keep portable charging devices out of pets’ reach

Realistically, I suspect that a smartphone battery is enough to start a fire. I doubt that there is any chance that every dog owner is going to keep smartphones out of pet reach.

My understanding is that basically the political issue is that as we shifted to a more-specialized set of people working in various areas, experts — usually people with a university education in a particular relevant area — became the decision-makers. That led to some other people feeling disenfranchised, feeling that they had no input, because nobody cared about their positions.

That became exacerbated on things like homosexuality, where you had the reclassification of homosexuality in the DSM causing domain experts to be touching on things that some felt to be value questions, things that should not be a matter for specialists.

So what the Trump administration is doing is letting people feel that they’re getting to have their input, even though they aren’t some elite domain expert. Democracy has been restored, because now Joe Blow gets to say things and be have his voice visibly heard, rather than just being condescendingly ignored by bureaucrats who make the calls.

Trump beating up on Ivy League universities is political theater putting them in their place.

Stuff like that. Makes people who felt disempowered feel like order has been restored.

“Fluoride disconnects one from God,” a listener with the username “Peter & Melissa BioHacking Stem Cells” wrote during one call.

One can but hope that Satan never discovers Yahweh’s Kryptonite.

https://www.amazon.com/Marhynchus-Perforator-Leather-Tracing-Stainless/dp/B0B71XBHW4

The problem is that the angular resolution on any existing set of VR goggles is considerably worse than on existing conventional displays. And that’s just to start with — for VR goggles, then you have to “consume” some of that to effectively get clear projections into 3D space of stuff.

Someone a while back posted this article, which was talking specifically about the issues with using the Apple Vision Pro as a monitor replacement. I think that it was a good look into the issues:

https://kguttag.com/2023/08/05/apple-vision-pro-part-5a-why-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/

If I could get a “monitor replacement” set of VR goggles, something that I could use for as long as I do a monitor with the clarity and angular resolution of a monitor, then I’d do so. But they just aren’t there in 2025, and I doubt that they’re getting there soon. They’re good enough for playing some 3D games for limited periods of time, but that’s kind of a limited use case for me.

I have, in the past, kind of wished that settings and characters could not be copyrighted. I realize that there’s work that goes into creating each, but I think that we could still live in a world where those weren’t protected and interesting stuff still gets created. If that were to happen, then I agree, it’d be necessary to make it very clear who created what, since the setting and characters alone wouldn’t uniquely identify the source.

Like, there are things like Greek mythology or the Robin Hood collection of stories, very important works of art from our past, that were created by many different unaffiliated people. They just couldn’t be created today with our modern stories, because the settings and characters would be copyrighted and most rightsholders don’t just offer a blanket grant of rights to use them.

That’s actually one unusual and notable thing H.P. Lovecraft did — if you’ve ever seen stuff in the Cthulhu Mythos, that’s him. He encouraged anyone who wanted to do so to create stuff using his universe. One reason why we have that kind of collection of Lovecraftian stuff.

But you can’t do that with, say, Star Wars or a lot of other beloved settings.

This morning, I had bacon, easy-over eggs, stir-fried potatoes, and buttered rye toast.

For what OS?

On Linux, all drives are presented as device files, so getting an image is pretty trivial. If I wanted an exact copy of a hard drive, I’d probably do something like — first making sure that the drive in question isn’t mounted, since you don’t want to change any filesystems or anything while doing this:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=myimage.img bs=1M

Where /dev/sda is the name of the drive in question.

Note that that’s probably not the most-efficient way of just getting a copy of everything on the drive, since you’re storing copies of even blocks on the drive with no useful data, so it’ll waste space relative to just storing a copy of files on the filesystems on that drive. But it will be an exact copy of what’s there.

The current wrangler is an idea of what a modern Willy’s would be like. It’s going to be a $40k vehicle.

It looks like, adjusted for inflation, the original Willy’s MB contract was for about $16k per unit in 1941.

This says that a 2025 Jeep Wrangler starts at $32k, so it’s about twice the price.

https://www.jeep.com/model-compare.wrangler.2025.html

There’s also apparently a “willys” model available that costs $8k more, amusingly, making it less-minimalist and putting it at your $40k.

