I get this often enough that it really needs some exposure. Not even the EU is competent enough to at least print URLs and/or QR codes on paper documents that they send as postal mail. Large orgs are the biggest culprits of this variety of incompetence.

A spambot created several communities. When you report the posts therein, the moderator is obviously a recipient. And the mods themselves are in fact the abuser in this case. Does the admin see the report?

The “create report” option should list the mods and admins with pre-checked tickboxes.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/51989792

from https://systemli.social/@anneroth/117228668085415636

“20,000 mail accounts. 20,000 blogs. 5,000 mailing lists. 1,500 websites.

In Europe.

Run by volunteers of @cavallette, perfectly legal, and decidedly antifascist, feminist, queer.

Destroyed and shut down by Trump’s administration, extra legally.”

If you ever need to give a reason for refusing to use email, add this to the list of possible reasons.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/51680197

Append “_nomap” to the end of your SSIDs to instruct Google not to use your wi-fi access point for their mapping services.

To do the same for Apple, add “_optout” to the end of your SSIDs¹.

To boycott both, the rumor is that Google’s “_nomap” must be last, but Apple’s “_optout” flag must be in the penultimate position if and only if Google’s token is at the end. So you might have an SSID like “boycottCloudflare_optout_nomap” to boycott the baddies, for example. But note that “boycottCloudflare” is merely symbolic, to raise awareness of the web’s most harmful enshitifier.

¹ sorry to say I have no reference to cite for the Apple rules. It’s just a rumor.

update

The Apple opt-out procedure has apparently changed to align with Google. Someone refers to this page for Apple.

update 2

Mapquest is suddenly gaining popularity.

No privacy orgs have bothered to test and publish AMD CPUs that were made in 2013 which were not compromised by AMD’s PSP. This means if you want to avoid the spychip, you’re compelled to undertake a project of sorting through guesswork, heresay, and vague documents. AMD only vaguely identifies some microarchitectures that have the PSP. There is conflicting information about whether the Kaveri APUs have spychips.

And from there, even if you have a concrete list of chips, laptop and desktop manufacturers have scrubbed their websites of useful specs of that time period because they only want you to buy their new products. So it’s hard to know which machines have the precious resource of a trustworthy CPU.

If a privacy org or FOSS org were to investigate and publish lists of spychip-free processors and also lists of devices that contained those chips (perhaps in collaboration with an eco org like Greenpeace), it would drive up demand for machines that are being discarded for being “too old”. It would inspire some consumers to acquire or hang on to used machines rather than buy something newly enshitified.

I bought a Lenovo laptop charger with USB-C connector. There was no mention of USB PD but the label listed voltages (5v, 9v, 12v, 15v, 20v), which encourages us to guess that it may possibly be USB-PD (what else?). But since there is no incentive for Lenovo to disclose whether it’s USB-PD compliant, it chooses to minimise its legal liability and write nothing about USB-PD (as most PSUs do, even aftermarket ones).

Since I bought the PSU from a dodgy street market where people sell dumpster-dive products, I needed to quickly test it. I attached it to a simple USB-C bicycle light which has an LED to indicate charging. It did not charge. So it appeared the Lenovo PSU was dead. I tossed it into a box of e-waste to decide later whether to repair, harvest parts from, or dispose of.

Some manufacturers apparently believe when the USB-PD standard says “5v is the default”, it means 5v should be delivered in the absence of a handshake. Other engineers have interpretted “default” to mean both sides of the negotiation should conform to 5v /if/ the handshake negotiation yields nothing higher – but that a handshake is strictly required nonetheless. No handshake → no power.

Couple that discrepency of USB-PD interpretation with the fact that manufacturers resist claiming to conform to USB-PD anyway (as the law does not demand it and consumers don’t either), we have a recipe for disaster. I am sure a lot of functional USB-PD devices will be thrown away because of this kind of shit that I encountered. Perhaps the Lenovo PSU I have was already in a dumpster and fished out by whoever sold it to me.

