Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Conti spotted working on exploits for Intel Management Engine flaws

Re: More arguments for AMD?

AMD has PSP. Since that's already been posted about I won't bring it up again...

M1 is Apple proprietary and effectively an undocumented "black box". This SoC includes a GPU and power management, all with closed-source and potentially exploitable firmware, and ARM Trustzone which provides "secured" and "non-secured" software environments, again using either yet another embedded CPU and firmware, or using "below the level of the OS" firmware to implement. From what I've seen the M1 is an exccelent CPU both in terms of power use and in terms of performance, but if you're trying to avoid having potentially exploitable binary blobs running on your system, an Apple product is probably the worst way to do it.

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

Torn on this

I have to agree, IF someone upgraded their internet because of working from home, Amazon should foot the bill. I have serious doubts it comes out to $50 or $100 per class member, I would not be surprised to find the vast majority spent $0 extra on their internet service, and little to no extra on power. But on the other hand, Amazon's reply "no because it was a government mandate" is complete nonsense, and it's easy enough for a judge to go through the merits of the case, decide what is owed and to whom.

46 years after the UN proclaimed the right to join a union, Microsoft sort of agrees

US company

Got to realize Microsoft is a US company (headquarters-wise, for tax purposes they are I think based in Ireland so they can avoid paying the taxes they are supposed to pay in other countries.)

This is a common attitude within the US -- the US is a UN member (and member of the UN security council) for the purposes of telling OTHER countries what to do, but that the UN doesn't have word one over how things are done within the US.

So, I'm sure the US-based leadership does view this as some progressive statement, and not a recognition of human rights that have been formally recognized for 45 years.

The ‘substantial contributions’ Intel has promised to boost RISC-V adoption

On-chip use?

I'm wondering if they're even looking into a play like years back when they were making ARMs (when there were loads of devices with a 206mhz StrongARM), or if it's for on-chip use. These modern CPUs have the infamous Management Engine (ME) on them, some on-die CPU to do the TPM rights restriction stuff to keep Win11 happy or whatever; a core for power and clock management type functionality; there's probably some core in there coordinating the PCIe lanes, memory access, etc. too. There'll be embedded CPUs in the USB 3 controllers, Ethernet, wifi, and to coordinate things on the GPU as well.

Nvidia open-sources Linux kernel GPU modules. Repeat, open-source GPU modules

TBH

To be honest, I'm not a fan of binary blobs either but I've had good luck with Nvidia's blobs, both in terms of performance and support (running Gentoo, I would have to hold of on those "latest and greatest kernels" once in a while, but it was not a big deal to run a less recent kernel for a few weeks.

I did have old enough GPUs to have NVidia quit supporting them (Geforce 4 MX440 which despite the name is a Geforce2-based GPU...), at that point mesa and noveau were missing a lot of features the nvidia driver supported... but no features that the MX440 hardware actually supported.

That said I'm all for them opening it all up. Good start.

I wonder if Nvidia rigged up some kind of mesa + posisbly noveau + kernel turing support (which they're open sourcing now?) and found the performance to be on par or better than the nvidia driver? I've found nvidia's drivers to have excellent performance and could see why they didn't want to just open source the whole thing in the past (and then have everyone else's competing hardware get performance gains from whatever techniques their drivers are using.) But mesa has improved so much the last 2-3 years, perhaps that former advantage has gone?

Some data points here... (not nvidia but showing how much mesa & associated drivers have sped up.) My friend's old Sandy Bridge system got about a doubling in FPS about a year ago due to some mesa & Intel driver improvements (which were apparently meant to speed up newer GPUs but turned out to speed up everything back to like the "non extreme graphics" 840 or so.) Not great but some games that'd get like 15FPS in medium now get 25-30FPS. I have a 11-th gen Intel now, and from what I can tell it gets over double the frame rate in mesa now compared to a similar system running same games in Windows. AMD drivers also have seen huge speedups, there's vids online of the Steam Deck (one with SteamOS, one with Windows) running the same games at 20-30% higher FPS in SteamOS (which is after all just a recent Linux kernel with recent open source AMD drivers, recent Mesa, and then Steam Shell on that.. it's not some custom-optimized-for-Steam-Deck driver or anything like that.)

Anyway, certainly can't hurt, and a move in the right direction I think!

Biden deal with ISPs: Low to no cost internet for 40% of US

I don't know how...

I don't know how, but under the previous low income internet program, our local landline monopoly Centurylink and local cable monopoly Mediacom, both somehow got to say their plans under $50 were inelligible for the subsidies. Not sure how they got away with it since they just get full cash value (and therefore should not care what plan people get.) This of couse meant the subsidy was useless, the same people who could not afford the $30 plan couldn't afford a $65 plan with $30 knocked off either.

