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heffer

321 karma · joined June 12, 2014

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/fk; my proof: https://keybase.io/fk/sigs/9TuZef8KsIsAxbigRONpST7drGEHoMLAvRX0XHY10gY ]
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heffer··on Buyer cancels showing after Deflock shows two cameras utilized by the HOA
See, that's the great thing about America. There's also cities where it is legal to build a new neighbourhood without an HOA. And if that at some point happens to no longer be the case in the USA, there are many more countries in America to choose from where there are places you could still live an HOA-free life, such as Canada.
heffer··on I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them
More like https://www.printables.com/model/1148683-stacking-storage-ba...

No handles.

heffer··on Western Sahara
I play GeoGrid quite regularly and Western Sahara works well to score rare low-point answers. So I was a bit surprised to see it here as well.
heffer··on Tidal AI Policy
In Canada (which I assume you were referring to, as you didn't specify a jurisdiction) this claim is currently in litigation, so there is no definitive answer as to whether AI generated music is copyrightable or not. The currently accepted definition of "originality" (as required by the Copyright Act) is that it must involve the claimed author's "skill and judgment". Whatever that may mean in the context of AI is currently left for the reader to decide.
heffer··on Pre-2022 Books
That tracks with reality, as the majority of people don't have English as their first language. Depending on data sources used for training that could well reflect into AI detection tools.
heffer··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
I don't think it explains the "cat walks on keyboard" brand names for cheap Chinese goods on Amazon.
heffer··on Hold on to Your Hardware
Please, it's actually Cambodian Dollhairs or Canuckistan Pesos.
heffer··on FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
It's clickbait. The "driver" is actually a rather comprehensive kernel patch that modifies existing GPLv2 kernel code, so by its very nature it is at least GPLv2 (original parts may be dual licensed by the vendor if they want to, but they can't not make it GPLv2).

What this person paid $40,000 for is access to development kits for certain hardware, which with chip vendors like that usually also comes with support. The vendor cannot prevent you from exercising your GPLv2 rights after they hand you the code. In fact, if you manufacture and distribute a device that uses these kernel patches it becomes your obligation to enable your customers to exercise their GPLv2 rights. Chip manufacturers know this and (if they are somewhat reputable) usually license their code appropriately.

heffer··on Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
My local Indian restaurant offers tiffin service for CAD 250/month. That's enough food for my wife and I for lunch on the 5 out of 7 days of the week included in the price (and we usually have leftover Naan each day that we can snack on in the evenings). I would be hard pressed to walk out of a grocery store in Ontario buying fresh ingredients for that level of variety for 20 days out of the month. We can easily spend more on groceries each month for the 10 days that we do actually cook for ourselves.

Granted, this setup does require that you do like Indian food and don't mind having the bulk of what you eat each month generally be of that cuisine. But in our case the restaurant has enough variety that with both of us having a different dish for each meal there are enough dishes to choose from that we don't have to eat the same thing more than once all week.

With all that said, we haven't even talked about how there is no cooking or cleanup involved either, so there are massive time and convenience benefits as well.

But I can appreciate that not everyone would be satisfied with this.

heffer··on AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem
You're absolutely right! Every Apple user knows they shouldn't be holding it wrong.
heffer··on I Am Mark Zuckerberg
Same here. My Google Account is something along the lines of jose86@gmail.com (a common hispanic first name + birth year; I'm German).

It's unusable. I have received full blown mortgage applications from couples in Mexico (including paystubs, tax forms, credit ratings, phone bills, passports). Mostly, these days, it's transaction notifications for a guy in Nigeria and phone bills for people in South America.

heffer··on FDA takes action to make a treatment available for autism symptoms
Pretty sure we don't know each other. I am a fairly recent addition to the country (2019) but we've worked with Dan and Beanfield during COVID when we put together a server for Folding@Home in our office to help them with the huge increase in load due to interest in the COVID research they were doing. Beanfield sponsors the pipe and we donated the hardware and rackspace. That server (the only Canadian one), by the way, is still running to this day. We also came up with the WiFi@Toronto project which a paper says reduced the spread of COVID in those neighbourhoods by 14.4% (https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/f542d219-7abe-4918-846f-...). Again, Beanfield sponsored the pipe to exit all the traffic onto the internet and we sponsored the networking equipment and were the ones installing the APs on rooftops.
heffer··on FDA takes action to make a treatment available for autism symptoms
> I also happen to know this data is being transferred out of country to CDSI; ASN 23498

CDSI is Cogeco Data Services, Inc., a Canadian ISP, which later became Aptum, which in turn was acquired by Beanfield, also a Canadian ISP (the founder Dan Armstrong is actually well known in the internet community in Canada) that operates AS23498.

So I don't see how this would prove your data is leaving the country.

heffer··on EFF to court: The Supreme Court must rein in secondary copyright liability
Germany had this principle in place for a while for internet. It's called "Störerhaftung". Just google it and see the craziness that ensued. Led to exactly the kind of court cases you'd expect to see: grandmas paying to settle lawsuits for people abusing their misconfigured WiFi, AirBnB hosts paying for their tenants' torrenting. This gave rise to movements like Freifunk which allowed people to share an open WiFi that in many cases just tunnelled back the internet traffic to central exit points using IPs assigned to registered charities that were, for all intents and purposes, classified as ISPs and therefor exempt from this secondary liability. Another nice twist was that German privacy law only requires (and sometimes only allows) ISPs to store information about their customers needed for billing purposes. But because the service is free there is no billing and thus no information about the customer is known and nothing can be provided to courts or law enforcement as a result.

