I doubt that it's a major issue. Even cheap and dreadful ARM hardware runs Android without much trouble these days(partially because SoCs used to be a lot slower; and partially because Android used to suck even more, this wasn't always true; but unless the vendor has some truly atrocious skinning it is usually at least smooth these days); and that's not exactly lightweight. Contemporary Windows Phone is also an NT kernel with graphical stuff heavily borrowed from desktop Windows; and by all accounts it runs quite adequately on undistinguished ARM parts, when anyone actually buys it.
What will be interesting to see is if anyone from Team ARM manages to come up with a genuinely punchy option; or whether they'll be useful for scaring Intel away from 'because we can, that's why' pricing; and allowing specialty hardware vendors to quickly and cheaply add a well supported CPU core to their collection of custom accellerator components(like a lot of the Cavium NAS and networking parts, which are pretty unexciting as general purpose CPUs; but pack way more hardware acceleration for crypto, packet munging, and similar; along with markedly nicer integrated networking; than the cheap x86s that offer similar general purpose CPU support tend to); but not be all that interesting if you have scared Intel(and maybe AMD; for the first time in years, hooray) into not doubling the price just for leaving ECC support intact.
At least up till now; ARMs haven't been exactly slow by historical standards; but(especially if you need good single threaded performance) certainly haven't been exciting, and have mostly been of interest because Intel hates selling cheap CPUs; and really hates selling cheap CPUs with ECC and similar features; while there are enough hungry ARM vendors that they don't have the luxury of being picky.
I think that we are supposed to treat it as outlandish because Brianna Wu; not because of some sort of engineering assessment(yes, getting a decent rock off the moon would be a pain; but it's gravity well isn't that deep, and you don't have an atmosphere to worry about).
If Heinlein were running, we'd be expected to talk about the idea.
While adoption has been patchy; the 'trusted computing'/TPM guys definitely have what it takes to deliver a cryptographically locked bootloader and a variety of other powerful-and-somewhat-creepy capabilities; so anyone who gets onboard with this will presumably move from shipping hardware with shitty firmware that doesn't get patches to shipping hardware with shitty firmware that doesn't get patches and cannot be fixed or replaced even if you have the requisite expertise with that platform. The sort of 'support' that bootloader locked android devices get now. Far too insecure to be remotely safe; far too secure for mere mortals to reflash the firmware with something else without a particularly elegant 'trustzone' compromise or hardware attacks.
I hardly mean to suggest that OpenWRT will save IoT or anything(IoT needs a lot more saving than is probably possible for anyone; and vendors are spitting out unsupported hardware far faster than 3rd parties and mainline kernel support can catch up); but if you think shoddy firmware is bad; it's hard to get excited about shoddy firmware that is effectively impossible to replace even for devices based on well supported hardware.
My understanding is that it is more extensive: PCI(mostly 'e' these days) passthrough allows you to assign a physical device to a VM; but the device can't be shared: if a given piece of hardware is being passed through to one of the guests, none of the other guests or the host OS can use it.
This 'virtual GPU' stuff is supposed to make allocating GPU resources between VMs closer to how it is with CPU time or memory, where all the guests and the host can't exceed the capabilities of the machine they are running on; but they can all have access, with relatively modest overhead, to the same device.
I don't know if things work as pleasantly as desired yet; but in principle it should be a lot more convenient than full device passthrough. Especially in cases where you might be interested in the GPU for its computational capabilities, video transcoder, etc.
If you think that finding a vendor that doesn't keep cutting battery life/SD card slots/headphone jacks/basic safeguards against electrical fire in order to make it thinner, cheaper, or both is hard; just try to find one that ensures sufficient borated polyethylene(with something else to sop up the resulting gamma rays) or other neutron shielding into their products.
There probably are some, making bits for nuclear reactors and industrial, scientific, and medical users of neutron sources; but it's a niche.
