SN 930: Rowhammer Indelible Fingerprinting

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

With regard to Firefox, I assume it is unverified (deep testing) add-ins that are the focus and the sites are those with high risk - financial or personal data processing sites, such as banks, credit agencies etc. and they want to stop add-ins stealing data or making fraudulent transactions.

Regarding the Russian Sovereign Internet story, surely, if the rail system being offline before the “test”, once they cut themselves off, things should have returned to normal, as the Ukrainians no longer be able to reach their servers?

That was my issue. Something so potentially important, should not be left to assumptions. They should have been more clear about what they’re doing. They should produce a list of the plugins that are verified, they should produce a list of the sites they consider worth protecting, and I shouldn’t have to guess if they’re really serious about this, or if it’s all just marketing hooey.

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About smoke detector disposal:

I too have recently replaced a few of my smoke detectors. Two of which probably should have been replaced (at least) a couple of years ago because they are the really cheap ones that have three year life span. But instead of rambling, I’ll get to my point. Because I have recently put up new (and better) smoke detectors, I have “researched” how you should dispose of detectors that you want to discard. According to who handles waste disposal for me, you can legally discard household detectors with your household refuge, although its website also states that the manufacturer may have a program to take back old detector.

I’m going to leave the link to the site’s search function for where I discovered this information because the link you want is technically a PDF. This way you can verify that it’s my local government’s website before opening the link to the PDF. https://www.durhamnc.gov/Search?searchPhrase=Properly%20Dispose%20of%20Smoke%20Detectors

Glad to know it’s legal - but is it good to put all that Americium in the landfill? Maybe it does’t matter.

From Wikipedia:

In the end, it’s all going to be neptunium-237, for 10 million+ years at least…

Given the amount in each detector (that has it), it might not matter. From what I gather it’s only 0.25 µg. There’s probably much more serious things to worry about in a landfill than that amount of radioactive material. Especially given people may not replace their detectors as often as they should. While I did replace one of the detectors shortly after moving into my townhouse five years ago, I did it because it didn’t work. I may have receive a small shock (literally) when I found out that it was a wired smoke detector. Nothing serious, just unpleasant luckily. When one of the two X Sensor detectors in the bedrooms started chirping about a month ago, I noticed that the sticker says it only has an effective lifespan of three years. That got me to look at the detector in the kitchen. That one says it has a life of 10 years and was manufactured in October of 2013, so I could have waited to replace it, but I wanted to put a battery powered Nest detect so if there was a problem on either floor the other would also sound. Not that it really matters with the layout of my house. You will hear either because one is at the base of the stairs and the other is at the top. I then put a 10-year Z-wave enabled detector in the master bedroom that will notify me of problem with my Smartthings hub. Technically, I haven’t replace the cheap 3-year detector that’s in the guest bedroom, but that room almost never has anyone in it, so I am addressing other things before I get another Z-wave detector for that room.

Back to the point I wanted to make before I rambled, smoke detectors should be labelled as having Americium in them if it is in them. The cheap X Sensor detectors do not state they have it, but the 10-year Kidde detector I took down does say it uses Americium. Surprisingly, Kidde does not seem to offer a take back program. X Sensor doesn’t seem to have one either, but I’m less worried about those because they aren’t radioactive.

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Well for better or worse I just threw all the old smoke detectors in the trash.

It’s better than eating them, anyway.

Just getting around to listening to this episode. For some strange reason, Pocketcasts didn’t download this, or the following weeks episode. Strange…

I’ve had this happen a few times with Pocket Casts, for some reason a feed will stop working and I will have to subscribe.