I almost tossed the Lenovo PSU but decided to try powering a 9v device with it, and it worked. I almost didn’t do the experiment because I originally thought if it cannot power a 5v bicycle light it’s probably dead.

Worth mentioning this thread which shows how consumers are blindly overrating USB-PD unaware of the pitfalls.

I saw an HP pavilion 17-f048nb at a street market and cannot find the specs for this. I simply want to know if the CPU is AMD, and if so which AMD. It’s such a shitshow on HP’s website. Considering the same HP model can sometimes have either intel or AMD, do I have any way to find out?

Sometimes you can get /some/ details based on the serial number at https://partsurfer.hp.com/ but not the CPU.

A slightly different model (17-f048ca) reportedly has an amd chip. But what do the last two letters mean? Is that a country code for where it is deployed?

I am trying to get a grasp of how to identify what power standards various PSUs claim to conform to. The label on this Dell PSU is ram-packed with info, but I see no direct claim that it supports USB-PD at all.

The range of voltages might imply that perhaps maybe it’s USB-PD, but I see no indication where they take credit for that; much less a particular PD revision. IIUC, that means if it’s USB-PD non-compliant and someone drags Dell into court, they can say to the judge “we never said it was USB PD-compliant”.

The review that probes this thing shows that the PSU is detected as PD3.0. Yet at the same time it does not support PPS according to the blogger. So wtf… how can it be PD3 if it does not support PPS?

It seems Dell is banking on consumers not being keen to read the label. According to the blogger:

The odd thing is that it is advertising itself as a 96W adapter (20V/4.8A) which is different to the printed 20V/5A rating on the rear.

So it seems has Dell decided that if they do not benefit from advertising a capability, they might as well not mention it and downplay what it can do, for legal purposes.

The blogger goes on to test it with all kinds of fancy costly gear that no typical consumer would have. When I am at a street market rifling through a pile of dumped electronics, how do I know what I am looking at? Do any of the cryptic symbols on that Dell label suggest USB-PD?

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/51092505

I have a 3-pin Dell PSU spec’d as 19.5v 3.34A and DMM measures at 20v unloaded. The power reqs on the HP laptop are 19.5v 3.33A. AFAICT, that’s a match. Even the 3-pin barrel connector geometry matches. So what’s the problem?

The center pin is a “smart pin” aka “data pin”, as I came to learn. According to @over_clox@lemmy.world, this PIN basically passes brand info so HP can reject non-HP PSUs. But according to this article, the data pin is used to “regulate” the voltage – which I take to mean it negotiates the voltage for transmission as USB-PD does. If it’s merely negotiating power reqs, then the Dell should work.

It’s possible both sources are correct… perhaps HP has its own proprietary way of negotiating voltage and Dell has theirs.

Someone even claims that the data channel is used to communicate temp info so a PSU does not overheat. If that’s true, then perhaps it was a good design (noting that the USB-PD standard did not emerge yet).

But is it true about the communication? Considering there are hacks with a resistor or something to satisfy the data channel, it’s hard to believe that the communication is that sophisticated.

This page advises HP owners to always buy HP-branded PSUs. But it’s unclear if that’s just overly safe nonsense.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/51012219

I bought an untested 2nd-hand HP probook 645 g1. When I plug it in, the power button just flashes. It does not look like an error code. It flashes every second or so. No long flashes and does not pause. It’s uniformly separated blinks that never stop.

It does this with or without memory installed. There is no hard drive but I don’t imagine that would stop it at least booting to the BIOS. I tried removing the wi-fi card and CD drive to ensure there is no problem to detect on those components. I also tried unplugging, removing the battery, and also detaching the cr2032 CMOS battery for some time. No matter what, the power button just blinks when it gets power. The power button is non-responsive.

What might the issue be?

One friend’s theory is that the machine is extremely fussy about the brand of PSU. I am using a Dell PSU to power the HP. It is 19.5v, as specified. So in terms of physics it should work. My friend’s theory is that genuine OEM HP PSUs give 19.51v (for example) and HP is somehow detecting that it’s not an HP PSU. Does that sound plausible?