Students smoking where they shouldn’t is a PITA to me, a librarian, because it can set off some fire alarms.

I do not appreciate needing to help a less mobile coworker down the stairs to evacuate the building. I don’t like spending in the rain while we wait for the fire department to declare the “all clear”.

We don’t use spy pucks to tattle on students, though: we know what alarm was triggered and we know who checked out that study room. Or we know who came out of the single seat bathroom.

Edit: and generally students have been contrite when they return the study room key after the building was evacuated. Very “I didn’t do it but I’ll let my friends who were studying with me know…” and we’ve not had repeat offenders. Tbh, they’re [young] adults so as long as no one is hurt and I don’t hear about it I’m cool with it.

Insurance is a scam and our rulers rejoiced when they made it mandatory for cars.

The minute the Pi4 compute module showed up, the jig was up.

For the secure boot scheme to be really secure, you have to generate a unique key for each device. Most vendors don’t bother because it means each firmware update has to be signed and encrypted for each unique device. This also means you have to have the infrastructure for device attestation. You can’t just stick an update file on a public S3 bucket or FTP site like the good old days.

Some end up reusing the same product key, so if it’s compromised, all devices in that family can be hacked. But even that’s too much for some vendors.

Instead, they just wing it, and go back to the bad old habits (no encryption, or symmetric keys embedded in firmware) that get them featured in DefCon presentations.

Yeah cool that frog started getting hot 15 years ago whats the plan haha

*chock full

A terrifying/infuriating/interesting watch.