Re: 404
Ta -- when Biden was sworn in, the 45th president's White House site was archived and replaced. I've fixed up the link to the archived WH site.
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3493 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011
It was never our intention to tarnish anyone's reputation and I wanted to be very careful that we didn't. We felt that we were maybe only hearing half the story. And as it turned out that it really was a one-sided HR screw-up, we ran a second story and addressed our misplaced skepticism. At least we're being transparent.
There's very very rarely a perfect story in which there is a clearly defined good person and a bad person, and the good person has done nothing wrong, and the bad person has done everything wrong. Life is way more complex than that. Hence our concern.
But it turns out it really was that bad -- and we've followed it up and laid it out here.
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From WhatsApp's European Economic Area FAQ (which claims to include the UK still, updated Jan 4, 2021):
"WhatsApp also works, and shares information with the other Facebook Companies who act on our behalf to help us operate, provide, improve, understand, customise, support, and market our Services.
"This includes the provision of infrastructure, technology, and systems, e.g. for providing you with fast and reliable messaging and calls around the world; improving infrastructure and delivery systems; understanding how our Services are used; helping us provide a way for you to connect with businesses; and securing systems.
"When we receive services from the Facebook Companies, the information we share with them is used on WhatsApp’s behalf and in accordance with our instructions. Any information WhatsApp shares on this basis cannot be used for the Facebook Companies’ own purposes"
So, Facebook Companies can't use the info for their own purposes but can use it as Facebook-owned WhatsApp directs.
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I wouldn't call it a social evil, but there are loads of reasons why it's a good idea to have a diverse workforce, and have more than just a vast majority of straight white guys in technology.
For example: realizing when features could be abused by stalker exes, when features only work with people of a certain color, etc.
I know a guy who wanted to build a glass-floor second-floor balcony for their house overlooking their nice view of the SF bay... which is cool except anyone standing underneath it, walking from the yard into the home, could look up and see up the skirts of any women standing up there. I like using this unintended consequence of his design as an example that you need more than just guys on your engineering team.
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Apropos of almost nothing, that TD article is one of the most reader hostile things I've seen in years. It's not written to educate anyone; it's written so that people can show off to others that they know something better than someone else.
You don't teach people using the tone 'you're a f'king idiot'. Just my 2p.
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"So, $28835 / year divided by 2040 hours/year is $14.13/hr."
Which is more than the US federal min wage. These people won't be working in CA, I suspect.
"In 2015, I was hired as an SRE III/SWE IV. Salary, bonuses, and stock was >$200k. I have little doubt that our TPM was close to $300k."
Yeah, as the article says, the quoted numbers are base pay. Once you include bonuses and stock, it's going to be a lot more. And sure, $200k base is low when you get up to L6 and long-term L5.
The quoted base pay range is in the right sort of neighborhood, depending where you are, and experience. You get the gist: in engineering you get paid a lot, and outside engineering, not so much.
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> The Department of Redundancy Department obviously hasn't been furloughed.
That part's been trimmed.
> Aspect ratios come in Hz now, do they?
Should be refresh rate -- a brain blip where fingers type the wrong words. Now fixed.
> *Bzzzzt*. Contradiction.
Should be desaturated not saturated, and fixed.
> Cancelling my subscription, etc, etc.
I hope you can forgive these errors -- we're worn out, letting typos slip through, and looking forward to the Christmas break to rest and recharge. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong.
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FWIW the article doesn't draw any conclusions on _why_ the birth rate is low, just that it is, and Japan's answer to it is... AI dating. There are probably loads of reason why people aren't having children, not just in Japan, that all aligns to fewer babies.
My wife and I are Xennials who don't want kids for various reasons.
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Yeah, MySQL. It's fixed -- and the Big Reg typo, too.
We're all knackered, to be honest, from this year, and our brains aren't as sharp as they usually are, and fingers are thus free to type the wrong words. We all need a Christmas break.
Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong so we can fix it ASAP. It's lower latency than waiting for us to read through comments.
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IMHO it's just a polite, non-confrontational way of saying "this statement is false". It's a way for organizations to say a statement is incorrect but we don't have the time and energy to get into a massive argument over it.
It comes down to this: we've got to start drawing a line again between reality and fiction. It's been blurred by the fact that anyone on the internet can say anything they like and demand it be treated with exactly the same weight as other statements -- even if what they are saying is completely untrue. And when their statements are disputed, they scream censorship. No, it's because you're talking bollocks.
We're in this mess at the moment because the line between reality and fiction is being blurred by those unhappy with the reality of the situation they find themselves in. They need something to blame. They need an explanation why things aren't going their way. They come up with a theory and they assert it as fact. It used to be one-night arguments in the pub. Now it's posts being shared to 100,000s of people if not more.
Fine, if you want to, let's get down to some definition of what truth is. But we have to get there and stick to it, or nothing matters any more. Nothing at all.
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FWIW we've tweaked the article with a link to a fuller description of how it works. It's all about the salts involved. Here's a key part from that explanation:
"OPAQUE gets around this with the following clever trick. They leave the password hash on the client’s side, but they don’t feed it the stored salt. Instead, they use a special two-party protocol called an oblivious PRF to calculate a second salt (call it salt2) so that the client can use salt2 in the hash function — but does not learn the original salt.
"The basic idea of such a function is that the server and client can jointly compute a function PRF(salt, password), where the server knows “salt” and the client knows “password”. Only the client learns the output of this function. Neither party learns anything about the other party’s input."
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Uh yeah, it matters a lot. It's a validation of a design, for one thing. You're right that the fabs -- and by that, we mean TSMC, etc -- don't care about the architecture. That's not their job.
