2026-03-25 04:00:36
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is tasked with regulating both wired and wireless communications, which also includes a national security component. This is how previously the FCC tossed networking gear made by Huawei and foreign-manufactured drones onto its Covered List, effectively banning it from sale in the US. Now foreign-made consumer routers have been added to this list, barring explicit conditional approval on said list that would exempt them during a ‘transition phase’.
As per the FCC fact sheet, this follows after determination by an interagency body that such routers “pose unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States [..]”. This document points us to the National Security Determination PDF, which attempts to lay out the reasoning. In it is noted that routers are an integral part of every day life, and compromised routers are a major risk factor, ergo it follows that only US-manufactured routers are to be trusted.
These – so far fictional – US-manufactured consumer routers would have to feature ‘trusted supply chains’, which would seem to imply onshoring a large industrial base, though without specifying how deep this would have to go it’s hard to say what would be involved. The ‘supporting evidence’ section also only talks about firmware-related vulnerabilities, which would imply that US firmware developers do not produce CVEs.
Currently there do not appear to be any specific details on what router manufacturers are supposed to do about this whole issue, though they can continue to sell previously FCC-approved routers in the US.
Although hardware backdoors are definitely a possibility, this requires a fair bit of effort within the supply chain that should generally also fairly easily to detect. Yet after for example Bloomberg claimed in 2018 that Supermicro gear had been infested with hardware backdoors, this started a years-long controversy.
Meanwhile actually verified issues with Supermicro hardware are boringly due to software CVEs. In that particular issue from 2024 two CVEs were discovered involving a lack of validation of a newly uploaded firmware image.
All of which is reminiscent of an early 2024 White House ‘memory safety appeal’ that smelled very strongly of red herring. Although it’s easy to point at compromised hardware with scary backdoors and sneaky software backdoors hidden deep inside firmware of servers and networking devices, the truth of the matter is that sloppy input validation is still by far the #1 cause of fresh CVEs each year, especially if you look at the CVEs that are actually being actively exploited.
As for this de-facto ban on new routers being sold in the US, this will correspondingly not change much here. The best defense against issues with networking equipment is still to practice network hygiene by keeping tabs on what is being sent on the LAN and WAN sides, while a government could e.g. force consumer routers to pass a strict independent hardware and software audit paid for by the manufacturer.
Speaking as someone who used to run DIY routers for the longest time built around FreeSCO and Smoothwall Linux, there’s also always the option of turning any old PC into a router by putting a bunch of NICs and WNICs into it and run SmoothWall, OpenWRT, etc.. A router is after all just a specialized computer, regardless of what the government feels that it identifies as.
2026-03-25 02:30:26
Creating PCBs at home is quite easy these days (vias not withstanding), but even the best DIY methods usually can’t match the resolution offered by commercial PCB production lines. Large traces are easy enough to carve out of copper-backed FR1 or FR4 with even a mill, what if you need something more like 100 µm sized traces with similar clearance? This is what [Giangix] has been experimenting with, using both a fiber laser and chemical etching to see what approach gives the best results.
The thin copper clad boards are put on the 20 Watt fiber laser and held in place with the vacuum table that [Giangix] previously made, using the power of suction to make sure the board doesn’t move. The used laser specifies a minimum line width of 0.01 mm, so that’s clearly fine enough to engrave away the chemical resist layer that is sprayed on top of the copper layer.
After some experimentation, it was found that increasing the trace clearance between the 0.1 mm traces to a hair above 0.1 mm was necessary for the subsequent chemical etching step to work the best, as otherwise some copper was still likely to remain. The chemical etching bath mixture consists of hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide, in a ratio of 2 mL water to 2 mL 30% HCl and 2 drops of 35% H2O2. This is agitated for 90 s to get a pretty good result.
Although the final resistance measurements on the traces is a bit higher than theoretical, comments suggest that maybe some of the copper got removed along with the removal of the resist layer. Perhaps the most interesting question here is whether directly ablating the copper using the fiber laser would give even better results and bypass the etching chemicals.
