I've had AT&T DSL with fixed IP addresses for a couple decades now. They haven't maintained the copper well and have been trying to abandon it for some years now.

Twice in the last few years my DSL has had outages that took them a MONTH to fix. No refund.

This week they're killing DSL and migrating the customers to
All-fi / internet air (5g link to the home/office hotspot and ethernet router.) No fixed IP addresses, though. They don't offer them in the area until they get around to rolling out fiber - maybe sometime in the next year, maybe not. No other fixed-IP service available in the area from them, they say to try Comcast...

The all-fi device also blocks two ports, one of which is the SMTP port.

Not a happy camper today.

Amazing how he allegedly found everything a MAGA chud could yearn for in his most fevered wet dream, right there in plain, security free English.

Including saved emails with hashes of their content, encrypted by a Google mail server ephemeral private key, which (absent the breaking of public key encryption or Google leaking the private key) prove they moved through a Google mail server during the period that key was in use and came from the mail server of the well-known sender's account.

Was that before or after the dipshits fucked up the chain of custody making any subsequently retrieved info suspect?

For starters, some of the emails could be authenticated as passing through Google's mail servers within the time and from the (well-known) corporate sender, using a mail-processing security system dependent on a google server's for-a-time-period ephemeral private key which was never published (though its companion public key was widely published and archived). After-the-fact forgery of the covered contents of the emails (all but some of the header lines) without that private key is not possible, short of breaking public key cryptography.

So for those emails, chain of custody is not an issue. The bits themselves, in combination with the archived public key, is sufficient to prove their authenticity.

The security expert who authenticated one of the emails for a news operation that obtained access to the drive contents published the procedure he used. Now anyone with enough expertese to follow his system and access to the alleged disk image can also authenticate any of the stored emails that went through these or similarly-configured servers in a similar manner.

Interestingly, shortly after this there were calls for Google to publish these private keys some time after each is retired, specifically to "protect" email users from having intercepted email provably traceable to them (or their email accounts). Last I heard, Google has not done so. B-)

This and the fact that the opioid problem appears to be burning itself out. Thereâ(TM)s been articles about it recently. Nobody is sure whatâ(TM)s going on, ....

But it may be related to (at least?) one cartel being concerned about being blamed for the fentanyl deaths (both by the outgoing and incoming US administrations - regardless of which one won the election), becoming subject to military-grade "law enforcement", so they ordered their rank-and-file not to sell or possess fentanyl (on pain of death), and enforced this edict over the recent few months.

A major cartel liquidating any of its number that persist in selling fentanyl could put a major dent in the US opiate-related death rate.

These things produce less power than the average termite fart. They have extremely limited applications, such as bios batteries and low power clocks.

And Internet of Things protocols such as BLE are designed so they operate in short bursts on a schedule. A microwatt gives you a miliwatt for a milisecond every second, which is quite enough for substantal crunch and radio action if you spend the other 999 miliseconds asleep. This is how they run for years on a tiny coin cell. A long halflife betavoltaic battery paired with a supercapacitor is a good match for their power needs. (Upsize it by a factor of two and you can run the gadget for a whole halflife before it flakes out.)

(BLE devices actually turn off everything but a wakeup timer which is tiny, mostly an oscillator and counter, and actually DOES use a quartz watch crystal to gain economy of scale.)

Now if they'd just pay similar attention to solar power equipment.

Nearly all solar power smart electronics is not just contract manufactured in China, but is actually rebranded Chinese designs or Chinese/US co-designs, with the base firmware having been Chinese even if tweaked by the US brand.

It has long been suspected that there are "remote brick-it" back doors in it, suitable for shutting down solar power installations should some US-China dispute arise, both shutting down residential, small industrial, and solar farm power and destabilizing the grid by making much of the (currently substantial) solar power input disappear.

In November, Deye (manufacturer of the premier model of their own branded "all in one box", also that of Sol-Ark (USA/North America), Sunsynk (UK) and inverex (Pakistan)), proved it existed by activating it, bricking a number of Deye branded systems, mainly in Puetro Rico.

