HN user
All of there IoT devices will be slop coded soon
Soon?
I've already seen multiple of TP-Link's firmware engineers leave their LLM history public and indexed by search engines.
It's quite obviously them as well.
On this subject since it's an Australian seller and marketed as "DV safe".
Australia has a national test of it's phone alert system in 10 days at 27/07/26, 2PM AEST. (People in North America would know it as Cell Alerts/Presidential Alerts etc.)
There have been warnings that hidden phones will almost certainly sound, and their recommendation is to ether power off the phone or put it into airplane mode at least an hour before the test...
While they're okay on paper, they managed to burn a lot of customers in regards to the add-on wifi 7 module.
Quite a few of the modules went out without their eeprom programmed correctly, and all of them appear to be plagued by quite mediocre performance from (alleged) inadequate RF shielding on the card.
It looks like they've revised the design, but it's peeved off quite a few of the Banana Pi/Sinovoip customers who have bought them with the intention of using it as a router/ap with their R4. (It's dual-PCIe fingers with unique spacing and requires out of spec PCIe voltages, so it's only practically usable with a BPi R4.)
At the very least, the customers using them as wired-only routers are likely to be having a slightly better experience.
I too honestly thought that this was going to be a deep dive on the M-series PCIe controller or something similar.
It did however deliver the hilarious quote "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia", in regards to end-to-end encrypted messaging.[1]
It went down as well as about you would think it would.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/australian-pm-calls-en... (2017)
I suspected something along these lines was possible when I looked at this provider a couple months ago.
If I recall, I had a fairly decent view of their various checks because it was delivered completely unminified, including a couple amusing sections and unimplemented features. (A gesture detector with the middle finger gesture in the enumerable commented out, for example...)
Another attack vector that I speculated upon was intercepting and replacing their tflite model with ones own, returning whatever results required.
Additionally, I believe they had a check for virtual camera names in place, as checks would quietly fail with a generic message in the interface, but show the reason as being virtual camera within responses. (Camera names are mutable though, so...)
If I recall, for something like GPON or XGS-PON, you end up having to clone the various attributes of the original for it to work properly. This typically includes serial number, hardware id, firmware identifiers, etc.
Qualcomm kind of does this with their XPAN extension, sends the audio over local network. I believe it's mostly a proprietary solution though, so I haven't seen any serious attempts to re-implement it yet.
Most vendors gave the security researchers either silent treatment or were slow, even after Airoha published fixes. Jabra was one of the positive outlier, Sony unfortunately negatively.
While I don't recall Sony issuing an advisory, I believe the users of their app would have started getting update notifications since they (quietly) released firmware updates.
This means there is great opportunity for Linux users to control their Bluetooth headsets, which for example is quite nice in an office setting to toggle "hearthrough" when toggling volume "mute" on your machine.
I think most vendors are using custom services with their own UUIDs for settings such as this.
Regardless, I believe there are open client implementations for some of the more popular devices. Gadgetbridge comes to mind in regards to Android, not sure about any Linux equivalent.
400GB for Ark
Ark is a strange case. It compresses very very well. Most of it ends up with compression ratios of around 80%.
Total size on disk is 628.32 GiB and total download size is 171.42 GiB.
From SteamDB's summary of Ark's content depots.
that let Pixel users enable VoLTE anywhere
It did a great deal more than that. It also allowed the toggling of VoNR, which apparently affected the fallback behavior of some people's services. (Ie. It would fall back to LTE and not roam back to 5G data unless nudged manually)
However for me, it would enable backup calls over a secondary sim card's data, which would allow text and calls overseas without the usual extortionate charges. Oddly enough, I believe that toggle is enabled for my carrier... but only on iOS.
The major carriers perhaps, but support among the MVNOs isn't universal. Number sharing support for smart watch usage is almost non-existent among the MVNOs in Australia.
Eg. ALDI (yes, the German supermarket chain run a MVNO in Australia), have been saying esim support in the future since 2021.
They've pulled out of my market (Australia) 6 years ago, so that's not really an option, even if I imported one.
If I imported one, the majority of the handsets released before this year wouldn't be able to register on a network, given that the networks have gone and blocked the IMEI TAC associated with most of Sony's handsets.[1]
This is due to Sony not having the correct carrier settings in order to roam onto them for emergency calls, and a ham-fisted direction to have working emergency calls post-3G shutdown.
It's still a pretty hard question to answer, given how specific model numbers are sometimes missing on sales listings, and silent revisions to hardware.
