Posts by FILE_ID.DIZ

The coming of Wi-Fi 6 does not mean it's time to ditch your cabled LAN. Here's why

Re: What really grinds my gears.

First off, I did not propose a restriction. What I am proposing is an upgrade. While GMRS wasn't the best analog, it was a quick example that I could come up where licensed users are granted more transmitting power and more bandwidth where GMRS and FRS overlap (except for the 467MHz interstitial frequencies... those are identical) and granted access to repeater frequencies.

What I know is that the unregulated 2.4GHz non-ISM use is a hot mess in saturated environments because people simply believe that more power (transmitter output) and more APs is more better. They start buying these spider looking access points and place them in every corner of their home on odd-ball channels, thinking that more is always better.

That is no different than a large group of people in a room, subdivided into smaller groups of people conversing together and slowly each smaller group starts to speak louder to overcome the din of the entire room. Eventually all the smaller group are speaking louder and louder until everyone is screaming in order to be heard over the cacophony of the room.

That is my general impression of residential wifi today.

First topic, a firm understanding of wifi channels and what they actually represent.

Second topic, is related to channels are "wide" band settings.

Third topic is location, location, location. Poor AP positioning (physical) can do a lot to destroy throughput, even in low RF saturation areas.

Fourth topic is understanding mesh network design and understanding that wireless back haul is still shit in its current form and every form since 2007 when I tried to install my first wireless back haul. (To be clear, this is STRONGLY my personal opinion, but I think it is still an important topic nevertheless to understand everything going on behind the scenes.)

Fifth topic is understanding that it takes two to tango. Just because your signal strength is showing strongly on your device, that doesn't mean the same is true for that device talking back to the access point. Yea, there's RSSI/RCPI that's supposed to help.

So, there are some topics off the top of my head.

The obverse to those points is that is what is happening with some consumers of wifi today - an arms race thinking that more power and more antennas and wider bands are going to help them with higher speeds and/or lower latency or at least maybe the ability to out scream out their next door (or many doors down) neighbor(s).

How does one resolve that in an unlicensed space today?

1) Does one go and talk and try to educate other meatsacks about their RF pollution?

2) Does one foil their home over to prevent "noisy" meatsack's RF pollution who didn't take kindly to the earlier education attempt(s)?

3) Does one abandon wifi entirely?

4) Does one say fuckit and move to Green Bank, WV?

Personally, I've chosen option 3 as much as I can, except for where I can't - such as our iDevices and printer and laptops when they're not docked (which is most of the time).

Can an industry group get together and come up with an identical radio standard to Wifi, except instead of using the hot mess of an unlicensed space, carve out some licensed frequency where all participants of that space agree to the same set of rules by which all abide to with the ability to file grievances against other licensees and the ultimate penalty for failure of adherence when it causes undue interference - revocation of your license.

That space can even overlap with another licensed/restricted space with similar terms on how Wifi overlaps the 2.45GHz ISM band, except that you have to pass a test and pay a fee.

There you go, and I also didn't mention unwashed masses or plebs.

Re: What really grinds my gears.

What's your point that that a licensed frequency product is not called WiFi? I couldn't care less in the name of something, I'm not from the marketing department.

Amateur space cannot be used for commercial purposes, period. Furthermore, amateur space is not "assigned" to any one licensee.

And these last few years are even worst, but for different reasons. Today's problems are due to a proliferation of devices which use these frequencies with no way to mediate problems between different users.

I mean, in my building, I would LOVE to be able to have our property manager include in everyone's lease agreement that for the 2.4GHz band, that only channels 1,6 and 11 are to be used and only 20MHz is to be selected. But I can't, and they probably can't either. Only through talking to other the other meatsacks in the building and teaching them some basic RF/wifi knowledge, them maybe I could get some people to come to a common understanding on how we can all be "better RF neighbors". But that's not going to happen either.

Which is why I'd rather leave the unwashed masses behind in their cesspit.

Re: What really grinds my gears.

I wouldn't know what to put on the test. I am not qualified to write tests in the least. I am no psychometrician.

While I cannot design any test, that doesn't make what I've stated untrue about the unwashed masses using unlicensed spectrum who are doing exactly what one would expect in unlicensed space, which is why wifi is such a crap-in-shoot - especially in high-density environments.

Over the past year I have been working with numerous colleagues who have been struggling with mediocre wireless performance within their home. Things like average 30-40ms RTTs with the occasional 200ms+ from their laptop to their home's gateway... is pathetic.

