StrawberryPigtails

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20187958

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

He has also co-authored scores of academic papers on a diverse range of research fields, including cryptography, systems security, and data privacy, including the protection of human genomic data. I have personally spoken to him on three occasions for articles here, here, and here.

"None of this is in any way normal"

In recent weeks, Wang's email account, phone number, and profile page at the Luddy School were quietly erased by his employer. Over the same time, Indiana University also removed a profile for his wife, Nianli Ma, who was listed as a Lead Systems Analyst and Programmer at the university's Library Technologies division.

According to the Herald-Times in Bloomington, a small fleet of unmarked cars driven by government agents descended on the Bloomington home of Wang and Ma on Friday. They spent most of the day going in and out of the house and occasionally transferred boxes from their vehicles. TV station WTHR, meanwhile, reported that a second home owned by Wang and Ma and located in Carmel, Indiana, was also searched. The station said that both a resident and an attorney for the resident were on scene during at least part of the search.

Attempts to locate Wang and Ma have so far been unsuccessful. An Indiana University spokesman didn't answer emailed questions asking if the couple was still employed by the university and why their profile pages, email addresses and phone numbers had been removed. The spokesman provided the contact information for a spokeswoman at the FBI's field office in Indianapolis. In an email, the spokeswoman wrote: "The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at homes in Bloomington and Carmel Friday. We have no further comment at this time."

Searches of federal court dockets turned up no documents related to Wang, Ma, or any searches of their residences. The FBI spokeswoman didn't answer questions seeking which US district court issued the warrant and when, and whether either Wang or Ma is being detained by authorities. Justice Department representatives didn't return an email seeking the same information. An email sent to a personal email address belonging to Wang went unanswered at the time this post went live. Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown.

Fellow researchers took to social media over the weekend to register their concern over the series of events.

"None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???"

In the same thread, Matt Blaze, a McDevitt Professor of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University said: "It's hard to imagine what reason there could be for the university to scrub its website as if he never worked there. And while there's a process for removing tenured faculty, it takes more than an afternoon to do it."

Local news outlets reported the agents spent several hours moving boxes in an out of the residences. WTHR provided the following details about the raid on the Carmel home:

Neighbors say the agents announced "FBI, come out!" over a megaphone.

A woman came out of the house holding a phone. A video from a neighbor shows an agent taking that phone from her. She was then questioned in the driveway before agents began searching the home, collecting evidence and taking photos.

A car was pulled out of the garage slightly to allow investigators to access the attic.

The woman left the house before 13News arrived. She returned just after noon accompanied by a lawyer. The group of ten or so investigators left a few minutes later.

The FBI would not say what they were looking for or who is under investigation. A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today. We have no further comment at this time.”

Investigators were at the house for about four hours before leaving with several boxes of evidence. 13News rang the doorbell when the agents were gone. A lawyer representing the family who answered the door told us they're not sure yet what the investigation is about.

This post will be updated if new details become available. Anyone with first-hand knowledge of events involving Wang, Ma, or the investigation into either is encouraged to contact me, preferably over Signal at DanArs.82. The email address is: dan.goodin@arstechnica.com.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30720427

One bit (out of context) from the article that made me chuckle:

Rubio told Sikorski: “No one has made any threats about cutting Ukraine off from Starlink. And say thank you because without Starlink, Ukraine would have lost this war long ago and Russians would be on the border with Poland right now.”

In fact, Russians are already on the border with Poland because the Russian region of Kaliningrad lies on Poland’s northern border.

One bit (out of context) from the article that made me chuckle:

Rubio told Sikorski: “No one has made any threats about cutting Ukraine off from Starlink. And say thank you because without Starlink, Ukraine would have lost this war long ago and Russians would be on the border with Poland right now.”

In fact, Russians are already on the border with Poland because the Russian region of Kaliningrad lies on Poland’s northern border.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24748170

Supply and Demand.

If there is no supply of good public infrastructure, inclusive institutions, good governance, etc. people will go elsewhere.

And also, lol.

Original Post:

I recently had a Proxmox node I was using as a NAS fail catastrophically. Not surprising as it was repurposed 12 year old desktop. I was able to salvage my data drive, but the boot drive was toast. Looks like the sata controller went out and fried the SSD I was using as the boot drive. This system was running TurnKey FileServer as a LXC with the media storage on a subvol on a ZFS storage pool.

My new system is based on OpenMediaVault and I'm am happy with it, but I'm hitting my head against a brick wall trying to get it to mount the ZFS drive from the old system. I tried installing ZFS using the instructions here as OMV is based on Debian but haven't had any luck so far.

