Posts by Fazal Majid

What's needed is something like a legally binding form of the Do-Not-Track flag, but considering the vast majority of cookie "consent" pop-ups violate GDPR by not making "Reject All" as prominent and easy as "Accept All", seemingly with no consequences this far, I don't have high hopes.

Fabs with that feature size are good for automobile components, low-end microcontrollers and imaging chips that China’s surveillance society is a big consumer of.

TikTok

I remember reading an interview of TikTok's founders a few years ago when they were still called Musical.ly and when asked why they didn't offer their service in their home country of China, the answer was "Oh no, Chinese kids should study". Tells you everything you need to know about how they thought about their service and their customers.

There was talk of a browser-based mechanism similar to Do-Not-Track to allow users to do a blanket “Reject All” or (unlikely) “Accept All” and skip the cookie banners, but all the talk about “unleashing data” clearly signals the real intention is to gut the GDPR to suit the civilian surveillance-industrial complex (the UK’s completely out-of-control and unaccountable government surveillance complex is of course in complete violation of the law and in itself grounds for the EU to revoke the fiction of adequacy).

Isn’t making false statements to the police an offense?

And couldn’t he sue them for that?

Tragedy of the Commons

QUIC is designed so the app decides what congestion control algorithm to use, not the OS networking stack. Most use the BBR algorithm, which is very aggressive and will steal more than its fair share of bandwidth in the event of congestion compared to TCP with CUBIC or older implementations. This creates a situation where greedy browsers using BBR have apparent better performance, and everyone starts switching over until the well-behaved clients are so penalized they become unusable when there is congestion. Of course, TCP can also run BBR, and outperforms QUIC, but that requires OS upgrades, which don't happen as frequently as browser upgrades.

The two are not equivalent

NSO was distributing malware from AWS’ servers, creating criminal liability for AWS if they did not shut it down as soon as they became aware of it. Parker’s questionable content is not illegal, at least not in the US.

There are actual products you can buy today

Like the Renault Twizy, the Smart EVs, the Citroën Ami electric.

Surely you mean “6GHZ Wi-Fi 6E standard”, not “60GHZ Wi-Fi 6 standard”.

It's like the disastrous consequences of the CIA using fake vaccination workers to locate Bin Laden. Now real vaccination workers are targeted by the Taliban and the fight to eradicate polio may never recover.

The US is also more vulnerable

The US’ greater adoption of IT, IOT and IIoT also make it more exposed and vulnerable to attack, as illustrated by the Colonial Pipeline incident.

In the homeland of Tolkien

Does no one remember it is Sauron who wields control over the Palantir?

Probably has to do with RAM

My M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM smokes my i9-9700K with 64GB RAM, and significantly faster on single-core and nearly as fast on multi-core with my i9-9900K (those are 95W CPUs, not 6W like the i9-9900 non-K).

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/1826503?baseline=6428909

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2117078?baseline=6428909

It’s more objectionable that he is an advertising guy than that he is a misogyne

The real issue is that Apple talks a good game about privacy, but building an advertising business is inherently at odds with that.

China has made a durable enemy of India

Indian governments were willing to overlook China's occupation of Indian territory since 1962, but the brutal attack this year (with nail-studded clubs!) combined with China's wolf-warrior "diplomacy" has permanently turned India into an enemy. While India's GDP is piddling in comparison to China's, due to decades of crony-capitalist faux-socialism, it still has a young population that is not aging like China's and is a huge market that will now be off-limits to the kinds of high-end products China wants to break into. What's more, the Indians are now developing their own 5G technology in-house at Reliance Jio that could prove to be a formidable competitor to Huawei in the future, as telecoms networks are being eaten by software and software is something India is good at, unlike hardware.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

It's not just an IT scandal

I don't know why so much emphasis is put on the IT side of things. It's a gross miscarriage of justice that has shown gaping flaws in the UK's judicial system and its unwarranted deference to the establishment.