You can definitely embed Windows Metafile images in LibreOffice on Windows; but I'm not entirely sure if that is enough to make it vulnerable. WMF is dangerous because it is basically a package of GDI function calls, which might be good for efficiency or compactness; but has led to a number of creative and executable things being shoehorned in(as in this case; and repeatedly over the years).
However, there are several image handling libraries that can render or convert WMF images without access to GDI; so in those cases GDI bugs wouldn't be a problem(though you probably have other things to worry about).
This Libreoffice VCL documentation suggests that LibreOffice uses its own VCL WMF filters; but I sure wouldn't bet anything remotely important on that without testing it first; or knowing rather more about how LibreOffice is put together.
So, yet another exploit in GDI; an initial attempt at a fix that didn't actually work; a second attempt that was delayed a month(along with a reasonably juicy SMB issue; and probably some other stuff); and the disclosure is the 'disappointing' part? How eminently plausible.
Vitrification is pretty trivial(indeed, the material being not-recycled here is leaded glass already); getting something folded into the earth's mantle, not so much.
So, the only illicit aspect of the "Russian identity theft service called ssndob[dot]ru" is the fact that it used compromised LexisNexis accounts to pull personal details from their gigantic database; rather than paying for access like a decent customer...
The same could be said of tea; and tea won't get you shitfaced enough to numb the pain of being a subsistence mud farmer; so while I don't deny the sanitary virtues of alcohol; I suspect that some of the other benefits may have been a bigger seller.
Keeping the rats and fungi at bay can be tricky; so long-term survival is only assured in optimal cases. That said; the fact that ancient-recipe booze tends to be aggressively unfiltered by the standards of even the most yeast riddled modern variants quite possibly has something to do with the fact that you definitely lose calories if you do the filtering and clarifying necessary to get the 'suitably tinted; but otherwise optically clear' results that are currently favored.
You can recover at least some of the losses if you feed fermentation byproducts to livestock, use them as fertilizer, etc; but if hunger is a real constraint the fact that there's effectively bread sludge suspended in your beer starts to look more like a virtue than a defect.
This seems like a rather touchy solution looking for a problem.
Unless you really enjoy buying replacement hardware; the need to have battery power in order to trigger the kill switch is a problem. If you don't configure the device to self-destruct when its battery is on the verge of no longer having enough energy to perform a self destruct; all the attacker has to do is run the battery down. If you do configure it that way, forgetting to put it on the charger could get expensive and tedious rather fast(in addition to the various other issues that can interrupt battery power: overtemp protection kicking in in a hot car; current delivery capability falling under freezing conditions, etc.)
Plus, the battery, and its connection to the logic boards, tend to be among the larger and more obvious parts of a modern electronic widget. That makes them good candidates for controlled disconnection/destruction, even if you can't open the case without tripping some sort of anti-tamper mechanism.
Finding a good self-destruct temperature is also a bit tricky. The lower you go, the closer you get to the high end of normal operating conditions or the 'device won't operate; but should not be permanently damaged' range. 80 degrees is high for flash memory; but most CPUs will be happy enough to run that hot. The higher you go; the more power you need to be able to deliver to kick off the destruction; and the more vulnerable you are to an attacker who is able to apply coolant to slow you down; limit current or voltage delivered to the resistive heater, or both.
I certainly don't disagree that Flash should be taken out and shot on security grounds; but it is pretty much the last NPAPI plugin that you are likely to piss users off by dropping support for. iOS got away with it; but Safari continues to support it(though grudgingly); Chrome killed NPAPI; but the 'Pepper' plugin interface appears to exist primarily to support Flash; Edge also whitelists Flash; and Flash on Android died mostly because Adobe couldn't make it work very well; not because Google shoved them off the platform.
Given Mozilla's less-than-commanding presence in the browser market; I suspect that they can't afford to take a hard line on flash right now.
If Flash is being whitelisted; the main news will be Java applets(much rarer than they used to be; but a distant second to Flash in the embedded-blobs-of-stuff-that-can't be done in HTML, at least not when this site was built market); maybe Shockwave; if anyone still uses that; and then mostly shitware(at least at one point, Acrobat or Acrobat Reader would install something to grab PDF handling, some AV packages would inject their little contribution; Cisco has a hilariously vulnerable Webex support plugin that makes joining webex sessions incrementally easier and remote code execution a lot easier).
