Or changing the MAC address of the AP. MAC addresses are issued to manufacturers in blocks, change the address of your AP to one in the block that Sony used for its old security cameras or which Nokia used for its long-discontinued WAPs. Maybe something issued to 3-Com or Digital Equipment. As long as the local router doesn't somehow run into ancient equipment that should have been a brick decades ago you won't have a problem.

How will that fix anything? Then MAC addresses they collect are just dumped into a database and refreshed periodically. They likely don't care what MAC address it is, they just say "I saw MAC address at GPS location xx.yy".

Shuffling your MAC address around does zilch.

What researchers have found is that sometimes APs move around (big shock). Except that given current war zones like Gaza and Ukraine, how those APs move around can detail movements. It's not in real time - it takes time from when the AP is moved for the database to start updating its new location, but it provides an interesting view of the wars as the battles progress and evolve.

I would say less security issue, and more interesting source of historical movement information for people who document wars. More for research purposes. I'm not sure if it even has any tactical use knowing an AP moved about if the information is a month old.

Because of touch keyboards on small screens.

A lot of people use swipe typing, so they literally can't avoid using auto-correct as that's fundamental to how it works.

Even without swipe typing auto-correct is used extensively.

You see, the keyboard on screen doesn't correspond to the touch areas of each letter. The keyboard looks at what you've typed so far, and uses that to predict the next letter you're going to type - making the hit box for those letters much larger than the hit box of letters you're less likely to type.

It turns out if you try to make the hit box the same size, accuracy goes way down - think "uselessness".

It's one of those features. You know the kind of feature that's useful but also has a dark side. Like how AirTags and such can be used to help find lost items, or to stalk people. Or how guns can be used to catch food, or kill people.

I mean, there are times I do wish for a feature like this - plenty of times I've gone and said "I recall reading about X, but I can't figure out how to get it back again" and no amount of history searching or other things will let me remember it. I might stumble around and figure it out much later, or I might never find it.

Of course, I probably won't use this feature - it's limited to the PC and many times the things I wish to recall are things I see on my phone or in public.

A coworker was planning a holiday, and they got a phishing email that had the details of their trip - their name and flight. It was an email saying their flight had changed and they needed to confirm the new flight details immediately or they wouldn't be allowed to board.

In other words, it was worded like a typical phishing email, but it had his name and flight details. He checked the link and it was a fake link so he knew it wasn't real.

But that one was scary in that it had the details and no one could figure out where they camer from. I'm guessing stuff like this is far more prevalent than you might imagine.

He went on his trip fine - his flight was not cancelled, changed or anything. And he credits the company mandated spam/phishing/etc training for being able to recognize that there's something wrong with the email.

Can they really disable them enough to prevent an attacker with full local access and unlimited time enabling them again?

For that matter can they guarantee that they will have remote access at all? If China did invade it is easy to imagine that one of the first things they would do is cut undersea cables and start jamming wireless communications.

When you're dealing with machines that cost billions of dollars each, it wouldn't surprise me if these machines are continually talking to ASML and other manufacturers so they can see the status of their machines in real time.

Those machines need to run continually, and chances are they will get warnings way in advance of anything that might be going out of parameters. This would also include consumables.

It would not surprise me if they can push software updates to their machines - so pushing a software update the wipes all the software on the machines is a possibility. Another thing they probably can do is wipe the calibration information for the various parts and pieces so the machine is useless as without that data, you cannot properly focus.

So if they wipe all that data, the machine basically has to be recalibrated and reinstalled and chances are it needs to be fully refurbished.

Of course, if China were to invade, I think a few sledgehammers to the walls would be all that's needed. The machines need a really clean environment. So smashing a few walls until you compromise the clean room (both with wall dust, plus letting regular atmospheric air in), getting everyone to take off their bunny suits will cause human skin shedding.

And doing this while the machines are running would contaminate the machines such that they'd have to be torn apart and individually cleaned. And removing the filters from the HVAC so it's recirculating the air around.

Another option is fire - set some paper on fire or something.

We've had a few fab fires since the pandemic - those fabs haven't been brought online from what I've heard

Ethanol only has a very tiny benefit in terms of CO2 emission.
It was always about providing an extra market for corn growers, and a lessening of dependence on middle east oil.

