Would you happen to know where the requirement that "“there is no way” you can make the radio do what the FCC doesn’t allow" comes from? I found an FCC compliance guide [1] but it's very long and not easily searchable as far as I can tell.
If there has to be no way to change the radio's functionality, would that mean that simply using a binary blob wouldn't be enough. Wouldn't device vendors have to sign it as well?
Also, that makes me wonder about the one Wi-Fi chip I know of that does have free firmware: AR9271 [2]. I wonder what makes that situation different. Maybe I'm misunderstanding and there's firmware on a separate chip stored in ROM.
I'm far from an expert, but from what I understand the FCC cares most about consumer electronics is devices that stomp on the spectrum. And so frequency, antenna power, and signal band matter a lot. So you need to make sure that your antenna is only ever emitting in the band it's allowed, and that the total power never exceeds some amount, where the allowed amount is a function of the area under the curve of bandwidth vs antenna strength.
So when I say "there is no way", what I'm referring to, are the functions that configure drivers don't accept out of bounds values. And functions that ultimately drive the antenna can't drive them hard enough to be in violation. The main reason I know any of this, was that I found a function when working on firmware for the ESP32 on a commercial device, and I thought I could set the power to a level that I thought was too high. Well, that's when I learned what the binary blob that Espressif supplies was for. The guardrails are baked into the API for that blob.
So, does that mean you can't go out of your way to subvert those guardrails? No, but you would be incredibly foolish to knowingly create a device that will get the attention of the FCC. Similarly, there's nothing stopping you from building a circuit that amplifies the signal the device sends to the antenna. But when you're potentially talking about fines per event, and fines per device, it's wise to make sure you play nice.
If the wi-fi chip you're using has free firmware, where none of it is obfuscated, it's very likely that the limitations are baked directly into the chip, such that there is no register combination that would allow it to be out of compliance. Also, I'm not sure that all chips have transitive FCC licensing, so it might be wise to look into that before releasing the device commercially.
And keep in mind, I'm not even talking about creating accidental radios from poorly designed analog circuits, or unshielded high frequency digital circuits. That's a whole other can of worms.
It's not the same as what you suggest, but there's still hope you could regain consciousness, and this is a process that some companies already have infrastructure for. It is pretty expensive though.
this actually started to look promising recently, since https://eon.systems/ somewhat managed to scan and upload fly brain to the computer, maybe one day the same would be possible with the frozen human brain.
Does Minecraft's offline mode not work indefinitely? I'm not familiar with the official launcher but this article [1] doesn't say anything about needing to reconnect occasionally.
> First, you need to make sure Minecraft is installed on your device. Once this is complete, log in to the launcher while you are still online. This will save your login details for offline access.
A connection to Microsoft's servers will also be required to download the game in the first place, so I'm not sure this is really a problem (for compliance with the bill). I think the official launcher won't even let you download the game without authenticating first, but I'm not sure.
This would be a way better outcome than the current default. I've even seen this suggested before [1].
If game-specific logic is not public, information needed for reverse engineering could be completely missing, but if game-specific logic is available plus the names of the missing libraries, reconstruction of the game should be possible eventually.
Yes, partial source is still very useful. I don't think the law should allow for it though as companies could intentionally put as much as possible into "proprietary" libraries that they conveniently only license for binary distribution from a totally unrelated company that for no reason at all is owned by the same stakeholders. Much better to just require everything to be there and then have the industry adapt.
What software do you use for the reCAPTCHA on archive.today? I use a fork of hacktcha [1] but I had to modify the software myself to get it to work conveniently [2], so I'm curious how other people do it.
1. Any given system has a finite number of findable vulnerabilities.
2. All findable vulnerabilities are fixable (if not in software then with a new hardware revision).
3. Fixing a vulnerability while keeping the same intended functionality introduces on average less than 1 other findable vulnerability.
4. It is possible to cease adding new features to a system and from that point forward only focus on fixing vulnerabilities.
If all 4 are true, then perfect security seems possible, in some sense. I think some vulnerabilities might not be fixable, if you include things like the idea that users can be tricked into revealing their passwords. If you restrict the definition of vulnerability to some narrower meaning that still captures most of what people mean when they say computer vulnerability, then I think those 4 statements are probably true.
Perfect security might be near impossible in practice because vulnerabilities will get more difficult to find and fix over time, but I think we should expect the discovery of vulnerabilities to eventually become arbitrarily slow in a hypothetical system that prioritized security above all else.
Would you be willing to license this code as GPL-3.0-or-later, or some other free license? I'd like to include a JavaScript derivative of this for Haketilo (a userscript manager). I would add it to a collection of scripts that aim to replace proprietary JavaScript here: https://codeberg.org/JacobK/unfinished-site-fixes/
In this case, it also seems like the paywall doesn't show up if you have JavaScript disabled, which I find strange, but lots of news sites are like that I think.
I'm not who the person you replied to is talking about, but I also didn't/don't use a mobile phone for a long time. Technically I had a mobile phone during this time, but it stayed powered off in my room. Now, I carry a mobile phone around but it doesn't exactly work (no network connectivity, not even Wi-Fi or USB tethering) so I don't actually use it except for testing.
I carry a laptop almost everywhere, and I even use JMP.chat for sending SMS messages, so it's functionally similar to a mobile phone, just bigger and heavier. It doesn't connect to the cell network but Wi-Fi works fine.
I think there's more to a mobile phone than SMS but I'm stuggling to think of what since I don't use it. I have GPS in my car, instead of using GPS in a mobile phone. I don't take pictures very often but when I really needed to I could use my laptop webcam (built-in or USB attached), and recently I bought a camera at a garage sale that seems higher-quality than the webcam and is much more convenient.
The ability to call 911 from anywhere is the main thing I think about that I'm missing, which is also one of the reasons I'd like to get a mobile phone working at some point, but it's difficult to gauge how important that is (since the need is rare). My friends might worry about this more than I do.
Before college, I did use a mobile phone (but mostly for gaming and taking pictures), and I am only recently out of college, so maybe I will feel more pressure to get a mobile phone in the future, and since I'm not opposed to getting one working at some point, I probably will. I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
I've never actually commented on Hacker News as far as I remember, but I'm the same JacobK as <https://codeberg.org/jacobk> and as jacobk on Libera.Chat. I'm not a bot.
If there has to be no way to change the radio's functionality, would that mean that simply using a binary blob wouldn't be enough. Wouldn't device vendors have to sign it as well?
Also, that makes me wonder about the one Wi-Fi chip I know of that does have free firmware: AR9271 [2]. I wonder what makes that situation different. Maybe I'm misunderstanding and there's firmware on a separate chip stored in ROM.
[1] http://www.fcc.gov/documents/compliance-guide [2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/AR9271
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