Apparently it's irrelevant if maintenance stops because old mate asked Claude to streamline it, and it "dropped TLS handshake time from 1.7 seconds to 0.1 seconds"
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/the-end-of-mbedtls-development/msg6376243/#msg6376243
This industry is so cooked.
I thought ARM were mostly paying for MbedTLS development, which seemed like a good strategy - if you're responsible for most of the embedded CPUs out in the world then surely it's worth making sure they have good crypto? Guess not actually worth it...
Oh snap, the MbedTLS maintainers are stepping back next April unless other organisations provide support: https://lists.trustedfirmware.org/archives/list/mbed-tls@lists.trustedfirmware.org/thread/YPIGCB7WN6GCHOGEGKOJXUYAP7OK527W/#BSRM3JY6JFNWWEHKMY4JQQON5QB3LP5U
Big news for the most used permissively licensed embedded TLS library!
I gotta say, I do enjoy these "there's a dog in the playground" days when they happen on Computer Toucher Internet.
If you're also coming to this "random number 4" thing via everyone's shitposts, the bugzilla is a good read for actual details: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c11
Could anyone who knows about UEFI explain why a multi-boot tool like Ventoy can't be implemented as a UEFI binary?
(My understanding is that Ventoy is implemented as a Linux-based chain-loader with a lot of hacks to work around special cases.)
My naive guess is that the only bit a UEFI environment lacks would be a driver that presents the contents of an .iso image on a filesystem as if it was a block device.
Is that right? Is it impossible due to UEFI architecture/permissions issues, or more that it's hard & fiddly to implement?
RE: https://mastodon.social/@kornel/117442505997141940
"Sam Bankman-Fried’s mistake was operational, not philosophical. He was right that a serious altruist goes where the money is. He went to crypto. I went to the El."
:discoursechef:
Oh, me? Not much, just getting pumped about Triangle Computing. It's almost ready to break through into the mainstream.
Ampol, the petrol station company with the worst EV charging app in Australia, has acquired Evie, the EV charging network company with one of the best apps and user experiences.
Yay?
(PDF link)
https://wcsecure.weblink.com.au/pdf/ALD/03142904.pdf
Surprised to also learn that there are STM32 clones (Artery AT32F415 here) where compatible peripheral interfaces from different STM32 chips are bundled together inconsistently! So it's kind of a mix and match. 🤯
AT32F415 less than 20% of the cost of a similar specced ST part, so not surprising these fabless companies are eating ST's lunch on cost-sensitive consumer products.
Detailed write-up of reverse engineering and rewriting the firmware for an e-scooter display using Rust: https://bensimms.moe/reverse-engineering-scooter/
Good overview of how to structure actor-model style async firmware, plus a discussion of the trade-offs when you need to render a UI but not enough RAM for a framebuffer.
Someone harvested my email alias from PyPI (maybe via a data broker) and sent spam advertising their slop project that literally relays your terminal session through their server.
Bad ideas have been around forever, but I'm particularly baffled by "I need developers to find and trust me so my project can take off, how about I spam them?"
There's a bunch of "new" ICs for sale on Taobao but if I'm reading the date codes right then they're from 2009-2011.
New old stock, reclaimed parts from e-waste, or something else...?
RE: https://aus.social/@Unixbigot/117155179569298557
Impressed that in this universe you can buy VT6315N PCIe/Firewire interface chips. I wonder what the story is there.
(The datasheet mirrored online is from 2008.)
That linked review is fantastic:
"Much of this is probably due to the sheer size of everything – large chunks of 32-bit data being pushed around by over 5Mb of executable program will stress even the highest-spec PC."
... An entire multi-modal 2D/3D graphical CAD program in a 5MB executable with a minimum 8MB RAM requirement (32 recommended), and the reviewer criticises it for being big!
How far we have come.
AutoCAD release 13 (1994), the first version to include a solid modeller.
https://freelance.timbaty.co.uk/autocad-release-13
This was the optional "documentation pack", a quite fancy boxed set of the manuals. Imagine it cost a bit!
Despite the quite fetching box design, the software manuals are still plain old manuals!
This feels @decryption adjacent, although maybe because you've also been trying to get rid of a bunch of it...
Australian retrocomputing(ish) nerds, I've been helping my dad clean out some stuff and have stumbled into a trove of 90s and 2000s PC software...
I don't know all of what is here, but we have some boxed software including Windows 98 & ME, and a stack of PC magazine cover CDs from the 90s and early 2000s. Also about a billion versions of AutoCAD (my dad is a retired architect.)
Does anyone collect or archive any of this stuff? Will send to good homes within Australia for cost of postage.
> I think what would work best for me is an Extension that limits my browser fonts to those included in a default Ubuntu install
This is dangerously close to me wondering if I might be happier overall as a mainstream Linux distro user or even a Windows user, so I'm gonna log off now. /s
There is an extension that adds randomness to your font fingerprint: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-fingerprint-defender/
I guess this would work against bulk tracking databases, but it only has 1,595 users[*] which feels like it could also make you stand out pretty distinctly once combined with other characteristics. Would probably require someone to be targeting one of those 1,595 users directly though.
I think what would work best for me is an Extension that limits my browser fonts to those included in a default Ubuntu install, maybe plus CJK. It's not like most websites are using system fonts, anyhow...
[*] Caveat that I assume this is Firefox users with telemetry turned on, which is probably not a huge overlap with the target audience for this stuff.