Posts by vtcodger

Annoyed US regulator warns it might knock SpaceX's shiny new Texas tower down

Re: "The current regulatory system is broken"

My guess has been that Musk's electric truck is targeted at transport from distribution centers to retail stores within a few hundred miles. That is to say, containers of Vietnamese TVs, and Korean PCs and Chinese pretty much everything arrive at Long Beach California by ship. Make their way across the US by train and eventually get broken down at huge warehouses built in repurposed corn fields in the middle of nowhere. From there, a delivery of the many different products needed to restock the retail stores are assembled into shipments delivered by (electric) truck.

I could be way wrong. It's not like actually I know anything about this other than that the container terminal in Long Beach (Wilmington actually) exists and that some of those distribution centers also exist. But it seems to me to make sense -- if the economics work. If they don't Musk presumably won't sell a lot of trucks.

Re: WTAF - this is bullshit

The FAA requires approval of any structure in the US taller than 200 (61m) feet above local ground level or near an airport. Musk's towers are more than twice that. Roughly the height of a 40 story building.

Of course he should have asked for approval. Assuming that they aren't actually an air travel hazard of some sort, I imagine he'll get approval. Along possibly with a (well deserved) fine?

Re: And yet

"He has planning permission from the local council"

We're talking about Texas which -- outside of Travis County (Austin) -- is notoriously lacking in meddlesome regulation of just about everything. At least as long as you are the right sort of person. Being white and wealthy goes a long way toward making you the right sort of person. Bringing jobs to the neighborhood helps a lot also.

I doubt the local planning commission (if any) had any substantive objections to Musk's plans. If he even bothered to present them.

Don't get me wrong. Texas is not that bad a place if you are roughly the right sort of person, can tolerate interminable 35C (95F) plus most days Summers, and don't get nervous around dimwits with firearms. I wouldn't want to live there, but there are much less attractive places in North America.

So nice of China to put all of its network zero-day vulns in one giant database no one will think to break into

Re: Interesting Article 7

"It potentially gives Beijing from that 2 days until a patch is released to do exploits."

My first thought was that that's a pretty reasonable point. Followed by -- but 2 days doesn't seem like a lot of time for a government to isolate a defect, code, debug, test, and use an exploit. Why not give themselves a week or two weeks?

Then, about an hour later the light dawned. There doesn't seem to be any indication I can see that this government data base will be accessible outside the government. Two days possibly is important but for exactly the opposite reason. It looks to maximize the amount of time Chinese intelligence has to isolate and exploit weaknesses before they are patched.

Re: Database vulnerability

"The requirement to submit the bugs within 2 days implies that it is either FAX or more likely electronic."

Or, if security is really important and time isn't of the essence, postal mail. Most people aren't aware of it, but here in the US, quite highly classified information used to be -- and probably still is -- routinely moved around by registered mail. Given the current state of network security perhaps we should be thinking in terms of alternatives to adding additional complex layers of digital "Security" on top of a sort of wobbly foundation. Making things more complex doesn't necessarily make them more secure.

Database vulnerability

"Another part of the order that worries Moussouris is the central Chinese vulnerability database that will be created to house all of these reported bugs: "

Just because we live in a connected world, doesn't mean China's network vulnerability database has to be on-line. It could be stashed on properly backed up USB sticks on computers never attached to a network. My guess is that the database will be tiny -- a few thousand items. It could probably have been handled nicely by a 1980s 8086 PC with 5.25 inch floppies.

In fact, it likely doesn't even have to be computerized. A physical file of 3x5 (OK, OK in China, possibly A7) index cards written in Chinese and kept in a safe in a secure facility could probably do the job -- whatever it is -- just fine.

United, Mesa airlines order 200 electric 19-seater planes for short-hop flights

Re: 250 mile range/19 passengers

250 miles is basically my "might as well drive" range.

