Denatonium

It's probably for the best. As recently as 2016 (and probably more recently; that's just the last time I tested this), they weren't even validating SPF records on their email-to-SMS gateway. You could spoof the "From" address to any email address you fancied and your messages would go through, appearing to be from that sender. Back in high school, my childish self had a field day showing off my phone's SMS inbox filled up with spam Viagra ads that were "sent by" Hillary Clinton's "hacked" email server.

It's not as funny in hindsight, given the unexpected results of that election, but at the time, it felt like top-tier humor.

The limits of dynamic stability go down drastically when the brakes are locked up. You can be _far_ from the limits of dynamic stability when going around a bend in the road, but if your car locks up the brakes mid-bend, you can unexpectedly go from nowhere close to those limits to exceeding them in the blink of an eye. A human driver would wait until they've straightened out to brake hard, but the computer in a car is entirely at the mercy of whoever programmed it. Hopefully it would do the same, but do you really trust Tesla (or whomever) with their move-fast-and-break-things additude?

Then there's the fact that automatic emergency braking requires the software algorithm to make decisions based on data that is a lot more complex and ambiguous than the data used by electronic stability control and ABS systems. It's much easier to detect steering angle and wheel slippage than it is to detect how an object in the distance is likely to behave.

I suspect this will just lead to people pulling the ABS fuse and losing ABS and ESC along with AEB.

Automatic braking can also be hazardous! In a front-wheel drive car, understeer is a fact of life. When you're approaching a bend in the road with your foot in the accelerator, you're going to be pointed at the guardrail, since the car's going to rotate around the bend when lift your foot off the gas. Now imagine you're driving a car with AEB and it slams on the brakes while you were lightly accelerating towards the guardrail, right before you were going to lift your foot off the gas. What was a perfectly routine curve just turned into complete loss of control, and there's a very good chance your car's going straight into the guardrail!

Even when it doesn't slam on the brakes, if you were concentrating on the road, those jarring beeps can just as easily break your focus on driving as they can break your focus on a distraction. I think it's better to avoid distraction by keeping cruise control off, and you can compensate for having human-level reaction time by following at a safe distance and staying in an appropriate gear or setting an appropriate level of regenerative braking to avoid mindlessly getting too close to the car in front of you.

I think that too often, driver assist features are being added to cars to compensate for the other features (like adaptive cruise control) that encourage drivers to mentally disengage from the task of driving. There's also the fact (well, opinion) that driving a car without electronic assists and nannies is fun and engaging (especially on back roads with the windows down and the radio up). Riding in an autonomous vehicle is just as dull as riding on public transportation, all while being less efficient, less social, and worse for the environment.

It would be interesting if we could somehow test how the reduction in crashes with the introduction of driver assists would compare with if we had just banned cruise control, introduced minimum visibility and minimum suspension stiffness standards, and mandated manual transmissions.

The uBlock Origin lite that can run on iOS is very limited compared to the uBlock Origin that runs on Firefox Android.

I did too, but I really miss Mullvad's static port forwarding system. It's a pain having to continually run a NAT-PMP client, and it doesn't work when you're connecting to ProtonVPN on your router.

PowerAmp is paid, and Aurora Store can't do paid apps or in-app purchases without a Google Account. It's better to download the APK and buy a license key on the official website, which doesn't require Google Play Services if you do it that way.

Looks like they also allow you to buy with a credit card on their website, and they say Google Services aren't required if you buy that way. Very cool!

Does your ISP router not allow you forward a port to a different port? I just assumed that was just a basic feature that any router would have. If the ISP router is that bad, it's definitely time to replace the ISP router or put in into bridge mode.

You can bind ports 1024-65535, and if you're in a home setting, you can just configure the port forwarding/DNAT settings on your home router to forward external ports 80/443 to whatever ports you're using internally.

Containers are nice, but they're not strictly necessary. On Google Pixel 6 and newer phones, you can take it a step further and root your phone and run a KVM-accellerated arm64 Linux virtual machine on your phone. There's a port of Limbo PC emulator that includes support for the KVM accelleration, and it works quite well! It even allows you to pass through USB devices to the guest.

Old thin clients can be good deals too. Dell Wyse 5070s are great for basic tasks, especially if you can get the Pentium Silver J5005 models. They take M.2 SATA SSDs and they don't have UEFI whitelists on their M.2 WLAN cards, meaning you can get one of those M.2 A+E key SATA cards and connect a SATA HDD to it. Expect to pay around $40-$50 for a Dell Wyse 5070 with 4GB of RAM and eMMC storage. You can easily add an SSD, and since it takes M.2 SATA SSDs, you can buy lightly used ones relatively inexpensively.

Old Optiplex are also good deals. I bought a Dell Optiplex 5070 MT for $150 for myself and 2 Dell Optiplex 3070 SFF computers for $75 each to replace my mom's aging Windows 7 PC. All 3 computers take DDR4 and M.2 NVMe SSDs and have an Intel i5-9500 CPU that will also run Windows 11 pretty well, if you're into masochism that is.

