* Posts by diodesign

3493 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

Voicemail phishing emails steal Microsoft credentials

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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 corrections@theregister.com so we can get on to it right away.

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Amazon accused of obstructing probe into deadly warehouse collapse

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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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Multi-level marketing corporation that sells weightloss products sues ex-exec over 'fraudulent' Dell deal

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Claims against Gerry Berg have been dismissed

Sure -- I've added that into the article, thanks.

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Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Size and weight

It's just a description. It's like if we said it had some heft to it.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: You're whinging about a 6.5 pound laptop?

FWIW I don't think anyone's whinging - not us, anyway - we're simply pointing out it weighs more than your average laptop.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Not an ad

It's not an ad or paid-for -- we would have labeled as such if it were.

We'll see about getting some more photos of the machine into the piece.

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AMD reveals 5nm Ryzen 7000 powered by Zen 4 cores

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: RYZEN 7000CPU

Hi -- yeah, we'll get that clarified for you.

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JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you're not alone... a chunk of pros also feel JS is 'overly complex'

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

You're commenting on an article from 2019...

...in which the people who did the survey chose not to make a distinction between Angular and AngularJS.

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How ICE became a $2.8b domestic surveillance agency

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"anti-American president"

That was the previous guy. At least the latest guy seems to have a more measurable level of concern for his fellow citizens.

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Pictured: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Pronounciation

It's "sadge-a-star."

The article initially included this but it was cut in the edit for readability reasons.

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Big Tech shrank the internet while growing its own power

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Feedback

Hey thanks for the feedback. We've taken your points onboard, with a few tweaks to the piece and also for food for thought in future.

The thrust of our argument was that more and more traffic is going into the hands of a smaller number of network owners, which isn't great for resilience, for one thing.

Also, if we end up in a situation where 90%+ of traffic ends up in Google, Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft, Akamai, etc, pipes, what happens with standards? Might be a bit less IETF and a lot more GAMCA. Maybe we're worrying about nothing, maybe it's worth putting it out there. We went with the latter.

Also, re: CDNs. Sure, you don't have to use one or you could build your own. Much like if you don't like using DHL or FedEx, you could ship something literally yourself. Or if you don't want to fly BA or AA, you could get your own plane, pilot's license, and fly. There comes a point where you need a site-protection service that's cost prohibitive for you to build.

You mentioned other anti-competitive stuff, which is valid, but beyond the intended scope of this article.

It's a comment piece on this particular part of the industry.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: The i in iPhone stands for "internet"

Yeah, the i was for internet, among other things, if you follow the history.

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Intel puts ‘desktop-caliber’ CPUs in laptops with 12th-gen Core HX

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Mix of GPUs

The GPUs aren't consistent across tests, which we've popped into the piece. Hope this helps.

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Palantir summons specter of nuclear conflict as share price collapses

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Correction

You're right. We could have done better. We should have said:

"... Donald Trump, who was impeached twice and continues to be unable to stop his inane thoughts from spilling out of his alleged brain."

We are happy to clarify the article.

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Legacy IT to blame for UK's inflexible benefits system

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Titles, schmitles

We'll call him whatever we like, TBH.

Britain's Big Beancounter.

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Google Docs crashed when fed 'And. And. And. And. And.'

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Walkerisms

I lol'd

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Samsung unveils hardened SD card that can last 16 years if you treat it right

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Typo.

Yeah minus 25. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong, please, so we can fix it right away.

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US judge dismisses Republican efforts to block release of Salesforce emails

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"That's all the protesters on 6th January were after"

That's gold-winning mental gymnastics

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EU Apple suit alleges anticompetitive Apple Pay practices

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

revenue or profit

It's revenue (sales), which I've inserted into the piece.

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El Reg - Shadow Banning

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

No

The answer to your question is: no. One or two stories had a flag put on them for manual moderation of all comments as they were about sensitive subjects.

It's been a long weekend (public holiday in the UK) so moderation slowed down. Queue is being cleared now.

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Microsoft points at Linux and shouts: Look, look! Privilege-escalation flaws here, too!

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"most distributions don't even package"

It gets more desperate the more you look at it. It's not on our Debian 11 workstations.

That it's in default Ubuntu, so some people out there are using it, is Redmond's saving grace.

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Elon Musk's Twitter mega-takeover likely imminent

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

A share

It's $54.20 a share, FWIW

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Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Not solar

Hi, yeah, brain blip by one of us. It's fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong.

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Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Errors

Hi -- just a reminder to all and any: if you think there's an error in an article, please email corrections@theregister.com specifying exactly which sentence you think is wrong and why.

Think of it as filing a bug report

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COVID-19 contact tracing apps were suggested as saviors. They sometimes delivered

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Corections

Hi -- can you please email corrections@theregister.co.uk if you spot anything wrong so we can fix it?

The year typo has been fixed.

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Twitter preps poison pill to preclude Elon Musk's purchase plan

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

'I have much trouble agreeing with'

So, wait, you're for or against free speech?