Nothing rare about rare earths

It's just the process of extracting them is incredibly polluting, which is why US rare earth plants were closed, they were happy to ship the pollution to China. Australians for one are not particularly loth to rape the environment for a quick buck, and the Register's own Tim Worstall explained why China's rare earth monopoly is not the trump card it thinks that is:

https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/15/rare_earth_metals/

Rewarding failure

So Mr. Frank was responsible for Intel CPU design at a time when it was floundering? Granted, a lot of this is due to losing its lead in semiconductor fab process technology to TSMC and Samsung, but that still doesn't inspire confidence, this guy is no Jim Keller of DEC Alpha and Apple A-series fame.

I did an informal version of this

I set up an IPsec/IKEv2 VPN on an OpenBSD box a friend installed in his home network, for purposes of circumventing Netflix's geofencing of content, because of course they blacklist most cloud provider IP address ranges. The one day the machine burned out due to a thunderstorm and that was that.

Pentagon

A big part of the problem is the huge swathes of spectrum squatted on by the military, which is why US carriers went all-in on mmWave dead-end frequencies that can literally not punch their way out of a paper bag.

I hope it takes them less time from announcement to actual availability than it did for the previous Ryzen, some of which took more than 6 months. Also, keep in mind not all mobile Ryzen 5000 are zen3 based, some are still zen2 with significantly lower IPC scores.

Second time TeamCity is mentioned in a major breach

Nowhere near as severe as the SolarWinds fiasco, but surely something must be wrong with a critical product that’s seemingly so hard to secure.

Social is the key

Intelligence seems to develop first among eusocial animals like primates, whales, dolphins, corvids, parakeets and octopi.

Server-side tagging is about hiding tracking, not advertising

It aims to work around third-party cookie blocking by riding on the coat-tails of the publisher’s first-party domain. Ads can’t be hidden by definition, and will find their way onto blocklists anyway.

Except the Cloud is going in the same direction

Amazon is not-so-slowly but surely moving towards it own Graviton2 SOCs for AWS, even if they are not yet as tightly integrated, and I would very surprised if Apple didn’t have a data center variant of the M1 (or perhaps the M2 that will inevitably follow for higher-end MacBook Pros, iMacs and Mac Pros) for its own extensive data center operations (running Linux, BTW).

"Britain, like most of the Western Five Eyes spying alliance, is increasingly alarmed by Russian and Chinese indifference to the rules-based international order when it comes to cybersecurity matters."

That's pretty rich from a country that spies not only on the Russian and Chinese, but also on Brussels (including compromising Belgacom's telephone network) and Germany.

BGP

I would worry less about the cables and more about the lack of security in BGP:

https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=mca

Tasmota

The first thing you do with smart plugs is replace the manufacturer's spyware with the open-source Tasmota firmware that is cloud-free. Unfortunately, that won't protect you from electrical engineering flaws in the device.

Hard Brexit

Membership in Galileo PRS may not require membership in the EU, but the acrimonious hard Brexit that is clearly the intended outcome of the sham negotiations (and proposed violation of the Withdrawal Agreement) will not incline the Europeans to let the UK in.

I’ve wondered

Why the Feds closed the Chinese consulate in Houston rather than the much more sensitive one in San Francisco.

Er, the FCC *are* Feds

The F stands for Federal

WeChat dominance

WeChat dominates in China to an extent we can hardly understand in the West. It’s the reason why iOS has hardly any stickiness in China. If the Trump administration bans WeChat from the App Store, Apple’s sales in China will simply collapse (presumably to Huawei’s benefit).

Company culture matters

I suspect WFH can simply not be grafted onto a company culture not initially designed around it, unlike Automattic (makers of Wordpress), who sold their expensive San Francisco office a couple of years ago because no one was using it.

Like all bureaucracies, Facebook must have parts that are super-anal about privacy and compliance, and others that couldn't care less. Most likely R&D that sponsored this contest fall within the former, whereas revenue-generating bits fall within the latter.