There really just isn't all that much anymore(which is presumably why FF is doing it; and why Chrome already did). Much as Oracle is a bit petulant about it(just visit the java download page in Chrome to see a nice little whine about how Google 'disabled the standard plugin mechanism'); relatively few people care; Flash is still hanging on; but Shockwave is pretty much dead; and most of the seriously hardcore legacy cases, the ones that will probably outlive some of us now talking about it; tend to involve ActiveX somewhere; so NPAPI plugin support is irrelevant; because NPAPI-only browsers never worked; and if they also need Java or something it continues to be available as an ActiveX plugin.
It is true that there is no requirement about intereference resistance(unless perhaps you are selling fancy gear to the DoD or the like); but, unless rather carefully engineered, badly shielded systems tend to leak both ways; and a contemporary high resolution display isn't exactly short on very high frequency signal lines and similar sources of RF noise.
The FCC doesn't care if your device falls over as soon as someone gives it a funny look; but unless this display was beautifully engineered for low emissions from the circuitry, without reliance on additional shielding; it's a trifle surprising that wholly inadequate shielding wouldn't involve RF leaking out, as well as in.
This issue is an obvious defect from a customer perspective($1,000 for a computer peripheral that malfunctions if the wifi is too close? Are you kidding?); but from a regulatory perspective I'm not sure why LG would be in any trouble. If failure modes don't include catching fire/electrocuting the user; it's not like UL or the consumer products safety commission cares; and the FCC's usual stance is
"This device complies with part 15 of the FCC Rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) This device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation."
Which would justify a beatdown if the LG monitors were disrupting other devices; but allows(indeed, requires) products to suck it up and deal with the presence of licensed RF and FCC-compliant ISM/misc background noise. The customer obviously has reason to be displeased; but regulatory bodies are mostly concerned either with devices that are overtly dangerous; or devices that do RF things that step on other people's toes. Pitiful resistance to interference isn't their concern.
Good to know. I've been poking at the idea of trying to purge my environment of wall warts and line lumps by moving AC-DC conversion duties to a single high efficiency PSU in a case with a whole bunch of front panel connectors; but (in addition to bells and whistles like load monitoring) I'm trying to avoid any unforeseen issues that would either set things on fire or damage equipment. I knew fuses were a good plan; but I'll definitely have to take note of the diode consideration.
I had forgotten about those; but you are correct about them existing. It's a pity that the cigarette-lighter socket, while entrenched for historical reasons; has got to be one of the more ridiculous power connectors to have ever approached mass market use.
Is the turbopump subject to combustion temperatures; as well as alarming pressures; or is it at a point in the fuel delivery system where most of the material isn't on fire yet(I assume a modest amount is being used to drive the turbopump; but that's less alarming than the conditions in the rocket engine itself)?
I ask because, in jet engines, where the turbine blades are exposed to combustion temperatures, fabricating them is a considerable challenge because optimal operating temperatures are well above the melting point of even the comparatively exotic nickel alloys preferred for the job; and metals tend to suffer substantial reductions in their mechanical properties well below their melting points. I'm not an expert by any means; but my understanding is that the demands of even fairly prosaic civil aviation jet engines are such that very fiddly and demanding fabrication techniques, like casting with sufficient precision that the entire turbine blade is monocrystalline(because ordinary polycrystalline castings tend to fail at grain boundaries); then wire-EDM-ing cooling channels into the structure, without compromising its mechanical properties; and finishing up with an insulative ceramic coating.
The fact that it is hard doesn't make failure acceptable if it compromises the system; but if these turbopump blades are anything like turbojet blades; I can't say I'm entirely surprised that keeping them from cracking is proving to be a serious challenge.
It's all in the name: The US "Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" forbids US persons and corporations from employing corruption in the course of business abroad.
The US "Domestic Corrupt Practices Act" does not exist.
