Posts by Fazal Majid

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

So will Element (Matrix)

Matthew Hodgson, CEO of Element, the home of the Matrix secure messaging platform also said he will move their HQ away from the UK if this passes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34923544

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

Not surprising

Most drug dealers would make more money flipping burgers for McDonalds. It's only the kingpins who make serious money.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Innumeracy

I fail to see how only 1/3 or 33% of Americans are overweight but 2 in 5 or 40% are obese, which one would presume also means overweight.

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

Why the scare-quotes around 'stealing'? It's a clear-cut case of wage theft.

Re: Tips?

I grew up in France, and it's traditional for the firefighters, postmen, garbagemen and others to come sell calendars for the New Year.

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?

Support costs will go down as well

Considering 50% of all help desk support calls are printer-related, that will also yield savings (and job losses).

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

Re: Can't help feeling it's more a bottom line thing than a green thing...

Consumer laser cartridges are much, much more expensive, and not competitive with ink tank inkjet printers.

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

Coire Glas

There is a pumped hydro storage project in the works in Scotland at Coire Glas that would have 1.5GW power and up to 30GWh capacity (for reference, the peak power consumption in the UK is about 30GW).

https://www.coireglas.com

Don't believe the hype: HP CEO says 3D printing hasn't met early hopes

Re: Perhaps it's because HP makes crappy 3D printers

I have a Prusa MK3S, and I wouldn’t call it plug-and-play. There is still a lot of art and black magic involved in getting decent prints and avoiding failures, specially when you move beyond PLA.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Heh, a blast from the past. I first installed Linux on my 33 MHz 486DX in 1991-1992 or so:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.advocacy/c/7MdzcPwmPFs/m/r89Mb88DzsUJ

Most Metaverse business projects will be dead by 2025

I agree

My company wasted tens of thousands of dollars equipping every member of staff with an Oculus Quest 2. We used it once for a virtual meeting. Laggy, low-res, utterly pointless. They should have issued iPads and Pencils instead, whiteboarding using those at least has a fighting chance.

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).

Nadine Dorries promotes 'Brexit rewards' of proposed UK data protection law

The damage is already baked in

Every company I know assume the UK will diverge from GDPR and lose equivalence. Thus the UK was ruled out from consideration for implanting our EMEA data operations.

W3C's planned transition to HTTPS stymied by legacy laggards

Wellnhofer is incoherent

If his concern is about loading schemas over the network, he should disable unencrypted HTTP as well.

Google promises to adjust search algorithm to favor 'people-first content'

An obvious tell

Is sites with affiliate links. Penalize them and you’ve killed the profit motive behind those “content” farms.

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

It’s actually Philosophy, Politics and Economics, i.e. tosser central.

Re: What part of "Leave." ....

The EU put Horizon on deep freeze in retaliation because the UK reneged on the NI Protocol and fishing quotas. Two can play the game.

Re: Reap what you sow

Also the UK exported mostly services to the EU (finance, legal, advertising, media) and imported mostly goods. Services are not covered and they are the ones that get hit with non-tariff barriers like licensing requirements for lawyers.

Re: Reap what you sow

Also archive.is to work around paywalls

Re: Reap what you sow

It is also a fact the UK got a disproportionate amount of EU R&D funding. It was still a net contributor, like Germany or France, to be sure, but oddly enough the Treasury hasn’t replaced the former EU contributions with domestic R&D funding, just as the NHS is being funded by the NI hike (i.e. new taxes, not reassigned contributions).

Then again it is a national sport for politicians in EU members to blame the EU for their own failings, it’s just the UK press (owned largely by a US citizen, Rupert Murdoch) and political class showed an unusual level of mendacity, like one Boris Johnson making things up out of thin air.

AMD has a lot riding on its 5nm Ryzen 7000 CPUs. And so here begins the hype

Good

big.LITTLE is great for mobile, but does not belong on desktop processors. I hope Sapphire Rapids also drops the E-cores.

Intel finally takes the hint on software optimization

Clear Linux

Intel’s Clear Linux is a good illustration of how optimizations can get an easy 10-20% improvement in performance, and it’s not Intel-specific, AMD also uses Clear for its own benchmarks. But the project hardly gets any love internally at Intel.

Re: a cunning plan?

And yet they disabled AVX512 in Alder Lake, the biggest differentiator they have over AMD, just because of those gimped E-cores that don’t support it.

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

It’s official US government policy

And has been for years, and most other nations agree. Unfortunately unanimity is required and the two big holdouts are China (“our culture requires time to be aligned with the seasons”) and the UK (“nothing should ever be done for the first time”).

DiDi in deep doo-doo over 64 billion illegal acts of data collection

Re: "It has apologised for its actions, accepted the fine, [..]"

The best example being eBay's campaign of terror against David and Ina Steiner. The CEO at the time escaped unscathed, only his flunkies were jailed.