Wrong use case. The traffic they are anticipating almost certainly is international travelers and/or business trips that depart/arrive at a relatively small number of airports. If you live in New England and want/need to travel to Germany would you rather drive 4 or 5 or 6 hours to Montreal, JFK or BOS, deal with difficult traffic, and pay through the nose for parking? Or would you rather drive 50 minutes to a regional airport, Lebanon, NH perhaps, park for free or at minimal cost, and check in there? Yes, you may spend an extra hour or so hanging out in airport lounges. And yes that is ... ahem ... terminally dull. But if the alternative is an hour or so fearing for your life in Boston's notorious traffic, airport lounges begin to look better and better.

IPv6 still 5-10 years away from mainstream use, but K8s networking and multi-cloud are now real

Re: Version 6

I have no idea what 6G actually is. And if prior experience is any guide, neither do most of the folks babbling about it. But my first question would be whether it's going to use higher frequencies (shorter wavelengths) than current technologies. If so, is it going to work worth a damn indoors without specialized construction that includes "windows" that are transparent to 6G wavelengths?

Microsoft names Chinese group as source of new attack on SolarWinds

Rarer than unicorns?

"Bad actor likes to work through insecure consumer routers"

Is there such a thing as a secure consumer router?

Google fined €500m for not paying French publishers after using their words on web

Re: Thick skin

There may well be a legitimate problem here, but I wonder if you've described it correctly. Google news credits its sources, limits its description to short snippets and provides a link to the original source. Always has I believe. At least here in the US. Its news operation looks to be designed to be compliant with "Fair Use" under US copyright law because they'd surely be in deep trouble at home and most everywhere else if they weren't.

Look for yourself https://news.google.com/topstories

I'm not especially fond of Google for a lot of reasons. But I'm not sure Google News is especially evil except for its contributing click data to Google's extensive dossiers on every sentient creature on the planet.

BTW. I imagine that Google's response other than sending a platoon of lawyers to France to argue compliance with EU copyright law will be to stop ever reporting news from French sources.

Google killed desktop Drive and replaced it with two apps. Now it’s killing those, and Drive for desktop is returning

Re: Google - great at search...

Their maps are pretty good also -- when they aren't broken. (But Open Street Map is Much faster).

Lenovo says it’s crammed a workstation into a litre of space – less than three cans of beer

Might get a little warm in there

Cosmetics seem critically important to much of humanity, so maybe there's a substantial market amongst those who believe that you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too compact a workstation.

But what worries me about great capability in very little space is heat. Even in 2021, great capability tends to come with a certain amount of toastiness. Can this thing really shed all that heat effectively in worst case conditions?

Tencent uses facial recognition to enforce China’s curfew on gaming kids

Confucius say

If Tencent's facial recognition algorithm works as well as most, I expect that using dad's phone with a picture of dad or for that matter a picture of a random adult Chinese like, for example, Confucius, in front of the camera will probably keep one on line past curfew. And if so and if Chinese kids are anything like American kids, 97% of the youngsters in China will know that within about 3 days of the first kid discovering it.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a project dating back to the late 1900s, may launch this very century

Re: Please Please Please go to (latest) plan.

If you're just interested in spectacular images of very distant objects, you're probably OK no matter what happens with the Webb observatory. Several large earth bound telescopes with mirrors approaching the size of a soccer field are scheduled to come on line in the next decade. What Webb will give you that they won't (I think) is well resolved false color images of cooler objects radiating at wavelengths longer than the visible spectrum.

Re: Well

The Webb telescope is supposed to fly to the L2 point 1.5 million km out. Technically it will be (if it gets there) in solar orbit, not earth orbit. I'm not sure that Falcon 9 could get it there. Somebody around here probably does know.

It's also huge -- the mirror is 6.5m (21 feet) in diameter. That's larger than all but a handful of earthly telescopes. Building optical devices that size takes monumental effort. Building a new one every 3-5 years would probably take significant chunk out of mankind's space budget which is currently around $70B a year and is largely committed to useful stuff -- e.g. communications satellites, weather satellites and to politically popular but (IMHO) rather pointless manned missions. Personally, I'd rather see the money go to things that will tell us potentially useful stuff -- more lunar and Mars rovers and resource surveys of asteroids.

