* Posts by diodesign

3496 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

Google says its artificial intelligence is faster and better than humans at laying out chips for artificial intelligence

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Traditional algorithms

The neural network, Google says, outperforms human and industry automated tool placement.

So when you see in the article "beats humans" read it as "beats humans using their brains and their automated tools". I'll try to make that clearer.

Google's argument is that the neural net places macro blocks better than humans and their tools, and does it in hours, and not in a process that can take months to juggle around blocks and cells. Also, the AI can place the blocks in an unconventional manner: it seems to scatters them as needed, which some humans might not be so brave to do. The design looks like a mess but it's optimal.

FWIW it's been 15+ years since I've done any kind of chip design. In researching this piece, I read a pre-publication analysis of the paper by Andrew B. Kahng, a VLSI professor at UCSD, and for instance he mentions:

"The authors report that the agent places macro blocks sequentially, in decreasing order of size — which means that a block can be placed next even if it has no connections (physical or functional) to previously placed blocks.

"When blocks have the same size, the agent’s choice of the next block echoes the choices made by ‘cluster-growth’ methods, which were previously developed in efforts to automate floorplan design, but were abandoned several decades ago.

"It will be fascinating to see whether the authors’ use of massive computation and deep learning reveal that chip designers took a wrong turn in giving up on sequential and cluster-growth methods."

In other words, the AI works differently to humans and their automated tools, and that difference can be seen.

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Indian government to Twitter: Stop offshoring and outsourcing – or risk losing legal protections

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: The world’s most-populous nation

Thanks -- it was fixed. But don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong so we can fix it straight away.

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Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: UTC

Thanks, it was fixed. Please consider dropping corrections@theregister.com an email if you spot anything odd so we can take a look straight away.

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Chinese app binned by Beijing after asking what day it is on anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Incident

Yeah, apologies: it's fixed. Was a bit more than an incident.

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Australian cops, FBI created backdoored chat app, told crims it was secure – then snooped on 9,000 users' plots

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

'What kinds of mobile phones would these be then?'

Mobile phones that can't make calls. There's a demand among drug traffickers for handhelds that have had their voice call capabilities, and other functions, removed for security and privacy reasons -- preferably physically removed, if possible. See Sky ECC, which was bundled on devices that had their microphones, cameras, and GPS receivers removed.

From the AFP announcement:

"The app AN0M was installed on mobile phones that were stripped of other capability. The mobile phones, which were bought on the black market, could not make calls or send emails. It could only send messages to another device that had the organised crime app. Criminals needed to know a criminal to get a device."

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Everything Apple announced: Tor-ish Safari anonymization. Cloaked iCloud addresses. Cloud CI/CD. And more

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Not quite like Tor

Yeah, you kinda have to take Apple's word for it for now when its people say "no one, including Apple, can see both who you are and what sites you're visiting."

Presumably the Apple security guide [PDF] will be updated with details of Private Relay for cryptographers to study and assess. That guide is usually detailed enough to determine the viability of a design.

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UK's Labour Party calls for delay to NHS Digital's GP data slurp until patients can be properly informed

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Note to El Reg

Sure, OK, I'll see what I can do.

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Google's diversity strat lead who said Jews have 'insatiable appetite for war' is no longer diversity strat lead

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

'I wonder if anyone has checked to see if these are still his views.'

We've asked him. We'll let you know if he responds. Google PR and HR are going to be all over him, though.

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Are the forums broken?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Are the forums broken?

We did some upgrades to the backend of our systems over the long weekend and that held up the processing and publishing of comments.

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Big Tech has a big problem with Florida passing a law that protects politicians from web moderation

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

California

You mean Florida, right?

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Arm has another 'most powerful CPU to date' – this time, the 64-bit-only Cortex-X2 for laptops and smartphones

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: ARM A710 or ARM710

Yeah I know. The A510 kept making me think of the Acorn A540, too.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "It also supports 128-bit-length vectors"

Ah, see this article about the introduction of Arm's SVE, which can support SIMD vectors that are 128 to 2048 bits in length, though this implementation for smartphones goes to 128. x86 can go up to 512 bits (see AVX)

SVE started life as vector extensions for Arm supercomputers, and is now coming to client chips in the form of SVE2 (which includes SVE).

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10+ users can lead to washout: Data lakes struggle with SQL concurrency, says Gartner

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

No.

"This is an advertorial for Databricks"

No, it's not. Please don't accuse us of passing off sponsored copy as editorial -- paid-for articles are clearly marked as such.

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Virgin Galactic goes where it's gone twice before, for the first time in two years

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I didn't know El Reg was US-chauvinist

Yeah, yeah. It's now noted in the piece.

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More power for your Raspberry Pi: A new PoE+ HAT to sate power-hungry peripherals

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Timelines

'IEEE 802.3at-2003' is just a typo on their end on their sales webage. The standards are: the original IEEE 802.3af-2003 and the updated 802.3at-2009.

Our article just uses 'at' (newer) and 'af' (original).

