* Posts by diodesign

3496 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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.

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"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.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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.

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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.

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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.

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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 corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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.

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"block JavaScript by default"

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

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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?

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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.

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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.

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

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.

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"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..."

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"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.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Democratic AGs are on board with a separate effort

Now noted in this article -- we're writing a second story right now that kicks off with those separate antitrust cases being prepared.

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VMware CEO doesn’t know who will run its hypervisor on SmartNICs

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Isn’t this smartnic the recent Project Monterey announcement?"

Yes -- I've added a link to our past coverage.

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Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"political neutral factual tech reporting"

You're suggesting here that you don't like facts that go against your world view, which I can't do anything about except comment on it. It's something for you to wrangle with yourself.

"The Register's Powers That Be will remember that..."

This isn't how it works. We have in our mind, based on feedback, meeting people, reader surveys, etc, who our audience is and who we want to reach, and we write for all of them the best way we can with facts and reality. You can take it or leave it. We cannot please all the people all of the time.

We also can't get into a situation where we think "oh, better say something nice about X because 50% of readers like X and we don't want to lose them even though X screwed up."

If you're asking us to lie or bend the truth or say nice things about crap ideas to make people feel better, and others feel worse, then, yeah, we're not gonna do that, and have never done that TTBOMK.

And I'm talking news, BTW: if one of our columnists has a particular viewpoint, that's their headache.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"this article just stinks of pre-election bias"

You mean, this article doesn't align with your, i dunno, your personal view of the world.

And you can't point at any and every article published before an election and say it's pre-election bias.

"I understand that Californians have a strong preference for lefty politics"

I think you're jumping to conclusions on the political leanings of individual staff members, not that it really matters. If someone does something stupid, we call it stupid -- doesn't matter where on the political map they are.

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Toshiba to sell off-the-shelf quantum key distribution kit, eventually offer it as-a-service

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Let me understand

Simply, as far as I can tell, a box that sends encryption keys to another box with light pulses down fiber. Tosh claims it exploits quantum mechanics to detect if the data has been observed in transit.

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US Supreme Court Justice flames lower courts for giving 'sweeping immunity' to Facebook, YouTube, etc when it comes to harmful content

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Publishers?

FWIW I've taken that sentence out as... it was added during the edit to summarize the situation and may have missed the mark. The piece is fine without it.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"that may need to be addressed in legislation"

Or rather, may be addressed by the Supreme Court. In other words, if Congress can't figure out how to write and pass an updated communications law, the Supremes could mull it over and set a precedent. Justice Thomas didn't think the Malwarebytes case was suitable for that purpose.

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Confirmed: Barnes & Noble hacked, systems taken offline for days, miscreants may have swiped personal info

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Confirmed Incident

Hi -- thanks. Could you forward a copy of the message to us, please? There are various ways to get hold of us, from encrypted email to an anonymous HTTPS form.

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Intel celebrates security of Ice Lake Xeon processors, so far impervious to any threat due to their unavailability

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

SGX support

"how does this help anyone right now? Presumably Microsoft and Linux O/S coders need to add these instructions to the kernels to get the benefit?"

SGX has been around for ages, years in fact, in certain Intel processor families, and there is operating system support for it. What's new here is Intel adding SGX to mainstream Xeon server parts. I've made that clearer in the article.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"in the future everyone will be able to design a custom CPU in fifteen minutes."

I don't want to sound like a RISC-V fanatic and also go off-topic on an Intel story, but..

If you pop over to the SiFive website, it has an in-browser processor designer that allows you to configure pretty much what you're asking for: the number of RISC-V CPU cores, the security and integrity check features, various cache sizes and arrangements, the level of floating-point support, bus interfaces, branch prediction, interrupts, etc.

When you're done, the site generates an FPGA bitstream for you to evaluate the processor core(s) on your own board, or the RTL to produce a custom ASIC. There are T&Cs depending on the complexity of the design, and if you go too high end, the site will tell you to contact sales rather than emit design files.

Anyway, it's not exactly what you wanted, and it's not completely flexible, but it's just something I wanted to mention as an example of the chip world going in that way -- and SiFive wants to expand its in-browser tool.

I've used it to generate a simple processor for an FPGA.

