Denatonium

IIRC, WiFi on cellphones tends to have power-saving features that cause unsolicited incoming connections to have poor performance and very high latency. I don't know if there are kernel parameters to disable this, but even if there are, you'd likely need root to toggle them.

In practice, they'll just prescribe a higher dose when that happens, thus worsening the problem.

I'm not defending the use of AI chatbots, but you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a worse solution for depression than the medical system.

In other news, a massive spike in BitTorrent traffic has been detected in the UK. Experts are calling the rise "unprecedented".

Whiskey

This has already been tried. During the 1930s to 1950s, amphetamine was available over-the-counter under the trade name Benzedrine, but it was made prescription-only following rampant abuse. By then, it had garnered a significant reputation, and the folk proto-punk band "The Fugs" sang about it in their song "New Amphetamine Shriek".

The real issue with increasing legal access to speed is that you're never fully aware of the impairment that amphetamines cause, because they make the user feel cognitively-enhanced, regardless of reality. In contrast, with alcohol and cannabis, the user is generally well-aware that they are not safe to drive or operate heavy machinery.

I have known SO many people on prescribed amphetamines who either wrecked their cars or narrowly avoided doing so. When I was on it, I narrowly avoided rear-ending multiple different cars before it finally occurred to me that I probably shouldn't be driving. Until that happened, I felt like my driving was being made better by the amphetamine, and for repetitive aspects of driving it probably was. For reaction time and spatial awareness, amphetamine was impairing.

Think of the profound-seeming drivel-filled essay written by a college student cranking out an essay last-minute while high on Adderall and now imagine these people all over the place, driving large pickup trucks with similar misplaced confidence in their cognitive abilities.

Google's Pixel phones are also this way, and the GrapheneOS project takes advantage of this feature.

I find it odd that most states legalize pot before they legalize/decriminalize shrooms. Psilocybin mushrooms are native to a lot more states than cannabis. It's an odd experience to walk down the streets of NJ and see a patch of Psilocybe Ovoideocystidiata growing in a mulch bed and to think, "Wow! A natural fungal felony with freewill and a means to reproduce, turning other people's mulch beds into felonies!"

More like most parts of the country! There's at least one species of psilocybin mushroom for most states. The Shroomery is a great starting resource.

I think a lot of Android devices have that; you type ##4636## into the dialer, and a menu appears. In that menu, you can select which cellular technologies are used.

I've had much better success having fax calls work over VoIP then I have getting data modem calls to work. My best guess as to why is that fax calls have much less back and forth, and as a result, they are less latency-sensitive. Fax calls also usually negotiate at 14.4kbps, whereas data modem calls often try to train at faster rates.

I used Gandi's SMTP servers to relay outbound mail only (through postfix). For inbound mail, I pointed the MX record to my home IP address, where I received it directly on my postfix server.

This avoided my ISP's block on outbound TCP port 25, and it also gave me a reputable sending IP address economically.

Gandi is a good registrar for situations like this, you can use their free hosted email, create one email account, and alias all email addresses you'll use to that inbox. Then, change the MX records to point to your self-hosted email server, and configure the server to relay through the Gandi SMTP account you created.

You can often tell which ISPs are competently managed by looking at which direction TCP/25 is blocked. Around me, there are 2 ISPs.The one that I use blocks port 25 outbound and leaves inbound open (sensible).

The incompetent, smaller ISP blocks 25 inbound, but leaves outbound wide open, as well as 587 inbound open. This effectively blocks people from receiving mail directly, but it does nothing to prevent outbound spam from being sent.

UPnP for port mapping is such a nice, convenient security hole. There have been a few cases where I have needed to forward a port without access to the router's WebUI and 8/10 times, in a residential setting, UPnP saves the day. I normally use miniupnpc, but it's pretty cool seeing this done with curl.

I've tunneled VXLAN over Wireguard on Linux. In my setup, my WAN's MTU was 1500 bytes, and my Wireguard tunnel's MTU was 1550, with the VXLAN's MTU being 1500. Surprisingly, traffic and iperf3 tests going over the VXLAN had much better throughput than traffic going directly over the Wireguard connection. IIRC, over the VXLAN, I was pulling ~800Mbps over the VXLAN/WG setup with iperf3.

Where this would fall apart is if there are firewalls in between that silently drop UDP fragments. In a case like that, it may be necessary to do VXLAN/Wireguard/Wireguard to conceal the fragmented packets with MTUs of 1500/1550/1440 respectively, assuming IPv4 and WAN MTU of 1500. I bet this would come with a significant performance hit though.

When I took my Schwab debit card to Europe, the exchange rates that I got were identical to the ones posted on Visa's website, suggesting that it's Visa doing the ForEx conversions.

A lot of banks do charge a percentage fee on top of Visa/MC's exchange rate, but my bank does not.

I think a lot of enterprise networking gear requires licenses. Meraki APs don't work without a subscription, for example.

A long time ago, I once had a Netgear WGR614v10 (802.11g router). Imagine my surprise when I learned that it was possible to enable telnet access, alter the model number in the NVRAM, and flash WNR1000v3 firmware onto it, converting it to an 802.11n router. They were identical internally.

