What's inappropriate about the behavior here, I wonder? The interviewer got exactly what they asked for, and an awful lot more signal than they probably were expecting.
I guess my question is: as an amateur radio enthusiast, why should I tolerate a special exception for THESE people to broadcast data if I can't even do something as simple as coordinate club meeting addresses in private over the airwaves?
Even if I saw HFT as a valuable thing (I don't), it's unfair to create a new exemption for these people just because they have money. And if you suggest that he government shouldn't be involved, then keep in mind the only practical force stopping someone from jamming these transmissions is the exact same government bandwidth allocation guidelines.
This should not be understood as an infight by HFTs. It should be understood as the radio waves of the world being a public, shared resource and folks asking, "Are we changing these rules now?" If so, it should be done equitably.
> why should I tolerate a special exception for THESE people to broadcast data
The problem is it's not about you or me tolerating the special exception or not. It's about recourse, and we have none.
> a new exemption for these people just because they have money
The people with money can donate to all the politicians and make them aware of their needs, in exchange for the donations continuing. That's their recourse.
> This should not be understood as an infight by HFTs.
But that's exactly what it is. Multiple entities with money lobbying the same government for favorable results.
Yes, the active parties in the fight are two HFTs jockeying for latency advantage, but the scope of the fight goes beyond HFT: they are fighting over use of a scarce public resource.
As Glenn Hauser, Kim Andrew Elliott, and others have asked it comes down to the big question of what regs exactly authorize this. There really isn’t any ambiguity in the relevant rules to sneak this in under.
Gab bans people openly and credulously discussing marxism. I have experimented with and experienced this directly. So, it fails my litmus test for "an uncensored platform."
And it's a bit comical, because Gab as a community experience is much smaller (in my perspective) from even weird sites like minds or funky social blockchain plays. Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me.
Fair. By my own admission, I don't know much about gab.
I think the first time I ever heard about it was when Firefox banned Dissenter from their addons. Dissenter to me was a genius idea that has an ugly userbase. I'd love to have a version of Dissenter that isn't populated entirely by bigots.
I think the idea of Dissenter really has some value, you walk along the web for all sorts of reasons, and then up in the corner in your toolbar you see "oh, someone from my community has said something about this". Rather than the social network taking you to a site, the site takes you to the network.
That by itself implies that every URL you visit has to be looked up to see if there's a related discussion.
No way I'd trust any add-on/startup/mega corp to do that. I barely trust Mozilla to keep my history on their servers, and that's only because they only keep the last few months and purge older data.
Because you'd still know everyone who went to a specific site because they'd be sending you unique hash. Even if you ignore that, you'd know what clusters of people all use the same sites, how often and when.
That was the intent of the bloom filter. Configured properly it would actively filter out the need to endlessly send the server requests like "Hey, have anything for this hash?"
However I suppose that if the site does have comments, then you do have to make requests to the server to get them...
Still, I believe you're being overly pessimistic here. I think there may be some solutions to this. Maybe not perfect, but better. Lets say our social network "Ascenter" has become corrupt and is looking blackmail its participants. What about this?:
The design currently requires you to send a sha(URL+salt) to the server to look up comments. This prevents Ascenter from directly knowing what site the comments refer to, but the comments themselves will be a big clue. What if to look at the comments you have to decrypt them using sha(URL+salt2)? Ascenter will have no means to derive this key, it will only be able to determine how many comments have being placed and how large they are. That improves things a bit...
But Ascenter might be able to crawl the web to discover conversations. Particularly for salacious sites if it's looking for blackmail. So... What if the salts are the answer to that? If you had your own set of salts you could use them to create your own private groups, Ascenter would have no way to access that conversation. Or even figure out that they have occurred.
With the presence of public and private salts, what if the browser plugin itself could be configured with a blacklist of sites not to send requests for? You could still have private channel comments, but not public. I could see the community per-generating a black list...
One last note I'd end on here is that the level of trust we are expecting right now is a huge bar lower than the level of trust we give general social networks
Consider what HackerNews could do if it went rogue like like Ascenter? To blackmail you all they would need to do is go to one of your old comments, rewrite it as something salacious, then blackmail you with it. Comments on HackerNews arn't signed, and arn't encrypted. We're quite vulnerable to them.
edit: sorry for the long post. This was a bit of a stream of consciousness.
TL;DR: The bloom filter limits the risk, and I think there are cryptographic solutions that reduce the level of user exposure to below that of current social networks.
The bloom filter wouldn't stop you from confirming folks gathered around any specific page that has content, and would have a fixed probability of leaking data even if there was no data there.
And that ignores the problem that you're not going to be able to sync the bloom filter in real time, so now you're going to need to have a very merge-friendly design for these annotations.
No, I'm not being pessimistic. This is just a candid analysis of the difficulties of doing this competently. If you'd like to do it incompetently, feel free.
Likely because the intended audience is not people who see it as a viable alternative or something worth even entertaining. The irony of the situation being someone took the time to make their own platform for like minded individuals, and people in other spaces who've been known to tow the "you're free to make your own platform" line get extraordinarily bent out of sort when people actusally go and do just that.
The hilarious part being that by having the censorship in the first place and not just letting folks work it out amongst themselves, you just increase the echo chamber factor, which at some point, you have to come to terms with in real life on the basis these people exist in the real world. The very act of technically enforced societal marginalization in and of itself is an "extremism" amplifier/polarization catalyst. What confuses me is why I feel like I'm the only one who regularly brings it up. It's not that hard of a realization to reach From first principles. Especially if you spent any time in your life as a social misfit.
Well, you don't see me make fun of Parler as much because they're honest about their intentions. Gab originally claimed they were about "freedom" so it seems pretty fair to me to call them out on moderation that is clearly political.
AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all offer competitive alternatives for the small business sector. Personally, I find the actual cost of CloudFlare very difficult to reason about in advance of actual use. This is in part because it's easy to miss a bit of the a la carte model you need.
Full disclosure, I work at Google on the SRE team for Cloud CDN. If you want a credible alternative for the CDN part of Cloudflare, our product is extremely fast. We were all very sad for Cloudflare and watched the whole affair closely, as we've got a few customers that use our services alongside Cloudflare's.
Doubly ironic since in doing this, they created a system where a protocol is the SPoF; namely nonsensical or false BGP advertisements can quickly kill the internet as a whole if done correctly.
That's not actually a contradiction. When an individual website is considered as a system, it will have multiple points where the failure of a component inhibits the system. It's possible to have both cloudflare and your database as "SPoFs" and that "single" is not meant to imply everyone only gets one.
It's absolutely true that if us-east-1 in AWS has a bad day, a significant fraction of the American digital economy will shut down. For some companies, the same is true of Azure and Google's various comparable offerings.
I read your post as skeptical. Why would you be skeptical? If you care about keeping your product up, you absolutely should have a fallback for cloudflare if you're a customer of theirs. Now, you might not care (and actually, for most folks I submit you need not care), but the folks making sure Ambulances get timely push notifications and realtime driving instructions probably care quite a bit.
If you came here hoping for good resources on how to set up and control LED strips, angry that the article linked was bad and devoid of any good details, here are some useful resources.
#2: Andreas Speiss has a phenomenal youtube channel that offers a lot of solid tips and tricks for new makers looking to avoid common pitfalls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIl5nDjfkjY
#3: GreatScott! (another great youtuber) has a really fun article on what I'd label a very "intermediate" LED project to get a sense of how to put everything together to make a unique object that is not simply a matrix and a lot of software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXfMg8y1Fs4
Good luck, and one last tip: remember to be careful that your microcontroller may be fried by the voltage your LED strips needs. It may seem that there is an obvious solution to that which is, "Just use 2 power supplies" but with 3-wire LED strips group loops can exist and ruin your ability to control the strip. Don't despair, search for "buck converter board" and then look up how to tune it. You'll get a system efficient enough that you can drop 12v to 3.3v and it won't drain your battery or overhead your enclosure. Linear regulators are not your friend, they're usually cheaper specialist tools for folks who care about radios.
As for voltage difference between controller and lights, you can sacrifice the first led and power it at 3.3v and power the remaining ones from a second power supply. The first led will be a little dimmer than he rest but this setup has been very stable in my tests.
How does that work? Do I understand correctly that you connect the first led to a esp32 (+3V, onewire, GND) and then connect +12V and GND to the second led?
I wonder why it wouldn’t work if you connect +12V on the first led?
The LEDs in the article are WS2812B LEDs that operate at 5v rather than 12v. 5v is a slightly more "normal" LED voltage, 12v strips are usually going little tricks like have 3 or LEDs in series and using that to get the required 12v drop.
With the WS2812B you're issue is that they operate on 5v logic for communications. 3v logic from a chip can _just about_ communicate with 5v devices. But you can't send the signal very far before the voltage drop stops communication. The cheat here is to use a single WS2812B LED as logic voltage converter. You put a resistor in line so it's operating at ~4v, give it a 3v logic signal it can understand, and it'll then talk down stream using ~4v logic, which you can then pump into normal 5v LEDs.
You can find detail of this little trick on hackaday[1]. But it's specific to WS2812B type LEDs that are really microcontrollers that happen to also put out light, rather than traditional dumb LEDs that have no smarts.
IME, you can use 3.3V logic with 5V WS2812B/SK6812 strips, no trouble.
Each LED reforms the signal before sending it to the next LED in the chain, so voltage dropping over distance shouldn't a huge issue for the logic line unless the strip is very far away from the controller.
And the datasheet almost agrees with my experience; the "high" voltage threshold is listed as 0.7×VDD, and 0.7×5=3.5V. That's a bit over 3.3V, but I haven't had any issues across several projects. Maybe it's because many USB supplies provide a little over 5V to account for droop? Maybe the datasheet is slightly pessimistic? Maybe 0.7 really means 2/3? Whatever the reason, it simplifies the wiring for small displays.
Here's my favorite reference for the single-wire protocol that these LEDs use, since everyone seems to be chiming in with one:
I think maybe folks got the model number confused. There are strips where the entire signal is passed verbatim without being reformed to every package on the line, but everyone stopped using them because they're awful.
In my experience, slow microprocessors are WAY more tricky to deal with than a 3V3 logic voltage for these strips; and often lead to crazy hacks. I'd way rather just put a modestly powerful resistor or a buck converter in my project than deal with trashy old Atmel chips, given how absurdly cheap ESP32 and ARM M7 packages are.
I believe the word you're searching for here is "clickbait."
Controlling LED strips is not a boring project and it's a wonderful entry into the hobby since it often works with very safe voltages and is happy with cheap components.
But this article is clickbait, and it's probably the most detail-free article imaginable on the subject.
True for constant voltage, resistor limited current ones only.
With constant current LED drivers, the voltage is approx 3V per LED. So it adds nicely to unsafe levels, albeit DC.
Another note is the power supplies can be quite unsafe too - esp. the cheap off-brand ones.
Panels and strips using more than 24V are extremely rare, with 12V being common and 5V existing for the hobbyist crowd. I've never seen a 24V rig for hobbyist uses (although some Ikea strips run there).
You don't wire them in serial anyways. In general if you care about blocks of LEDs at all you don't wire them in serial.
