* Posts by William1940

8 publicly visible posts • joined 25 May 2018

LAN traffic can be wirelessly sniffed from cables with $30 setup, says researcher

William1940

Re: New? Bwahaha!

I've a friend who "worked" on the original TEMPEST project. He can't say much except that Russian trawlers would follow naval ships and pick up what was being typed on electric typewriters.

Bad news for 'cool dads' trying to bond with their teens: China-owned TikTok and WeChat face US download ban by Sunday

William1940

You must've missed this decision today:

A federal judge has blocked President Trump's executive order that would have effectively shut down popular Chinese app WeChat, ruling that the action represents a free speech violation.

The complete story is here:

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/20/914983610/federal-judge-blocks-trump-administrations-u-s-wechat-ban

Bravo ! Such Trump BS. There is scant evidence that WeChat collects user data for the Chinese government.

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

William1940

My first programing language was Burroughs EXTENDED Algol 60 on a B5000 in 1965. Burroughs always extended the basic language. The beauty of the Burroughs' extensions is that their ALGOL 60 was wedded to the hardware design, and their compilers are wall written in the language they compiled. At that time is was ALGOL, COBOL and ESBOL(?SP) which was superset of ALGOL used to program the MCP. I did in fact program the MCP. In ESBOL one had wide open access to the hardware itself.

The B5000 hardware had an interesting limitation: Code was generated into program segment strings which were block limited to 1024 words. A word was 48 bits. Why? The program segment string S register was 10 bits. If say, a BEGIN code END; block exceeded 1024 words, then the compiler yielded a "program segment string exceeds 1024" error. This of course nailed me in my first program. Easy enough to repair.

The B5000. B6000 series also had virtual memory. Program segment strings need not be memory resident. And the 1024 word segments could be viewed a VM. Each program segment string terminated n a descriptor that referenced the program reference table (PRT). This referenced location could be a disk address to access the next segment. Etc.

The B6000 series, I worked on the B6500, generalized the PRT into what was called the cactus stack. This enabled the extended version of ALGOL 60 to have multiple dimensional arrays of tasks. Super feature. An array element had the parent node that could link to family member tasks. The first time I used the feature I had a "death in the family error." This meant that a member the family hierarchy crashed.

I can go on and on about this amazing hardware/ALGOL fusion. I have to say it's unforgettable since I'm soon to be 80 years old. I've written software in some 20 or so languages during my career as a computer scientist, and Burroughs extended ALGOL 60 is definitely the mid-wife of almost all of them.

Bill

Minister slams 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories as 'dangerous nonsense' after phone towers torched in UK

William1940

Well, what really happened is that they had just installed a 5G base station above the small meat market in WuHan. The owner of this meat market was making a 5G phone call. The RF ionized the corona virus DNA, sent it to the mobile switching station, which in turn placed it a sequence of TCP/IP packets (5G after all does use TCP/IP for communication) and managed to broadcast it over the the WLAN. The problem here is the Chinese great firewall. But somehow they permitted these IP packets to spread world wide. Hmm ... Did I see a Dr. Who or Star Trek with a similar scheme? Blame it all on the IETF. What f**ng idiots.

That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well

William1940

Re: Class, repeat after me:

Actually, AI is not AI. Rather, it is Machine Based Intelligence. Nothing artificial about it at all. John McCarthy should've known better.

German competition watchdog tells Facebook to stop combining user data without consent

William1940

Facebook's behavior in one word is REPUGNANT !

Texas lawyer suing Apple over FaceTime bug claims it was used to snoop on a meeting

William1940

Having done computer science research for 20 years as well as R&D in a very large Internet company, I can only say that even with the best Q/A possible, murphy's law always applies, and there will be bugs at the worst possible time. C'est la vie, c'est la programmation.

You know that silly fear about Alexa recording everything and leaking it online? It just happened

William1940

Alexa weirdness when overhearing Chinese

My wife and I were recently staying in a cabin near Yosemite Valley that has an Alexa. I spoke some Chinese for the fun of it: Alexa, 你好,你说中文吗?Alexa responded, "Sorry, I don't know that phone number."

Makes one wonder what might happen when a non-English speaking person or persons have one of these that has English enabled ... Voice recognition is still fairly primitive.

Users beware ... I'd never own one of these, never, and I am very familiar with AI - 50 years of computer science ...

LOL - Marketing is basically evil. They'll try and sell anything to make a few £$元 。。