Is that protocol called the brake and signal lights?
Up until Silicon Valley got their hairy hands into self driving tech, there was never a need for such data to be communicated to other *cars* (not drivers).
> From the patents it looks like I can thank inventors Mr. Krause and Mr. Chernov for their freedom sucking, major appliance disabling, communist, 1984-esque idea.
I know it’s just a figure of speech. But having DRM on a fucking fridge filter is the most capitalistic idea that I have ever seen. Communists don’t do this.
Sadly, as much as, I too would like to pin every bad thing on communism, I have to agree with you. If anything the economic realities of communism created a mindset of creating things as simple and reliable as possible. The AK 47 probably being the prime example of this mentality and the Mig being another.
DRM is a purely capitalistic endeavor and does show the dark side of unfettered capitalism.
From my childhood memories, appliances requiring payment to work is literally the first example of why capitalism is bad in somewhat propagandist children's book Dunno on the Moon.
I'm pretty sure the USSR would have loved to have technical enforcement mechanisms available so that the great unwashed masses could only use "domestic products" anywhere.
Although, to be fair: a capitalist fears nothing more than a truly free market.
'Free' markets are fine there are a multitude of ways to avoid competition without regulatory oversight. From lying about weights & measures to monopolies.
What capitalists fear is a competitive or perfect market. But you'll never see anything close without strict policing of firms.
Well, they did have refrigerators, but they indeed were less widespread. I remember visiting relatives in my childhood and they didn't have a refrigerator sometime in late 1970s. Consumer goods were in short supply, that is true, and they actually never cought up with the West until the fall of the USSR. Not to mention personal cars, that was a real luxury.
I'm actually curious as to how much of that was the overall inefficiency of the Soviet system, and how much was simply due to the lack of industrialization that the Russians had to overcome.
Something a lot of (North) Americans take for granted is that, after WWII, we had the only functioning manufacturing base in the world -- we were China before it was cool.
For anyone who is interested in making an iMessage proxy and has time to spend: There is a legitimate way to interact with the iMessage system with a standard protocol. It requires you to have a host iPhone (no jailbreaking needed).
What you need to have is a Bluetooth adapter with MAP (Message Access Profile) support. Your iPhone will treat all messages from the MAP protocol as if they are from the Messages app. This means it will automatically route your SMS as iMessage if possible (you have no say on what the iPhone decides to do, however). As a bonus, you can also use email addresses as recipients with MAP.
A good place to start probing is the WT32 or WT41u module from Silicon Laboratories. It supports MAP, although it looks like the module supports receive-only [1]. I do not know whether you can hack blueZ to support MAP. I've tried to look at it and I don't think the MAP support for blueZ is complete but I could as well be very wrong. A Raspberry Pi 0 as a bluetooth middleman is very sweet, regardless.
Once that Bluetooth middleman is set up, you can use a public server to relay your messages. The scheme will look something like this:
iPhone <--bluetooth--> (WT41+ESP32)|(Pi0+BlueZ) <--wifi--> MQTT broker <--wifi--> your device of choice.
I am relatively confident that this scheme will work. I just don't have time in my hands to do it. So I figured I could share here. Hopefully, some good hacker will do it and publish it. Happy hacking!
A bit of a shameless self-plug, but it took me 4 weekends to implement iMessage message receiving with BlueZ[0]. Sadly, all I learned about Bluetooth LE and Apple's ANCS will be completely useless when it comes to sending messages, since MAP works over Bluetooth, while ANCS works over Bluetooth Low Energy, and these 2 protocols are almost nothing alike.
The only problem is that any messages that the iPhone received while the middleman was out of range won’t get to your PC, but this’d still be extremely useful for quick replies.
I wonder if the iPhone will accept photos over MAP....
> The only problem is that any messages that the iPhone received while the middleman was out of range won’t get to your PC
That is not a problem. MAP is sort of like the IMAP protocol. You can ask the phone to give you older messages and the iPhone does indeed support that as well.
Moreover, with this scheme, you will likely have to keep the donor host iPhone and the middleman at home and have them plugged in 24/7. So then your middleman doesn’t have to be extremely clever, although it wouldn’t hurt if it was.
> What you need to have is a Bluetooth adapter with MAP (Message Access Profile) support. When you send a message from the MAP protocol, then your iPhone will treat all messages as if they are sent from the Messages app.
What is the “legitimate” reason for this? Bluetooth accessories that can send messages, ideally from the MFI program?
Haha, I don’t know who else besides me who knew about this. I just happened to discover it the other day... night... month ;-) HN is the first platform that I shared this discovery with.
I figured that the ideas are free, the important part is the execution. I hope I didn’t accidentally open the Pandora’s box for the spammers and such. My thought is that programmatically sending iMessages is already doable just needs a lot of mucking around. This just makes it much more convenient.
I came from Vietnam, in my views, Vietnam is China-lite or China-CC.
The other day my American friend (who was my roommate) came with me to visit that country and we had a pretty interesting conversation on the taxi cab from the airport to the hotel. My ex's dad worked in the government and his role was essentially censor the press (and my ex was particularly hush-hush about that). Now on my ex's views, she said her dad has no illusion about how shitty the situation is, either. In her description of his job, that is to walk the thin line to allow the press to say as much as possible without making anyone really pissed off (and take revenge on the journalists). My American friend, predictably, didn't like that and thought that was just an excuse.
