moftz

You now also end up in the situation where your browser has the google.com certificate pinned so even if the portal tries to serve up a self-signed certificate for google.com, the browser will still complain about something fishy going on. The most complete solution is for the browser to try to detect captive portals and load up a plain HTTP website for the portal to hijack.

I remember in public school, IT had a website blocker that was effectively was a captive portal that would just route you to a "BLOCKED" web page and only could handle blocking non-HTTPS domains. Many sites were already going HTTPS by senior year so it was trivial to go to https://facebook.com and have full access. Another possibility was using a cgi-proxy. The site blocker was a blacklist so I hosted my own cgi-proxy when the one commonly used got blacklisted.

Mozilla also has one that Firefox will use when detecting captive portals: http://detectportal.firefox.com/success.txt

The work required for moving the RTG up a slight hill might just negate the energy you gain from it. An RTG is not really meant to move itself very fast. Consider the Mars rovers, they move extremely slow but benefit from the stable, long term power supply.

It would take days to fully charge an EV from a typical RTG and there's no way an RTG could put out enough power to even keep an EV rolling on a flat highway at highway speeds. They are good for remote, unmanned stations but not much else.

You don't necessarily have to engage in predatory pricing if you can sell in such volume that you can get better prices than a mom and pop as well as offering a one stop shop for most consumers. You don't even need to raise prices once the competition is gone simply because you are already making a decent profit.

Forcing companies to break up can have the unintentional effect of creating cartels where the previously joined companies of similar size work together to push out smaller companies with price fixing. If there is only so much business to be done and there's no realistic way for you to cover a majority of the industry, you can make more money pushing out any of the competition that won't keep prices fixed.

I went to a GnuRadio conference a few years ago where a lot of presentations were on directional tracking of signals. One huge issue is that truckers are using GPS jammers that plug into the cigarette lighter socket to block the truck tracking systems from knowing that they are driving outside of their legal time limits. One trucker has left his jammer plugged in for a day or two. The nearby port was entirely shutdown until authorities found the jammer because the massive ships couldn't navigate the tight quarters of the port without GPS. One project was using cameras along with multiple antennas to attempt to track who was driving past a particular overpass with a jammer turned on. A cigarette lighter socket has the potential to put out tens of watts out RF power which can almost certainly jam anyone that can't use the military anti-jam GPS channels.

That's probably just a convenient, cheap, and robust connector to source instead of something more obscure. Grill probes are more likely to be a thermocouple rather than a thermistor as they can usually handle higher temp ranges.

Sriracha isn't trademarked in any way. Anyone can make it and sell it in a similar bottle. Unless some restaurant specifically mentions Huy Fong or shows the rooster logo, the sriracha they are using is probably a generic version made from garlic and chilis.

Doing as many patches as you can may make the approvers fatigued and more likely to approve something that is bad or malicious.

People not able to scrape together enough for a down payment on a house aren't magically going to be able to afford one if landlords need to sell their properties. A decrease in market value of rental properties due to major increase in sales is just going to invite private equity firms that will come in and snatch them up from the smaller landlords that cannot afford to continue. A better system to increase homeownership would be to reduce the need for down payments. Plenty of people can afford a mortgage and the other costs of homeownership but simply cannot save up the initial investment. The government already offers student loans for tens of thousands of dollars with no collateral or down payment, why not do the same for mortgages? Obviously its a little different than college degree, you can't sell your degree to pay off the loan but I could see a future where some sort of federal mortgage program can exist.

I had to reread this part a couple times:

"How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone.

Haha, I forgot IPhone was a trademark before the iPhone.

With the right USB adapter, you can plug an RTLSDR into an android phone.

You could do something very basic with discrete components for controlling wireless lighting systems but system starts to get out of hand when you need to have a bunch of lights nearby. It's much cheaper, simpler, and smaller to reduce it down to a chip and move to a digital RF system. I've got a bunch of RF controlled outlets in my house but it's just about the dumbest system you can buy. It's on par with the typical remote garage door opener. You can program the on/off buttons on the remote for each outlet but that's as far as it goes. I'd like to be able to remotely control them away from home or be able to give each light or outlet its own schedule and that requires either a central controller or each device having network access for network time and remote control.

Interestingly, a friend rented a house in college once that had a system of low voltage light switches that ran back to a cabinet filled with relays that controlled light switches and outlets. No major benefit to the user other than a control panel in the master bedroom that lets you control the exterior and some interior lights. It was a neat system but definitely outdated. I'd imagine a retrofit would be to drop all of the relays for solid state and provide a networked controller to monitor status and provide remote control.

Get one of those under-the-desk bike peddle exercise machines and play the video on a TV in the background.

