My daughter has Kinoite set up for her boyfriend's grandparents. It's immutable, so there's not much damage they can do without admin access, and she made it look much like Windows. They were already doing everything with Firefox as it was, so it wasn't a huge transition for them.
She did go back to fix things because the grandma managed to delete the printer, and she said that the downloads folder was full of exe files with sketchy names.
I'm with you on the macOS stability in the past. The thing that gets me is that Windows somehow gets a pass in this regard, but there have been some pretty big changes over the years.
The Canadians that I know who have been living in the USA are all making plans to or have already returned to Canada. Some of them have been here for 20+ years, became American Citizens, the whole deal. And now they just want to get off the crazy train.
I have to imagine that their sentiment is not unique.
I fed crows for one summer but had to stop after it kept leaving baby bird parts, usually heads, for me and my neighbors. If it was just me, that's one thing, but my neighbor was tiring of finding bird parts in her bird bath.
I made it to the point where I could jingle my keys to let them know that I was putting food out and they would come down within a few minutes. They love cat kibble and blueberries, but will not eat apples or walnut pieces.
Besides the baby bird parts, I received:
1. French fries
2. BBQ ribs, just the bone and a little sauce
3. Baked ziti noodles
4. An adult dead bird. It was opened up, and presumably most of the organs were removed.
5. Chunks of bread / bun
6. Chicken nuggets
There's a McDonald's a few miles from my house and I think that they were raiding the dumpster.
It was a neat experience, and I still hear them cawing at me from time to time. You'd think that they would all sound the same, but they definitely have distinct "voices" once you get to know them.
That's so interesting! The crow family I give snacks to loves berries, pecans, and walnuts specifically, but not apples or grapes. Maybe it's a regional thing though, because I'm sure to feed them only things that grow in the area.
Walnuts, apples, and grapes all grow where I live. I was going to suggest that they might go for apples and walnuts if there was no other choice, but they left them there for days. The squirrels would eventually find the walnuts, but nobody (except the ants and hornets) would go for the apples.
If I ever move out of the suburbs into a place more remote / with more land, I'm definitely feeding crows again.
My neighbors used to have a wooden fence, and I was outside and saw a robin with its leg wedged and stuck between the slats. The robin was terrified of me, so I put on some leather gloves and gently dislodged it and released the bird, while it was trying to peck at my fingers. For the rest of the summer, if I was outside, a robin would follow me around the yard and sing to me. I don't know if it was the same bird or not, but I like to think that it was. :-)
Ages ago you could download binaries for Buffalo routers (g300nh / g300nh2) and flash it through the web ui. If you tried to build those images yourself, though, it would fail at the final step because the signing tools / keys were only in the possession of BrainSlayer / Sebastian. Other platforms relied on binary blobs for wlan drivers, and things like that.
Out of the two of them DD-WRT is more "hacky" and duct-taped together, while OpenWrt is more "pure". This can mean that DD-WRT feels more feature complete at times.
Buffalo shipped the WZR series routers with DD-WRT. But they stopped making them when the FCC restricted router firmware about a decade ago.
I bought a pair of them at the time. Kept one (N600) until I needed a 'mesh' and sold it on eBay about four years ago. Replaced it with an Orbi system that doesn't need to phone home (not sure such things are still available in the consumer market).
The ones that I had came with Buffalo firmware but you could load DD-WRT on them through the web ui. To load OpenWrt you had to use tftp and catch it during boot.
I ended up adding support for the G300NH2 model for OpenWrt.
The staff at Harris Teeter in Corolla NC (the outer banks) has been nearly 100% young adults from eastern European countries the last few times that I was down there.
I don't know their living situation, but I did see them both walking and riding bikes to the grocery store. It's a somewhat unique situation as the grocery store probably does 90% of their yearly business between June and August each year. I couldn't tell if they all knew each other from home or just from working together.
Do you mean that you are surprised that young Americans aren't working at the boardwalk in the USA or that young Americans are not working at the beaches in Europe?
Is this an older model? I could see them turning off or using weak encryption on media if the hardware couldn't keep up with the amount of data they were writing.
As another commenter pointed out, any cheapo ARM core from the last 10 years could do the job Flock needs it to do, as long as it has a (very cheap and common) crypto engine strapped to it.
But, a question for you: even if it was the case that the hardware was the limitation, isn't that also an indictment of Flock? Selling something that cannot exist securely within the bounds of current technology? Or, at a minimum, bad chip selection leading to a compromised design?