YouTube's recommendation engine is pretty naff, Mozilla study finds

A Journey through the digital sewer

Youtube has content policies? You're kidding, right?

I'd block the site if I didn't want watch the occasional how-to video and didn't, for some obscure reason, find the lock-picking lawyer (https://www.youtube.com/c/lockpickinglawyer) entertaining.

Microsoft patches PrintNightmare – even on Windows 7 – but the terror isn't over

Re: It is about time

Downvoted for obliviousness. While I agree that Windows isn't really as awful as the O.P. posits, I think Windows has long since become unmanageable. At least Microsoft can't manage it. I doubt anyone could. Other OSes don't seem to have that problem -- at least not to the same degree.

I also think that the IT industry has done at best a mediocre job of meeting user needs. A "Users, who cares about users? They'll take what we feed them and like it." mentality has driven the industry for decades.

Robots still suck. It's all they can do to stand up – never mind rise up

Re: Musk, are you listening?

The Elon is presumably well aware of the capabilities and limitations of robots. His attempt to manufacture the Tesla Model 3 largely with robots wasn't a total failure. But it was anything but an overwhelming success see https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/13/17234296/tesla-model-3-robots-production-hell-elon-musk The factory did end up using a lot of robots we're told. But apparently he ended up with many more human workers than were in the initial plans.

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

Re: Oh no ...

"MS will now spend the next 10 years fighting to get the contract cancellation revoked."

I suspect that the MS folks will probably be way too busy padding the bill they will send the government for work already performed and for contract termination costs to waste effort trying to get the contract reinstated.

Re: Obligatory Star Wars MisQuote

"I've got a bad feeling about this." Might be appropriate also.

Things that needn't be said: Don't plonk a massive Starlink dish on the hood of your car

Re: Spaced-GenX?

"Besides, given the need to keep the antenna pointing at the right bits of sky, wouldn't you need an auto-adjusting gyro aiming harness ,,,?"

I'm not a expert, but my understanding is that the Starlink antenna is a phased array antenna whose beam is electronically steerable, But I would think that adjusting for changes in the vehicle's direction might require satnav and some non-trivial mods to its standard beam steering software.

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

Re: It's Terminal

If it's truly terminal, I'm guessing that the number of mourners at the funeral will be small and most of those will be there either to gloat or for the free food at the reception.

The PrintNightmare continues: Microsoft confirms presence of vulnerable code in all versions of Windows

At long last -- The Paperless Office

"Microsoft's own workarounds start with disabling the Print Spooler service and end with disabling inbound remote printing through group policy. The former stops all printing"

They've been promising us a paperless office for what? 35 years? An now it is here!!!

Devilish plans for your next app update ensure they never happen – unless you start praying

Re: Buttering up the devil

Hey. Goats can't help it that their hoofs are cloven. I'm sure it they had a choice they would apt for paws or fingers or maybe tentacles. (Very useful--tentacles). Hoof-shaming is despicable conduct. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Openreach to UK businesses: Switch is about to hit the fan. Prepare for withdrawal of the copper-based phone network now or risk disruption

Ahem

Not my problem (thankfully). But might it not be better to get fiber to everyone who wants it BEFORE you announce a four year deadline for switching off your legacy phone network?

You, robo-car maker, any serious accidents, I want to know about them, stat – US watchdog

Re: Circumvention by obfuscation

"Pulling into a lane that doesn't exist should be pretty easy to spot if your eyes are on the road,"

I think that's more than a bit naive. Ever had a front tire come apart while traveling at speed? It takes a second or so to realize there is a problem and a bit longer to figure out what it is. Fortunately, the first thing that comes to mind -- hitting the brakes and trying to maintain directional control is probably the optimum approach. But everything happens really fast and you are not going to be doing much analysis during the critical time interval.

