• 1 Post
  • 4 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 4th, 2023
  • fubarx@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's the dumbest thing you've done to fix a tech issue?
    2·
    8 days ago

    Ran a hairdryer all night, propped against my Mac laptop keyboard after a friend knocked over a full pint of beer onto it.

    The next morning the whole bathroom reeked of stale beer, the power bill was astronomical, and the left quarter of the keyboard never worked again.

    Took it in for repairs and was grateful AppleCare swapped it out without a peep. This was a while back, before the embedded moisture strips that void the warranty.

  • fubarx@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.world•Undocumented Commands Found In Bluetooth Chip Manufactured in China Used By a Billion Devices.English
    1·
    8 days ago

    This sounds like there are some undocumented opcodes on the HCI side – the Host Computer Interface – not the wireless side. By itself, it’s not that big a deal. If someone can prove that there’s some sort of custom BLE packet that gives access to those HCI opcodes wirelessly, I’d be REALLY concerned.

    But if it’s just on the host side, you can only get to it if you’ve cracked the box and have access to the wiring. If someone has that kind of access, they’re likely to be able to flash their own firmware and take over the whole device anyway.

    Not sure this disclosure increases the risk any. I wouldn’t start panicking.

  • fubarx@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.world•Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platformsEnglish
    1·
    21 days ago

    The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?

    Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it’s still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.

    Bluesky wants to tell people they’re not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that’s their key advantage.

    The only thing that will guarantee they don’t end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven’t come up with a long-term revenue model, so it’s not clear how they can avoid it.