AFAICT, the hardware encryption thing was solved eons ago.

Or at least, none of my routers suffer from high CPU utilization when doing Wifi things.

Doesn't mean systemd should be default across all dists

It isn't, but it's really not your choice if you aren't the one making and maintaining the distro, no?

Two words: Fork it.

Just because you can't quickly and easily remove it yourself doesn't mean that it's not removable. It is removable, you just need some time and tools to do it.

Remove the battery on an iPhone 6 in 27 easy steps. After that, reassembly is simply the opposite of disassembly!*

You just need some time and tools to do it!

*: You hope.

Indeed.

And the only licensees I'm aware of for the 2.4GHZ Part 15 ISM band are HAMs.

Which are about the friendliest bunch around when it comes to talking about RF, even if they are licensed for tens-of-Watts and you are an unlicensed, must-accept-interference consumer.

> hurricane hugo

That was a disaster. The insurance companies, like Allstate, couldn't afford to pay all of the claims so they lied and cheated their way out of the vast majority of them. When Hugo hit, I lived between Florence and Conway. All of the homes in our neighborhood had damage. About a fourth were so damaged they were later torn down. The head of our HOA worked for Allstate, so most of us in the neighborhood had Allstate since he was a great guy. After Allstate refused to pay a single valid claim, he ended-up leaving town. The town him and his wife were from, where both sets of his children's grandparents live, and where he had a business he had grown for over thirty-five years. While we all hated how Allstate screwed nearly the entire neighborhood out of our houses, Allstate screwed his family out of their lives.

You're in good hands, with Allstate.

Well, you're on the right path: Pale Moon doesn't have pdf functionality OOTB. Look for and destroy a pdf.js in your profile directory, perhaps? Because whatever you have isn't getting updated, and according to TFS, that can be a problem from time to time.....

And yes, again: Firefox's pdf viewer is disgusting. Gmail's JS-based viewer actually provides presentable documents, and they seem to even print OK, but Firefox's interpretation of pdf (IN THE SAME BROWSER!) reminds me of the early days of Ghostscript, or maybe even Freetype -- a million years ago, before they got the kerning right. Or even close. At all.

I have three access points at my house: One on the second floor, one in the basement, and one in the garage. (The AP in the garage is a repeater, with a hacked router doing bridged client mode (not wasteful WDS) wired to another hacked router being a simple access point.)

I didn't always have to do this: Back before the neighbors all had Wifi and a million Wifi widgets all streaming Netflix and Youtube, I had reasonable coverage all over my house and yard with a single WRT54G with a parabolic beer can on one of its antennas.

But now I have to do this just to get a simple Pandora stream running reliably in the garage (20 feet from the house), much less the garden at the back of the lot.

I try to use it efficiently, with the radios only putting out enough power to do an effective job. I manage channels carefully, so that the most-used channel in the neighborhood is the one that is in the basement (where it radiates least), and the least-used channel is used in the garage (where it radiates most), to help mitigate co-channel interference. I always hard-wire my devices if they allow me to do so, to keep wireless spectrum available -- even though I rent (old houses can be ridiculously easy to non-permanently cable).

But when I can sit in my living room and see 17 access points that don't belong to me, with manufacturer-default SSIDs, I know I'm amidst hordes of folks who are using the spectrum for fixed devices: The streaming box by the TV, the old desktop in the kid's bedroom that does Youtube livestreams 8 hours a day -- that sort of thing.

And that's just inefficient use of the spectrum. Fixed devices should be wired if at all possible: Period.

If pre-terminated cat5 cables were cheaper (and I know that quality cables can be very cheap indeed, but they're pretty bloody expensive at Wal-Mart), I think I'd see a bit less of this problem. When it comes to buying a $20 wire to hook up the Fire TV to the 75Mbps modem, or buy a pizza to go with that streaming movie: It seems that most buy the pizza.

I can't say that I blame them. But I roll my own wires, or buy the $2 Chinese imports from deepsurplus.com which seem to be as good as anything else, so I get pizza -and- high-quality streaming -and- improve spectral efficiency of the neighborhood.

The biggest guidelines that I have for myself is if it's designed to sit on a shelf for a long time, it's not designed to be consumed

But then you miss out on an entire world of lacto-fermented foods which are absolutely lovely, and also very good for you.

Sauerkraut, for instance. It's designed to sit on a shelf for a long time (sitting on a shelf is part of the production process, FFS), is ridiculously nutritious and requires only two ingredients: Cabbage and salt.

What did you do to Pale Moon to allow it to grok PDFs, and why haven't you undone it yet?

How can you let your browser view pdfs by itself? It will open malicious pdfs automatically, adding a big security hole without much use.

How can you let your browser view [GIF/JPEG/CSS/HTML] by itself? It will open malicious [user-requested content] automatically, adding a big security hole without much use.

(When you get your head out of the sand, we'll talk about security.)

The answer to the question that you did not ask is Pale Moon.

Insurance companies already use satellites to deal with claims. I know from recent experience that Travelers settles roof damage claims based on satellite imagery in an automated estimate system, and the results are so reliable that contractors take these jobs at face value. The 'adjuster' looks around for 15 minutes, pencil whips the claim and it's over.

No. No, they don't.

We're light-years away from near-real-time satellite photography for such small purposes as figuring out a single insurance claim, not to mention that the resolution is always piss-poor from space.

What we can do today is use existing aerial photographs taken from multiple angles, shove them into a computer, and automatically generate a 3D model of a roof which is accurate enough to generate a precise bill of materials to replace that roof. [citation]

What this means is that instead of an adjuster climbing a ladder and using a tape measure and math, he can instead do a rough visual inspection ("yep, your roof is fucked") from the ground and clickity-click his way to an estimate of the job.

What drones add to this is the ability to see damage on (e.g. flat) roofs not visible from the ground (which keeps adjusters off of ladders), while potentially supplement existing aerial photographs.

Oh, the car-without-a-dashboard-because-it-has-been-so-hacked-on hack, whereby the brakes were partially disabled with a computer and various vehicular things were controlled by someone other than the driver.

Any tool with a toolkit can do that to any car. The only "OMG!" in that article (which I did read, over a year ago when it was published) is that it happened with a Macbook.

A smarter tool can can do the partially-disabled brakes trick on any ABS-equipped vehicle using a 555 timer and a toggle switch, especially if they get to deconstruct the car first.

Give me a proper fucking citation about OBD hacks over publicly-accessible Bluetooth, as you claim to be so prevalent, or sit down at the back of the class.

Go ahead and Google it. Let me know what you find.

Thanks!

I'm not aware of any "standard" way for a keyboard to control a display's brightness through software on non-Apple hardware.

I have in my possession a 1TB WD Blue which was built in 2011.

The controller board was assembled onto the drive improperly, with the board bent over an alignment post instead of the post going through a hole.

Eventually, this caused a power issue as some SMD or other's RoHS solder joint(s) turned intermittent through years of heat-cycling: It wasn't spinning up or being recognized in BIOS.

I took it apart, looked at it funny, put it back together as properly as possible, and applied a rubber band to put some tension on things.

It worked fine. Acronis moved the partitions over, and the customer was back in business with zero loss.

Of particular note: This customer also had backups of their data. On-site, online backups (using whatever software a WD MyBook USB external comes with these days), but well-versioned and complete and up-to-date. They were already well-protected from such a failure scenario (though not a natural disaster or particularly-nasty malware).