Most likely referring to CVE-2018-6242 aka "Fusée Gelée"
The paperclip was just the easiest way of triggering RCM, which is a standard feature on Tegra. The vulnerability lay in that they didn't bounds check certain types of USB requests properly.
I'm surprised that there are modern Tegra devices shipping with identical SBK across their production line.
I would have thought they'd do some mixing based on serial number or chip id as a baseline.
Or at least that's what the hash of their SBK implies.
I do enjoy seeing the boot chain on Tegra get broken yet again though.
From what I can tell of the block diagram, dropping the 2x 1gbit ports would not yield you a 2nd 10G SFP, as those would be running off the integrated switch as opposed to one of two USXGMII interfaces.
You would have to drop the other ports instead, and then you would just have 2x 10G SFP and a gigabit switch. Which is exactly how the BPi R4 is configured.
I had a similarly negative experience, sadly. Samsung managed to break HDMI-CEC in the final firmware update for one of their tvs, and wouldn't allow downgrading.
Which tends not to be great for a tv one wants to use with a Chromecast or similar media box...
For a second I thought this was referring to the other reset bug on Polaris, Vega and Navi. (These apparently have broken Function Level Reset sequences, requiring quite specific reset code as a separate module or a system reboot to bring back to a working state.)
It's a shame that Intel seemed to really not want people to use it, given they started disabling the ability to use it in future microcode, and fused it off in later parts.
For those not aware, they are most likely referring to an ongoing "tobacco war" among organised crime groups in Australia, with tobacconists becoming the targets of many arson attacks.
Obviously the illicit tobacco trade is a large/primary driver of this, but illicit vapes are also becoming a part of their business.
The sad thing is, the WRT3200ACM has more or less an unmaintained wifi driver, with 802.11w (and thus WPA3) possibly broken within the radio firmware itself. I believe there are other issues regarding regulatory settings being hardcoded in there too.
In addition to the wifi, I recall the preloader at the start of the boot chain is also a binary blob, which handles some of the chip init and memory calibration for the DDR4.
The insane thing when I tried to update Nextcloud, was that it kept timing out the download because it was too slow, and then required me to delete the upgrade in progress file in order to try again...
Not too surprising given what I've seen of their vendor sdk driver source code, compared to mt76. (Messy would be kind assessment)
Unfortunately, there are also some running aftermarket firmware builds with the vendor driver, due to it having an edge in throughput over mt76.
Mediatek and their WiSoC division luckily have a few engineers that are enthusiastic about engaging with the FOSS community, while also maintaining their own little OpenWrt fork running mt76.[1]
[1] https://git01.mediatek.com/plugins/gitiles/openwrt/feeds/mtk...
I wonder what SoC these are running?
Quite a few of them actually end up configured to preference SD boot over internal flash and/or have easily accessible buttons or shortable pads to trigger bootrom recovery modes.
Which at least, stops them being automatically consigned to e-waste.
Although, customising a LibreELEC image for the dozens of different models of TV box isn't great. Typically involves sorting out the dts for the device and remapping the remote.
Somehow, someone was intercepting and replaying the web traffic from likely every single device on my home network.
Normally I'd laugh and assume device compromise but...
The largest ISP in Australia (Telstra) got caught doing exactly this over a decade ago. People got extra paranoid when they noticed the originating IP was from Rackspace as opposed to within Telstra. Turned out to be a filter vendor scraping with dubious acceptance from customers. The ToS was quietly and promptly updated.
Samsung does monthly updates on more premium phones. But a former flagship like the S22 would sometimes only get the update near the end of the month, even before the S24 is out.
This is complicated by their rolling updates per country, it can be few weeks between the first CSC (3 letter identifier for country and carrier variant) to receive an update and it being rolled out to the final one.
I was towards the end of that update cycle, so the Android security patch level could become quite detached from the actual month.
Well it's just the amount that declare it on the partner portal and their store pages and are currently publicly viewable.
Said number is roughly 1354 currently if you go around counting things like DLC and Demos distinctively.[1]
The majority being games with ai-generated assets, with a small number (~99 currently) being live-generated content like chatbot interactions.
https://steamdb.info/search/?a=app_keynames&type=-1&keyname=...
I'd consider enabling the hardware watchdog as well.
While one could argue that you should figure out the source of your device freezing in the first place;
Nothing is better than having to ask someone to power cycle your Raspberry Pi while you're away.