I can ship a cross-platform application that accesses a hardware device without having to deal with all the platform specifics, and with decent sandboxing of my driver.
I think one way to make it more "secure" against unwitting users would be to only support WebUSB for devices that have a WebUSB descriptor - would allow "origin" checking.
Yep, I’ve bought a few thermal printers recently and webusb support (marketed as Chromebook support) was a major deciding factor. Thermal printers aren’t well supported by built in printer drivers, so it’s nice to not have to install some questionable driver software with access to my whole computer and instead have a sandboxed chrome extension with enumerated permissions. I’ve also poked around the extensions’ minified js source out of curiosity and as a basic security audit
It was also nice trying out some RTL-SDR apps as soon as I got it without having to figure out how to build and install the Debian packages from source first.
It drives me nuts every time I have to switch from Firefox to Chrome to use webusb or webserial.
Yep. FlipperZero, Android, now some random chinese handheld radio - just some of the things I didn't have to install some crap unsandboxed app to flash in the last 3 months. Absolutely revolutionary.
This right here is the reason I like it and web bluetooth too, with them 'just working' regardless of platform I'm using.
Miss me with some unsigned questionable app that only runs on windows as admin.
You can ship an offline, standalone HTML file you can open in your browser too (this might not happen often but my point is it's not inherent to the technology)
That was always the case. Lots of “flasher” applications have had web dependencies where they’d download the latest firmware to a temp directory before flashing.
Aren't most retrocomputing USB devices running open source firmware? Adding a descriptor "WebUSB supported" is a few commits and a firmware update away.
For me PulseView unfortunately has been very buggy and I never really got it to work (neither with an old Saleae 8, a new Saleae Pro 16, or an FX2 clone) well and without constant crashes.
I tried on Linux & mac, but never could get it to run well. I'd be super curious to chat with someone who had a different experience on what you've been doing differently from me!
I love the idea of Sigrok, so would love to get it to work (well) for me
PulseView shouldn't be crashing a lot at all, honestly. Were you running the nightly or the 0.4.2 release? The 0.4.2 release is rather outdated, I'm working on making a new release soon to fix that.
Not my experience. I got a cheap Sparkfun logic analyzer on a whim and it sat idle until I had a work problem that I spent a lot of WFH time debugging with it using Pulseview.
I later recommended that we buy a Saleae analyzer just in case the SF one was hiding a problem and I didn't find any substantive difference between the two.
It is my firm belief that everybody should have one of those $10 FX2 boards in their drawer, either for debugging some electronics board stuff (arduino and up), or just for learning about digital signalling. $10 and Pulseview is all you need!
SD cards do not increase the memory available to user applications. They are storage devices, even if the technology behind them has the word memory in the name.
It's not the memory that's the problem, it's that games like FGO require 10GB or more of flash storage which is most of a 16GB device particularly when you consider overhead for software updates. It's not like the game has high memory requirements but it sure has a lot of levels, textures and stuff.
It's amusing the the IBM Mainframe world still uses the word "storage" to describe RAM.
- Enable VoiceOver (Settings -> Accessibility) and learn how to enable/disable it (triple-tap the side button. Might be difficult for elderly) - Apple video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDm7GiKra28
- Having a learning partner really helps the blind person. Try to learn to use a phone blind with him, it will allow you to help debug his (most definitely occuring) issues
- Watch some videos on how blind people use the iPhone, lots of tips there. For example Molly Burke, or even simple ones like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FVjLXIaBC4
- For elderly, an iPad is really nice. Especially as dexterity gets worse it's easier to use blindly. Also usability between iPhone and iPad is almost the same, so easy transition between both (i.e. on the go)
- For movies, check out Greta. It plays the AD in parallel with a movie via the iPhone - so they can watch movies together with the family, without everyone listening to AD https://www.gretaundstarks.de/starks/GretaAndStarks
And bring lots of patience :)
What is really amazing is how fast people tend to improve: VoiceOver lets you adjust the speech speed etcpp, and so it "grows" with you
I worked under a blind manager when the iPhone first came out. He was a former dev before his vision started to go. He was a power user while blind, and knew twice as many hot keys as I did, had his screen reader speed cranked up to a rate incomprehensible to me.