The changes I make were generally small, rarely require purchasing additional hardware, but significant enough to resolve most of their problems and at a minimum, stabilize the latency inside the home.

Back to my original point, by providing a licensed chuck of frequency for those qualified to use it - it can segregate those with enough training to use that space responsibly from those who clearly aren't, much like how other licensed space is used today.

Finally, amateur bands cannot be used in a commercial application, full stop. I would anticipate a licensed chuck of frequency would be initially sought after by commercial users long before consumers pick it up, except maybe by gamers who (for whatever reason) haven't gone back to a wired connection.

I mean, I've done plenty of wifi designs for commercial users and in complex scenarios, that can take a lot of time and effort to fine-tune. And time = money.

Re: What really grinds my gears.

An exam and enforcement, to answer points one and three, respectively. No different than how FCC regulates amateur radio licensees or other radio frequencies that businesses use, such as licensed wireless microphone systems, two-way radio systems, radio data systems, so on and such forth.

As for point two, if the market demands it, it would behoove a manufacturer to make the product

What really grinds my gears.

"Importantly the transmission medium still hasn't magically become full-duplex. Stations may get around this with some kind of trickery, but they still need to wait for the all-clear to send data. Remember that all stations and APs still hear all the transmissions. It's still a broadcast medium at the most basic." (Emphasis mine)

This is the thing that I like to mention to people when they open up their wifi adapter and see two dozen SSIDs is what you don't see. You don't see any extra BSS's with the same SSID, less likely in a residential setting. More troubling are all the wireless clients, eg: phones, laptops, tablets, fire sticks, thermostats, so on and so forth which are also transmitting.

I kinda wish that that there could be a WIFI equivalent to GMRS (at least here in the US, it requires a license to use). This way the educated WIFI users can get out of the quagmire that the unwashed cause in high-density environments. Where everyone buys the access point with more antennas than a spider has legs, cranks their output to 11 and start using channels like 2,3,4,7,8,9 and 10, thinking that a channel is only a signal frequency wide. And let's not start on the "wide channel" users - fuck them.

Sure, 5GHz is a thing, and I use it everywhere I can, but it attenuates so rapidly. And for whatever reason (I forgot the reason, tbh) but a lot of the 5GHz channels overlap on Public Safety Networks, which is shitty. Sure, there's a(nother) fix for that, DFS, but for me, it is more polite to simply stay out of the DFS channels. Wouldn't want my crappy equipment to cause some PSN interference.

Report sheds light on 'cocky' but 'creative' Mespinoza ransomware group

Some Security Researcher....

"There's really no reason to expose RDP directly to the public internet in this day and age," security researcher Tom Hudson told The Register of the all-too-familiar entry point for Mespinoza's attacks. "If you need RDP access over the internet you should be requiring the use of a VPN with multi-factor authentication enforced."

FTFY.

Their prose is too wishy washy for me to take them seriously.

What follows Patch Tuesday? Exploit Wednesday. Grab this bumper batch of security updates from Microsoft

Re: #The Times They Are Not A-Changing#

At one point I believed that was how Microsoft stored their root CAs (think early oughts) at a Microsoft campus. I don't know if that was rumor or whatever.

I know that when I heard of that, I knew very little about PKI at the time and for sure didn't know about HSMs, which is where valuable data like root certificates reside these days.

SolarWinds issues software update – one it wrote for a change – to patch hole exploited in the wild

Re: A modest proposal

With few exceptions, I have found that inbound blocking those IPs from our datacenter networks hasn't had much impact, which makes a lot of sense (at least to me).

Most of the "cloud" is spoken to first, then it responds. So uninitiated traffic from cloud provider networks to our datacenter networks isn't generally expected, except where other vendors/partners/customers/whathaveyou are also hosted by one of those providers.

And the reason why I block cloud providers is that I've hosted more than a few honeypots over time and there is just so much dirty looking traffic coming from presumably compromised machines running in the AWS, Azure and GCP space.

To prevent the browser or whatever app you're reading The Register with from creating an automatic hyperlink, when one was explicitly not asked for.

Re: A modest proposal

It's not that simple.

In the first (original?) SolarWinds data exfiltration service, the crims were using Azure compute nodes out of the US (or at least Azure IP addresses based in a US region), presumably to get past any obvious GeoIP filtering and keep suspicion down for as long as possible from a suspicious analyst.

