Monthly Archives: November 2023

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is the dumbest. European governments attempting to mandate an MITM option (which won't be that hard for anyone to use) in the existing relatively robust system for asserting you aren't being MITM'd, that lets things like ...eCommerce... work. And also make it illegal to provide ways to detect or disable that MITMing.
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Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Ugh. Ads in your garage door opener remote. Intentionally breaking interoperability for the existing install base. Any device that _could_ work locally designed such that has to pass through the vendor's server should be presumed broken, because the only reason to do that is rentseeking.
A photo of the myQ app from LiftMaster's website.

Enlarge / A photo of the myQ app from LiftMaster's website. (credit: Liftmaster)

Chamberlain Group—the owner of most of the garage door opener brands like LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco—would like its customers to stop doing smart home things with its "myQ" smart garage door openers. The company recently issued a statement decrying "unauthorized usage" of its smart garage door openers. That's "unauthorized usage" by the people who bought the garage door opener, by the way. Basically, Chamberlain's customers want to trigger the garage door and see its status through third-party smart home apps, and Chamberlain doesn't want that.

Here's the statement:

Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps.

This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users.

We encourage those who were impacted to check out our authorized partners here: https://www.myq.com/works-with-myq.

We caught wind of this statement through the Home Assistant blog, a popular open source smart home platform. The myQ integration is being stripped from the project because it doesn't work anymore. Allegedly, Chamberlain has been sabotaging Home Assistant support for a while now, with the integration maintainer, Lash-L, telling the Home Assistant blog, "We are playing a game of cat and mouse with MyQ and right now it looks like the cat is winning."

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A C Compiler that fits in the 512 byte boot sector of an x86 machine

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Interesting how these projects tend to be PC-Centric. I get that the BIOS environment gets you a lot (and dictates a fun limit), but self-hosting an environment on the profusion of few-dollar micros that wildly out-muscle a PDP-11 seems like _more_ fun.
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OpenELA releases redhat source code on github

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is where it gets interesting, an external point of coordination has been set up. If OpenELA becomes the reference against which the enterprise/science/etc. software is built and tested, RH is suddenly largely irrelevant.
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BeagleV Catches Fire With The BeagleV-Fire

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: Unless they've worked out a board-linked license agreement for Libero (Microchip's FPGA design suite, which unlike the other players doesn't have a usable free tier), or the yosis folks figure out a backend for these, this thing is irrelevant.

A new BeagleBoard is on the way, full of FPGA hotness: the BeagleV-Fire has been announced. The new $150 Single-Board Computer (SBC) from the pioneering open source BeagleBoard company is built around a RISC-V chip that has FPGA features built in. The BeagleV-Fire is built around the snappily named Microchip PolarFire MPFS025T FCVG484E, a System on a Chip (SoC) that has five Reduced Instruction Set Coding Version 5 (RISC-V) cores and a big chunk of FPGA fabric built in. That means it combines the speed of RISC-V processors with the flexibility of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), a big pile of logic gates that can be reprogrammed.

The new BeagleV-Fire includes a sizeable chunk of FPGA to work with: the core chip includes 23 K logic elements and 68 Math blocks, plus 4 Serializer/Deserializer (SerDer) lanes that can throw about 12.7 Gbps of data into and out of the fabric. On the BeagleV-Fire, the main chip is supported by 16 GB of eMMC and 2 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, plus a micro SD slot for extra storage. Gigabit Ethernet is also included, plus USB-C power and a few serial connections for debugging. There is no WiFi built in, but there is an M.2 Key E connection were you could plug in an a wireless adapter if you need it.

Like most other BeagleBoards, the BeagleV-Fire has two headers with 92 pins, which offer access to pretty much every signal on the board, plus lots of analog to digital stuff that works with add-on boards (BeagleBoard refers to them as capes). Also present is the usual 22-pin CSI connector for attaching cameras and other devices.

Want one? They are available for immediate order on BeagleBoard.org or from the usual suspects. It looks like they are already in stock for next-day delivery. If this all sounds familiar, it’s probably because we’ve been posting about this particular board for awhile now, covering both the announcement and first tests.

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Arch: Remove Itanium (IA-64) architecture

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The last few nails are approaching the coffin for Itanic.
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