I’ve talked a fair bit about USB-C before, explaining how it all works, from many different angles. That said, USB-C is just the physical connector standard, plus the PD part that takes care of voltages and altmodes – things like data transfer are still delegated to the two interfaces you invariably end up using on USB-C ports, USB 2, and USB 3.
You might think USB 2 and USB 3 are tightly related, but in many crucial ways, they couldn’t be more different. I have experience working with both, and, as you might guess, I want to share it all with you. You might be surprised to hear there’s plenty to learn about USB 2 in particular – after all, we’ve had it hang around for 30 years now. Well, let’s make sure you’re fully caught up!
The Ingredients
USB 2 is a point-to-point link – one side is “host” and another is “device”, with the host typically being a PC chipset or a single-board computer. USB 2 relies on a single pseudodifferential pair. It’s “pseudodifferential” because the wires don’t just do differential signaling – they also use digital logic levels and pullup/pulldown resistors to signal device presence, especially in the beginning when the USB link is still getting established. Indeed, you can imitate a USB device’s presence with just a resistor.
This differential pair is half-duplex – it’s used for communications back and forth, but only one direction of data transfer at a time. Just like I2C, USB 2 requires the host to initiate all communications. The host has to poll the devices on a regular basis to receive data, a point that regularly gets brought up by defenders of PS/2 keyboards.
You know that USB ports come with a a 5 V power rail, but there are plenty of 3.3 V USB devices, too – in fact, most USB devices operate on 3.3 V internally. At its core, USB 2 requires 3.3 V-based signaling – which is why, when powering your RP2040 from 1.8 V, you must still provide 3.3 V if you want the USB peripheral to work.
An old flash drive, with a 12MHz crystal front and center. By [Tod Kurt], CC BY 2.0You need reasonably accurate clocks to talk USB 2, which is why everyone ends up adding a 12 MHz crystal to their USB projects even when they have an internal RC oscillator. Some devices like cheap USB hub ICs boast an internal RC oscillator that supposedly works for USB transfers, but if you want to use it, you should test it well before you try and rely on it – it could be a path towards USB data transfer errors. Thankfully, 12 MHz crystals are more than abundant, and more than cheap enough.
In short – if you plan to put USB devices on your board, get some 12 MHz crystals and you’ll likely be well-prepared. Why the 12 MHz specifically? It’s directly related to a common USB 2 device speed, of which there are three.
The Three Generations
You might have heard of USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 standards, supposedly, being entirely different beasts – that’s true, but nowadays this distinction can be misleading. In practice, there are three versions of USB 2 you should actually distinguish.
These three versions are: low-speed at 1.5 Mbps, full-speed at 12 Mbps, and high-speed at 480 Mbps. The USB 1.1 standard only described the 1.5 Mbps “low-speed” and 12 Mbps “full-speed” devices. The USB 2.0 standard covers both of these modes, too, but also adds the 480 Mbps “high-speed” mode, which operates quite differently on the hardware level, and a number of other improvements. Modern devices are most often USB 2.0, even if they’re 1.5 Mbps or 12 Mbps, which is why I don’t use USB 1 to refer to these kinds of devices – it’s rarely true.
Which speed is this “USB 2.0” hub? Well, it could be any of the three – plug it in and find out. In my experience, this particular hub is unlikely to be well-built. By [メイド理世], CC BY-SA 4.0In fact, I’ve just checked, and all of my 12 Mbps USB devices report compatibility with USB 2.0 standard – my Logitech Unifying receiver, the internal Bluetooth adapter of my Intel WiFI card, and a USB-C 3.5 mm jack DAC from Apple. By the way, you can learn about your plugged-in USB devices and their speeds on Linux using lsusb -t and lsusb -v, and on Windows, you can use something like HWInfo. Bottom line is – the device speed is what matters, and the standard version doesn’t matter as much, whether it’s 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, or a secret fourth thing.
Flash drives and Ethernet or WiFi adapters are bound to be 480 Mbps, whereas devices like mice, keyboards, fingerprint readers, or USB-UART adapters are typically 12 Mbps. The three speed standards are expected to be compatible between each other – for instance, 480 Mbps devices are expected to be able to fall back to lower speeds if needed, and 480 Mbps hosts are designed to support 12 Mbps and 1.5 Mbps devices. The USB guarantee is that you can plug anything into anything, and generally, it works out.
Microcontrollers, sadly, rarely reach 480 Mbps on their USB peripherals, as much as that would make all our Pi Pico logic analyzers shine. There’s some fundamental reasons for this – 480 Mbps signaling is entirely different from 12 Mbps and 1.5 Mbps, with the 480 Mbps signal looking much more like a modern day differential pair, and 12 Mbps signal being firmly 3.3 V-referenced, in effect, a logic level signal a la UART. This is why you can easily capture lower-speed USB with a logic analyzer or a Pi Pico, but you can’t do that for 480 Mbps anymore.
Of course, some hosts don’t handle the inter-speed compatibility aspect well. This is generally a matter of driver support – famously, the Raspberry Pi 1 Model A, without the onboard USB hub and Ethernet chip, initially didn’t work well with mice and keyboards and other low-speed devices on its sole USB port. Specifically, its only USB port that was connected directly to the SoC. On the far more popular Model B, the onboard USB hub acted as a “proxy” of sorts, handling the lower-speed USB devices internally while keeping a full-speed link to the SoC, so the SoC on the Model B only actually talked to a single full-speed device and the driver issues never surfaced. The driver quality has come a long way, and the Pi Zero no longer experiences this problem, however, but other devices of yours might – if that’s the case, remember that you can always add a hub in between.
