Posts by Richard Boyce

Trump spectrum sale leaves airlines with $4.5B bill for altimeter do-over

Depends on whether an auction takes place.

Poop-peeping toilet attachment has a different definition of 'end-to-end' encryption

They're missing an opportunity

Instead of rephrasing their product description, they could, in accordance with their privacy policy, start selling "anonymised" pictures to people who like seeing this sort of thing, and have them provide the feedback to the pooper with real end-to-end encryption, perhaps mid-poop. I'm sure the company would really not want the ability to eavesdrop on the resulting conversations. All for a fee, of course.

NATO taps Google for air-gapped sovereign cloud

Re: How is this a cloud?

"Air-gapped cloud" is self-contradictory.

Cryptology boffins’ association to re-run election after losing encryption key needed to count votes

Two out of three

Isn't "no two trustees could collude" undermined by the new system? Indeed there are three possible ways that two can collude, and push the other under a bus. The BOFH would approve.

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

The Reg should post a story on April 1st, saying that telcos plan to add an extra subscription fee of x amount for ermergency calls in people's monthly bills to cover increasing costs, and that people could opt out of the ability to make emergency calls to avoid this fee. Then provide instructions for this opt out. The reaction could be entertaining.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok make very squishy jury members

Re: This 'test' was totally flawed

"The 'judge' probably found him guilty the second he saw him. North Carolina has a deserved reputation for being thoroughly racist."

You must guard against a similar reaction the second you see North Carolina and a black defendant.

MIT boffins double precision of atomic clocks by taming quantum noise

Re: Caesium

You made a spelling error yourself. The short form of "it is" uses an apostrophe but the possessive pronoun does not.

Microsoft cuts off Azure phone surveillance support for Israeli military

Moving 8,000 TB

What's the best way to move that amount of data from MS to Amazon? Over the Internet at 100Gb/s, it would take over a week. Is that speed reasonably practical for that long, even between the two giants? I guess you could put the data on hundreds of hard drives and transport those.

Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

I seem to remember that, at one time, MS said that Windows 10 was going to be the last version, .i.e. it would become Windows as a service, updated as required.

Not again! Microsoft blames config tweak for 365 outage in parts of North America

... and MS increasingly insists on users logging in to Windows with online accounts. What could possibly go wrong?

Physicist models new use for nuclear waste: Turning it into super-rare fusion fuel

Are the numbers right?

The article says that a 1GW D&T reactor would need 55kg of T, perhaps without a breeding blanket. It also says that would be enough to make 2kg of T with this new technique, even if the heat could be used for a secondary purpose. Not even close to break even. But then, that's been the story of fusion for a very long time. We need a genuine breakthrough. Until then, the best fusion plant we have is the one in the sky.

No more 'Sanity Checks.' Inclusive language guide bans problematic tech terms

Are we still allowed to use...

...the term "B Ark"?

Oracle's $40B Nvidia hardware haul may be too hot for OpenAI's Abilene, Texas DC to handle

Re: What?

Enough waste heat to provide those colleges with a simulation of hell. Amen.

Whodunit? 'Unauthorized' change to Grok made it blather on about 'White genocide'

Senior manager: "Yes, Sir, I'll handle it personally. No need to trouble the techs".

Isn't this what happened to the fictional HAL?

Rather than add a backdoor, Apple decides to kill iCloud encryption for UK peeps

Re: Without an understanding

Given that the US government gains access too, maybe the new US government persuaded the UK government to do this.

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

"24x7x365 operation". That's 365 weeks... :)

FBI wipes Chinese PlugX malware from thousands of Windows PCs in America

Re: Scary

This was done openly with a court order and using the malware itself and it seems that only computers in the US were cleaned up. If they had also added software at the same time, they'd be taking a ridiculously large risk, especially when other branches of government can do so more covertly.

Rollable laptop displays to roll off the production line from April, says Samsung

Re: Hmm

I have used a pivoted display for more years than I care to count, with a 16:10 aspect ratio. I last bought a monitor in 2021, and like the monitor it replaced, it has a 16:10 aspect ratio, but still only 1900x1200. I have never seen a better (squarer) ratio at a reasonable price or even the same ratio with 4K resolution at a reasonable price. I keep hoping that someone would compete with LG's DualUp, causing the price to drop, but that's not happened yet.

