mrsteveman1

> Plus, the number of people who are might be affected is most likely dwarfed by the number of fraudulent votes that happen every single election, but that some people would rather not try to prevent.

This is the exact opposite of reality, and the opposite of basically every attempt[1] to investigate the prevalence of voter fraud.

The number of actual fraudulent votes is somewhere in the single to low double digits, it makes the news when it happens because it's extraordinarily rare. And it's a felony with virtually no real benefit for the person committing it.

And even some of those few cases were people who simply weren't supposed to vote, like the woman in Texas that was just sent to prison for it, not people who didn't have identification. Texas has a voter ID law.

The hyper-focus on one very specific kind of potential voter fraud, with virtually no evidence that it's even a problem, is suspicious on its face.

That voter ID proponents keep ignoring simple facts about the actual incidence of voter ID fraud, while dismissing all other concerns, strongly suggests they're arguing in bad faith.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...

Voter registration cards are on the identification document list in that link, they don't have pictures on them.

Either way the requirements to vote are currently less strict in many places than the requirements to get a photo ID that can then meet the requirements of voter ID laws.

That, all by itself, means it will affect some percentage of the voters in an area, and that means it can easily affect the outcome of an election, at the very least for a period of time that may span multiple election cycles.

And that is the real reason voter ID laws are constantly being proposed.

Constantly re-arguing the theoretical neutrality and easy availability of ID (which is generally neither free or easily available, in some cases deliberately) ignores the practical effect of voter ID laws, and the motivations of those pushing for voter ID laws.

Good point, it's an issue of optics really, regardless of the actual costs involved.

It's certainly not the drug itself that is so expensive; the unit cost of an individual dose of any of the common opiates, when purchased through a pharmaceutical channel, is going to be less than a rounding error.

Excellent idea.

In the U.S. we commonly see waves of "heroin" overdose deaths over the course of a single weekend. I use quotes because it's usually not diacetylmorphine, it's a fentanyl analog. While they're both illegal, fentanyl doesn't require large poppy fields to manufacture, and it can be more easily concealed for smuggling due to the significantly higher potency by weight and volume.

And the cause of those overdose deaths is typically a new illegally smuggled batch of it showing up in a specific area that may or may not be diluted correctly, and even if it is diluted correctly, it may or may not be significantly more potent than the batch that was being sold the day before.

The "normal" fentanyl that we use to control chronic and postoperative pain, and for anesthesia, is active and easily felt at the 12.5-25mcg level. Some of the fentanyl analogs, including some we use in hospitals, are active at less than 1/100th of that. You simply can't see that or handle it safely, so illicit "heroin" is dry mixed with other, ideally inert, powders.

This works fine for things like a cake mix, where the whole thing is going to be further processed with liquids added to it, but for a potentially lethal drug it's extremely dangerous.

As a result, people accidentally take 50x or more than they thought they were taking, and first responders like police and EMS are at serious risk of overdose themselves, simply from touching a surface or a plastic bag that looks empty.

There is virtually nothing we can do to prevent that unless we move the demand into a regulated channel like a pharmacy.

A nice side benefit to distributing the drugs for free, as long as it isn't overly restrictive, is that it can potentially destroy the blackmarket by eliminating the profit motive as well.

> does anyone here know of any drugs that cause neurogenesis?

Tianeptine is fairly well known[1][2] for being able to prevent and/or reverse changes like hippocampal volume loss, which is commonly seen in untreated depression[3], chronic stress[4] and several other conditions.

7,8-Dihydroxyflavone[5] derivatives and/or prodrugs also look promising[6].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22047727

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034085/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1557684/

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep29127

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7,8-Dihydroxyflavone

[6] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jm101206p

I've seen some indication that the HECI (mailbox between the main OS and the ME) is disabled as well on most/all Apple machines.

I don't think they've ever used the Intel NIC hardware either, wired or wireless.

> In all honesty "most PC/laptops users" will never need these patches because their systems don't have the ME firmware. You need specific CPU, specific chipset, specific NIC, and the ME FW.

Every Intel system shipped in the last few years has the correct CPU, chipset and some version of the ME firmware (it's involved in initial platform boot, including Boot Guard which validates the BIOS before the CPU even gets a chance to run it), however some of them have "diet" ME firmware with fewer modules present.

The supported NIC is the only one that common desktops and laptops may not have at all. There's a side-channel required between the NIC and ME for certain features like AMT (remote desktop/management), and some NICs don't/can't support it. However, I recall seeing something about Intel allowing non-Intel NICs to be used at some point.

