* Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

3555 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007

Putin threatens supply chains with counter-sanction order

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

How much do we need?

I know that Europe is in quite an energy crunch but the other materials might not be as scarce as Putin hopes. COVID started this thing where businesses charged high prices as a result of labor shortages and then realized that it's super profitable to keep charging high prices and not paying for employees. New competition will eventually come along to fix some of that, but those new competitors are likely to also find ways to avoid or reduce dependencies on materials with limited supplies.

Don't hate on cryptomining, hate the power stations, say Bitcoin super-fans

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever

Heating your home with miners isn't a great excuse. In many climates a heat pump is 3 to 4 times as efficient.

EU Apple suit alleges anticompetitive Apple Pay practices

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

The sensible thing for a good operating system to do would be asking you if the app should be permitted to process payments by NFC.

iOS, and recently Android, no longer ask if your answer might hurt corporate revenue even the slightest.

Meta materials: Facebook using AI to design green concrete

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Dot.com time scales

I recall reading that concrete's formula is critical for long term stability. The AI knows Meta well and considers self-demolition to be a huge carbon emissions saver.

Google releases beta version of Android 13 'Tiramisu'

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: What the article needed

It noted that there are permissions for only audio, video, and still images rather than general file access. I read that as Google driving the last nail into Android's coffin because all but the boring apps will stop working. Android 11+ is really broken.

China turns cyber-espionage eyes to Russia as Ukraine invasion grinds on

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Stealing thunder

China was supposed to be the new scary super power but Russia suddenly begins exterminating a country and threatening nuclear war. China really wants to know where they stand in this new game.

North Korea is demanding attention too but nobody is still listening.

Could a leaky capacitor be at fault on ESA's Sentinel-1B?

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Leaky ceramic?

I figured that when I said shorted. That's why you can maybe get it to pop off the board. Once the solder melts, various organic vapors will either pop it off or blow the solder away.

MLCC caps cap pop off by burning their adhesive dot. Tantalum caps need no help.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Leaky ceramic?

Ceramic capacitors have nothing to leak since they're metal and ceramic. Maybe they mean shorted? Hopefully there's more than one cap on the power supply. If they can get the shorted cap hot quickly it might pop itself off the board.

I'd bet it's a damaged switching transistor. The symptoms are similar but with no chance of fixing it. Hopefully there's another power supply too.

Samsung, others test drive Esperanto's 1,000-core RISC-V AI chip

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Maybe a media codec chip

This might make for a great software defined media codec chip. All of the pattern searching to efficiently compress natural media takes so much computational power that it needs limitations to be practical. A chip like could improve the quality per bitrate in live 4K video recording. It could probably improve playback quite a bit too.

Insteon's vanishing act explained: Smart home biz insolvent, sells off assets

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Infinitely scalable (hosting costs)

If you can't host 100 million home automation devices on few ordinary servers, you're seriously doing it wrong. Remember that X number of clients also means X free computational nodes. The servers should only coordinate communications and hold configuration backups.

I imagine all these makers that cut hosting the moment budgets get tight have been putting too much faith in cloud vendor blogs.

Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Greenwashing?

They only need enough time to shift loads and boost replication of data. If they had 10 hours of battery power, they could ignore common short outages and only take action for extraordinary outages.

Anyone who uses cloud hosting knows that uptime quotes only apply to multiregional systems.

Yandex speaks out from front line of Western sanctions against Russia

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Not a Russian Google

Yandex stands out as a rare large network that doesn't seem to tolerate misuse. Hackers and spammers are kicked out in less than a day, and it's often followed by an apology for the incident. Their only faut is Putin's control.

Google doesn't care what's done with their services as long as the victims aren't on Google. I'm pretty sure Google is controlling politicians, not the other way around.

Brave, DuckDuckGo to unplug Google's AMP where possible

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: "Google [..] maintains that AMP is here to help make the web better"

Google has forced it to be a better deal for ad-driven web sites and visitors, at least in the short term. It's what monopolies do.

Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Kids

The newer trick is to tell the Internet who you want to be.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Just for bots

https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/

LinkedIn could probably run it locally.

Google 'Switch to Android' app surfaces in iOS App Store

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Meh

Google has used their control over Android APIs to whittle away the advantages of Android without adding any value. It's becoming a buggy clone of iOS. MicroSd use is broken. Swapping the OS keeps getting harder. Custom UI is limited to changing the launcher, and Google has been eroding support for that too by withholding API access.

