With 'only one country', I assume you refer to South Africa. Are you aware that the ANC itself approved of nuclear disarmament?
If you look at the Budapest Memorandum, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine also voluntarily gave up their nuclear arsenals by becoming a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in exchange for security guarantees.
I found the open source Valetudo (https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo) project quite interesting, as it sits between the vendor firmware and (cloud) connectivity. The project is made possible due to Dennis Giese's research.
It currently supports Dreame, Xiaomi, Roborock and some others. But not Ecovacs.
And not sure it prevents this type of Bluetooth vulnerabilities.
Dennis works closely with the Valetudo developer. On one of the Valetudo Telegram channels, they announced the following:
> As you might know, we looked into Ecovacs as an alternative for Dreame&Roborock. However, we found security and privacy being completely broken. If you have a X2, a Goat lawnmower, or newer than 2023 devices, you might want to turn them off for now. There is a BLE RCE, that lets an unauthenticated attacker send a payload via Bluetooth, that gets executed as root on the device. It does not appear that Ecovacs wants to fix that.
More information:
https://twitter.com/lorenzofb/status/1822002515279270079https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/09/ecovacs-home-robots-can-be...
Same. Had to spend a bunch of time on Telegram finding a breakout board in NA, but once I did that, it was just a matter of following directions. It’s my favorite piece of tech at the moment, and it cost me 180 bucks brand new.
The breakout board is the reason I haven't bought and hacked one of these robots yet. I have to source the PCB and then solder the components myself. I've never done this before and learning this is taking up significant amounts of my free time. Personally I would rather get a manufactured PCB that would no doubt be better built.
I respect their "learn to solder" stance but it's a fact that a lot more people would be involved in the project if it wasn't required.
+1 for Valetudo, not only does it work, but it is also maintained and keeps getting better. Moreover old vacuums are still maintained as new ones are added
Yup, my first gen roborock is still trundling along quite happily because of Valetudo. Would be nice if the base ubuntu was updatable but as it's offline except for a connection to a homeassistant instance it's probably safer than 99% of IOT devices
Can Valetudo provide artificially blocked cloud features? For example the Roborock S5 doesn't have persistent maps, though it would be trivial to just keep one loaded in the cloud, but Roborock would rather you upgrade to an S7.
Someone advertise me why vacuum cleaner needs internet?
I have xiaomi unit and I haven't connected it to an app, so it has no connectivity. It does it's job - cleans house 1st floor.
Is it useful to target specific places to clean? Ok, that is a feature that would be useful but I can live without.
Remotely starting? Fancy feature not sure I need - you can aswell start it when leaving the house. Maybe useful for some people when wanting to cleanup after guests remotely, but then again who knows what's dropped on floor there.
> Someone advertise me why vacuum cleaner needs internet?
It doesn't. And it isn't like hosting a web-portal is some kinda alien technology that can only be done in the cloud. There's absolutely no reason that a robot vacuum couldn't serve its own web interface.
This sounds like the Roborock S series. I went with lidar over camera because it can run in any lighting condition and I don’t have a need for poop detection.
That's a much requested feature. With imho two main challenges:
1. Much traffic data is private / requires licensing, however some countries have reasonable public data.
For example the TraffXML (https://gitlab.com/traffxml) project has some.
2. The project is free to use, but also volunteer driven. It requires setting up a privacy preserving "live data" infrastructure.
If you think this is a nice challenge and you can help, feel free to reach out!
I like the idea of Organic Maps in general, but using it in Hong Kong is awkward; not only because in many cases it uses Pinyin Mandarin place labels (which locals never use) but also because requires me to download 200+ MB of “China Guangdong”—a large but, critically, distinct in every de jure and de facto sense place beyond a border restriction with no free travel (considering in the case of, say, Kaliningrad, with the same situation and even smaller/sparser place, I would get a separate download). For me it raises questions about who exactly is behind the app and why should I trust its privacy promises.
Can't you just write an Github issue and suggest splitting of these areas? I remember them splitting some areas in the past (because map data are getting bigger and bigger)
There used to also be the interesting prospect of OpenTraffic: https://github.com/opentraffic . Unfortunately the main website appears to be down and the GitHub hasn't seen recent contributions, so I'm guessing the project is dead in the water :(
Cool projects! I actually had a look at you gtfs-server, to use Rust for processing GTFS files. Processing GTFS (basically large zipped text files) is quite resource intensive indeed, especially if you want to do it for the whole planet. What would you do differently now?
Thanks for bringing this up to hackernews! The challenge for OrganicMaps is to make it privacy preserving and offline usable, which means on device routing and getting as much information on the device as possible.
The referred document concerns the existing static part, it's a rather cumbersome to build it yourself at the moment. There is some routing logic in the app - I think from the Maps.me time - but currently disabled.
The idea is to redesign this - in the mentioned ticket - and divide it in static (e.g. stops, routes) and 'live' data (e.g. schedule changes). It requires an efficient infrastructure. It's all volunteer driven. If you want to help, feel free to contribute!
It seems like the serverside resource requirements to help with the privacy preserving aspect (and also to avoid DDoSing the data providers) would be non-trivial for a FOSS project like this.
I was wondering if a torrent-based architecture, where clients share updates with each other would help reduce the load. Any idea if it's been considered or would it just overcomplicate it for the number of clients involved and/or the latency for updates be too much to be of use?
Cartes.app is quite like an Organic Maps for the Web. So I don't have any of the offline limitations that you have, but feel free to explore the code if anything looks interesting. The development is in french but the code is mostly in english.
I agree with you on the issue with trust. The Atlantic compares the US developments from the last 10 years with what happened to the tower of Babel:
"Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech."
The main thing that I find wrong with this article is that it lays all the blame on social media. While it is a valid point, the mainstream media is also culpable for the public's growing lack of trust. It's disingenuous when it's not part of the conversation.
You stole my thunder! I was about to come here and say, “well damn, I’ll bet the Knights who say ‘NI!’ are pretty pissed!” but here you had to go beating me to the punch (line)… :-)
One of the driving forces behind the neonicotinoids theory is a toxicologist called Henk Tennekes, who used to work as a consultant for Solvay, Roche, Monsanto en Sandoz (now known as Syngenta). Basically he claims that the toxicity was underestimated as it grows with time, the damage to the nerve system in insects is irreversible.
The pesticides also go into the surface water, where they found a link between higher surface-water concentrations of imidacloprid - a specific neonicotinoid - and a decline of birds that feed on insects.
Perhaps a better source in English, the EU policy advisory report from the European Academies Science Advisory Council from 2015 on Ecosystem services, agriculture and neonicotinoids.
If you look at the Budapest Memorandum, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine also voluntarily gave up their nuclear arsenals by becoming a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in exchange for security guarantees.