Ethanol is an octane booster - it's the most environmentally friendly one we have right now. The first one was used in the original unleaded fuels (hint: tetraethyl lead is also an octane booster), but it wasn't too great for the environment.

Ethanol is also an octane booster. The fact that it has all those side benefits (aka subsidies) was a bonus.

Every civil case should start with a motion to dismiss. It's the very first thing. Unless the DOJ failed to state a lawful claim properly or failed to state factual allegations that would sufficiently support the claim if true; the motion to dismiss would almost certainly fail.

Exactly.

But sometimes the claims will get narrowed down as well during the dismissal process - just because your claim for dismissal failed doesn't mean there isn't going to be some element of success if you can toss out some of the charges at the same time.

Sometimes you can get rid of the big headline grabbing troublesome charges as well and then you can settle the rest.

It's just like why even if you're guilty you still get representation - a defense attorney's job, even if their client is completely guilty, is to make sure the case is handled properly from start to finish.

Wikipedia is no exception, it exists only because of generous donations

Pages also only exist at the generosity of the editors. Pages get deleted all the time for various reasons, and while if you know how you can probably view the last edit, for the most part it's gone.

I think employees have the right to use a messaging service that erases the messages after a while.

Perhaps, but it generally isn't in their interests to do so.

After all, aren't we always saying to CYA? If your boss asks you do something via Signal that's not something you should be doing, you want documentation so when the excrement hits the rotating ventilator you want the documentation to be there saying you were following orders.

It also helps in case you need to initiate legal proceedings for getting laid off or fired to get things like unemployment or other things.

Expect that thousands of widely used FOSS libraries will be in a not-audited state given that getting them audited and recertifying them every few years is cost many FOSS projects won't have time or money to do.

Why do you think every project needs auditing?

It's a security audit, not a line by line code audit. To pass these you need to show things like how you designed your system to be secure, what steps you take to ensure that bad actors can't insert random code into your product, and other things.

None of this is to be done by the software authors themselves. Instead, there are companies that will audit the software stacks you use - what versions are you using, how do you verify against CVEs, how you release code and updates, your infrastructure, etc.

It's less about the code you use, and more how the code fits into your system - how is the overall system secured and protected, versus just how did you protect your library against code injections and other things.

Basically a security audit is less about ensuring every line of code is correct, and more about ensuring you're not making dumb errors - like if you're using a cloud service, they want to know you're not being stupid and using plain unencrypted transports, but using something with authentication in it.Or even doing something dumb that can allow third parties to access data (like how you can change a number in a URL to get someone else's account information).

They also want to know that you're not using known vulnerable versions of software, and ensuring what steps you are going to take to prevent soemthing like the xz attack from happening.

How do I know? We had our software stack audited - because cybersecurity is a big deal and the software I write is potentially going to be in places where attackers will have stupidly easy access to it.

I was a bit surprised by the "As a result, these 6TB 2.5-inch drives will unlikely fit into any desktop PC" comment. While that may be true for laptops, many desktops still have 3.5" and even 5.25" bays, and 2.5" adapters to the larger form factors have been readily available for years. While the >15mm Z-height may be problematic for adapters using removable drive trays, there shouldn't be any problems for internal use, as 3.5" drives are typically 20-26mm high and 5.25" drives are around 42mm high.

Depends on how old the laptop. I have old PATA laptops that do have space for a 15mm drive (most drives were that tall). But only maybe 4 or 5 years later, the height standard moved from 15mm to 9.5mm. These days, you're looking at 5mm, which is the height of SSDs. Ironically, you can get larger SSDs in the 5mm form factor than HDDs - 5mm HDDs top out around 2TB or so. SSDs can get much larger.

It's much like what killed the 1.8" hard drive - used in things like the iPods. You could get them in 160GB but that's as dense as they went. It didn't take long for SSDs to start approaching 256GB in that form factor to show those drive's days were numbered.

I'm guessing it's SMR too? It's probably OK to leave for overnight backups but 130MB/s was exciting in 1999.

CMR drives only get 130MB/sec media speeds too. The speed you can read data off the drive hasn't really increased.

SMR drives will just be really slow writing since there's two writes - first to the CMR area for fast writing (most writes are bursty, so the drive can write data to the CMR area to land data at media speeds. Then when the drive is idle it can move that data from the CMR area to the SMR area.