Mediacom also screwed up their $30 plan. It used to be 3mbps but no cap. Now it's like 100mbps but a 10GB (not a typo) cap. Pretty worthless since a) you can blow through your month's cap in minutes. b) most streaming sites, the faster the connection the higher quality stream it gives so the 100mbps virtually guarantees you WILL blow through the cap in a matter of days.

Starlink's Portability mode lets you take your sat broadband dish anywhere*

Not technical issues

As people have said, I don't think the "don't use it while mobile" is a technical limitation; it's a matter of the current satellites talking to a ground station or two at a time, the laser link planned between sats is not operational yet (not sure if the current sats actually have lasers or not for that matter.) So you have areas of the earth where overhead sats are out of range of any ground station; and areas where visible sats will have high traffic going through them. They presently allow or disallow new signups in an area based on that.

I think this rule is REALLY to let people know they don't want them paying like $135 a month and using it as a replacement for a mobile hotspot in their car... otherwise you'd probably have a crush of RVers using it. (Note, RV'ers are US equivalent of caravaners.) The RV parks tend to be out in the sticks so it'd probably be fine while they're parked. But if they left it running during the day, they'd be driving on the interstate (highways) between nightly stops, which will invariably go through densely populated cities (where the sats are probably maxed out.) I suppose they do not want to encourage that kind of usage.

TurboTax to pay $141m to settle claims it scammed millions of people

Annoying too

Besides being blatant false advertising, the Turbotax ad was the most annoying piece of crap waste of time ad you've ever seen, some pair of jackasses would be on screen having what (by tone of voice and cadence) was a normal conversation but all words replaced with the word free. Then the last like 2 seconds they'd (falsely) claim TurboTax is free. The odd thing is the gov't agencies that should be assessing fines for false advertising (like FTC) don't seem to do it at all, you don't hear about these fines and ads being pulled like you do in UK. Even in this case, they were sued in court rather than being fined.

Fedora starts to simplify Linux graphics handling

Sounds fine to me

Not sure why you'd drop BIOS support and require EFI -- what's that save, like one grub package?

But I do believe fbdev has not been required by anything in a long time, that all fbdev drivers have KMS equivallents now. As the "fbdev" name implies ("frame buffer device"), most fbdev drivers were like "Here, the graphics mode is set, here's your framebuffer" and stuff was just drawn straight into memory. Possibly a bitblt for accelerating scrolling. AFAIK all fbdev drivers were ported to KMS or the like long ago.

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

Re: Not seeing the advantages over Rust

I did not know that. When I did some programming in Rust a while back, I didn't really sweat the giant Rust binaries, but damn were they big. I'll have to check out those linker flags next time!

LLVM

I agree 100%, it would be a real good idea for them to use LLVM backend. LLVM is even used to compile shaders and by AMD's stack to run CUDA-type code on the GPU. I'm pretty sure it's not tied to using libc in any way. You'd then have Hare being able to build for many types of CPU, and (from what I've seen) the way LLVM is designed (it's designed so new frontends, backends, and optimizations to the byte code can be "easily" added... I mean, working on a compiler can't be easy but you know what I mean.) if QBE has any nice optimization features that LLVM doesn't do, they can be added to LLVM.

Crooks steal NFTs worth '$3m' in Bored Ape Yacht Club heist

What will they do with them?

What will they do with them? Overlooking the whole daftness of paying this kind of money for a little icon-sized image... They aren't like jewelry where if it's too hot to sell whole it can be broken down into gold and jewels. I's not like cash or equivalent where it's directly worth money; and it's not like fine artworks where you may find people who just want it in their private collection either to enjoy it's beauty or to know they have an antique item made by a famous artist. The image itself can be downloaded by anyone (without proof of ownership) so the "having it to look at" doesn't apply; and the whole "proof of ownership" property of NFTs means if someone buys it they then have an indelible record of having received stolen property, there is no transferring it privately like there is with a stolen painting or something.

Insteon's vanishing act explained: Smart home biz insolvent, sells off assets

Moral of the story

Moral of the story, do make sure your iot devices can work without a central server. Simple as that.

Meta strikes blow against 30% 'App Store tax' by charging 47.5% Metaverse toll

sadville fee

just like to point out, sadville (second life) fee is 7.5% and capped at $9.99 (hopefully there are not too many people buying an over $120 or so virtual item to hit the $9.99 cap...) also, better graphics, 15 years of content already in there, buy, sell, rent, and lease and sublet already in there (of both items and land).

I really don't see the point of Meta badly reinventing Sadville but with much higher fees.

Side note, apparently liden labs is highly profitable now, almost entirely based on a 10 or 15% or so cut of gambling revenues. Yes there are highly active casinos and strip clubs in there. No I'm not contributing to it, I won't sit around clicking a virtual slot machine.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

Also please thwart brute force attempts

Also please thwart brute force attempts. The password policy is not good, but an attacker should also not be able to attempt to log in 1000s and 1000s of times. Shouldn't the account lock, or the IP address be blocked or something if there's 1000s of attempts? I mean obviously the answer should be "yes".

