Evan Krall
[email protected]
A software engineer pretending to be an electrical engineer in my free time.
Blogwww.evankrall.com/
Coolest projecthackaday.io/project/177256-put-a-raspberry-pi-cm4-into-an-original-ipad
Evan Krall shared a note by bobMar 30, 2024

reminder that the type of dirty tricks that let to the xz backdoor could just has easily have happened within a company, we just wouldn't know about it apart from seeing a CVE and a patch

After ironing out some bugs (well, mostly hot-airing out some bugs), my Pipad is actually functional in tablet form! https://www.evankrall.com/posts/pipad/logs/226319-its-a-tablet-rev2-pcb-testing/

I so, so, so don't want to drive any new car that can do this:

A federal appeals court refused to bring back a class action lawsuit alleging four auto manufacturers had violated Washington state’s privacy laws by using vehicles’ on-board infotainment systems to record and intercept customers’ private text messages and mobile phone call logs.

The court ruled that the practice does not meet the threshold for an illegal privacy violation under state law, handing a big win to automakers Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors, which are defendants in five related class action suits focused on the issue.

The plaintiffs had appealed a prior judge’s dismissal. But the appeals court ruled Tuesday that the interception and recording of mobile phone activity did not meet the Washington Privacy Act’s standard that a plaintiff must prove that “his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation” has been threatened.

A suit filed against Honda in 2021, argu[ed] that beginning in at least 2014 infotainment systems in the company’s vehicles began downloading and storing a copy of all text messages on smartphones when they were connected to the system.

An Annapolis, Maryland-based company, Berla Corporation, provides the technology to some car manufacturers but does not offer it to the general public, the lawsuit said. Once messages are downloaded, Berla’s software makes it impossible for vehicle owners to access their communications and call logs but does provide law enforcement with access, the lawsuit said.

Many car manufacturers are selling car owners’ data to advertisers as a revenue boosting tactic, according to earlier reporting by Recorded Future News. Automakers are exponentially increasing the number of sensors they place in their cars every year with little regulation of the practice.

therecord.media/class-action-l

Tonight's mini project: I wrote a little python script which scrapes my Hackaday project log so I can mirror that content on my own blog.

https://github.com/EvanKrall/evankrall-pages/blob/ccf2711b15b70e0e2728a71ba775993119baf591/scrape_project_logs.py

Example output: https://www.evankrall.com/posts/pipad/logs/223863-nvme-hdq-sdio-and-curvy-pcb-traces/

It's geared for my Hugo directory structure, but it should be easy enough to adapt to something else.

Reddit users figured out that some bot crawlers scrape popular threads and auto-generate AI articles based on user comments, so they decided to create some fake hype to confuse them.

reddit.com/r/wow/comments/154u

It worked.

archive.li/2023.07.20-203104/h

This is why real journalism matters.

Big news! Maker Faire Bay Area will return this October
Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 will be held along the waterfront at Mare Island, an historic former naval shipyard across from Vallejo. It will be held over two consecutive weekends (Friday through Sunday), October 13-15 and October 20-22.
makezine.com/article/maker-new

“Be the statue”

This weekend I wrote two decoders for TI's HDQ protocol -- one in the Linux kernel for my pipad project, and one as an analyzer plug-in for Saleae Logic so I could debug the first one.

The kernel implementation is kinda janky, but the Logic plugin is pretty decent. It's actually a generic PWM serial decoder -- should handle any simple serial protocol where the value of the bit is encoded by the length of a pulse.

Screenshot of the Saleae Logic 2 program with my analyzer plugin enabled. Squiggly lines represent the logic level (high or low voltage), and text bubbles above each group of 8 bits show the decoded value.


https://github.com/EvanKrall/raspberrypi-linux/commit/354e1a71079559d1b2cded459980322dfb2adcc5

https://github.com/EvanKrall/pwm_serial_analyzer

I am really concerned that this #Meta verification scheme will be particularly attractive to seniors who use Facebook and are plagued with impersonators who attempt to scam their friends via messenger. They’re going to see $15 and say well, that’s less than lunch for two people at McDonald’s and they are going to give their money and their ID to address a problem that isn’t theirs to solve.

I feel like we aren't calling the 2038 problem the "epocholypse" often enough

We should all try harder to make this a thing