But yes, hard drive speeds haven't really increased - you're still looking at 130MB/sec off the media.

Makes sense to me. Having the phone handle it means it can be done via an app with no internet connection, saving a whole lot of money in maintenance-related troubles. Sure, it also means that some idiot could risk jailtime to save a few bucks on laundry, but who'd be dumb enough to do that?

That's probably the biggest problem - how do you do coin laundry when you don't have an internet connection? In the past, you did it with real coins, and those were a pain to deal with (given it costs like $5 now, that's 20 quarters).

It's not easy to design a system where you can operate offline machines in a way without having to trust something, or having to deal with the aftermath if something goes wrong. You could demand the offline machine get a token that contains the time (encrypted, etc), which is great because it's a way for the machines to keep time and everything.

But what if the token gets corrupted on the way to the machine? You've securely removed the money from the user's account, and the token to a do a load of laundry is gone. Now the user is screwed over. Not a big deal if you're the only guy on campus, but it's going to happen a lot, and schools will get complaints about it and demands to fix it, and eventually it's going to hit someone important.

About the only way is to have the machine use the phone as a router and connect to the company that way, but that raises all sorts of privacy issues and network usage issues. It also raises support issues because if they don't have a phone that works.

Now, you can rely on the fact the machines will be serviced on a regular basis - there will be someone who will go around to make sure the machines are working and to stock up the vending machines for detergent and other supplies. What can be done is the machines all log the IDs used and the accounts are billed afterwards. This is usually combined with a stored value card that caches how much is on the card. Sure the student can rewrite it, but the audit log would show how many loads were actually done and the proper amount can be deducted even if the cached value on the card is incorrect. But it still means someone can get a bunch of free laundry done because they're leaving at the end of the semester so who cares.

The final way is to install an offline credit card machine - you do laundry you tap your card. Someone periodically downloads the transactions and posts them to the credit card account. The problem with this is the erratic posting - you do your laundry and it only shows up on the credit card bill a week later.

But yes, that's the fundamental problem - the machines may be placed in a location where there is no access to connectivity - cellular, WiFi or network. Coming up with a reliable payment system for this is extremely difficult - it's possible, like I said, credit cards can work offline (the old kerchunk machines were completely offline) but you do run into issues in that mode of operation especially if records aren't kept properly, receipts, etc.

If you're a government, yes you can.

The EU has consistently resisted Apple's fake and hostile "compliance" and they will likely continue to do so.

And all Apple has to do is play the "European Citizen" card. This forces those who wish to develop their browsers to do it on EU soil, earning EU salaries and more importantly, earning EU taxes.

Apple can lift the restriction, but do they really want US citizens working on a product that only works in the EU, and EU money going to the US for it?

In the end, it's not like there aren't EU developers. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Opera, Mozilla, etc., all either are HQ'd in Europe or have EU operations and EU developers.

And you can bet if the EU tries to enforce Apple to obey its rules around the world, you're going to see China do the same and force its list of banned apps onto the EU.

There are no international laws. There is an international governing body called the UN, but you can tell how ineffectual it is because of conflicts of interest. When you have Russia, China and the US clamoring for their conflicting interests, it's impossible to get any laws made

Well, Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or SAF is what the aviation sector was counting on for reducing carbon emissions. While the affected travel really only consists of 0.1% of total CO2 emissions, they are probably the most visible part of the population - that is, private jets. (Aviation itself, including the commercial sector, accounts for 3-5% of total emissions).

So there's a lot of money behind it, because private jets are one of the most visible ways of declaring one's wealth, thus forming a very easy target for environmentalists. After all, the likes of Donald Trump and others with their own planes, to executives flying in a GulfStream is not something most people can experience. And if climate change is going to hurt the pocketbook, perhaps the people who pay should be the ones who can afford it.

Thus, the SAF movement, which creates regulated aviation fuel out of mixed feedstock of used oils.

The problem is, there is too much demand - right now SAF can only meet about 10% of the demand for it as the feedstock is in high demand for biodiesel.

It comes out of the necessity for the sector to clean up its act - flying is still seen as a huge producer of carbon emissions, those particularly flush with money especially so