Yes, if you suspect that Elon's monstrosity is likely to attempt self destruction, you MIGHT have an appropriate response keyed up to implement. And it MIGHT save your life. But then if you mistrust Autopilot, why would you be driving a Tesla?

Re: Circumvention by obfuscation

The initial report is bound to be vague. Basically "We've been informed that a Belchfire 500 autonomous vehicle has been involved in a serious accident. We are investigating."

After all, most accidents will occur outside of normal working hours (40 to 50 hours in a 168 hour week -- before allowing for holidays). What exactly do we expect the janitorial/security staff to do when the police call them at 0300 on Christmas morning to inform them of an accident? They'll call their boss ... will call his/her boss ... who will attempt to call someone in the company who actually cares -- if such can be found at a time when half the country is visiting relatives. A well run company will presumably have some mechanism in place to meet the statutory 24 hour requirement. It might even work. (In my experience not all that many companies are actually that well run).

It's surely the ten day report that matters. It will presumably contain actual information.

automate reporting

I'm a bit skeptical that a vehicle that has just run into an obstacle while traveling 113kph can be relied upon to automatically report an accident.

Re: Circumvention by obfuscation

One thing that bothers me a bit about incidents like this. Conceptually, the driver is supposed to monitor the car and override it if it is about to do something dangerous. But who among us is actually capable of discerning that their vehicle is going to try to kill them, then working out and implementing an alternative course of action -- all in a few hundred milliseconds.

It's not like the car computer fades the music on the entertainment system and announces. "Hey Dave, you see that bridge abutment up ahead? I'm going to crash into it ... three ... two ... one ... adios amigo"

Revealed: Why Windows Task Manager took a cuddlier approach to (process) death and destruction

Re: Why so long?

Seriously -- Linux shutdown also takes a while. I think (and boy could I be wrong) that both OSes issue some sort of polite shutdown request to all running processes which then close their open files, save cached data that was awaiting an output opportunity, etc, etc, etc. Demons are shut down gracefully. File systems are unmounted -- but you can't do that until processes using them shut down. All that can take a while. And you have to wait for the slowest (and possibly worst coded) process to end.

... something like that anyway.

I invite folks who actually know something about how modern OSes work to straighten out my misconceptions.

This always-on culture we're in is awful. How do we stop it? Oh, sorry, hold on – just had another notification

Re: This is unnecessary

Thanks for the link. It looks interesting. I'll read it this afternoon.

BTW, I can't imagine why someone downvoted your post. I suppose that's more proof , if any were needed, that it's wall-to-wall crackpots out there, and the internet has given each and every one of them a voice.

Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

Maximize efficiency

"slap as many features together as possible as fast as possible and ship it!"

And don't waste time and effort testing. The customers will do that for you. Much faster and more cost effective overall than waiting for a test team to dink around with the product for days or weeks and then having the customers find a whole lot of additional problems as they always do.

If it compiles clean and links, it's good to go.

"slap as many features together as possible as fast as possible and ship it!"

And don't waste time and effort testing. The customers will do that for you. Much faster and more cost effective overall than waiting for a test team to dink around with the product for days or weeks. If it compiles clean and links, it's good to go.

No BS*: BT is hooking up with OneWeb to tackle UK notspots

Sincerely, Good Luck

I really hope that this will result in adequate internet connections for rural Britons. But I have to say that if US experience is any guide, the most likely result is that vast sums of money will be disappeared from the public coffers and those in the countryside will mostly experience no improvement whatsoever in their dismal internet connections.

The wild card in all this is Starlink. I'm not a big fan of Elon Musk. He seems more than a bit unstable, and is not overly devoted to truthtelling, and is prone to wildly overpromise. But he does have remarkable organizational skills. And SpaceX is throwing a LOT of money at the project. And as far as I can see, there's nothing Starlink is trying to do that couldn't be and surely was costed out with fair precision on a cocktail napkin before work began. So it seems possible that he and his company will come to the rescue of those of us who don't live in big cities.