Volvo car sales tumble amid ongoing chip shortages

I like my chips

I like my chips. I had a 1972 Cadillac Fleetwood with 472 cubic inch V8 (7.8 liters!), and a 750CFM Quadrajet carburetor. Man did that thing chug gas. Given on there having to adjust idle mixture (I did only have to do this once..) and idle speed, potentially have to dick around with jets, set engine timing with distributor... I had the accelerator pump fail and a friend of mine and I pulled the carb and rebuilt it. I wonder if that thing has enough parts in it? (I'm just saying there's a lot of little internal bits in there). I've found my fuel injected vehicles to be far more reliable (especially at starting in those below -20C temps we get here), easier to diagnose to fix when they did go wrong, then I ever would have with a carburetor.

Especially TBI (throttle body injection) -- a MAF (airflow) or MAP (vacuum) sensor.. the one I had used MAP.. an RPM sensor on the distributor so computer had engine speed, a speed sensor (which on that one actually fed off the speedometer, rather than the usual modern method of having the computer feed the speedometer based on it's own speed sensor input), O2 sensor, and 1 big 'ol injector over the throttle body.. which in my 1985 Chevy Celebrity was literally a 1-barrel carb with all the extra carb stuff sealed off and no choke since the computer took care of cold starting. Oh and a valve to adjust the idle speed, it shoves this reentry-cone-shaped thing in and out of an air bypass to adjust idle speed. Very little wiring, very few sensors, and very little to go wrong.

I do admit modern models can be a tad overcomplicated. I rue the day I have engine management-related problems with my Chevy Cruze... 1.4L turbo with variable valve timing, turbocharging (with electronically controlled wastgate etc.), and electronic throttle control. That'll be REAL fun to sort out if it acts up!

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Laid off

I must say, if I were being laid off, I would NOT go through and sabotage the comments or code. But, I could definitely see doing the bare minimum, taking any saved up leave, and not worrying about if the transfer goes smoothly or not, if the management were dicks about it. If the management was nice about it, I'd probably be nice and professional about it and try to ensure a smooth transfer.

Re: Not asking for a handover

Fair point -- they already violated people's contracts, and then threatened legal action if anyone tried to enforce the terms of the contract they had agreed to. I would probably walk away from this too.

Extensive comments

I must admit to using extensive comments, especially in Javacscript (... in Javascript, I specifically have like "} // End catch" or "} // End if(x>y)" or the like at the end of some larger sections of code, since the design of Javascript seems to encourage like "foo{ ..{..{..{..}..}..}", and it's a PITA to track how far down the nested {}s you are.) I strongly prefer Python, one of the many reasons being how a block of code has to be indented the same amount, so you can see in an instant where an if, else, catch, etc. block ends.

Occasionally a comment's really not necessary but as much as one can say good code is self-documenting, I also do like having enough comments to be able to know at some high level at least what a piece of code is doing just by looking at the comments near it. Both for me having to work on code much later, and if it's handed off to another programmer.

Man, that's a nasty trick changing out all the comments in some assembly code! Just for those who don't know, to even print (in this case) 15 characters of of text onto screen you end up with something like (they use pnemonics like LDA, JNE, etc. but in plain text):

load address a into register 1

load address b into register 2

load from address at register a into register c

write what is in register c to address pointed to by b

increment a

increment b

subtract 15 from a, put result in c

jump if not zero (register c, and the address the "load address a into register 1" is at) -- to jump to top of code if c is not zero.)

With a pointing to a block of text and b to screen memory (for a screen in text mode), just to print 15 characters onto a screen!

You were unlikely to have multiply and divide instructions, and you'd need some extra code to add or subtract if you expected values larger than what a single word would hold of course. This may have been in a library, or just inline in the code if you weren't going to use it much -- and without comments who knows which is the case.

So yeah without comments you would be royally screwed.

Any fool can write a language: It takes compilers to save the world

ROCm

Yup, AMD ROCm for one takes full advantage of LLVM. From the user perspective, you have AMD ROCm (an ATI-developed programming system for running data processing on card) that I think is "deprecated" but their own utilities some use it as well as any end-user code written for it still working; a CUDA frontend, so CUDA code should run with it (recognizing how much code is for CUDA that was not going to be available for their cards since nobody was going to port it to ROCm); and a (at least partial) openCL frontend. But all three feed into LLVM so the user doesn't need to care. Good thing too...