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It's 2020 and a rogue ICMPv6 network packet can pwn your Microsoft Windows machine

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"the compiler spanks you repeatedly until you are totally humiliated"

It really be like that.

error[E0382]: borrow of moved value

"But," you say out loud after the 20th borrow checker error, "if you won't let me use that structure there, I have to refactor the whole thing. Can I move this to that line there?"

error[E0382]: borrow of moved value

"oh, ok, fine"

--------

It's basically all for your own good. The compiler often gives you the option of cloning/copying an object if you really want to use it in tricky situations but then... it's a copy of the data and that copying is also unnecessarily expensive.

Better just to write it properly the first time, as you should. Good Rust code should be known for its sharp edges -- no cut corners.

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California outlaws wording, webpage buttons designed to hoodwink people into handing over their personal data

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"how does that even work?"

When you opt-out, your browser stores a cookie that simply means 'i opt out'. When the cookie is presented, the website should act accordingly.

Deleting cookies or blocking them means you lose your 'i've opted out' cookie.

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Amazon-like megacorps dominating various online sectors could become norm for pandemic-stricken planet

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"the report is out there"

Yes, we wrote about it and linked to the report PDF right here.

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From the Department of WCGW: An app-controlled polycarbonate lock with no manual override/physical key

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Flight or fright

We've given that part a massage – don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot something wrong so it can be fixed ASAP.

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BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Dabsy & Simon

It's no coincidence -- our regular contributors are back, we're grateful for their return, and there's room for more.

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A 73bn-kg, skyscraper-size chocolate creme egg spinning fast enough to eventually explode – it's asteroid Bennu

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: How common is this?

I've added a link to an in-depth explanation of YORP by the probe's principal investigator. As you can see it goes on for quite a while, and in all honesty, we ran out of time to condense the effect's description down into an explanation that would satisfy everyone.

Like any product, you have to draw a line at some point and ship it. Articles are no different -- otherwise, nothing would get published because we'd forever be trying to improve or add to them.

I encourage you to read up on it and share here your best explanations of it.

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After ten years, the Google vs Oracle API copyright mega-battle finally hit the Supreme Court – and we listened in

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Java doesn't have declarations, only implementations"

Ah mate, you know what I mean. The stuff outside the { } versus the stuff inside the { }.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Declarations and implementations

Complicating the matter is that most / a lot of the 11,000 lines are declarations and not implementations, but Google did slip some implementation code in there.

For example, the infamous nine lines in the rangeCheck function that were copied. It's negligible in the grand scheme of things but gave Oracle a gotcha against Google. The function was included as a temporary measure and forgotten about -- oops.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Status quo?

Good question. It's the status quo for the stated reasons: the courts have decided in Oracle's favor (which is why it's at the Supremes now, brought here by Google) and it's the position of the US government.

BTW, personally speaking, I'm not saying the status quo is right. It's just what it is.

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Heads up: From 2022, all new top-end Arm Cortex-A CPU cores for phones, slabtops will be 64-bit-only, snub 32-bit

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Old Arm

Ex-A5000, A3020, RiscPC user/owner here. I learned assembly programming on ARM26 then ARM32 (then x86 etc).

I met a few of Arm's Cortex-A designers around the launch of the A76, which was Arm's first step to 64-bit-only. I was surprised by the rolling of eyes when I mentioned the nice bits of ARM32. It was clear they just wanted to deal with the more RISC-y ARM64.

I got the impression some of the old guard at Arm, and some of the early designers who had moved on, had made their feelings known that ARM64 wasn't, in their opinion, 'real Arm'. Today's engineers, who were working away on ARM64, were fairly hurt by that.

It seemed the ARM32/64 was more than just an ISA split; there were internal politics and philosophies attached, too.

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UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and... it was all a little bit overblown, no?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"The impression given by that sentence is that the University was involved in the collection or use of that data."

No, I reckon it doesn't. It's a matter of fact: he was at Cambridge. I suspect that detail was included as a way of clarifying exactly who the chap is. Dr Kogan, you know, the one at Cambridge.

What Zuckerberg said (following your link) and what the ICO said are very different.

"I hope El Reg have run that statement past their lawyers."

It's a direct quote from a letter written by a public body to a Parliamentary committee that's a matter of public record. Reporting its contents accurately and fairly is protected by qualified privilege (Defamation Act, schedule 1).

Not that's a problematic quote, anyway.

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Former antivirus baron John McAfee collared, faces extradition to America on tax evasion, securities allegations

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

'same for most "employed" US citizens'

According to factcheck.org (here and here) that's not quite true. Your premiums were going up anyway.

