Posts by diodesign

How Google uses mirrors to dynamically reconfigure its networks

More sophisticated and dense

Yeah that's it - it's just rad to see it detailed at Google-scale. See the paper for more info.

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Re: How Google uses mirrors dynamically reconfigure its networks dynamically,

Don't worry, we fired the AI bot that wrote that headline into /dev/null

It's fixed - don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot something wrong.

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NASA builds for keeps: Voyager mission still going after 45 years

Re: Correction !

Yeah, we meant that the two probes between them went to the four planets. I've now added a bit that says what specifically went where.

Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong, or we might not see your comment for days.

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Scientists use supercritical carbon dioxide to power the grid

kWh

Yeah, it's fixed. It was a bit obvious from the context in the first par. But, fine.

For those saying why trust a whole article if some simple thing is wrong in it. That's a very 1D way one of looking at it. We're most concerned with making sure the main, sensitive parts of a story are correct.

Sometimes that means little things like saying 10 kWh in the first sentence and 10 kW later get overlooked.

Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong, please.

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Whatever happened to???

Re: Whatever happened to???

We fired her.

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Janet Jackson music video declared a cybersecurity exploit

Perfect August story

It is the summer silly season when actual news is thin on the ground. August is the perfect time of tales that seem too good to be true.

On a more serious note, it is just reporting what Chen said, and that a CVE was assigned, which is funny. No one's confirmed the actual issue.

Our readers are smart enough to know how much weight to put on these sorts of yarns.

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Software developer cracks Hyundai car security with Google search

Probably!

You can run whatever app you want on it.

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Oh Deere: Farm hardware jailbroken to run Doom

The Linux kernel is not the only GPL'd piece of software out there.

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Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

Re: Full Self Driving (FSD) was not even engaged!

FWIW we've added a large update to our piece. I'd like to highlight that we drew attention to the weirdly small sample size and the incorrect use of Autopilot in our initial reporting, which may leave readers rightly healthily skeptical of the project's claims.

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South Korea's lunar orbiter launches and phones home happily

Re: Is there another kind of camera?

Yeah, you know what we mean: it's an extra sensitive camera, designed to pull images out of dark areas.

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Re: Re: Is there another kind of camera?

Yeah it's poles, not pole. And the ShadowCam is just a super sensitive camera:

http://shadowcam.sese.asu.edu/about

Don't forget to drop an email to [e-mail], please, if you spot anything wrong or weird, so we can fix it right away.

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One way Bitcoin miners can make money: Selling electricity back to Texas

And also...

...a 1 GW one coming online in 2023.

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Anti-piracy messaging may just encourage more piracy

Rant

OK, chill out! The "reasonable comparison" and "less reasonable comparisons" was the paper's viewpoint, not ours, which I've made clearer in the piece. Suffice to say, no, we don't think physical theft of an item is the same as downloading something you weren't going to pay for anyway.

One, this article is critical of the paper in that (for example) we note that the paper cites industry numbers without challenging them, which is not great.

Two, Tom (who wrote the article) is one of our top staff who goes beyond press releases, and routinely ruins an exec's month with original reporting. Gimme a break with this churnalism stuff.

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Apple plays the supply-chain card to explain Mac, iPad revenue shrink

Components

Yeah, totally: we've reported as much before.

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Apple network traffic takes mysterious detour through Russia

Re: Block sizes

We meant the /19 is announced as part of a larger /9 block, which is in the /8 range. Here's the passage from MANRS:

"Around 21:25 UTC On 26 July 2022, Rostelecom’s AS12389 network started announcing 17.70.96.0/19. This prefix is part of Apple’s 17.0.0.0/8 block; usually, Apple only announces the larger 17.0.0.0/9 block and not this shorter prefix length."

I've edited that part as it seems to be confusing people. A /19 block is smaller than /9 which is smaller than /8.

Also if you think we've written something wrong, please drop us an email to [e-mail] so we can take a look straight away, thanks.

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Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

Re: What's the Orbit, Bob?

Well, it's easily Google-able, if you care that much, but fine: I've added it to the story.

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Re: Re: What's the Orbit, Bob?

There's a tweet in the story illustrating potential re-entry.

It links to here.

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James Webb, Halley's Comet may be set for cosmic dust-up

Re: Unserviceable????

Yeah, we mean not serviceable. Please don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong like this - we can't read every comment.

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General Motors goes electric with $2.5b US government loan for battery plants

Re: Nissan must feel hard done by...

Ugh, it's $1.45 billion. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong so it can be fixed right away.

Ta.

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This credit card-sized PC board can use an Intel Core i7

Conversion

It was written and edited in the US and scheduled for the UK morning. We just wanted to go home, TBH, so didn't do the conversion. I've added it now seeing as I'm up late working.