But people further up the chain considering using the architecture will think it matters. 'Can we trust that this tech works?' 'Well, Seagate just put XYZm into production.'
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FWIW I asked the RISC-V Int'l directors about patents, and they were pretty sure anything they spec out that Arm could claim ownership of could be traced back to pre-Arm days, or would be entirely new and novel.
I think there's going to be a patent royal rumble at some point. One side - and not just Arm or a RISC-V member - is going to crack and it's going to kick off, and we'll find out that once again IBM has the patent on adding 4 to the program counter each cycle.
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I have to say that does appear to be the case. Apple's set the gold standard in what's possible with Arm CPU design - from big caches to large reordering buffers to optimizations for reference-counting-heavy code.
I didn't want to call it until outside benchmarks and tests are available. And I still totally appreciate that this level of chip, the 888, takes a lot of patience, skill and time to develop. It appears Qualcomm's poured a lot of that effort into things like the camera capture processing and GPU/AI in hope that that makes up for where it doesn't match Apple's A14.
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It's still headquartered in Cambridge, UK. It's acknowledged in the piece that it's owned by Japan's Softbank.
FWIW, an Arm PR once punched me in the arm - how apt - after we called Arm a Japanese chip designer in an opening sentence in a Register story. That jab didn't lead to us calling Arm a British company this week, but it reinforces my feeling that we sufficiently made the point of its foreign ownership.
Arm was created in Britain, bankrolled by non-British entities, now owned by a non-British entity, but still headquartered in the same city it grew up in. It's British by nature, Japanese owned.
Basically, we didn't say Arm is British-owned. We said it's British. And that's something we decided ourselves.
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Click the second link in the article, and you'll have a nice surprise.
Also, the article's mainly about Arm the company (from 1990), not the original Arm team. Sophie, IIRC, remained at Acorn all the way to the Element-14 days, working on things like Acorn Replay (tho consulted for Arm Ltd).
Trust me, we've covered her -- see the linked-to articles.
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It's a bit more than "some cheap points" -- it's Mac hardware available in the largest cloud on the planet, allowing it to be managed and used alongside whatever fleet of rented systems you have in AWS, with some storage plugged into it.
We've acknowledged the likes of MacStadium in the piece. If MacStadium was as big as AWS, it'd have its own story, too.
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In the context of cloud computing, bare metal means you get an actual physical host to yourself, not a virtualized one shared on a host with other customers. You run the OS and stack on the bare-metal of the server, not on a hypervisor (or god forbid, an emulator).
In other words, you are booting software of your choice on the bare-metal of the machine, a Mac Mini. The software in this case happens to be limited to recent macOS.
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We try our best to say it's Arm compatible, or it's a desktop-grade Apple Arm-compatible SoC, and it's a case of whoever's working on a story remember to including it. We've written about the M1 a few times this week that it might be a given, but in case not, we've tweaked the piece.
'Arm compatible' is deliberate because Arm has, last time I heard, little to no involvement in the development of these cores. Apple follows the spec.
We have to use 'Apple Silicon' at some point in the article so that people searching with that term - in an outside engine or our own site search - will find this article.
There's biting the hand, and then there's blowing our brains out.
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Pretty funny given the "fuck your feelings" ethos of the MAGA movement.
Same movement that had t-shirts with "Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required" on them. Can't forget that.
Trump spent at least four years encouraging, among other things, intolerance and boorish behavior. I'm surprised you can't take what you've dished out.
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"Out of interest". Sure. It's been all over the news.
There's been about a dozen lawsuits at last count, all but one or two are doomed or dismissed, with the so-called successful legal challenges, such as in Pennsylvania, having no effect on the outcome.
They have so far failed to show any election fraud.
Edit: Pennsylvania court rejects five Trump campaign, GOP legal challenges to ballots
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Well, Zoom now says it's doing proper E2EE after earlier trying to claim its use of vanilla TLS was E2E. Here's its statement:
"Zoom’s E2EE offering uses public key cryptography. In short, the keys for each Zoom meeting are generated by participants’ machines, not by Zoom’s servers. Encrypted data relayed through Zoom’s servers is indecipherable by Zoom, since Zoom’s servers do not have the necessary decryption key. This key management strategy is similar to that used by most end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms today."
Take that into account as you will.
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They launder it through other crypto-currencies, exchanges, and marketplaces, so that the trail stops. Until they do that, you can follow the movement of the funds, and there are companies out there that make a living out of tracing coin transfers for the cops and others.
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I'm not defending the blockchain hype but if you consider it to be what it is -- an append-only data stream -- it has uses beyond cryptocurrencies, such as log file storage in which any tampering can be detected due to the cryptography involved.
You can do this with other approaches, of course. If you think of BC as an append-only data stream, it melts away the hype.
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Ah, it's not. Gross receipts and work attributable to the city are defined things in SF city tax code, so if in doubt: consult your tax lawyer. We have one in San Francisco who does our taxes for us.
When Google fills in its taxes for the city -- it has an office on Spear St -- it will declare its gross receipts attributable to the city and the city will tax them on it. This boils down to:
* Receipts involving property, of multiple kinds, and sales and services in the city
* Payroll in the city
If it feels complex, it is. It's tax law. See https://sfgov.org/sfc/san-francisco-gross-receipts-tax for info.
Edit: I've added a link to more details on GR tax in the article.
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No, it just has to do business within SF.
The city's business taxes generally apply to any business doing work within the city limits. El Reg's West Coast office is* in SF so we're familiar with the rules.
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* Offices have been closed since mid-March for the pandemic. But amusing that if you look out the window, opposite us is the Microsoft office on 555 California St.