Welcome to security news theatre :(

I don’t think espressif would bother suing, these kind of misshapen claims get constantly made against popular projects all of the time. It’s just unusual to see so much coverage about this particular one.

Not so say that externally attackable vulnerabilities in an ESP32 don’t exist, they might. Bluetooth devices have an awful track record. But making them up doesn’t help the world.

I happily ran THUGPRO under wine, so I assume rethawed would be the same. Dunno.

Where am I even supposed to buy it if I wanted to, which I don’t really,

Looks like it’s abandonware. Yeah, publisher dropped the ball.

Bleepingcomputer’s title and article are very misleading, the presentation did NOT reveal a backdoor into an ESP32. It looks like Bleepingcomputer completely misunderstood what was presented (EDIT: and tarlogic isn’t helping with the first sentence on their site).

Instead the presentation was about using an ESP32 as a tool to attack other devices. Additionally they discovered some undocumented commands that you can send from the ESP32 processor to the ESP32 radio peripheral that let you take control of it and potentially send some extra forms of traffic that could be useful. They did NOT present anything about the ESP32 bluetooth radio being externally attackable.

Another perspective that might help: imagine you have a cheap bluetooth chipset that is open source and well documented. That would give you more than what the presentation just found. Would Bleepingcomputer then be reporting it’s a backdoor threatening millions of devices?

Changing virtual desktops works for me, no patches needed. I have to use it often because of how many games don’t understand multiple monitors.

Technically they have some differences, but the biggest from a user’s perspective is how they are delivered and by whom. Wine is manually installed by you from your distro’s package repo. Proton is provided by steam when you install a windows game on a Linux steam instance. If one breaks then you complain to the relevant party.

Might be worth checking out ReThawed.. You can choose the physics models, UI, characters, tricks and maps from all of the old THPS games.

I tried THUGPRO previously (another community mod in similar vein) and it was fun, especially the mods to the park editor (overlapping objects!) and Sonic Adventure maps.

Doh. Got it now.

You had me excited that there was another 'gong I hadn’t heard about, but I can’t find Cottongong on a map. I am getting wooshed?

gets off train after long trip “Oh no, I’m in the Wrong Gong!”

It looks identical to me. Same size before clicking, same size after right clicking -> Open image in new tab.

it would be interesting to know if the hole is connected right through to the barb or not

I feel very uncomfortable with the thought of probing this thing with long metal rods whilst looking down the end.

maybe hint it to police

I guess I could try and send them the pics and ask them about this “suspicious object”. Hopefully it’s just a bong.

(I can’t quite see it being an arsenic cannon, but yeah I wasn’t planning on trusting my copper oxide assumption regardless xD)

I was going to reply with “you can’t use barbed fittings at high pressures”, but I looked it up and found some claiming 150psi (10 atmospheres). Huh. Perhaps this did start life as a hydraulic cylinder that has had some parts lopped off.

Not sure what the tube is filled with, but it looks like a lot of corrosion.

I don’t think it’s built up corrosion. The pipe is steel and corrodes to red/brown iron oxide, as visible around the circumference at the end. The green colour in the filling is not an iron oxide. It might be a copper oxide, or some dye in the white material.

Hmm. I admittedly don’t have experience here, but I guess that makes sense.

I’m not sure how you would attach an elbow to a barb fitting though. A rubber pipe is usually used on these (but that would then burn/melt).

Is plaster of paris usually used to make bongs? I’ve only really noticed plastic bottle ones in the bush. I guess plaster will survive burning things better than plastic, but it’s also porous.

Anything odd with temperatures or power draws perhaps? nv-top shows both for me (but I run an AMD GPU + non-proprietary drivers), otherwise lm-sensors might be good.

nvtop seems to show normal usage

Neither the GPU nor CPU utilisation change at the 30 min mark? If one is pegged at 100% then it’s probably hard to work out what is going on. Running a singleplayer game staring at a wall and configured with limited framrate might let you run both the CPU and GPU at less than 100%, perhaps making it easier to see if one or the other suddenly changes.

The rough (frit) glaze surface would be the opposite of what you want in a HV bushing, because they would wick and store conductive water.

Interestingly it’s on the both the top and the bottom. Perhaps this high surface area makes it more compatible with some specific glues; allowing you to stack a pile of these pieces together to make a full bushing? That might also explain why there is not hole in the middle, this could be a compression style bushing stack for holding wires up in the air off a surface.

Have not seen this mentioned anywhere else so I’ll add: this is a “board edge connector”. A whole PCB will plug into this socket, rather than a plastic connector on the end of some wires.

Picture plugging a graphics card into a socket on a motherboard. It’s that type of connector. The PCB it will plug into will have exposed metal pads on a bit that juts out.

I hesitant to say that this shouldn’t affect you. I’m sure that somehow, somewhere, Optus still managed to ruin your day. Hope it resolves SynopsisTant.

There are no changes to the nbn wholesale pricing of these speed tiers arising from the speed increases.

Interesting, but how will this affect the price for end users? There are other fees charged to the ISPs too?

I am suspicious because NBNco only mentions wholesale pricing in this article, not end user pricing. They would have modelled it and then chosen not to talk about it. They might not technically be the entity finally billing you, but they’re responsible for strong and direct impacts on what users pay.

It’s a gorgeous game experience. Not to mention they put so many other gamedevs to shame with their technical accomplishments (especially in the expansion – flooding waves in a ringworld!).

Don’t look up spoilers. Get yourself a copy and play it. Find somewhere to land your spaceship :)

Atomic wafers made by the techo-church-state? Or have I got this back to front and this is how the non-technical society irradiates its children?