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T-Mobile US to cough up $550m after info stolen on 77m customers

Re: A bit of maths

OTOH $550m is ~18% of T-Mobile US's 2021 net income of $3b. About a fifth of annual profit.

And FWIW it's $350m for the final class action, $150m on better security (ker-ching, vendors), and the rest on other settlements, totaling $550m.

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My Big Coin founder is – you guessed it – a $6m crypto-fraudster

"crypto is all worthless numbers"

It really isn't. Crypto scams are worthless, yes, so watch out for those. Actual crypto, no.

If you go on Coinbase or Robinhood or WeBull or FTX or whatever, and you spend $1,000 on Ethereum, the price of ETH goes up 10%, and you sell, you just made $100 cash (minus any applicable tax). If the price goes down 10% and you sell, you just set fire to $100.

So yes, real money at play here. $1.5m of it in the alleged Coinbase case.

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"Is that illegal?"

Yes, if the allegations in that particular case are true, that would be insider trading.

Whenever a coin is listed on a large exchange like Coinbase, its value goes up - at least initially.

Speaking generally: Let's say a CB staffer quietly tips you off that a token is about to be listed. You buy thousands of those tokens from other exchanges, or perhaps mine a load yourself. Then it's listed on CB and the price shoots up as demand kicks in. When it's gone high enough for you, sell the tokens, and bag a profit.

That would be pants-on-head insider trading.

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Survey: "What do you want The Register to do for you?"

Options

Glad you enjoy all the types - it's not so much we'll only do one thing out of the list, it's that we'll do more of what people want.

This is to make sure we're not (say) expecting demand for story type X when really people want type Y the most. It's to make sure we're aligned with what people want the most out of us.

Yeah we know it's a one-shot choice: that will be taken into account when we look at the numbers.

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Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Balance

"journalistic balance through opinion pieces isn't really journalism"

Well, it is. It's an opinion piece. It's like if I have the opinion that Chrome is a nicer experience than Firefox, I'm not going to put in it how Firefox is better than Chrome when that's not my actual honest view.

For some people, MS's efforts in O/S are a positive (it's not going to open source Windows, is it). For others, it's not enough or just lip service (where's Office for Linux?).

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'The Register purchased by Microsoft?'

LMAO. No.

We've done two opinion articles - thought provoking columns - out of, well, take a look at just these three stories in the past few days.

* Microsoft intros clothing line that is absolutely not leftover conference swag

* Microsoft resorts to Registry hack to keep Outlook from using Windows 11 search

* Lenovo told by Microsoft to prevent non-Windows OSes booting by default

And so on. I think if you suggested to anyone at Microsoft that we were a pro-Redmond title, they would think you're trolling them.

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Tories spar over UK's delayed Online Safety Bill

Twitter replies

The honest answer is: I ran out of time, and wanted to schedule the story before it became old news.

The tweets are linked so people can see the followups. And the article mentions that sending a malicious message - like telling someone to kill themselves - is potentially a criminal offense.

Also, the point of the article was Tories fighting over the bill, not really the actual bill because it's still in flux. And quite a lot of it will be defined with Ofcom.

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Weird Flex, but OK: Now you can officially turn these PCs, Macs into Chromebooks

Headlines

Yeah, that's fair. FWIW we wanted our article to reflect the point and goals of Chrome OS Flex. It's for people who want to turn their stuff into Chromebooks in an easy, faff-free way, from what I can tell.

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FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

Copyright law

Sounds like a blatant piracy protection circumvention, and a bajillion dollar fine and/or imprisonment.

I'm being 90% facetious.

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First-ever James Webb Space Telescope image revealed

Pffft

All right, smaller, then, not tiny.

Don't forget to drop us a note to corrections@ if you spot something odd.

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Microsoft delays controversial ban on paid-for open source, WebKit in app store

Alternative engines

Correct.

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Broadcom takeover deal for VMware faces no rival bids

Re: Requiem for a once-great

Reportedly, the EU is investigating the Broadcom-VMware deal.

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Arrogant, subtle, entitled: 'Toxic' open source GitHub discussions examined

Re: Eh?

One might argue it's passive aggressive, unprofessional, and not particularly constructive.

I would say it depends on how well you know the other person and the context. Someone you've had banter with, you might say to them "this is 1,000,000 times harder than it needs to be, mate." Someone you don't really know, that kind of comment may be off putting.

Many years ago, I contributed to a project and the lead dev gave me the feedback: "This code makes my shoes sad." It's not a great starting point. I had to ask: was it the comments or variable names, or...

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How can we make the VC world less pale and male, Congress wonders

"a larger or fewer number of entrepreneurs"

Yeah, that did cross my mind. How many people in each bracket want to start their own business, and how many would consider taking VC money?

But then how many don't even consider it because of other effects... it feels like a complicated puzzle of many moving parts.

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'what wasn't specifically mentioned'

Yeah, that's what we meant by: "That doesn't quite match up with the US adult population."

