With 'only one country', I assume you refer to South Africa. Are you aware that the ANC itself approved of nuclear disarmament?
If you look at the Budapest Memorandum, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine also voluntarily gave up their nuclear arsenals by becoming a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in exchange for security guarantees.
I found the open source Valetudo (https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo) project quite interesting, as it sits between the vendor firmware and (cloud) connectivity. The project is made possible due to Dennis Giese's research.
It currently supports Dreame, Xiaomi, Roborock and some others. But not Ecovacs.
And not sure it prevents this type of Bluetooth vulnerabilities.
That's a much requested feature. With imho two main challenges:
1. Much traffic data is private / requires licensing, however some countries have reasonable public data.
For example the TraffXML (https://gitlab.com/traffxml) project has some.
2. The project is free to use, but also volunteer driven. It requires setting up a privacy preserving "live data" infrastructure.
If you think this is a nice challenge and you can help, feel free to reach out!
Cool projects! I actually had a look at you gtfs-server, to use Rust for processing GTFS files. Processing GTFS (basically large zipped text files) is quite resource intensive indeed, especially if you want to do it for the whole planet. What would you do differently now?
Thanks for bringing this up to hackernews! The challenge for OrganicMaps is to make it privacy preserving and offline usable, which means on device routing and getting as much information on the device as possible.
The referred document concerns the existing static part, it's a rather cumbersome to build it yourself at the moment. There is some routing logic in the app - I think from the Maps.me time - but currently disabled.
The idea is to redesign this - in the mentioned ticket - and divide it in static (e.g. stops, routes) and 'live' data (e.g. schedule changes). It requires an efficient infrastructure. It's all volunteer driven. If you want to help, feel free to contribute!
I agree with you on the issue with trust. The Atlantic compares the US developments from the last 10 years with what happened to the tower of Babel:
"Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech."
Perhaps a better source in English, the EU policy advisory report from the European Academies Science Advisory Council from 2015 on Ecosystem services, agriculture and neonicotinoids.
One of the driving forces behind the neonicotinoids theory is a toxicologist called Henk Tennekes, who used to work as a consultant for Solvay, Roche, Monsanto en Sandoz (now known as Syngenta). Basically he claims that the toxicity was underestimated as it grows with time, the damage to the nerve system in insects is irreversible.
The pesticides also go into the surface water, where they found a link between higher surface-water concentrations of imidacloprid - a specific neonicotinoid - and a decline of birds that feed on insects.
The problem is not so much whether it's the government's job to regulate it, but that it is primarily treated as a criminal issue, and thus is 'solved' through police enforcement.
In other countries people see it more as a health issue, this leads to completely different approaches and policies.
What would happen if we treated e.g. education primarily as a criminal issue?
Nice to mention the link to Objectivism and Ayn Rand. I can highly recommend Adam Curtis's 'All Watched over Machines of Loving Grace' docu [1], which goes into that relationship and has a great scene of pong!
Actually, thinking a bit longer about the problem, the issue in my mind is that vendors/producers do not have an incentive to update software if you only pay for the hardware once. For them it's just a cost. It's more interesting to sell more hardware. My strategy as consumer is to go to open source for such devices. But perhaps there are better strategies.
I'm aware of Cisco having a model to pay for software updates, but this is mainly for business clients. Does anyone know other vendors that have business models, that create incentives for updating devices? Perhaps even for consumers?
I remember that in the past MacOS updates had to be purchased, but this no longer seems to be the case.
Is there actually a consumer market for such business models, where hardware and (paid) software are tied together for a longer life cycle?
I agree, you have a good point with respect to a large amount of older hardware and I do not have a solution for that problem. What I can say is that I try to buy hardware which has support for open source software and has a community around it. So far this helped me to extend the life of these devices, as it does not depend on the vendor alone.
I'm not really sure how to interpret your 'Awesome!'. If it was meant snarky and if you're willing to, please have a look at the HN guidelines for comments [1]. We can then improve the quality of the discussion.
If you're using something like OpenWRT, you most likely don't need to buy new hardware.
The WPA3 functionality is already added to hostapd and wpa_supplicant [1]. Look for the terms SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals), DPP (Device Provisioning Protocol) and OWE (Opportunistic Wireless Encryption).
The current experimental wpa_supplicant Debian package has this enabled [2]. I think the main challenge is upgrading clients, especially when vendors no longer provide updates.
I truly believe that if you can't do the job of the people below you: you're not qualified to lead them. If you can't motivate people to work harder to solve the issues that they're stumbling on: you don't deserve leadership. If you can't get your team together to coordinate their activities in a way that makes Russian ballet seem like a circus full of bears - you need to get out of the way and get someone in who can handle the machine-like precision needed to coordinate an organization and start making real headway to building the business.
I disagree that if you can't do the job of the people 'below' you, you're not qualified to lead them. When I first lead a team, I worked with people that were a lot more competent in specific areas than I ever will be. In turn, I could still learn from my 'managers', but in different areas than where I have my skills. So everybody learns from one another.
I do agree that motivation is very important. I had to think of theory X or Y. Do you distrust (X) or trust (Y) people to do their work well? These believes tend to be self-fulfilling, but can still be useful in different situations. Distrust tends to lead to a lot of control and micromanagement, which imho for knowledge workers does not work. Trust has advantages and for me leads to a better working culture, but can also lead to the issues described in the article.
I learned a lot from an online version of Harvard's Psychology 1508: The Psychology of Leadership given by Tal Ben-Shahar. If you can find it somewhere (there are some classes on youtube), highly recommended!
To differentiate between needs and (economic) wants, I found the "fundamental human needs" framework quite useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_human_needs
(as developed by Chilean Economist Manfred Max-Neef).
If you look at the Budapest Memorandum, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine also voluntarily gave up their nuclear arsenals by becoming a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in exchange for security guarantees.