2026-03-25 01:00:17
Although it may be hard to believe for current generations, there was a time when the Internet and the World Wide Web were not as integrated into society as it is today. The only forms of online ‘social media’ that existed came in the form of IRC, forums, BBSes, newsgroups and kin, while obtaining new software for your PC involved generally making your way over to a physical store to buy a boxed copy, at least officially.
In this era – and those before it – age-verification already existed, with various goods ranging from tobacco and alcohol to naughty adult magazines requiring you to pass some form of age check. Much like how movies also got age-gated, so did video games, with a sales clerk taking a very good look at you before selling you that naughty puzzle game or boxed copy of Quake 3.
Today we’re seeing a big fuss being made about online age-verification, with the claim being that it is ‘for the children’, but as any well-adjusted adult can attest to, this is essentially a big bucket of hogwash.
The concept of restricting certain types of drugs, entertainment, and the operating of automobiles and trucks to specific age groups is a popular one. The general reasoning is that you have to set a limit somewhere because you cannot have toddlers driving lifted 4x4s, smoking a big fat cigar, and chugging down a cold one. As for where set this limit, there is rarely more than scarce evidence for a particular age past childhood being more reasonable than any other, with claims of harm often being dubious at best.
In the case of exposing children to ‘harmful content’, whether in the form of video games or audiovisual entertainment, things get if possible even fuzzier, as proving that such content is indeed harmful is a tough ask. Realistically what we should primarily focus on as responsible adults and parents is the prevention of childhood trauma, as any reasonable person ought to be able to agree that inflicting trauma on a child is a certifiably Bad Thing.
In addition to this, there is also the importance of teaching children why certain types of behavior and excesses are bad, such as why you cannot drink soft drinks exclusively, why you need to eat your vegetables, why torturing small animals to death is absolutely not okay, and that Being Nice to Others is totally something to strive for.
Because children since time immemorial have sought to escape the suffocating hold of age restrictions, this raises the question of whether we can prove that this is in fact traumatic or in any way affects their behavior in a negative manner.
Although in the case of the pre-digital-everything age, sales clerks and adults had a lot more insight into what content you consumed, nobody really believed that with the right contacts you couldn’t get access to all the dirty magazines, violent video games and Parental Guidance (PG) or Adult Only (AO) rated movies.
The reason that I was playing Doom, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D and similar titles as a kid in the 1990s wasn’t due to me somehow passing as a certified adult or having an adult purchase it for me in a store, but because a computer-enthusiastic older cousin would copy them zipped up with ARJ across a bunch of floppy disks for me and my younger brother to enjoy. Think warez, but with a personal touch.
This kind of black market culture has always been pretty strong, from 1980s mix tapes and copy parties to buying copied audio CDs off someone at school by the late 90s, whether filled to the brim with explicit lyrics or not. This made ‘age restrictions’ mostly limited by one’s technological means and in how far one’s parents were aware of your illicit activities. Having your own TV and VHS/DVD player or multimedia-capable PC in your bedroom really broadened one’s horizons.
Considering that as a child I was also reading adult literature of the (mostly) non-nekkid variety, including the works of Stephen King and Jan Wolkers, as well as Lord of the Rings, there were many things that I did back then that were age-inappropriate. The main question remains whether any of that harmed or benefited me. This is a highly subjective question to ask, of course, but we do have some science to provide a more objective take on this subject.
Back in the 1990s the idea that violent video games were causing children to become more violent got a lot of traction, mostly due to fighting games and first person shooters like Doom entering the scene. To some people, the premise that playing these games in which you use a variety of weapons and techniques to violently turn pixelated monsters and opponents into pixelated piles of viscera would not have any effect on the developing brain of children and teenagers seemed inconceivable.
The 1993-1994 US Senate hearings on video games came in the wake of the release of controversial games like Night Trap, Mortal Kombat, and by the 1994 hearing, also Doom. Effectively this is where video game ratings became an integral part of this new kind of media, with the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) being established for the US and Canada.
