Posts by Scene it all

Jack Dorsey floats specs for decentralized messaging app that uses Bluetooth

Apparently RetroShare is SO dark-netty that the author did not know about it. RetroShare has been around for 20 years. It uses internet connections but there is no central server and the entire thing runs P2P, encrypted everywhere.

'Cyber security' behind decision to end defense satellite sharing of hurricane data

The only "weather app" that is guaranteed to work most places in the US is a "Weather Alert Radio". These special purpose VHF radios are tuned to a network of stations all over the country, and controlled directly by the NWS. You program your radio according to your postal code and the radio will turn itself on if it receives an alert specific to your area. No internet required. And there are portable versions for campers and hikers.

Proton bashes Apple and joins antitrust suit that seeks to throw the App Store wide open

"Acting on behalf of authoritarians" is called "obeying local laws" in other contexts. Yes, Russia has some restrictive laws, and so does China. And so does the United States, which is why I can't buy a Huawei phone.

China just two years behind USA on chip design, says White House tech Czar

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: Fork it

I have started using the Zen browser, which is a fork with a different UI and eliminates the "call home" functions of Firefox. I am liking it so far.

Do you trust Xi with your 'private' browsing data? Apple, Google stores still offer China-based VPNs, report says

Re: Why should Apple/Google pull them?

Plus, the US government is in a much better place to do something to me than the CPC is. My email provider is not based in the US either.

Ex-NASA Admin pick blames Musk ties for pulled nomination

And living underground requires digging a big hole, and that requires heavy equipment. One article I saw pointed out that heavy construction equipment wears out all the time because of sand getting in the works, hoses breaking, etc. Mars surface is a very hostile environment not just for people but for backhoes and bulldozers.

Unless you land near one of those volcanic skylight things, but I would want that to be fully robot-mapped before I went into one.

Schneier tries to rip the rose-colored AI glasses from the eyes of Congress

Re: Amendment Zero

And they get a LOT of money from places other than mere "salaries".

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Even faster

I can pick up the phone and be "at" a conference in New Zealand before an SST traveler gets out of their car at the airport. Costs less too.

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

I have never had DeepSeek regurgitate training material at me. I have never *asked* it to, but if I did it probably would just have done a web search behind the scenes and used that. Speaking of which, is Google infringing everyone's copyright?

I am more interested in the question, do the AI companies pay the cover price for the books they feed into their training algorithms? If so, how is that different from ME paying for a book, reading it, and then making use of that knowledge to do something profitable?

AWS says Britain needs more nuclear power to feed AI datacenter surge

Maybe get some Thorium tech from China? Much simpler than current Uranium reactors.

Intuitive Machines blames dim lighting and dodgy data for second lunar faceplant

Meanwhile China has done this four times, including near the South Pole, and on the lunar backside out of direct radio contact.

EU tells US scientists to dump Trump for a lab in Europe

Spending on pure research in China is growing faster than the US and EU. Combined.

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

Re: Confused

And "children" under the age of 16 are not even allowed in.

Tech titans: Wanna secure US AI leadership? Stop giving the world excuses to buy Chinese

Nobody explained WHY "We need to accelerate the diffusion of American AI technology around the world," Maybe start using the metric system first.

US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check

So every radio, in everything from a Piper Cub to an Airbus A380 needs to be replaced with the new VOIP equipment? At whose expense? (And avionics tend to be really expensive because of all the testing and robustness required.) And what do you bet StarLink will be the preferred satellite provider to funnel more money to Elon Musk? What could possibly go wrong?

Trump derails Chinese H20 GPU sales, forcing Nvidia to eat $5.5B this quarter

China is making it's own AI accelerators, like this one: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/chinas-push-for-chip-independence-continues-with-its-first-risc-v-server-cpu

But I have no idea what the power is compared to even the Nvidia H20.

Meanwhile, in Japan, train stations are being 3D-printed in an afternoon

Re: Stay-in-place formwork

That is called Insulated Concrete Form (ICF) construction and is energy efficient as well as sturdy and quiet inside. It is also safe from termites, which is an issue here in Florida.

Oracle Cloud says it's not true someone broke into its login servers and stole data

Re: Encrypted passwords?

