ARM is a UK-based company. If they hadn’t dropped out of EU, it’s possible they would have settled on an ARM-based supercomputer design.

Chalk it up to another WIN for Brexit!

This sounds like there are some undocumented opcodes on the HCI side – the Host Computer Interface – not the wireless side. By itself, it’s not that big a deal. If someone can prove that there’s some sort of custom BLE packet that gives access to those HCI opcodes wirelessly, I’d be REALLY concerned.

But if it’s just on the host side, you can only get to it if you’ve cracked the box and have access to the wiring. If someone has that kind of access, they’re likely to be able to flash their own firmware and take over the whole device anyway.

Not sure this disclosure increases the risk any. I wouldn’t start panicking.

I live in an earthquake zone and have been taking CERT emergency training courses. Have been looking at these as part of a neighborhood emergency network.

Turns out SeedStudio sells these with a base that comes with a display and a bunch of grove connectors, as well as a cheap GPS module. Will have to think a bit more on what else may be needed (keyboard, display, battery, vibration, or other environmental sensors?)

It may be possible to build one of these for < $50USD and hopefully cheaper, then have each emergency sector in the city keep one as part of their emergency cache. Would be useful if cell networks and power go out.

The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?

Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it’s still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.

Bluesky wants to tell people they’re not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that’s their key advantage.

The only thing that will guarantee they don’t end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven’t come up with a long-term revenue model, so it’s not clear how they can avoid it.