Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

Lumen to double size of US network with six million extra miles of fiber

Re: Ah, CenturyLink

Lots of Lumen/CenturyLink/Level3 connects to Russia so we need more bandwidth for all the brute-force attacks coming in.

Musk says spat with Apple over App Store ejection threat for Twitter was 'misunderstanding'

Apple tour

Did it include the secret iCar factory?

Neuralink's AI brain chip could be in humans within six months claims Elon Musk

Re: Once Upon a Time In The Beginning ....

^ Beta tester

Huawei teases bonkers gadget combo

Re: Why?

More lost parts, more things accidentally dropped, more batteries to charge, more custom chargers, more tiny pieces to break, more space needed to carry more stuff.

Just a phone with always-on-display, 1 TB storage, and a headphone jack for me. I can fit the two travel accessories - USB cable and wired earbuds - in a pocket.

Google says Android runs better when covered in Rust

Googley

Google is stuck with minimal C++ type safety because they use a nonstandard language subset with cascading feature breakage.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html

It's enough of a disaster to make employees use Google's nonstandard version of Golang.

Domain aging gang CashRewindo picks vintage sites to push malvertising

next-generation firewalls and DNS filtering...

Or ask your local government to kick asses at network providers. Gangs have been running stable phishing infrastructure on Amazon and Cloudflare for about half a year now. Then there are all the backbone networks that are somehow peering with little /24 networks that are entirely hostile.

ICE data dump reveals names, locations of 6,000+ asylum seekers

Free for 6 months...

Their intimate data is now being transferred to a credit reporting agency for free identity theft monitoring services. If that agency gets hacked, it will be transferred to another credit reporting agency...

Sirius XM flaw unlocks so-called smart cars thanks to code flaw

Re: Sirius XM?

Sirius does telematics - traffic reports, roadside assistance, movie tickets, gas prices, and tons of marketing buzzword features that requires a subscription. Some of it is via the satellite link, some by cellular.

It's hard to imagine that at least 12 major companies worked on these protocols and there was still zero security. That's a pretty pig pool of engineering stupidity.

'Russian missiles can't destroy the cloud': Ukraine leader describes emergency migration

Yes, and the RETN.net backbone has been busy hacking:

"HORIZON LLC" 62.204.41.0/24

"Chang Way Technologies" (aka Hostway) 91.240.118.0/24, 92.255.85.0/24

"Cloud Solutions S.A." 179.60.147.0/24.

Japanese convenience store chain opens outlet staffed by avatars and robots

Re: Shrinkage

Theft is rare in Japan. Stealing in Japan would be as shocking as full nudity in the US or UK.

San Francisco is it's own unique WTF, even by California standards. Blame it on decades of believing that you should decriminalize mental illness and instead offer assistance, then vanishing the assistance budget into administrative costs like a quick magic trick.

Android users in 12 US states cleared to sue Google Play

How about APIs

Google also uses Play Store to force developers into using crippled APIs. This has been dumbing down phones from powerful Linux computers to web terminals. I have purchased apps that have become technically impossible to run.

Google says it's "for security" even though AOSP has a permissions management system. It's really about Google bottlenecking data through themselves at any cost, even if it kills the Android platform.

Twitter search spam campaign hides China riots, researchers say

420

OK, Musky - Who's free speech wins here? People in need of a voice or the combined forces of the Chinese government? The whole world is watching. Oh, sorry, we interrupted your delusional tweets about Apple and sleeping with guns.

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

Re: Dumb question time...

Inverters are moving to Silicon Carbide MOSFETs. They're industrial grade but can switch very quickly with minimal filtering hardware. I've heard Tesla is a big fan of them.

IGBTs are the traditional choice for industrial power. Megawatt trains run their motors from these. The downside is that their slow switching speed makes clean power output difficult. Filtering inductors and capacitors are big, costly, and heavy.

SolarEdge was talking about stacking ordinary low voltage silicon MOSFETs for industrial use. I haven't opened my inverter to see if that's the tech, but it could explain why people complain about high failure rates on some power grids.

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

Software by day, hardware by night

Inkjets won't give me PCB etching masks. Yeah, I know you can get PCBs made for you, but ordering a PCB for your impulsive crazy idea would be like ordering a candy bar online when you're hungry.

Telecoms networks could provide next-gen GPS services without the need for satellites

Re: increased positioning accuracy is deemed to be worth the cost

Because of Bluetooth beacons - the indoor positioning system. Unlike GPS, the beacons send only a GUID. An altruistic company, like Google or Apple, serves a database of their actual location.

This is my suspicion behind Google and Apple wanting the headphone jack gone.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Re: Seriously ?

You don't have to use Twitter to be harmed by Q-Anon knuckle draggers carrying assault rifles. How are you missing the original cause for censorship on Twitter.

"Your tormentors are coming back"

It could be worse. You could be a Twitter employee.

UK bans Chinese CCTV cameras on 'sensitive' government sites

Re: Is China Snooping?

RIPE says 193.32.164.0/24 is in Indonesia, with a London address, and specific a Yandex contact shared with some Russian networks. I'm gonna go with "fake RIPE record."

Re: Good idea anyways

I have three Axis cameras. The lenses aren't the best but the durability and software support are amazing. The IP cameras are self-sufficient Linux servers so no central video processor is needed.

They're worth the price if you don't want to be fussing around to keep the cameras running.

Good idea anyways

The software quality on those cameras is a disaster. They have trivial exploits, tons of bugs, and they phone home. I know they're cheap, but what's the use of a security camera with no security?

They're also very hard to avoid. Even many reputable looking brands of cameras are a Hikvision with a customized housing and UX. Just log into the exposed telnet port and "strings" the executable.

HP Inc to lay off up to 6,000 staff, cut costs by $1.4 billion

Layoffs are the new firing

Lots of companies have regular hiring and layoff cycles that have nothing to do with the market. It's a way to continuously purge less liked employees without the mess of having to fire them.

It's a great way to transform your company into an incompetent pool of buddies and ass kissers. I've been selling my stock in any company I see doing it. The price surge that follows is as good as it's ever going to be.

Study suggests AI cruise control could kill traffic jams by cutting out the 'intuition' factor

Drivers aren't paying attention. They brake late and too hard, followed by accelerating late and too fast. It progressively amplifies the slightest disturbance into hard stop and go ripples.

Also, a significant number of drivers don't look up from their cellphones quickly enough to avoid a collision. That blocks a lane for a while.

New SI prefixes clear the way for quettabytes of storage

Quettabytes

According to my quick internet search, a few quettabytes of storage would be non-trivial even if you had molecular encoding. We'd hit the AI singularity first, and our new overlords probably won't need the units.

Regardless, "quettascale" should be appearing in job postings and resumes any time now.

AWS gives older EC2 instances a legacy lifeline

What's the goal?

I'm confused. It's extremely unlikely that any software is going to notice a basic x86 instance upgrade. If anything is stuck on a very old instance type, it's likely because it's using the "Launch Configuration" instance descriptor that's no longer supported. The last thing you want to do is test your luck adding a Nitro mount to an old template that will likely self-destruct when touched.

The modern "Launch Configuration" self-destructs too, but at least it has versioning.

NASA's meteor avoidance plan for James Webb Space Telescope: Turn it around

Turn around

Bright eye

Twitter set for more layoffs as Musk mulls next move

Speaking of hardcore

The weekend was like Usenet binary groups turned into hashtags. No, not the software piracy ones.

Biden administration earmarks $13b to modernize electric grid

Re: Socialism

PG&E is on a whole different level. Musk would have to launch a rocket into a city, be convicted, do it a few more times, and then ask for government money to support investor dividends during hard times.

Google looking outside the usual channels to fix security skills gap

Google security?

Google has a long history of allowing, maybe even encouraging, service abuses that hurt competition. They obliterated Usenet competitors with gigabytes per hour of spam, they flood e-mail competitors with phishing mails, and now Google Cloud has started hosting botnets. Google Ads has a history of browser hacks to bypass user security. Android is pretty much spyware in a pocket. RCS, WiFi whitespace database, Bluetooth beacons, Google Assist, on and on...

So yeah, it takes a very specific kind of person to hold a security role at Google. I wouldn't expect diversity.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

Re: Regrets

She might be the classic psycho CEO stereotype and not understand any of this. It's a mental defect that some people interpret as genius leadership.

Theranos overlapped with Magic Leap and all the companies claiming to almost have fully self-driving cars. Lots of hype with no verification and no analytical thinking of what's possible. Investors should have seen a bad pattern coming but, instead, reached out with fists of money. Now we're in another dot-com bubble.

iFixit stabs batteries – for science – so you don't have to

Re: One thing that was totally glossed over

Single pouch cells extinguish easily as long as they weren't overcharged. You're thinking of multi-cell packs where thermal runaway hops from cell to cell for potentially days.

100% is playing it safe

The rated capacity of a LiPo is for electrical storage but it's not yet at full energy capacity. Charge it with no protection circuit. There's no heat, no puffing, just soaking up the charge. The true 100% is revealed when the battery suddenly explodes and the metal plates burn.

(I've read that this is lithium electrolysis - a very bad thing)

Worried about your datacenter carbon footprint? Why not put it in orbit?

Easier

More efficient designs would be far more effective. Elon Musk has the right idea here, even if his train of thought is 500 rail cars of epically bad solutions.

Investor tells Google: Cut costs now and stop paying staff so much

Loss of efficiency

Loss of efficiency is often rooted in the corporation and it's attitude. The systems having the most revenue generation are usually the oldest, least understood, and most difficult to maintain. These same systems can dictate which technologies the company can use because they must be kept running. I'm betting a lot of new products die when it's time to bring them in line with corporate technology standards.

I witnessed my coolest job ever disintegrate when Google bought the company and tried to rewrite it to Googley (antiquated & opinionated) standards. It had to be done but couldn't be done, so that was the end of it.

Qualcomm pushes latest Arm-powered Snapdragon chip amid bitter license fight

Yawn

How many people would pay $1400 (typical flagship price) for a small increase in speed and the next round of whatever features are being cut by the maker?

I thought that cellphones could eventually be like always-online personal computers in your pocket that could be customized to do anything you want them to. Instead they're turning into web browsers in a glass slab.

Country that still uses fax machines wants to lead the world on data standards at G7

Re: "still uses fax machines" - off the high horse, please

I haven't seen anything in the US, even government agencies, request a fax. It has all been replaced by Microsoft corporate accounts that lose critical emails forever into a maze of antiquated IT hygiene rules. It's a good solid 5 years more advanced than fax machines.

Waymo turns its driverless cars into roving weather stations

Redefining success

Self-driving cars didn't work out but we have billions of dollars of on-the-scene weather reporters now. Can they operate SF's parking meters while they're collecting fog?

Amazon reportedly considers laying off 10k employees

Dump & swap

From what I see, the layoffs for self-driving cars, Twits, and Metaverse are real. Everything else is purging highly paid staff to make room for cheap and desperate hires. Layoffs in Q4, sell on brief stock surge, hire back for cheap next year.

The flaw in this plan is that companies are rushing it and making too many mistakes.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Twit sized sound bytes

Unless it's a freshly rebuilt system, I'm sure that the correct and concise answer to every question is, "It's complicated."

How many RPCs for the home page?

- At which point or points in the system do you want them counted? What is or isn't an RPC? Tell me what number you want to hear.

Walk me through exactly what happens when...

- Are we talking about shapes and arrows on a whiteboard or stepping through source code spanning multiple systems?

How much resources are wasted?

- A lot, but the easy stuff is already fixed.

How long will it take to fix everything?

- Do you mean replace everything?

Republican senators tell FTC to back off data security, surveillance rules

Re: U.S. separation of powers

It could be argued that the FTC is enforcing rights to privacy and a fair trial. A 'little harmless marketing data collection' causing people great harm hasn't been hypothetical for a long time. Some states have enacted radical anti-abortion laws and they will cobble together marketing data as evidence of a crime. Police are using it to trace peoples' steps to past crimes. It's virtually impossible to stop your phone from leaking that data.

Do the right-wing radicals and local police departments have experts that can correlate collected data correctly? Hell, no. I bet 99.9% of typical Software Engineers can't either. They're more likely to get the wrong person that the right one. Say a criminal hits stores A, N, and then X. You visited the same stores in that order so you must be guilty, right? Maybe store A is home theater electronics, N is home theater furniture, and X is a supermarket. You were just some innocent sucker doing nothing except researching a home theater upgrade, buying dinner, and having your phone's factory weather app installed.

Twitter CISO flies the coop

Re: Socially distanced

It's clear that Musk is more interested in being "The Boss." No sane person looking for money would buy a delicate company like Twitter then blow it to pieces.

Twitter, Musk, and a week of bad decisions

Publicity isn't always good

The surge of traffic is to watch Twitter fail. Now it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If it doesn't immediately fail, everyone will lose interest and it will fail.

The $8 blue mark was Musk not understanding how the site works. You don't charge fees to your content producers. Most blue tick buyers were just buying one for kicks. They won't buy another one.

Tesla rival Rivian posts losses of $1.7b, with worse to come

"administrative costs also grew considerably"

Cars are insanely difficult to sell. There are costly destructive tests, certifications, warranties, recall tracking, parts suppliers, repair manuals, service centers, deliveries, showrooms, test drives, financing, advertising, configuration and customization, ...

It all makes software seem easy. My crashes, stalls, and destructive tests cost nothing while they're in a development environment.

Mythic bet big on analog AI but has run out of cash

Maybe not critical mass

The barrier to adoption would be that it's different. Assuming they're using flash cells, the precision is going to be low and it can drift over time. It may have more than enough precision for AI, but it's not going to match digital models and it's not going to have exactly reproducible results. It might need a feedback loop to keep it trained.

On the flip side, an analog calculator is exactly what you'd want to take the 'A' out of 'AI' in the future.

Wells Fargo, Zelle slammed by Liz Warren over rampant online banking fraud

Stockholm syndrome

I don't understand how BoA, Wells Fargo, and Chase keep existing. They take away your money and tell you it's your fault for being such a crappy customer, then demand you sign up for more because they're trying to help. You lend them $50000 and you're still deep into a negative annual yield.

There are so many credit unions and small banks that are a pleasure to do business with.

LG debuts thin malleable screens made from contact lens material

Re: Now, if they really want to impress

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing

3 in 1 win

Inorganic LEDs aren't just more efficient than OLED. They can run efficiently at retina-searing brightness for tens of thousands of hours. UV-A chips can incinerate pretty much anything at close range except optical silicone.

It looks like LG figured out how make micro-LEDs, mount them, and prevent thermal stress all in one demo.

Experian, T-Mobile US settle data spills for mere $16m

Re: Maybe 1 penny per spam

Plenty of scammers have large, long-running infrastructures. This specific scammer had REST services at https://safety-links.com/ that was used to pre-populate web forms and downstream trackers. You could query it with parameter 'phone' from 0000000000 to 9999999999 and get back JSON describing all customers' names, addresses, gender, age, various PI, successful scams, and the origin of the data. It was quite fun to explore. The scammer eventually caught on and switched to using identifier codes rather than plain text.

The scammer is rotating domain names but still alive and well on the same infrastructure. Have your browser impersonate an iPhone and load http://meszd.com/86qhp5Ys while recording requests.

Maybe 1 penny per spam

I've received maybe 200 SMS spams for fake stores hosted by a gang with a consistent hosting combination of Namecheap, Salesforce, Amazon, Cloudflare, High Speed Web, and Google. Some of those systems have trivial APIs that can be browsed to examine the database. My information source was listed as T-Mobile.

I'd like to give a special F-U to T-Mo for leaking my data and the lawyers for making sure there's no meaningful compensation. That's on top of the ongoing F-U to Namecheap, Salesforce, Amazon, Cloudflare, High Speed Web, and Google for playing dumb (or being authentically dumb) when they receive an abuse complaint.

Microsoft feels the need, the need for speed in Teams

Skype#

I remember cancelling some job interviews because they required MS Skype and it just wouldn't run reliably on a modern Linux home computer. The jobs required Linux skills so I imagined the office being a living hell of Linux apps using Excel files as transport layer.

One nice thing about Google App Suite offices is that there's no Google file format. They also use Zoom because nobody can remember which Google video conferencing app is the right one.