Solved:

1. Download and install OMV Extras
2. OMV's web admin panel, go to System -> Plugins and install the Kernel Plugin
3. Go to System -> Kernel and click the blue icon that says Proxmox (looks like a box with a down arrow as of Jan 2025) and install the latest Proxmox kernel from the drop down menu.
4. Reboot
5. Go back to the web panel, System -> Plugins and install the plugin openmediavault-zfs.
6. Go to Storage -> zfs -> Pools and click on the blue icon Tools -> Import Pool. From here you can import all existing zfs pools or a single pool.

I've been looking for a good Bluetooth speaker for a while now. My old one, a 1st gen Anker SoundCore that I bought in late in 2018 decided to quit working on me 2020 when the battery failed. I decided that I didn't want another one that would only last me a year or two before it failed. The ones that have actually decent sound just cost too much for me to be able to justify that. That one requirement turned out to be a big problem as almost nobody makes a decent Bluetooth speaker with a replaceable battery. Except, the power tool makers.

About 15 years ago (give or take) I had owned a Ryobi Bluetooth radio. The sound was crap and it wasn't exactly what you would call compact but it was loud and it took a good 5 years of actual, honest to god, abuse until it finally died. It fell into a pan of used motor oil. I cried. Not so much over the radio but rather over the 4ah 18v battery that had been powering it. Those things were damned expensive at the time.

So when I noticed that Ryobi had produced a new Bluetooth speaker, I figured that it would probably take a beating. Question was, how was the sound and more importantly for me, how loud could it get. Unfortunately, everybody seemed to be sleeping on it and hadn't done more than a cursory review on it.

Price wise, it's a bit eye watering with a $100USD MSRP with a 2ah battery included but it does seem to be on discount frequently. Which is good because I recommend getting a 3ah battery for it.

The speaker is a triangular rod a little taller than a 20oz coke bottle. Call it 8 inches long and 2 across. Feels well built, though not as solid as the Anker Soundcore. Ryobi claims that it has a IP67 rating and there are rubber bumpers on every surface the thing could possibly rest on. Feels like it weighs about a pound and a half.

On one end there are it's controls, a power button, play/pause, volume, and the Verse Link pairing button (which is not for pairing Bluetooth). On the other end is the battery door held closed by a toggle clasp and sealed with a rubber gasket. And finally on the side, opposite the speaker, is a USB-C port for charging only. I did check, and no, he charge port will not power the unit without a battery installed.

Sadly, no 3.5mm audio jack nor can the USB-C port handle audio in. This is a Bluetooth only speaker.

Bluetooth pairing is pretty simple, just press and hold the play/pause button while it is on and it will drop its current connection and enter pairing mode. I'm not sure what Bluetooth standards it is using, but the only device I have that I couldn't get to pair with it was my 9 year old Dell Latitude. It could see the speaker but I was never able to get the laptop to pair with it. My desktop did not have the same problem so it's probably just the ancient bluetooth chip on my laptop.

The sound quality is excellent within the limits of my damaged hearing. An audiophile coworker of mine (whose hearing is even worse due to spinning lug nuts off heavy trucks with air impacts all day) says the bass is a bit muddy but otherwise good. As for how loud, at max volume, playing Crab Rave on YouTube, my Apple Watch was showing 90dB 3 feet from the speaker. So more than loud enough for my needs and loud enough to continue damaging my hearing.

Ryobi claims that the 2ah battery it comes with will last "up to" 6 hours and that seems about right. The one time I actually used the battery it came with, it died about an hour before my 8 hour shift ended. I put the 3ah battery in it and it lasts longer than my attention span for testing it. In practice, the 3ah battery lasts me about a shift and a half, playing audio about 60% - 70% of the time.

The batteries this uses has a pair of party tricks, the first of which is actually pretty useful. While you can certainly charge the battery using an external charging dock or via the speaker's own USB-C port, the batteries themselves have a USB-C port on them which can be used for charging the battery. It can charge via any USB charger.

The second party trick is that the battery can also be used as a very small, very slow, 10W USB-C PD power bank to charge a phone or something. I get the feeling that the engineer in charge of designing the battery said "It's got the port, why not!" and nobody in accounting thought to stop them. And no, that ability does not pass through the speaker, and yes, I tried. Though I did find out that my iPhone 16 and iPad Air can themselves act as powerbanks, which I did not know.

About the Verse Link. It's not something I have a use for and haven't tested, but Ryobi crows about this feature more that anything else about this speaker so I figure I'll mention it. The Verse Link is a way to link up several Verse Link speakers up to a single audio source with a range of up to 125'. Again, not something I have a use for, but might be handy at a pool party or something.

All in all, I really like this speaker. Is it "buy it for life"? Probably not, but it does have the makings to be a piece of kit that will last a good long time. How long, I suspect, will depend more on whether Ryobi kills off the USB Lithium line like they did the Tek4 line. I don't think they will, but time will tell.