I know of a case where some clever guys were able to "crack" every password for every account on the in-house development network for a certain operating system. The OS was using the hardware CRC instruction to do the "hashing" and the project leaders ignored cries that this was not secure. So a demonstration was in order. The key insight is that it was not necessary to discover the EXACT password, only one that HASHED THE SAME. And doing this for several hundred passwords at once greatly increases the speed of the process. They completed the whole thing in one night and everyone on the network was emailed their own password (or one that worked just as well) the next morning. The hashing algorithm was changed immediately, as was the protection on the password file.

I can vouch for this being a true story as I was there and received my own password in the mail. I also knew the two "clever guys".

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

Re: ALGOL-68 is out

I once worked on the Bliss compilers at DEC. That was a language in which "2=X" made perfect sense but you probably would not like the result. It means "Store the address of X into memory location 2." Maybe if you were setting up interrupt handlers that would be OK, and Bliss was targeted at applications like that.

Boeing, Boeing, burned: Over half a billion dollars by Starliner in 2024

Does "reach forward loss" mean "predicted loss"? Why not use English instead of business-obfuscation-speech?

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

This Perfect Day

People need to read "This Perfect Day", a 1970 novel by Ira Levin (who also wrote Rosemary's Baby). A huge computer named UniComp runs the world. The entire population is being treated by psychoactive drugs to keep them compliant. Recalcitrant individuals are banished to small islands that strangely do not appear on any maps. Then it turns out that UniComp, under a mountain near Geneva, is actually controlled by its programmers.

DeepSeek rated too dodgy down under: Banned from Australian government devices

Have they presented any evidence of all this keystroke logging, etc? The code IS available after all.

Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts

Re: Opportunity knocking?

Deepseek was developed from scratch, in two months, at a cost of $6 million. I wonder where these OpenAI billions are going.

Infosec was literally the last item in Trump's policy plan, yet major changes are likely on his watch

If the US government owned half of TikTok, nobody would use it.

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

Re: Lead to a bunch of stuff at what was RSRE Malvern

I remember how the "Revised report on Algol 68" used literary quotations to help "explain" the concepts. In the section on "comments" appears this quotation from Gilbert & Sullivan: "Merely corroborative detail, intended to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

This made up for the difficulty in understanding the two-level "Wijngaarden grammar" that was the formal definition, as well as the not-invented-here use of unusual words. You did not "execute a program"; rather the computer "elaborated the definition" of the program.

It's been 20 years since Oracle bought two software rivals, changing the market forever

Re: Make it so

I used to work on a small part of Fusion at Oracle and your description is exactly what it was like.

US reportedly mulls TP-Link router ban over national security risk

I wonder how many TP-Link routers are *already* installed in the US? I have one myself because its security features are much better than the ones built into my AT&T supplied fiber gateway.

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

Re: I have a bad feeling about this ....

That is called "normalization of deviance" and NASA does this a lot. "The wing fell off but nobody died so the mission was a success."

Oracle's Java price hikes push CIOs to brew new licensing strategies

Re: Oracle as innovator

It was not any fun being an employee there either.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

I knew some people who ran a usability lab. They would film people with no experience using a computer, to see how well written the documentation was. One user had trouble clicking on icons. He said "nothing happens". Reviewing the video footage they saw that this user had interpreted the words "position the pointer ON the icon" to mean "just ABOVE the icon".

China has utterly pwned 'thousands and thousands' of devices at US telcos

Re: Surveillance functionality

AT&T technician Mark Klein reveal the existence of those intercept facilities back in 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

It uses optical beam splitters to be able to look at entire fiber contents at a time while introducing no delay.

I seem to recall the telcos putting in monitoring and backdoor features at the request of the FBI. Who would have guessed that somebody else might take advantage of those tools? /s

The National Museum of Computing reboots Bletchley Park's H Block

You are standing in a clearing

I remember running Colossal Cave Adventure in the 1970s. My terminal was not orange though.

Tesla Cybertruck, a paragon of reliability, recalled again

Re: He probably shouldn't give up his day job for auto mechanic or electrician.

The single-phase converter that is used to charge the batteries from the wall is separate from the three-phase process used for dynamic braking on the road.

