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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Years ago there was a commit to the Linux kernal that strangly had no author. This got some attention of several of the developers.

    Looking into the code that had to deal with network transmission. there was a section that if you tried to get network access in a unusual way had a check that was written something like this.

    If (usr_permission = ROOT) … Instead of If (usr_permission == ROOT) …

    The first giving the user root if invoked and the second checking to see if the user was root.

    It’s widely thought this was the NSA or some other intelligence agency trying to backdoor lin Linux.





  • If you are trying to steel credentials from people with power and money passengers in first class are a good target.

    Where else are you going to find a cluster of people like that that are using the wifi and are going to be there for hours. It’s about as optimal as I can think of.

    Even better if you are targeting a spefic company. Just pick flights out of the headquarters for that company.

    If you want to attack say Microsoft pick a flight from Seattle to DC. Pretty good odds of a Microsoft high up being on the flight and wanting to use the wifi for work.





  • There are a subset of vegans who are very vocal an pushy about being vegan.

    There are a lot people who think vegan food is just salads.

    Vegans often don’t actually remember what meat tastes like. I have several very nice vegan friends. They sometimes that something tastes just like meat and you can’t tell the difference. In sorry but I can tell and vegan meat substitutes are often bad.

    It’s too bad because there are a lot of tasty and satisfying vegan dishes but they are usually not trying to mimic meat. I love fried tofo or mapo tofu. I’ve never had a good tofu burger.

    There are also a lot of vegans who are all or nothing. I eat meat but I also try to limit the amount. I don’t need meat at every meal. Some act like that’s the same as eating streak for the meals a day.

    There is also a lot of complexity eating vegan. Just cooking for vegan friends can almost double the complexity.

    I primarily limit meat because of environmental reasons. And frankly my backyard chickens are lower impact then that avocado at the store.





  • Simple answer is they are careful about what they say and have good lawyers that review it.

    A few examples.

    Calling Tom Cruise a fudge packer in the context of him being in a bathhouse could eaisly open them up to liability for calling him gay. But doing it in a fudge factory while showing him putting fudge in a box gives them a clear defense that they meant it literally.

    Simmaraly telling him to come out of the closet while he is actually in a closet provides cover.

    Making things so absurd that a reasonable person wouldn’t believe it and know it’s a joke also works. So having Barbara Streisand aquire an artifact that makes her into a giant robot monster works but something plausible wouldn’t.

    Having Kanye open up and admit he is a gay fish is absurd enough to provide protection. However they probably couldn’t get away with him simply coming out as gay.

    Of course the genius of south park is they use these legal protections in ways that make the story funnier and not just for cover.


  • I should have been clear about which resistor. I was talking about R18 as current limiter to the presumed load on the header. That way if the header gets shorted or the load has too high a draw at 3V3 you don’t blow the transistor.

    R20 is probably a weak pull down resistor to keep the transistor off until the microcontroller comes online.

    As far as the transistor I was thinking it was probably a 2N7000. That’s my goto in this kind of circuit.

    Depending on the spefic microcontroller the pins can default to a very week high even when off. Enough to activate a 2N7000. I’ve had motors briefly engage using a PIC and a 2N7000 when the system is turned on without a pull down resistor.


  • It’s not connected but this is a very common circuit for driving some load efficiently that the gpio can’t handle for it self. The two pins probably go to some load like a LED, motor, or relay that the gpio can’t power on it’s on. When the transistor is off current will be almost zero so no power loss. When the transistor is on it’s resistance is close to zero using all the power in the unknown load and the resistor. The resistor is probably there for current limiting in case the pins are shorted.