Yet despite the premise being that exposure to violence and pornography at a young age causes individuals to perform criminal behavior, the crime statistics do not bear this out. In fact, there was a much sharper rise since the 1950s in violent crime across the US, peaking at around 1990, when incidentally lead in the form of tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive was phased out. This lends credence to the hypothesis that exposure to significant amounts of lead from a young age in one’s environment impaired cognitive development and resulted in said crime wave.
In a 2023 systematic review article by Virginia Lérida-Ayala et al. the causes of behavioral disorders in children and teenagers within the context of internet and video games are considered. Of note is that Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) is featured in the DSM-5, involving compulsive use of video games to the point that it impairs one’s ability to function.
This negative aspect is of course also contrasted with the positive effects of video games when it comes to things like socializing, cognitive skills and improved self-esteem.
In the review article it is found that playing a very large number of hours of video games per day is correlated strongly with negative effects, yet with the caveat that it’s important not to confuse the order of causality. A strong connection is found between ADHD and escaping into video games, in order to avoid the complexities of emotional and social interactions.
Much like with other types of addictions and substance abuse, they can often act as an escape from reality, in which case the solution does not lie in technological solutions like age restrictions or forcefully limiting the number of hours that a user can play as doing so would merely force the individual to find other forms of escape.
Yet even in these extreme cases of IGD the result is generally not violent or even criminal behavior, but rather a withdrawal from society. This contrasts with the final point being raised, with that of aggression and other forms of dysfunctional behavior, which when left uncontrolled can result in negative feedback from the child or teen’s environment. Yet here too underlying psychological issues such as OCD, depression, social anxiety disorder and so on would seem to be generally present.
In short, it would appear that violent and otherwise age-restricted content do not reprogram a child or teenager’s brain, but it can provide a coping mechanism for those who are dealing with certain mental and psychological issues. Or in other words, when a child or teen is feeling generally happy and content, there should be no negative effects from them indulging in video games and movies, even if they may be deemed to be not quite age-appropriate.
There are many ways in which a child can suffer trauma, but the primary question is whether exposure to age-restricted content can actually induce trauma. This somewhat goes back to the previous section where it’s important to not confuse the order of causality, as after all often trauma can precede problematic behavior rather than be caused by it.
Yet if we look at the list of the types of trauma, it’s not immediately obvious in what way voluntarily opting to listen to explicit lyrics, play violent or erotic video games, would in any way be ‘traumatic’. When contrasted with the list of childhood traumas, such a thing would seem to be rather benign as it’s done out of curiosity tinged with a hint of adventure due to it being ‘for adults’ or at least much older children.
When I look back upon my own experiences playing those violent games – with an occasional stop to pass a stripper in DN3D a few bucks to have them show me some very naughty pixels – it fills me more with a feeling of nostalgia rather than an overwhelming urge to acquire firearms or frequent a strip club.
I will admit that catching that the scene from Child’s Play where Chucky has been thrown into the lit hearth and comes walking out whilst on fire caused child me to fear walking into the dark garage later on. I would fortunately quickly get over that, though I’m still not a fan of snuff-type films like the Saw ones.
Ultimately, when it comes to childhood trauma, this doesn’t appear to be much of a reason to age-restrict certain types of content.
Since the arrival of so-called ‘social media’ the central tenet of never giving out your personal information which was front and center during the 1990s and 2000s got quite literally flipped around. Suddenly we had massive corporations practically begging you to give every last scrap of your personal information, every intimate detail of your daily life and with it every last second of your attention span. They even made an ‘everything device‘ for it in the form of a smartphone that practically ensures that you’ll never be alone with your thoughts again.
The upshot of this reversal is that instead of a mostly comfortable anonymous experience, suddenly every second that you’re awake has been turned into the equivalent of a schoolyard during recess, the watercooler banter at the office and similar social interactions. Along with this comes social anxiety, real-life bullying, and worse, with multiple studies indicating the real harm to children and teenagers in particular, but also to adults.