I have tried to convince other people that mainly look at documents or web pages on their computers to consider a pivoted display, but they just want more of what they're used to. Habits die hard, both good ones and bad.

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

SQRL

Steve Gibson is a well-known guy who put a LOT of thought into this problem, and devised an excellent system to replace the way we currently use usernames and passwords. The major problem that the industry had, I think, is that SQRL is completely open, placed in the public domain and requires no third party to act between the user and web sites. So there is no way for any third party to control or limit its use and no way to directly monetize it. It also didn't help that it took Steve Gibson five years to finish and polish it, albeit with a lot of volunteer support. Plus FIDO, a system that can be used to make money, was being worked on in parallel, but which has also largely flopped.

For interested people, the system is described and defined at https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm . There is a two-hour video of a presentation given by Steve Gibson available on the main page.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

SpaceX may have killed this

The development of Falcon 9 and now Starship changes the economics of spaceflight completely. Maybe if this technology had come into use earlier, things might have been different.

Western Digital releases firmware fix for SSDs blighted by Windows 11 24H2 BSODs

Re: Anyone still buying WD?

I stopped buying WD after the WD Red scandal, where they quietly replaced CMR drives with SMR drives that weren't fit for NAS. At first they denied it, then admitted it but denied it was a problem. After that, I started buying Seagate, so I dodged the next scandal, again in NAS, where they triggered false drive failure warnings as soon as drives ran out of warranty.

First time's the charm: SpaceX catches a descending Super Heavy Booster

Re: To the Moon and Mars

The Starship program is intended to take people to Mars. Would you have Boeing take on that project, or have China do it, or not have humanity aim for that at all?

Heart of glass: Human genome stored for 'eternity' in 5D memory crystal

Our DNA contains the info for building a human body inside another, so that's likely a showstopper right there.

Scandium-based nuclear clocks promise punctuality for next 300 billion years

Clock speed variations

How sensitive would this be to altitude? The closer you are to the ground, the slower time passes. Also, the rotation speed of the Earth varies slightly with the global weather. Would that be something that could measureably affect the rate at which time passes for such a clock?

After years of fighting Right to Repair, Apple U-turns-ish in California

It's not just the US

The EU is also heading in this direction. Apple has perhaps decided that if you can't beat them, join them.

NIST boffins shrink atomic beam clock to the size of a postage stamp

In a hundred years...

.... this may be a treasured item in a museum, viewed by people who routinely carry a low-cost device that measures their personal speed through time with far more accuracy.

Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra is a worthy heir to the Note

Re: Too powerful ?

Which is why there is increasing pressure on manufacturer's to build in failure. A decaying battery, a decaying screen (particularly OLED), and decaying security for lack of updates. They also want to build in information gathering, and eventually adverts, as a continuous source of income.

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Web interface

Anyone who is exposing the web interface on these devices to the public internet is asking for trouble anyway. From memory, I don't think modern browsers will tolerate connecting to it via https either. All this said, I don't think there is reason for panic if the interface is only available from the LAN. For many businesses, if the LAN is compromised, it's game over anyway.

If these adapters are replaced, don't buy the suggested Cisco alternative. Go with a different manufacturer that still has an interest in this market.

Diving DRAM prices are a problem not even AI can solve

Re: A problem?!

Somehow I doubt that Apple will stop charging £200 / $200 for 8GB of RAM.

Barred from US tech, Huawei claims to have built its own 14nm chip design suite

Intel

" Intel has said it will have a 2nm chip in production by late next year."

I suspect readers here will take that with a large pinch of salt.

China's Mars rover hibernates for a scarily long time

New solution

Any future lander that includes a helicopter might have a solution.

Rolls-Royce, EasyJet fire up first hydrogen-fueled jet engine

I suspect this is most useful as PR

I think hydrogen is going to have a hard time competing with synthetic hydrocarbons because of the storage problems. Even liquid hydrogen requires much bigger storage tanks. Then you've got the weight and size of the insulation. If you don't liquify it, you've got to compress it, which again requires heavy tanks. Then you've got the much higher risks from leaks, especially during refueling.

