Web Excursions 2021-07-31
Tidbits about the data plan of Amazon’s 3G Kindle models; why recent macOS updates become so large.
Amazon’s older Kindles will start to lose their internet access in December - The Verge
Amazon’s Kindle e-readers with built-in 3G will begin to lose the ability to connect to the internet on their own in the US in December, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. The change is due to mobile carriers transitioning from older 2G and 3G networking technology to newer 4G and 5G networks.
For customers with Kindle (1st Generation), Amazon is offering a free Kindle Oasis (10th Generation) device and cover.
kweks: the SIM cards from these kindles made for the best emergency data SIM that money could (not) buy.
Everything passed via an http proxy, with a key that could be easily extracted from the Kindle via SSH.
The SIM worked globally - I'd used it in China, Iran, Iraq, etc - all sorts of places that normally are not covered by providers.
At some point others must have abused the system, because the unlimited data got capped to 150MB a month
Ditto with first generation Lime scooters that had unlocked global twillio SIMs
isp 17 hrs
It was also possible to SSH from the Kindle, over its 3G connection.
So the SIM card could be kept in the Kindle, to be used as originally intended.
But also (in an emergency) to use a few KB of data anywhere in the world for SSH.
From memory, broad steps were:
Root (jailbreak) the Kindle, and sideload "USB Networking" (to allow tethering - i.e., connect the Kindle to a computer via USB, and the computer would share the Kindle's Internet connection)
Read the magic key (which the HTTP proxy required) - it was sitting in a plaintext file within
/var/local/
so could be easily read after rooting the KindleRun an SSH server on the HTTPS port (TCP/443), then use proxytunnel to connect via the HTTP proxy server
Why are Big Sur updates so large? – The Eclectic Light Company
The smallest updates to Mojave and Catalina came in at 1 GB
As of 11.5.1, M1 Macs have now had over 43 GB of macOS updates, and Monterey must still be at least six weeks away.
Universal
Apple only releases one update, which has to install and update all Macs supported by that version of macOS.
each has to contain a complete set of firmware updates for all supported models.
each update is a Universal binary
Upon updates, a Content Caching Server delivers over 900 MB of content only to M1 models
Internal changes since Big Sur
the use of cache files for the active contents of Frameworks and Private Frameworks code in
/System/Library/dyld
every Mac, regardless of its processor, contains three copies of the dyld shared cache for separate processor architectures, x86_64, x86_64h and arm64e.