Posts by diodesign

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

Size and weight

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

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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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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

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'

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

"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

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

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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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

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

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

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.'

Walkerisms

I lol'd

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

Typo.

Yeah minus 25. Don't forget to email [e-mail] 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

"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

revenue or profit

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

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El Reg - Shadow Banning

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!

"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

A share

It's $54.20 a share, FWIW

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Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel

Not solar

Hi, yeah, brain blip by one of us. It's fixed. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong.

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Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

Errors

Hi -- just a reminder to all and any: if you think there's an error in an article, please email [e-mail] 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

Corections

Hi -- can you please email [e-mail] 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

'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

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

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'

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'

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

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

Typo

We probably meant the ~200 countries on Earth, not 200 million. It's fixed. Don't forget to email [e-mail] 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?

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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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

Re: Interpreter please

5th grade is 10-11 years old.

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CafePress fined for covering up 2019 customer info leak

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

'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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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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How big?

Uuuuuuuuuge. The biggested and bestest possible.

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

'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

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

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

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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SPEC mulls benchmarks for ML processing performance

IDC figures

I think the point is that it's too early to know exactly how much was spent in 2021, so IDC is guesstimating right now.

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Developer adoption is our priority, profits second, Cloudflare tells bankers

'deleting my post'

FWIW your now-deleted previous post made what looked like a baseless accusation of criminal activity so a moderator removed it.

Also FWIW Cloudflare's pretty open about the position it takes: it doesn't want to decide what's right or wrong on the internet. It doesn't want to be the arbiter of what is allowed to be hosted. Eg:

Cloudflare: We dumped Daily Stormer not because they're Nazis but because they said we love Nazis

Cloudflare speaks out amid allegations it safeguards banned terror gangs' websites

If you report spam or malware-based abuse to Cloudflare, feel free to CC us in ([e-mail]) and we'll take a look at the same time.

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VMware offers hardware compatibility list for home labs

Just a stock image

It's just a generic pic to indicate someone tinkering with kit at home. I've changed the pic.

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Microsoft patches critical remote-code-exec hole in Exchange Server and others

Re: HEVC "data" files contain executable code?

No, they're not supposed to contain arbitrary code.

What happens is, with these kinds of bugs, is that there is a payload of instructions carefully placed within the multimedia file that is otherwise just data. When the file is parsed, the vulnerability in the parser is exploited to allow the payload to eventually execute.

There are steps in between to get around the OS's security defenses.

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Linux distros patch 'Dirty Pipe' make-me-root kernel bug

Re: Linux Bias?

"How big would the article be for a Windows vuln that let any fucker get admin privileges?"

For a Windows vuln for which patches are already out? Typically a few sentences: there are EoP holes in every Windows Patch Tuesday.

If we write a whole article about an EoP it's usually because a patch isn't out yet (it's a zero day) or it's being actively exploited or that the bug is particularly interesting, or that someone on the team was at a loose end and had enough time and material to write a whole article.

"C'mon El reg, there was a time when you weren't afraid to put the boot into ANY OS, even Linux. Are you really that frightened of a load of pissy comments?"

No. We often assign stories based on how much time and scribes we've got available. For Dirty Pipe, we wanted to get it out as soon as possible as the next lead item on the weekly roundup.

In fact think of it as a Dirty Pipe story with bonus material, as the DP section is quite a lot more than a couple of paragraphs.

We'll look at the Android angle next (it's also mentioned in the article).

Good news is that we've hired two writers this month to cover security, so expect more security stories sooner rather than later.

"Step the fuck up."

Sigh, why this angry?

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Re: Example

If you overwrite an entry in /etc/password so that the password field is blank, no password is needed. (If there's an x, use the shadow file.)

So, just blank out root's password entry with the DirtyPipe overwrite and everyone can get root.

PS: Another example would be to pick a root-owned setuid binary and overwrite it so that it simply spawns a root shell, and then restore the binary to normal.

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Here's why prolonged Russia-Ukraine war would be really bad for us, say chip designers

Confused

How do you mean?

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The time we came up with a solution – and found a big customer problem

Patch level

The sidebar was there right from the start for those who needed an intro to MPLS.

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Study: AI detects backdoor-unlocking DNA samples

Hype

FWIW there is no commercial project linked to this or anything like that, from what I can tell, so there's no snake oil to sell here.

It's an interesting attack vector that we thought we'd write about. We'll stay away from more theoretical attacks in future.

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'If the lab already is already infected with a trojan'

I guess the point of this is that - a la SolarWinds - you modify some popular software in a supply chain attack, and the code is deployed all over the world.

In order to target specific labs, you get them to process a sample with an IP address and port in it so you know which lab you're breaking into.

It's very theoretical, we thought it was interesting, and we think readers will understand the threat. We'll keep the feedback in mind for future.

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