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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 2nd, 2023

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  • Having worked in classified areas, both as an admin and an unprivileged user, CDs were normally the method of transferring data up the network. (Transferring down rarely occurred, and even then you’d be limited to plaintext files or printouts.)

    I’ve seen more places use data diodes to perform one- or two-way transfers so that requests can be streamlined and there’s no loose media to worry about tracking. It’s not super fast and higher speeds mean more expensive equipment, but it covers 98% of software update needs, and most non-admin file transfers were under 20MB anyways.

    Anything that did require a USB drive, like special test equipment (STE) or BIOS updates, had to use a FIPS-140-1 approved drive that offered a ready-only mode via PIN. This drive could only be written to from a specific workstation that was isolated from the rest of the machines (where data was transferred via CDs of course) and required two persons to perform the job to ensure accountability.

    Not the most time-efficient way of doing things, and not completely bulletproof, but it works well enough to keep things moving forward.











  • I was talking to a Tesla owner about this and they argued that if the window is electric then there’s no difference making the door electric. They couldn’t understand that the door itself can be operated independently of the rest of the vehicle.

    Making windows electric causes a safety tradeoff. You get ease of operation while losing the ability to open the window in the event of an accident (where power cannot be supplied). However you can still unlock and open the door manually as an alternative escape option. This also applies in non-accident scenarios (dead battery).

    Making doors electric is nothing more than a safety risk. From the inside you might have access to a manual release latch, but some doors require you to unscrew things first. Any emergency situation where you need to exit as soon as possible and the power is lost almost guarantees that you’ll be unable to safely escape.


  • I’ve been in a few situations before where it’s been incredibly tempting to just not show up because:

    • Your management doesn’t value your input
    • Nepotism is prevalent when promotions come around
    • You’re not doing the type of work that was advertised in the job post and discussed your first two weeks
    • You’re doing excellent work solving difficult and/or outstanding problems but someone else gets the credit

    Sure, you could put in a notice of resignation, but if you know that your manager is going to harass you for reasons why, possibly belittle you, and try to guilt-trip you into giving more time to the company to “finish out” tasks on your queue that they’ve not bothered to train anyone else on that you’ve requested over the last two years, then wanting to cut ties as quickly as possible given the toxic environment is a fairly normal desire.

    Not saying it’s the right thing to do, and all the flight-hopping that OP claims does seem a tad strange, but sometimes people end up in a fairly unsupportive or toxic environment where you just have to take actions in putting as much distance and as many barriers in place as possible to mentally feel like you’ve regained some level of control.


  • I don’t disagree with you. There should be a level of inspection possible by an owner on the functions and processes running, especially if they will be held liable for any outcomes from operating failures that cannot be attributed to the driver.

    In other words, if my insurance covers an accident but I can be sued in civil court for additional damages then I should be able to update/fix/review everything in it given that all liability is transferred to me upon sale. If I cannot answer to something because it’s deemed “proprietary” and “property” of the manufacturer, then they should not be allowed to transfer that liability to me.


  • 4 hours sounds familiar. I used to work in network engineering and polled equipment via SNMP for statistics. Some counters were measured at high resolutions that would hit their max after just a few hours of runtime.

    Take an unsigned 32-bit integer or uint32_t. It has a maximum value of 4,294,967,295. That may seem like a lot, but if you had an FPGA that took measurements and provided a timestamp as ticks since boot for each message it sends back, you’d hit the maximum value after just a few hours.

    For example, imagine that they had a low-power FPGA running at 1MHz which increases the tick counter on every cycle. This would cause the counter to increase by 1,000,000 every second. You’d hit the max in just under 4,295 seconds, or roughly 71 minutes. To get closer to 4 hours we’d reduce the frequency by 4 to get 250KHz.

    All of this is speculative. Could be that it’s not from a value failing to update but just a divide-by-zero error somewhere. Interested to see what the public is able to uncover as the core problem.