Based on the internals, it appears it uses LLVM to turn into intermediate form, and then a seperate backend for each and every card it's going to spit out code for. The chips within a series are generally similar, but do have the ability to handle more or fewer pieces of data per instruction, apparently with specific code (i.e. the same code won't run on the one that does data 64 at a time versus the one that does 128 at a time). Some series appear to use completely different architectures, like there's mentions of VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) instructions internally for one series while the next series doesn't mention VLIW at all. I.e. they appear to be, at will, using completely different instruction sets internally on their cards as they see fit, and let LLVM take care of it.

Mesa does this too, the shader compilers now use LLVM to optimize things before they spit out bytecode for whatever intel, nvidia, or ati/amd card (or I suppose ARM Mali or whatever else) the shaders are going to.

Russia bans foreign software purchases for critical infrastructure

Permission to import?

I didn't realize I needed explicit permission to import products into a country. I mean, I could see excluding it (if you have a specified importer and don't want others bringing product in), but I would assume when a company says nothing one way or the other, the default would be "what is not forbibden is allowed", that I'm free to buy product overseas and bring it into the country.

Web3 'contains the seeds of a dystopian nightmare' says analyst firm

Rolling my eyes at Web3

I roll my eyes at Web3. It will make it convenient to avoid the hype cycle if they decided to rebrand all the "lets use blockchains for..." (anything except keeping track of transactions), of NFT (why should I use a complicated block chain system to "prove" I own a web address, that may or may not still point to a picture?), and of "Metaverse" (Sadville 2.0 -- FYI, Second Life still exists, and has much better graphics than ex-Facebook are showing in their demonstrations, it has sales, rental, leases, and subletting, both of land and in-game items, which the user can create themselves. Of course, you get dirty old in-SL currency and plain-text contracts and records showing what you own or rent, not shiny new non-fungible tokens and assurance that your records are on the blockchain somewhere.

So, I did look into blockchain, and this doing distributed computing on it. It really is crap, the amount of work that is done to like, add the integers from 1 to 10, it's probably taking billions of instruction cycles since there's all this running one step (probably at least twice to "reach consensus"), sticking result on blockchain, pulling that in so some others can run the next step, and so on. Seriously, it makes the bloatiest bloatware Microsoft ever came up with look like a paragon of efficiency. And I should add, the "simple" examples I saw, the code was quite complicated to get very little real work done. One of the reasons "they" want to get more people into blockchains is simply that the number of instructions per second of actual work these blockchains can get done is quite low (...since they were really meant more or less as a distributed ledge for transferring cryptocurrency around, not for doing number crunching), if they're wanting to run much of anything on blockchain it's going to need more users processing blockchain to get anything significant to finish in a reasonable length of time.

Samba 4.16 release strips away more SMB 1

Versioning

I find it a bit odd that making some potentially incompatible changes (removing functionality, even if it's deprecated and outdated) is done in a .01 version release. You'd think it'd at least warrant a .10 version bump. That said... *shrug* if you're running XP or 98 still, you don't have any issues running old and out-of-support software so I'd just go ahead and run an older samba version with it (well, maybe it doesn't matter now but when SMB1 is totally removed.)

Rolling Rhino: A rolling-release remix of Ubuntu

I'd think twice about this one

I'd think twice about this one. I've run (in a VM) the non-LTS Ubuntu versions from time to time, and sometimes they become quite the mess. A distro designed as a rolling distro, they tend to have some mechanism to have, say, a stable, unstable, and testing branches, so some big change can be rolled out to those who wish to have the test version, then rolled out to everyone else when the bugs are worked out. Ubuntu? Secure in the knowledge that those who favor stability run the LTS version, sometimes the non-LTS versions are quite unstable for a while, as they make some big sweeping change and work out the bugs from it. It's not a technical issue, apt & dpkg (the Debian packaging tools Ubuntu uses) fully support having multiple branches and switching between them; it's simply that administratively Ubuntu doesn't do it that way.

Coding in a war zone: A Ruby developer's life in Kharkiv

Re: Spreading the news

Yup, I saw an article a few days ago that NATO had reconiassance/surveillance planes flying near Ukraine, to provide some information (radar coverage) on what all was flying over. The system was advanced enough to ID each plane type, but Ukraine and Russia both use MIGs so it pretty much showed a bunch of MIGs without it being clear whose they were. Does make it interesting if they capture any hardware (probably not capturing planes, but tanks, guns, vehicles, etc.) that the parts will all be ineterchangeable.

This browser-in-browser attack is perfect for phishing

Seen 'em

Seen 'em. Go to some greasy porn or pirate site (not that I've ever done that... oh no... of course not) in Ubuntu and be amazed at the appearance of "Windows" dialog boxes on screen, swearing up and down you must click "Yes" to continue, click to install flash (on pages with zero flash), update your video codecs, update chrome (even when I'm in Firefox), update my virus scanner, and so on.

Of course, this specific method of doing this does appear to be novel.

