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).
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
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?