I remember how happy he was with the iPhone. He said it was the first device he was able to use without special accessibility software, and that was in 2007, I imagine the experience is better today.
I’m sure you’re (OP) already on the ball with ways to help him, but if you haven’t looked into movies with described audio, apparently it makes a whale of a difference.
One other non-obvious but major thing there for a newly blind person using an iPhone - the Magnifier app can generate basic spoken descriptions of whatever object or text you point it at [1][2], including following your hand to tell you what text is on button labels [3].
Apple accessibility including VoiceOver is amazing and from everything I read second to none. Though I don’t have first hand experience on that, I did spend several hours one time lined up for an iPhone talking with a blind girl - she was showing me how she uses both her Mac and iPhone with voiceover and with the screen totally black. Was a fun night.
Is there a website that works like youtube but for audio only? Because otherwise thoughtfully produced videos are going to be the best way for someone who doesn't know how to use a screen reader efficiently to gather information.
Podcasts generally are the audio alternative to YouTube. Thankfully, podcasts remain largely decentralised and aren't restricted to a single website or service.
Podcast search is something of a challenge. There are a few websites that claim to do this though in my experience they do so poorly.
Podcast Republic (Android & iOS) is an app I've used that has an excellent podcast search capability --- both podcasts as a whole and individual episodes, with shownotes indexed (protip to podcast creators: your shownotes are themselves and excellent discovery tool, do not neglect them).
PR isn't my main podcast driver (I use AntennaPod from F-Droid), but I will bring it up to search for specific content when I need to do so.
Either I'm not blind or I'm not using a phone, because I have an android. With pass phrase, thank you very much.
Both IPhone and Android have screen readers, with Android having the ability for alternative sr-s and voices. The Iphone is more integrated as far as I know, but the default google apps are pretty accessible on Android as well. There is a mailing list for blind android users if you want more advice, but if your grandfather is used to the Iphone, there is no reason not to use it. The default apple recourse on the topic is applevis, if I remember correctly.
you are right. the sr pronounced "used" as "use" and I've took it for more generalizating statement than it was. Still, the idea of removing security because people are presumed unable to enter their passwords or because it would make it more convenient for someone else triggered me badly.
The Game Boy ROM is so much fun to dump in various ways. For example you can clock glitch it by just by scraping a contact with a jumper wire:
https://youtu.be/64FgfhfvJ4s?t=154
Gameboy is really slow when compared to modern hardware. One ECDSA signature that takes around 100ms on Trezor (32-bit CPU @ 120 MHz) would take around a minute on GameBoy (8-bit CPU @ ~4 MHz.
If we're talking about GameBoy Advance (32-bit CPU @ 25 MHz) - this more plausible but still 5 times slower than Trezor.
I think waiting a full minute is a perfectly justifiable trade-off for a dystopian future that at least forces people to have an iconic '80's handheld strapped to their hip. If we're headed toward a dystopia, we can at least try to set the stage for a certain standard of aesthetics.
Unfortunately the software support for the BladeRF 2.0 micro is not yet very mature - the official installation instructions do not work (don't install udev rules etc).
I would recommend waiting a couple of months and see how the ecosystem develops.
The HackRF ($300) or RTL-SDR ($20, but RX only) are the go-to hardware for consumers/hackers. These devices are more limited than some of the newer SDRs, but the software support is a lot better.
For software, the HackRF is probably the best ecosystem. It's open hardware, and the firmware is GPLv2.
The software ecosystem for SDR is pretty messy, pretty much all of the consumer/hacker SDR software is hard to set up correctly, and Linux only. The easiest thing to use is the Pentoo distro, it has all of the common tools, up to date and included in the base image.
I can ship a cross-platform application that accesses a hardware device without having to deal with all the platform specifics, and with decent sandboxing of my driver.
I think one way to make it more "secure" against unwitting users would be to only support WebUSB for devices that have a WebUSB descriptor - would allow "origin" checking.