Militia didn't mean a bunch of retards with John Wayne complexes either.

Amazing he finds the money after he figures out he's not getting out.

Amazing he finds the money after he figures out he's not getting out. Interesting you trust criminals.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund is over $2,000,000,000,000. Yes 2 trillion dollars. The country can afford to put chargers practically anywhere. Pretty helpful selling the idea then.

2000 mile range of a diesel. Probably only 200 to 300 for this POS (I doubt even that but trying to be nice). Electric motors drain batteries super fast under heavy load conditions, and long and even short haul cargo trucks are expected to carry up to 40,000 pounds of cargo. The whole truck including tractor, trailer, and cargo can weigh up to 80,000 pounds. This electric tractor might make it 500 miles on its own. Add the trailer and cargo and likely not even 200 miles. A half hour wasted every 200 miles will bankrupt the trucker. No one will want to hire his/her truck if it wastes that much time.

It doesn't matter how fast it charges if it can't drive as far as a diesel with 40,000 pounds of cargo. The heavier the weight, the more toque required, which is the Achilles Heel of electric motors and batteries. They aren't telling us anything if they don't show how far it drive pulling a 40,000 pound cargo on a long trailer. 80,000 pounds altogether. Diesel tractor trailers can drive up to 2000 miles on a full fuel load, depending on tank size. I seriously doubt a Tesla semi can drive even 200 to 300 miles with a full cargo load of 40,000 pounds.

FTFY: Don't use whitening agents. Your washer will implode.

Infrared are longer wavelengths. Probably too long to be trapped the way they describe. I immediately wondered about microwaves, i.e. radar. But those are way longer waves, so no as well. The reason they can put a mesh screen you can see through in the door of a microwave oven, is because the wavelength of those radio waves (that is really what they are) are so long they can't get through. Finally, black items can radiate heat, you just can't see it. So sure, if it trapped enough visible light, it could be 'converted' to a longer wavelength (infrared) as the fabric tries to shed the extra energy.

Given their size, we should send half a dozen (or whatever the right amount is) SpaceX Starships to Venus with a payload of reflective dust. Dust that can be released around the planet to see the effect it has with respect to cooling the planet.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or another one of the big software development companies could easily fork ffmpeg itself, fix the open CVEs, provide their own (likely incompatible) features, and become the new standard - leaving the original developers out in the cold. Google did this with Blink (forked from WebKit, which itself was forked from KHTML). They took a fork of a KDE backed project, put it into what is now the #1 browser in the world, allowed Microsoft, Opera, and others to then use it in their own browsers — and now Google owns the entire narrative and development direction for the engine (in parallel to, and controlled to a lesser extent by Apple which maintains WebKit). The original KHTML developers really couldn’t keep up, and stopped maintaining KHTML back in 2016 (with full deprecation in 2023).

That is the risk for the original developers here. You’re right in that there isn’t really anything out there that can do what ffmpeg does — but if the developers don’t keep up on CVEs then organizations are going to look for new maintainers — and a year or two from now everyone will be using the Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook renamed version of ffmpeg instead.

That’s the shitty truth of how these things work. We’ve seen these same actors do it before.

Yaz

Look — I’m a developer. I get it. I’m personally all for having organizations do more to support the OSS they rely on. But the people in the C-suite are more worried about organizational reputation and losing money to lawsuits. If a piece of software they rely on has a known critical CVE that allows for remote code execution and someone breaks in and steals customer data — that software either needs to be fixed, or it needs to be scrapped. Those are the choices. Our customers in the EU are allowed to request SBOMs of everything we use and pass it through their own security validation software — and if they find sev critical CVEs in software we’re using there is going to be hell to pay. And the people in the C-suite can’t abide that level of risk.

Most software development companies (outside some of the biggest ones) don’t really have the kind of expertise in house to supply patches to something as complex as ffmpeg. But a company like Google has the staff with sufficient experience in this area that they could fork the project, fix the issues, and redistribute it as their own solution to the problem — and now Google is driving ffmpeg development. Organizations that need a security-guaranteed version will simply switch to Google’s version, which will likely slowly become incompatible with the original. They’ve done it before — Chrome was Google’s fork of WebKit, huge swaths of users flocked to Chrome, and now Google has over the years made enough changes that their patches often aren’t compatible with WebKit (and, of course, WebKit itself did similar when they forked KHTML).