Google's plan to win the cloud war hinges on its security aspirations

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Security?

Google's whole product line revolves around backing everyone into a corner where no privacy exists and being deaf to all complaints. They host hackers and bots on GCP, Trojan horses in Google Drive and Play Store, spammers in Gmail, and content pirates on YouTube. It's all thanks to completely automated algorithmic management.

Rest assured that you'll be notified of your compromised hosting after it's in at least 3 public block lists, 15000 abuse reports, and a web crawler finds your data on a piracy site.

Climate model code is so outdated, MIT starts from scratch

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: "Dynamically typed"

Sometimes. It ruins some optimizations but a JIT can be a big advantage with localized optimizations. Remember that even C++ like languages can have performance problems with virtual methods. A JIT doesn't have those limitations because it can add, remove, and recompile optimizations as needed for different implementations. It's how Java beats C++ in certain kinds of benchmarks.

Broken password check algorithm lets anyone log into Cisco's Wi-Fi admin software

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: OH FFS

Also Stack Overflow:

Question: Complex security thingy doesn't work

Top rated answers: Simplest ways to disable complex security thingy

Cerebras' wafer-size AI chips play nice with PyTorch, TensorFlow

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

400000 cores and Python

World's most compact space heater. I've seen people try to use 3 cores in Python and it's all spin locks and dead locks. Even the acceleration libraries are bad because efficient mathematics and efficient concurrency together are a lot to master.

Amazon expands: Datacenter site planned for Santa Clara

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Hot summer nights and diesel in the air

Has anyone told AWS that California has regular power generation deficits on hot summer evenings? Loss of western US hydroelectric power to drought isn't helping.

Hopefully they have a big budget for solar and batteries. No one's going to let them run dirty emergency generators 4pm to 10pm after each hot day.

Google makes outdated apps less accessible on Play Store

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Walling the garden

Forced updates means new APIs with tightened controls by Google. Google recently disabled microSd cards by making them scoped storage through an API that's 5x to 10000x slower than the native card speed. Google says they will grant permission to bypass that crapfest for only special circumstances. The current workaround is to use older apps or F-Droid.

What's next? Mandatory metrics libraries? Mandatory cloud storage? Whatever feels good for Google.

IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit claims

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Plenty of prison space!

Are you counting IBM vacancies as prison vacancies? Accounting tricks like that... might be accurate.

Direct lithium extraction technique for greener batteries gains traction

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"water"

Need some clarification: Is that drinking water or brine? Nobody is going to use what's in the Salton Sea except a salt mine.

Atlassian Jira, Confluence outage persists two days on

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Little Bobby Tables' older brother

Nolan Romy Riff-Star, short name \nrm -rf *

Such a trouble maker.

Google now requires two staff to sign off each Go change

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Gerrit

You have no idea how bad it is. Google's codebase is the '<- deprecated | not ready ->' road sign meme with Kool Aid guzzlers in charge of it. A code review can have 5 people arguing with each other about which APIs you're using and another 3 people arguing with each other about variable names and whitespace placement. Each believes they have god-like powers of code improvement yet none of them will notice critical product flaws.

Japanese startup makes baby carrier-style sling for 'Love Robots'

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

The original Japanese site has videos to give you nightmares. They're emotional support toys that send status updates and video feeds to the owner's cellphone.

Google unrolls search features to tackle misinformation

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Big Brother

Is somebody checking on censorship?

The query "google hosting spammers" has made a sudden change. Google Search used to only give instructions and discussions for using Gmail to block outside spammers. Now it's slightly less filtered. They've added some relevant results that are clearly marked with old timestamps. It's still highly censored but Google lawyers could point to the old articles and claim it isn't.

Google: Russian credential thieves target NATO, Eastern European military

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: So, we know who they are

Nope. Google is only interested in inbound and inside protection. Outbound attacks are, in their mind, good for business. This is hardly the first time they've warned the public about other networks being not fully secured against attacks (that are carried out using Google).

US court allows ZTE to exit probation despite visa fraud

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Re: Err ...

Lobbyists and bribes would be the American way.

Prepare for weaponized AI that adapts in real-time to your defenses, says prof

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I place my bets on Google

I imagine we're not far from a time when AI is flooding the Internet with more crap than it can handle. It's going to look like an endless sea of crazies doing it but there will be big money behind it. Google killed Usenet by flooding it with spam levels that no other Usenet node could handle. Google is killing e-mail by the same means. If Google can make money by offering a product that filters out AI-generated garbage, you should bet on them helping to flood the rest of the world with AI-generated garbage.

sigh. Mail server logs.

