@mcc@mastodon.social
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mcc

@mcc@mastodon.social

glitch girl

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rotopenguin, to random
@rotopenguin@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc wait. Did Youtube kill their games lineup, and then bring it back (so that they can kill it again)?

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-playables/

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@rotopenguin I think that they didn't ever kill it, they were just running it as a limited-audience experiment and they shut down the experiment and shortly after launched it for the general public.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I thiiiiink that all this email actually means is "Find My Device will now include bluetooth devices at their location last seen by an Android phone, which means that if your phone is disconnected from the Internet but Bluetooth is on then Find My Device can still find it if another Android device passes nearby (unless you disable this feature)".

But uhhhh wow Google used some pretty alarming language to describe it

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

One thing I'm scratching my head about. They say the device location data is "encrypted" with your "PIN" and are "not available to Google". I'm confused how this works given that the Bluetooth reporting is done by other devices. How do those other devices know which PIN to encrypt the device location with, without making some online query?

(The email I'm quoting here does not seem to be online, but they link to a support page containing some of the same information: https://support.google.com/android/answer/14796936?visit_id=638525094126856662-3948161146&p=find_offline_devices&rd=1#finding_offline_devices )

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@prozacchiwawa I don't think I understand how this would be different from it storing its last self-reported location from the last time it had Internet, unless the device is somehow transmitting a bluetooth id while it's turned off, which sounds wrong.

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

A running problem with Google's approach to privacy is that they're often vague about which privacy guarantees are technical guarantees, and which google guarantees personally by a privacy policy under which certain data sent to servers is not retained.

I imagine a nation-state actor within Google's network observing all data coming in to the Find My Device bluetooth snitch network. If the data's encrypted with a key, could they determine which owner's key each report is encrypted with?

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Maybe there's a conference paper somewhere that goes into the technical detail this support page elides. (Like, it's nice to see Google putting such emphasis on "end to end encryption" but that's less helpful than it could be when it's not clear what's being encrypted, how it gets the key, or in general what the two "ends" are exactly.)

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@prozacchiwawa How does the "other phone" know what key to encrypt the report with? If the phone-being-tracked reports the key over bluetooth that makes sense, but then how does it work with headphones? Is the idea these are special headphones ("fast pair")?

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@jvb Is my Android phone transmitting via BLE when it is powered off? How long has it been doing this? How can I prevent it from doing this (does turning off bluetooth prevent it? is it possible to turn on bluetooth while turning off BLE transmission)?

Alternately: If my phone has the ability to transmit BLE while turned off, is it possible for me to exploit this (for example from a Flipper Zero) without going through Apple/Google's central srevers?

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@tojiro I think we've had a conversation like this about Google privacy policies before, but this is the kind of information that would be very important to disclose "and here's a list of devices that have this feature" when mentioning the feature in public comms!

Do you know, how clearly is this disclosed to a Pixel 8 owner when setting up their device, and to what degree can it be turned off (eg, could offline beacon be off while Bluetooth is on, or vice versa)?

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@prozacchiwawa So is the idea the "compatible earbuds" have on-board CPUs with capacity to encrypt these reports?

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@aadmaa Google has several options for the PIN including a long text password.

But even with a long password, consider Claire's question here: https://social.sitedethib.com/@Claire/112519638647135227

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@tojiro I guess the question is, does changing your level of participation in the network change something on the server side or on the device side. Ie if you've chosen only to participate in certain areas is the BTLE-while-off still on, it's just the reports aren't forwarded?

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@tojiro (Among my many questions here: It seems a potentially useful way to use this feature would be a mode where Find My Device is not participated in, but BTLE-while-off would still be on to the extent a device in the environment with an appropriate knock would still be able to find its position. But if Google isn't even clearly disclosing the existence of this BTLE-while-off feature in support documents, that implies not much user control either.)

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@thomastc Yeah. "Not available to Google" clearly means something very specific and since they don't disclose what it's hard to say if it's reasonable or not

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@tojiro Thank you, I will read this

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@sjjh @Claire The HSM is a chip in Android phones, right? So it seems like this still doesn't explain Google's claims about "compatible earbuds"!

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@sjjh @Claire No, that makes sense. Although among the things I'm wondering are "what are the battery and manufacturing costs associated with adding this feature to earbuds?". I don't know what I'd do with that information, but I'm curious.

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

the existence of lsbians implies the existence of msbians

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@whitequark lsb_ian

onelson, to random
@onelson@mastodon.social avatar

I'm never going to verify any of these screenshots I see of google search returning nonsense answers.

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@onelson imo, the fact this is impossible is a sign there's something wrong with a utility program that randomly does something different every time you run it and for every person who runs it

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I hate Unity!! I hate Unity!! I hate Unity!!!

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@chris Unreal and Unity have very different architectures and licensing models so this assumption is not correct

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@chris I mean I believe it had actually simply locked up, as evidenced by the fact that it went on for 20 minutes without finishing but when I canceled, deleted what it had downloaded, and tried again it finished in 7

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@chris 7 is kind of a large number but it is still less than infinity

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Okay. Lately I've been asking some cursed MSBuild questions. I now ask the cursedestest. I could ask this question to ways:

  • In MSBuild, how do I split a string into a list?

Or, in more detail:

  • I want to put a newline-separated list of filenames into a text file, and then have both CMake and MSBuild (vcxproj) interpret the text file as a list of files to compile. How can I do this on the MSBuild side?

(Things I've tried, which didn't work, below:)

mcc, (edited )
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Since I was talking about this last week:

Say you have a C++ project, you want to build it with Visual Studio on Windows and CMake elsewhere (say the usual process of CMake generating vcxproj is not just then convenient) BUT you want to have the ability to share information between CMake and Vcxproj.

I found a solution where you can write a newline delineated file which both your CMakeLists and your msbuild script can import as list variables, and I posted sample code:

https://github.com/mcclure/vcxproj-cmake-sharing-example

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

In the sample code above I use this to make a shared list of filenames which both the CMakeLists and the vcxproj independently compile, but you could imagine also sharing things like preprocessor definitions this way.

There is a very specific platform which the ability in the above sample code is actually very useful for, due to on that platform it being seemingly impossible to generate working VCXProj's from CMake, but… because of an NDA I cannot elaborate lol

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

For the last two years I've been semi-daily posting "What I'm Listening to Today" links here. Mastodon has some problems with threads containing hundreds of posts, so I re-create the thread once a year.

If you'd like to see, here's my "year two" thread: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/110266770603341546

Or, alternately, every song from year two in the least practical format possible: A 301-song, 38-hour YouTube playlist (note: video #1 contains flashing):

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLIjft6ja7DM_kacOW8zo2vtr-aWpTNX6

And here's the thread for "year three":

mcc,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

What I'm listening to today: "Desmorph", AcidTonic

Made on one of those wall-sized modular synth racks, the artist describes the video with "Loose ended live improv. First take."

A chill but determined groove undergirded by erratic drums, with a sense of low menace starting to creep in in the second half. Good zone-out music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkh9xgNaplU

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