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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • HDMI has an Ethernet channel builtin to it. This was designed along with the audio return channel and the remote channel to make it so you only need one cable between your smart devices.

    Its lovely really, other than the privacy concerns. USB-c takes it one step further and let’s you power devices over the data cable. So you might really only need one cable to link all your devices.

    I’ve been worried about the data over HDMI standard for a while, but I don’t think many devices implement it. At some point there probably should be a revision to the standards (if there isn’t one already) to require pairing permissions in the next version. Otherwise manufacturers will eventually start using this back channel to spy on customers, even when you don’t enable WiFi on the television.









  • The esp32 supports efuses that can be used to require a signed binary to boot. So they could lock their hardware to only work with their binary. Source code wouldn’t matter.

    Of course if the source is open you can buy and put together your own hardware and then put their code on it.

    I’m not advocating what they’re doing. Rent seeking is rent seeking even if they need to recoup development costs. I’d rather pay for open hardware and software with no monthly fee.


  • I realized a while back that social media is trying to radicalize everyone and it might not even be entirely the oligarchs that control its fault.

    The algorithm was written with one thing in mind: maximizing engagement time. The longer you stay on the page, the more ads you watch, the more money they make.

    This is pervasive and even if educated adults tune it out, there is always children, who get Mr. Beast and thousands of others trying to trick them into like, subscribe and follow.

    This is something governments should be looking at how to control. Propaganda created for the sole purpose of making money is still propaganda. I think at this point that sites feeding content that use an algorithm to personalize feeds for each user are all compromised.