Tuxedo Pulse G2: Linux in your lap

Consider Starlabs

Here in the UK Starlabs makes Linux laptops of their own design, not mere rebadged Clevos:

https://starlabs.systems

Apple's new MacBook Air: Is the jump to M2 silicon worth another $200?

Heat throttling

Preliminary results from the M2 MacBook Pro 13, where the chassis hasn't been redesigned, suggest the M2 runs hotter than the M1 and is encountering thermal throttling. Now the MacBook Air has been redesigned and may have better thermal design, but it still doesn't have a fan so it's an open question as to whether it can sustain the performance before throttling occurs.

W3C overrules objections by Google, Mozilla to decentralized identifier spec

Tim Berners-Lee

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

Re: Long Range for a Proton

The A350-900ULR has a 9700 nautical mile range, and can do London or New York to Sydney non-stop, Qantas is trialing this as part of its Project Sunrise service due in 2025. It's still a twinjet but a much bigger one, with a capacity similar to early B747 Jumbo Jets.

The A321XLR is a much cheaper and economical jet that can still serve some fairly hefty point-to-point lines like most transatlantic lines.

Vivaldi email client released 7 years after first announcement

A good option for Linux user

I doubt it will displace Mail.app on my Mac, but it's definitely something I will consider above Thunderbird on Linux.

Ex-spymaster and fellow Brexiteers' emails leaked by suspected Russian op

It’s extremely dodgy when the intelligence services dabble in influencing politics, but Dearlove was not actually in government service any more when this plot was hatched, so it’s not like the abuses that spawned the Wilson Doctrine,

Minimal, systemd-free Alpine Linux releases version 3.16

I run my home server on Alpine

It's fast, simple, and has a much smaller attack surface than most other Linux distros. The sanity reminds me of OpenBSD. Probably not the best for desktop/laptop use for the reasons explained in the article.

It's 2022 and there are still malware-laden PDFs in emails exploiting bugs from 2017

Re: PDFs to blame, or Adobe Reader (for unnecessary functionality)?

In this case it's not JavaScript in the PDF but PDF's completely unnecessary ability to embed third-party file formats like Office docs, that has the actual malicious payload.

Telcos fear Big Tech will bleed them until they can’t afford network builds

Sense of entitlement

This just goes on to show the Telcos stunning sense of entitlement to value-creation they have no direct credit for.

Ad-tech firms grab email addresses from forms before they're even submitted

Autocomplete

Will “helpfully” fill in many fields like email.

Good thing I use a separate email for each website (Apple’s email privacy feature before its time).

Google starts testing fenced frames to guard its Privacy Sandbox

That won’t work

If they think embedding their adtech infrastructure inside the browser will let them evade GDPR and its pesky requirement for informed consent, they are going to be disappointed. GDPR does not care one whit where the processing is done.

Wi-Fi 6E unaffected by chip shortages, claims Wi-Fi Alliance

The EU is lagging

And hasn’t approved the spectrum yet, because Telcos are furiously lobbying to arrogate themselves that spectrum as they unsuccessfully tried to do in the US, despite having in Ajit Pai the most telco-captured FCC head in decades. Telcos, really, *really* hate the idea that someone, somewhere, may be transferring data without paying for it.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

I'm holding off

After a blistering pace of speed improvements, Apple's Silicon team seems to have hit a wall, the same one Intel hit a decade ago. The M1 Pro, Max and Ultra are just refinements on the M1 design from 1.5 years ago, and I suspect most unoptimized apps will not see any performance improvement from a lowly M1 MacBook Air, apart from the faster SSD and increased RAM. Let's see what the M2 looks like.

BitConnect boss accused of $2.4bn crypto-Ponzi fraud has disappeared

All cryptocurrencies are Ponzi schemes

But I repeat myself.

Construction starts on another Asia-Europe undersea cable

Diverse routes are also needed

It would be a good idea to avoid Egypt and the Suez Canal altogether and route a portion overland through Oman-UAE-Saudi Arabia-Jordan-Israel.

Make assistive driving safe: Eliminate pedestrians

Elaine Herzberg RIP

Then there is the case of the pedestrian who was mowed down by a Uber self-driving car in Arizona. Their programmers, no doubt hired from the same school of douchebaggery as their executives, programmed the car not to slow down because that would inconvenience passengers. The safety driver was busy playing with her cell phone. The NSTB issued a scathing report blaming an "inadequate safety culture", which is putting it mildly. Sometimes moving fast and breaking things means breaking people, to a pulp.

US carriers want to junk three times more Chinese comms kit than planned

Re: What American replacements?

It's not all 4G/5G equipment. There is a lot of SONET/SDH optical transmission gear, and quite a lot of Ethernet switching as well.

European watchdog: All data collected about users via ad-consent popup system must be deleted

Circular logic

Since they do not put a prominent "Reject All" button next to the "Accept All", the 69% number is as spurious as the alleged consent.

A better data point: 96% of Apple app users opted out of tracking when Apple introduced opt-in in iOS 14.5, and this was in the US, which is generally less privacy-conscious than Europe. So the real figure is not 69%, it's 4%.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/