A recent response to this has been the introduction of social media bans for under-16 year olds, which by itself sounds like a good idea, but this fails to address the many problems that this introduces: from illicit access as demand remains, to the privacy nightmare that ensues as suddenly access to social media requires more stringent identification than accessing a pornographic website.
This raises many questions, such as whether ‘social media’ and the FOMO it introduces is a legitimate addiction, and whether we shouldn’t make being online more anonymous rather than enforce a rather dystopian ‘real name’ policy onto the populace. Contrast this to the old ‘don’t trust strangers’ adage that used to get hammered into the minds of young children, to prevent them from taking up offers from overly friendly people with candy-filled vans.
In how far do children today understand the dangers of the Internet? In a 2019 research article by Jun Zhao et al. a group of UK school children aged 6 – 10 were asked a range of questions in focus groups to see how they see these risks. Now that many children are practically raised by iPads and equivalents, it’s more relevant than ever that the adults in their environment teach them to be safe and to reinforce good online privacy behavior.
The paper was also summarized in an article by Chun Fei Lung, for those whose attention spans are beginning to drift at this point. A major take-away is that children will generally recognize situations that feel ‘scary’ or ‘annoying’, and they agreed that they should ask one of their parents about it before doing anything else.
Perhaps the scariest part is how trusting these children were when it came to platforms they were familiar with. We have seen issues recently pertaining to platforms like Roblox where such trust was exploited by unscrupulous adults, leading to age verification being implemented through the services of Persona. This same identity verification company has also been hired by Discord and has seen its services used in the UK and Australia for their respective online safety legislation.
This then gets us to the crux of modern day online safety, where online anonymity has been replaced with identify verification through private companies. It’s hard to shake the feeling that parental involvement and education campaigns by governments wouldn’t be significantly more effective here. As well as pose a significantly lower risk of having your identity stolen.
Of course, none of this is an easy issue to solve, and there will always be unscrupulous folk around, but treating age verification as some kind of technological silver bullet to a societal issue will always end in tears.
2026-03-24 23:30:35
If you’re intending to work at your desk for long periods of time, good lighting is a must, as it can help stave off eye strain and mental fatigue. It was a desire for more comfortable productivity that drove [Jade] to whip up a monitor-mounted lighting system for her workstation.
The build uses an ESP32 to run the show, with a rotary encoder for manual control and firmware that allows the monitor light to be neatly integrated with Home Assistant. The light itself comes from light strips that feature both warm white and cold white LEDs. Simple MOSFETs are used to control the brightness of the LEDs and which of the warm and cold LEDs are activated at any time. Everything is wrapped up in a 3D printed housing that neatly sits on top of the monitor with the aid of a simple printed clamp. The LED strips also have a nice soft glow thanks to a strip of diffuser material that [Jade] snatched from an old television.
We love a good lighting build, from the work-focused to the creative and beautiful.
2026-03-24 22:00:49
If you were anywhere near a computer in the mid-to-late 1990s, you almost certainly encountered a Zip drive. That distinctive purple peripheral, with its satisfying clunk as you slotted in a cartridge, was as much a fixture of the era as beige tower cases and CRT monitors. Iomega, the company behind it, went from an obscure Utah outfit to a multi-billion-dollar darling of Wall Street in the span of about two years. And then, almost as quickly, it all fell apart.
The story of Iomega is one of genuine engineering innovation and the fickle nature of consumer technology. As with so many other juggernauts of its era, Iomega was eventually brought down by a new technology that simply wasn’t practical to counter.
Iomega was founded in Utah, in 1980, by Jerome Paul Johnson, David Bailey, and David Norton. The company soon developed a novel approach to removable magnetic storage based on the Bernoulli effect. The Bernoulli Box arrived in 1982, which was a drive relying on PET film disks spun at 1500 RPM inside a rigid, removable cartridge. The airflow generated by the spinning disk pulled the media down toward the read/write head thanks to the eponymous Bernoulli effect. While spinning, the disk would float a mere micron above the head surface on a cushion of air. If the power cut out or the drive otherwise failed, the disk simply floated away from the head rather than crashing into it—a boon over contemporary hard drives for which head crashes were a real risk. The Bernoulli Box made them essentially impossible.
