Posts by David Pearce

Starlink clashes with Telecom Italia over frequency data sharing

The 1900/1910 MHz block is reserved for railway communications in Malaysia (and other countries I believe) - a safety critical usage, so interference from satellites would be a serious issue.

Nokia brainwave turns cell towers into cash cows with backup batteries

A lot of the cost of backup is the security guards you need to stop your batteries being stolen. This is a cost that doesn't go up as you add more batteries

AI flips the script on fingerprint lore – maybe they're not so unique after all

Fingerprints are not compared as images. There are several proprietary and incompatible systems that classify what are considered as important details of a print. This data reduction greatly increases the probability of false positives.

SpaceX sends first direct-to-cell Starlinks to orbit

Re: Beam forming technology

3G and LTE smartphone uplink is usually just 200 mW, GSM was 2W

Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5 million bank transactions

Re: Global warming???

Singapore has hit all time temperature records this year. Even the equator is getting hotter

UK to crack down on imported Chinese optical fiber cables

Prysmian Group headquarters are in Milan

Over the years they have eaten the UK suppliers like BICC. They also own Draka

You shouldn't be able to buy devices that tamper with diesel truck emissions on eBay, says DoJ

Re: no ..but

"You are getting into the same thing as an ISP being held liable for people pirating movies and music. How about people that post albums to YouTube without permission"

But does your ISP act as a middleman and collect a payment from you to watch this pirate movie?

South Korea's biggest mobile telco says 5G has failed to deliver on its promise

5G is working fine in urban parts of Malaysia now. It does drain your phone battery faster.

So far the telcos have been unable to charge the premium price they were hoping for and my monthly data cap is an order of magnitude higher than my usage.

The IOT hype for 5G has not worked out at all and I cannot see 6G helping.

To me 6G is really about patent control and excluding China.

TV and film extras fear generative AI will copy their faces and bodies to take their jobs

Cloning research?

Trying to make a clone of Steve Jobs perhaps?

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

Re: Also, I just noticed...

On a PC, it's easy to never open multiple tabs when banking and close the browser after use. On cellphones it's much harder to keep your banking App isolated

Tech support scammers go analog, ask victims to mail bundles of cash

The scammers have found that cryptocurrencies are very public and hard to spend without being arrested

Want to feel old? Ethernet just celebrated its 50th birthday

Remember PLANET?

Before Token Ring, RACAL had its PLANET dual rotating ring "LAN". This staerted life as a method of networking RS232, PC connection was added in the mid 80s.

This one failed to get the IEEE blessing.

A lot of what we now are familiar with in Ethernet was borrowed from AT&T Starlan, which was a 1 Mbps tree and branch

Sci-fi author 'writes' 97 AI-generated tales in nine months

There are many "real authors" who have done nothing more than rehash existing stories without an original idea over the years.

This is what the AI basically does

West warns Malaysia to keep Huawei out of 5G networks

Re: Global Policing.....

The 5G incumbent is Ericsson.

They were recently fined by the US for bribing in some neighbouring countries.

Huawei are widely used in Malaysia on other networks

Google: Turn off Wi-Fi calling, VoLTE to protect your Android from Samsung hijack bugs

I checked and found an unexpected security update for my A53G, the last only on 6th March, so maybe connected

Funnily enough, FDA forbids Elon Musk's Neuralink human experiments

This is about immortality really

The SciFi dream is of moving the mind out of the biological brain

Yukon UFO could have cost unfortunate balloon fan $12

Helium is rare

The Earths supply of helium is very limited, so why waste it in an unmanned balloon.

Bonus that hydrogen is a little lighter and doesn't leak as much

Intel Sapphire Rapids workstation chips tout up to 56 cores, unlocked SKUs

56 Cores

So only useful for massively threaded applications then

Amazon convinces FCC it can avoid space junk chaos

Congestion

So Kuiper is just above the Starlink orbit and they in turn are just above Hubble, the ISS a bit lower.

Any launch failures and you will risk collisions

China to stop certifying fax machines, ISDN and frame relay kit

PABXs

There are still plenty of analog telephony PABXs out there with 2 Mbps trunk lines.

I had trouble buying a fixed line telephone recently to replace a broken set which was on my VOIP gateway box at home.

BT in tests to beam down 5G coverage from the stratosphere

Looks like someone chose hydrogen without thinking about its abysmal energy density. Those high pressure tanks are heavy

Atlassian CEO's bonkers scheme to pipe electricity from Australia to Singapore collapses

Politics too

Any cable from Australia to Singapore inevitably passes through Indonesian territorial waters..

The North Sea cables don't have these 3rd party problems

Intel casts doubt on Italy for chip factory location

Packaging and test requires cheap labour, which is why Malaysia and the Philippines have so much.

