He (He₁) gas molecules are absolutely tiny, they love to leak through everything.

Site seems offline now, says “Closed Jan 30th”

If something is POSIX compliant then it’s very likely to work on any Linux, BSD or the like; and probably very easy to port to windows. It’s a sign that the developer is willing to go the extra mile to make users’ lives easier.

N.B. “POSIX compliance” is not just considered in black or white terms, it’s also done in degrees. There are many things that have never formally been changed or been specified in POSIX but informally things have evolved. By attempting any level of compliance (or a similar equivalent) you tend to be doing better than most software.

Every news website is covering it. I think I’ve spotted most of 10 articles around the place.

The law of well-marketed unreleased goods dictates that this vehicle is not going to meet any of the promises mentioned in the articles. I hope to be proven wrong, but just like video games: don’t pre-order, wait for it to come out and be reviewed.

Welcome to security news theatre :(

I don’t think espressif would bother suing, these kind of misshapen claims get constantly made against popular projects all of the time. It’s just unusual to see so much coverage about this particular one.

Not so say that externally attackable vulnerabilities in an ESP32 don’t exist, they might. Bluetooth devices have an awful track record. But making them up doesn’t help the world.

Bleepingcomputer’s title and article are very misleading, the presentation did NOT reveal a backdoor into an ESP32. It looks like Bleepingcomputer completely misunderstood what was presented (EDIT: and tarlogic isn’t helping with the first sentence on their site).

Instead the presentation was about using an ESP32 as a tool to attack other devices. Additionally they discovered some undocumented commands that you can send from the ESP32 processor to the ESP32 radio peripheral that let you take control of it and potentially send some extra forms of traffic that could be useful. They did NOT present anything about the ESP32 bluetooth radio being externally attackable.

Another perspective that might help: imagine you have a cheap bluetooth chipset that is open source and well documented. That would give you more than what the presentation just found. Would Bleepingcomputer then be reporting it’s a backdoor threatening millions of devices?

It looks identical to me. Same size before clicking, same size after right clicking -> Open image in new tab.

GNOME 2 was fun and easy. It felt like they were trying to learn from the mistakes of Windows and Mac UIs.

I’ve been using PipeWire this year on my Void Linux laptop & desktop. It’s been mostly OK but has a few problems. For years I have been using plain ALSA (with no custom configuration) because pulseaudio causes me regular issues across multiple machines (mostly silently failing).

Pros:

• I don’t have to use Chromium for my mic to work on online video conf (WTF Firefox)
• “EasyEffects” lets me quickly fix crappy youtube audio (bad gain normalisation, way too much sibilance) with a minimum of effort.

Cons:

• Sometimes breaks all audio until I manually restart it (hey, just like pulseaudio. This problem never happens when using ALSA straight)
• First time setup is complicated, involving environment variables, dbus user session buses and multiple daemons (running just pipewire isn’t enough). Why can’t it handle this all itself? Surely it should notice if these things are missing and just fix it itself? Compare this to straight ALSA where you (1) do nothing and then (2) everything works (except Firefox mic support)
• I can’t have multiple audio outputs all unmuted at the same time. Eg my headphone output and my rear speaker output. If I override this (using alsamixer) then it gets forgotten next boot anyway, it seems to be out of scope of PipeWire’s understanding.