Early Bernoulli Box drives offered 10 MB and 20 MB of removable storage at a time when a fixed hard drive might hold 30 MB. Bernoulli Boxes were never really aimed at the home market, but found a devoted following among power users—publishers, CAD users, and anyone who needed to move serious amounts of data between machines. Sales were strong, and by 1983, Iomega hit the stock market running with an initial public offering raising $21.7 million.
As hard drive prices continued to dive over time due to economies of scale, though, the expensive Bernoulli Box became a less attractive proposition even despite its portability and greater storage. By 1986, Iomega had sold over 70,000 units and more than a million cartridges, but sales had peaked. The company had racked up serious debt and slow sales left the company saddled with undesirable inventory that wouldn’t move. Upgrades came thick and fast as Iomega pushed to keep up with the rapidly-changing storage market, which was enough to keep Iomega relevant if not flourishing. By 1993, the largest Bernoulli carts could hold 230 MB if you had a suitable model drive to read them, though the expensive drives mostly remained the domain of large corporate and government users.
The next phase for Iomega saw the company reach its greatest peak. The Zip drive launched in March 1995, and aimed to be a more affordable solution to high-capacity removable storage. It hit the market with 100 MB cartridges priced at $19.95 each, in an era when the standard 3.5” floppy could only hold 1.44 MB. For anyone regularly shuffling large files between home and office, or backing up a hard drive that might only hold a few hundred megabytes, it was a great leap forward. The iconic external model became popular in businesses, universities, and homes, and before long, OEMs like Apple, Dell, and Gateway started offering internal Zip drives as factory options. It became as close to a defacto standard for removable storage as a proprietary storage solution could ever be.
When the Zip drive hit, the sales numbers were staggering. Iomega’s revenue leapt from $362 million in 1995 to $1.2 billion in 1996. At its peak, Iomega was valued at nearly $7 billion. The company’s stock became a darling of investors addicted to massive gains. For a time, they appeared to be an unstoppable tech juggernaut, hanging on to a sizable chunk of the removable storage market without any obvious competitors on the horizon.
Iomega chased the success of the Zip drive with the even higher-capacity Jaz drive, which could store 1 GB in early models on hefty cartridges that contained rigid drive platters not dissimilar from those in contemporary hard disks. They were a great solution for power users moving what was then considered a lot of data, but their higher price meant they were never a consumer-grade darling like the cheaper Zip drive itself. The later “Clik” or “PocketZip” drive came along later in 1999, with a diminutive form factor and 40 MB disks. It too failed to gain the foothold of Zip, however, with a low install base limiting the usefulness of the removable format.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course. A serious blow to Iomega’s reputation came from its own engineering. Some Zip drives developed a fault that came to be known as the “Click of Death.” The term referred to a clicking sound of the drive heads bouncing off their end stops when they became misaligned. In extreme cases, misaligned heads in a bad drive could damage disks, which would then damage the next drive they were used in. It was a mark against the technology that was supposed to be robust enough to be used as mobile storage. A class action lawsuit was filed in September 1998 and eventually settled in 2001, but the reputational damage remained.
It wasn’t the Click of Death debacle that doomed Iomega, though. It was merely the march of competing technologies that made its storage solutions less attractive over time. CD-R drives, which had been expensive curiosities in the mid-1990s, became dirt cheap just a few years later. By 2000, blank CD-Rs were retailing for as little as fifty cents each, and they held 650 MB a pop— more than six times the capacity of a Zip disk, on media that cost a fraction of the price and didn’t require proprietary hardware. They were so cheap, the write-once nature almost failed to matter. It was far more attractive to many customers to just burn another cheap CD that anyone could read than to go out and buy a Zip drive, an expensive 100 MB disk, and hope that whoever you were sending the disk to also had a drive that could read it. The CD-RW followed soon enough after, and writable DVDs would then take storage capacities well into the multi-gigabyte range. Zip drives jumped to 250 MB and then 750 MB, while the Jaz line was upgraded to 2 GB, but by and large, consumers were choosing writable optical discs over Iomega’s proprietary solutions.
