61–70 of 123 posts
Have any hardware companies ever written good accompanying software? From all the custom-ui graphics card config nonsense to utilities that phone home of their own accord, to things like this which are laughably awful. I feel glad I left for the mild shores of Linux in the early 00s.
Apple?
How does the process of getting the certificate installed work? Does the user manually accept the installation at any point? Or is part of the blame on Microsoft for allowing this?
For example Battle.net have a per machine generated CA that gets installed when you install BNet (which is why it recently started asking for admin privs to install / update instead of just asking for them when installing a game).
Its used for talking to BNet when following a battle.net link which can be used to prompt you to join BattleNet groups and other things. They used to use a cert signed by a public CA but that's is frowned upon (as the only way the client could really use it is if it knew the key for the cert which would lead to either a million localhost.bnet.tld (I don't remember the actual hostname so pulled one out of the air) certs or a shared cert with a million people who could access the private key if they went looking hard enough). They made a forum post about it when the issue about their own self signed CA started showing up everywhere [0].
I believe Spotify do something similar so things like open.spotify.com and other widgets can control the locally running spotify app.
MS themselves have a certtool in Visual Studio to create and add certs when dev'ing using the latest builds of ASP.NET Core 2 as the default for new projects is to use SSL (but iirc the cert tool VS uses does give you a prompt about it installing a cert).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In practice the corporation "dictating" the set of publicly trusted CA roots is the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a large volunteer effort. On paper all the major browser vendors / operating system vendors (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla) have independent root trust programmes. But after several years working on this stuff I would say that all real public oversight is done by Mozilla, which AFAIC…
> In practice the "corporation" "dictating" the set of publicly trusted CA roots is the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a large volunteer effort. Why the scare quotes on “corporation”? Mozilla Foundation is a corporation. Here are he articles of incorporation: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-arti...
The comfort in this article is knowing for every boutique german headphone company that insists on becoming a CA, there are thousands of nameless chinese companies producing superior products at lower prices that do to some measure respect the users privacy in that they arent more than just a USB peripheral. Sades and Xiberia for example make perfectly useful (if not a little bit cyberpunk) headsets that just operate…
I know this is really nitpicky, but is Sennheiser really a "boutique" company? I was under the impression their maybe one of the biggest and most prominent headphone manufacturers in the world, especially when measured by R&D.
The comfort in this article is knowing for every boutique german headphone company that insists on becoming a CA, there are thousands of nameless chinese companies producing superior products at lower prices that do to some measure respect the users privacy in that they arent more than just a USB peripheral. Sades and Xiberia for example make perfectly useful (if not a little bit cyberpunk) headsets that just operate…
I know this is really nitpicky, but is Sennheiser really a "boutique" company? I was under the impression their maybe one of the biggest and most prominent headphone manufacturers in the world, especially when measured by R&D.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Android constantly nags about "network might be monitored" when custom certificates are installed. This is why I baked my home network certificate into the system trust store when building the ROM.
What tools / guide did you use to accomplish this (building the ROM AND adding your certificate) ?
But for beginners there are some pretty nice LineageOs build guides floating around:
For specific pieces of hardware: https://wiki.lineageos.org/build_guides.html
Generic instructions: https://forum.xda-developers.com/chef-central/android/how-to...
As far as changing the certs, I know offhand to do it with a couple random linux distro's but i'm not 100% sure for android, you might just try searching the repo for the default certs then looking at how they are built into the image and tweaking that.
Have any hardware companies ever written good accompanying software? From all the custom-ui graphics card config nonsense to utilities that phone home of their own accord, to things like this which are laughably awful. I feel glad I left for the mild shores of Linux in the early 00s.
Apple?
OTOH, it seems if you pair the headphones with normal bluetooth its just using A2DP/SBC and the audio quality is _miserable_. Maybe its using a custom bluetooth profile/a2dp codec?
Basically, why exactly do they even need a full blown app?
(on a further side note, I've gotten to the point where I don't really even notice AC and computer fan noise so much so that while a couple of coworkers complained about it, it wasn't until I tried the PXC 550's at work that I realized our AC blowers are really _LOUD_. With the 550's the constant low frequency rumble is just gone. I guess my earplugs just wern't blocking that much low frequency.).
Can't they safely communicate with whatever.sennheiser.com using the existing certs? Afaict, this isn't a stand-alone device trying to communicate, but your computer, running some app.
What am I missing?
Edit: okay, I see below that they are using a local web server, and (thanks to browser decisions about localhost) it requires https.
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Yeah, because on Linux the community has to support the hardware because the manufacturer doesn't even bother. Sounds way better...
OpenBSD's official FAQ has this to say about Flash: Adobe's Flash plugin is distributed in binary form only, and they do not provide a native OpenBSD version. Considering their security record, we thank them for this neglect. The situation is equivalent here; given the kind of software that hardware manufacturers tend to write, I'm quite happy to take volunteer efforts over what they produce.