Now forking like this is great for the community, but it can be tough on individual developers who see their work co-opted and then sidelined by massive corporations. And that’s really why the ffmpeg developers need to be very careful about ignoring CVEs like this. They do so at their own peril, as anyone can fork their code, fix the issues, and slowly make it incompatible with the original. And a big enough organization can ensure they’re fork becomes the new standard, leaving the original developers out in the cold.

Yaz

That, or your project gets sidelined. Which is where the danger lies.

I work for a big multinational software company that uses a lot of Open Source Software. We have a security office that audits all of our products several times a year. If any piece of our stack shows any open CVEs we have a fixed amount of time to fix the issue, with the amount of time varying from a few days (for CRITICAL severity issues) to roughly half a year for the lowest severity issues. A lack of a fix for a published CVE isn’t an excuse for not fixing the issue on our end — the software still has a security flaw in it, and the organization is so incredible security averse (thanks in part to having contacts in the defence industry) that they don’t want to risk expensive lawsuits and the loss of reputation if a vulnerability is exploited.

A lot of bigger organizations now work this way. We’ve all seen what has happened to organizations that have had significantly security breaches, and it’s not pretty. Our customers are big corporations and government entities — and if they even sniff a risk there are going to be problems. So if there is an unpatched exploit, we’re expected to either switch to something comparable, or DIY a solution (either replacing the library in question, or potentially patching it ourselves).

If ffmpeg allows known and published vulnerabilities to languish, the risk here is that organizations that use their code will simply stop using it and will look for other solutions. That’s a tough pill for an Open Source Software developer to swallow, especially when they make it as big and important as ffmpeg. You might wind up in a situation where an entity like Google forks your code and takes ownership, and eventually gets everyone to migrate to using their version instead (like what they did with WebKit to Chrome), leaving you sidelines. Or maybe someone else jumps in with a compatible solution that works well enough for enough users that they switch to that instead.

Now in an ideal world, the Google’s of this world would not only submit a CVE but would also submit a patch. Having been an OSS developer myself I’ve always encouraged my staff if they find a bug in a piece of software we use to file a bug report and ideally a patch if they know how to patch the issue correctly — but I know that is hardly universal within our organization, and probably even less so elsewhere.

TL;DR: a lot of OSS success relies on having lots of users, or at least some big and important users. But you risk losing those if you leave CVE’s open for too long, as company policies may require scrapping software with unfixed CVEs. That loss of users and reputation is dangerous for an OSS project — it’s how projects get supplanted, either by a fork or by a new (and similar) project.

Yaz

Imagine, a small hits a satellite and the satellite sends out a shitload of shards moving at extremely high speed. And then some of those hit a sky data centre and cause a cascading (Kessler) effect. Of it the meteor hits the much larger data centre directly. We already know we are walking a fine line of losing a significant proportion of satellites if there are collisions.

Or worse, what if some bad player shoots a missile into one of those centres? This would cause orders of magnitude worse results than a simple collision. If a cloud of debris started orbiting, it could knock out a large portion of the world's computing power (assuming most adopted this silly idea). If most of the data centres were put in space and that worst case scenario happened, the whole world would shut down. And if you moved the centres far enough apart in space, they would be so high up the communications lag would have just as bad a consequence.

For shit like this, you have to plan for worst case. It's why they put berms around terrestrial data centres and have enough security to protect a gold repository, just about. Right now, there is no way to protect against a Kessler Syndrome/Effect/Event if it happens.

"You don't need to know how to learn; In fact don't need to know anything. Just ask 'Brother AI', he will tell you everything." [In a soothing big brother voice.]
Keep the masses ignorant and only tell them stuff you want them to hear. It's the next step in making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
.

Way to look like a full on completely ignorant asshole. I bet you think you sounded smart there. Here is an article that gives people some useful information on an important topic, that was not known before. There's nothing stopping you (or anyone else) from taking this thing, which you had no clue about before so couldn't, and digging deeper. In essence fuck off you useless troll. Cancer sucks. Information on fighting it is always welcome.