Re: Made me wonder at least...

Just about every EV uses three-phase induction motors. It is the easiest way to get bi-directional variable torque control down to zero RPM.

Australia tells tots: No TikTok till you're 16... or X, Instagram and Facebook

"Facial analysis" IS identification. All this is a backdoor way of eliminating online anonymity.

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

Re: don't try this at home...

I once did the ancient equivalent of this, on an IBM System 370. What I was SUPPOSED to do was copy the disk containing all the operator "procedures" to a backup disk. In those dark days, a "procedure" is what today you would call a command script, and the operations staff had a big book of scheduled things they had to do, like run the company payroll, or inventory updates, or something, and the book would tell them to "Mount tape number 2375 and run procedure XYZ". And a disk pack, weighing ten pounds, could hold about 250 Megabytes. With an "M".

But I got the device definitions backwards and copied the empty disk on top of the the live one, erasing it. Under the glowering gaze of my boss, I went to the tape library, fetched the most recent backup tape, and copied it to the proper disk as the operator staff stood there waiting. No timesharing here - this computer system that filled a room could do ONE thing at a time.

TSMC halts advanced chip shipments to Chinese AI companies

Meanwhile China is making progress on their own way to make 5nm chips.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3257442/tech-war-china-quietly-making-progress-new-techniques-cut-reliance-advanced-asml-lithography

Python dethrones JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub

Glad to see both Java and Javascript going down a step. Miserable languages the both of them (for different reasons).

Congress to Commerce: Sanction more Chinese chip firms to stop Huawei's evasion

The US *claims* to be worried about surveillance technology buried in the Chinese chips. They do not mention that Intel and AMD have been doing the same thing for years.

The Europa Clipper stretches its wings as launch nears

Re: Tight constraints

Presumably it is bolted to the rest of the spacecraft, weighing hundreds of kg, so would be contributing something to the mission.

Tight constraints

I remember a presentation from JPL person saying that the ideal deep-space experiment package would have zero mass, consume no power, and provide a few Newtons of thrust.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: Full names please.......

Was it a pink Rolls-Royce?

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: 'Exit interview'

My 'exit' was like that - just the facts on a checklist. And it was done online with a form. I particularly enjoyed the question "Would you work for <this company> in the future?" I was disappointed that there was no "HELL NO" choice, so I just checked NO.

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

We covered this in one of my EE classes. Thermo-powered electricity generation, by boiling water, has a thermodynamic limit on efficiency of about 40%. (look up "Carnot Cycle".) The electromagnetic process of converting the power of a spinning turbine into electricity is over 90%. The transmissions network is also over 90% and battery conversion about 85%. Compared to an internal combustion engine at ~12%, electricity still wins and that is assuming fossil-fuel use to heat the water. With any other source of electricity not involving thermodynamic limits, the efficiency of the electric car is WAY better. And this does not count the environmental factors. Using fossil fuels could be 100% efficient and there would STILL be an excellent reason to get rid of them.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Re: There is a proper way to do most things

"You drink beer out of a porcellain mug?! (sorry...)"

I have had beer out of a porcelain mug. It was in Germany, where they do such things.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Re: Honourable mention

The big thing I noticed during this time was that the Intel 8088 and 8086 architectures (the instruction set that the programmer sees) was very clumsy. As though it was designed by hardware people who were not programmers. The DEC PDP-11 clearly was designed with programmers in mind, most noticeably in its clever addressing modes based around truly general-purpose registers. And the Motorola 68000 clearly copied some ideas from that. Then later the DEC VAX line instruction set was *heavily* designed for the convenience of programmers and also for small code size. (I know - I was there) This was before the modern ideas around RISC designs that did simple things very fast.

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Used to be, you would hire an army of guys with green eyeshades and sleeve protectors to just *do* it. Forget the automation.

In my county in the US, the county supervisors just signed a multi-year contracts with a new company to handle the residential trash collection. It has been, in the words of one supervisor, "an unmitigated disaster" with trash not being picked up on time for thousands of residents, going on several weeks. They are looking for ways out of the contract. But in the meantime, they have been redirecting existing county employees in the road maintenance department to pick up the trash, and then they send the overtime bill to the under-performing contractor.