On the other hand, over a dozen years ago, when high-speed 480Mbps devices became more popular, PC front panel cabling was often designed for the somewhat more lax physical requirements of lower-speed USB, and even stretching those requirements. Remember the advice to plug your USB device directly into the motherboard port if it’s not working well? Often, the shoddily built front panel cable was the reason for that. Not to mention that most front panel boards never had any capacitors on them, something that dramatically helps your USB device stability when you’re adding a host port.
Oh, and the usual reminder, these data rate numbers are megabits (Mb) per second. If you want megabytes (MB) per second, you want to divide by 8, and then some more because of the data transfer overhead. In practice, if you have a 480 Mbps flash drive, expect transfer speeds of 30 MB per second or so; same goes for USB2 WiFi and Ethernet adapters, of course. This was another well-known problem with Raspberry Pi boards before Pi 4 – lowered transfer speeds when using Ethernet and USB devices at the same time, since all of them had to go through a single 480 Mbps link to the SoC. Then, with the Pi 4, the SoC acquired a PCIe link and a separate GMII link for Ethernet, and nowadays this complaint is history.
Conventions, Pinouts, Colours
Follow these colours and pinout as much as possible. Based on drawing by [Fred the Oyster], CC BY-SA 4.0USB2 has a well defined standard for wire colours and connector pinout. You shall try and preserve both the colours and the pinout as much as possible, because such conventions help everyone involved. Debugging a device for hours because you confused ground with data, or burning up devices because you mixed up power wires – these scenarios are disastrous and entirely preventable if you stick to the colors that everyone uses!
Red and black are 5 V power and ground – a good ground connection is required for USB to work. Wondering just how much current you get? The answer is, 500 mA is guaranteed, and 1 A to 2 A is exceptionally likely; I’ve talked about it in more detail in this article.
Green and white are D+ and D-, the two pins in the diffpair. Again, preserve these colours where possible! Cables are very likely to follow these specifications, and if you memorize the colours, you can easily wire up your own tech in no time. You can remember the colours through a mnemonic – green is summer (life, +), and white is winter (death, -). The standard pinout for USB-A and MicroUSB/MiniUSB connectors is VCC–D-–D+–GND, and it’s easy to remember too – you sit next to a fireplace (power) in winter, you go to the beach (ground) in the summer.
A USB standard, or a warcrime? Who’s to say. Though, maybe it’s my anti-HDMI bias speaking. By [C0nanPayne], CC BY-SA 4.0MicroUSB (and MiniUSB) has an ID pin right next to GND, a pin originally intended for indicating whether your phone’s MicroUSB socket should switch into host mode, and later growing into a proprietary mess of a pin. In those dark times, it was used for video over MicroUSB standards like MHL, debug port summoning using bespoke resistor values, and even combined charging and host modes – none of it documented or prominent in any reasonable way. You rarely ever need to bother with the ID pin – nowadays, USB-C does that the ID pin ever could and way more, and it’s clear the primitive proprietary ID pin signaling standards have inspired the well-structured standard that is USB PD.
Unlike some nice standards like PCIe and USB 2, you have to connect + to + and - to -, no crossing wires. It won’t hurt anything electrically if you flip them, though, so if you’re reverse-engineering a device with USB 2 on a custom connector, feel free to connect it one way, plug it in, check dmesg or Device Manager. If you see enumeration faults, just unplug, flip the wires, and plug it in again. One warning, don’t solder on the data wires of a device plugged in, that can easily kill your device! A flipped connection where both wires still make contact is guaranteed to still result in enumeration, just that it will error out – you can use that as a way to check your connections, too.
Which connector do you use for USB2 on your own devices? Without a doubt, USB-C is the best and most universal choice; don’t be like Raspberry Pi Foundation with Pi Pico boards, forcing us to tap into our ever so dwindling supply of microUSB cables. Remember, you only need two 5.1 kΩ resistors (or 4.7 kΩ, or two pairs of 10 kΩ in parallel) to properly implement a USB-C device port, or two 51 kΩ resistors to implement a host port. Don’t be a fool, USB-C your tools.
What if you want an embedded USB port, in a low footprint? My advice: you should put USB on JST-SH sockets, just like QWIIC, which is an I2C-on-JST-SH connector and pinout standard that you should also use. I used to put USB on the JST-SH pins in a way that mimicks the USB-A pinout, but now, I use a riff on the QWIIC pinout – GND–VCC–D+–D-. Yes, I told you to use a pinout, but this one is for a good cause – it avoids killing devices if you accidentally plug a QWIIC device into a USB JST-SH port, or vice-versa.
Bringing USB2 Places
You can pull a USB 2 link for up to five meters, in theory, though three or four meters is way more likely. Two meters is the longest that you usually see in USB2 cables on the market. You’ll want seriously proper cables for five meters, of course, because that’s where things start to get touchy. When it comes to link quality, USB 2 can take a beating – until it can’t.
You might have seen USB 2 operate in some pretty bad conditions – dirt cheap USB hubs routed on a single-layer cardboard-backed PCBs, no impedance matching whatsoever. Indeed, you can get away with this more often than not. However, if you’re pushing USB 2 to its 480 Mbps limit, maybe you’re just putting a hub on your board and exposing some ports, beware – you might just get an unpleasant surprise in the shape of USB errors in your OS logs. By the way, on Linux, you can check for these errors by looking in dmesg – run dmesg -Hw to get a view on what’s happening with your kernel, including any USB errors that might occur.
The RP2040 with its 12 Mbps max speed might not have to impedance match, though the Pi Pico does, but if you’re designing a hub and you want stable 480 Mbps, you should certainly remove length differences between tracks in the USB 2 differential pair, and at least attempt to impedance match your tracks – again, treat your diffpairs with respect. Off the board, same goes for making sure your D+ and D- wires are a twisted pair.