USB flash drives would then prove to be the final nail in the coffin. They were compact and cheap, and required no special hardware whatsoever. You could just plug them into any USB port on any computer and your files were right there. They too would become cheap enough to be disposable, in a way that Iomega’s bespoke drives and mechanically-complicated cartridges would never be.
By 2002, the Jaz drive was dead, and the Zip drive followed soon after in 2003. It was CD burners that did the most damage, with the leap to DVD and the rising prominence of the USB drive that promised there would be no way back for removable magnetic cartridge media. These solutions were far less mechanically complex and a lot cheaper in terms of cost per megabyte.
Iomega was, at this point, a lumbering corporation with hundreds of employees, a dying product line, and a bleak future ahead. The company pivoted to other storage solutions, like selling rebranded optical disc drives, external hard drives, and network-attached storage devices. However, none of these products were particularly unique or competitive, as Iomega went from dominating a specific niche to fighting in a market segment where it had no particular competitive advantage. They became a small, sickly fish in a big pond, competing against dozens of other established storage brands that were far more renowned in their fields.
The end came in April 2008, when EMC Corporation announced plans to acquire Iomega for $213 million — a tiny fraction of the company’s peak valuation. EMC saw lingering value in Iomega’s small office and home office customer base, and kept the brand alive for a few years, slapping the Iomega name on NAS boxes and media adapters. These weren’t iconic products unique to the brand, so much as middle-of-the-road options that had no technical edge or promise to speak of. In 2013, EMC formed a joint venture with Lenovo called LenovoEMC. Iomega’s remaining products were rebadged accordingly, and the brand effectively ceased to exist. There was no reason to continue Iomega, because what it was built to do was simply no longer relevant in the modern marketplace.
The Iomega story is, in many ways, the archetypal cautionary tale of the consumer technology industry. In the 1990s, the company identified a genuine need—affordable, portable, high-capacity removable storage. It nailed this brief with the Zip drive, which propelled the company’s fortunes into the stratosphere. However, the entire business hinged on a product category that had a shelf life measured in years. Iomega simply couldn’t hold on to its edge in removable storage against so many competitors that were both cheaper and more practical. It’s the same death that Blockbuster died—fail to see the future, and you will inevitably succumb to it.
2026-03-24 19:00:06
Some people love fiddling with their 3D printers, others love printing. Some fiddle so they can spend more time printing, which is probably where this latest project comes in: an automated pressure advance calibration tool by [markniu].
Most of us don’t take enough care with pressure advance (PA). But if you want absolutely perfect prints, its something you should be calibrating for every type filament in your collection. Some would argue, ideally every individual spool. While that sort of dialing in can be fun, it takes away from actually running off prints. Bambu printers automate PA by scanning the usual sort of calibration print, but that’s still a very indirect measurement. Why not, just advance the filament, and measure the pressure at the nozzle directly? That is what PA is meant to account for, after all: the pressure of the plastic in the hotend causing oozing and blobbing at corners.
[mark]’s solution comes very close to a direct measurement. It uses a strain gauge that sits directly on top of the heatbreak, with the sound logic that the strain there experienced will be directly proportional to the pressure inside, at least along the axis of flow. Instead of filling half the bed with lines, the calibration process instead is a ‘printer poop’ style extrusion that doesn’t take nearly as long, and seems to save plastic, too. Since this puts a strain gauge in your hotend, you also get the bonus of being able to use it for bed leveling if you should so desire.
[mark] is claiming sub-90 second calibration — as you can see in the demo video embedded below — versus over seven minutes for the indirect calibration print. The value is plugged directly into Klipper, assuming you configured everything correctly, which should be easy enough looking at the instructions on the GitHub.