> Which you're only going to find in OEM systems marked as such - vPro.

See slide 68:

> Our Achievements

> • Switched-on AMT on non-vPro systems

https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-17/materials/eu-17-Goryachy...

One thing the PSP doesn't have is AMT style remote management.

AMD has their own kind of management system available on some machines (DASH, using "smart" NICs like Broadcom), but the PSP isn't even involved when DASH is available and in use, as far as I know.

However, on my Intel machine with AMT, there's a network port opened by the ME itself (TCP/16992). It can use the same IP as the main OS, or a different IP entirely if desired. It uses the same ethernet port as the main OS though, splitting the packets that are directed to one of the ME ports and selectively allowing the rest to continue to the main OS (there's a low-level ME firewall[1]).

On that port, there is a full remote desktop with mouse and keyboard, the ability to remotely connect small drives and/or ISO files, a remote serial console, a low level firewall configuration utility, and power/reboot controls. Even on machines where AMT is not even supposed to be available, there have been PoC demonstrated using one of the ME flaws to turn it back on[2].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/Wphopk1.jpg

(slide 68) [2] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-17/materials/eu-17-Goryachy...

> What if someone (perhaps a political campaign or party) with some kind of vested interest and a whole lot of money broke off a couple hundred dollars for a few hundred people?

If those people are OK with committing a felony for a few hundred dollars, ok, but I doubt most people would even entertain the idea.

It's a huge risk, a personal risk, and takes a large number of people who all have to be trusted.

And then any NDA they sign will be made irrelevant as soon as one of them gets immunity for testifying against the organizer in what would inevitably become a RICO case.

The 2018 MacBook Pro having thermal issues doesn't surprise me after seeing what my 2015 model does under load, but it's really disappointing since I've been anxiously waiting for Apple to release new laptops.

This 2015 MacBook Pro will avoid turning the fan on at any cost. I frequently watch the CPU package heat up to about 190F while the fan is still at 0RPM.

Further, the SMC chip and/or kernel are set to use fairly slow fan speeds compared to the amount of heat being produced, so even when it does come on, the system remains hotter than necessary.

But, here's the major problem: it's also become clear that there is a thermal window where the system is hot enough to cause it to throttle itself, perhaps somewhere between 140F and 180F, but not hot enough for the SMC to turn the fan on fast enough or at all, even though it could and should.

So in addition to being really hot and not using the fan to get the heat away from your lap, it gets slow at the same time, right when it's being used. The system becomes faster soon after the fan is turned up to the max.

And to top it off, there appear to be two different throttling mechanisms, the CPU speed can adjust up or down (you can see this with the Intel Power Gadget), and Apple has some kernel system that will use CPU cycles for idling instead of scheduling threads that are waiting, which reduces overall CPU usage, and therefore also heat production.

All combined, it looks like the system is constantly bouncing between ramping up the CPU frequency to handle load, then wasting some of the additional CPU time idling to avoid turning the fan on, then turning the fan on just long enough to get the heat down before turning the fan back off again, and repeat.

> Through experimentation they have arrived at these algorithms to maximize the probability that you find what YOU were looking for.

Depending on the query, 60-80% of Google Image results point to Pinterest, which no one is looking for and is not the original source of anything that shows up.

For regular searches, in the past few years there has been a continuous and significant decline in both the accuracy of results and the ability to communicate to Google what you're looking for in the first place.

Quoted phrases are frequently reinterpreted, destroying the intent.

On a query with 3 words, Google will frequently ignore one of them entirely, based on an opaque and constantly changing set of rules, and will return results for the other 2 words that have no relevance whatsoever.

Perhaps most frustrating is the constant irritating battle to trick Google's many different query "filters", not all of which are NSFW "safe search" filters, to avoid the very strange situations where a query with a small number of common english words somehow returned no results whatsoever, despite Google's clear willingness to throw away even the most important words in a query in order to return something.

> "Although not explicitly stated, it will also allow for the patentability of medical diagnostics and innovative pharmaceuticals"

The notion that patents are promoting pharmaceutical innovation or improved medical outcomes is absurd at this point, there are medications that are being excluded from the market because they can't be patented despite being well known and in use for decades, while other medications are being brought to market solely because someone managed to obtain a patent.