That’s enough for today – next time, let’s talk about ESD diodes, USB2 hubs, connectors, debug tools, bitbanging, descriptors, and a fair bit more. At the same time, let’s explore USB3 – USB2’s younger sibling, so alike yet very different.
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Le prime analisi dimostrano l'uccisione del leader del movimento palestinese. Israele attende la conferma definitiva dall'esame del DNA. Sinwar sarebbe stato ucciso durante uno scambio a fuoco e non per un'esecuzione mirata. L'articolo Israele: “Abbiamo ucciso Sinwar”. Hamas non conferma proviene da
Occasionally, we find fun new electronic instruments in the wild and can’t resist sharing them with our readers. The item in question is the FNIRSI HRM-10 Internal resistance meter, which we show here being reviewed by [JohnAudioTech].
So what does it do, and why would you want one? The device is designed to measure batteries so you can quickly determine their health. Its operating principle also allows it to do a decent job of measuring low-resistance parts, which is not necessarily as easy to achieve with the garden variety multimeter, especially the low-end ones. We reckon it would be useful in the field for checking the resistance of switches and relays, possibly in automotive or industrial applications. The four-pin connector is needed because there are two wires per probe, making a Kelvin (also known as four-wire) connection.
Likely, the operating principle is to apply a varying load to the battery under test and then measure the voltage drop. The slope of the voltage sag vs load is a reasonable estimate of the resistance of the source, at least for the applied voltage range. The Kelvin connection uses one pair of wires to apply the test current from a relatively low-impedance source and the second pair to measure the voltage with a high input impedance. That way, the resistance of the probe wires can be calibrated out, giving a much more accurate measurement. Many lab-grade measurement equipment works this way.
Circling back to the HRM-10, [John] notes that it also supports limit testing, making it a helpful gauging tool for the workbench when sorting through many batteries. Data logging and the ability to upload to a computer completes the feature set, which is quite typical for this level of product now. Gone are the days of keeping a manual logbook next to the instrument stack and writing everything down by hand!
[quote]Napoli si prepara ad accogliere i responsabili della Difesa dei Paesi del G7, nell’ambito della ministeriale dedicata al comparto organizzata dalla presidenza italiana. Il Gruppo dei sette parlerà, naturalmente, delle principali sfide geopolitiche attuali, dalla guerra in Ucraina alla crisi in Medio Oriente, passando
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale È uscito il nuovo numero di The Post Internazionale. Il magazine, disponibile già da ora nella versione digitale sulla nostra App, e da domani, venerdì 18 ottobre, in tutte le edicole, propone ogni due settimane inchieste e approfondimenti sugli affari e il
Gli hacker nordcoreani utilizzano una nuova variante Linux del malwareFASTCash per infettare i sistemi di trasferimento dei pagamenti degli istituti finanziari e il prelievo non autorizzato di contanti dagli sportelli bancomat.
Le varianti precedenti di FASTCash erano mirate ai sistemi Windows e IBM AIX (Unix), ma recentemente un rapporto del ricercatore di sicurezza HaxRob ha menzionato una versione Linux precedentemente sconosciuta del malware che prendeva di mira le distribuzioni Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Vale la pena notare che gli esperti hanno messo in guardia già nel 2018. All’epoca, questa attività era attribuita al gruppo di hacker nordcoreano Hidden Cobra. È stato segnalato che FASTCash è stato utilizzato per svuotare gli sportelli bancomat in paesi dell’Asia e dell’Africa almeno dal 2016. Nel 2017, sono stati prelevati contanti dagli sportelli bancomat contemporaneamente in 30 paesi, e nel 2018 è stato registrato un altro incidente in cui gli hacker hanno svuotato gli sportelli bancomat in altri 23 paesi.
Nel 2020, lo US Cyber Command ha portato rinnovata attenzione su questa minaccia, collegando la rinnovata attività a FASTCash 2.0 e al gruppo APT38 (Lazarus). Un anno dopo, tre cittadini nordcoreani furono accusati di essere coinvolti in questi programmi e responsabili del furto di oltre 1,3 miliardi di dollari da istituzioni finanziarie di tutto il mondo.
La variante di malware più recente individuata da HaxRob è apparsa per la prima volta su VirusTotal nel giugno 2023 e il ricercatore scrive che presenta somiglianze con le varianti precedenti per Windows e AIX. Il nuovo FASTCash si presenta come una libreria condivisa che viene inserita in un processo in esecuzione sul server utilizzando la chiamata di sistema ptrace e la collega alle funzioni di rete.
Gli switch attaccati sono intermediari che forniscono la comunicazione tra gli ATM, i terminali PoS e i sistemi centrali delle banche, instradando richieste e risposte alle transazioni. Il malware intercetta e manipola i messaggi di transazione ISO8583, utilizzati nel settore finanziario per elaborare carte di debito e di credito.
Nello specifico, FASTCash intercetta i messaggi relativi alle transazioni che sono state rifiutate a causa di fondi insufficienti sul conto del titolare della carta e sostituisce la risposta “rifiuta” con una risposta “approva“. Il messaggio modificato contiene anche un importo casuale compreso tra 12.000 e 30.000 lire turche (350-875 dollari) per autorizzare la transazione richiesta.
Una volta ricevuto nel sistema della banca il messaggio contenente i codici di approvazione (DE38, DE39) e l’importo (DE54), la banca approva la transazione e il money mule, lavorando in collaborazione con gli hacker, ritira i contanti dal bancomat e fugge.
Va notato che quando la versione Linux di FASTCash è apparsa su VirusTotal, non è stata rilevata dalle soluzioni di sicurezza, il che significa che il malware ha aggirato con successo la maggior parte dei meccanismi di sicurezza standard, consentendo agli hacker di eseguire le proprie operazioni senza interferenze.
From space, the most striking feature of our Pale Blue Dot is exactly what makes it blue: all that water. About three-quarters of the globe is covered with liquid water, and our atmosphere is a thick gaseous soup laden with water vapor. Almost everywhere you look there’s water, and even where there’s no obvious surface water, chances are good that more water than you could use in a lifetime lies just below your feet, and accessing it could be as easy as an afternoon’s work with a shovel.
And therein lies the rub for those who delve into the Earth’s depths for the minerals and other resources we need to function as a society — if you dig deep enough, water is going to become a problem. The Earth’s crust holds something like 44 million cubic kilometers of largely hidden water, and it doesn’t take much to release it from the geological structures holding it back and restricting its flow. One simple mineshaft chasing a coal seam or a shaft dug in the wrong place, and suddenly all the hard-won workings are nothing but flooded holes in the ground. Add to that the enormous open-pit mines dotting the surface of the planet that resemble nothing so much as empty lakes waiting to fill back up with water if given a chance, and the scale of the problem water presents to mining operations becomes clear.
Dewatering mines is a complex engineering problem, one that intersects and overlaps multiple fields of expertise. Geotechnical engineers work alongside mining engineers, hydrogeologists, and environmental engineers to devise cost-effective ways to control the flow of water into mines, redirect it when they can, and remove it when there’s no alternative.
An Old Problem
You’d be forgiven for thinking that dewatering mines is just about building and installing big pumps; that’s pretty much where I was when I started researching this article in the wake of Hurricane Helene’s recent unwelcome visit to Appalachia and the potential destruction of the quartz mines at Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The mines there are the world’s single source for ultra-pure natural quartz, and flooding from the two feet (60 cm) of rain Helene dumped there threatened to shut down the semiconductor industry, thanks to the lack of natural quartz needed for the crucibles that turn raw silicon into high-purity wafers via the Czochralski process.
Luckily, the Spruce Pine mines somehow dodged that bullet, but the whole thing got me thinking about dewatering. I knew that pumping water out of mines went back at least to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, with getting rid of water from coal mines being one of the driving forces behind the invention of the steam engine. Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engines were put to use pumping out coal mines in the West Midlands of England and tin mines in Cornwall as early as 1712. Inefficient, but effective. A Newcomen atmospheric engine, similar to the ones that powered dewatering pumps for mines early in the Industrial Revolution. Early dewatering efforts were a brute-force affair, with the massive rocking arms of remarkably inefficient steam engines pulling pistons up and down inside pipes, lifting water to the surface and dumping it onto the ground to drain into streams and lakes. The pumps only needed to move water faster than it flowed into the mine, and woe betide the engineer who let his engine lag behind or fail completely so that the mine flooded. To make things worse, the water that was ejected from these mines was often quite polluted, especially in geological formations that resulted in the acidification of floodwaters. Spilling toxic and acidic tailings water onto the surface is famously destructive to the environment, a topic of much less concern back then.
Current dewatering processes are much more mindful of the environmental impact of pumping contaminated water onto the surface, and are also sensitive to the incredible costs of running pumps and water treatment plants around the clock. These days, a lot more effort goes into controlling and managing water before it ever gets into the mine’s workings, and passive methods of dewatering are favored wherever possible. It also matters very much what kind of mine is being dewatered; while the basic processes are similar for open-pit versus underground mines, there are important differences.
Underground mines generally have the advantage of penetrating below the local water table. If the mine’s workings are sufficiently far below the groundwater layer and the rock between them is relatively impervious, the mine might be naturally dry. That’s rarely the case, though, as the shafts and ramps that pass through the water table generally liberate water that then flows into the lower parts of the mine, eventually flooding it to the level of the water table. Sometimes it’s possible to mitigate this by drilling wells into the local water table further up the hydraulic grade; the clean water pumped from these wells causes a “cone of depression” in the local water table, lowering it enough to reduce the flow of water into the well to a manageable level.
In other cases, it may be possible to create an impervious barrier between the porous water-bearing rocks and the mine’s workings. The idea here is to redirect the water, preferably so that it finds other hydraulic paths of less resistance rather than flooding into the workings. Grouting mine workings can use cementitious materials like so-called “shotcrete,” a thin concrete that can be sprayed onto rock surfaces. Other grouting jobs are best accomplished with polymeric materials like urethane resins. No matter what material is used, water is kept from entering the workings thanks to drainage pipes and adits built between the water table rocks and the inside of the applied impervious barrier. The redirected water collects in local sumps, where large electric pumps send it out of the mine for processing.
Big Digs
One interesting way to mitigate the flow of water into workings that penetrate the water table is by freezing it. Ground freezing has been used to stabilize wet soils on construction sites for years, with the technique gaining fame during the Boston “Big Dig” megaproject, which buried sections of Interstates 90 and 93 in the saturated fill that most of Boston is built upon. Ground freezing uses massive refrigeration plants to circulate chilled brine in pipes buried in the wet soil, freezing it solid. In mine dewatering, ground freezing is often used around a shaft or ramp passing through the water table. The drawback to ground freezing is the need to operate a refrigeration plant around the clock, but in some instances, it’s more cost-effective than grouting or other passive methods.
Open-pit mines present their own dewatering challenges. By definition, open-pit mines are near the surface and therefore closer to the local water table, which tends to be within the first few hundred meters from the surface. Open-pit mines also tend to disrupt much more surface area of the water table, as opposed to the numerous but relatively small penetrations caused by underground shafts and tunnels. There’s also the compounding problem that open-pit mines are exposed to the elements, meaning that precipitation into the mine and runoff from the local catchment area can introduce massive amounts of water, all of which has to be managed. Open-pit uranium mine in Australia. Despite the arid climate, water is still a problem. The pit at the lowest level of the mine is the sump; water that accumulates there is either pumped out to water treatment plants and retention ponds on the surface, allowed to evaporate in situ, or re-infiltrated in the soil below the mine workings by infiltration wells. Source: Adobe Stock. As with underground mining, dewatering open-pit mines starts with preventing as much water as possible from entering the workings in the first place. Surface berms and swales are often constructed around the perimeter of the mine to control and direct storm runoff into retention ponds, where water can evaporate naturally. Also, dewatering wells are often drilled vertically around the perimeter of the mine, and sometimes horizontally from the walls of the mine into the local water table, to intercept water flowing in the local water table before it enters the mine. Passive dewatering techniques are also used, such as filling cracks with grout or sealants.
The importance of removing water from open-pit mines can’t be overstated. Excess water is a real problem in terms of mine productivity; wet material is heavy, and the huge haulers that bring material up to the surface have to work harder to carry something the mine will make no profit from. Also, the pressure exerted by water in the soil tends to reduce the mechanical strength of the material, making it necessary to cut the walls at a shallower angle than in dry material. That results in removing far more overburden to get to the producing ore body, which might be the difference between a profitable mine and an expensive hole in the ground.
Underground Guitars
Monitoring pore pressure in the groundwater around a mine is one of the biggest parts of dewatering, so much so that mines will install far-flung networks of pressure sensors in and around their workings. The data gathered from these networks not only helps decide where to concentrate dewatering resources, but also serves to monitor how well those efforts are paying off, and to help redirect resources in case the hydrogeological environment changes over time, as it is likely to do.
The chief instrument used today for monitoring pore pressure in mining operations is the piezometer. From the name, one imagines these devices measure water pressure thanks to a piezoelectric transducer. And while there are piezometers that approach, the more common piezometers in use today are of the vibrating wire type. Vibrating wire piezometers, or VWPs, are similar to electric guitars. A thin steel wire is tensioned between a fixed point and a flexible diaphragm. The diaphragm is exposed to the environment, often through a filter to keep debris in the groundwater from getting packed against the diaphragm. The wire’s tension varies as the diaphragm is deflected by water pressure, which changes its resonant frequency. A coil of wire surrounding the steel wire serves to both excite it, like plucking a guitar string, and as a pickup for the resulting vibrations. The higher the pressure outside, the further the diaphragm deflects, which lowers the tension on the string and results in a lower “note” when excited.
VWPs are expected to operate under extreme conditions, so they’re built to last. Most are built from stainless steel cases that can survive inside deep boreholes, and some are even made to be driven into soil directly. Most VWPs include on-board thermistors to adjust pressure readings for the temperature of the water, as well as gas-discharge tubes to protect the sensors and the drivers they’re connected to from lightning strikes and other electrical discharges.
@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Ecco il curriculum del generale Antonio De Vita, nominato alla testa della neonata area Chief Security Officer di Intesa Sanpaolo. Tutti i dettagli
[quote]L’Esercito degli Stati Uniti sta per fare un passo importante verso l’integrazione di veicoli robotici nel proprio arsenale. Entro la prossima primavera, sarà selezionato il vincitore tra quattro concorrenti che stanno sviluppando il Robotic Combat Vehicle
[quote]Le azioni di Israele contro le postazioni Unifil sono “rilevanti e gravissime, violazioni del diritto internazionale, non incidenti”, ha dichiarato Guido Crosetto, ministro della Difesa, durante l’informativa al Senato del 17 ottobre. Crosetto parla di una crisi “gravissima, caratterizzata dal superamento
#PNRR, è stata pubblicata oggi la graduatoria degli interventi finanziati a seguito del bando da 515 milioni pubblicato il 29 luglio 2024 per la realizzazione e messa in sicurezza delle mense scolastiche.
#PNRR, è stata pubblicata oggi la graduatoria degli interventi finanziati a seguito del bando da 515 milioni pubblicato il 29 luglio 2024 per la realizzazione e messa in sicurezza delle mense scolastiche.
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Trump conquista crescenti consensi nelle comunità ispaniche, afroamericane e tra le altre minoranze etniche. Kamala Harris in difficoltà L'articolo STATI UNITI: Trump rimonta e scala le minoranze etniche proviene da Pagine Esteri.
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Mentre si attendono in ogni momento i raid aerei contro l'Iran, Netanyahu avrebbe accettato di ridimensionare la portata della rappresaglia israeliana anche per le pressioni delle monarchie arabe del Golfo che temono di subire le
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Il rapporto, Food Wars, ha esaminato 54 paesi colpiti dal conflitto e ha scoperto che rappresentano quasi tutti i 281,6 milioni di persone che affrontano oggi la fame acuta. L'articolo OXFAM. A causa delle guerre, ogni giorno migliaia di persone muoiono di fame
su facebook ho scritto: testuale commento: "l'alternativa alla Harris è Trump ed è terrificante". commento cancellato. che poi sono un'italiana... mica voto. ecco perché scrivo cose serie anche qua. ma è offensivo sostenere che un candidato è terrificante? pensavo fosse una legittima opinione.
Alla prima giornata a Bari di Fiera Didacta Italia edizione Puglia, il Ministro Giuseppe Valditara ha partecipato alla cerimonia di inaugurazione e ha visitato gli spazi del quartiere fieristico incontrando docenti, studenti, personale scolastico.
Chatting comes to the ATmosphere with Picosky, X is unbanned in Brazil, and a significant group of Brazilians moved back, and a deeper dive into aviary.domains.
Chatting comes to the ATmosphere with Picosky, X is unbanned in Brazil, and a significant group of Brazilians moved back, and a deeper dive into aviary.domains.
