Archive for February 14, 2023

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

DiskWarrior 5.3

Alsoft (via Agen Schmitz):

Supports OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion through macOS 13 Ventura when rebuilding Mac OS Extended volumes.

Now runs on Apple Silicon M1 & M2 Macs to rebuild Mac OS Extended volumes.

No longer requires a kernel extension (KEXT) to operate in macOS 11 Big Sur and later.

Now runs within the macOS 11 Big Sur (and later) Recovery environment on Intel Macs.

Alsoft:

The next major release of DiskWarrior (DiskWarrior 6.0) will include the ability to rebuild APFS disks. Apple released a majority of the APFS format documentation in June of 2020. Our developers are now using this documentation to update DiskWarrior in order to safely rebuild Apple File System (APFS) disks.

I would be interested in this, since several times files have disappeared from my APFS volumes (from all snapshots).

Previously:

Comcast Gave False Map Data to FCC

Jon Brodkin (via Hacker News):

When Hillier looked up his address on the FCC map, it showed Comcast claims to offer 1.2Gbps download and 35Mbps upload speeds at the house. In reality, he makes do with CenturyLink Internet that tops out at 60Mbps downloads and 5Mbps uploads.

Hillier—an engineer with 30 years experience who previously worked for several telecom firms, including Comcast and Charter—submitted a challenge to the FCC in mid-November, telling the commission that Comcast doesn’t serve his address. Correcting false data is important because the map will be used to determine which parts of the US are eligible for $42.45 billion in federal grants to expand broadband availability.

Program rules require ISPs to respond to challenges within 60 days, and Comcast’s first response to Hillier’s insisted that it actually does serve the house, which is on a street called Quartz Loop.

David Major:

We demonstrate a new approach to building broadband coverage maps: automated large-scale queries to the public availability checking tools offered by major internet service providers. We reverse engineer the coverage tools for nine major ISPs in the U.S., test over 19 million residential street addresses across nine states for service, and compare the results to the FCC’s maps.

Our results demonstrate that the FCC’s coverage data significantly overstates the availability of each ISP’s service, access to any broadband, connection speeds available to consumers, and competition in broadband markets. We also find that the FCC’s data disproportionately overstates coverage in rural and minority communities.

Previously:

Update (2023-02-23): Jon Brodkin (via Hacker News):

Comcast has fessed up to another mistake on the national broadband map after previously insisting that false data it gave the Federal Communications Commission was actually correct.

[…]

The FCC says it can conduct audits of provider-reported availability information and confirmed to Ars last week that it has “multiple ongoing” investigations into data submitted by ISPs. One of those investigations began after our report about an Ohio ISP called Jefferson County Cable, which admitted to lying to the FCC about the size of its network in an attempt to block funding to rivals. While the FCC confirmed an investigation into Jefferson County Cable, it hasn’t yet confirmed an investigation into Comcast.

A spokesperson for FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel told Ars that Comcast’s correction of the Fort Collins mistake shows the challenge process is working as intended.

Compare Binary Data Using Kaleidoscope

Florian Albrecht:

As we have done before on several occasions, we’re going to employ macOS Shortcuts to create a solution for comparing binary data of files in Kaleidoscope, without the need to change Kaleidoscope itself.

[…]

Some Kaleidoscope users prefer dealing with the command line. Almost the same functionality that took us several setup steps in Shortcuts can be achieved using an elegant single line command in Terminal:

ksdiff <(xxd A.txt) <(xxd B.txt)