around the fob housing...) and then the certification fails and has to be repeated (not just money, but getting the slot for it...). Some OEM might even be inclined to think they don't need a certification for such a minor change and push it to the market, making the problem worse if there is an issue.

Regarding the ornament things on fobs, there were even instances of them magnetically coupling with the wireless chargers or even immobilizers and that lead to some melting...

Not really - antenna is tuned to the maximum allowed emission power per local regulations (e.g. big differences between EU, US and JPN regulations). Certification tests do not include any human handling, since it's really unpredictable and varies. Therefore, tests are just the fob with a (per specifications) positioned Rx antenna (highly controlled environment).

BTW similar effect is observed with the fob being next to the bottle of water. There are peer reviewed studies on these topics, that my RF engineer shared with me when I asked him way back about it, but are heavy on the RF/antenna theory, beyond my understanding.

The list of caught ones is immensely longer. It’s a cat and mouse game, it doesn’t really stop. Big pharma spends a lot of money on training the employees on how not to get caught. I worked 5 years in big pharma and it took me almost a year to understand why are the constantly repeating compliance and fair practice trainings. Giving examples how others failed, etc. Those were not there to tell you not to do it, but what to watch out for. And the sale targets and incentives are there to motivate you to cross the lines. I’m just grateful I was not in sales but application training.

Btw how is a government responsible for Theranos? There was never a product there, just promises burning VC money. Wirecard is more a failure of trusted independent auditors (one of the big 4) that failed to do a proper international audit.

> I assume that you are referring to the soft device blob? Has that been abandoned in nRF Connect?

Quite, yes. They took the ZephyrOS approach, but it comes with a learning curve penalty, unless you go the easy route of nRF Connect GUI. In that case you do have some limitations of how you organize the code base (so that the GUI works), but even that is miles ahead in configuration compared with to the nRF5 SDK + Segger Studio.

Some skim reading material about it: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/latest/...

https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/latest/...

nRF5 is indeed inferior SDK of the 2 (thus abandoned). Also I dislike that a big chunk of the stack there is a binary blob. Regarding the code organization, not sure what toolchain you used, but the latest recommendation for nRF5 (Segger studio) could make it fairly easy to do this, but manually opening the project config files and changing them, not through the GUI.

nRF Connect is a different world, comes with a lot more options, some really rooted in Zephyr OS, some lessons learned from the prior SDK. And if you're familiar with Linux build configuration system, that is basically what Zephyr brings to the table (comes from Linux foundation). But yeah all that flexibility comes as a penalty when you want simple stuff, compared to ESP32-Sx

GDB options for debugging/flashing can be had for sub 10eur, Segger is not mandatory. Moreover, the onboard Segger of the devkit can be used externally on Nordic MCUs in custom products and is covered by the licensing agreement between Nordic and Segger for this usecase.

There are actually 2 Nordic SDKs, nRF5 (now in maintenance, but still in many supported products in the field) and nRF Connect (bundled with Zephyr). Later gives a lot of access to both Host and Controller part of the stack and for commercial products that are not simply flipping a lightbulb it is still a standard. ESPs are good for quick hacks and more competitive with Nordic if low power is not an imperative.

Important to note that some shops in the Netherlands do not accept credit cards, and some even debit cards from Visa/Mastercard due to high processing fees (few %, varies from market to market and business to business). What made digital payments dominant in the Netherlands is the iDeal and (now retiring) Maestro cards, which have low fees. EU is looking into implementing something like iDeal at EU level, to popularize card payments. Those few % that Visa/Mastercard take are a lot for some low margin businesses.

My initial reaction was completely opposite to yours: - Oh this is going to burn google's money, especially if the phone becomes popular.

Unless you want to charge a subscription for a feature it really isn't smart for Apple to try something like this.

That is not the case with Aliexpress and EU countries for some time now (since July 1 2021). There's been a deal at EU level with Ali that it includes local VAT at checkout, for items of lower value.

You can repeat that comment here as many times as you want but it will not make it a valid one. Amazon is practically a monopoly, and they have reached that position by often selling goods below COG prices, incurring losses but outliving the competition. Now without a competitive marketplace for quite a lot of stuff they can dictate the prices at a loss for everyone except them. If somebody was to challenge them with lower prices they can just repeat the cycle. They simply do not have proper competition for a lot of stuff and they are abusing it.

Same could be said for Android. Moreover, exploit brokers are paying more for Android exploits than iOS ones [1], and that could be used as a good counter argument against Apple's security and privacy fearmongering.

[1] https://www.zerodium.com/program.html

Porn

Yes, move out of the left lane.

CCP has been doing the opposite for the past year, letting the big construction companies go out of business and not bail them out and letting the housing bubble deflate, with housing becoming more affordable. That is actually the biggest reason for the bad economic numbers (at least available numbers, since the youth unemployment is being "revisited") coming lately from China. IMO don't think people should be worried if magic numbers (GDP) go down because housing is becoming affordable.

I guess this is what you get when you train it on data from the chip shortage (high prices) period

My guess is simply to deter people from using it as their more permanent option. Nevertheless, the phrase "I owe my soul to the company store" starts ringing in the back of my head.

After racing with each other to fuel political extremism or push the corporate narratives like how working from home is terrible for the worker or how good it is for us that the rich don’t pay the taxes, how unaffordable housing is good for the economy… this is what they choose to be careful about?

Nah, this just doesn’t sell or is not a paid article.

>This article (edited multiple times!) is not evidence of anything, let alone Nord co-operating with law enforcement to log customer data.

Not sure what is not clear from this: “We will comply with lawful requests as long as they are delivered according to all the laws and regulations," NordVPN says. "We are a company that protects the security and privacy of our customers, but we operate according to laws and regulations.”

Why you don't find articles googling is that Nord puts a lot of effort in removing or burring it (google their dispute with TorGuard). Same what they tried to do with the breach in 2018, they half-ass disclosed at least 6 months later after being known to them. (at a point in time the breach already leaked)

Example I gave was a talk in a hacker conference, with no recording (common request for hacker conference talks).

Here is a general text on that: https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-wit...

Exact examples are hard to find in the press. One that comes to mind is from a Belgian Telco company that was internally hacked by an employee hiding behind NordVPN. Nord when approached by the telco responded with the usual no logs, but after the telco involved the Interpol, logs were given and the attacker doxxed.

Countless examples of Nord supplying logs. They all have to keep logs or would be banned from offering services to US citizens.

This looks like a plan B, after the spinoff was blocked. Also could have future impact on deterring this type of studies.

Quite a few in the Netherlands

Your response does zero to address (absolutely rightful) negative comments on your original comment, nor is it related to your original comment that sounds like a parody of a Wall Street liberals before they start crying for government bailouts. It's just a poor Red Herring argument that you provided.

It's a CAN injection, has nothing to do with the immobilizer feature (between the fob and the car) that has a random SK exchanged on fob-car pairing and is mandated (by insurance companies to prevent hot wiring a car) for more than a decade.

Definitely not as some grim prognosis of AI ruling or something like that. More in a sense of seeing many of these startups popping up to take advantage of the AI hype, although most of theme being quite late to the party. And market traditionally overestimating the potential of AI an the crash that will follow.

This is not going to end well.

Not really, this is how they got in the current situation with justified existential fears.

Branching out into popular fields and spending a shit load of resources (in relative terms to Mozilla size) although they're late to the party. Meanwhile neglecting the core product.

Could someone save me from reading through it - Did Zuck take full responsibility? I really sleep better when CEOs state that they take full responsibility for massive layoffs.