It sounds to me like the input to the algorithm is truly random, but not unbiased, and the algorithm perfectly unbiases output from the particular source they are using. The rest of the article goes into the type of flaw they're addressing, and talks about very slightly unfair dice, which you could correct, but you'd need to know exactly how unfair they are, and you're always going to be very slightly wrong and end up correcting not quite perfectly. The obvious quantum RNG is to generate polarized light and measure it perpendicular to the polarization, but you'd still need to get it perfectly perpendicular. It sounds like they've built something that doesn't rely on precise alignment to give a known distribution, which they can then use to unbias the output perfectly.

It's pretty close to being an MP3 marked as a BMP, actually. It's the result of taking a reversable transformation of the audio signal that separates out the different perceptible components and then discarding the ones that matter least, and keeping the important ones in a convenient form for accessing them. It's the first step you'd take if you wanted a computer to identify speakers or what they were saying. The only part that's image-related is making the diagram, but getting back to the data is just taking the pixel values.

I suspect that they started using spectrograms in reports at a time when getting back the data from the image would have lost too much quality to printing and scanning to hear anything as quiet as voices, but PDFs with lossless images retain all of that.

I suspect part of it is that the mitigation for DirtyFrag covers it, so everyone who blocked all the modules in question when that had only an incomplete patch probably hasn't unblocked them yet. I think this is the 4th patch for these modules, and only got a new name rather than just "there's still a way to get this code to do the wrong thing" because a different outside team found this one.

Yeah, and the person who released the information first was operating in an "if I noticed this, doing only as much as I'm doing, surely attackers would also notice" mode. Possibly some patches these days are sufficiently obvious as to their correctness and also effect that they should first become public as a set of stable releases. This was a kind of special case, as CopyFail was the combination of some code doing something strange with one user not being prepared for it, and fixed the user. If there are other users that also aren't prepared, fixing them isn't going to be subtle.

How shadows and reflections move when you're 10 milies from a mostly flat surface a thousand miles across is legitimately hard to analyze for a visual system that evolved on the ground, especially if you throw in small periodic surface orientation variations. Given how complicated it is to explain rare rainbow-related phenomena like sun dogs, it would be surprising if we'd identified and explained everything that can appear when flying above the ocean.

While you're at it, you also need to block installing esp4, esp6, and rxrpc, for, y'know, reasons.

So glad I switched from Fitbit to Garmin. Google has done everything possible to lose me as a customer.

According to the article, they (by way of their cloud provider) had DR backups, which they were able to get restored. But getting offline backups restored takes longer than the SLAs they give their customers and loses some data that hasn't been copied offline yet, which is why they also have backups that are complete and immediately available, using the API key that the attacker -- sorry, AI -- found in a file it wasn't supposed to have access to.

Speaking as a motorcycle rider, ebikes are dangerous. Not because of the bike but because of the riders. They often don't wear safety gear, they don't follow traffic laws, and many bikes top out at 70-80kph. It took considerable effort to get my Class M. A bike going that fast should require licensing and safety courses and helmet laws. Most people don't realize they can squid out on the road on an ebike just like you will on a motorcycle without proper gear.

I just installed Fedora 44 on my old Win10 laptop. Because Microsoft made sure this perfectly good laptop with 16gb RAM could not run Win11. And Affinity Suite runs great on wine now. And no obnoxious telemetry tracking. Oh yeah, for games: steam and lutris too.

Yeah yeah yeah, linux linux linux

still, Microsoft is in self-destruct mode.

Everyone wants roads near their house. If you don't have a road going to your house then your house is worthless. Once the government has a right of way for a road, expanding the road might be expensive, but it doesn't get the whole community involved in a series of lawsuits.

The only people that want to live near the train tracks, on the other hand, are the people out in the middle of the California desert that would love to have a way to easily get to the parts of California that aren't a wasteland. In the nice parts of California, every home owner within visual distance of the proposed route has hired a lawyer and vowed to fight the tracks to the death.

This means that California has built a tiny bit of tracks out in the middle of nowhere (near Bakersfield but not in Bakersfield). It also means that every single foot from this point on is likely to get even more astronomically expensive. The homeowners involved know that houses that are far enough away from the tracks so that their home value doesn't plummet are going to get a windfall as their prime real estate will become even more valuable with decent public transit. The rail system is going to be a serious amenity eventually. The homeowners near the tracks, on the other hand, are going to see a serious drop to their net worth. Everyone in California wants more light rail, but only if it doesn't go through their neighborhood.

It could easily be that California real estate is simply too expensive in this day and age for something like this to be built.

Verizon's 2 Gbps Fios home service doesn't support IPv6, due apparently to them picking hardware for this particular service that doesn't handle it. Their other service does handle it, including slower home Fios, but not that in particular.

It uses VRTX, reportedly. Linux wasn't suitable as a real-time OS when the Hubble was designed, or really even when the Hubble got the 486 installed in 2009.

The LitleLLM packages were comprimosed on Tuesday. The packages compromised today were telnyx 4.87.1 and 4.87.2. It's the same root cause: credentials exposed to a compromised version of Trivy earlier were used to make an unauthorized release of a compromised version of a different package.

Chinese vehicles, both EV and ICE, are selling like crazy in every market where they can legally be sold. I've spent some time in Latin America recently and have ridden in several of the various models, and the reality is that they are all quite nice. The Uber drivers driving them invariably think that they got excellent value for their money.

In the United States we don't have access to these inexpensive brands. We can either buy expensive ICE vehicles, or even more expensive EVs where you pay a premium to not burn fossil fuels. In that situation it makes sense to want a vehicle that competes favorably with an ICE vehicle. After all, you can get a perfectly good ICE or hybrid vehicle for less than it would cost to buy a less capable EV.

The equation shifts dramatically when the Chinese vehicle you are looking at (whether it is ICE or EV) is 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a comparable vehicle. If I could get a Chinese EV for $13K I, personally, would be willing to put up with some of its shortcomings. As an example, I like the idea of the American made and designed Slate truck. However, it isn't available until next year at the earliest, and it is likely to cost $30K, very close to what a base model Ford Maverik, Nissan Frontera, or even a Toyota Tacoma currently cost. At that price it doesn't really make sense to purchase the far less capable electric vehicle.

However, if the Slate only cost $15K then it becomes far more interesting. That's the sort of price difference that Chinese brands are currently offering. I could learn to live with a range of 150 miles (that's supposedly the Slate's range, Chinese vehicles typically offer more than that), if it costs half as much as the competition. China is making vehicles that are more than competitive with what we currently have access to in the United States, and the prices are very low. The only thing keeping China from making huge inroads in the U.S. auto market is politics.

Sure there are some people that will never buy a Chinese vehicle, and there are other people that will never buy an EV. That's fine. I remember when the same arguments were made against Japanese (and later Korean) vehicles. If the politicians really thought that no one would be interested in these cars then they wouldn't need to protect us from them with tariffs.