BrianKrebsAttention Mac laptop users: It might be time to update your magsafe charger. Seriously, WTF:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/14/apple-issues-firmware-update-for-magsafe-3-charging-cable
Zac@briankrebs @cstross I don’t understand the incredulity. There are a lot of cables that have hardware in them. AV cables for instance. IIRC crossover ethernet cables do as well.
LisPi@lolzac @briankrebs @cstross I've never terminated a single ethernet cable with anything more complicated than grounding & shielding wrappers around electrical connections.
Crossover vs straight-through is just a pinout difference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI/TIA-568#T568A_and_T568B_termination
@lolzac @briankrebs @cstross Possibly.
Most smarts in AV cables that I can recall also involve little more than relays (although those do sometimes involve conversion to & from optical to support longer runs).
@lispi314 @briankrebs @cstross When I had two Macs I had a single ethernet cable that I would use to connect the Macs and also connect to the printer when I needed it.
@lolzac @briankrebs @cstross Yeah, back in the old days (but not that old, #ethernet was around before RJ45 & 4 twisted-pair ethernet) you'd have needed different cables depending on whether you connecting uplinks/downlinks or peers.
Thankfully eventually we collectively realized that was /incredibly/ obnoxious so we fixed that problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Auto_MDI-X
mathew@briankrebs @lispi314 @cstross @lolzac The $9 Apple Lightning to audio cable contains an A/D, D/A and amplifier.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown
@mathew @briankrebs @cstross @lolzac Right, you can do that kind of stuff. But then that's not just a cable, that's a converter/adapter. It's roughly analogous to cheap USB audio interfaces.
I can't read German so I don't know if the article is missing important details. I know such interfaces often have problems with frequency muddling (very noticeable when it affects voices, humans don't usually react equally to all frequencies).
Charlie Stross@mathew @briankrebs @lispi314 @lolzac Trying to remember who it was who discovered, to their horror, that Apple's Lightning Digital AV adapter not only has an ARM cpu with 256MB of RAM but *has to download a binary object that unpacks to a full XNU operating system* in order to decrypt and re-encode as video files from the iPhone or iPad it's plugged into. And it went on sale in 2012.
@cstross @mathew @briankrebs @lolzac That sounds like there's similar horror to HDCP? Are my suspicions correct?