Your assessment would not at all surprise me(though 'customer confusion' didn't seem to be a problem when the industry somehow decided to make not including a cheap USB cable with most consumer/retail printers the standard; since printer companies don't tend to sell USB cables separately, especially not at Staples and the like, I always wondered if that was driven by retailers being unwilling to carry ultra-low margin, and fairly bulky, printer SKUs unless they were given the chance to sell $35 gold-plated USB cables to actually make money on the purchase); though since I am definitely geekier than average and (while hardly 'wealthy' by a long shot) definitely better-off than the 'my prepaid Android shitphone is my only personal internet access' demographic; I would be curious to know if there are at least certain product categories where that pack-in adapter is genuinely a valuable accessory for the customer.
For me, it definitely isn't(and, if vendors would stop slipping the occasional 'haha, this barrel plug looks just like the others on casual inspection; but doesn't quite fit, sucker!' into 12v devices), I'd be in full agreement with you on 12v adapters as well(most of mine are interchangeable; but I have a few hard cases that have to be specially labelled); I just don't know if this is because I have a mildly deviant quantity of widgets; or because much of the developed world is glutted with extraneous AC adapters. On the subject of 12v, it's too bad that there is no(formal, there are various hacky workarounds you can find from case-mod vendors; and IBM/NCR's "PoweredUSB" proprietary connector extension for 12 and 24v point of sale gear) connection standard for exposing 12v power from a computer's PSU for use by external hardware. This wasn't the purpose of USB; but the fact that basically every computer has a bunch of standardized 5v sockets is a handy side effect. It would be nice if there were something to handle the slightly more demanding external HDDs and similar peripherals in the same way. I understand that USB-C is supposed to save us all at some point in the future; but a simple, keyed, 12v connector could have spared us a lot of wall warts with minimal complexity starting years ago.
I'd be curious to know if it was a design flaw; or somebody pinching pennies hard enough that no QA was done and the workers were being pushed fast enough that some units didn't receive all the assembly steps they were supposed to. 4 reports out of 147,000 seems a little low for some fundamental design issue; but wholly plausible if the correctly assembled ones are just durable enough, and the line is moving fast enough that the ones that pass while the glue is being refilled just don't get glued(or any number of similar mishaps).
Well-built AC adapters tend to be a huge pain in the ass to open, even if you are quite deliberately attempting to do so(especially the ones high-wattage enough that the whole assembly is potted, the least exciting reward for fighting your way through glued and/or ultrasonic welded plastic); so ones that you can open by accident have definitely been cut to the bone; but as an absolute failure rate those numbers aren't terribly high.
More generally: Is it time for vendors of cheapo USB powered/charged devices to just stop pretending to care by including an 'eh, probably won't catch fire' quality adapter in every box; and leave that job either to computers or to separately purchased adapters? On the one hand, I'm not entirely sure that the savings would be passed on to the customer; but on the other, I know that I have rather more USB chargers than I have devices that need them(through a mixture of device attrition and things I only charge from computers or hubs); and that the really cheap AC adapters must cost a nonzero amount of money to include; but are sufficiently untrustworthy that they are of negligible value to me, which seems like a lose/lose situation.
Am I just a nerd with an atypically well stocked junk drawer, or are others glutted with dubiously trustworthy pack-in adapters as well?
It seems like this move could mean one of two things: either Team Oracle thinks that there is sufficient willingness to pay among users of their products, and they were previously leaving money on the table in AWS instances; or they fully expect this to seriously dent use of their products in AWS; but don't care because they have their own 'cloud' offerings and want everyone not running on premises to be buying cloud from them.
Any guesses as to which it is? Is this a "Larry's a jerkass; but he knows that most of us will suck it up and pay the extra" situation; or is this a straightforward move to make one of the more popular cloud options blatantly uneconomic for use with Oracle stuff, in order to improve the apparent value of Oracle's pet cloud?
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I doubt that it's a major issue. Even cheap and dreadful ARM hardware runs Android without much trouble these days(partially because SoCs used to be a lot slower; and partially because Android used to suck even more, this wasn't always true; but unless the vendor has some truly atrocious skinning it is usually at least smooth these days); and that's not exactly lightweight. Contemporary Windows Phone is also an NT kernel with graphical stuff heavily borrowed from desktop Windows; and by all accounts it runs quite adequately on undistinguished ARM parts, when anyone actually buys it.
What will be interesting to see is if anyone from Team ARM manages to come up with a genuinely punchy option; or whether they'll be useful for scaring Intel away from 'because we can, that's why' pricing; and allowing specialty hardware vendors to quickly and cheaply add a well supported CPU core to their collection of custom accellerator components(like a lot of the Cavium NAS and networking parts, which are pretty unexciting as general purpose CPUs; but pack way more hardware acceleration for crypto, packet munging, and similar; along with markedly nicer integrated networking; than the cheap x86s that offer similar general purpose CPU support tend to); but not be all that interesting if you have scared Intel(and maybe AMD; for the first time in years, hooray) into not doubling the price just for leaving ECC support intact.
At least up till now; ARMs haven't been exactly slow by historical standards; but(especially if you need good single threaded performance) certainly haven't been exciting, and have mostly been of interest because Intel hates selling cheap CPUs; and really hates selling cheap CPUs with ECC and similar features; while there are enough hungry ARM vendors that they don't have the luxury of being picky.
You know that you run a classy operation when "Company announces plans to obey law" is headline material.
I think that we are supposed to treat it as outlandish because Brianna Wu; not because of some sort of engineering assessment(yes, getting a decent rock off the moon would be a pain; but it's gravity well isn't that deep, and you don't have an atmosphere to worry about).
If Heinlein were running, we'd be expected to talk about the idea.
Worse than that; in all likelihood.
While adoption has been patchy; the 'trusted computing'/TPM guys definitely have what it takes to deliver a cryptographically locked bootloader and a variety of other powerful-and-somewhat-creepy capabilities; so anyone who gets onboard with this will presumably move from shipping hardware with shitty firmware that doesn't get patches to shipping hardware with shitty firmware that doesn't get patches and cannot be fixed or replaced even if you have the requisite expertise with that platform. The sort of 'support' that bootloader locked android devices get now. Far too insecure to be remotely safe; far too secure for mere mortals to reflash the firmware with something else without a particularly elegant 'trustzone' compromise or hardware attacks.
I hardly mean to suggest that OpenWRT will save IoT or anything(IoT needs a lot more saving than is probably possible for anyone; and vendors are spitting out unsupported hardware far faster than 3rd parties and mainline kernel support can catch up); but if you think shoddy firmware is bad; it's hard to get excited about shoddy firmware that is effectively impossible to replace even for devices based on well supported hardware.
My understanding is that it is more extensive: PCI(mostly 'e' these days) passthrough allows you to assign a physical device to a VM; but the device can't be shared: if a given piece of hardware is being passed through to one of the guests, none of the other guests or the host OS can use it.
This 'virtual GPU' stuff is supposed to make allocating GPU resources between VMs closer to how it is with CPU time or memory, where all the guests and the host can't exceed the capabilities of the machine they are running on; but they can all have access, with relatively modest overhead, to the same device.
I don't know if things work as pleasantly as desired yet; but in principle it should be a lot more convenient than full device passthrough. Especially in cases where you might be interested in the GPU for its computational capabilities, video transcoder, etc.
If you think that finding a vendor that doesn't keep cutting battery life/SD card slots/headphone jacks/basic safeguards against electrical fire in order to make it thinner, cheaper, or both is hard; just try to find one that ensures sufficient borated polyethylene(with something else to sop up the resulting gamma rays) or other neutron shielding into their products.
There probably are some, making bits for nuclear reactors and industrial, scientific, and medical users of neutron sources; but it's a niche.
