Posts by Crypto Monad

Need for speed? CityFibre punts 5.5 Gbps symmetrical broadband at ISPs

Re: I would be happy...

Anyone know why BT don't offer symmetric?

1. So that they can continue to offer "Unlimited" bandwidth packages.

In the download direction, there's only so much bandwidth you can consume: sooner or later you need to watch those videos, or play those games you downloaded. Faster speed mostly means downloading the same amount in a shorter time.

But in the upload direction, there are a minority of people who abuse the network by filling the pipe 24x7, whether that be by hosting bittorrent or by doing full backups of their server every 10 minutes to the cloud. If you apply a transfer limit or FUP, even something huge like 10TB per month, everyone will complain loudly. By keeping the upload speed low, you put a lid on the problem.

Remember that BT/OR are mainly concerned about the 95% of people who just watch Netflix and download games, not the 5% who process 8K video at home and upload it.

2. So that they can allow altnets some of the customers.

If BT/OR were to squeeze altnets completely out of the market, this would be considered anti-competitive, and lead to increased regulation. The altnets have only two selling points: they are cheaper (since they can cherry-pick where to build and are unregulated); and they offer faster uploads. BT/OR is happy to hand off the least profitable, most bandwidth-hungry 5% of customers to altnets in order to show "the market is working".

3. To protect their highly profitable leased line market. Leased lines are still a better grade of service, but for many users, a contended PON symmetric service would be a perfectly acceptable replacement.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: "Someone Else's Computer" is nonsense

I think the vast majority of people that compare DC costs to cloud costs are comparing, say, a single rack (or less) or a COLO situation. When you have a full row, it's a lot less clear cut in terms of price.

If you have heavy-duty compute needs that require a full row of racks in a data centre - that is, they are actually doing real work and not just sitting there idle most of the time - then this is the case that can work out *much* cheaper than cloud.

Say you are using AWS c5.metal (96vCPU, 192GiB RAM, $4.08 per hour): it only takes a few months before you've covered the cost of buying an equivalent server. Even if you got a 50% discount by taking, say, a 1 year reservation, you've still covered the cost in less than a year; after that you're just paying for the colo. And that's before looking at things like data egress pricing, which is the main gouging point.

Credible nerd says stop using atop, doesn't say why, everyone panics

Re: "You might want to stop running atop."

There's also been a lot of crying wolf recently, like the one which claimed to be "unauthenticated RCE against all GNU/Linux systems" and then turned out to be just CUPS. Or the vague announcement of "probably the worst curl security flaw in a long time" which also turned out to be specific to SOCKS5.

Which is why (a) some skepticism is valid, and (b) the personal reputation of the reporter matters more than anything.

Chimera Linux ghosts RISC-V because there's no time for sluggish hardware

If things can't cross-compile properly, then you just run a RISC-V virtual machine and compile inside that.

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Re: Excuse my skepticism

I simply don't trust any of this new 'post quantum stuff' at all, not one bit of it. Not yet anyway.

Don't let anyone *replace* your well worn and well understood algorithms with this new stuff.

Add it as an *additional* layer - sure.

NASA’s radiation tolerant computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts

Glad to see it has a DB25 serial port, as all proper computers should have

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

Re: Absolutely proprietary

The editorial content of The Register is also copyright. Does that mean we shouldn't read it?

Re: "moving away from Earth at 17.32 km/s "

> a bit more than its nutritional 4.4kJ (1047kcal.)

I believe that should say 4.4MJ. Even so, the fireball of spam only adds about 9% to the total impact energy (although quite a lot to the smell I'd imagine).

Trump eyes up to 100% tariffs on foreign semiconductors, TSMC in crosshairs

Re: Elections

I might be missing something, but as far as I can tell, so far Trump has only *talked* about such tariffs, he has not implemented them. This has caused everyone to scramble around to ramp up their US-based production as quickly as possible - which is what he wanted.

In the same way, he has *talked* about invading Greenland, which has caused everyone in a mad panic to spend more on defence in that area - which was what he wanted. There was no need to actually invade.

