So when I ride the bus or train, I'm allowed to use my phone? What about when I use an uber (or lift or any of the many many other local alternatives)?
Not everyone that moves at driving speeds is driving, especially in places outside of America.
It would also cost lives. In a serious emergency you can start driving someone to the hospital and call 911. In rural areas when ambulances can take 45+ minutes being unable to call and drive can be a big issue.
That’s just one of many edge cases where disabling cellphone service for moving callers is downright dangerous.
Yes, used different messages max sizes, with 2000 characters got the best speed but got the account banned, using 20000 is a great middle term and not banned for now, could get banned anyway, its an educational project
During the Facebook outage of a few years ago, WhatsApp messages still worked but I couldn't send an image. I think images are uploaded to Facebook-related servers and messages are through a separate real-time infrastructure, and it's likely that the message includes the fuzzy thumbnail and a url for the image from the other server.
I was on a boat recently where WhatsApp was free to use, and you had to pay to use the rest of the internet. You could send and receive messages but attempting to send an image, which wasn’t even all that big in size, did not work on the free connection.
It must be either message size, or WhatsApp using a separate host name for attachments.
I would not be surprised if the free WA messaging is implemented by whitelisting the signaling ports and domains (XMPP or similar) which only handle text content and small inline attachments. While larger images are uploaded and fetched out of band (HTTP or similar) with only a URL or reference passing over the signaling channel.
They probably use some deep packet inspection on shore side firewall which blocks audio/video. Quite normal on congested satellite connections. Most “next-generation” firewall providers have predefined signatures for WhatsApp file transfer.
Using less characters got you banned? I don't understand why that would happen. I would think using more characters would be more likely to get you banned since it's less like what normal users do.
Well increasing the usage would also increase the number of messages.
How does Whatsapp choose to ban people? Total messages sent? Then increasing the message size doesn't stop you from being banned, it just makes it take longer before you're banned. Messages/second? Then avoiding the ban by a message size restriction seems like a very clumsy way of doing it; it would be much more straightforward to avoid the ban by limiting the messages/second.
Yea there are many examples of high level corruption in the german government (and most western governments actually, including the US). A recent example is the mask scandal with CDU/CSU (same party) https://www.dw.com/en/german-mask-scandal-unforgivable-viola...
You will not find much local corruption though, which is what most people think of when they hear corrupt countries. Local corruption is paying of a cop, judge, that kind of stuff. I’m sure it also happens in Germany, but that is very very rare.
My experience, having German family: Germans in general are very much about propriety and doing things correctly and are often very harsh if you step outside this line.
So to be corrupt in Germany, and places like it, is to do the "corrupt" thing "correctly" -- e.g. in some structural fashion tied to political parties, long term associations, business connections, etc. that have the appearance of being practical, official, and "right."
A friend of mine who came from Iran originally had a comment like this about western countries corruption vs "third world" or "second world" corruption:
In Iran or etc. corruption is almost more democratic, because it means as a regular layperson you can bribe some local official to make something go your way. It's not just, it's not fair, it's ugly, but it's "accessible" if you have some spare cash.
But in the west, corruption is for the super rich and the connected at a much higher level. e.g. you can't bribe a zoning official so you can build an addition or a shed, but if you're powerful enough you can control a political party and prevent it from investigating your company, have it enact some preferential laws, or stop it from some raising some tax.
Yeah, I tried to explain this to someone about Portugal too... they didn't get it. If the system is completely broken and going to kill you in a "non-corrupt" country, there's nothing you can do about it as someone who's not a megacapitalist.
Assuming you’re running a smb server, you could just veto the files. Windows isn’t much better since it likes to create thumbs.db almost everywhere too (which I also veto, but vetoing them can increase the load and bandwidth requirements and your server and clients)
Yeah Vetoing is an option, although without testing I do not know how the mac clients would react on saving a file and its metadata was not allowed. Would the mac throw an error?
EDIT: I have had people say this to me before about windows and thumbs.db. But I personally have not seen this in the wild. Maybe its what old versions of windows did and people are still remembering this?
I haven’t seen any errors and macOS seems to handle it greacefully. You can also disable it on macOS clients for network servers individually but that seems to be a loosing battle (even if you control all clients). They are finder settings after all
Thumbs.db files are created on my windows 11 pc at least. They’re only created for files that have metadata that requires reading those files. Explorer likes to display the metadata (sometimes) for some folders that have a lot of media in it (pictures, music, videos, etc). If the thumbs.db file is missing, windows will partially read every media file on the server to show thumbnails, that obviously creates unnecessary load but it’s really a trade off that might not make sense for most.