These days its mandatory to not just GeoIP filter, but block all of the IP space that GCP, AWS and Azure use these days. Of course, whitelisting trusted sources might be simpler.

Quick Reference:

Azure

AWS

GCP

PS: In this case, at least the ".1" of each of the /24's provided, one was based in the US and two were from Canada (at least based on inference of their rDNS record), so probably not places that'd be likely excluded from a Geo-Fence... at least in the SSH setups that I have.

I also block based on the client connection string, like "SSH-2.0-libssh" and "SSH-2.0-Go". If only the idiots would be smart enough to use OpenSSH or PuTTY, or WinSCP in their string, they could easily slip past that filter.

Smuggler caught with 256 Intel Core processors wrapped around him in cling film

Art imitating life or do I have that backwards

Slums of Beverly Hill, sans the probing fork to the thigh?

IBM email fiasco complicates sales deals, is worse than biz is letting on – sources

Re: Unbelievable

I suspect that they didn't plan for failure. I mean, they spent 18 months planning this out, or six quarters for the financial types.

Shit. If this was Windows, that's what... three feature updates?

International law enforcement op nukes Russian-language DoubleVPN service allegedly favoured by cybercriminals

Are there any smart criminals left?

So wait... just so that I understand what was going on here...

DoubleVPN was a single, monolithic company with multiple PoPs and they upcharged you to route your traffic through multiple PoPs before heading to the destination.

Yet the infrastructure was all owned by the same organization?

In the old hackers example provided in the article, the protection afforded was that you were bouncing off non-related infrastructures, so it'd take longer and be harder to back-trace the traffic. (According to a friend.)

It seems that all these clowns did is introduce excessive latency and hike the cost to connect to your destination.

Microsoft wasn't joking about the Dev Channel not enforcing hardware checks: Windows 11 pops up on Pi, mobile phone

Re: Every complicated problem has a very simple answer...

If they were smart, they'd own Advanced Micro Devices stock instead... ~1800% over the last five years for AMD versus ~80% for INTC over the same period of time.

Record-breaking Kuwaiti heatwave triggers inadvisable TikTok expletive outburst

Re: Change what we can change

Saddam Hussein tried to about 30 years ago.

NASA's InSight lander expected to survive most of summer before choking to death on Martian dust

Re: Excellent engineering

It is.

Engineering is about compromise, usually along the lines of money, time to deliver and lifespan.

But NASA doesn't seem to have any problems pushing back time to deliver, or exploding costs and apparently OK ignoring lifespan specs.

Please know that I'm not discounting the extra science, but let's have a honest conversation about the above three.

Hell, some of the overspending of some theoretical rover project could have been diverted to Arecibo for instance.

Re: Excellent engineering

I could argue that these devices are poorly engineered.

If a rover is supposed to have a one-year life (for example), but it goes for three years, that's over engineered. They could have cut some corners to cheapen the cost and perhaps its weight.

I mean, if they're concerned about the weight of a brush, then every gram counts everywhere.

Re: Park It At Any Street Corner.

You got a Benz, I got a Busket!

AWS offers you the opportunity to pay cloud bills before they’ve been issued

Re: Has anyone had an on-prem -> cloud migration...

One thing that always gets me is depreciation (seriously, I don't get it).

In my feeble mind, whether your organization is responsible for depreciation or the organization that you're leasing stuff from (anything from cars to servers to heavy equipment), someone is on the hook for that, right?

If so, at the end of the day, the end user of the whatchamacallit is paying for that depreciation, either directly or indirectly. The only difference is the side of the ledge it falls on, I guess.

Why get in the way of relieving people of their money in advance?

An initial search found this interesting thread going back a over a decade.

Ed: I like the follow-ups... being from the future, this just reminds me how little we matter to companies like Amazon even back in 2010 when we communicate through their forums.

There's more here once I refined the search further.

Looks like a combo of people who have to pay per transaction fee(s) and people where its easier for them to authorize $1K for cloud services in one go versus $80 one month, $120 the next, $90 the following and so on and so forth but don't want to commit to their annual offerings.

It's the best of both worlds for Amazon, per second rates AND money up front.

US Supreme Court rules teens cussing out schools on social media is protected speech

Re: How much

NFT is such bullshit. It doesn't even prove that your the sole holder of an item, just that you are a holder of said item.

I know your comments were in jest, but the mere mention of NFT just sets my teeth on edge. But it is well known that money parts ways from fools from time to time.

