Posts by Fazal Majid

UK government on the lookout for bargain-priced CTO

The UK could draw inspiration from the US Digital Service. Obama had established it, where top-notch talent from the private sector like Matt Cutts (who was the head of Google Search algorithms) gave their time for love of country. They provided deep expertise and significant savings, not to mention saving projects. Of course, it was axed by Trump while DOGE tried and failed to reproduce their savings.

Law firm email blunder exposes Church of England abuse victim details

Re: "Church of England still has more to do to rebuild the trust ..."

The current government has promised to rid the Lords of its hereditary peers, but has not moved to kick out the lords spiritual, so no, that half-measure is mere window-dressing.

Re: Hide and hide some more to hide it all

Sadly, in the UK, a country with neither a proper constitution, a bill of rights, spearation of church and state or an independent judiciary, they act as agents of the state, which they are as the established church.

News from a possible future: ‘Rampant jellyfish cause AI outage by taking datacenter offline'

Release sea turtles

They are one of the few animals that prey on jellyfish

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Tor also works quite well

Much easier to set up, and has other privacy benefits as well

Linus Torvalds hints Bcachefs may get dropped from the Linux kernel

That’s how OpenZFS works

The VFS layer between kernel and file systems is complex, however, and not set in stone (unstable), which makes the file system maintainers have to scramble whenever a new kernel is posted.

What doesn’t help is that the buggy btrfs’ maintainers have been delegated as gatekeepers for file system code, which they abuse to sabotage the competition.

Linux Foundation tries to play peacemaker in ongoing WordPress scuffle

The surprising thing is Amazon didn't get there first

Their operational excellence is unmatched.

There are no good guys in Automattic vs WP-Engine

I moved from WP to Hugo almost a decade ago and I don't have a dog in this fight. One of my former employers used WP-Engine and I was to say the least not impressed.

Just because Mullenweg's actions are peevish and infantile does not mean WP-Engine is in the right.

Sadly, your prognostic is likely correct, as Automattic controls the repository, will ban the FAIR installer (unless forced to reverse itself by European antitrust authorities, US FTC being of course completely neutered and useless), and through the power of defaults the vast majority of WP users will never hear of it.

Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?

Re: Nice non sequitur there...

It is also a false statement. The IMSI identifies the subscriber, the International Mobile Equipment Identifier or IMEI identifies the specific device independently of SIM card, IMSI or anything else tying the subscriber to the carrier.

I thought it was a crime to lie to Parliament.

Europe warns giant e-tailer to stop cheating consumers or face its wrath

At this point, I trust AliExpress more than Amazon

They are not perfect, mind you, far too many "Genuine 1TB SanDisk memory card for £5" obvious scams, but prices are often 75% less than Amazon if you can tolerate a 2-week shipping time, and the pleasure of cutting out price-gouging middleman Jeff Bezos is priceless.

RIP, Google Privacy Sandbox

Re: Their profits

"There are alternative browsers that do not live from selling you."

No, there aren't (yet).

Chrome is obviously out, Apple is increasingly relying on "services" (i.e. App Store 30% tax and advertising) to make up for a saturated smartphone market, Firefox is all-in on baking in advertising tech in the browser. Chromium-based browsers are all relying on Google's base, e.g. they will not be able to keep uBlock Origin when Google rips out Manifest V2 from the code base. The only glimmer of hope is from the Ladybird and Servo browser engines, but they are still at least 2 years away from being usable.

EU OS drafts a locked-down Linux blueprint for Eurocrats

Why even have a local disk?

PXE booting would remove the local SSD as a single point of failure, and disposing of old machines would be simpler if they didn't have to have their internal SSD removed lest an attacker use advanced data recovery techniques to retrieve saved data.

Quad goals: Meta proposes QLC SSDs as a new storage tier in datacenters

Bad tradeoff

QLC has 1/3 more capacity in exchange for 2/3 loss of endurance. It only makes sense for applications where reads outnumber writes by at least 10:1. Storing LLM models is one such application and Meta is investing massively in those.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

How many other companies are doing the same, but are smart enough not to put it in writing?

HP being a laggard in most respects, they are probably not the ones who first thought this idiocy up.

London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds

400GW makes no sense

Peak electricity consumption in the UK is 35-50GW

Six vulnerabilities in ubiquitous rsync tool announced and fixed in a day

rsync has two weaknesses

1) it does not parallelize transfers and does them one by one using a single core on each end. One a fast, low-latency connection like a LAN, this does not take full advantage of the CPU and network resources to speed things up.