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BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Virtual Friday BOFH

I could lie here in an attempt to make you all return on Friday

But no, we brought BOFH forward for those who want to do other things in an Easter break other than check out IT news and the internet

But hey you're welcome to drop by tomorrow anyway, half of us will still be working ;-)

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Microsoft arms Azure VMs with Ampere Altra chips

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

VM costs

"the article makes it sound like the cost of a 8x x86 CPU (with HT enabled) is same/similar as a 16 x x86 CPU VM. I assume this is not the case"

It likely costs more. We've updated the article with Ampere's POV on this.

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Japanese startup makes baby carrier-style sling for 'Love Robots'

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Un-fool

This year we tried to do an April unFool. There's so much weird and bad stuff happening that taking something completely bonkers but real and running it straight might be more amusing that a corny obvious AF joke.

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National Security Agency employee indicted for 'leaking top secret info'

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "The NSA is [..] supposed to be very good at securing data"

Keyword: supposed.

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Procurement guy at Apple allegedly ripped off iPhone giant in $10m+ scam

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Income

Two things. One, the IRS demands you report ill-gotten gains as income. The IRS doesn't care if you robbed a bank - that's another agency's problem - it wants that income tax from your heist. If you ripped off Apple and you under-declare your income, you'll have the IRS to answer for. So - if the allegations are true - he may have tried to declare some of the scam money as income to avoid the IRS poking around.

Second thing, examples of Apple pay are on levels.fyi FYI.

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Amazon to spend £1.8bn on UK infrastructure over next 2 years

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Typo

We probably meant the ~200 countries on Earth, not 200 million. It's fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything weird in stories so we can get right on it.

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If you want to make your own chip and aren't Microsoft rich, who do you turn to?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "Skywater Technology's 130nm process"

130nm is OK for low-volume simple devices and microcontrollers. Academic studies, first-time tape-outs, one-off silicon, weird mixed-signal stuff, etc. No one expects it to be advanced. Depending on how much money you have, the 130nm is virtually free (or free if qualifying with Google), so you get what you pay for.

Skywater does 90-350nm (and seems to be trying out 65nm) and if you need something else, like 65nm and below, there are other foundries.

BTW one of the reasons why you want a high transistor count (and therefore a dense node) is to fit a decent amount of cache on the die. If you don't need a lot of cache, and you're not doing an SoC with a lot of complex things on it, well, why do you need a small node?

But hey, don't let me stop you. If you want something super dense, knock yourself out. Just cough up the six or seven figures rather than ten large.

For instance, take SiFive: their first chips were in the 16-14nm range, and it's had hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, and sales on top of that.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: How do they compare?

There are some others. Eg,

MOSIS – this takes the same multiple-designs-per-wafer approach and works with TSMC, Intel, and GF. These have been around for ages.

Europractice is another broker for access to foundries

IC Alps often pops up

Minimal Fab Nederland is gauging interest

There is a choice. If there's an interest in low-volume chip making, we'll explore the area more and speak to others. I dream of having the time and budget to design and make a simple vulture chip for an article series.

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Even complex AI models are failing 5th grade science

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Interpreter please

5th grade is 10-11 years old.

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CafePress fined for covering up 2019 customer info leak

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

What's $500k to Cafepress?

As an aside, Cafepress's quarterly revenue was $15m in 2018, on which it made a $1.5m loss. That year it was acquired and taken private by Snapfish for $25m, got hacked in 2019, and was sold to PlanetArt in 2020.

Those are the final financial figures we have for it.

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Intel to spend €17bn on chip mega-factory in Germany

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

'the wrong metaphor'

We can kinda use words how we want around here. Call 911 if you don't like it.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Writing

FWIW though Agam is a US citizen writing in the US, he didn't do the headline. I did, and I'm a British citizen in the US.

Whenever we publish in US time, we try to use US spelling. In fact, we're gradually moving to all US spelling to make the site consistent.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

How big?

Uuuuuuuuuge. The biggested and bestest possible.

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Another data-leaking Spectre bug found, smashes Intel, Arm defenses

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

'ended up'

Well yeah, that's why we used the words "ended up," as in: one way or another, they put performance before security.

It could have been intentional, it could have been accidental. I've heard anecdotally in the Valley that some CPU designers had an inkling that speculative execution left a trace in the cache that could be used to leak data but thought it was either theoretical or not worth worrying about.

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Chip world's major suppliers of neon gas shut down by Ukraine invasion – report

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Get in the f***ing robot, Shinji

I'm glad someone got it.

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If you want to connect GPUs direct to SSDs for a speed boost, this could be it

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Just check out the paper

It's just an interesting way to get threads on GPU cores to talk direct to NVMe SSDs to get the data they need in a fine-grained, software-cached manner that specifically suits the access patterns of GPU-bound applications.

Yeah it involves DMA and all that. It's not claiming to have reinvented or come up with DMA; it's an application of it specific to GPU workloads.

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Google introduces new Cloud infrastructure pricing

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Timing

The 'X hours' string is generated using client-side JavaScript running in your browser.

The webpage contains the exact time and date, and the code on the page converts that into 'X hours ago' based on the local time of your device. So the time on your device was out.

To me, it says your comment was posted an hour ago.

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