My dad, like many people of his generation, refused to work with that government. He refused to take any higher-up position. He is just a college lecturer for all his life. To him, taking upper management jobs means he will be corrupted just like the ones he despited. Now he is a disgruntled, angry old man who now faces the fact that there is absolutely nothing he can do to change anything in that shitty system. I believe if he took the job, he would have been able to do more good to the students than the corrupted people he despited.
One of the things that Vietnam has over China is that the internet is much much freer. We get access to Facebook, Google, etc. without problems. That was thanks to someone who worked in the government basically convinced the higher-ups to open up the internet and "fix problems as they appear."
I talked to one of my Chinese graduate friends who has a dad who did essentially what my dad did. I feel bad for both of them.
I feel that in dictatorship countries, making something happen is better than nothing.
I still don't know what to think about my ex's dad, but I owe my gratitude to whoever worked in the government to get the internet to Vietnam so I can be in the USA today to do really great, great work and to speak freely. But I only write this because I had the choice to get the fuck out. My dad and my friend's dad, they had a family to feed and couldn't get out due to many reasons. In that case, for their owns' good, I wonder if making a compromise and "do what you can" is a better choice for both the person and the common good. This is one of the cases where I ask whether the black-and-white, absolutist thinking of good-and-bad what was a too simplistic view of the problem. I believe many scholars in China didn’t say things directly because they were brainwashed or cowards. They know their priorities.
>I believe many scholars in China didn’t say things directly because they were brainwashed or cowards. They know their priorities.
What I meant was “many scholars in China didn’t say things directly not because they were brainwashed or cowards.” Say if I do AI or biology research or whatever, I’d rather spend my time doing those things instead of arguing with people about whether a particular person really was good or bad. It’s like how we see the Trump administration now: everyone already made up their mind. I don’t go out to the street to protest Trump everyday, and I don’t share CNN news about how bad he is on my Facebook feed.
Not that I can freely do it in those countries, but the idea is that we have limited time in this world. Asking people to express/assert their views on shit they have little interest in and saying that they’re cowards when they don’t say what you want to hear is simplifying it a bit much.
When you're an international student on the F1 visa, it's not that easy. The moment you're out of school, you have to get back to your home country. Basically, you can swallow it and shut up for 5-n long years, or go home dishonored and waste at least n years (n = number of years you have been in grad school) of your life.
I am an international grad student and a regular commentator on HN here, but as this topic is quite sensitive, I would like to remain anonymous.
I just knew from a first-hand source, a very accomplished PI was suspended just a couple of weeks ago from the job held at a large research institute. He also had appointments at the two largest universities in the same state. The description was that he "stormed out of the building." Apparently, he (white male, eh) employs a number of postdocs from China and apparently made out/had sex with them. It was so ridiculous that there were witnesses of him pushing the postdoc-single mom baby's cart in the park. The reason is described in the article: If the postdocs want good recommendations, they better keep their mouths shut. Oh, and somehow, according to the same source (first-hand), reports of the sexual harassment from the PI was swept under the rug and was mysteriously disappeared before the #meeto movement.
As an international student, I understand how hard it is to change jobs as a student in F-1 visa in here. The visa situation for international students and postdocs made it especially easy to exploit those people. If you get kicked out of the lab you're currently in, you have extremely limited time to find a lab in the same university, otherwise, you will be kicked back to the home country. If you find out that you're not a good fit for the university then you're literally fucked -- you can't be employed, you can't have gap time to find another one. The only way is to find another university who is willing to adopt you first and then transfer. But heck, that's a catch-22: How can you find another university if you don't have a good recommendation?
Personally, I can attest to that visa situation from another angle. I have a very bad taste in my mouth the first week I worked for a public school as a grad student here. So before I entered grad school, I worked for a public educational institution in the US as an OPT student after receiving my bachelor's degree. They were grateful for the extra work I did for them before I departed for grad school, so they offered to pay me some trivial extra amount of money. So, to make sure everything was OK, I called up the international office in the new school to explain the situation. Not waiting for me to finish my sentence, they threatened to deport me because "I told you not to work on anything else when you're on F-1 visa." I was totally disheartened by that response and it literally ruined my whole positive outlook for the grad school for me.
That incident was in the middle of the Obama's 8-year term. I tend to think local-level management has more to do with it than the president. Of course, the current one doesn't help either.
The amount of mismanagement in that school was fascinating to witness. I couldn't be happier seeing the dissatisfaction level in that school was so damn high that the president of that university was protested out of his position by African American students not long after. Not because of me, of course, but when he made the CNN front page, I thought, holy shit for once history happened.
International students are the minority that gets fucked the most when bad people are in charge. We have no rights, we aren't even considered immigrants, we get fucked if we speak up, we get fucked if we don't. Even now, you see, I still have to speak about my experience under a nickname.
Up until Silicon Valley got their hairy hands into self driving tech, there was never a need for such data to be communicated to other *cars* (not drivers).