Italy is an unsuitable candidate for the fabs as it is prone to earthquakes and the odd volcano, plus short of water

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

International traffic

A Teams meeting for me that includes people outside my office, but still in Malaysia, is usually hosted by a server in Japan or the USA. This leads to horrible packet loss and latency

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Asimovs Foundation series

If you remember, in the Foundation series the "Engineers" had become a cult trying to maintain a technology that they did not understand.

The West is well down the road in following that as a script.

US House boots TikTok from government phones

I was surprised to see a TikTok app installed during a clean Windows10 install.recently

Intel settles to escape $4b patent suit with VLSI

Nationality again?

Softbank is Japanese and the US courts have plenty of track record in favouring US companies in patent cases

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Re: Monetise Me If You Can!!!

Many countries insist on proof of identity to get a SIM card

Micron plans staff decimation as demand dips to Great Recession levels

But still most ICs are out of stock at the distributors

European telco body looks into terahertz for future 6G comms

A lot of pressure for 6G is because China has a lot of the 5G patents and certain countries want to shut China out.

Already where I am there is a single 5G infrastructure operator as its simply crazy economics to have every telco with its own physical base station in every street.

SEC charges crew of social media influencers with $100m fraud

I wonder how many others are less stupid and don't get recorded and caught

To protect its cloud, Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services

There is something wrong with a price model that doesn't cover electricity and cooling costs. If you do that, coin mining is hopelessly uneconomic on a general purpose CPU

UK arrests five for selling 'dodgy' point of sale software

Never try to cheat the tax man, it doesn't end well unless you are a billionaire

Creator of spec for melting RTX 4090 cables urges Nvidia, others to 'ensure user safety'

Some backstory here

http://jongerow.com/12VHPWR/

TLDR - not all cables are suitable for 600W

Australia blames Russia for harboring health insurance hackers

Re: Details details details

"But more than the fact all 9 million records were available to any account, what about field level security?"

Lazy design - allow everyone to see everything or all sorts of things get complicated to do

Or

Paranoid management PHBs that think that they have to be able to micromanage their staff

TSMC reportedly looks to raise a second Arizona chip fab

Which state is better in the USA?

There are downsides to many states. Some have earthquakes, some hurricanes, some no staff, some too expensive staff

Asus packs 12-core Intel i7 into a Raspberry Pi-sized board

Product lifecycle?

The question with this class of SBC is how long will you be able to buy it for after you have designed it into some system

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

Realistic rates

In Malaysia you can get a fresh graduate for $6000pa

A competent software developer who can write a spec and follow it and test will cost you far more, from $25000pa, but still much less than in the West

Starlink's success in Ukraine amplifies interest in anti-satellite weapons

A bag of sand launched into reverse orbit would be a very simple and effective method, a fairly long time before all the debris de-orbits though

Big Tech's maps led ride-sharing giant Grab astray

I find Google shows roads as uncongested when they are actually gridlocked because so many motorcycle delivery riders are weaving through.

The fundamental error is not differentiating the App users into cars and bikes

Starlink's Portability mode lets you take your sat broadband dish anywhere*

Aircraft are in the open air

Aircraft are hopefully above trees and buildings, so terrain fading will not be an issue.

They turn quite slowly, so satellite handovers will be reduced. In the air, ATC tries to keep the planes well apart, so planes per satellite will never get too high

Re: "If Starlink detects a dish isn't at its home address, there's no guarantee of service"

The rural areas are where you would want this. Fibre based Internet in anywhere urban should be much cheaper

Semiconductor average lead time breaks half-year barrier

This is average lead time, so lead times in years is all too common

Hello Slackware, our old friend: Veteran Linux distribution releases version 15.0 at last

Re: my first distro

The stock Slackware kernel was not bloated anyway

'Boombox' function sparks Tesla recall

Over powerful motors and the matching power and cooling system will have a serious weight penalty, affecting range badly in normal driving

Intel chases after Bitcoin miners with dedicated chip

Maybe I might be able to buy a Radeon graphics card again

US House passes bill to boost chip manufacturing and R&D

Re: EU Competition?

There have been plenty of chip fabs in the EU. Philips, ST, Siemens and several others

Another US president, time for another big Intel factory promise by another CEO

Re: Workers?

Chip fabs have very few workers. The diffused wafers get flown to Penang for package and test, which is the labour intensive step

T-Mobile US figuring out international roaming on 5G

Re: So the challenge is?

3G is turning off nationwide in Malaysia through this month, other countries are doing similar

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

It will get worse

Netflix etc are trying to reduce energy use to increase profits.

Bitcoin will use more and more as it is the nature of the proof of work algorithm