Three things that have vanished: $3.6bn in Bitcoin, a crypto investment biz, and the two brothers who ran it

I read an article on Bloomberg where some old traders are loving cryptocurrency because they're able to bust out tricks from 30 years ago that don't work any more in modern commodity markets due to their efficiencies - but exist in crypto exchanges.

Not sure why your Madoff reference reminded me of this story, other than the fact that big Bernie also pioneered Payment for Order Flow, which is the method by which most brokerage firms today can offer commission-free trades (eg: Robinhood, etcetera)

Mysterious ‘security update’ to Google Drive cloud storage locker will break links to some files

Re: Google fail.

Maybe disclosing now will provide enough hints to the problem for the baddies to exploit early, putting into jeopardy their extended go live date of 13SEP.

While I don't buy google tech, I'm surprised that they couldn't provide a report of the impacted files and users "who haven't accessed the link yet". I mean, they know what's going to be changed, amirite?

And hey, to each their own with not applying the (or really any) patch for an internet-facing application/service. I mean, putting stuff up on the internet - sorry, "cloud" - with a flaw that might allow world+dog to see is a bold move. Many before you have had data leak out of poorly secured storage and many after you will too, but I suspect most try to avoid doing so.

Racist malware blocks The Pirate Bay by tampering with victims' Windows hosts file

Re: Hostfile ?

The HOSTS file has a secure DACL.

But the article states this came through as an executable. If that executable requested elevation (and was granted it) OR if a user turns off UAC/runs as an Admin all the time, then its fair game.

I find that many clowns don't like UAC.

Rank amature

Anyone with a decent amount of knowledge knows that 0.0.0.0 (or anything within that /8) is far better for "blocking" a site via a hosts file than 127.0.0.1 (or anything within that /8).

By using the former, the network stack doesn't even attempt to create a socket.

Western Australia rushes out legislation after cops access contact-tracing data to investigate serious crimes

Re: Not the first, won't be the last...

Not that this would ever happen in the US - mandatory tracking application on a smart phone. We can't even get a decent subset of the population to want prove if they got a shot or not... I say, be proud of your choice vaccinated or not vaccinated, no reason to hide! The virus always knows, and that's all that matters. :)

But if that were to happen or if I were to travel to a country like Singapore where a tracking app is compulsory.... I'll go out and buy a phone that doesn't run Android or iOS, like an old-style flip phone and wag my slightly libertarian middle fingers in the air.

Bonus nachos... I'll probably get longer talk and standby times to boot by dumping my SE2 iPhone - the talk time is fucking miserable.

If you have a QNAP NAS, stop what you're doing right now and install latest updates. Do it before Qlocker gets you

Re: "follow the 3-2-1 rule on backups"

And your tape setup is reasonable.

3-2-1 has been Veeam's mantra for years. I don't know if they came up with it or just made it (better) known.

Unlike your scenario using tape, software in charge of data stored on hard drives are very mutable in most cases. Eg: Laptop, desktop, NAS, traditional SAN LUNs mounted as a drive to a server, iSCSI targets mounted as a drive to a server, even VMware datastores mounted to a vulnerable ESXi (CVE-​2019-5544 and CVE-2020-3992) host.

Tapes, on the other hand, can't be touched by software, especially if they're not loaded in a drive.

In a viable Veeam setup, that off-site location better be designed so that it isn't reachable in the same manner that your two local-site storage devices are.

Absolutely fab: As TSMC invests $100bn to address chip shortage, where does that leave the rest of the industry?

Re: Formosa

There's been enough saber rattling between the US (and some other countries around the world) and China over Taiwan through the years, rising in a nice crescendo in recent times to wonder what China's next or final step will be to cement their hold on Taiwan. Xi does not like democracies.

But, I've taken this convo off course, so apologies... I'll grab my coat.

Re: Formosa

Given that China isn't doing so well on the home-front with chip fabrication, I don't know why they haven't started the Hong Kong playbook with Taiwan yet. Maybe they're waiting for civil unrest, so they can quash the uprising, swap out leaders, install a new National Security Law which supersedes their Basic Law where conflicts occur, require allegiance from Legislative Council members and smell like roses for the other half of the citizens who weren't protesting.

TSMC only has a single fab on US soil, everything else is in Taiwan except for two in China.

SMIC is doing OK, but they reported they're starting to struggle with 10nm designs due to US sanctions. And what was supposed to be China's next flagship foundry, Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor, collapsed before they could even start.

