Posts by diodesign

Larry Ellison says he's not following Oracle to Texas, prefers his private Hawaii pad

Uh

People who might not have a choice but to move state?

C.

Asus ROG Phone 3: An ugly but refreshing choice – for gaming fans only

Re: "Colours feel a bit washed out and saturated."

Should be desaturated, not saturated. It's been fixed. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything weird or wrong so we can address it ASAP.

C.

"Any chance of any kind of consistency?"

Ah yeah, sorry that slipped through the edit. It's now fixed. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything weird.

C.

Corrections

> 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 [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong.

C.

AWS is fed up with tech that wasn’t built for clouds because it has a big 'blast radius' when things go awry

Re: Strange terminology

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

C.

Japan pours millions into AI-powered dating to get its people making babies again

The cost of parenting

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.

C.

Oracle Database 21c bridges NoSQL gap with native JSON support, plays catch-up with relational rivals

MySQL v NoSQL

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 [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong so we can fix it ASAP. It's lower latency than waiting for us to read through comments.

C.

Twitter, Mozilla, Vimeo slam Europe’s one-size-fits-all internet content policing plan

"This statement is disputed"

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.

C.

Useful quantum computers will be impossible without error correction. Good thing these folks are working on it

A million qubits

The one-million-plus figure is the ball-park estimate thrown around by IBM, Intel, China, and others, in terms of building something generally useful.

C.

Oblivious DoH, OPAQUE passwords, Encrypted Client Hello: Cloudflare's protocol proposals to protect privacy

Re: OPAQUE doesn't add any light

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."

C.

Seagate says it's designed two of its own RISC-V CPU cores – and they'll do more than just control storage drives

"And does that matter to anyone?"

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.'

C.

Patents

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.

C.

Senators, net neutrality advocates rail against looming lame-duck confirmation of new FCC commissioner

Re: I know I'll get in trouble with the admins for this...

Yeah one day we'll set up a form. In the meantime, please email [e-mail] so we can fix this stuff as soon as possible, please.

C.

Channel Isles cop sacked after abusing police database to track down women drivers for Instagram 'comic' page

PC

Well, the article does kick off with "A police constable" so we kinda thought that would set the stage. But fine, we can do officer or something.

C.

Four or so things we found interesting about Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888, its latest 5G chip for high-end Androids

"all of this looks a bit mediocre"

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.

C.

Arm at 30: From Cambridge to the world, one plucky British startup changed everything

Re: British?

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.

C.

Sophie Wilson

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.

C.

Amazon’s cloudy Macs cost $25.99 a day. 77 days of usage would buy you your own Mac

"comparable"

Yeah, well, you know what we mean: close enough.

C.

QEMU brings back its one-OS-a-day virtual advent calendar

Re: Link

The project announcement was linked in the penultimate paragraph, though to make it more obvious, I've now linked directly to the calendar at the start of the article.

Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything weird -- we can fix it right away.

C.

Bare-metal Macs-as-a-service come to AWS. Intel for now, M1 silicon in 2021

"This is AWS trying to score some cheap points"

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.

C.

"Strange how terms get redefined"

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.

C.

Your laptop may have just survived 2020 – but is it ready for 2023?

Re: I'm confused

For the avoidance of doubt: it is a registered trademark, and the advertiser asked that its marks be recognized in the sponsored article copy.

C.

I work therefore I ache: Logitech aims to ease WFH pains with Ergo M575 trackball mouse

"Pretty sure these existed back in the late 1990s early 2000s"

Yeah, they did, and we're taking another look at them.

C.

Study: While text-generating AI can write like humans, it lacks common sense

"I really really really don't understand how this isn't obvious"

A lot of science is proving or demonstrating the obvious so that it's proven, or demonstrated, and not assumed.

C.

Hard to believe but Congress just approved an IoT security law and it doesn't totally suck

Re: It looked good until...

Congress can force a bill into law if there's a great enough majority supporting it.

C.

Google yanks Apple Silicon Chrome port after browser is found to 'crash unexpectedly'

Apple Arm SoC v Apple Silicon

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.

C.

The revolution will not be televised because my television has been radicalised

"Here we go with the name calling again"

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.

C.

Election security fears doused with reality: Top officials say Nov 3 'was the most secure in American history.' The end

"in spite of Trump's Republican 80% approval rating"

Approval or not, the vast majority of Americans understand the concept of democracy.

"Nearly 80% of Americans, including more than half of Republicans, recognize President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the Nov. 3 election"

Source.

C.

"Out of interest, which judges have thrown this out?"

"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

C.