Mar 23 03:32:17 postfix/cleanup[605156]: 67E104075B: reject: header Reply-To: hayleeschowalter736@gmail.com from 4.176.133.34.bc.googleusercontent.com[34.133.176.4]; from=<noreply@usa.gov> to=<> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail.video.io>: 5.7.1 Can not Reply-To world's largest spam host

Mar 23 16:11:09 postfix/smtpd[924835]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-ej1-x634.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::634]: 554 5.7.1 <mail-ej1-x634.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::634]>: Client host rejected: Too much phishing spam from Google. Use a different mail provider.; from=<willmonroe11mg@gmail.com> to=<> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-ej1-x634.google.com>

Mar 24 00:53:40 postfix/cleanup[1407408]: 73EA941271: reject: header Reply-To: vojnovicdejan0@gmail.com from mail.gusclothing.org[103.143.108.122]; from=<nojlic@verat.net> to=<> proto=ESMTP helo=<gusclothing.org>: 5.7.1 Can not Reply-To world's largest spam host

GitHub explains outage string in incidents update

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

DBA?

Nobody has a DBA anymore. Companies "scale up" their cloud configuration and consider it solved, even if that scale-up costs far more than a DBA. If GitHub did have one, this overload should have been no surprise.

Containers may be more effective than VMs for hybrid apps – Gartner

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Crystal ball facing wrong way?

Didn't everyone start replacing VMs with containers something like 15 years ago. There's no need for a VM unless your software needs to play with the kernel. There's usually not even a need for a container except for buzzword compliance.

How not to attract a WSL (or any) engineer

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What use is it?

I would hate to be the one that has to read the answers. I bet they had an idea to search for unexpected correlations between good and bad candidates but never bothered to maintain it.

The high school questions I see on the Canonical application shouldn't be asked in a professional environment. They're literally asking about your activities as a minor. I'd inform them of my withdrawal for consideration. All interviews are two-ways.

Hear us out: Smartphone lidar can test blood, milk

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Too good to true?

Some Theranos technical documents said that AI was being used to create more information from less data; something not possible.

This research measures the LIDAR sparkle in milk caused by solids to see if it matches expected values. It measures the LIDAR phase shift in blood to see if it matches expected values. It's completely within the realm of matching known science and it doesn't violate any data theory. The only difficult part is the application of the technology to real-world environments.

Claiming to know the taste of milk from LIDAR would be a VC funding scam. Claiming the same for blood probably means they don't care much for sunlight and garlic.

Google Maps just got lost for a few hours

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

The world isn't that big - it fits on my cellphone. Maps, navigation metadata, addresses, businesses, geo-tagged Wikipedia, contour lines, hillshade, and some satellite imagery comes out to 362 GB. If you're wondering, the full English Wikipedia is about 90 GB. It's no big deal for phones still sporting a microSd slot. My car has North America on its SD card.

Nope, I didn't notice the Google outage.

This browser-in-browser attack is perfect for phishing

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Android apps have been doing this for years. It's usually not from an intentionally malicious app, but ones indirectly hooked up to a malicious ad server. They simulate an app transition then a login window, usually by playing a full-screen video.

I will NOT use any ad-driven Android apps. There's too much malware in them. It has to be free or paid.

UK regulator puts NortonLifeLock merger with Avast on ice

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Wouldn't want to be there if it happens

I can only imagine the headaches of the merger. Non-stop fraudulent activity holds in finance, no e-mails getting through, and all computer systems slowing to a halt and flagging suspicious file changes.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: if programmed correctly, mean that a straightforward update will do the trick

Hopefully permanent DST is not coded in December by people who can't wake up properly without a bit of morning sunlight.

Rubbing sleepy eyes icon.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Single threaded performance

Lazy coders. Swift, Rust, C++, Objective-C, Java, Scala, Go, and Ruby all have refined tools for multiprocessing. JavaScript and shell scripts are the only active languages that can't support elegant multiprocessing. Even Python does if you don't use CPython.

OpenZFS 2.1.3 bugfix brings compatibility with Linux 5.16

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Why would you demand that one filesystem is perfect for all uses? That's not the way anything works. You use the right tools in the right place.

A ridiculous counterpoint would be asking what good 7GB/s NVMe sticks are when they only hold a itty bitty 2TB.