Dell SupportAssist contained RCE flaw allowing miscreants to remotely reflash your BIOS with code of their creation

Oooopsie

The only road to a truly secure BIOS probably goes back to the 1980s when BIOSes were compact, tightly coded and burned into a chip by physically blowing internal fuses, They were not alterable except by replacing the chip.

Perhaps we need to go back to BIOSes that are not field upgradable. Of course that would require BIOS code that contains no vulnerabilities. And we don't actually know how to write that.

Seems that we're kinda, sorta -- Screwed.

Dozens of Iranian media websites devoured by the Great Satan, apparently

Re: You just can't get quality staff nowadays so be prepared for second best helpings

You misread -- or perhaps I expressed myself poorly. It's the Iranian president who has less authority than people assume. Much/most of the power one assumes presidents should have is actually in the domain of the Supreme Leader. The president does have some power. The president can veto legislation for example. But he can't do anything much the Supreme Leader doesn't agree with whereas the Supreme Leader appoints many key officials, is the commander in chief of the military, appoints half the Guardian Council, and can even unilaterally declare war.

Re: You just can't get quality staff nowadays so be prepared for second best helpings

"How can that be of great help to any Supreme Leader?"

Iran's Supreme Leader seems to be the Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei His role seems to be more or less "President for life". It's not an elected office. There is also an Iranian President who is elected every four years from a slate of right thinking candidates but it's not all that powerful a job apparently.

It's confusing. But perhaps no more so than monarchies where the "monarch" has little or no power.

(Almost) for sure

One thing is (almost) for sure. This seizure will be cited for years by India, China, North Korea etc when the US whinges about internet censorship. Unless there is some well hidden justification beyond "the Iranians are liars" this will probably turn out to have been a dumb idea.

Re: Surreal

Downvoted because I can't find any source -- much less a credible source -- for the claim that "weapons inspectors reporting from the very first visit that they were kept away from every site they wanted to inspect" and I very much doubt that you can.

As far as I can tell, Iran allowed inspections from 2015 until 2018 when Donald J Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal on the basis of no public evidence whatsoever. Iran did block inspections of two sites used for nuclear work around the turn of the century for most of 2020, but did finally agree to the inspections. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/world/middleeast/trump-iran-nuclear-iaea.html

Now that China has all but banned cryptocurrencies, GPU prices are falling like Bitcoin

Re: I am no lover of the Chinese political system

"There's nothing that needs a dedicated digital currency."

Agreed. No one actually needs a digital currency for any reason I can think of. But digital transactions are convenient. And they don't require wandering around with a pocket full of change. I usually use a credit card at the grocery store just because it gets me out of the way of the way of whoever is in back of me in line more quickly than tying up the cashier with counting and sorting a handful of banknotes. (I do sometimes wish that the lady in front of me with seven credit cards, most of which are expired and the remainder of which have PINs she can't keep straight and eventually ends up writing a check would pay cash).

"neither cyptocurrencies or gold have any intrinsic value"

Commodities like Gold, Silver, Copper,etc have an underlying value set by their actual usage in business and industry. For most of them, the underlying value is (probably) very close to the market price. Gold is an exception because it is extraordinarily subject to speculation, government manipulation, etc, etc, etc. But still, it's almost always worth something if for nothing other than melt value.

The consequence. If things get tough, you'll probably be able to hock your grandmother's Gold ring in order to buy food. My guess is that in tough times, trying to hock your Bitcoin Wallet will get you laughed at.

Re: I am no lover of the Chinese political system

"The Chinese Governement will only tolerate digital coins whose supply they can control, the same way as that of ordinary money."

