What people get wrong about vaping

Electronic cigarettes aren’t new. They have been around for over 10 years, but there is still a lot that isn’t properly understood. This is even more apparent following the “vape lung” craze of 2019, not to mention the Australian delusion and the movement to ban flavored vape juice.

Let me start by giving the finger to the dumbest ideas of them all, the bans. This really doesn’t make sense on any scale, or from any viewpoint. I understand how flavors can make e-cigs more attractive to teenagers, but at the same time we already have laws in place to stop teenagers from getting their hands on cigarettes and other nicotine products. The logical thing to do is to acknowledge that these laws need bumping or reinforcing and go from there. Banning flavored vape juice for this reason is like banning cider and alco-pops to keep kids from drinking. Prohibition didn’t make alcohol consumption safer — up to 10,000 people died from drinking denatured alcohol.

“But why?” you ask, “Why should anybody vape?” The answer might not be as simple as you think. There are reasons why you should vape, and there are reasons why you shouldn’t vape!

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IoT, D-Link and Third-Party Firmware

In the early 2000’s, everybody was talking about IPv4 address exhaustion. As some of you technically enlightened readers probably know, IP stands for “Internet Protocol” and version 4 of the protocol coincidentally uses 4 bytes for the address. This means a logical span of 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, or 4294967295 possible IPs (including the unusable or private ones.) And had we kept giving out public IPs to all connected devices we would have been screwed by now. The solution was thought to be IPv6, with 16 byte addresses; enough to give a unique IPv6 address to every grain of sand on this planet.

But it wasn’t IPv6 that saved us, but rather a feature called Network Address Translation, or NAT for short. This feature usually lives in your router and bridges a private network with a public one. This is the reason you see IP-addresses starting with 192.168. in many places as that is one of the private IP ranges mentioned before. But for this to work your router also need to have a public IP address, an address that is reachable from the Internet, and therein lies the crux.

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Apple just patented a way for anyone to disable the camera on your phone

Today, an article popped up in my Google News feed, with the headline “Apple patented a way to keep people from filming at concerts and movie theaters on their phones“, and to be honest it gave me the chills. At a first glance it doesn’t seem like such a dangerous idea, but just think about it for a seconds.

Giving anyone the ability to remotely disable your camera is a bad idea. A really bad idea. Especially if it can cover an entire venue.

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Hey Samsung, don’t you use your own stuff or are you just lazy?

I recently upgraded from a 2012 Samsung Smart-TV to a 2015 model. Both are amazing machines with great picture quality and a lot of apps and awesomeness inside. The upgrade however feels more like a downgrade at times. I am pretty much consistently able to break the device in various ways through the most silly methods.

A little background on how I use it; I don’t have an aerial connected, so the “TV” part is unused. Connected is a PS4, a Raspberry Pi, and a desktop computer all over HDMI. The RPi is my main method of consuming media, and the YouTube app is frequently used as well. I also use HDMI-CEC (AnyNet) to control everything with the TV-remote. All of this worked great on the 2012 model, but the 2015 one isn’t playing along as well.

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