Nintendo shouldn’t be able to patent game mechanics

Those are patents, not copyrights. There are a bunch of different forms of intellectual property. Off the top of my head:

• Copyright

• Trademark

• Patent

• Moral (not very substantial in the US, but more-meaningful in France)

Not specific to that vehicle, but I think that generally, the way type certification works for vehicles is that existing certifications remain valid for already-manufactured vehicles, but once regulations change, you can’t just go back and produce more of something.

I am confident that doing the Willys in particular would violate existing regulations. One off-the-cuff issue is that the original engine in that thing would have used leaded gasoline, and I’m pretty sure that you can’t make new cars that use leaded gasoline in the US.

EDIT: It might be possible to build an "experimental’ car for yourself — I forget the term, but there’s some class of vehicles in the US that DIYers and experimenters build, and I believe that it has a lighter set of requirements. Even if you could, though, it wouldn’t permit for mass production, which I assume is what you’re after.

kagis

Sounds like at least some, if not all, of that classification is state-level. So I suspect what’s permissible would vary by state.

https://afdc.energy.gov/laws/9492

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-registration/new-registration/register-a-specially-constructed-or-modified-vehicle/

There is a class of products that consist of a hardware box that you ram your network traffic moving between different business locations in a company through that tries to accelerate this traffic. F5 is one manufacturer of them. One technique these use is to have private key material such that they can pretend to be the server at the other end of a TLS connection — that’s most of the “encrypted” traffic that you see on the Internet. If you go to an “https” URL in your Web browser, you’re talking TLS, using an encrypted connection. They can then decode the traffic and use various caching and other modification techniques on the decoded information to reduce the amount of traffic moving across the link and to reduce effective latency, avoid transferring duplicate information, etc. Once upon a time, when there was a lot less encrypted traffic in the world, you could just do this by working on cleartext data, but over time, network traffic have increasingly become encrypted. Many such techniques become impossible with encrypted traffic. So they have to be able to break the encryption on the traffic, to get at the cleartext material.

The problem is that to let this box impersonate such a server so that it can get at the unencrypted traffic, they have to have a private key that permits them to impersonate the real server. Having access to this key is also interesting to an attacker, because it would similarly let them impersonate the real server, which would let them view or modify network traffic in transit. If one could push new, malicious software up to control these boxes, one could steal these keys, which would be of interest to attackers in attacking other systems.

It sounds, to my brief skim, like attackers got control of the portion of F5’s internal network that is involved with building and distributing software updates to these boxes.

The problem is that if you’re a sysadmin at, say, General Dynamics (an American defense contractor which, from a quick search, apparently uses these products from F5), you may have properly secured your servers internal to the company in all ways…but then the network admin basically let another box, which wasn’t properly secured, into the encrypted communications between your inter-office servers on the network. It could extract information from your encrypted communication streams, or modify it. God only knows what important data you’ve been shoveling across those connections, or what you’ve done with information that you trusted to remain unmodified while crossing such a connection. It’s be a useful tool for an attacker to stick all sorts of new holes into customer networks that are harder to root out.

Apparently there’s competition for the same crowd.

https://www.dw.com/en/russias-anti-woke-visa-woos-western-expatriates/a-73214511

Russia’s ‘anti-woke visa’ woos Western expatriates

07/09/2025

Moscow’s “Shared Values Visa” welcomes conservative migrants who are against LGBTQ+ rights or globalism in general.

A reactionary was a rare and precious thing, something to be courted, lured, seduced.

I mean, any country that wants to do so could make the offer. It’s the destination country that makes the call.

The proposals also advise Trump to prioritize Europeans who have been “targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.”

“We don’t have enough white nationalists.”

Everyone looked glum.

“What about that Farage guy? He’s got some.”

Everyone brightened up.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/12/08/analysis-apple-vision-pro-sells-well-but-needs-more-content-faster

The Apple Vision Pro is often referred to as a “flop” in media reports, but by the end of 2024, it will have sold around 500,000 units.

That’s a lot less than some others, and probably not where Apple would like it to be, but there are some people who bought it.

https://www.tomshardware.com/virtual-reality/valves-next-gen-deckard-vr-headset-reportedly-enters-mass-production-company-allegedly-plans-to-ship-up-to-600k-units-annually-upcoming-steam-frame-could-launch-before-the-end-of-the-year

Upload VR reports that the Steam Deck has sold around 5 million units so far, while Meta’s popular Quest 2 VR headset shipped 20 million units.