Not that it matters to your argument, but neither China nor any other country can actually control their money supply. The vast majority of the money supply is private debt, not government IOUs. About the best the government can do is try to influence the money supply by tinkering with interest rates, forbidding or impeding some types of transactions, taxing some transactions and maybe throwing some folks who have annoyed the regulators or the public sufficiently into jail.

I doubt the Chinese actually much care one way or the other about crytocurrencies except to the extent that their energy usage and risk of collapse are potentially destabilizing. Crypto's problem in China is probably that it has grown or is growing too large.

Re: I am no lover of the Chinese political system

I haven't given much thought to government backed digital currency other than that it sort of sounds like a good idea. Off the top of my head it seems like the overriding requirements might be that it is impossible to counterfit with any technology we have or can envision, and that it is easily verifiable by pretty much anyone as genuine. It'd also be good if it didn't require functioning digital infrastructure for transactions. Which is to say that I might like to transfer $10 to the little girl selling Girl Scout Cookies door to door even if some company's latest poorly tested update has crippled half of North America or my cell phone needs charging.

Is any of that even possible?

Re: Phew that was close!

Downvoted because it expresses a dubious -- if not uncommon -- viewpoint.

A "currency" that isn't either an IOU or a share of some commodity is a currency backed only by happy thoughts. From tulips to The South Seas Company to phony gold mines to Credit Default Swaps, in the past people have invariably stopped thinking happy thoughts sooner or later. Of course, things might truly be different this time. But that's really not a good bet.

If nothing else, you can use government IOUs to pay taxes. You do plan to pay your taxes ... right?

Hubble Space Telescope sails serenely on in safe mode after efforts to switch to backup memory modules fail

Power Off

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

I've been told by folks that actually command satellites that power cycling and switching to backup components that affect command/control are last resorts only to be tried after everything else has failed. Makes sense. What's the fallback if you power down and the satellite or its communications system fails to come back up????

Toshiba engulfed by scandal again — and the prime minister is implicated

Re: Wow...

"A government being Big Business puppet?"

Probably more like a partner than a puppet. In many ways Japan operates more like a family with 126,000,00 members than like western countries. And I wouldn't have too much faith in the legal system fixing things. Conflicts in Japan rarely get hashed out in court. There are only 14000 lawyers in the whole country -- about the same as Alabama or Puerto Rico.

FYI: There's a human-less, AI robot Mayflower ship sailing from the UK to US right now

Re: The

"This is a sail boat, ..."

That's what you'd expect. But I can't see any sign of (a) mast(s)/sail(s) in the pictures of the thing or in the drawings on the website. And it does have a rather conspicuous propeller. So I think it's probably a solar powered electric boat rather than a sailboat.

Re: Off Air!

Well, it's solar powered. Including the propulsion apparently. And it's night in the Eastern North Atlantic. And www.ventusky.com indicates a large area of rain S of Iceland and W of Ireland in the general area they might be traversing. Even when the sun comes up, they may not be generating a lot of power. Perhaps they have fallen back to a power saving mode.

Chrome 'Conformance' for JavaScript frameworks says: If you don't follow our rules, your project won't build

Re: Locations On By Default

"And all privacy safeguards turned off."

What are these "privacy safeguards" you speak of? We're talking Google and Javascript here. If you're interested in privacy you've clearly navigated to the wrong port.

Toyota reveals its work on an honest-to-goodness cloak of invisibility

Re: Interesting

Follow-up: I got to wondering about WHY it's so hard to see behind the passenger side doorpost on our cars. So I went out and sat in one of them for a while. Turns out that the driver's side doorpost is pretty close to the driver and seeing objects behind it only requires moving one's head maybe 10 cm or less -- which is something we humans do routinely to see around posts and supports in shops and such. The passenger side doorpost is maybe six times as far away. Which means I'd have to move my head six times as far to see objects beyond it. Not so easy. Plus which on that particular vehicle -- a Kia Soul -- the passenger side outside mirror also blocks visibility of many objects and vehicles on the passenger side.