You can definitely embed Windows Metafile images in LibreOffice on Windows; but I'm not entirely sure if that is enough to make it vulnerable. WMF is dangerous because it is basically a package of GDI function calls, which might be good for efficiency or compactness; but has led to a number of creative and executable things being shoehorned in(as in this case; and repeatedly over the years).
However, there are several image handling libraries that can render or convert WMF images without access to GDI; so in those cases GDI bugs wouldn't be a problem(though you probably have other things to worry about).
This Libreoffice VCL documentation suggests that LibreOffice uses its own VCL WMF filters; but I sure wouldn't bet anything remotely important on that without testing it first; or knowing rather more about how LibreOffice is put together.
So, yet another exploit in GDI; an initial attempt at a fix that didn't actually work; a second attempt that was delayed a month(along with a reasonably juicy SMB issue; and probably some other stuff); and the disclosure is the 'disappointing' part? How eminently plausible.
Vitrification is pretty trivial(indeed, the material being not-recycled here is leaded glass already); getting something folded into the earth's mantle, not so much.
So, the only illicit aspect of the "Russian identity theft service called ssndob[dot]ru" is the fact that it used compromised LexisNexis accounts to pull personal details from their gigantic database; rather than paying for access like a decent customer...
How supremely comforting.
The same could be said of tea; and tea won't get you shitfaced enough to numb the pain of being a subsistence mud farmer; so while I don't deny the sanitary virtues of alcohol; I suspect that some of the other benefits may have been a bigger seller.
Keeping the rats and fungi at bay can be tricky; so long-term survival is only assured in optimal cases. That said; the fact that ancient-recipe booze tends to be aggressively unfiltered by the standards of even the most yeast riddled modern variants quite possibly has something to do with the fact that you definitely lose calories if you do the filtering and clarifying necessary to get the 'suitably tinted; but otherwise optically clear' results that are currently favored.
You can recover at least some of the losses if you feed fermentation byproducts to livestock, use them as fertilizer, etc; but if hunger is a real constraint the fact that there's effectively bread sludge suspended in your beer starts to look more like a virtue than a defect.
This seems like a rather touchy solution looking for a problem.
Unless you really enjoy buying replacement hardware; the need to have battery power in order to trigger the kill switch is a problem. If you don't configure the device to self-destruct when its battery is on the verge of no longer having enough energy to perform a self destruct; all the attacker has to do is run the battery down. If you do configure it that way, forgetting to put it on the charger could get expensive and tedious rather fast(in addition to the various other issues that can interrupt battery power: overtemp protection kicking in in a hot car; current delivery capability falling under freezing conditions, etc.)
Plus, the battery, and its connection to the logic boards, tend to be among the larger and more obvious parts of a modern electronic widget. That makes them good candidates for controlled disconnection/destruction, even if you can't open the case without tripping some sort of anti-tamper mechanism.
Finding a good self-destruct temperature is also a bit tricky. The lower you go, the closer you get to the high end of normal operating conditions or the 'device won't operate; but should not be permanently damaged' range. 80 degrees is high for flash memory; but most CPUs will be happy enough to run that hot. The higher you go; the more power you need to be able to deliver to kick off the destruction; and the more vulnerable you are to an attacker who is able to apply coolant to slow you down; limit current or voltage delivered to the resistive heater, or both.
Given the expected symptoms; it would probably feel like a very long day, which is almost the same as increased survival time!
I certainly don't disagree that Flash should be taken out and shot on security grounds; but it is pretty much the last NPAPI plugin that you are likely to piss users off by dropping support for. iOS got away with it; but Safari continues to support it(though grudgingly); Chrome killed NPAPI; but the 'Pepper' plugin interface appears to exist primarily to support Flash; Edge also whitelists Flash; and Flash on Android died mostly because Adobe couldn't make it work very well; not because Google shoved them off the platform.
Given Mozilla's less-than-commanding presence in the browser market; I suspect that they can't afford to take a hard line on flash right now.
