Nat Tuck @nat@ferrus.net

Why is it important to control your own computers?

One more reason: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/02/apple_hong_kong/

The world clearly needs more "smart" devices, as indicated by this factory reset procedure for GE light bulbs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BB6wj6RyKo&feature=youtu.be

Buying home routers for OpenWRT is annoying. The used market especially can result in getting some weird stuff. I just spent like three days figuring out how Shaw had messed up the firmware on my newly acquired refurb Netgear WNDR3700.

http://pandion.ferrus.net/2019/06/18/wndr3700v4sh.html

Luckily, sometimes the world gets a VW Bus and a video camera into the right hands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByRKF1INOcU

Note to self: Don't put two routers on the same network with the same IP address.

Mozilla: The problem wasn't that you couldn't push updates fast enough, the problem is that you built an innately broken system. If you cease to exist, my browser should still work in five years. And you shouldn't be preventing users from running software of their choice to begin with.

(re: https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-to-track-infrastructure-time-bombs-in-wake-of-recent-firefox-armagadd-on/ )

Good job Mozilla. Not only did you foist this addon signing bullshit on #firefox users and then forget to renew your signing cert, you made your broken browser continuously check for certificate validity and disable already installed and working addons.

Someone really needs to put in the effort to maintain a de-crapified Firefox fork designed to keep working even if Mozilla and all the companies who give them money cease to exist.

Switzerland is planning to run an election over the internet. Turns out their software has a backdoor that would allow the election administrators to undetectably alter votes.

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/13/principal-agent-problems.html

The security requirements for an election are pretty straightforward. The #1 threat is the people running the elections. Anyone running an election who downplays that point should be treated as actively engaged in election fraud.

Here's why the gun debate isn't just about guns. Making guns isn't that hard, and any regulation that effectively prevented it would also necessarily ban any sort of useful home workshop. This very quickly becomes an issue impacting the right to repair, and more importantly the freedom to tinker.

https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/360/untraceable-unregulated-and-easy-to-build-colorado-and-the-increasing-popularity-of-ghost-guns

Great. Apparently the New England Journal of Medicine can't even meet their own commitments on handling statistical cheating in papers they've published.

https://boingboing.net/2019/02/15/pre-specified-outcomes.html

Apparently the entire internet is slowly turning into an Amazon service: https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-block-amazon-from-my-life-it-was-impossible-1830565336

Turns out that when cell phone companies sell location data, that means that people can buy that data.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunter-300-dollars-located-phone-microbilt-zumigo-tmobile