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: 802.3at/af...really?

The RPi people claim the PoE+ HAT supports 802.3af and 802.3at

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Google to revive RSS support in Chrome for Android

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Disinterest v uninterest

Hi -- yeah, it's just a tick some writers and editors have, that they mean uninterested and they write disinterest. It's fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong, ta.

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Here's how we got persistent shell access on a Boeing 747 – Pen Test Partners

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Very grouchy

Yes, it's in the tail end and it's now fixed. The piece does also say that it's impossible exploit in the wild, and it's more an interesting hack than anything else. If it was going to make planes fall out of the sky, we would say so.

We're not perfect. We make mistakes just like everyone else.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Nose cone

Yup -- we've fixed that, ta. Don't forget to email corrections@ if you spot anything wrong so we can address it immediately.

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Microsoft hits Alt-F4 on Windows 10X: OS designed for dual-screen PCs axed

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Dual screen

Nah mate, when we say dual-screen laptop or slabtop, we mean a laptop that has 2 screens and folds up, like two touchscreen tablets hinged together --- not a multiple monitor PC.

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Reports link Bill Gates' departure from Microsoft board in 2020 with probe into employee affair

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Bill had a relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein"

Yea, it's in our article, my guy.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: French Gates?

For the avoidance of doubt, It's Bill (Henry) Gates and Melinda French Gates -- the French Gates refers to the wife as that's the name on her Twitters.

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China says its first Mars rover Zhurong has landed on the Red Planet

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Time

Yeah, that's at 11.13pm UTC today. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com please if you spot anything wrong, ta.

And thanks to those who did -- it was fixed straight away.

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India’s massive COVID-19 wave slows VMware desktop hypervisor development

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Clarification please

The latter (the M1 MB Air has no fans FWIW). From the blog post:

"I have 7 ARM VMs booted at once… 2 are CLI only (Photon and BSD), the others are full desktops… each is configured with 4CPU and 8GB of RAM. 6 different Linux flavors and 1 FreeBSD… MacBook Air. On battery. No fans. Yep."

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BadAlloc: Microsoft looked at memory allocation code in tons of devices and found this one common security flaw

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Does it have trapping arithmetic operations?"

Rust performs overflow checking and panics if it happens for debug builds of projects. Non-debug release builds do not panic.

You should use the built-in checked_ methods for things like this, eg checked_add. They're available for all the primitive types, at least.

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Here's what Russia's SVR spy agency does when it breaks into your network, says US CISA infosec agency

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Counterpart

We're not Russian media but this right here is perhaps what it may look like -- coverage of 5EYES piling into Russia.

And here. And pretty much everything written about Edward Snowden and the CIA Wikileaks materials.

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FCC gives SpaceX the go-ahead to drop Starlink satellite orbits by 500 kilometres or so

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

4,409 to 4,408

It's not a typo: the FCC's reduced the max size of the constellation by one and allowed some of them to operate at a lower altitude. There's about 1,200 in orbit now, and 12,000 or more planned eventually, which will be launched in stages.

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It doesn't really matter how many of us gripe about Google, nothing can stop it printing billions of dollars

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Narrative

For the avoidance of doubt, we're being flippant in the framing of this article.

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Why is DevClass a separate website?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Why is DevClass a separate website?

There's a group of readers and advertisers heavily into just DevOps, CI/CD, software development, and containerization, and DevClass is there to serve them. El Reg isn't everyone's cup of tea, so we created a space for them.

Having said that, we'll be more closely integrating our sister sites (like DevClass) into The Reg sometime soon, which means your Reg account will work across them, allowing you to post comments, etc. And make DC stories easier to find on the Reg home and section pages.

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Computer security world in mourning over death of Dan Kaminsky, aged 42

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Twitter

It was more to show that there was a wide respect for Dan.

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From cash machines to commercial kitchen appliances, Doom really will run on almost anything

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Doom on a pregnancy test

Ah yeah, that's true -- I've tweaked the story to reflect this.

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If you have a QNAP NAS, stop what you're doing right now and install latest updates. Do it before Qlocker gets you

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Infection vector

I've asked QNAP how exactly are vulnerable boxes being found by the ransomware. Presumably it's by scanning the internet for public-facing NAS machines, though I hate to assume that's the only way in.

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University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Code commits

Off the top of my head, some code was committed to development trees but nowhere near branches for release.

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Not saying you should but we're told it's possible to land serverless app a '$40k/month bill using a 1,000-node botnet'

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Headline

As in, 'land a serverless app a $40k/month bill'. Just keeping the headline snappy. Too many 'a's make it a mouthful.

If you can't parse a headline, the good news is that the article will immediately explain it.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"If it is linear"

The paper was in error, the authors fixed their version, and let us know -- we've now corrected the quote.

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Debian devs decide best response to Richard Stallman controversy is … nothing

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

I think the summary's fine

I think the article succinctly summed up the situation OK. Stallman questioned whether the word "assault" was the right one to use while defending his pal.

