Hi folks, not sure if this is the right place but so please lmk if there is a better place to put this:

I'm currently attempting to reverse engineer yealink t41p IP phone firmware since the device is out of support for some years and but works very well imo. For security reasons and keeping the devices out of the trash, I would like to provide open source firmware for it. I recently learned how the process with clean room reversing works but I'm stumbling at the first step already. Here is what I attempted so far:

haui@TowerPC:~/Downloads/t41p-firmware$ binwalk T41-36.83.0.160.rom 

DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

haui@TowerPC:~/Downloads/t41p-firmware$ binwalk --signature T41-36.83.0.160.rom 

DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

haui@TowerPC:~/Downloads/t41p-firmware$ binwalk -E T41-36.83.0.160.rom 

DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     ENTROPY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16384         0x4000          Rising entropy edge (0.984980)
20480         0x5000          Falling entropy edge (0.783278)
32768         0x8000          Rising entropy edge (0.992664)
45056         0xB000          Falling entropy edge (0.601562)
65536         0x10000         Rising entropy edge (0.991434)
815104        0xC7000         Rising entropy edge (0.992069)
2945024       0x2CF000        Falling entropy edge (0.668870)
2949120       0x2D0000        Rising entropy edge (0.993514)
8155136       0x7C7000        Falling entropy edge (0.843171)

haui@TowerPC:~/Downloads/t41p-firmware$ binwalk -BE T41-36.83.0.160.rom 

DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     ENTROPY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16384         0x4000          Rising entropy edge (0.984980)
20480         0x5000          Falling entropy edge (0.783278)
32768         0x8000          Rising entropy edge (0.992664)
45056         0xB000          Falling entropy edge (0.601562)
65536         0x10000         Rising entropy edge (0.991434)
815104        0xC7000         Rising entropy edge (0.992069)
2945024       0x2CF000        Falling entropy edge (0.668870)
2949120       0x2D0000        Rising entropy edge (0.993514)
8155136       0x7C7000        Falling entropy edge (0.843171)

haui@TowerPC:~/Downloads/t41p-firmware$ binwalk -y T41-36.83.0.160.rom 
haui@TowerPC:~/Downloads/t41p-firmware$ binwalk -e T41-36.83.0.160.rom 

DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

haui@TowerPC:~/Downloads/t41p-firmware$ binwalk -I T41-36.83.0.160.rom 

DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
12622         0x314E          BFF volume entry, AIXv3, file name: "iX2jÅ

haui@TowerPC:~/Downloads/t41p-firmware$ binw^C

haui@TowerPC:~/Downloads/t41p-firmware$ binwalk -G T41-36.83.0.160.rom 

DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1153465

In the second finding of the 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer survey, we found that the more maintainers are paid, the more improvements they make to their projects.

...

In the previous finding, we reported that 60% of maintainers describe themselves as unpaid hobbyists, and 36% of maintainers describe themselves as paid (professional or semi-professional) maintainers, earning some or all of their income from their open source work.

...

When you break down the paid maintainers into professional (earning most or all of their income from their maintenance work) and semi-professional (earning some of their income from maintaining projects), it becomes clear that the amount of money a maintainer is making for their work has a large impact on the types of improvements they are able to make. Across nearly all major categories, professional maintainers are on average over 20 percentage points more likely to make key improvements to their projects than semi-professional maintainers.

...

In the previous study, 81% percent of professional maintainers earning most or all of their income from maintaining projects spend more than 20 hours a week maintaining their projects. This year, the percentage was nearly identical (82%).

Conversely, in last year’s survey, we found that the vast majority of unpaid hobbyists spend ten hours or less per week on their maintenance work (81%). This percentage also stayed consistent in this year’s survey, with 78% of unpaid hobbyist maintainers working ten hours or less per week.

...

We’ve heard from many maintainers that how they are paid for their work also matters. For many maintainers there is a huge difference between getting a one-time “airdrop” of money, perhaps right after a high profile incident where people are paying attention to their projects, compared to ongoing recurring income that they can count on. So this year for the first time we asked maintainers to tell us whether they would prefer to get predictable monthly income or a one-time lump payment.

An overwhelming majority of maintainers prefer to receive predictable monthly income, with 81% choosing that option.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20072658

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/10771034

Personal review:

A good recap of his previous writings and talks on the subject for the first third, but a bit long. Having paid attention to them for the past year or two, my attention started drifting a few times. I ended up being more impressed with how much he's managed to condense explaining "enshittification" from 45+ minutes down to around 15.

As soon as he starts building off of that to work towards the core of his message for this talk, I was more-or-less glued to the screen. At first because it's not exactly clear where he's going, and there are (what felt like) many specific court rulings to keep up with. Thankfully, once he has laid enough groundwork he gets straight his point. I don't want to spoil or otherwise lessen the performance he gives, so I won't directly comment on what his point is in the body of this post - I think the comments are better suited for that anyways.

I found the rest to be pretty compelling. He rides the fine line between directionless discontent and overenthusiastic activist-with-a-plan as he doubles down on his narrative by calling back to the various bits of groundwork he laid before - now that we're "in" on the idea, what felt like stumbling around in the dark turns into an illuminating path through some of the specifics of the last twenty to forty years of the dynamics of power between tech bosses and their employees. The rousing call to action was also great way to end and wrap it all up.

I've become very biased towards Cory Doctorow's ideas, in part because they line up with a lot of the impressions I have from my few years working as a dev in a big-ish multinational tech company. This talk has done nothing to diminish that bias - on the contrary.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20429091

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20410864

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2776160

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19624344

Ex-Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president Chris Deering does not believe recent layoffs across the games industry have been a result of corporate greed. Instead, workers who have lost their jobs should "drive an Uber" or "go to the beach for a year" until employment settles.

Deering was a guest on games writer Simon Parkin's podcast My Perfect Console, where the pair discussed games industry layoffs.

"I don't think it's fair to say that the resulting layoffs have been greed," said Deering. "I always tried to minimise the speed with which we added staff because I always knew there would be a cycle and I didn't want to end up having the same problems that Sony did in Electronics."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19519945

Taux the rich: Petition (EU)

Hi there, if you are from one of the EU countries that didn't reach the threshold (see on the page), please sign this petition. ECI (European Citizen Initiatives) are petitions that forces the EU to take a decision on the matter if they reach 1 000 000 signatures.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/41690098

"workers remain on strike on Friday morning and have taken the keys to hundreds of vehicles".

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/22351831

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13094630

Link to sign EU initiative: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

Guides on how to sign EU initiative: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci