Posts by Fazal Majid 396 posts • joined 16 May 2007
Cassandra was written at Facebook by Avinash Lakshman, one of the authors of Dynamo at Amazon. DynamoDB is essentially the external version of the in-house Dynamo tool that predates Bezos' famous API directive.
As for ScyllaDB vs. Cassandra, if you are starting from scratch, why would you incur the overhead and GC pauses of Java if you don't have to? There's a reason why Facebook doesn't use Cassandra for anything critical in-house, even though they originally developed it.
The A13 in the soon-to-be replaced iPhone beats all Apple's laptops other than the highest-end 16" MacBook Pro. I can only imagine what the A14 in a thermally less constrained body can achieve, and I suspect the "low-end" laptops mentioned will actually be superior in all respects (speed and battery life) to the Intel ones. All apps submissions the App Store have been sending a LLVM Intermediate Language variant that can be retargeted to any architecture supported by LLVM, including arm64. Obviously, poor coding practices and assumptions can still cause the code to work incorrectly, but I would think the transition will be better than the PPC to x86 one was.
The single most important measure would be to ban non-EU control of the press (a certain Australian-American press baron comes to mind) or non-EU political campaign-finance contributions. The US does not allow foreign nationals or corporations to control its media and telecommunications firms (or airlines, for that matter), nor does it allow campaign contributions from non US persons.
Denial of service is one threat. All the others can be addressed with end-to-end encryption, which is becoming the norm on the Internet and should already be for sensitive government operations. Telephony for the general public is practically unencrypted, but that's because our spooks like it this way and have made sure that encryption remains inconvenient if not illegal, and thus they are responsible for this vulnerability.
As for standards, they are built on a baroque foundation of legacy telco crap designed by C-team standards committees, leading to grossly vulnerable protocols like SS7 (in addition to the laughable lack of security, the network also crashes if it is pushed above a certain traffic threshold). In practice, because they are so sloppily specified, interoperability requires access to the other vendor's equipment, which they make sure is not available to potentially disruptive new entrants. In the case of 5G, the 4G already deployed is predominantly Huawei, and since modern networks are essentially software-defined, they can mostly be upgraded but Huawei will do so only if you stay with them.
It would be best if 6G were totally software-defined to work on white boxes and got rid of the legacy ITU cruft, but chances are low.
As for telcos monitoring their network traffic, the author's naive faith in their technical competence would be charming if it weren't misplaced. Read Bert Hubert's excellent paper on how they have been so hollowed out technically through outsourcing:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/
I use a Ubiquiti USG as my firewall for the convenience of a single management pane of glass. This is completely unacceptable.
In the short term I am going to block them in DNS, and in the slightly longer term I am going to have to get another OpenBSD box with PF in transparent bridge mode to block them.
You may be confusing audio and video. Unlike USB-C the Lightning connector has such risible bandwidth it cannot carry a full video signal. Apple's Lightning to HDMI connector actually has a full computer inside the dongle that decodes the compress (MPEG-2, H.264, H.265) video sent over Lightning to uncompressed HDM video.
http://www.iphonehacks.com/2013/03/why-lightning-digital-av-adapter-cant-stream-raw-hdmi.html
This will stop carriers from profiting off their own failure to implement SS7 and Caller ID security by charging consumers for anti-robocall services. It won’t stop the robocall scourge itself, as it is conducted by scam operators who are already criminals, mostly located offshore, and unlikely to comply with any fines levied.
It is outrageous how executive branch agencies feel they can exempt themselves from Congressional oversight using transparently bogus arguments (it's not as if there are privacy matters like personnel files involved). Congress has subpoena powers and it's long past time they were exercised.
It has nothing to do with being pro- or con- privacy. It has to do with which industries she is shillng for. Telcos want to gut privacy laws that would block their ability to sell marketing profiles collected by deep packet inspection, but at the same time they want to hobble their Google/Facebook webco competition.
Certainly Google and Facebook go direct to ODMs like Quanta for their servers, with none of the proprietary lock-in "value add" the enterprise vendors love to include. With projects like Open Compute, you'd think smaller hosters like Rackspace would follow as well.
They are not talking about human rights. They are talking about security. If I were Airbus, for instance, I would be far more concerned about government-abetted industrial espionage from the US than from China. That doesn't mean China isn't also a threat, just that the US is a bigger one. This is nothing new, Bill Clinton is the one who added "economic intelligence" to the NSA's missions.
Much as I loathe to defend telcos, authenticating callers to determine if they are legitimate police officers is a hard problem. There are so many agencies that unless the States take charge of implementing some sort of authentication or 2FA challenge-response mechanism, the telcos have really no viable way to do so in an emergency situation.
This is a stopgap, but since the flawed design of the keyboard hasn't been corrected, they will be back for repairs until AppleCare runs out, but if Apple wants to avoid the cost of class-action lawyers, they'd better put in place an unconditional warranty extension until the butterfly keyswitch can be corrected and all MacBooks and MacBook Pros made since 2005 recalled.
If you are referring to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, he did in fact advocate against declaring war on the United States, because he was well aware of the US' industrial might and the impossible odds of winning, but he was overruled, on the basis that the superior Japanese warrior spirit would prevail.
That said, even his bosses were aware at a certain level that winning against the US was impossible, but a surefire defeat was less dishonorable than the alternative of surrendering when Japan's oil supplied dried out due to the US embargo, as described in this official US miltary history of the road to Pearl Harbor:
http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB905.pdf
The typical WiFi AP has radio power of 1 watt. The typical cellular base station will be under 100 watts. The typical digital TV broadcast emitter has power in the *hundreds of kilowatts*, e.g. 1.3MW total for the Crystal Palace transmitter that covers most of London:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_transmitting_station#After_switchover
During the WWII Manhattan Project, copper was hard to come by, and they needed huge amounts of conductors for the electromagnets in the uranium refineries. So they used silver from the Federal Reserve instead. 6000 tons of it:
https://hubpages.com/education/The-Manhattan-Project-and-The-Borrowed-Silver
Machine learning or other GPGPU workloads usually written using nVidia's proprietary CUDA API (wrapped in TensorFlow et al) rather than the open OpenCL one. As another poster pointed out, nVidia imposed onerous licensing restrictions, you can no longer legally use CUDA on a GTX1080 or similar, you have to use even more overpriced Pro cards like Quadro or Tesla. A naked cash grab if there's one.
The French tax authorities are finalizing a tax that will be applied this year.
Google's violations are so egregious and clear-cut, it's almost as if they were daring the DPAs. After years of impunity under their buddies in the Obama administration, they've developed a sense of impunity, and are going to be disabused. European Civil Law legal systems are not as vulnerable to abuse by capricious Common Law judges.
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