The amount of funding given to non-White people is out of proportion – whether it's too much or too little.

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Intel demos multi-wavelength laser array integrated on silicon wafer

Re: 300mm tech?

I can't tell if you're joking or not, but 300mm refers to the silicon wafer size this stuff is built on. It's one of the standard wafer diameters.

It's not a whole wafer being used. It means the equipment Intel uses to make components from 300mm wafers can be used to make these arrays.

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Arm says its Cortex-X3 CPU smokes this Intel laptop silicon

System targets

Yeah, the 8-core example is for things like smart TVs and the 12-core one for laptops and PCs. I've made this clearer in the article - thanks.

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That's the comparison Arm gave

That's indeed the comparison Arm gave. 12 cores with the latest gen versus eight in the previous generation.

So yes, there's a performance boost there, enabled by Arm's support for 12 cores in its latest DSU.

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Always read the comments: Beijing requires oversight of all reader-generated chat

"I have never seen so many comments being moderated"

I don't have moderation stats easily to hand but I don't believe there's been a significant uptick in moderation.

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Administrivia

I'm personally loving the "my comments are being moderated!" and the whiff of allegations of censorship ....... in comments that are public for everyone to see. I explained in the linked-to thread why comments were being held on that story.

We pretty much only reject comments that are legally problematic to us (as someone said, we are UK based and that nation's rules on UGC are not the same as the US's), flat out misinformation (eg, claims that COVID-19 vaccines have 5G chips in them), or things that would derail a conversation (eg, complaining about moderation when there are forums for that).

The vast majority of comments go through automatically, and some are manually moderated for really boring reasons. If you find your comments being moderated then it's going to be because of some practical reason above and not because someone here disagrees with you.

If someone's comment is approved or rejected when the opposite should have happened, it's always cockup over conspiracy - drop us a note to appeal it if you're so inclined.

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Cisco warns of security holes in its security appliances

Re: Is this in addition to ...

Ah yup, these four are on top of the ones we wrote about last week.

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Voicemail phishing emails steal Microsoft credentials

Re: I'm getting too old for this shit...

FWIW, as the article says, it's a bogus email saying you have a voicemail waiting for you, and you have to open the attached file to listen to it.

Someone in a rush, or not aware of how these scams work, opens it, gets directed to a Microsoft 365 login page, thinks, 'fking computer, I already logged in', types in their password, and it's game over.

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Capital One: Convicted techie got in via 'misconfigured' AWS buckets

"this fact was excluded from the article"

Because it's not relevant. We don't feel the need to say "born a man" or "born a woman" in all our other hacking stories, so why would we start here?

I'm being rhetorical, BTW.

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Intel delivers first discrete Arc desktop GPUs ... in China

Sponsored content

I would normally reject this as it's off-topic but I'll allow it this one time.

The article you referred to is sponsored content with no editorial input nor endorsement. The advertiser has paid to write their own words, and we use that money to fund the rest of the site.

Such as our reporting on ZTE equipment being stripped out of networks and China's treatment of its people, which is well documented here and elsewhere.

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Intel says Sapphire Rapids CPU delay will help AMD catch up

Re: Catch up?

Think a little further in the future: Intel says Sapphire Rapids will be the clear leading server chip when it comes out – but then AMD's next-gen Epyc will soon land that will even out the race (or overtake the Xeon family).

Intel's saying that, in its view, its time to be the leading server processor supplier again will be a lot shorter than it expected. Which is quite something.

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IETF publishes HTTP/3 RFC to take the web from TCP to UDP

RFCs

Yeah, got it - thanks. We've corrected the piece. Thanks for the feedback.

Next time you spot something wrong, please drop us a note too to [e-mail] so we can get on to it right away.

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Amazon accused of obstructing probe into deadly warehouse collapse

Billionaire runs for president

I'm sure Mike Bloomberg has a ton of advice for Jeff.

It might be 12,000 pages of 'Don't.' repeated over and over.

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Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

"If you use Linux, what kind of work do you do?"

I, at least, use Linux on a daily desktop basis for Register work. That's mostly in Chrome, Gimp for any simple picture editing, and some extra tools for testing / checking things.

Hopper disassembler is good for going through executables to check cybersecurity research (if possible). When I used to use a Mac for work, I'd use Hopper to RE macOS components to find out a bit more where the latest text-based crash was in Apple products.

There's also Docker and the terminal for checking stuff for Linux and related stories, like packages and building source and running it. I get that this can be done on Windows and Mac; I just like the way it all works on Linux (Debian).

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All-AMD US Frontier supercomputer ousts Japan's Fugaku as No. 1 in Top500

Re: So powerful it can predict the future?

The Top500 results are usually updated in November and June annually. Due to way dates have fallen this year, the June 2022 results are technically out on May 30.

Yes, I'm this fun at parties.

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