Posts by VRocker

Jack Dorsey floats specs for decentralized messaging app that uses Bluetooth

This is something i thought would be useful years ago while i was in another country, i had no roaming data and my friends were the other side of the coach we were on. It would've been nice to be able to message them about the noisy bugger sat next to me.

And while this sounds useful in some cases, i think it would work far better if the bluetooth mesh networking was a fallback for something else. I seem to remember reading many years ago about Matrix looking into something like this, where a chat could fallback to local comms if it lost server communication. Think something like Signal going 'oh this guy is on the same coach as you and you have no data, you can still message them'. This can get pretty complex though so i don't think it was ever implemented.

But hey, i hope somebody develops on this, i can see it being useful in some situations.

Windows Server 2025 locking up after February patch, no word of when a fix will land

Oh they finally acknowledge this one. I've had this on my home server for ages and it's been pretty annoying. I was starting to think the microserver was starting to show its age. As it's only on my home server it's been a mild annoyance more than anything, and i could just use the esxi console when RDP failed, but i could see this getting pretty annoying if it happened in a real environment.

Once again, Microsoft showing that QA is actually needed and not just a cost sink. You would've thought that they would at least have some automated tests for things like this though...

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

I was waiting for this news article to appear (i was thinking of prodding you guys about it myself but i'm lazy...)

So i have some more info on this as it's affected my CR-Z and i've been looking into it. The date reported by the GPS is May 2002, exactly 1024 weeks ago so it is the rollover issue. It's not due to GPSd though as these units run Windows CE for Automotive. The reason it's going back to 1am every time the car turns on is due to some error handling in the code itself. If the date is before a certain date, it resets to 1st Jan 2002 at midnight. The 1am comes from the auto summer time kicking in (which goes on the date reported by the GPS, not the 'corrected' date) so being May 2002 means it's summer time. Timezones also get applied to the reset time which is why Americans are seeing 4/5am.

The suspected reason why they say it'll fix itself in August is that the date valid check could well be 2003. On 17th August, the unit will think it's 2003 and may say the correct time, although auto summer time won't work for obvious reasons.

I have my doubts that it'll correct itself this August though, as everything i'm seeing in the code seems to point to 2004 being the valid date check... but we'll see.

I currently have Ghidra open with the firmware for my own nav trying to find this check to nop out... we'll see how that goes!

Bank on it: It's either legal to port-scan someone without consent or it's not, fumes researcher

I actually noticed this back in 2016 and it put me off banking with them back then. I did find it a bit strange that they were trying all sorts of port scans, including RDP and VNC.

They say its for 'scanning for malware' but they never actually alert the users that they found open ports (or didn't last time i checked). I have RDP enabled on this machine but not to the internet obviously. The port is checked from your machine (Websocket from the check.js) so even if its not open to the internet the scanner should find it 'open' and report back. Nothing flags up in pfsense about any outside scans so they're not checking if it is open to the internet but yet, i get no 'alert' to say they found something suspicious on my machine so what is it actually used for?

I imagine the way they'll get around this thing is that the scan is done by your own browser rather than their servers so they're not technically scanning you...