If you're hosting behind a NAT device, you can just map external port 80/443 to internal port whatever. You can bind any port 1024 or higher.

Termux is only slower without root if you use proot. PRoot provides a limited implementation of chroot that runs unprivileged in userspace, but this also causes it to be pretty slow. If the server software you want to run is available in the Termux repos, you can use that and have it run at full-speed.

Termux works by patching all programs to treat /data/data/com.termux/files/usr as the root directory and /data/data/com.termux/files/home as the home directory. This introduces some compatibility issues, but it doesn't make it any slower.

The Termux project has a great wiki at https://wiki.termux.com/

If your phone is a Tensor-powered Google Pixel (so a Pixel 6 or newer), you can root it and run a full KVM-accellerated arm64 Linux VM with USB passthrough and SLiRP networking. I've used my Pixel 8 with a USB hub and a Mediatek MT7921AU USB 3.0 WiFi card in monitor mode with kismet for the ultimate mobile wardriving setup.

Honestly, Mehmet Oz deserves more of the blame here. He and the other people who are fighting to make healthcare expensive and inaccessible create situations where people aren't being diagnosed and cured of Hep C, which leaves them passing the infection to others through sexual contact, sharing needles, etc.

RFK Jr. is an anti-vax crackpot, but Hep C isn't vaccine-preventable. On the other hand, we can absolutely blame RFK Jr. for our rising Hep A, B, and D rates.

Here on the east coast, you can just wait until May comes around and it rains a couple days in a row. Then, you can just go for a walk by your local river/creek and wade through the seas of Japanese knotweed, lesser celandine, and box elder maple while looking for mushrooms growing out of the wet woody debris. Between them and nearby mulch beds, SWIM has allegedly found psilocybe ovoideocystidiata pretty consistently for the past several years, in Minecraft. Just don't try and take any shortcuts with the identification. It's better to throw out questionable specimens than risk needing a liver transplant.

When I was in high school in the mid 2010s, Verizon's email-to-SMS gateway didn't verify SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and I had a field day showing my classmates the Viagra ads that Hillary Clinton's "hacked" email server was sending me. In reality, it was an open relay, but Verizon didn't care; they always delivered it anyway.

Timing and scalability are probably the biggest issues with realtime P2P applications. Scalability is becoming a bit less of an issue; with mid-splits becoming the norm on cable internet services and 5G SA rolling out, there's just a lot more bandwidth to go around.

Timing issues can be worked around and GPS modules are cheap.

NAT problems aren't usually that bad. Only a minority of networks use symmetric NAT implementations, with most seeming to be using port-restricted cone NAT (EIM/APDF), which can still communicate with any other NAT implementation using endpoint-independent mapping (EIM). Most CGNAT implementations that I've encountered use EIM, with some also doing endpoint-independent filtering (EIF). Between UDP hole-punching, UPnP, NAT-PMP, and IPv6, it's usually possible to establish a P2P connection between 2 endpoints.

A game could use a hybrid client/server and P2P model, with the option to run entirely P2P while accepting its limitations.

I forget if it was $20 or $29.99, but in either event, it wasn't much. If you shop at Wally World regularly, you can sometimes find carrier burner phones for $10-$20, but finding them in-stock can be a bit of a challenge.

Many opioids, including opiates, used to be OTC. I personally know someone who used to smoke paregoric (camphorated tincture of opium), which was OTC in the US until 1970.

I believe 1970 was also the year when amphetamine (Benzedrine) inhalers stopped being OTC.

Some of us are already doing this. My main phone is a Google Pixel 8 running LineageOS 23.2 with F-Droid, microG, and Aurora Store installed.

For things requiring Play Integrity, I picked up a $20 burner carrier-locked Motorola phone at Walmart for $30. It's WiFi-only, given that I'm never going to pay for service on it, but I can also tether it to my main phone. It's also useful for writing one-star reviews on apps that require Play Integrity to function, which is something everyone should be doing.

Hopefully they exempt UDP traffic with a destination port of 53. Or suspiciously-large ICMP echo request and echo response packets.

Systems like Everseen make that approach significantly riskier than it used to be. A live video of you checking out is run through image classification software, so if you scan a steak as 4011, it'll pause the checkout flow and call the SCO (self-checkout) attendant to watch the video of you scanning the item. They then have to approve the scan, at best leaving you publicly humiliated.

One of the AP (asset protection) guys at my local store always wore an eyepatch and a t-shirt reading "A bullet a day keeps the terrorists away". He did NOT look like a typical grocery store employee, and I'm sure that was intentional.

I think it was just clock drift on the camcorder during the initial recording, as I'm pretty sure I tried adjusting the frequency of the audio track to make it the same duration as the video track, and the A/V sync was still wrong.

I'm so glad the audio and video tracks are stored interleaved, as it made my solution possible, and the results I got were great. By splitting the interleaved video into small enough chunks, padding the audio, and cutting it exactly to video length, the padding was practically imperceptible.