If you think you've spotted something wrong, please email corrections@ and we'll take a look, ta.

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Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Vitamin C lamp?

Nah, mate, it's vit D. Typo that's now fixed!

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Report: Aussie biz Azimuth cracked San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, ending Apple-FBI privacy standoff

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Tpyose

Hi -- yeah, we need as much help with editing as possible. So much so, it would be great to have some kind of subscriber-level feature where people can create 'pull requests' for improvements to pieces and we'll accept them if they're any good and you'll get some sort of credit for it.

If you want to know how this kind of blunder happens, it's when a sentence turns into a bit of a mouthful or is missing some info and then when someone (like me) tries to tidy it up, they push it straight to prod and get distracted by something else that needs sorting out, and they forget to look back to make sure the change is correct.

Mea culpa, I should have previewed the change then made it live. Just got too many other things right now to juggle.

So, it's fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong, please. Like bugs make their way into software, sometimes errors creep in during the edit.

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FSF doubles down on Richard Stallman's return: Sure, he is 'troubling for some' but we need him, says org

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"An organised campaign from some group with a motive"

Does seem that way though there's nothing to really conclude at this stage.

Maybe RMS has a bigger-than-expected following in Russia?

The uneven distribution of signatories' location leaves us curious. That's it in a nutshell. If there was an unexpected level of support in another part of the world -- China or Canada or Dubai, wherever -- we would note that as well.

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Intel offers to produce car chips for automakers stalled by ongoing semiconductor supply drought

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: There's no chip shortage!

Is there a decent source for this, or is this just your take on it? Because if we've missed a trick on this saga, I'm happy to steer The Reg's coverage in the right direction.

Edit: Never mind -- looked into it, and will insert a note into the article. Basically, automakers cut their orders and are now scrambling for parts.

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Jensen Huang's kitchen gets another viewing as Nvidia teases Arm-powered supercomputing chip Grace

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"that you won't actually be able to buy at MSRP"

Yeah, well, we figured Reg readers would know the context of all this chip announcement stuff. Demand > supply.

It's just a sidebar of quick links to stuff we didn't have time to cover in detail.

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What's this about a muon experiment potentially upending Standard Model of physics? We speak to one of the scientists involved

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Pretty sure it's positrons

We've thought about this. The muons decay into electrons or positrons:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Particles/lepton.html

In the case of the muon g-2 experiment, though, they're looking out for positrons specifically:

https://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/muons/g-2/

Pretty much all the academic writing we've seen on the experiment talks about observing positrons. The hardware is set up to observe the positrons.

And it doesn't help that some of the Fermi Lab material refers to electrons at times when talking about muon decay.

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South Africa's state-owned energy firm to appeal after court rules Oracle does not have to support its software

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Chugh v Oracle

It's still open and stalled since 2019. I hate to speculate why but I suspect the plaintiff ran out of money to bankroll the case, or gave up pursuing it.

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Cybercrooks targeting UK organisations started 2020 strong only for attacks to wither away by Christmas

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Why can't Reg hacks use grammar checkers?

Cos we mostly type into the web-based publishing system that does spell checking (which is a bit hard to see in all the HTML) though not grammar. It's fixed.

Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong, ta.

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Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Article publication times

You might be interested to know that our wonderful home-made publishing system lets you schedule when articles go live. Pieces can be written on one day, edited, and queued up to appear any time after.

We use this for various reasons, and the reason here is that Kieren is on the US West Coast and the article is ideal for a UK audience. So for things like this, which isn't breaking news and more analytical, we time it to appear as Britain wakes up and checks its phones and laptops for news.

The homepage is mostly a flow of articles, and people mostly come to us via the homepage. If stuff's published overnight, it can be missed by readers as by the time they glance at the page, the headline is way down under many others. Not a lot of people look beyond the first few rows.

We're coming up with an iteration of the homepage in which important articles aren't lost in the flow, but also that people who want a flow of articles can get a flow of articles.

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And the Turing Award for best compilation goes to... Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Awkward

it's a bit tricky tracking and listing all of their achievements, though I've added Awk to our piece.

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IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Not an April Fool

It's still March 31 here.

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Browser tracking protections won't stop tracking, warns DuckDuckGo

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Not an ad

No, this isn't an ad and not paid for. Our commercial content is clearly marked as a promotion, sponsored, or a webcast brought to you by an advertiser.

Sometimes we just like an underdog.

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Satellites, space debris may have already brightened night skies 10% globally – and it's going to get worse

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"The authors attribution doesn't, neither does Send us news..."

No, I mean links in the articles -- the ones that go in article text that link out to stuff on other websites. Those we try to make open in new tabs. If you click on the tweet, it should open in a new tab or play in the current tab -- it just works for us.

Ultimately, if you reeeeallly want a link to open in a new tab, remember to press Control (or whatever your browser uses) when clicking the link to force it to a new tab.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Blankety Blank

Every link on the page, except the 'read more' one, opens in a new tab. Which one do you think does not?

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