Picosky
Picosky is a new chatting service build on top of atproto. Picosky was created by Juliet, and started as an experiment with building an simple chatting app on atproto, originally limited to just 12 characters per message. It was a demonstration of making an AppView for chatting on atproto that utilises the existing infrastructure of the network: You log in with your Bluesky/atproto account, messages are stored on your PDS, and the PicoSky AppView listens to all the messages on the Relay and displays them. The direct connection of your Bluesky account made it a fun place for atproto hackers to hang out, which expanded the scope of Picosky quickly to a serious project.
Over the last week or so Picosky has undergone rapid changes by the developers Juliet and Elainya: you can log in with OAuth, the character limit got increased multiple times, now at 2048, you can edit and delete your posts, and UI updates where it is now a clear and minimalist proper chat UI.
The simple structure of Picosky, and the way that it integrates with the atproto infrastrucuture, makes Picosky an attractive place to further build on by other developers: one of the first Picosky-compatible projects to make it available via IRC. This is a separate AppView, that reads the same posts as the Picosky AppView does, and that can fully interact (federate) with each other. Other projects in the works are an iOS client or one for the terminal.
Meanwhile, the Lexicon structure (which determines the format of the messages) has had a major update the other day: there is now support for creating separate rooms on Picosky. Anyone can create rooms, and the owner of the room can set moderation to be based on a deny-list or an allow-list. The frontend has not been updated yet to take advantage of this however, but I’m sure we’ll get back to Picosky next week.
The News
It is now a week since X has been unbanned in Brazil, and a significant part of the Brazilian user base that joined Bluesky has gone back to X. Daily Active User count dropped by half, from 1.2M to 600k. This number was around 300k before the ban, indicating that a large number of Brazilians did stick around: Portuguese is still the most popular language of the platform; 45% of posts are in Portuguese, compared to 32% English posts. It shows that social networks are extremely sticky, and people have very high switching costs. In that context, Bluesky has done well with the number of Brazilian who stayed around after X became unbanned.
Bluesky is hiring, and they are looking for a Feed Algorithmics Engineer. The job is to “design and implement machine learning models to improve personalized content recommendations, spam detection, labeling, and more.” As the network grows, so do the challenges of providing algorithmic recommendations for feeds and spam detection.
Threads struggles with moderation on their platform, and Bluesky is seizing the opportunity by creating an account on Threads to promote the platform as an alternative on (and to) Threads.
Altmetric, which tracks online engagement with academic research, is looking for people that are willing to help with feedback sessions for their Bluesky attention tracking roll-out.
Bluesky has updated their app (v1.92), with some new features: you can now pin a post to your profile. There are also design improvements, including new font options. You can also now filter your searches by language.
TOKIMEKI, an alternative client for Bluesky, now supports showing your atproto-powered Linkat and WhiteWind profiles.
Threads struggles with moderation on their platform, and Bluesky is seizing the opportunity by creating an account on Threads to promote the platform as an alternative on (and to) Threads.
Frontpage, a link-aggregator platform build on atproto, is now open and available for everyone to use. The developers say that they’ll work on notifications first, and that decentralised and self-sovereign sub-communities are coming later.
For the protocol-people: what happens when there are clashing lexicon fields? Nick Gerakines publishes his thoughts on how the Lexicon system can evolve, with some additional thoughtsby Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold.
Deep dive: Aviary.domains
Aviary.domains is a new service that helps managing domains for Bluesky and the ATmosphere, that recently launched in early access. Aviary makes it easy for people who have a domain name to share that domain name with other people as their handle.
To place Aviary in a larger context, a short explanation: It helps to understand as the central offering of the ATmosphere being a single digital identity. When you first sign up for Bluesky, two things happen:
You join the ATmosphere, by creating a digital identity (a DID) that works with all other products that are build on atproto.
You log in with this newly created identity into Bluesky, and use Bluesky with this digital identity.
This digital identity, a DID (Decentralized IDentifier) is a unique string of letters and numbers that can never change, which is good for computers because it is unique, but very unpractical for humans to use. That’s why you have a handle, which corresponds behind the scenes with your DID. The idea of atproto is to use a website domain name as your handle. You can always change your handle to a different handle if you want, as long as you have a website domain you can use. Most people do not have their own website domain, so when you first join the ATmosphere and your DID gets created, Bluesky also gives you one of their sub domains you can use: yourname.bsky.social.
The goal for Bluesky is that people use their website domains as their handle, as it gives an easy way to verify ownership: the owner of the website is also the owner of the account. One problem however, is that many people do not have their own website domain. This is both an opportunity for Bluesky (which now sells domain names to people), but also still a challenge: a significant group of people are simply not interested in paying money for what amounts to a better user name. Even if you have your own website domain, having to change DNS settings is still a technical barrier that is too high for a large group of people.
This is the part where Aviary.domains comes it, as it tries to find an audience for people who have a domain name, that they want to share with their community. It has created a system where an owner of a domain name can invite other people to use a version of that domain as their handle on Bluesky. So as the owner of laurenshof.online, I can log in with Aviary, and generate a subdomain for, lets say my cat. Aviary generates a link that my cat can click; they log in on Aviary with Bluesky’s OAuth, type in their name, press accept, and their handle is now changed, without them having to change settings.
What makes this different from projects like swifties.social, which also hand out subdomains for people to use as handles on Bluesky, is that it does not require the final step, changing settings in the app. It also gives the owner of the domain control over each subdomain, with the ability to subtract subdomains as well. This makes Aviary more useful for people who want to have more control over who identifies with the domain, and can show they are part of the community.
Audio spaces app Bluecast now can show your broadcasting history.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online.
A quieter news week: self-hosted 3d printing app Manyfold joins the fediverse, and write.as now offers paid subscriptions for fediverse accounts with sub.club.