PDF

You know this is virtually all fantasy and nonsense, right? That virtually every judge so far has thrown this all out, and that there is no hard evidence of actual fraud, that this is just time wasting?

Please don't spread misinformation in the comments.

C.

Ericsson warns investors: This Biden fellow coming into the White House may look to resolve China trade dispute...

Re: Probably, but jumping the gun

As you said, "probably." And we're not jumping the gun: Biden is the projected President-Elect.

C.

Amazon makes big bet on New Zealand to crack Indian market

"I wonder how this makes sense then."

It doesn't -- it was an error that's now fixed. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong so we can address it right away.

C.

Zoom strong-armed by US watchdog to beef up security after boasting of end-to-end encryption that didn't exist

"So which video services actually do offer true end-to-end encryption"

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.

C.

Let's Encrypt warns about a third of Android devices will from next year stumble over sites that use its certs

Manual install

Thanks -- added that to the piece. We'll also see if it's possible for Chrome to include the necessary certs, too.

C.

Shopping online for Xmas? AI chatbots know whether you want to be naughty or nice

"how do people get away with stealing cryptocurrencies?"

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.

C.

Blockchain uses

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.

C.

San Francisco approves 'CEO tax', hopes to extract up to $140m a year from corps with wide exec-staff salary gap

"I presume that lowered your rent considerably?"

More like lowered theirs. Did want to put up a banner on the window saying 'The Reg is watching' or something similar

C.

"this gobbledygook "

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.

C.

Re: Does the coporation need to be HQ'd in San Francisco for this to apply, or just have offices there?

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.

C.

* 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.

BBC makes switch to AWS, serverless for new website architecture, observers grumble about the HTML

Re: Quite a Misleading Title

Hi -- no, the headline is quite correct. People have complained about the HTML. I don't think we, the Register, made any comment on it -- it's people hoping to parse the HTML who are upset.

C.

Vivo pushes out X51 5G: Chipper whippersnapper, quite a battery-sapper, but at least the wrapper's dapper

Re: ROM?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of us slip into ROM as a shorthand for 'storage in the device' a la the olden days when your OS and system software came on ROM chips. It's fixed.

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

C.

Size

It's in the article. It's 158 x 72 x 8 mm (6.24 x 2.87 x 0.31 in) and has a 6.56-inch display.

C.

Resolution

It's relatively low-res. It works out at 398 PPI, which isn't as high as others. Even the Pixel 3 had a PPI >400.

C.

We did NAT see that coming: How malicious JavaScript can open holes in your firewall for miscreants to slip through

"block JavaScript by default"

I think there's more chance of Jeremy Corbyn being elected US president than that happening.

C.

Russian jailed for eight years in the US for writing code that sifted botnet logs for web banking creds for fraudsters

Re: Maze ransomware gang says it has quit the cybercrime business

Why would anyone believe that? And what does this have to do with the Russian guy?

C.

SiFive inches closer to offering a true RISC-V PC: Latest five-core dev board includes PCIe, SSD interfaces

Spectre/Meltdown

FYI. these SiFive CPU cores are in-order and have a relatively short pipeline – they are highly unlikely to be susceptible to Spectre, and won't be affected by Meltdown.

It's the out-of-order cores with a decent pipeline length you need to be wary of.

C.

Did Arthur C. Clarke call it right? Water spotted in Moon's sunlit Clavius crater by NASA telescope

Re: Why does Arthur get all the credit?

Well, if that is true then we doff our cap to you. That is some prime-time sci-fi pedantry.

C.

Can't afford an AI-accelerating Nvidia Jetson Nano? Open-source emulator lets you prototype Python apps for it

Re: Wow

Eh, well, Python's for beginners and prototyping which this is aimed at. We can't all knock out parallel C++ right off the bat.

C.

Google screwed rivals to protect monopoly, says Uncle Sam in antitrust lawsuit: We go inside the Sherman parked on a Silicon Valley lawn

"What agreements are they?"

It's up to the US government to prove any exclusionary agreements were made, or get Google to otherwise agree it won't make any such deals in future, whether or not it was found to have signed them in the past.

For a taste of these agreements, see the article, particularly the paragraph beginning:

"Of particular focus is the deal with Google and Apple where Google pays Apple billions of dollars to make Google the default search on Apple’s iOS devices..."

C.

"Is the problem that there are so few state attorneys general?"

It's that the DoJ legal challenge only seemed to involve select Republican AGs, whereas there is a separate bipartisan effort that got overlooked or ignored. The DoJ shouldn't be partisan like this.

Google, like pretty much every other tech giant and other corps, IIRC lobbies and finances everyone, red and blue.

C.