If Flash is being whitelisted; the main news will be Java applets(much rarer than they used to be; but a distant second to Flash in the embedded-blobs-of-stuff-that-can't be done in HTML, at least not when this site was built market); maybe Shockwave; if anyone still uses that; and then mostly shitware(at least at one point, Acrobat or Acrobat Reader would install something to grab PDF handling, some AV packages would inject their little contribution; Cisco has a hilariously vulnerable Webex support plugin that makes joining webex sessions incrementally easier and remote code execution a lot easier).
There really just isn't all that much anymore(which is presumably why FF is doing it; and why Chrome already did). Much as Oracle is a bit petulant about it(just visit the java download page in Chrome to see a nice little whine about how Google 'disabled the standard plugin mechanism'); relatively few people care; Flash is still hanging on; but Shockwave is pretty much dead; and most of the seriously hardcore legacy cases, the ones that will probably outlive some of us now talking about it; tend to involve ActiveX somewhere; so NPAPI plugin support is irrelevant; because NPAPI-only browsers never worked; and if they also need Java or something it continues to be available as an ActiveX plugin.
It is true that there is no requirement about intereference resistance(unless perhaps you are selling fancy gear to the DoD or the like); but, unless rather carefully engineered, badly shielded systems tend to leak both ways; and a contemporary high resolution display isn't exactly short on very high frequency signal lines and similar sources of RF noise.
The FCC doesn't care if your device falls over as soon as someone gives it a funny look; but unless this display was beautifully engineered for low emissions from the circuitry, without reliance on additional shielding; it's a trifle surprising that wholly inadequate shielding wouldn't involve RF leaking out, as well as in.
This issue is an obvious defect from a customer perspective($1,000 for a computer peripheral that malfunctions if the wifi is too close? Are you kidding?); but from a regulatory perspective I'm not sure why LG would be in any trouble. If failure modes don't include catching fire/electrocuting the user; it's not like UL or the consumer products safety commission cares; and the FCC's usual stance is
"This device complies with part 15 of the FCC Rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) This device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation."
Which would justify a beatdown if the LG monitors were disrupting other devices; but allows(indeed, requires) products to suck it up and deal with the presence of licensed RF and FCC-compliant ISM/misc background noise. The customer obviously has reason to be displeased; but regulatory bodies are mostly concerned either with devices that are overtly dangerous; or devices that do RF things that step on other people's toes. Pitiful resistance to interference isn't their concern.
Good to know. I've been poking at the idea of trying to purge my environment of wall warts and line lumps by moving AC-DC conversion duties to a single high efficiency PSU in a case with a whole bunch of front panel connectors; but (in addition to bells and whistles like load monitoring) I'm trying to avoid any unforeseen issues that would either set things on fire or damage equipment. I knew fuses were a good plan; but I'll definitely have to take note of the diode consideration.
I had forgotten about those; but you are correct about them existing. It's a pity that the cigarette-lighter socket, while entrenched for historical reasons; has got to be one of the more ridiculous power connectors to have ever approached mass market use.
Is the turbopump subject to combustion temperatures; as well as alarming pressures; or is it at a point in the fuel delivery system where most of the material isn't on fire yet(I assume a modest amount is being used to drive the turbopump; but that's less alarming than the conditions in the rocket engine itself)?
I ask because, in jet engines, where the turbine blades are exposed to combustion temperatures, fabricating them is a considerable challenge because optimal operating temperatures are well above the melting point of even the comparatively exotic nickel alloys preferred for the job; and metals tend to suffer substantial reductions in their mechanical properties well below their melting points. I'm not an expert by any means; but my understanding is that the demands of even fairly prosaic civil aviation jet engines are such that very fiddly and demanding fabrication techniques, like casting with sufficient precision that the entire turbine blade is monocrystalline(because ordinary polycrystalline castings tend to fail at grain boundaries); then wire-EDM-ing cooling channels into the structure, without compromising its mechanical properties; and finishing up with an insulative ceramic coating.
The fact that it is hard doesn't make failure acceptable if it compromises the system; but if these turbopump blades are anything like turbojet blades; I can't say I'm entirely surprised that keeping them from cracking is proving to be a serious challenge.