I'm in the process of optimizing a bootolader for my various SoC/SBCs and even the cheapest, oldest least powerful SoC from 15 years ago can manage AES-CBC via crypto accelerator at 50 MiB/s. There's no excuse.
You can achieve 50MiB/s if that's all that you're doing. I've worked with some DSPs (TI's DaVinci line) where some operations would abort if DDR was overwhelmed.
For example, passing a frame of video (YUV) into the peripheral which can resize the overall image, would fail if the system was busy with other DMA transfers. You could attempt to resize again, but there were no guarantee that it would complete successfully. Your options are to reduce overall DDR utilization or drop frames. In an application like Flock's, dropping frames is likely something they need to avoid.
The system in question is doing similar tasks, and I don't think that what I'm suggesting is out of the question.
They can choose the SoC that would be able to fill the requirements. Eg. almost all Rockchip SoCs have NoC with configurable QoS on master ports (even the cheapest IP camera targetted SoCs that cost like 2-3$), or some other interconnect mechanism that can make it so that SDRAM controller gets tasks in some user selected priority order (eg. you deprioritize CPU in favor of camera interface and other things). This is not a new tech. It already existed when Flock was founded.
And in any case. Passing compressed video streams or pictures through HW encryption engine will not saturate 1.5+ GiB/s or whatever even the lousiest 16-bit DDR3 at 400MHz would give you, not even close. It would be like a fraction of a percent of total bandwidth.
In a perfect world, yes, but this is a for-profit company and there's almost zero repercussion for doing it half-assed. They'd have to pay someone to implement it, and deal with the overhead and complexity.
Now they are in a position where they can sell new models with enhanced encryption and more features.
3.18.71-perf-gaf770dc is a Qualcomm Android vendor kernel from roughly late 2017. The 3.18 branch went fully EOL in 2019, so nothing after that was ever backported to it.
2017 was also the year Flock was funded and founded and went through the YConbinator cohort.
But you would have thought that by 2021 when Andreessen Horowitz funded them or at least by 2025 [1] when both further funded them, someone would have actually done some minor due diligence. Coincidentally too, 2025 was when the flock surveillance matrix went up all over the country almost immediately.
We constantly hear that the magic of tech funding lies in the people, not even the product/service. These types of things always seem to uncover that that is effectively just a lie to cover up the ulterior motives of setting up a tyrannical surveillance matrix all around you … to protect the children, of course.
In an ideal world they'd have people whose job it is to monitor upstream activity in the components used in the firmware and maintain this. Sounds like they did not have that.
I don’t think you are catching on. Why would tyrants do ethics vetting? You assume God intentions?
I’m not a fan of the sloppy use of fascism in lieu of the more suitable term, tyranny (which I believe is intentional distraction, because that’s what I would have done), however, if you understand the mechanism of a YC and its total reliance on the money printing fraud, you would understand that YC is the closest thing to “fascism” there actually is, the federal government’s money printing fraud fueling and life blood of the Monopoly money they print to defraud you of value, in order to run their own little con job of how impressive and futuristic and modern these companies are that rely on extracting of value and exploiting vulnerabilities, not actually creating value.
Flock by a guy named Langley is at the very best a rather poetic example of that. I doubt they’re sophisticated enough to have worked this out, but they’re exploiting the vulnerability of people wanting and needing to feel safe in a system that maintains deliberate danger as a social engineering mechanism to control and dominate and even up until recently, deliberately degrade the populace.
What better way to get to more “fascist” fraudulent Monopoly money than to promise the people who’s lives you’ve made insecure that you can protect them through 24/7 surveillance of all of their activities and thoughts.
It’s not really a new thing; the “Patriot” Act was the first major act that simply shoved the American Revolution aside, but Flock by Langley is just the first instance of it being apparent through its ham fisted swashbuckling YC “beak things fast” clown approach that has unfortunately made many people extremely rich, and thus we got more of it.
I don't think you misunderstood, I think they're talking out their arse. Modems don't run Linux, they run RTOS operating systems. ShannonOS in the case of the Pixel 6 with a exynos modem
I'll be honest I wasn't considering off the shelf modem modules in my statement. I was talking about your typical cellphone modem made by Samsung, Qualcomm, mediatek. I'm sure there's some basic options and older broadcomm modems and stuff that still run Linux, but most people's devices don't have those
To be fair if you could SLTS support by CIP (which is designed for things like this) you have 4.19 at least still maintained. 4.4 might still be too but I'd have to check
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