For example Prilosec, which was discovered in 1979 and has been marketed since 1989, is a racemic mixture of (S)-(-)omeprazole and (R)-(+)omeprazole. For an exceptionally simple analogy of what that means: hold your hand in front of your face vertically with all of your fingers together pointing straight up. Now point just your thumb sideways instead. Same hand, same thumb, different configuration, only one of which would fit through the sleeve of a dress shirt. (S)-(-)omeprazole is the one that actually fits, and your body turns (R)-(+)omeprazole into (S)-(-)omeprazole, which causes it to eventually fit as well.

Prilosec is now generic and long past the patent term which expired in 2001, is well understood and is on the WHO list of essential medicines.

Nexium on the other hand, is (S)-(-)omeprazole by itself, and was able to immediately enter the market when the Prilosec patent expired because the same company patented Nexium 2 years before that happened.

Nexium is essentially just Prilosec with an active ingredient removed (the (R)-(+)omeprazole form) rather than added or altered. They claimed it was an improvement over Prilosec, and were able to market it as another more expensive drug, but even that improvement was somewhere between questionable and fabricated according to their own studies.

Only 2 out of the 3 studies used by AstraZenica showed an improvement over Prilosec, and they compared 20mg-40mg of Nexium to 20mg of Prilosec, which means they just doubled or quadrupled the dosage of (S)-(-)omeprazole, because 20mg of Nexium is 20mg of (S)-(-)omeprazole, while 20mg of Prilosec is only 10mg of (S)-(-)omeprazole. You could do the same thing by taking 2 Prilosec capsules instead.

And that patented decision to remove an active ingredient while misrepresenting the research to justify it was somehow not only "innovative" but should be treated as "private property"?

Nonsense.

> This conception of patents as private property rights protecting the innovator’s creation is arguably required by the Patent Clause of the Constitution

The Patent Act of 1790 set the patent term limit to 14 years and allowed them to be much shorter if the situation called for it, and Article I Section 8. Clause 8 of the Constitution itself calls patents an "exclusive right" for a limited period of time.

So then, we're saying that both the Constitution and the first Congress declared your "private property" to no longer be yours after a limited period of time?

That's quite an... interesting definition of property too, one where the Constitution itself separately defines it from all other property, then gives an explicit reason for allowing you to have any right to it at all, and the reason has nothing to do with it being "your" property and everything to do with the broader benefit to society by promoting "... the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

Have to agree. Even the code examples for some of the skill types aren't examples of using the API, they're examples of things like migrating existing code to a newer version of the API, which means much of the code is not only hard to read but irrelevant.

And the Smart Home skill APIs are very different from the normal skills, so most of the tutorials that are available don't help much.

Lambda is required as a back-end for Smart Home skills, but must still be set up manually which means copying and pasting things back and forth between completely unrelated management interfaces, some on AWS, some on Amazon Developer Services.

User authentication is required for Smart Home skills, but after checking the configuration very carefully and still seeing the auth step fail in the Alexa app even though the OAUTH calls succeeded, with little to no visibility into why it failed, I stopped wasting time on it.

> all you'd have to do is have someone examine it and find inode activity when you had a clear alibi that the government didn't know about (which would be easy, given we're talking 8 years here, he'd just have to find when he was on a date or out to dinner or something, the government isn't going to know his entire life history for 8 years), and you'd be well on your way to creating enough doubt with a jury.

There are plenty of ways that happens even accidentally though, a prosecutor would be able to knock out that claim easily.

You've never seen a Linux machine write entries to the system log with the wrong timestamp? It happens all the time on machines with no RTC (Raspberry Pi) or a dead battery.

> All the funeral director would have to do is ask if the deceased had any social media accounts and do you want me to contact them on your behalf?

This would make a great plot for a novel, a disgruntled funeral director starts "killing" people digitally by marking various accounts permanently deactivated after death. And thanks to advances in genetic engineering, even showing up in person isn't enough to prove they're who they claim to be anymore, so they can't drive, work, buy anything, or communicate with anyone.

Maybe enough to skip through the automated checks, maybe not. I suppose it depends on whether it's being done through an ID verification service or just a payment processor putting a hold on the card.

The gift card number wouldn't be visible to the ID verification services as a credit or deposit account, and that'll certainly knock points off in their scoring system.

I suspect it would just shift the point where someone eventually notices either way.

The Pi Zero can do this as a USB client device for a host PC, including the QRCodes with the Pi camera, buttons/switches, and a small touchscreen for host-isolated verification and pin entry. Beaglebone Black (possibly also Pocket Beagle) can do it too, and the am335x does have some minimal crypto acceleration.

