I don’t have to auth on my phone every time. I suspect maybe I do for the first time I use this feature for that boot of my phone, but I haven’t confirmed that yet. This would be useless if you had to auth on the phone every single usage

That was the first thing I checked, and it looks like they’re using some existing python package to parse docx files. I wonder if they contributed to it or vetted it strongly

Wow, I dunno if that's good or bad, certainly it's not what I expected.

Looking at the code, it looks like they used existing Python packages to read and parse MS Office formats, not what I expected, seeing that the repo is in Microsoft's org on GitHub I expected them to have used Microsoft's "official" libraries for parsing these formats, through Component Object Model (COM).

They used Mammoth for docx (Word) [1][2] Python-pptx for ppt (PowerPoint) [3][4] and Pandas for XSLX (Excel) [5]

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/70ab149ff1657c3... [2] https://pypi.org/project/mammoth/ [3] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/70ab149ff1657c3... [4] https://pypi.org/project/python-pptx/ [5] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/70ab149ff1657c3...

COM requires you to interact with the files through the associated MS Office applications, whereas these libs parse the ooxml file format directly.

I suppose the difference is 1st party support for creating the audiogram, plus the clearance from the US gov to market it the way they want as OTC hearing aids

It also applied the same profile to both ears, which matters for some. My hearing loss is highly asymmetric.

Does it still do that? I understand it had problems with asymetric hearing loss earlier.

Still did it on 18.0. It just averaged the two ears into a single profile.

I wonder if the flag gets reset every so often if the device doesn't think it's in the US for a long period of time. I've heard Apple considered that for some of the other EU restrictions

Probably not to account for people spending lots of time outside the US. The main restriction is not selling items with particular features outside of approved countries but them getting used after being bought elsewhere isn't usually a big deal. India doesn't care about my Grandma wearing her hearing aids because they're not approved in India and if the government doesn't care where's the incentive for Apple to break functionality for customers?

They look a lot like the graphs that Hopper produces :)

Would be nice if I could add my own holidays instead of only remove them

Because you'll have users who do it by accident and lose basic hardware functionality of their device without knowing how to fix it

People have already apps they can delete. And when they do it by mistake, they just go to the App Store to download it again, wasting nobody’s time. Why would it be any different?

There’s just need to be a button in the settings if the App Store itself is deleted.

Uhh this seems like a big fact to gloss over, and something I am quite surprised by. Could you point to any examples as I’m having a hard time finding anything available publicly from any DMVs/states

In Michigan anyone can do a in-person plate lookup for about $15 and it comes back with complete registration information including name and address. VIN and car details as well.

That’s usually the kicker - requests have to be done in person but other than that there’s not much limitation.

The $15 makes this pretty hard to scale too. The link someone posted was $0.05/request. I'd love to see how/where you can get this data in bulk from a primary source.

I thought AWS uses KVM, which is the same VM that QEMU would use? Or am I mistaken?

AWS uses KVM in the kernel but they have a different, non-open source userspace stack for EC2; plus Firecracker which is open source but is only used for Lambda, and runs on EC2 bare metal instances.

Google also uses KVM with a variety of userspace stacks: a proprietary one (tied to a lot of internal Google infrastructure but overall a lot more similar to QEMU than Amazon's) for GCE, gVisor for AppEngine or whatever it is called these days, crosvm for ChromeOS, and QEMU for Android Emulator.

EC2 instances are using the Xen hypervisor. At least that's what reported by hostnamectl.

EC2 migrated off Xen around ten years ago. Only really old instances should be using Xen or Xen emulation.

I'm puzzled by your comment. On an EC2 instance of AL2023 deployed on us-east-1 region this is the output of hostnamectl:

  [ec2-user][~]$ hostnamectl
   Static hostname: ip-x-x-x-x.ec2.internal
         Icon name: computer-vm
           Chassis: vm 
        Machine ID: ec2d54f27fc534ea74980638ccc33d96
           Boot ID: 6caf18b7ed3647819c1985c11f128142
    Virtualization: xen
  Operating System: Amazon Linux 2023.5.20240903
       CPE OS Name: cpe:2.3:o:amazon:amazon_linux:2023
            Kernel: Linux 6.1.106-116.188.amzn2023.x86_64
      Architecture: x86-64
   Hardware Vendor: Xen
    Hardware Model: HVM domU
  Firmware Version: 4.11.amazon

KVM can emulate the Xen hypercall interface. Amazon is not using Xen anymore.

I'm not quite sure the status of it at least, but reported back in 2017 that they are moving off Xen

https://www.theregister.com/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_ba...

It could be that it's not all over and tied to specific machine types still, or there's something they've done to make it report to the guest still that it's xen based for some compatibility reasons.

I think some older instance types are still on xen, later types run kvm (code named nitro.. perhaps?). I can’t remember the exact type but last year we ran into some weird issues related to some kernel regression that only affected some instances in our fleet, turns out they where all the same type and apparently ran on xen according to aws support

What instance type is it?

Lambda and Fargate.

It was true for Fargate some time ago, but is not true anymore since quite a while. All Fargate tasks run on EC2 instances today.

…which is probably the reason why task launches take 3-5 business weeks

Ah, interesting. Thanks for the correction!

unless something has changed in the past year, fargate still runs each task in a single use ec2 vm with no further isolation around containers in a task.

QEMU can use a number of different hypervisors, KVM and Xen being the two most common ones. Additionally it can also emulate any architecture if one would want/need that.

Non-US watch series 10 specification pages mention it still, so it's there and just disabled. I wonder though if they could legally enable it after the fact on watches imported while the ban was in effect