2) transfer is unidirectional. There is another utility called Unison, however, that uses the rsync algorithm to provide bidirectional sync

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

Meta, the smallest of the FAANGs, will spend $26B this year on AI data centers. The idea the perennially bankrupt UK government (or any other European government, or even the EU) can play with the big boys is completely delusional. It would make a lot more sense to fund a few millions’ worth of PhDs at Cambridge to find ways to train AI more efficiently without the insane Capex.

Matt Clifford is no entrepreneur

He started an incubator, hardly qualifies as an entrepreneur. Seems more like a wheeler-dealer than anything. Wonder what his family background looks like.

Former Facebook lobbyist joins UK comms regulator as non-exec director

Sometimes former poachers make the best gamekeepers. Tom Wheeler proved remarkably tough on telcos as chairman of the FCC despite having ya Verizon lobbyist.

In any case, a former Facebook guy is unlikely to be sympathetic to telco rent-seeking. His Cisco past would be more relevant as to conflicts of interest.

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

H1-B shenanigans

Many of those job postings are for a job the company fully intends to fill with someone on a H1-B visa, because those visas are tied to the job and the employee does not have much flexibility to job-hop. The Department of Labor certification required for the H1-B does require the company to provide evidence the job couldn't be filled by a local, so they deliberately advertise pro forma in the most inconvenient form no one reads ever, dead-tree newspaper ads, and they can then truthfully say no one applied.

You're right not to rush into running AMD, Intel's new manycore monster CPUs

Analytics

One good use-case for this kind of machine is analytics and data-science, where simpler single-node tools like DuckDB outperform complex multinode distributed big data systems like Spark or Hadoop, and are far more agile.

Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration with 'nontechnical nonsense'

Re: Others chose to stay awyay,

The Rust community is rife with such toxicity:

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/the-rustconf-keynote-fiasco-explained

Re: New kernel seems like a good idea

And Mach failed, as in all widespread OSes based on it like macOS/Darwin or the late Tru64 glom together all the kernel components together for performance, recreating a monolithic kernel.

Re: Rust

No, and it is so unstable spec-wise that only the last version of the compiler is guaranteed to compile the next, and to bootstrap it you need to go through 80-something stages, vs 3 for Go. The fact there is no other implementation, not even in GCC, tells all you need to know about the maturity of the language.

Buying a PC for local AI? These are the specs that actually matter

A M1 or M2 Mac Studio has far more unified RAM available to its GPU/NPU than even the $36,000 nVidia H100 to run large models. Unfortunately the Apple Silicon GPU is nowhere near as fast as nVidia's.

Primate Labs, makers of Geekbench, have a ML/AI benchmark tool. The results are finally available on the genersl Geekbench browse (but still not searchable)r:

https://browser.geekbench.com/ai/v1

SiFive offers potential Neoverse N2 rival – the P870-D RISC-V core for datacenters

China

China is the elephant in the room. They have been burned by US sanctions and adopting RISC-V as it is an open standard not subject to US sanctions (although SiFive may be). If the US blocks SiFive exports, they can just switch to another RISC-V provider, including home-grown ones, something not possible with x64 or arm64.

Fancy climbing the peaks of Alpine Linux? 3.20 is out

People often think of Alpine only as a base for Docker containers but it runs perfectly on bare metal. The low footprint reduces the attack surface, being systemd and glibc free made it immune to the recent xz attack, for instance.

Europol confirms incident following alleged auction of staff data

And of course

It's the same incompetent buffoons who can't even secure their own HR databases who demand a master key to everyone's private encryption because "will no one think of the children"?

Amazon and Epson accuse a bunch of traders of selling knockoff print ink

Re: So, Epson joins HP in the golden ink deal

Eco tank ink is very reasonably priced and much cheaper than laser toner.

Malicious SSH backdoor sneaks into xz, Linux world's data compression library

Re: SytemD?

systemd is linked against liblzma, which has the backdoor. OpenSSH has nothing to do with systemd but many distros tamper with it to interface with systemd, thereby introducing this vulnerability.

Redis tightens its license terms, pleasing basically no one

Re: Open Source developers

You may not be "contributing" to these external projects but your employer certainly is, presumably they see value in doing so.

Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format

Frankly JPEG XL is much more attractive than the patent-larded monstrosity that is AVIF, but I get their point. Every new format, specially a niche one, increases the already large attack surface of the browser. Most of the exploits used by NSO's spyware are from bugs in image file format parsers used by iMessage, for example, and you can bet the JPEG XL implementation is nowhere near as robust and battle-tested as the JPEG or PNG one (which still deliver a steady stream of CVEs despite their maturity).