They're not high performance, they aren't "security focused" hardware, nor are they perfect fit for the task, but they're reasonably well understood and broadly available. The Pi Zero does have a closed "GPU" firmware, but there is an effort[1] to run open firmware on it.

However if you expect the host to attack the device, USB OTG (i.e. Linux USB gadget drivers) may not be a good choice, you may want to access it via network instead and that opens up more choices (though most will not be as small).

The other alternatives are basically going to be micro-controllers, for example FST-01[2]/Gnuk[3], and FPGAs which are still more of a black box than CPUs at the moment.

[1] https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

[2] http://wiki.seeedstudio.com/FST-01/

[3] https://wiki.debian.org/GNUK

> The FCC actually changed the definition of an ISP so that cellular and satellite providers are included.

Wireless providers are competition for home internet service the same way the gas station down the street selling water bottles for $3/each is an alternative to running water.

You aren't going to get a $300 water bill just because some company in another state spent several days secretly filling your in-ground pool with the garden hose without permission, nor would anyone tolerate having that happen repeatedly while being told they can only brush their teeth but not flush the toilet for the rest of the month.

A while back, the DSL here was not working for a few days, so I connected my iPhone to my Macbook. Normally that's not an issue while away from home or in a car for an hour or two, as there are limits to how much data anything could use in that amount of time.

Apple's Photos app proactively downloaded something like 25GB of old stuff from iCloud Photo Library that I didn't ask to download, didn't browse through, or even remember having, simply because the local drive had free space and Apple decided that both the space and the bandwidth were freely available for it to waste.

If wireless providers were forbidden from imposing ridiculous data caps I would be fine with calling them competition, because we do have multiple high speed providers here, they're just not usable because they'd rather be selling water bottles.

> MacBook Pros throttle even on "docks". They can't magically dissipate more heat when stationary on a desk.

Given how frequently I catch my Macbook Pro leaving the fan at 0rpm even when the CPU is 180F, I suspect they're capable of getting rid of a lot more heat than they're permitted to at the moment.

Even forcing the fan to stay on with 3rd party tools just makes it bounce back and forth, once the CPU is no longer hot enough to burn your lap the fan completely turns off again and the cycle repeats.

I'd love to know why Apple thought it was a good idea to throttle and retain a ton of heat instead of turning the fan on, the end result is that the laptop is both hot and slow at the worst possible times.

With IoT stuff, especially light bulbs, the "escape hatch" to avoid some of the cloud nonsense manufacturers might disable at any time is to ensure you get devices that have local-only control interfaces. So basically bluetooth, ZWave, Zigbee, or a WiFi API that works 100% offline.

There are quite a few that fit that requirement, but among the WiFi bulbs I know that LiFX devices all support a local API with official documentation[1].

I was able add support[2] for the LiFX bulbs to Mozilla's IoT gateway because of that local API.

These are all largely closed devices though, the real solution is to get devices where the firmware is under your own control. However that's easier said than done, as it constrains your choices quite a bit.

[1] https://lan.developer.lifx.com/

[2] https://github.com/infincia/lifx-adapter

> On the other hand, they've made me care more about counterfeit goods.

This is the one that's starting to really surprise me. You generally expect there to be counterfeit versions of items that are expensive or easy to replicate, but I've now received counterfeit:

* Burts Bees face wipes

* 3M command strips

* Curad alcohol prep pads

... and quite a few others. The alcohol prep pads were the most unexpected, but also the easiest to spot because I buy them all the time at Costco and other stores.

> Eventually, more taps were installed on Soviet lines in other parts of the world, with more advanced instruments built by AT&T's Bell Laboratories that were nuclear-powered and could store a year's worth of data.

I assume they're referring to an RTG[1], where heat is generated by natural decay.

Earlier the article specifically mentions the storage medium being tape, and that they were replaced on a monthly basis. Perhaps the larger capacity versions were also tape? Was that the only realistic option at the time in such a situation, deep underwater with a requirement for large storage capacity?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

> specially at the size depicted, it can't possibly fly for more than a couple minutes if it also needs to process a video feed.

Assuming we're talking about 10-20 years from now, what kind of power source could work for a longer period of time without increasing the size?

> Sellers of 'banned' substances -- drug dealers this segment should be the only one prosecuted and jailed

Banning substances is a large part of the problem.

In banning specific drugs all we've accomplished is to make the market that still exists dangerous to consumers, by making regulation impossible.

The recent uptick in Fentanyl overdoses is an example, those probably would not have happened if the Fentanyl were coming from a pharmacy in packaging designed for end use, made by a pharmaceutical company, rather than mystery powder from a blackmarket channel.