Devs of bcachefs try to get filesystem into Linux again

s3qlfs

I was going to add this to my last post but decided it deserves it's own. I recommend s3qlfs! Pretty fast and easy way to get compression and deduplication.

I'm using s3qlfs for some of my storage now. As the "s3" suggests it's meant for cloud storage (Amazon S3 supported plus several other cloud systems) but one backend is "local", I just make a "s3ql-data" directory on my ext4 file system, a "s3ql-fs" mount point, and have a choice of several compression methods (also encryption, but not sure that's useful when it's already sitting on my local disk as opposed to "in the cloud", so I have that off.) It has built-in deduplication. I have it set to use a 50GB cache. Fast, reliable, and I have had power cuts and such and have had it recover just how you'd expect (Run a slow'ish fsck, lose the last couple writes if it was in the middle of writing something, and away you go.) I have a 4TB disk with like 6GB files on it and still 1TB free disk space so I can guarantee it's effective.

btrfs and bcachefs

So, there's already a "bcache" block cache subsystem in the linux kernel. You can (for instance) have a slow block device, use a faster block device as a cache, the result is a 3rd block device that uses the cache to speed up access. The design is simple and reliable, and has full failure paths -- if the cache device fails, you don't have your device drop dead, it just goes to accessing the slow device directly. I have not used bcachefs, but it looks to also have a solid design that should both have good performance, and be able to be resilient to failure.

btrfs? I've attempted to use it twice. First time, I turned on data compression and it corrupted by data. Second time, after plenty of assurances floating around online that all those bugs have been fixed and it's fine... I had filesystem self-destruct within a few months. I was not running a UPS and all that good stuff, and found that btrfs seriously cannot deal with power cuts. At all. I was not doing anything special (large file transfer, snapshot, etc.) when power cut, but that was enough to make it flip out -- the transaction log, checksums everywhere, and sequence numbers in critical data structures, sure make it DETECT when there's a filesystem inconsistency. But there's no automatic fsck AND no manual procedure to just have it roll back like 30 seconds, lose the last transaction or two and be consistent again. It's read-only use only from there on until you reformat!

JavaScript library updated to wipe files from Russian computers

Bad idea

Bad idea. I support Anonymous' attacks on Russian systems and exfiltration of data. Overwriting systems based on IP-based geolocation? BAD IDEA. A) I'm not for automated destruction of people's systems anyway -- pick your targets. Wiping out some rando's system because they happen to be (maybe) in Russia is seriously a dick move. B) Geolocation IS UNRELIABLE. If this had been in the wild long, the chance is very high you would have overwritten random people's systems that are in no way associated with Russia or Belarus.

I have 0 complaints about peacenotwar -- a lib that is likely used as a nuisance, but it's non-destructive, doing what it says it does and can be included or not in other projects.

As for node-ipc... I definitely (as I've said) cannot condone destroying people's systems based on geolocation. Putting a file on the system as peacenotwar does? I'd strongly prefer my libs to do exactly what I ask them to do and nothing else, but this is one of the risks people take from using a system like npm -- near-continuous updates with essentially nobody vetting the packages, or their dependencies, instead waiting until problems show up and taking care of it after the fact.

Driverless car first: Chinese biz recalls faulty AI

First law

First law of robotics indeed.

Jeremy Clarkson brought up a good point in one of those Grand Tour shows or possibly one of the last episodes of Top Gear with him in it (I think he was, as he likes to do, just trying to be a smartass and brought up an interesting topic unintentionally.). I thought the example was contrived (and it is) but found it interesting that the car companies truly have not come up with some standard on what behavior is expected or desired.

So, you have a vehicle that has gotten into a situation where some kind of accident is inevitable. It can brake while going straight, running into whatever's ahead of it and killing the passenger. Or, it can veer right, veering into a pile of nuns but saving the passenger. Clarkson of course said it should save him at all costs.

This sounds silly, but this was brought up to several car companies developing self-driving vehicles; one clearly said it'd pick the path that caused the fewest deaths, killing the passenger. The other clearly said passenger safety is paramount, they would program their vehicles to veer off the road into the pile of nuns to save the passenger.

Fedora inches closer to dropping x86-32 support

Ubuntu and wine

Yeah, I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 32-bit on one system. Effectively, they didn't ship a graphical CD installer but had everything else. I think I upgraded it from 16.04, but you could also run that "netboot" CD (or actually network boot it with PXE.. it's about a 50MB CD), pick "Ubuntu desktop" in the text installer and end up with a Ubuntu desktop install. Not sure why they bothered not building the install CD considering they still built literally everything else.

As for any newer hardware -- Ubuntu and other modern Linux distros truly have no need for 32-bit libs whatsoever, there is not any "legacy code" lurking in there that uses them or anything. But, Steam itself, Steam's Proton (for running windows games) and Wine, those need it. Steam needs 32-bit libs I think primarily for running the older Linux games that are 32-bit (of course, you'd also need those 32-bit libs running the same games outside Steam, it's nice to keep enough 32-bit libs available for doing so.) Proton and Wine, technically you can install only amd64 build of wine, it only needs 64-bit Linux libraries then but also only runs 64-bit Windows apps. But this would be annoying, even if you have 64-bit apps, they may have a 32-bit "setup.exe" for instance. So typically the 32-bit wine package is also installed, uses 32-bit Linux libs and used for running 32-bit (as well as 16-bit and some DOS) applications.

Three Chinese web giants create streaming video 'standard'

Cool with me

Cool with me.

First off, they may not have to provide source code. Internet RFCs going back decades included a description of what to do, not source code to do so. (I have not looked at this new streaming system's description explicitly, but...) this is not like MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, H.265 where it's so complex you probably want a reference implementation just to compare to. This would involve speed, latency, and throughput negotiation to be able to pick the proper bitrate of video (for most streaming systems where you have several choices), and possibly using a smaller video chunk size (it was common in the past to use at least 5 seconds video chunks.) It may not even need a smaller chunk size, just going ahead and starting to play the chunk before it's fully received.

Anyway, good on them. webRTC and HLS are both pretty crude, they work well enough and (especially with HLS) are simple to implement but there is some real room for improvement, nobody else has undertaken that in the past 15 or 20 years, so good on them for going ahead and doing so.

Cryptocurrency ATMs illegal right now in UK

FCA equipment approval

I guess one question is, for those who have registered, does their equipment not have FCA equipment approval because it is actually not meeting some technical or other standard? Or is this just FCA playing the game of just indefinitely sitting on applications because, per existing rules, they should be approved and they don't want to?

Don't get me wrong, I think crypto ATMs are daft. But I'm also not a fan of regulators sitting on applications because they want to effectively ban something without bothering to change the rules to do so.

Russia scrambles to bootstrap HPC clusters with native tech

Odd systems

So it'll be back like with the Soviet Union of old. They had quite a few systems that were essentially clones of western systems built from domestically available parts (clone PDP-11s, VAXes, 8-bit PCs, etc.) and some sometimes quite unusual domestic designs.

Deutsche Bank seeks options as sanctions threaten Russian dev unit

Bespoke systems

It really seems like, when you have a large, complex system that is also bespoke, that it'd be a REALLY good idea to have IT, development, and operations in-house*. Forget whether they're Russian or not, you could have a domestic firm still go bankrupt or something and you'd be SOL having it all outsourced to them too.

Well, good luck to ya! Hopefully that cross-training goes quick enough!

*Not to say the physical servers must be in-house, do cloud if you want, but the people operating that it's probably good to have in-house.

Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS

Is it maintained

I did use reiserfs once, I found the performance to be quite good and had no problems with it that I recall. But subsequent systems I went back to ext3 then ext4, generally just out of laziness of going with the default (ext4 is no slouch.)

I guess it is a matter of, how extensive of changes are going to be made to the kernel filesystem API? If it's a flag or two, and they're already getting patches to avoid having to use them, no big deal. If extensive changes are planned, and they would require a lot of work with reiserfs, I guess it's a matter of if patches show up in a timely matter or not. If so, reiserfs is presumably supported and I'd keep it in. If not, it's not getting adequate support and I could see dropping it, it's not good to have a single filesystem holding back development.

It would be interesting, there's all these hardware surveys (CPU make & model, GPU make & model, RAM, storage capacity, etc.) but it would be interesting to have one for filesystem type. I wouldn't be surprised to see reisefs has very low usage, but I really don't know I was surprised to read some NAS model was using btrfs.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Honestly I don't care

Honestly I don't care. I think worrying about this too much (on the uni's part) is a bit silly but it also doesn't bother me a bit if the names are Ali instead of Alice and so on.

Canonical puts out last update to Ubuntu 20.04 before 22.04

NVidia driver

I'm running NVidia driver for my GTX650 at home, and 5.13 kernel. Do make sure to see what precautions they have especially if you did anything custom with your nvidia driver install. But I'm running the regular nvidia-driver Ubuntu package, and have run HWE kernels fore quite a while. I'm running 5.13.0-30 now and update is trouble-free, part of the update process (DKMS) automatically builds the nvidia kernel modules whenever a new kernel is installed, and the nvidia-drivers Ubuntu package has supported 5.13 kernels for quite a while.

India surpasses a billion active mobile subscriptions

I wouldn't mind that

I wouldn't mind that. A cell phone company that "sweats the assets" a little longer so you could have a lower phone bill.

Verizon Wireless (historically CDMA-based) and AT&T(historically GSM-based) keep up on their technology, they both had LTE+VoLTE all rolled out by 7 or 8 years ago but you do pay for it.

The rural CDMA carriers rapidly adopted LTE too... EVDO wasn't bad capacity-wise (12.4mbps in 5mhz) but it used 1.25mhz channels so max speed was 3.1mbps. If you want to offer some wireless broadband and such, that 50-100mbps LTE looks like a real nice upgrade to get up quick then. The GSM-based carriers had the option of sweating the 3G assets, even 14.4mbps max speed is not shabby, and they could run DC-HSPA+ 42mbps if they wanted.

T-Mobile did it but was smart about it and it's worked out pretty well for them. They had loads of rural GSM/EDGE 2G, they rolled it out and just left it as-is for like 10 years, focusing upgrades on urban areas. They've upgraded it to 4G over the last 4 or 5 years, skipping 3G entirely, these areas have no 3G service. Since they got pretty modern 4G equipment, they were able to software update it to 5G so they now have quite widespread 5G coverage.

Sprint tried the same strategy. They were CDMA (2G)/EVDO (3G)-based, were mid-way through rolling out LTE and did not have VoLTE running anywhere they had LTE, they were relying entirely on CDMA for voice and I think text traffic. They were planning to complete their 4G rollout in 3 or 4 years.. but since every other CDMA carrier has already gone VoLTE, there's almost no phones available with CDMA support and would have been none to buy before Sprint had finished their upgrades. T-Mobile bought them out and are rapidly deploying all that spectrum Sprint had not gotten around to lighting up yet.

What is it with cloud status pages not reflecting reality?

Network problem?

More likely it's just what the article suggests, that it's manager description to flip the flag to yellow or red and they just didn't do that.

But another possibility, Amazon could have had everything working, all their peer internet links working, but some link in between them and some users was down. I had a "Google outage" once, my ISP's links were up, I think Google's were up, running "mtr" (a modern traceroute replacement) showed some link in between was down (... and the traffic was not being properly rerouted through some other path.) It came back up some time later, I didn't re-check with MTR if the link came back up, or if the traffic was rerouted.

Fujitsu confirms end date for mainframe and Unix systems

Cloud hardware

So, is Fujitsu just suggesting people move from mainframe to an unrelated cloud service? Or is it going to effectively be a mainframe hosted on their end? If so, are they making new mainframe hardware for their own use, or are they just going to keep running the same systems "in the cloud" for some indefinite length of time?

Beware the techie who takes things literally

no sympathy

No sympathy, not paying like $10 or $20 is ridiculous.

Former Oracle execs warn that Big Red's auditing process is also a 'sales enablement tool'

VMware issue

To be clear, the VMWare issue is you run Oracle on 1 or 4 CPUs or whatever via VMware, on a 40-core server; Oracle comes in to audit and says you should be paying for 40 cores since VMware is not an approved method of partitioning the system.

But yeah, it's been well-known since the 1990s that if you're using Oracle, you better have plenty budgeted for it because the price will just keep going up every couple years. This is another way to keep the 'ol revenue stream going I guess.

Nvidia reportedly prepares for un-Arm'd combat with rivals: $40bn takeover may be abandoned

I don't think this'll hurt too badly

I don't think this'll hurt too badly. Don't get me wrong, I think NVidia ARM merger would have been good for both, they both have excellent engineers that could have done even more working together.

But, they both have excellent engineers seperately too; ARM is making plenty of money and I don't think they're cash constrained from doing what they want; NVidia isn't either, they'll have to keep paying for an ARM license but the $40 billion they're not spending buying ARM will buy many years of licenses. ARM licensees are pretty much free to do what they want ARM-wise, using ARM designs "off-the-shelf", modifying these ARM designs, or designing some ARM-compatible chip totally from scratch.

Apple's developed the M1, NVidia I'm sure NVidia can also make a nice high-speed ARM, the existing NVidia ARM stuff is already no slouch. I had a Acer Chromebook with a Tegra K1 and it was no slouch; 22 hour battery life.. 12 if I ran video encodes on it. It'd run ffmpeg to do some h.264 encoding and that NEON instruction set would get it running at a good 2-3x the performance of my (admittedly elderly) Core i5-750 (and this was using an older "ARMv7" 32-bit ARM, not 64-bit ARM8 which is a fair bit faster at number crunching. It was pretty cool, I used Chrubuntu to get Ubuntu on it, held back the X packages and kernel (because it had a binary NVidia driver) and ugraded to more-current Ubuntu version, and I had an up-to-date Ubuntu with full Nvidia drivers, even CUDA worked on it, 192 cores. It ran about dead even with a GTX650 while using about 5 watts of power (max ed out CPU cores & GPU altogether was about 10 watts) Unfortuantely since it was like $190 it was definitely "built to spec", after about 2 years the battery, touchpad, power connector, and keyboard all started acting up within a matter of weeks of each other. Oh well, back to a normal notebook with a few hours battery life.

Employers in denial over success of digital skills training, say exasperated staffers

Keeping current

Yeah, without either paid courses, or at least some time set aside now and then for skills training (online tutorials or at least reading up on the current tech), one's skills are going to get out of date. If I were working somewhere that used, say, Python, Oracle and SAP, I enjoy Python and would probably read up on new developments on my own, but I would not be spending time outside work looking into any recent developments in Oracle and SAP.

Windows box won't boot? SystemRescue 9 may help

Ventoy is pretty sweet

Just wanted to stress how cool Ventoy is. You install it to a USB stick (supports regular partition tables, EFI, and secure boot; and apparently also booting on like ARMS and MIPS and a few other setups via EFI). It makes a ~100MB or so EFI and the rest a data partition. You put bootable stuff (.iso or .wim) and when you boot the stick, it lists all the bootable items on there, arrow down and hit enter, bam it boots.

Note, if you really want the ultimate rescue stick, Medicat has like 20GB of .ISO and .Wim files with like bootable Linux rescue systems, bootable virus scanners, a bootable stripped windows (which I used to do a BIOS update since apparently this Inspiron 3505 has 0 support for flashing from Linux.. including the BIOS's "flash from file" refusing to flash from either the .exe or .rcv BIOS update downloads... blah..), bootable disk utilities, like a total swiss army knife of utilities and rescue systems.

Running Windows 10? Microsoft is preparing to fire up the update engines

Cheap Linux systems

What'll happen when Win10 goes EOL if you can't run Win11? People'll get a supply of cheap used systems to put Ubuntu 26.04 on I guess 8-)

(Note, Linux still has full support for Audigy out-of-the-box too.)

IBM confirms new mainframe to arrive 'late in first half of 2022'

Mainframe terminiology

This "power more MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) than in any previous program in the company’s history" sounds stilted because it's mainframe terminology. Similar to how DEC would rate their systems in VAX MIPS, IBM specified some level of performance as "1 mainframe MIPS" decades ago, and you can pay for a system with a certain number of MIPS. It has spare CPUs both as hot spares (even in-progress work, the mainframe CPUs run two side-by-side pipelines, any mismatch is detected, the jobs running on it moved live to a spare CPU) and as additional capacity (If you find you need more MIPS, you call IBM and they turn on more CPUs).

I think it's a nice way of saying they're selling fewer mainframes (I doubt it's a growing market) but the remaining mainframe customers are putting more load on them and so ordering more MIPS than before. Would not be surprised to find quite a bit of this is mainframe Linux (... if you have a mainframe and some Linux servers accessing the mainframe and obviously providing result via TCP/IP, you can move those Linux workloads onto the mainframe itself. ) A bit bizzare, but IBM charges a significantly lower price to turn on a CPU for Linux-only use versus a "full CPU"... I think they disable a few instructions that only the mainframe software uses but Linux (and GCC & Clang compilers) don't; so if you try to cheat and run DB2 or whatever on it it won't start.

Not to dissemble, but mainframe MIPS are odd; they measure the number of instructions run by the CPU, but mainframes have IO processors that (for the mainframe databases and record stores at least) do a major amount of the work that would normally be done by the CPU; a single IO instruction could pull a database record into memory and provide a pointer to a particular field in the record.

Edit: I can't put my finger on it but it seemed ironic that IBM's hoping to boost sales by putting out systems within 3 years, when these systems will last for decades with proper maintenance (and part of the hefty fees to IBM are for proper maintenance.)

Machine needs more Learning: Google Drive dings single-character files for copyright infringement

And it's not even effective

And as far as I can tell it's not even effective. I've seen^H^H^H^H heard about (vague rumors, obviously *I* would *never* go to primewire and the like.. yeah..) plenty of google drive links out and about, presumably fully functional.

Saved by the Bill: What if... Microsoft had killed Windows 95?

NT

To be honest, I don't know if it would have made a big difference, I think computers at the low end would have just stuck with DOS+Win3.1, and otherwise would have sucked it up and shipped with the 8MB extra RAM to run NT4. (Minimum, which really couldn't do jack, on 95 was 4MB, with 8MB recommended; minimum on NT4 was 12MB with 16MB recommended.) Maybe (if 95 had been cancelled) they would have been able to put NT on a diet and shave a few MB off those system requirements. NT ended up with DirectX, media player, multimedia codecs, etc. as addons that came out later too; so basically instead of running 95, 98, and Me you'd be running NT4 then 2000, and probably had a somewhat more stable system for the trouble. This is a bit second-hand for me though, I switched straight from DOS + Win3.1 to a brief detour to OS/2, then to Linux (initially Slackware) so I bypassed that hold 95 versus NT4 personally.

I suppose if there was a lot that the NT DOS VDM (the DOS box) couldn't handle, they probably would have come up with some solution to boot into DOS for those like a few other Windows versions had.