beala (u/beala) - Readit News

beala commented on Reticulum, a secure and anonymous mesh networking stack github.com/markqvist/Reti... · Posted by u/brogu

selimthegrim · 2 months ago

So numbers stations fall under as otherwise provided?

beala · 2 months ago

No, numbers stations are not permitted on amateur frequencies in the US. There are some notable cases of foreign governments setting these up and interfering with amateur allocations [1], but there's not much the FCC can do about that.

[1] https://www.arrl.org/news/russian-buzzer-disappears-chinese-...

beala commented on Reticulum, a secure and anonymous mesh networking stack github.com/markqvist/Reti... · Posted by u/brogu

BSDobelix · 2 months ago

>It isn't suited for real-time chat (nevermind secure)

It is encrypted on private channels and direct messages.

>and so I think you can't really make it work while respecting transmission regulations.

I don't know from where your information's are from, but for sure not from reality. Voice encryption/scramble on Amateur-Band's is not allowed, everything else is ok.

beala · 2 months ago

> Voice encryption/scramble on Amateur-Band's is not allowed, everything else is ok.

It seems like you're saying voice encryption is not permitted, but data encryption is? This is not true in the US. Any encoding used for the purpose of "obscuring meaning" is not permitted on amateur frequencies. Even using code phrases like "the eagle has landed" is arguably not allowed. There are some narrow exceptions for things like satellite control codes, but nothing that applies to hobby mesh nets.

Here is the relevant Part 97 rule: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-97#p-97.113(a)(4)

> No amateur station shall transmit: [...] messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, except as otherwise provided herein; obscene or indecent words or language; or false or deceptive messages, signals or identification.

beala commented on NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/jtokoph

evanriley · 3 months ago

> Gah, just when you think you can trust time.nist.gov

You still can...

If you're that considered about 5 microseconds: Build your own Stratum 1 time server https://github.com/geerlingguy/time-pi

or just use ntppool https://www.ntppool.org/en/

beala · 3 months ago

It sounds like GPS, and thus a GPS-based stratum 1 server, uses these time servers, but they were successfully failed over:

> Jeff finished off the email mentioning the US GPS system failed over successfully to the WWV-Ft. Collins campus. So again, for almost everyone, there was zero issue, and the redundancy designed into the system worked like it's supposed to.

So failures in these systems are potentially correlated.

The author mentions another solution. Apparently he runs his own atomic clock. I didn’t know this was a thing an individual could do.

> But even with multiple time sources, some places need more. I have two Rubidium atomic clocks in my studio, including the one inside a fancy GPS Disciplined Oscillator (GPSDO). That's good for holdover. Even if someone were jamming my signal, or my GPS antenna broke, I could keep my time accurate to nanoseconds for a while, and milliseconds for months. That'd be good enough for me.

beala commented on Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help hey.paris/posts/appleid/... · Posted by u/parisidau

mh- · 3 months ago

Thanks, I have the same problem and need to do something about it.

I wonder if it can calculate (estimate) how big of an external disk I'll need. My wife and I each have 40-50k photos and a few thousand videos in iCloud Photos.

beala · 3 months ago

On my iPhone, I can see the size of my iCloud photo backups. Settings -> Apple Account -> iCloud -> Storage.

Weirdly, that number is different than Immich’s estimate of my photo library (95 GB vs 150 GB), but perhaps good enough to get you in the ballpark.

beala commented on Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help hey.paris/posts/appleid/... · Posted by u/parisidau

sho · 3 months ago

Wow. This is a cautionary tale. I don't think I'd be as devastated as this poor chap, but as it grew I realize I've allowed my iCloud photo library to become a single copy.

How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..

beala · 3 months ago

I self host an Immich [1] instance to backup photos on my iPhone. It’s OSS and has a level of polish I’ve rarely seen in free software. Really, it’s shockingly good. The iOS app whisks my photo off to my home server several times per day.

What I’m not sure about is how to backup things like iMessages, Notes, and my Contacts. Every time I’ve looked, it appears the only options are random GitHub scripts that have reverse engineered the iMessage database.

1. https://immich.app/

beala commented on Netflix’s AV1 Journey: From Android to TVs and Beyond netflixtechblog.com/av1-n... · Posted by u/CharlesW

mort96 · 3 months ago

And in the case of many others, it makes a very significant difference. And a codec doesn't have enough information to know.

Imagine a criminal investigation. A witness happened to take a video as the perpetrator did the crime. In the video, you can clearly see a recognizable detail on the perpetrator's body in high quality; a birthmark perhaps. This rules out the main suspect -- but can we trust that the birthmark actually exists and isn't hallucinated? Would a non-AI codec have just showed a clearly compression-artifact-looking blob of pixels which can't be determined one way or the other? Or would a non-AI codec have contained actual image data of the birth mark in sufficient detail?

Using AI to introduce realistic-looking details where there was none before (which is what your proposed AI codec inherently does) should never happen automatically.

beala · 3 months ago

There’s an infamous case of xerox photocopiers substituting in incorrect characters due to a poorly tuned compression algorithm. No AI necessary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2#:~:text=Character%20subs...

beala commented on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops' CPUs arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/latexr

snvzz · 4 months ago

Even on Linux?

beala · 4 months ago

I don't understand why people downvote questions like this rather than just answer the question. It's a perfectly reasonable question imo given that it's not clear how this feature is being disabled. It appears that most of this is based on reddit speculation and the OEMs don't provide a definitive answer.

Meta: recently it seems like the community has been way too loose with the downvote button, but I'm not sure if I'm just noticing it more because it's getting on my nerves, or if there has actually been a change in behavior.

beala commented on Data-at-Rest Encryption in DuckDB duckdb.org/2025/11/19/enc... · Posted by u/chmaynard

PunchyHamster · 4 months ago

Why not just LUKS ? Kernel level, leverages acceleration, transparent to anything you run on top of it.

DB encryption is useful if you have multiple things that need separate ACL and encryption keys but if it is one app one DB there is no need for it

beala · 4 months ago

From the article:

> This allows for some interesting new deployment models for DuckDB, for example, we could now put an encrypted DuckDB database file on a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A fleet of DuckDB instances could attach to this file read-only using the decryption key. This elegantly allows efficient distribution of private background data in a similar way like encrypted Parquet files, but of course with many more features like multi-table storage. When using DuckDB with encrypted storage, we can also simplify threat modeling when – for example – using DuckDB on cloud providers. While in the past access to DuckDB storage would have been enough to leak data, we can now relax paranoia regarding storage a little, especially since temporary files and WAL are also encrypted.

beala commented on Maestro Technology Sells Used SSD Drives as New kozubik.com/items/Maestro... · Posted by u/walterbell

turtletontine · 4 months ago

Is there any way to tell if the SMART has been reset/tampered with in any way? If you have a drive that claims to have 0 hours of use, but it quickly starts to rack up failure indicators… how can you tell if it’s spurious failures or a fraudulent tampered drive?

beala · 4 months ago

Seagate has a proprietary version of SMART called FARM. It’s supposed to be more tamper resistant than SMART, but it appears the fraudsters have figured out how to manipulate it too [1].

The best you can do is check FARM if available and perform a long burn-in with something like badblocks. Then compare the SMART data before and after the burn in. Checking the serial number against the manufacturers database if available is also a good precaution.

These are probably things you should be doing whether or not the drive is allegedly new.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Larger-disks-wi...