The Columbians tried to call his bluff, but in that particular instance it was so one-sided in the US's favour that they didn't have a chance. There is plenty of non-Columbian coffee on the market.

Ransomware crew abuses AWS native encryption, sets data-destruct timer for 7 days

Immutable buckets

i.e. versioning + object lock, configured with a fixed minimum retention, say 3 months. Then if anyone deletes or overwrites your object, you have 3 months to retrieve the previous version.

Mind you: if an attacker has somehow gained the ability to re-encrypt files in your bucket, then they could instead do it a million times and bankrupt you in AWS storage fees.

Sonos CEO steps down after smart speaker app upgrade hit bum note

Re: "henceforth “always establish rigorous quality benchmarks

They sound like Microsoft.....

Except Microsoft has a large opt-in beta programme. Developer previews of Windows have been in the hands of users for months. They don't just suddenly release a new OS overnight and expect the whole world to upgrade to it simultaneously.

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

robbing me from the illusion that PDFs were benign in terms of safety.

Where did you get that illusion from? Malware-ridden PDFs have been a thing for ever. If you want safety, open PDFs inside a disposable VM.

RISC-V is making moves, but it has work to do if it wants to hit the mainstream

Re: Ecosystem is absolutely necessary for small and medium developers

> But I think for anyone thinking of using these cores in a commercial product, the license fee isn't the major cost.

Indeed. The processor cost is X, and some part of it is silicon and some is IP.

At least, that's true as long as the license fee remains flat for a given part. If ARM starts demanding a percentage of the sale price of the *final product*, as has been mooted, then suddenly the equation changes.

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Re: I give it 30 years...

It doesn't require that much fuel to give in to gravity

Actually, in the absence of an atmosphere for drag, it requires rather a lot.

Just getting Parker from the Earth into an elliptical orbit around the Sun took a lot of manoeuvering: seven flybys of Venus over more than 6 years, to bleed off enough momentum.

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

Re: pyramid scam

NFC works pretty well and is non-controversial. Do you mean NFT?

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Re: EV tanks ?

> Which has for a long time been MY suggestion: turbine-electric powertrain for "hybrid" motor vehicles.

Sorry but you didn't think of it first.

Google "series hybrid" - there are multiple examples of such motor vehicles in production.

Boeing busted by employee over plans to surveil workers, quickly reverses course

Re: "blurry photos"

If you just want to tell if an area is occupied, wouldn't you just use IR sensors (as used in burglar alarms)?

Cheap, binary on/off, no AI processing required, no privacy problems.

NASA finds Orion heatshield cracks won't cook Artemis II crew

Avcoat, will leave

Lenovo China clones the ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an old, slow, local x86

Re: Useless

Or as reported by The Onion many years ago:

"It remains to be seen if the [Macbook] Wheel will catch on in the business world, where people use computers for actual work, and not just dicking around."

Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework

Re: Ironic

It's trained on conversations which take place on Internet forums.

Are you surprised it ends up "generating such a cynical and threatening non sequitur"?

Mystery Palo Alto Networks hijack-my-firewall zero-day now officially under exploit

Because this is an AI firewall, powered by Keanu Reeves.

Anyway, the solution is obvious: just put it behind a firewall. It's firewalls all the way down :-)

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

It depends what you mean by "safe".

If you simply redefined C so that all "undefined behaviour" became "must immediately crash", that by itself would be a huge improvement in safety. At the moment, any C program which triggers "undefined behaviour" can literally do *anything at all*, including reformatting your hard drive, and it is correct for the compiler to allow that. e.g.

https://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-know_14.html

https://blog.regehr.org/archives/213

No pilot? No problem! EHang's autonomous air taxis take off in Thailand

Re: Not quite the range...

I don't really see them updating all the regulations about where you can land and take off

Especially when these things have 16 external blades at knee and groin height.

The term "chopper" seems more appropriate than ever.

GCC 15 to keep Itanium support for now, after all

Re: itanium support.