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

Iran

The Iranians used GPS spoofing to capture a US RQ-170 Sentinerl drone in 2011, so they would be a natural suspect for the attacks over Iraq-Iran.

How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip

Mixed signals

Intel axed its proposed $700M liquid and immersion cooling R&D facility, so what gives?

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/23/intel_liquid_cooling/

UK's cookie crumble: Data watchdog serves up tougher recipe for consent banners

Global Provacy Control

Global Privacy Control (GPC) is essentially the old Do-Not-Track header, only this time wiht force of law. It is already mandatory in California, and the EU is considering it. One browser setting to automatically reject all cookie banners. The UK should also endorse this. Of course this does not preclude enforcement against dark patterns like not having a "Reject All" button as prominent as the "Accept All" one, or making unsubscribing harder than joining.

Datacenter would spoil beautiful view ... of former industrial waste dump

England's planning system is a mess

Part of the reason why HS2 is a fiasco is every rural Tory local council NIMBY demanding (and getting) gold-plated tunnels to hide the trains. Same with power lines, there is huge wind farm capacity in Scotland or East Anglia that cannot be used in Southeast England where the demand is because of inadequate transmission power lines.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/10/26/britain-must-overhaul-the-way-it-approves-infrastructure

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

New datacenters?

Last I heard, new housing and datacenter plans were put on ice because of a lack of electrical grid capacity to power them. One big factor is NIMBYs objecting to the construction of power lines from Scotland, where wind power is plentiful but sparse population means little demand, to South-East England where the demand is.

When is a PC an AI PC? Nobody seems to know or wants to tell

A simple definition

My definition would be a computer that can run a GPT3-equivalent LLM locally, since GPT3 is the one that kick-started the current AI revolution. This would need at least 64 to 128GB of RAM accessible by a GPU or NPU. Thus the Mac Studio qualifies, as would a PC with a couple of nVidia 4070s. Today's price for such a config is about $5000, but expect that to fall quickly.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Too pessimistic

The 6GHz band's failure to penetrate walls is a feature, as it means you are less likely to experience interference from other units in an apartment building, as 2.4Ghz is a lost cause and even 5GHz is congested in most places. It does require you to have a multi-AP setup, preferrably with wired or optical backhaul, but I am starting to see new build housing equipped thus.

Most consumer-grade WiFi gear is indeed ghastly, with numerous bugs that cause inexplicable (and practically undebuggable) authentication bugs and connection brown-outs. Most could do with a simple watchdog timer that performs a scheduled reboot at 3AM to maintain stability throughout the day.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: "Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear."

Since pretty much everything they did was illegal, it’s not too surprising

Meet the guy trying to drag HM Treasury's data strategy into the 21st century

Using a Microsoft stack

Means they are probably unable to attract the best Data Scientists from Big Tech companies who are used to working with open-source analytics stacks like Jupyter notebooks as front-ends. At some level, basic BI capabilities are a commodity (and having Tableau probably means more people can actually access data without needing a data specialist to assist), but cutting-edge predictive analytics and machine learning are not available first on commercial products.

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

For a contrarian take

See this:

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/06/28/the-working-from-home-delusion-fades

paywall-free:

https://archive.ph/KkojP

US vendor accused of violating GDPR by reputation-scoring EU citizens

Carefully parsed statement

GDPR allows a legitimate interest exemption for preventing fraud against yourself. Not for selling fraud-scoring services to others.

Mark Zuckerberg would kick Elon Musk's ass, experts say

Considering Twitter has never been profitable, a better question is why would anyone bother cloning it?

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

Re: Coming together in person.

Boardroom tables are hard and it’s not as pleasant an experience as you’d think, beyond the transgressive thrills.

Brexit Britain looks to French company to save crumbling borders and immigration tech

Boris Johnson’s great-grandfather was a Turkish minister

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Kemal

Cisco Moscow trashed offices as it quit Putin's putrid pariah state

Goes both ways

The US used shell companies to buy titanium from the USSR as it could not source enough on its own to make the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane otherwise.

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

Re: Other major Russian open-source projects

Oh, and Zabbix also

Other major Russian open-source projects

Nginx, Clickhouse, quite a few contributors to PostgreSQL. Not open-source, but JetBrains was founded by Russians and had a lot of R&D done in Russia.

I realize the ban is Microsoft complying with US sanctions law, but ipmitool is critical infrastructure with privileged access to hardware that would be a prime vector for malware or root kits if compromised, so there is a sound national security rationale for a freeze there.

George W Bush was re-elected

So much for democratic accountability