It happens in very predictable cycles: every so often suppliers flood the market with higher potency or incorrectly "cut" Fentanyl analogs, which can't be used safely, and people who otherwise would have survived instead overdose and die.

Opiates are still dangerous when used incorrectly (and sometimes even when used correctly), but those additional overdoses are largely caused by lack of regulation in the market, because of the ban.

We probably wouldn't even be talking about Fentanyl if it weren't for the ban on Heroin itself. Fentanyl is just easier to illegally manufacture since large poppy fields aren't required, and the potency is extremely high so smuggling large amounts is easier.

Agreed, those things alone are worth it.

However, once I already had an Echo I started thinking of things that could be done with it beyond the trivial stuff.

For example I have been working on a tiny ESP8266 device that will sit behind or above the toaster oven in my moms kitchen. If the temperature is high for more than an hour or two, Alexa will say "I'm reminding you, the toaster oven is still on".

Total cost will end up being about $10-15, and requires no contact with or alteration of the oven, so it is a progressive enhancement rather than potentially making things worse or interfering with the basic function of the oven.

I could put a "smart switch" on the power supply and cut it automatically, but when things like toaster ovens are plugged in those switches are a potential hazard themselves.

It seems like automatic shutoff is something toaster ovens should all have, but clearly not all of them do. The same is true for ovens, stove tops, coffee pots, clothes irons, heating pads, tea kettles, electric woks, curling irons, etc.

Also seems like a better idea to follow the example of smoke alarms and use external monitoring rather than trust every single appliance to work properly.

I've considered putting something like an AMG8833[1] in a smoke alarm housing on the ceiling, so it can detect any appliance left on too long, but I'm not sure if it would work well in practice. Things like that are getting cheaper though, eventually it'll be possible.

[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3538

Agreed, I built a group of waterproof outdoor cameras with the Pi Zero W, that thing is a true gem.

One is bolted to a utility pole outdoors, 200+ft away from the nearest WiFi access point through several walls. It's not a high link speed, but it works with nothing but that little triangle PCB trace cutout for the antenna.

> FedEx and UPS happily deliver to my front door, 25 miles and down a long dirt road from the nearest town.

What's the shipping cost, though? It's great that it's a real option either way.

A small amount of it, yes, but it's the card itself causing corruption issues most of the time, it happens even on devices where the filesystem is read-only. The controller will write and move things around for maintenance purposes even if the host hasn't issued a write command.

The cheap SD cards just aren't designed for anything except being used in consumer devices with batteries, where sudden power loss is rare and losing data isn't going to cause a plane to crash or result in someone not receiving a dose of insulin.

So when they suddenly lose power, they aren't always capable of ensuring that whatever task they were carrying out at the time is actually completed and did not accidentally destroy data.

And apparently the consumer SD card controllers are really there to manage and remap parts of the flash that were defective before ever leaving the factory.

It's probably cheaper to build over-provisioned cards with a simple controller that can deal with manufacturing defects in the field, than to do QA on 200 million thumbnail sized NAND die every month and still try to profit while selling them for a fraction of a penny each.

Take a look at ATP, specifically the AF4GUD3A and AF8GUD3A, for 4GB and 8GB respectively.

Digikey[1] and Arrow[2] generally sell the 4GB for $15 and the 8GB for $25. They make larger versions too, if you need them.

The 'A' stands for aMLC, they're using normal MLC flash (which most consumer SD cards no longer use, but is generally much more reliable than TLC) but they use it in 1-bit per cell mode like SLC. They make traditional SLC cards as well, but the price skyrockets.

The aMLC cards have very good endurance ratings, but they're still cheaper than SLC cards. The firmware and controller are designed to prevent sudden power loss issues, which is apparently the root cause of a lot of SD card corruption on the Pi.

They're also supposed to have lifetime (i.e. SMART) monitoring, but it's a vendor specific command set rather than something smartmontools can read. ATP has a tool for it that probably only runs on Windows.

I've been using those aMLC cards in a bunch of Pi3 and Pi Zero W devices for months, I've never seen them become corrupted or fail to boot even once, despite being pretty hard on them, compiling stuff, yanking the power, etc.

For comparison, a Samsung Ultra+ card became corrupted after a single power loss. The device was running Windows 10 IoT Core at the time, it never booted again and had to be re-flashed.

[1] https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/atp-electronics-in...

[2] https://www.arrow.com/en/products/af4gud3a-waaxx/atp-electro...