To be fair, avoiding "dynamic, out-of-order and speculative execution" could have avoided whole classes of of security vulnerabilities (Spectre, Meltdown etc), the mitigations for which can have severe impact on perfomance.

I wonder if Itanium might actually compare reasonably well now, if compared to x86 with all those mitigations enabled?

The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source

Re: Not a universal definition

I think it's disingenuous to blame large tech for somehow biasing the agenda. Authors make the decision between BSD and GPL with their eyes wide open, fully aware of the consequences, often to align with a community to make it easy to aggregate with other similar work - e.g. people who write libraries in Ruby often distribute it under the Ruby licence.

In any case, the world has moved on. Large tech = cloud, and cloud doesn't care if it's BSD/MIT or GPL - they can monetize both equally. Hence the development of AGPL and the like.

Perens is also being disingenuous. He wants to apply, in effect, a tax on all companies that use "open source", and use this to fund his trickle-down empire. This completely turns the head on the whole concept of "open source": all open source becomes commercially licensed under a collective subscription system with a massive price tag (1% of *turnover*) - comparable to regulatory penalities applied for market abuse. This is absolutely the opposite of what anyone who writes either BSD or GPL code wants, and I don't think it has the slightest chance of happening. The large companies will fork the code they use, and maintain it themselves - they can afford to - and stop contributing back.

AlmaLinux shows off its new Kitten

Where's Alma going?

The whole point of the original CentOS was that it was almost a byte-for-byte clone of RedHat, without the registration / license fee. If you were running CentOS in production then you had the confidence of it being identical to RedHat.

If Alma starts changing the way they compile things - different instruction set options, different stack layouts - then it's diverging from Red Hat. In an ideal world these things *shouldn't* make a difference, but in some edge cases they might.

How many Alma users want frame pointers - something which the article admits could reduce performance by 1%? And do they want this *more* than they want Red Hat equivalence?

Fujitsu claims 634-gram 14-inch Core i7 laptop is world's lightest

Re: Lenovo please take heed

I am one of the unfortunate that has to carry a laptop around everyday and am always happy to reduce a couple of 100 grams here and there. They also need to ensure that the charging brick is not compensating for the weight loss.

Would you consider a Macbook Air 13" at 1.24kg? That might not be astoundingly light in absolute terms, but the battery life *is* astounding and you may find you stop carrying a charger at all, as I have done. (And in any case, a GaN USB-C charger is very lightweight if you really need one).

I have the slightly heavier Macbook Pro M3 Pro. I do carry USB A-to-C and C-to-C cables just in case, but have never needed to use them for charging away from home.

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

https://spaceperspective.com/spaceship

It is "propelled by renewable hydrogen at the gentle speed of ~12 mph". It's not stated whether they are using hydrogen for lifting as well as propulsion - I hope not.

(But I calculate that climbing to 100,000ft at 12mph would take about 90 minutes, which is not too far off their 2 hour ascent and descent claim)

I also note that it is launched from, and retrieved by, a ship mid-ocean - presumably in order to avoid taxes.

These people want $125,000 per seat, for a ballooning day trip. I don't care how much champagne is included - that's just nuts.

Make the price comparable to a first-class round trip from London to Los Angeles, and maybe you'll have some customers.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

You have hair straighteners which are powered by USB-C? The 240W power delivery variant?

NASA switches off Voyager 2 plasma instrument to stretch out juice

Re: The Biggest Impediment to Interstellar Travel

> the biggest impediment to interstellar travel - electrical power

I would beg to say that the biggest impediment to interstellar travel is the vast distances involved.

Creating an electrical power source that lasts 50,000 years is pretty trivial compared to some of the other technology you've mentioned (e.g. creating humans from scratch using stored genetic material)

91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship

Re: Serious question about Blind..

How much more likely are people to join Blind if they are unhappy with their employer and want to whinge about them, than if they are happy? If so, these survey results may be skewed.

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

(forgot to say: ECMAScript is a rubbish name, so ignore that one)

This, exactly. Renaming software projects has happened many times in the past.