Long distance flight must eventually become net-zero carbon, but I doubt that Rolls Royce would be doing this if EasyJet weren't paying for it, probably from their PR budget.

Orion reaches the Moon, buzzes surface, gets ready to orbit

"Dark" side of the moon

I'm of an age where I remember Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, so I can't resist the bait....

"There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. [The only thing that makes it look light is the sun]."

I assume the author means "far" side. He may have a bet on how quickly someone posts this...

Moon has been drifting away from Earth for 2.4 billion years, rocks reveal

Re: those further away than geostationary orbit tend to depart (eventually).

If there were enough time, the moon would eventually become geostationary as the earth's rotation became tidally locked to the moon's orbit, and the system would stabilise, with no moving tides, just as has already happened to the moon. However, the Sun will reach the end of its normal life before then and likely swallow the remains of the Earth and moon as it swells.

US court backs FCC decision to let SpaceX fly Starlink sats at lower altitudes

Re: if you are going to complain to the courts....

Making allegations in court, simply on a wing and a prayer, with no evidence, may be seen to be professionally vexatious and suggests desperation.

FCC decides against giving Starlink $1b in rural broadband subsidies

Are all improving technologies disqualified?

That seems to be the gist of the FCC's reasoning.

Is it good enough and reliable enough to deliver what people need?

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

There are also the costs of lost opportunities, such as using the land and sunlight to produce electricity or using the heat for some other thermochemical process.

CHERI-based computer runs KDE for the first time

Re: Breakthrough

"I hereby predict that when that day comes intelligence agencies will once again clamor for backdoored operating systems and CPU's."

Because that's what their political masters insist upon. For the sake of the chldren, of course.

Copper shortage keeps green energy, tech ventures grounded

Possible solution....

Now would be a good time to discover a low-cost room-temperature superconductor that doesn't contain copper.

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

Intermediaries

What's to stop Russia from buying indirectly through intermediaries, though it would cost more?

What's to stop Russia importing products such as laptops from Chinese manufacturers that include such chips? Would Taiwan or the US sanction such companies?

Quantum internet within grasp as scientists show off entanglement demo

Re: Within our grasp

"The human mind, let's call it Real Intelligence (RI), is a marvelous thing for generating ideas. But implementing those ideas always seems to be a bit beyond our grasp."

If that were true, you wouldn't be using a computer.

US exempts South Korean smartphones from Russia export bans

China

I think everyone's aware that China sells phones, cars and white goods, and would benefit at South Korea's expense. Samsung also is one of the major chip manufacturers of the world and those are in very tight supply right now. Realpolitik.

Targeted ransomware takes aim at QNAP NAS drives, warns vendor: Get your updates done pronto

Re: "I have 50tb of data there, none of it essential"

I am surprised that he wrote tb instead of TB.

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

Legal costs

Does the loser pay the victor's legal costs in this case?

Dutch nuclear authority bans anti-5G pendants that could hurt their owners via – you guessed it – radiation

Source of radiation

I can't read Dutch, so can someone tell me if the authorities have said what the source material is that's producing the radiation, or any other technical details?

Humanity has officially touched the Sun (or, at least, one of its probes has)

Re: Jorge Cham's graphical illustration

If it were in a thermos flask, it would cook itself with the heat from its own energy use. It radiates that heat into space while mostly in the shadow of the shield.

Chinese Communist Party official expelled for mining cryptocurrency

Re: world is getting weirder again

Senior party members use those services too, and they have rivals.

Trick or treat? Massive solar storm could light up American skies this Halloween

High southern latitudes too.

31-year-old piece of hardware not working very well: Hubble telescope back in safe mode over 'synchronization issues'

Re: It’s going to L2?

It's going to the Earth-Sun L2 point, not the Earth-Moon L2 point.

Alpha adds to tally of exploding rockets, takes out space sail prototype with it

Re: Close

They may have destroyed evidence by interfering with debris. They also risked chemical burns.