Micron chief warns 'severe shortage' of DRAM expected to continue this year

Re: Economics

Well, this article was about memory. I mentioned mobiles and servers because they consume a lot of memory, along with other ICs. Usually you don't have one without the other.

Specific to the auto manufacturers are their extensive use of JIT inventories biting them in their ass. They turned down production slots with the chip makers during the pandemic when they stopped manufacturing cars and those production slots were given to other clients.

Car companies also aren't helped by the recent fire at a Renesas Electronics factory in Japan which is one of the biggest makers of automobile chips in the world.

Re: Economics

So in a downturn like 2020 wouldn't you run at some capacity making parts for stock, even if not at 3 shifts + overtime?

I believe that is the issue... there was no downturn for the chip industry (memory or IC) in 2020. With the WfH crush a year ago, companies and schools were buying mobile computers by the truckload. And that doesn't touch on what happened at the cloud providers. I recall a Azure UK datacenter quickly running out of servers. That was fixed by buying a shitload more servers.

I'm sure that type of buying happened everywhere, across all the cloud platforms last year too. Recall the success story of Zoom, going from 10 million daily users to 300 million in a few short weeks? That took a lot of computing capacity to sort that out.

Now we're faced with the fact that they've been running at 100%+ for a long time, all that slack capacity was consumed, all the inventory was consumed and now the shelves are bare and this year there are external threats to the foundries.

UK's National Cyber Security Centre sidles in to help firm behind hacked NurseryCam product secure itself

Everything sucks at this company

The point of access was, we were told, a poorly secured Odoo business apps server instance that used a default admin password for its web interface, seemingly relying on security through obscurity.

If your internal applications don't have their default passwords changed.... how can anything else that you emit be any better?

One should assume moving forward that everything this company emits is nothing but a turd.

Re: "The same practice is also made in platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and GitHub"

Facebook did.

It is probably more common than people imagine... a dev working to troubleshoot logon issues for example, flipping a debug bit and forgetting to set it back seems easy enough.

But their problem is not this.

FCC announces winners in $81bn 5G spectrum auction. Congrats to Verizon, which must cough up $45.4bn

Forever, until your tech is no longer needed.

Like when VHF was bought back from analog broadcast TV channel holders. Or when, in this case, some C-Band satellite frequencies were 'bought back'.

Unlicensed wireless microphones have had a terrible time on both sides of the pond it seems. In the US, that started in 2010 with the grace period ending last year and now the same is set to happen in the UK it seems.

It gets more complicated with unlicensed units that operate on the same frequencies as UHF DTV channels. Now you need to plan ahead for the geography where your wireless units will be used and check if your specific model has any available non-overlapping UHF "local" DTV channels (where local is defined as <60 miles from the DTV transmitter) and if so, this dictates how many, if any, different channels can you use at the same time.

I know that Shure recently petitioned FCC to reopen a 6Mhz UHF channel in each market due to all the frequency shuffling over the past decade, as FCC's proposed alternatives weren't really good alternatives.

It is an utter shit show. Of course, the pandemic has all but shut down concerts and most production across the US, so I guess it's a bit of a paused shit show.

Dangerous flying car drone zoomed into UK's Gatwick Airport airspace after killswitch failed

Re: From the report

Maybe not. They did bring two frames with them and damaged the first one the day before.

For some people this might be shocking... for others, just another day at the office. I suspect the latter for this cohort.

What are the points of these RC models?

I'm deeply interested in what these RC models, representing something that will eventually carry a human, are accomplishing for the company today. It looks like fundraising at best and at worst, a massive cash burn and/or fraud.

Quad-motor RC piloted software and hardware already exist, so nothing novel here. And from the investigation, they're not collecting any engineering data to help them identify issues and inform them when they've fixed past problems with these flights.... so what is the purpose for these flights?

As a result of the investigation, it looks like they had to solve a crap-ton (technical phrase) of engineering and safety issues that are likely explicit for an unmanned vehicle, which take them no closer to a manned flight.

Once they put a meatbag in this machine, this becomes something wholly different from a regulatory point of view.

Planespotters’ weekends turn traumatic as engine pieces fall from the sky in the Netherlands and the US

Re: Buy stock in hard hats

Maybe those face shields will have value after covid.

Nice Clarke and Dawe reference.

Re: Quick turnaround for the 777?

Not sure how fire plays out with this (maybe not as much as one would expect, given that I'm sure an engine fire over the pacific ocean half-way to HNL has been considered), but fuel dumping definitely happens for planes whose take off weight is greater than their landing weight or when their nose gear is turned 90 degrees and the plane will come to a stop on its chin.