I mean, there is a market for high-end VR goggles. There’s that Finnish place that sells mostly to the commercial/military flight-sim market, what’s-it-called.

kagis

Varjo.

https://www.knoxlabs.com/collections/varjo

It looks like that runs into the tens of thousands, depending upon model.

But I’m deeply skeptical that Apple can make a mass-market product at that price point.

And VR goggles still aren’t to the point where they’re really a reasonable drop-in replacement for a conventional display for general use.

It definitely is bad, but it may not be as bad as I thought above.

It sounds like they might actually just be relying on certificates pre-issued by a (secured) CA for specific hosts to MITM Web traffic to specific hosts, and they might not be able to MITM all TLS traffic, across-the-board (i.e. their appliance doesn’t get access to the internal CA’s private key). Not sure whether that’s the case — that’s just from a brief skim — and I’m not gonna come up to speed on their whole system for this comment, but if that’s the case, then you’d still be able to attack probably a lot of traffic going to theoretically-secured internal servers if you manage to get into a customer network and able to see traffic (which compromising the F5 software updates would also potentially permit for, unfortunately) but hopefully you wouldn’t be able to hit, say, their VPN traffic.

F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long-term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years.

This could be really bad. F5 produces WAN accelerators, and one feature that those can have is to have X.509 self-signed certificates used by corporate internal CAs stored on them — things that normally, you’d keep pretty damned secure — to basically “legitimately” perform MITM attacks on traffic internal to corporate networks as part of their normal mode of operation.

Like, if an attacker could compromise F5 Networks and get a malicious software update pushed out to WAN accelerators in the field to exfiltrate critical private keys from companies, that could be bad. You could probably potentially MITM their corporate VPNs. If you get inside a customer’s network, it’d probably let you get by a lot of their internal security.

kagis

Yeah, it sounds like that is exactly what they hit. The “BIG-IP” stuff apparently does this:

During that time, F5 said, the hackers took control of the network segment the company uses to create and distribute updates for BIG IP, a line of server appliances that F5 says is used by 48 of the world’s top 50 corporations

https://techdocs.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/ltm-implementations-11-5-1/10.html

MyF5 Home > Knowledge Centers > BIG-IP LTM > BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager: Implementations > Managing Client and Server HTTPS Traffic using a Self-signed Certificate

One of the ways to configure the BIG-IP system to manage SSL traffic is to enable both client-side and server-side SSL termination:

• Client-side SSL termination makes it possible for the system to decrypt client requests before sending them on to a server, and encrypt server responses before sending them back to the client. This ensures that client-side HTTPS traffic is encrypted. In this case, you need to install only one SSL key/certificate pair on the BIG-IP system.
• Server-side SSL termination makes it possible for the system to decrypt and then re-encrypt client requests before sending them on to a server. Server-side SSL termination also decrypts server responses and then re-encrypts them before sending them back to the client. This ensures security for both client- and server-side HTTPS traffic. In this case, you need to install two SSL key/certificate pairs on the BIG-IP system. The system uses the first certificate/key pair to authenticate the client, and uses the second pair to request authentication from the server.

This implementation uses a self-signed certificate to authenticate HTTPS traffic.

Well. That…definitely sucks.

For example, its not only illegal for someone to make and sell known illegal drugs, but its additionally illegal to make or sell anything that is not the specifically illegal drug but is analogous to it in terms of effect (and especially facets of chemical structure)

Hmm. I’m not familiar with that as a legal doctrine.

kagis

At least in the US — and this may not be the case everywhere — it sounds like there’s a law that produces this, rather than a doctrine. So I don’t think that there’s a general legal doctrine that would automatically apply here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act

The Federal Analogue Act, 21 U.S.C. § 813, is a section of the United States Controlled Substances Act passed in 1986 which allows any chemical “substantially similar” to a controlled substance listed in Schedule I or II to be treated as if it were listed in Schedule I, but only if intended for human consumption. These similar substances are often called designer drugs. The law’s broad reach has been used to successfully prosecute possession of chemicals openly sold as dietary supplements and naturally contained in foods (e.g., the possession of phenethylamine, a compound found in chocolate, has been successfully prosecuted based on its “substantial similarity” to the controlled substance methamphetamine).[1] The law’s constitutionality has been questioned by now Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch[2] on the basis of Vagueness doctrine.

But I guess that it might be possible to pass a similar such law for copyright, though.