It's all in the name: The US "Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" forbids US persons and corporations from employing corruption in the course of business abroad.
The US "Domestic Corrupt Practices Act" does not exist.
Your assessment would not at all surprise me(though 'customer confusion' didn't seem to be a problem when the industry somehow decided to make not including a cheap USB cable with most consumer/retail printers the standard; since printer companies don't tend to sell USB cables separately, especially not at Staples and the like, I always wondered if that was driven by retailers being unwilling to carry ultra-low margin, and fairly bulky, printer SKUs unless they were given the chance to sell $35 gold-plated USB cables to actually make money on the purchase); though since I am definitely geekier than average and (while hardly 'wealthy' by a long shot) definitely better-off than the 'my prepaid Android shitphone is my only personal internet access' demographic; I would be curious to know if there are at least certain product categories where that pack-in adapter is genuinely a valuable accessory for the customer.
For me, it definitely isn't(and, if vendors would stop slipping the occasional 'haha, this barrel plug looks just like the others on casual inspection; but doesn't quite fit, sucker!' into 12v devices), I'd be in full agreement with you on 12v adapters as well(most of mine are interchangeable; but I have a few hard cases that have to be specially labelled); I just don't know if this is because I have a mildly deviant quantity of widgets; or because much of the developed world is glutted with extraneous AC adapters. On the subject of 12v, it's too bad that there is no(formal, there are various hacky workarounds you can find from case-mod vendors; and IBM/NCR's "PoweredUSB" proprietary connector extension for 12 and 24v point of sale gear) connection standard for exposing 12v power from a computer's PSU for use by external hardware. This wasn't the purpose of USB; but the fact that basically every computer has a bunch of standardized 5v sockets is a handy side effect. It would be nice if there were something to handle the slightly more demanding external HDDs and similar peripherals in the same way. I understand that USB-C is supposed to save us all at some point in the future; but a simple, keyed, 12v connector could have spared us a lot of wall warts with minimal complexity starting years ago.
I'd be curious to know if it was a design flaw; or somebody pinching pennies hard enough that no QA was done and the workers were being pushed fast enough that some units didn't receive all the assembly steps they were supposed to. 4 reports out of 147,000 seems a little low for some fundamental design issue; but wholly plausible if the correctly assembled ones are just durable enough, and the line is moving fast enough that the ones that pass while the glue is being refilled just don't get glued(or any number of similar mishaps).
Well-built AC adapters tend to be a huge pain in the ass to open, even if you are quite deliberately attempting to do so(especially the ones high-wattage enough that the whole assembly is potted, the least exciting reward for fighting your way through glued and/or ultrasonic welded plastic); so ones that you can open by accident have definitely been cut to the bone; but as an absolute failure rate those numbers aren't terribly high.
More generally: Is it time for vendors of cheapo USB powered/charged devices to just stop pretending to care by including an 'eh, probably won't catch fire' quality adapter in every box; and leave that job either to computers or to separately purchased adapters? On the one hand, I'm not entirely sure that the savings would be passed on to the customer; but on the other, I know that I have rather more USB chargers than I have devices that need them(through a mixture of device attrition and things I only charge from computers or hubs); and that the really cheap AC adapters must cost a nonzero amount of money to include; but are sufficiently untrustworthy that they are of negligible value to me, which seems like a lose/lose situation.
Am I just a nerd with an atypically well stocked junk drawer, or are others glutted with dubiously trustworthy pack-in adapters as well?
It seems like this move could mean one of two things: either Team Oracle thinks that there is sufficient willingness to pay among users of their products, and they were previously leaving money on the table in AWS instances; or they fully expect this to seriously dent use of their products in AWS; but don't care because they have their own 'cloud' offerings and want everyone not running on premises to be buying cloud from them.
Any guesses as to which it is? Is this a "Larry's a jerkass; but he knows that most of us will suck it up and pay the extra" situation; or is this a straightforward move to make one of the more popular cloud options blatantly uneconomic for use with Oracle stuff, in order to improve the apparent value of Oracle's pet cloud?