This appears to have been fallout of a dispute over regional exclusive marketing and non-compete agreements with their OEM rebrand customers. But it shows the world, including state actors and ransomware artists, that the backdoor is already there and exploitable in their products, and raised again the issue that the CCP may mandate such remotely-exploitable backdoors in ALL Chinese-manufactured solar equipment.

(It also exposed that, even though the cloud-"Service" remote administration "features" of Sol-Ark had been moved from a Deye server in China to a new service on a Sol-Ark server in North America, the Sol-Ark box still "phoned home" to, and could be administered by, BOTH servers. Not due to the bricking, but by a user noticing, years after the move, that the old account and service still worked, and posting about it in the discussion, and by others using traffic monitoring tools on their networks.)

I read once that a grid scale D-T fusion plant would burn through the world's supply of tritium in a matter of days to weeks.That's why most fusion plants would involve a lithium lining in order to generate more tritium.

The "stripping reaction" D + D -> T + P is nuclear-scale exothermic, too. (0.9389 MeV vs. about 17 MeV for D + T -> He + N) So some approaches involve two reactors, one to make a little energy and some tritium to feed the other - or alternatively do both in one reactor in multiple steps by feeding D and not cleaning out the "ash" for a while.

Plants, stupid. Eat fucking plants.

My car won't run on unprocessed plants, (even if they're actively reproducing).

Plants, stupid. Eat fucking plants.

If you don't eat a LOT of the RIGHT plants you get sick and probably die.

Even if you DO eat a LOT of the RIGHT plants, in the right (and rather large) variety, you still get sick unless you eat synthetic B12, some bugs, a whole LOT of shiitake mushrooms, or some particular breeds of seaweed or algae...

How much of that (if any) is more chips and how much is inflation raising the price (denominated in cheaper dollars) of the chips?

... you notice their electric's not connected to any national grid?

Yes it is. Several of them. (And during the weather crisis a few years ago the other states and/or their power companies decided to save their power for themselves and keeping their own customers running, rather than feeding large amounts of power to Texas.)

It doesn't synchronize its frequency with other grids. So it's an island whose frequency and phase drifts with respect to its neighbors (as do several other divisions of the North American continent). That means the interconnects require frequency conversion, which makes them more expensive and also fewer. Given the distances involved, getting the grid to be stable if it WERE synchronized would be difficult and tend to lead to collapses and outages.

One of my big gripes with solar power systems is nearly all of them are built overseas - mainly in China. They have firmware running on the main inverter or all-in-one electronic system central box, the battery management systems, and sometimes other substantial components. Even if some of the firmware is written by the nameplate company that commissioned the particular version of the OEM platform, much of the underlying firmware is apparently built on libraries, development platforms, and application samples from the manufacturers. Most nameplate companies require them to be internet connected for management, monitoring, and software upgrading, and some of them also have radios for control and monitoring via cellphone applications.

The electrical code requires them to have a "rapid shut down" feature to protect firemen in case of a house fire.

I can imagine a scenario where the Chinese Government has embedded a backdoor in the devices so that they can be bricked, made to self-destruct, or even start a house fire by commands delivered over the internet or by radio from a fly-by, drive-by, or even a satellite. I can also imagine a ransom ware gang reverse-engineering the systems and shutting down people's utilities, or state-level actors developing such tools and deploying them for law enforcement, out-group suppression dirty tricks, or cyberwar.

Nothing says "I care about the environment" like cooking your own christmas turkey!

  * Photovoltaic solar panels don't bother birds. They don't get particularly warm - especially since they get less efficient as they heat up - even a few tens of degrees - so they're mounted so they are cooled by the air, staying cooler than an asphalt road. (Nice place to land or make a nest on the underside and supporting structure.)

  * Point focus concentrating solar systems ignite them in flight, creating "smokers" falling from the sky..

  * (Not sure about line focus systems. They only come up to the temperatures of process steam, so I expect that, even if the birds could get near the focus line, they'd be OK or escape with minor burns at worst.)

As far as I can tell, this site is using photovoltaic panels. No free roast bird dinners falling into your lap.

Would more computers have helped with that? Maybe maybe not.

The computer program would not have forgotten to configure the flaps and slats for takeoff.

This year battery peaking plants are deploying far faster than fuel peakers and have almost caught up with the rate if increase in daily peaking needs.