"...Cruz cites the increase as evidence of how the ACA has 'driven up the cost of health care.' In fact, that increase in employer-sponsored premiums is lower than the premium increase for the previous eight-year period, both in raw dollars and in the rate of growth. The total average family plan cost increased by 97 percent from 2000 to 2008, but it went up by 43 percent from 2008 to 2016."

ACA also means someone can't be charged more or refused coverage for having a so-called pre-existing condition, which seems rather essential to me.

(Speaking as someone who's been on El Reg's company healthcare plan in the States since 2013.)

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Supreme Court

I think the anon OP was referring to the fear that certain elements want the ACA to be declared unconstitutional, via the courts, and if it gets all the way to the Supremes, ACB has implied she'll happily vote that way.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: is he still a US citizen ?

Given he tried to run for president at least once lately, yes.

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Time for a virtual love affair: ESXi-Arm Fling flung onto the web for peeps to test drive with Raspberry Pi 4, other kit

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"will integrate in to a more broad VMWare management system"

Yes, that's precisely the point; it's for people who want to manage Arm stuff from their vCenter environment, or who want to try out VMware's SmartNIC stuff via VCF.

Or if you're that much of an ESXi fan, as a standalone host.

I've tried to make this more crystal clear in the article.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Welcome (late) to the party

True - and there are other Arm hypervisors out there, no doubt - but the thing is, ESXi-Arm can be controlled from vCenter so it should (in theory) just drop right into your VMware environment that controls the rest of your IT, making management feel perhaps straightforward and natural.

Which might be a bit easier than wrangling VxWorks deployments (which I imagine are aimed at individual machines, whereas ESXi is more about automatically wrangling fleets of stuff at once).

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Big Tech to face its Ma Bell moment? US House Dems demand break-up of 'monopolists' Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

FTC v FCC

Think you might be confusing the FTC with the FCC, the latter of which is run by your friend and mine Ajit Pai.

FCC does communications, primarily. FTC does antitrust and consumer protection.

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FFS FSF, you're 35 already? Hands up if you just sprouted a gray hair or felt a craving for a Werthers Original on reading that. Happy birthday, folks

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

S Club 7

British pop band from yesteryear.

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UEFI malware rears ugly head again: Kaspersky uncovers campaign with whiff of China

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Can someone clarify something?

Kaspersky says it doesn't know: "Unfortunately, we were not able to determine the exact infection vector that allowed the attackers to overwrite the original UEFI firmware."

So it could have been injected at the factory, in transit, by a rogue insider, by some other admin-level malware, etc.

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Red Hat tips its Fedora 33: Beta release introduces Btrfs as default file system, .NET on ARM64, plus an IoT variant

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: CentOS is not a Redhat distribution

Bear in mind the very next paragraph clarifies the relationship:

"RHEL is the main commercial release, and CentOS a community-built release based on RHEL, in effect a non-commercial version."

If you think you've spotted something wrong in an article, don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com and we'll take a look.

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Robot wars! Scandi automation biz AutoStore slings patent sueball, claims it owns Ocado warehouse tech

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Patents

The complaints don't appear to be listed yet in the public-facing court filing systems. We're seeking out copies, and once we've got the patent list, we'll add it to the story.

Edit: Complaint and patents added -- it's got little to do with tape drives unless you squint really hard.

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US comms watchdog calls for more scrutiny of submarine cables that land in 'adversary countries'

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Read what you can find about the USS Jimmy Carter"

Indeed, click no further than the 'read more' side box in the story :)

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CAA NZ CC's 1000's of users email adresses to each other :(

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: CAA NZ CC's 1000's of users email adresses to each other :(

And covered here!

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I love my electricity company's app – but the FBI says the nuclear industry bribed politicians $60m to kill it

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Old tech

We're referring to LEDs v bulbs, smart thermostats v unconnected gear, etc, not nuclear power.

I'd say most of us at El Reg are in favor of nuclear power, when done right and all above board. It is a global tragedy that we're still reliant on coal and other fossil fuels for electricity IMHO.

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Hydrogen-powered train tested on Britain's railway tracks as diesel alternative

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Masthead

We've made it slimmer and tidied up the navigation bar. We felt the previous masthead was quite chunky and took up space -- no, not just for ads but also articles.

If you go back through the archives, The Reg has had thick and thin mastheads. We felt it was time for a refresh

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Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Would have thought © would be more appropriate though."

We're the Register, not the Copywriter.

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