I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.

heffer··on Using the Internet without IPv4 connectivity
CloudFlare and friends use a multitude of factors, AS being only one of them. I am a TekSavvy customer (Canada's largest independent, i.e. not owned by one of the incumbents, ISP). Pretty clearly an eyeball network, and I get the CloudFlare captcha multiple times per day on different sites. I'm guessing it may have to do with the fact that I use custom reverse DNS entries (instead of their default schema of 127.0.0.1.dsl.teksavvy.com) for my internet facing IPv4 and IPv6 subnet.
heffer··on Powers of 2 with all even digits
The link is about 2^n not n^2.
heffer··on Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges
Pantum is a brand of Ninestar, a group of companies that pretty much make every major component across the entire value chain of laser printers.

They bought Lexmark in 2016 (which is why some Pantum printers look like Lexmark printers).

The company has origins in manufacturing third-party replacement ICs for building compatible consumables and as such has extensive experience reverse engineering many printer designs. Many compatible printing consumables outlets carry Pantum brand printers, as they are essentially buying them through the same channels they buy their compatible consumables.

Pantum has a program for identifying genuine Pantum consumables as well, as any respectable printer manufacturer would ;-) It's a fun little sticker with some tricks up its sleeve: https://global.pantum.com/support/identification/

heffer··on Avoid ISP Routers (2024)
In similar news: The German regulator (BNetzA) just re-confirmed two weeks ago [0] that passive optical networks are not exempt from § 73 (1) of the TKG (Telecommunication law) which mandates that the interface between provider and customer is required to be a passive interface (i.e. mandating an ONT is already in violation of that). And that is fine. The different PON standards are reasonably well standardized and can operate in these standard modes for most equipment manufacturers. The NSP may lose some proprietary features, but the past has shown that equipment manufacturers have adapted for the German market accordingly. The law does allow exemptions, mainly if required for access technology reasons, but clearly states that even in that case the device that connects the end-user devices to the service (i.e. router) cannot be mandated by the ISP. They can provide one, but they cannot prevent you from connecting your own.

I do sometimes miss living in Germany.

[0]: Press release in German: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...

heffer··on Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024
That's who I thought as well, but I think it's more likely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Sim
heffer··on How we built the Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023 globe
You can start with this: https://github.com/vasturiano/globe.gl I've built a few visualizations with it. You'd have to extend it a bit to copy exactly what Shopfiy did, but all the basics are there. It's probably also not as optimized as the Shopify implementation.
heffer··on Practical Introduction to BLE GATT Reverse Engineering: Hacking the Domyos EL500 (2023)
I've had a lot of fun with this reverse engineering my Napoleon gas fireplace BLE controller for the purposes of integration with Home Assisstant. In the process discovered the UART protocol it speaks with the very common SIT ProFlame 2 fireplace controller. So you could now build a very cheap controller for ProFlame 2 based fireplaces.

I went the Android Bluetooth HCI snoop log + Wireshark route.

I wrote a Wireshark protocol dissector for that specific BLE protocol which you can use with the Android BT logs: https://github.com/kaechele/bonaparte/blob/main/contrib/wire... I found this extremely valuable when debugging, because it allows me to visualize both the packets the OEM app sends and compare this with what my library sends over the air.

I ended up documenting my findings here: https://bonaparte.readthedocs.io/

BLE hacking is pretty fun.

heffer··on IPU6 camera support in Fedora 41
At least for the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen10 I know that they use a hybrid FFP/micro coax design. FFP to fit behind the display panel as the cable runs up to the sensor assembly and micro coax for fitting through the hinge. I don't think you'll see a lot of purely coax based designs, given the trend to thin displays with small bezels. Other laptops like the Dell XPS 13 Plus run straight FFP from the mainboard all the way to the sensor.
heffer··on The latter half of October, the maintainer goes offline
If you work Monday to Saturday. The law requires 20 days for people that work Monday to Friday. The effect is the same though: In both cases you get 4 weeks off.
heffer··on Critical Exploit in MediaTek Wi-Fi Chipsets: Zero-Click Vulnerability
Lenovo grew unhappy with MediaTek as well and started soldering down Qualcomm chips for WLAN on their AMD platforms only to be burned by buggy firmware/driver interactions on Linux (which they officially sell and support). And Qualcomm stretches themselves rather thin on the mainline kernel side once a chipset generation is no longer the latest. It takes a tremendous amount of vendor pressure to make Qualcomm do anything these days.
heffer··on OpenStreetMap Is Turning 20
OsmAnd
heffer··on Show HN: A football/soccer pass visualizer made with Three.js
Interesting to see how much (or little) the positions of the players in the lineup are reflected in the play. As someone that was born in Leverkusen I can appreciate you using a Bayer Leverkusen vs. Werder Bremen match for the example ;-) Nice work!
heffer··on British Columbia to recriminalize use of drugs in public spaces
Because some people view privilege of any kind critically. Also, especially in North America, being some place first has not historically proven to be a sufficient claim.
heffer··on Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest
There is always the option to detain them in Canada and maybe, possibly extradite them to the US (or not).
heffer··on WireViz: Easily document cables and wiring harnesses
There is nwdiag which is part of blockdiag: http://blockdiag.com/en/nwdiag/index.html

Unfortunately, it seems the package is abandoned with the maintainer being unresponsive. But I've been using it within Sphinx to generate some documentation for a Bluetooth protocol, and it generates pretty useful diagrams.

heffer··on Hetzner switches to new billing model
OVH's Toronto datacentre is not operational yet. But you can pre-order. It's going to be interesting to see what this does to pricing for the Toronto hosting and compute market, as that location has always been more expensive compared to other North American locations. Right now it looks like OVH will not be offering their lower tier offers out of the Toronto DC.
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