He (He₁) gas molecules are absolutely tiny, they love to leak through everything.

Site seems offline now, says “Closed Jan 30th”

Something to be wary of when interpreting the datasheet:

• Act10 = LED blinking when Ethernet packets transmitted/received at 10Mbps.
• Act100 = …
• Act1000 = …

Bad wording on their part. What they really mean is: “LED blinking when Ethernet packets transmitted/received AND the link is currently in a XYZMbps link speed mode”. The mode is negotiated once after you plug a cable in and usually does not change after that, regardless of how much data you try to send.

Technically each linkspeed/mode is a whole ethernet standard of its own, but we mostly gloss over that and pretend to end users that they’re backwards compatible.

Similar here.

Family is mostly OK on it. We used to have issues with iOS devices not noticing some new messages & calls, but that seems to have stopped a few months ago. Family is usually impatient about me getting to my phone and rings me using 3 different services in a row, one of them Snikket xD

Have not yet managed to get any friends onto it.

Thing is, its EOL, per Asus. Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?

OpenWRT tends to support devices longer and better than the OEM, but it depends on the popularity of the chipset inside the router.

Many different routers by different companies are almost identical internally, because they use the same chipset. Eg the RT-AC3100 seems to be a bcm53xx variant, of which OpenWRT supports a few dozen products. Support will probably only be dropped when every single one of those devices goes EOL and several years pass (ie no people left contributing/maintaining it and the builds break somehow).

Router chipsets can be very long lived. Many new devices use decade old chipset designs. Some chipset families have almost identical chips released every few years with slightly different peripherals, clocks & pinouts; but are supported by the same kernel drivers.

(This is all much better than the world of mobile phone hardware support. Maybe it’s because of different market pressures? Not to mention you don’t have a monopoly that benefits from keeping the hardware fractured. Imagine if people could make a competitor to Android that works across most devices)

As far as I understand, wireguard is designed so that it can’t be portscanned. Replies are never sent to packets unless they pass full auth.

This is both a blessing and a curse. It unfortunately means that if you misconfigure a key then your packets get silently ignored by the other party, no error messages or the likes, it’s as if the other party doesn’t exist.

EDIT: Yep, as per https://www.wireguard.com/protocol/

In fact, the server does not even respond at all to an unauthorized client; it is silent and invisible.

Read-only, or the ability to edit filenames & upload files?

Read only: as per other answers here, basically any HTTP server. The easiest one I know would be darkhttpd, because it requires no config files and can be run without root.

Read write: I like WFM https://github.com/tenox7/wfm

Every news website is covering it. I think I’ve spotted most of 10 articles around the place.

The law of well-marketed unreleased goods dictates that this vehicle is not going to meet any of the promises mentioned in the articles. I hope to be proven wrong, but just like video games: don’t pre-order, wait for it to come out and be reviewed.

Welcome to security news theatre :(

I don’t think espressif would bother suing, these kind of misshapen claims get constantly made against popular projects all of the time. It’s just unusual to see so much coverage about this particular one.

Not so say that externally attackable vulnerabilities in an ESP32 don’t exist, they might. Bluetooth devices have an awful track record. But making them up doesn’t help the world.

Bleepingcomputer’s title and article are very misleading, the presentation did NOT reveal a backdoor into an ESP32. It looks like Bleepingcomputer completely misunderstood what was presented (EDIT: and tarlogic isn’t helping with the first sentence on their site).

Instead the presentation was about using an ESP32 as a tool to attack other devices. Additionally they discovered some undocumented commands that you can send from the ESP32 processor to the ESP32 radio peripheral that let you take control of it and potentially send some extra forms of traffic that could be useful. They did NOT present anything about the ESP32 bluetooth radio being externally attackable.

Another perspective that might help: imagine you have a cheap bluetooth chipset that is open source and well documented. That would give you more than what the presentation just found. Would Bleepingcomputer then be reporting it’s a backdoor threatening millions of devices?

It looks identical to me. Same size before clicking, same size after right clicking -> Open image in new tab.

GNOME 2 was fun and easy. It felt like they were trying to learn from the mistakes of Windows and Mac UIs.

All of the the surface normals are backwards. This means your shoe is inside-out; instead of being a solid shoe in a vacuum it’s a shoe-shaped-hole inside a solid universe.

By default blender renders all polys as double-sided so you mostly don’t notice (other than some lighting oddities near corners). Turn on backface culling if you want to check if your normals are the right way around or not.

I often end up with some of my polys backwards because of the way I extrude and join parts of my models. I distinctly remember a bug in Gmax (old free version of 3DSmax) where the mirror tool would create polygons with some special, broken property where their normals would be correct in the editor, but completely wrong when exported :( much time and hassle was lost to that.

*mooshrooms

We rented our technology and could not read nor write.

Windows update fetches all sorts of things now. If the hardware advertises X device then Windows update will check if it has anything for it. Approved vendors can provide all sorts of guff. Historically that has included drivers that intentionally brick your devices. HP probably packaged up some software that updates the BIOS and got it into the Windows Update DBs.

This is something HP should have handled.

If a bad update is rolled out then it’s the responsibility of the software maker partner (HP) and the distributor (Microsoft), not just one or the other.

Those laptops are THEIR products, not Microsoft’s.

Both Microsoft and HP have branding on their laptops and a responsibility post-sale for the reliability of their systems. Hardware, firmware and OS responsibilities are all party to this chain of failure.

Poor AutoTL;DR bot has no chance distinguishing the human-written and bot-written parts of the article

Magazine CDs and DVDs were my bacon.

10 sec

Filthy casual.

My family has a Chiq U58G7P. Warm boots take about 30 sec and cold boots a few minutes.

Don’t try and press any buttons on the remote during this time or for a minute or two afterwards. They might work, 15 seconds later, or they might get ignored. Sometimes your button press inputs get re-ordered too.

Factory resets do work, but then all it can do is broadcast TV. If you let it update and install streaming apps then you will be back to the same problems.

I suspect that it might be running out of RAM and thrashing some poor innocent MMC as swap, but I can’t find a USB ADB port to properly find out (maybe it has one internally?).