I always found it interesting that Denatonium, one of the most bitter substances known, is structurally very similar to Lidocaine, a local anesthetic that would numb the taste buds. It's just another example of how a seemingly minor tweak to a structural formula can drastically alter the properties of a substance.

The Wayback Machine has it archived!

I got a COVID test at a local independent pharmacy. This same "Right Way Laboratory" processed the results and billed my health insurance company over $500 per test.

For audio, my all-time favorite format to work with is raw PCM.

One time, I had to split a bunch of WAV files at precise intervals. I first tried ffmpeg, but its seeking algorithm was nowhere near accurate enough. I finally wrote a bash script that did the splitting much more accurately. All I had to do to find the byte offset from a timestamp in an raw PCM audio file is multiply the timestamp (in seconds) by the sample rate (in Hz) by the bit depth (in bytes) by the number of channels. The offset was then rounded up to the nearest multiple of the bit depth (in bytes) times the number of channels (this avoids inversions of the stereo channels at cut points).

Once I had the byte offset, I could use the head and tail commands to manipulate the audio streams to get perfectly cut audio files. I had to admire the simplicity of dealing with raw data.

Enjoy that price while it lasts and get ready to haggle; the non-promotional rate (found on the "Rate Cards" page linked at the bottom of Astound's website) for your speed tier is $161.99 per month in addition to the Network Access and Maintenance Fee.

At least in former RCN areas, there's usually at least a semi-viable competitor, and after being away for 2 months, you generally become eligible for the new customer promotions again.

Intel cards in particular will flat out refuse to work in AP mode on the 5GHz band due to a poorly implemented regulatory domain check.

On the other hand, my generic AliExpress Mediatek MT7612U works in AP mode. If I recall, it was passable, but it didn't perform that well compared to my dedicated AP; I think it was the range that wasn't as good (probably had something to do with my antennas). I also didn't test it with a lot of clients.

You're absolutely right; I've operated a site-to-site VPN tunnel between two locations (tunnel endpoints were on the routers, and both peers were sharing an public IP address).

After a while, Google would associate the IP address of the local side of the tunnel with the location of the remote side of the tunnel.

I assume this is from Android devices connecting to the network on the remote side, being geolocated by Google Play Services, and Google tying this location with the IP address.

You'd be surprised; I'm pulling 150Mbps on a years-old $40 Edgerouter X (it was on sale when I bought it; it's normally $60) over Wireguard to Mullvad.

A properly designed captive portal can make it harder for someone leaving a small computer in the vicinity of your network and reverse tunneling through it for nefarious purposes. Having to log in every day would disrupt the tunnel and prevent remote access.

(Un)fortunately many captive portal are poorly designed, allowing arbitrary traffic to be sent over UDP/53 or ICMP, even when not authenticated. This kind of defeats the purpose of a captive portal, as the tunnel can be operated over UDP/53 (or whatever) and the captive portal can be solved remotely.

I know there's an opt out, but someone needs to create an app that connects to a TLS server while sending random SNI values. (I know from experience with their video streaming throttling that T-Mobile uses TLS SNI to categorize websites).

This could probably be scripted using Termux, OpenSSL, and Tasker.

At one point there was a piece of software called deezcloud which exploited Deezer's user uploaded MP3 storage, allowing it to be used as free CDN cloud storage for up to 400GB of files. I don't think it works anymore, and I'm not sure if it ever worked well (I never tried it).

That sounds suspiciously similar to how I used to download large files on a shared 2GB/month data plan. My carrier didn't count incoming MMS messages towards the quota, and conveniently didn't re-encode images sent to their subscribers via their email-to-MMS gateway. So naturally, I'd SSH into my server, download what I wanted to download, and run the bash script I wrote, which split the downloaded file into MMS-sized chunks, and prepended a 1x1 PNG image to them, and then sent them sequentially through my carrier's gateway. This worked surprisingly well, and I had a script on my phone which would extract the original file from the sequence of "photos". It may still work, but I've since gotten a less restrictive data plan.

It could also be TLS-SNI/HTTP-HOST based.

While this doesn't directly address Delta's captive portal implementation, on many TP-Link Omada wireless APs, there is a feature that allows you to create a captive portal, and when doing this, you can either whitelist a website by its hostname or by its IP address. I was curious as to how it was filtering by hostname, so I ran a few DNS queries, which all resolved normally, indicating that it wasn't a DNS-based whitelist. Seeing as the whitelisting also worked over HTTPS, I assumed it was TLS-SNI. It turns out that anyone can whitelist any IP address by visiting any website while sending the SNI of a whitelisted hostname. This caused the AP's software to create a firewall rule allowing access to the IP address associated with the spoofed SNI. After doing this, it was then possible to connect to any website hosted on that IP address with any SNI hostname.

>Over here in the EU any cellular device should contain a SIM card which must be registered to someone or some company...

This isn't true for all of the EU. For example, in the Netherlands, you can buy and activate a prepaid SIM without any identification requirements. This prepaid SIM, once activated in the Netherlands, can then be used in other parts of the EU without subsequent registration.