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).
Posts by Fazal Majid
540 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2007
Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format
GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry
How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip
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
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
US vendor accused of violating GDPR by reputation-scoring EU citizens
Mark Zuckerberg would kick Elon Musk's ass, experts say
Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week
Brexit Britain looks to French company to save crumbling borders and immigration tech
Cisco Moscow trashed offices as it quit Putin's putrid pariah state
Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools
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.
Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes
US government says Silicon Valley Bank depositors can get their cash on Monday
Re: Am I wrong in my thinking here?
It was forced to realize losses on bad bets on interest rates due to capital reserve requirements, that would not be an issue if held to maturity. As part of a larger bank with reserves, they will just hold those treasuries until they mature.
SVB has a unique skill set in catering to startups, some of which will be future unicorns or FANGs. Traditional banks are just too hidebound to address the]at market, and it is incredibly valuable. The problems did not come from the retail side. That retail expertise combined with a more diversified entity and competent risk management means whoever buys them will make a killing.
China's efforts to influence standards are mostly fake – and flopping
Re: chasing our tails
Indeed. I started my career at France Telecom R&D, and the guy who was responsible for attending standards organization meetings I wouldn't even classify as a C player. The UN's stewardship of the ITU also means one nation, one vote so Burkina Faso gets the same voting rights as the US or China, and usually ends up selling its vote to the highest bidder.
MacStadium brings macOS instances orchestrated by Kubernetes to AWS
Sure looks like Beijing stole blueprints from chip fab world's ASML
Fairly obvious consequence
This was guaranteed to happen. The Dutch intelligence services are pretty competent (remember when they had hacked into the security webcams of the Russian troll farm that was trying to influence US elections?) and I’m sure they have intercepted far more attempts that we don’t know about.
Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved
If you're struggling to secure email forwarding, it's not you, it's ... the protocols
It’s Outlook’s fault
Basically Outlook allowing an account unrelated to state.gov to launder forwarded email using an allowlist is the issue, but like GMail they are too big to fail and can get away with gross insecurity like this.
Securing email is pretty much impossible due to all the legacy and a fool’s errand.
Could RISC-V become a force in high performance computing?
Only if China pushes hard
The main driving force behind RISC-V is China's need to wean itself off dependence on Intel and ARM architectures subject to US sanctions, which is why all the major Chinese tech companies like Huawei, Baidu and Alibaba have RISC-V chip design teams, although how far they can get with the US also sanctioning cutting edge fab technology is anyone's guess. The Chinese government also obviously has HPC needs and will support this.
That said, RISC-V CPU performance is still far behind x64 and arm64.
The wages of sin aren't that great if you're a developer choosing the dark side
Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss
Intel, AMD just created a headache for datacenters
Balanced architecture
This problem has been ongoing for decades. Very few applications need the highest-speed processors, and data centers need to be designed with racks that have a couple of high-performance servers surrounded by more efficient (and thus likely ARM64-based) servers to balance out the energy requirements. Since most enterprise workloads have yet to begin the process of migrating to ARM, that is going to take some time.
Washington DC drags Amazon to court for 'yoinking' driver tips
Right. Simply paying back money owed is not enough, there should be a punitive deterrent. They should pay at least treble damages to the victims, and also be forced to cooperate by naming the guilty executives so they can be criminally prosecuted. When executives know they can go to prison for misbehavior that benefits their company is when the practice will end.
Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?
Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment
Re: Which environment we are talking about?
I have tow inkjet printers. An Epson EcoTank Pro ET-16600, where the price of refills good for 6000 pages is $22 x 4, far cheaper than any cartridge-based printer,
The other is a HP OfficeJet Pro X551dw that has the HP PageWide inkjet head that is 8.5 inches wide and can print the whole width of Letter/A4/Legal paper without scrolling back and forth, and thus exceptionally fast, but because it uses cartridges, they cost $120 x 4, or more than the price of the printer itself. At this point, I am going to decommission it because it is not economical to repair or even refill.
Interestingly, HP decided to discontinue PageWide in favor of laser technology, whereas Epson, the last maker of full-wifth inkjet technology (sadly not for consumer-level devices) is doubling down on inkjet.
Massive energy storage system goes online in UK
Don't believe the hype: HP CEO says 3D printing hasn't met early hopes
Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel
Most Metaverse business projects will be dead by 2025
Meta mad as hell over allegations it let Indian politicians block content
Meta has zero credibility
First of all, Meta long ago forfeited the benefit of doubt. Despite knowing this, they still made at least two provably false or carefully parsed statements in their denial, thus providing The Wire with a huge stick to beat them. The DKIM signatures are particularly damning.
What I take home from this is that Meta is appeasing the Modi government with censorship privileges, not surprising since they are banned from China, losing ground in the West as they are shunned by younger generations, and India is their one real growth market, albeit only marginally profitable. This is unlike their involuntary abetting of the Myanmar junta's genocide against the Rohingya, but then again, perhaps we should reconsider if that was actually complicity. Furthermore, that program is probably not Xcheck but has another name, which is why the carefully worded non-denial insists so much on that irrelevant matter of terminology.
Linus Torvalds's faulty memory (RAM, not wetware) slows kernel development
The newest (12th gen) Alder Lake non-Xeon CPUs do support ECC
But only if you use an Intel W680 workstation (I.e. expensive) chipset, e.g. in the HP Z2 Mini G9.
Making ECC a Xeon-only feature was a classic case of market segmentation by a monopolist to allow them to extract maximum profits from enterprise customers willing to pay more for reliability.
Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister
There is a very easy way to eliminate annoying cookie popups
And that is to give the Sec-GPC (Global Privacy Control) header force of law, something the old DNT (Do Not Track) header lacked, and ban cookie consent popups if it is sent.
But of course the real intention is to gut consent via opt-out as in the ineffectual US self-regulation free-for-all (except for enlightened states like California with its GDPR-equivalent CCPA/CPRA).