The News
Manyfold is a self-hosted open source web app for organising and managing your collection of 3d files, and in particularly 3d printing. With their latest update, Manyfold has now joined the fediverse by adding ActivityPub support. With the new integration, you can now follow a Manyfold creator from your fediverse account of choice, and get notified when the Manyfold account uploads a new 3d file. New Manyfold uploads appear as short posts with a link in the rest of the fediverse. To demonstrate, here is the Manyfold account from the creator Floppy as visible from Mastodon, and here is the profile on their Manyfold instance itself. The Manyfold server also has a button to follow the account on the fediverse. Manyfold implementing ActivityPub support is an illustration of how ActivityPub can be viewed as a form of ‘Social RSS’: it allows you to follow any Actor for updates, and adds social features (sharing/liking to it).
Sub.club is a service that lets people create paid subscription feeds on the fediverse. The service recently launched with the ability to monetise Mastodon feeds, and has now expanded to also include long-form writing, by collaborating with write.as. Write.as is the flagship instance of fediverse blogging software WriteFreely. With this update, blogs on write.as can now set on a a per-blog basis if a blog is a premium blog, and where the cut-off is. People who follow the blog from a fediverse account will see an option to subscribe and view the full post; this post by the sub.club account shows how a premium blog will look like from various perspectives. Adding sub.club to a write.as blog is as simple as following this three-minute PeerTube video.
The Redbox operating system has been dumped, and people are repurposing the massive DVD kiosks they've saved from the scrap heap.
The Redbox operating system has been dumped, and people are repurposing the massive DVD kiosks theyx27;ve saved from the scrap heap.#Redbox #CarRepair #Reverseengineering
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale Addio ai test d’ingresso per le facoltà universitarie di Medicina: dopo un semestre ad accesso libero, verrà stabilita una graduatoria nazionale tenendo in considerazione gli esami fatti che saranno uniformi per tutti. Il proseguimento degli studi al secondo semestre sarà
A prototype app called Impact describes “A Volunteer Fire Department For The Digital World,” which would summon real people to copy and paste AI-generated talking points on social media.#News
How the WordPress chaos may impact the web; using AI to apply for jobs; and how the National Archives wants to push its employees to use Google's AI.
How the WordPress chaos may impact the web; using AI to apply for jobs; and how the National Archives wants to push its employees to use Googlex27;s AI.#Podcast
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale Cosa prevede il disegno di legge di Bilancio 2025: tutte le misure Un piccolo sacrificio chiesto alle banche, l’ennesima sforbiciata a carico dei ministeri, la prevista conferma del taglio del cuneo fiscale e della
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Secondo un censimento del 2021 in Pakistan ci sarebbero quasi 22,000 persone transgender, ma il dato potrebbe essere altamente sottostimato. Sarebbero almeno 20 le persone transgender uccise nel 2021, ma solo il 34% dei casi di violenza viene denunciato. L'articolo Violenze e abusi sulla comunità
📌 Torna Fiera Didacta Italia! La più importante fiera sull’innovazione della #scuola si svolge per la prima volta in Puglia, dal 16 al 18 ottobre, alla Fiera del Levante a Bari.
📌 Torna Fiera Didacta Italia! La più importante fiera sull’innovazione della #scuola si svolge per la prima volta in Puglia, dal 16 al 18 ottobre, alla Fiera del Levante a Bari.
E’ stata caricata su E Learning Unisalento – Storia della filosofia (cui gli studenti sono pregati di iscriversi mediante mail istituzionale unisalento e con la pw fornita dagli uffici) la l…
Oggi #16ottobre è la Giornata Mondiale dell'Alimentazione. L’iniziativa, istituita dalla FAO nel 1979, ha l’obiettivo di sensibilizzare l’opinione pubblica sui problemi legati alla fame e alla malnutrizione e di promuovere la sicurezza alimentare bas…
Oggi #16ottobre è la Giornata Mondiale dell'Alimentazione. L’iniziativa, istituita dalla FAO nel 1979, ha l’obiettivo di sensibilizzare l’opinione pubblica sui problemi legati alla fame e alla malnutrizione e di promuovere la sicurezza alimentare bas…
@Noam Bergman yes, you're welcome if you want to try it out and report bugs, it's still in beta currently.
You can find the APK in the release page, otherwise you can install an app like Obtainium and add the main repository URL as a source (please remember to turn on the "enable pre-releases switch in Obtainium to install pre-production releases).
Come faccio a istruire la tastiera del mio telefono o non correggermi ce con c'è? Di tutte le malefatte del correttore automatico questa è quella che mi manda in bestia di più. #fediaiuto #fedihelp
mi sa che l'unica soluzione è cambiare tastiera o spendere le ore a scrivere frasi in cui usare "ce ne sono" e sperare che abbia la correzione a posteriori (che l'unica che conosco mi sa che è GBoard che dopo aver scritto "ne" correggeva il precedente "c'è" in "ce")
@ciccillo Ho provato a fare come @Jones , adesso il correttore automatico è spento, ma il suggeritore rimane. Adesso non c'è (⬅️funziona!) più nessuna scusa, se scrivo ammerda è colpa mia!
Ciao, sono nuovo qui, in questo mondo. Ho visto che parli italiano ed ho anche visto e trovato un tuo messaggio con il correttore automatico che modifica "c'è" in "ce". Se ti arriva questo mio messaggio e se lo leggerai, forse ho scoperto l'acqua calda per la soluzione del problema. Ciao.
Today I realized how similar RFL and RFL look at the surface: bottom navigation with identical sections, navigation drawer, a timeline in the home screen, each post with header, content, media, actions.