Given the plane was only going about half its rated distance (pure great circle shit), plus it was less than 2/3 full of pax and this was a domestic flight (less free bag allowances)... it might not have been above its landing weight.

However, I am not sure what the price of fuel is at HNL, and I don't know where that plane was going to next, but it might have been flying with way more fuel than needed if UA wanted to not buy as much fuel at HNL for the next leg.

The final report in 2-3 years will be a fun read, to be sure.

Nvidia cripples Ethereum mining on GeForce RTX 3060 to deter crypto bods from nabbing all the kit at launch

Not sure what you mean by "long term". Weeks or months really isn't long term.

And why wouldn't big miners still go out and acquire the cards en masse? If you're big enough or wallet deep enough, hedging your operation that the newest and best piece of cheaper hardware might be a software fix away, that seems like a good idea.

And at the end of the day, if you can't defeat the driver, however unlikely that is, you can still unload the cards on eBay. I'm no expert by any stretch on video cards or video card drivers. But I know that software is mutable and physically having your hands on a computer is king. Time is, after all, on the miner's side.

Nvidia can't alter the hardware once it's in the hands of the miners.

Ugh. Sounds like a new cat and mouse game with video drivers. We have this already with AV software.

And while I don't follow etherum specifically, I would have to imagine that if this hardware is superior to everything else out there, then there will be highly motivated people trying to circumvent this software restriction.

Toxic: Intel ordered to pay chip fab worker almost $1m after he was gassed at its facility in 2016

known as "sour gas"

Ahh.. that's why some pressure gauges are sour gas rated. I assumed it meant that it was capable of dealing with the hangover farts from the grunt looking at the gauge.

Re: Intel used to have good processes

you need steel toe boots everywhere in case someone rolls into your foot with an office chair

This made me chuckle. My second "proper" IT job when I was much younger, I was hired at a big-ass company. When they issued me a hardhat and back belt, I asked what they were for and I was told I had to wear them anytime I went under a desk, such as installing a PC or plugging in network cable, so on and such forth.

My job before that was working at a small ISP (this was in the mid 90s) I'd stand on a wheeled chair to move drop ceiling tiles from time to time because that was quicker than finding the ladder.

I didn't last long at the big-ass company. Hard hats for going under a desk? Sorry, not for me.

Machine-learning software scours database of already available drugs that could treat COVID-19 infections

Re: Interesting work

Or if they can find two or more drugs that are out of patent that work well together... then they can patent that combined drug and jack up the prices on it.

SHAREit app for Android said to share way too much: Billion-download code with holes no one wants to fix

Re: com.lenovo.anyshare.app.DefaultReceiver

When I was reading the article, the name was tugging at something in the back of my mind.

Sure enough, this was a Lenovo app and it was for Windows and Android. It looks like it was discontinued.

Not sure what happened between 2017 and now.

Science of Love app turns to hate for machine-learning startup in Korea after careless whispers of data

Re: Scatter Labs

Or Scat Labs.

Microsoft issues emergency fix for Wi-Fi foul-up delivered hot and fresh on Patch Tuesday

Re: Again? Seriously?

Thank you for proving my point. There's now up to six supported editions of Windows Client, excluding the variants. Twice as many as they did back in the Windows Vista/7/8 days.

Instead of having a three-year cadence between "Feature Releases", its now six months. I'm sure that Microsoft didn't shed their entire dev team in the period between Windows XP to Vista, or Vista to 7, or 7 to 8, so on and so forth. I'm sure they were busy making the next OS, or squishing bugs, or whatever it is that developers at massive companies do in-between RTMs.

And as an aside... Windows 8.0 support died six months after the first edition of Windows 10 (1507) was released. When 8.0 came out, XP only had 18 months left of support and when 8.1 came out, only six month of overlap. All told, there wasn't really that much time where Microsoft was supporting more than two "feature releases" of Windows.

President Biden to issue executive order on chip shortages as under-pressure silicon world begs for help

And therein lies the rub.

John Q Public might be on the hook to "home grow" IC manufacturing because the "government demands and shall compensate for it".

If no governmental forces force themselves upon the "free market", I suppose prices would rise (considerably) and possibly make production in the mainland (USA) profitable again.

Given pure capitalism, scarcity naturally leads to a price rise, so bonus nachos to all? Except that people don't like to have to directly pay more for something. Apparently its better if that's buried under layers of debt and dismal wages.