Getting it to work the first time was a pain. Basically, you want to disable cloudflare (just untick the box so that it goes directly to your server, you can keep using cloudflare's dns server), then obtain the normal way, and reactivate Cloudflare. But I would highly recommend using cerbot's cloduflare dns plugin[1] instead so that you can (re)create the certificate w/o disabling cloudflare.
I believe OP is referring to the fact that a sophisticated attack has access to the hardware and you continue using it afterwards. They could, for example, change the unencrypted /boot partition to log the password you use to decrypt your partition. Or, if you sign the boot partition, they could install a hardware key logger, or do any other kind of hardware modification that defeats the security. Preventing this kind of attack is incredible difficult. They are many means to prevent those kind of attacks but, for the most part, it just making it harder for the attacker so that the attacker needs to become even more sophisticated.
Full disk encryption only helps if you are worried that your hardware gets stolen
Just wanted to add that this is generally referred to as the "Evil Maid" scenario in case someone wants to Google it.
It can be mitigated somewhat with secure boot, tpm technologies etc but due to the breadth of possible attacks it's really hard to do against a serious attacker.
Even the sound of the keyboard is often enough to give your password away.
No amount of software complexity defeats a hardware keylogger, though... or like, a no-touch version of that, such as a spycam in the room that records the sight and sound of you typing your password.
The heatsink doesn't really work, though, and is marketing for the most part [1].
I have a crucial P1 NVME SSD and I can make it overheat pretty reliably. Pretty much any synthetic workload makes it overload if the SSD is empty (it reaches 70° pretty quickly and even starts throttling until it reaches 80° and the whole system starts shuttering because of extreme throttling do it doesn't damage itself. Although I have not properly tested it, it seems that not using any heatsinks from my motherboard makes the temps actually better but it still overheats.
The main reason it can overheat quickly is probably because its sitting in a really bad position where it gets close to zero airflow despite being in an airflow focused case. Most motherboards place the nvme slot directly under the GPU. The main problem seems to be that the controller is overheating when it's writing at close to 2000 MB/s. It's also important to note that only the controller (an actual relatively powerful ARM processor), not the flash memory, seems to overheat.
Fortunately, this is mostly not an issue because it's a QLC drive and the workload is unrealistic in the real world. When writing to an empty drive at 2000MB/s (Queue depth 4, 128k sequential writes), it takes 2 minutes until the cache is full. The way its currently used, it takes 30 secs for the cache to become full and for write speeds to drop to 150MB/s. The only way it has every overheated in the real world was during the loading screen of a gameplay when it reached 78C quickly (and I only noticed it in the hardware monitor). If the GPU hadn't heated up the nvme drive before (it was sitting at 65C mostly idle), and starved it for air, I doubt it would have hit 60C.
So until motherboards start placing nvme where it can get some actual cooling, or they make actual functioning heatsinks, their power usage can make a difference.
The Crucial P1 is a budget SSD that doesn't come with a proper heatsink, similar in quality to that god awful "heat shield" in that linked review. When I say "High performance m.2 drives come with removable finned heatsinks" I mean an actual high performance drives that come with a finned heatsinks like https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Force-MP600-Gen4-PCIe/dp/B07S... not examples of budget drives paired with flat pieces of metal.
Also your high performance SSD should be going in the direct-to-CPU slot to the right of the GPU, not under it.
I hope you don’t mind me asking but what’s the purpose of having a comment in the top to direct to different pages. There is already a more button on the bottom which makes the top comment kind of redundant.
Also a tip for others when HN is slow or almost down (like when Google was down): you can open a private tab and navigate HN from there. Since you’re not logged in, you’re served a copy from cloud flare. It’s usually out of date by 1min or so but good enough for reading in my opinion.
> The IEC 60320 connectors were specified for exactly that reason. Honestly, I don't get why these were not made mandatory for all kinds of appliances. There are even locking variants available if vibration is of concern.
I'm not sure what you mean by the second sentence but you can't use most appliances made for Europe in America and vice versa. Most electronic appliances depend on the input voltage and supplying 240V can easily cause a fire. That is true for almost all electronic appliances (water heater, fan, washing machine, etc) but not true most "computer related devices" such as a monitor, PSU, charger. Since those devices already operate on a much lower DC Voltage, they often have transformers (not sure if that's the right word), that can scale down the current from either 120 or 240. [0]
That being said, a mandatory IEC connector (and it's variances) would help a lot to cut down unnecessary e-waste. Instead of throwing away a device because the cable is damaged, you can easily order a replacement that is around $2 and high quality, instead of relying third party cords that might have bad wiring from a non reputable brand. The reason they are not mandatory, though, is that most companies like to have their own connectors so that you either overpay for it or just buy a new device.