They look like an elder and a younger brother. But there are some differences too:
RFL uses SQLDelight for persistence, whereas RFF uses Room multiplatform;
RFL uses coil2 for image rendering on Android and Kamel on iOS, RFF uses coil3 for both platforms;
RFL makes heavy usage of the slide-to-reveal pattern for like/dislike actions, RFF doesn't and do not allow dislike (even if on Friendica it could be technically done);
RFL has many customization options (zombie mode, different post layouts, many more languages etc.), RFF tries to have "sane defaults" and has a more minimalistic approach;
RFL has a "sidebar" on the right side which RFF does not have (again, minimalism);
RFL does not use a third party crash reporting and feedback system, RFF uses Sentry;
RFL has Android-only tests even for common code using MockK, RFF has common tests using Mokkery.
Have you tried both apps? Is there any feature of one app that you would like to be ported on the other one?
Come si è estinta la democrazia negli Stati Uniti. l'AntiDiplomatico intervista Chris Hedges - EGEMONIA - L'Antidiplomatico lantidiplomatico.it/dettnews-c…
Lanciata la sonda Europa Clipper verso Giove l Astronomia.com
"Scopo della missione è studiare da vicino la luna ghiacciata Europa per testare le sue possibilità di ospitare la vita, ma non di verificarne l’esistenza : in particolare dovrà confermare l’esistenza e la composizione di acqua al di sotto dello strato superficiale di ghiaccio nonché studiare dal punto di vista geologico la superficie e le sue caratteristiche superficiali."
Oggi, 15ottobre 2024, si è tenuta la settima e l’ottava lezione del corso di Storia della filosofia francese (corso di laurea in Filosofia). Il corso, intitolato “Percorsi di metafisica nel N…
Si sono tenute oggi, 15 ottobre 2024, la prima e la seconda del corso di Storia della filosofia (I anno del corso di laurea in Educazione sociale e tecniche dell’intervento educativo) dedicate a Jo…
‼️La nostra cara Stefania Maurizi non poteva lasciare #IlPotereSegreto senza l'happy end e senza spiegarvi perché vogliono ANCORA distruggere Julian #Assange e #WikiLeaks. O pensavate che fosse finita?
‼️La nostra cara Stefania Maurizi non poteva lasciare #IlPotereSegreto senza l'happy end e senza spiegarvi perché vogliono ANCORA distruggere Julian #Assange e #WikiLeaks. O pensavate che fosse finita?
il 25 ottobre in libreria.
Intelligenza artificiale, dati e supercazzole: fin dove abbiamo il controllo?
Dati e AI: di questa cosa ho parlato parecchio con @informapirata ⁂ :privacypride: e abbiamo convenuto sul fatto che il grosso problema è IL CONTROLLO sui dati. Io e il mio aiuto-blogger ci siamo divertiti a cercare informazioni su di noi su GPT: - chi è Elettrona? Niente, dà info generiche. Chi è Gifter? Lo stesso, alcune supercazzole su "one piece" che all'interessato hanno fatto parecchio ridere e su cui da tempi non sospetti approfitta per spiegare il motivo del soprannome ai non "addetti ai lavori". - Chi sono Elettrona e Gifter? Lo stesso risposta generica. La cosa cambia però se metti "ci sono su internet informazioni su Elettrona e Gifter?" La risposta (GIUSTA) è la seguente: **** "Elettrona" e "Gifter" sono gli pseudonimi di **Elena** e **Alessandro**, due blogger che gestiscono il sito *PlusBrothers*. Il blog tratta temi legati all'HIV, allo stigma sociale e alle loro esperienze personali.
- **Elettrona** è il nome scelto da Elena, che è non vedente e ha una lunga esperienza nell'accessibilità digitale e inclusività. Il soprannome "Elettrona" è una versione femminile e ironica di "elettrone", che rispecchia la sua personalità energica e il suo interesse per la tecnologia.
- **Gifter**, invece, è il soprannome di Alessandro, che vive con l'HIV. Questo nome deriva dalla sottocultura "gift giver" (donatore), legata alla trasmissione del virus HIV, un argomento provocatorio che hanno scelto di affrontare per sfidare i pregiudizi e sensibilizzare il pubblico.
Insieme, usano il loro blog per combattere lo stigma legato all'HIV e promuovere l'inclusività attraverso l'ironia e la narrazione personale. **** Dati assolutamente fedeli riportati dalle nostre fonti, il nostro @PlusBrothers ma anche un articolo che ho scritto io su HeroPress, altro sito pubblico. E mi/ci sta assolutamente bene. Ma se domani mattina Gifter si sveglia e davanti allo specchio urla "EXPELLIARMUS!" poi dalle successive analisi risulta HIV negativo? Se io urlo "LUMUS" e ci vedo, poi Gifter mi urla "NOX" e non ci vedo più di nuovo? E per vendicarmi gli urlo "AVADA KEDAVRA" per ucciderlo ma ottengo che diventa positivo HIV un'altra volta mentre io resto negativa perché sono protetta da "PROTEGO"?
Oppure il contrario, lui è protetto da "protego" e io invece divento positiva al posto suo quando lui si sveglia e dice expeliarmus? Va bene, parlo di cose impossibili per fare ironia ma la burla vuole far capire che ogni situazione può cambiare da un giorno all'altro sulle persone e le stesse non hanno alcun controllo su come e dove aggiornare le proprie informazioni né tanto meno verificare di essere loro ad aver pubblicato. Per assurdo qualcuno potrebbe addestrare il bot scrivendo che Alessandro mi ha trasmesso l'HIV, inventandosi una fake per farci del male. E noi non potremmo farci niente perché l'addestratore del bot può fare finta di essere me o Alex quando vuole. Non sono contro l'AI e la utilizzo ma le debolezze sono tante e la consapevolezza è d'obbligo. #ironia #burla #EticaDigitale #AI #satira
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in reply to qwe • •Diciamo che è lo scotto di rilanciare un feed automatico
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