You just need the next JS conference to solicit ideas for the new language name, have a vote, and abandon the old name forever.

I will vote for SMSF (Scripty McScriptFace)

China’s quantum* crypto tech may be unhackable, but it's hardly a secret

Re: old school

The theoretical attacks from future quantum computers are against public key systems, not symmetric ciphers.

Therefore, using quantum key distribution for a one-time pad is very wasteful. Just use them for keying a symmetric cipher like AES256, rekey every few seconds, and you're done.

Having said that, all this QDC stuff is just hype. If you are genuinely worried that your adversary is going to do quantum decryption of your key exchanges, then you could create two identical 32GB flash drives filled with random data(*), and have over 1 billion AES256 keys: enough for 34 years at one key per second.

Your problem then boils down to how to stop the USB drive being intercepted and cloned in shipping. The traditional approach is to put it in a suitcase chained to the wrist of a diplomat.

(*) generated from some truly random physical noise source, not pseudo-random.

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

Re: "a small red house on the surface of the Moon"

Next up: Whalers.

Domo arigato, Mr Roboto: Japan's bullet trains to ditch drivers

Re: "199 mph"

and to my surprise: Japan has nearly twice the land area than the island of Great Britain (*)!

Metropolitan France has over 2.6 times the land area of Great Britain.

The shape, rather than the area, needs to be considered too. A thin land mass is going to need longer train routes than a roughly circular blob.

Pat Gelsinger's grand plan to reinvent Intel is in jeopardy

Re: Economically Speaking

By which you mean, Intel is the IT Boeing?

Re: Kodak...

You can buy "Kodak" batteries too. But all it means is some firm has paid to license the name to make their cheap batteries look slightly less cheap.

Magnetic personalities at Tokamak Energy form separate division

Re: They can break it however they want

"it is possible the parent may spin off the division at some point in the future"

I'd say the chances of that are +½ : -½

Scientists find a common food dye can make a live mouse's skin transparent

Was going to say the same. The effect may well be real, but the picture which overlays a static photo of (human?) skin with a picture of blood vessels beneath is clearly fake.

13 days into the outage, will Kaseya's Traverse trip back to life today?

Re: Riddle me this

Sounds like they've had a dose of Solarwinds / Sunburst.

If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do

Re: Hamster wheels?

The example of asking ChatGPT as a calculator is shocking as it:

- takes longer than just using a calculator on the device you're already using

- is so wasteful by a factor of 30 according to the programme

You forgot:

- actually gives wrong answers (you can easily persuade a LLM than 2+2=5, for instance)

Transport for London confirms cyberattack, assures us all is well

Re: TfL is an Operator of Essential Services

Systems are under attack all the time; it's just background radiation on the Internet. So to report it, it must be a breach.

Oh perhaps Corporal Jones...

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Re: the average journey

Ionity on Electroverse with Intelligent Octopus Go discount is 63p/unit.

Ionity Passport Motion is £5.49 per month, for 53p/unit..

Ionity Passport Power is £10.50 per month, for 43p/unit.

43p/unit is also what Tesla superchargers cost, outside of 4pm-8pm, and equates to about 11p/mile (at 4 miles/kWh). That's *slightly* better than petrol, but it gets eaten up if you add in the cost of a cup of coffee while you wait for the charge!

If you have a source of clean hydrogen to hand, then why not convert it to methane or methanol? Both are far easier to handle than hydrogen, and the carbon released in their burning is exactly equal to the carbon you captured during the manufacture.

Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week

Re: Sine Waves in Companies

I am firmly in the "Fuck Sony, and the horse they rode in on" camp. I would not buy a 1p facial tissue from Sony, even if it came with a free ticket to heaven.

Oh but plenty of people do... see this classic from Onion News Network (somewhat NSFW)

Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks

> Really, its about time that those needing high speed terrestrial comms realise that fibre is the best option

Everybody who needs high-speed comms terrestrial already knows that fibre is the best option.

Starlink et al are for places where fibre is not available.