The only issue I ran into was that ffmpeg can't cut audio with any real precision. I eventually figured out that I could dump the audio track to a headerless PCM file, calculate the exact byte offsets for my cut points, and cut them with perfect precision using the head and tail commands from GNU coreutils. This was perfect because I was able to use the cat command to combine all of the padded audio chunks into a single raw PCM file, which I then made an AAC encode of with ffmpeg to mux with my original encoded video track.

Ffmpeg's dvvideo implantation is unfortunately just broken and mangles timecodes, even if just doing a stream copy from dvvideo to dvvideo without any re-encoding.

Fortunately, dvgrab does allow you to take the original .dv file and generate a .srt subtitle track with time stamps that you can mux into your encoded files.

I used dvgrab to ingest my old tapes, and ffmpeg and avisynth/QTGMC to de-interface and encode files for easy viewing (though I keep the original .dv files).

The biggest issue I ran into was that while the audio and video were properly synced up in the original .dv file (due to it being an interleaved format), when I re-encoded the videos, the audio and video would drift out of sync as the video went on.

I was able to fix the sync issues by using dvgrab to split the original dv file into a bunch of 3 minute chunks. I then wrote a script to extract the audio track from each chunk, pad the end of the audio with milliseconds of silence to the exact length of the video track, combine the padded audio tracks, encodes the combined track, and muxes the fixed audio track with the encoded video. This worked really well; the silence padding is imperceptible, but the audio and video are still in sync - even after 2 hours.

A final point that needs making is that doing anything with dv files in ffmpeg (even -c:v copy) destroys the SMPTE timecodes embedded in the original file, making it much harder to split by scene.

I built a revolutionary AI-powered weather forecaster. Unlike other similar websites, WeatherZOID runs entirely client-side, thus massively improving scalability and reducing hosting costs, allowing the site to remain ad-free forever.

The weather forecasts seem to have similar accuracy to the forecasts delivered by Google, but unlike Google's forecasts, if the first forecast generated by WeatherZOID is wrong the first time, you can get an accurate forecast by pressing the "Get Weather" button an indefinite number of times.

Edit: Happy April Fools day.

I would recommend VyOS Stream for this situation. It has better performance and hardware compatibility than *BSD-based software routers, and it also has a nice CLI that is syntactically similar to Vyatta and EdgeOS (found on Ubiquiti's Edgerouter line).

In additon, compared to PF/OPNsense or OpenWRT (Linux based), you have more control and exposure to the underlying network concepts with VyOS. You're not configuring the kernel manually, but you still learn quite a bit.

I was admittedly a bit hot-headed when I wrote the original comment, but the critical qualifier in all of this is that these driver assist technologies should be optional and easily disable-able in a persistent manner, with a dashboard warning light to remind you that they're disabled.

In a lot of modern cars, there's no straightforward way of fully disabling ABS, traction control, electronic stability control, etc. There are certainly situations where they may be helpful, such as in a top-heavy truck with an open differential, but ABS and traction control systems can pose problems in other situations, such as in snow. Especially in the case of RWD coupes with limited-slip differentials, a bit of skidding may be an asset, provided the driver knows how to correct for oversteer. Even in FWD cars, ABS can sometimes be a detriment when stopping in snow, as the rapid automated brake-pumping can dislodge the snow you were otherwise going to be holding steady on.

Ultimately, I'm opposed to driver assist features being forced onto drivers who don't want to use them. I'm also opposed to teaching people how to drive with these assistance features. It's a lot like teaching students to use AI chatbots to do their work instead of teaching them to do their work themselves.

I fully agree. Similar to killing bacteria with antibiotics, Attempting to idiot-proof machinery only leads to the creation of idiot-proofing-resistant idiots.

We need to move back to putting users back into full control. Machines (including computers) should ALWAYS respect the input of the user, even if the user is wrong.

If a person shoots themself with a gun as a result of their incompetence, we don't fault the gun manufacturer for not designing the gun to prevent auto-execution. If you can't operate a firearm safely, you shouldn't attempt to operate a firearm.

Similarly, if a person deliberately points their car a solid object and accelerates into it, the actions of the operator shouldn't be the car manufacturer's responsibility. We need to get rid of ESC, ABS, AEB, etc. These features have created a whole slew of drivers who speed headfirst into the back of stationary drivers and expect their car to stop itself. This works right up until a sensor fails and the operator flies through the windshield (usually people like this don't wear seat-belts). If you can't drive, you shouldn't be driving until you rectify your incompetence.

Similarly, phones and computers should respect user input. If a users wants root access to their personal device, they should be able to get root access. If a user runs "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" as root, the device should oblige and delete everything, since that is what the operator instructed it to do. If you can't be trusted to use a computer, you shouldn't be using a computer until you rectify your incompetence.

The lack of accountability in modern society is disgusting, and it leads to much deeper societal problems when people refuse to better themselves and instead expect the world to shield them from their willful ignorance.