And I thought it was going to be an old rail bike design from Bentley, the car manufacturer.

There's an LED on the box that says whether you are good or not. Seems like the check is only at start-up via a bluetooth connection so if you turn on the box and it's green, you're good to go.

No fucking clue. Some people like to leave jokey memo lines but I'm glad none of my friends have done something like that outside of the "friends only" option. I just say what it's for or give it a generic name like "money" or "here you go".

Not everyone buys an old 4x4 to go up and down muddy hills. Some people just want to be able to get to work in inclement weather but don't want to buy new or need to spend a lot on parts. If an old 4runner was the only thing in my price range for a 4x4 daily driver, I'd probably be a little disappointed too.

Last I checked, airbags are not required by any government nor are they a standard option on motorcycles. If you wish to wear one, either spend the $400 upfront or pay for the subscription for the months you do ride. The monthly subscription sounds just right for someone who can't afford $400 but can afford $12 to wear an airbag vest on their daily commute on a motorcycle. It's much cheaper than ending up in the ICU. Vice is trying to start some shit but the interviewee from In&motion sounds perfectly reasonable.

The crank reminds me of one of a handheld electronic fishing game I used to have as a kid. I didn't see a fishing game listed but that would be pretty fun.

In your first transaction, you just set it to private so only you and the recipient (and Venmo and whatever gov't agency) can only see the memo line. The amount is always private. The setting sticks after that so you don't ever need to change it again.

You can practice and take classes that teach you how to do well on the SAT/ACT. No guarantee that you'll ace it but you'll do much better if you know the strategy behind a perfect score.

Being out in the middle of the ocean with only INS supposedly keeping you on track is different than a GPS receiver that you can look at and see that you are not where you should be. Obviously the same thing would happen if no one was paying any mind to the cockpit instruments but at least a GPS receiver offers a solid reference to compare against. I really can't imagine how nerve wracking it would be trying to fly a plane without INS or GPS over an ocean. Your navigator would do their best to keep track of location but you'd probably end up way off course by the time you saw land.

Replacing hardware is much easier than trying to make backups of embedded systems.

You need to consider the motivation. Were the hackers just looking for a victim with deep pockets that would want to just hand over the money as soon as possible or were they actually looking to bring down a major pipeline? Giving the victim the chance to recover once the ransom is paid seems like it was more about the money. The attack could just have easily deleted everything from the network and totally crippled Colonial.

In the book Ghost Fleet, a billionaire obtains a letter of marque to go hijack a Chinese space station that is shooting down US satellites.

Money can certainly help influence someone to wear a bomb vest, they don't need to actually believe in the cause. There could be someone out there that specializes in finding people in vulnerable financial situations that wouldn't mind blowing themselves up if it meant that their family was well taken care of.

You can do a few things:

- Laser off the part marking. Not knowing what a part is makes the job much more difficult

- One time programmable chips: can't modify or read off firmware if the JTAG bus is disabled

- Encrypted firmware: helps if someone is able to fuzz the chip to dump the firmware

- BGA parts: hide the pins, bury the traces. It makes the job harder but not impossible

- Programming before soldering: you can leave the programming pins disconnected so someone would have to remove the chip before attempting anything on it

- Use more advanced features of the chip: some chips offer secure memory locations that can contain decryption keys, magic numbers, whatever you want. You could have a magic number that you XOR with every literal. It would certainly make things more difficult to determine what is what in the assembly code if you could decrypt it

- Pour some epoxy over the chip or board: makes repairs impossible but also can screw over the reverse engineer.

- Work with a manufacturer to build a custom chip. You could do crazy things like move the programming pins around and hide them as other things. Like the JTAG test points would be random decoupling caps hidden in the board.

- Finally, threaten to sue anyone that publishes anything

The vendor asks for your information before selling you the part. There's two different regulations when it comes to this kind of stuff. ITAR is for pretty much anything defense related. It's not easy buying something ITAR as a regular person as most companies would probably just refuse to sell it to you unless you worked for a company doing defense work. People have gotten caught in the past by buying things in the name of their employer (or a fake shell company) and then selling it to places like China. EAR is easier to get a hold of as these parts are considered commercial dual-use technology. For example, a new microprocessor has a temperature range that exceeds the typical milspec range (-55-125C) so it's great for high temperature environments like downhole drilling equipment where it can get really hot but this chip would also work well inside the engine of an F-35. The govt has a list of specifications that if your commercial product meets them, it's classified as EAR. EAR is much more lax than ITAR as the govt doesn't want to hamper the commercial sector simply because a technology is new and better but the sames rules apply as to where these products can be exported to.