Developer adoption is our priority, profits second, Cloudflare tells bankers

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: 'deleting my post'

Reg, you'll have to put up with our negative comments. Some of us really are being attacked by their customer base. They provide services to phishing sites that pay for click-through referrals. These referral payments encourage spamming from just about every random hijacked account on Earth, and that's difficult to filter.

Here's a good story for you: Find a phishing site behind Cloudflare and phone up their abuse department. Make sure you find a pure, low grade phishing site so there's no doubt about its purpose. It needs to have tons of fake security badges, fake privacy policy links, fake payment processor badges, and absolutely no legitimate business references. They won't read any e-mail so, yes, phone Cloudflare like it's the dark ages. They'll tell you to e-mail them but insist on escalating because credit card thefts are in progress. The nicest response I've heard is "go file a police report if it's illegal." See if you can actually accomplish anything.

I checked through my (in vain) abuse reports for the past 6 months. All legitimate web sites that were hacked to serve malware have been fixed. About half of the pure phishing sites are no longer using the same domain name. The other half are still up and collecting credit cards.

Just two die for: Apple reveals M1 Ultra chip in Mac Studio

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Already burned with an M1, not jumping again...

Apple still bundles QuickTime so you can't blame people for not immediately knowing which third-party video player should replace it. I actually see most people drop video files onto Chrome and hope for the best.

Even VLC is far from perfect. Its various filters to prevent late frame stutter also prevents it from playing variable frame rate videos, which some surveillance cameras generate.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

The Apple price

The hidden cost of Apple products is that you have to purchase specifications for the future - there's no upgrading. If you pay only for what you need now, the price is great but the computer is a hindrance the moment you need more power. That's a poorly planned purchase. If you buy enough extra power to last you a year, the price goes way up but now you have that extra year of use. Only a year extra for all that $$$$. OK, purchase specs to cover the next 5 years. Now there's an extra digit on the price tag and your cost per year is actually going up.

The other thing I greatly dislike about Apple is the locked-down OS. There's no tuning anything for different types of workloads. Tune swap - nope. Tune the Ethernet driver - not by much. Big ZFS raid - nope. Delete a hundred junk apps - nope. When Apple says your computer is old and they're not going to fix a nasty software bug, you might as well park it on the sidewalk with a "Free" sign. It's all more purchasing risk.

Where are the (serious) Russian cyberattacks?

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Nobody knows what they have

Say you have amazing infrastructure attacks lined up. You've secretly hacked the whole power grid. You're going to open all the switches, change the power plant frequencies a little bit, then force the switches closed again. The harmonics would blow up transformers and hit breakers with power they can't interrupt. Maybe you've hacked sewage processing to vent chlorine gas. Maybe hack oil refineries to catch fire for good show.

Any of that would be an unambiguous declaration of war. Will it send your enemy into the dark ages? Maybe there are mechanical checks that can't be seen online. Maybe a bunch of system operators say, "That's not right!" and hit the big red button before anything happens. You've just started your war with your most devastating blow being a two day technical inconvenience. The BOFHs are coming.

400Gbps is the new normal for biz networks

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Don't forget LocalTalk. You plugged it into an unused phone line pair and then your whole house is 230kbps networked. Not that anyone could afford Macs for the other ends of the wire, though. It was the idea that counted.

Russia acknowledges sanctions could hurt its tech companies

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Facepalm

Seen this before

The suddenly available money will be spent wisely with not a drop of waste.

Internet backbone Cogent cuts Russia connectivity

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: outbound cyber attacks

There may be misunderstanding of how the attacks run. It's mostly about building and controlling bot networks. Bots that hack, post to social media, and expand on vulnerable hosts. Those bots can be anywhere and they eventually, somehow, find networks where they're given a permanent home.

So yea, there are tons of botnet services in Russia, Vietnam, China, and the US. They're typically a /24 that has a fake business name and fake reverse DNS.

My original comment is about Cogent being a complete hypocrite when they say they're trying to stop outbound Russian attacks and misinformation. They still peer with plenty of botnet services that aren't physically in Russia.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

outbound cyber attacks

Why were they OK before and why are they still OK from non-Russian networks? What about American hostile networks that are popular with Chinese and Russian hackers?

Proprietary neural tech you had surgically implanted? Parts shortage

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

My desktop shows shimmering pixels on the screen if I pull RAM sticks while it's on, then some kind of deadman switch reboots it. It's not as touching.