[0]: You should still always read the specs on the input current for the device though. It is dangerous to rely on the fact that similar devices can operate at 120V/240V because yours might not. You can usually see the specs on the website/packaging or usually near the input plug.
> I'm not sure what you mean by the second sentence but you can't use most appliances made for Europe in America and vice versa. Most electronic appliances depend on the input voltage and supplying 240V can easily cause a fire.
Here in America "electronic appliances" would imply the tech/gadget category like TVs or computers where "electrical appliances" would be the big household equipment. Just to clarify in case that confuses anyone else like it did me, it kind of reverses the meaning of what you're trying to say.
Anyways, at least with relatively modern gear you can generally assume that anything with batteries or USB ports runs off a switch-mode power supply, and all but the cheapest of those will happily accept pretty much anything resembling residential power.
Anything with a large motor or any kind of resistive element (lighting, heating) on the other hand is almost certainly built for a specific variety of electrical service and will likely require modification to accept anything else without releasing the magic smoke.
The stuff in between those categories, well, RTFLabel. Outside of audio and ham radio gear I'd imagine most DC stuff runs on switch mode power supplies these days.
I wonder if there are regulatory reasons that prevent IEC connectors being used in e.g. washing machines. I guess getting a water ingress protection IP rating might be harder if you have an IEC connector. The lack of an IP rating might prevent you from then installing the appliance in, say, a bathroom (depends presumably on country-specific regulation). This in turn might limit your sales.
Even if that's the case, the appliances should be easy to repair for a competent person and if necessary allow the cable be replaced.
My cheap hair drier has a switch to select the input voltage (you need to turn the dial with a screwdriver). For many devices it shouldn't be too hard to make it possible to use them both with 110V and 230V, even more so for already complex and expensive machines like a washing machine.
The biggest problem might be the amount of power a device can draw. Half the voltage gives you half the power, which is the reason why e.g. kettles are much less useful in the US.
For resistive loads (like the heating element in a kettle), half the voltage gives you a quarter of the power. (Electric kettles work just fine on 110/120; they just haven't been a thing in the US. They've been ubiquitous in Canada, although they've been pushed aside somewhat by drip coffee makers. You just need a lower-resistance heating element than would be practical with 220/240.)
Electric kettles in the US typically are 1000W-1500W, while in Europe any kettle is 2000W-2800W. This is simply because houses are typically wired with outlets for 10A-16A everywhere, regardless of grid voltage.
That ofc makes electric kettles much less useful in countries with 110V grid. It also keeps stovetop kettles relevant in these counties, since stoves don't suffer power limitations.
Houses in the US are typically wired with 240v split phase, so nothing is stopping a mad lad from installing a 240v outlet in their kitchen, and running a kettle from it.
This just seems so crazy, to think of 120V. I haven't seen a house here with 120V in my entire lifetime. It sounds like a relic from the past, like the kind of thing people used back when they rode horses.
Hmm, I'm having trouble understanding what you mean. 120V is the standard household plug in North America. If you're in, say Europe, I don't imagine you'd see a house with 120V as IIRC, 220V is the standard, and you generally have to connect to your local grid. I think the parent's post about 120V was about international devices that may have to work in North America, for instance.
> You can buy games and just play them, 1080p60 on hardware you never have to pay for.
Honestly, this worries me the most. There doesn’t seem to be a way to transfer the licenses out of stadia, which means, even though you “bought the game“, you’re still at googles mercy for your continued enjoyment of the game. What if they decide that the hardware costs are too much for Google, and you now have to pay a monthly fee? What if they decide that stadia is not the success they hoped for and close it down (which Google is not known for doing at all…). Unless there are clear migrations paths away from stadia, I’d stay away from it because Google have shown that they are not afraid to change/EOL any of their products with no regards to their existing customers (just look at their lifetime free photos service, etc)
I agree, for the most part, but this is a separate problem to what the grandparent post was talking about. This is a common problem to most streaming services (except, as noted, GeForce Now) while GP was claiming that Stadia was the worst game streaming service. Honestly, of the ones I've tried, it's the best; games look good, perform well, and control with no noticable latency.
Now, why do I buy games on Stadia if I agree with your point about not owning the game? Well, portability is sometimes nice. I can throw a Chromecast in my bag and play a game anywhere. It's a supplement to how I game, but I don't think it will ever be the primary way.
Not everyone that moves at driving speeds is driving, especially in places outside of America.