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zafiro17 writes:

It's 2022 and most of us are glued to one internet device or another for 23 hours of the day. So where does your attention go? Software, for this discussion, can mean: apps installed on your laptop/desktop, operating systems, desktop environments/windowing applications, web software/software as a service, apps on a smartphone, etc. - broadly defined.

Use this as an opportunity to spread some love for software that you find helpful, useful, efficient, or rewarding.

Keep the conversation going.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Remoticon 2021 // Rob Weinstein Builds An HP-35 From The Patent Up:

Fifty years ago, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first handheld scientific calculator, the HP-35. It was quite the engineering feat, since equivalent machines of the day were bulky desktop affairs, if not rack-mounted. [Rob Weinstein] has long been a fan of HP calculators, and used an HP-41C for many years until it wore out. Since then he gradually developed a curiosity about these old calculators and what made them tick. The more he read, the more engrossed he became. [Rob] eventually decided to embark on a three year long reverse-engineer journey that culminated a recreation of the original design on a protoboard that operates exactly like the original from 1972 (although not quite pocket-sized). In this presentation he walks us through the history of the calculator design and his efforts in understanding and eventually replicating it using modern FPGAs.

He started with the original HP patent and began to build tinyFPGA models. One part of the patent was treated as a black box, but he was able to reverse engineer what it does based upon the parts that interacted with it. He made a brief video demonstrating his recreation side-by-side with an actual HP-35.

Rob Weinstein's Remoticon 2021 presentation can be found on YouTube.

upstart writes:

SUSE's New Linux Release Isn't for Your Desktop - FOSS Force:

While it's not going to be of much use to those running Linux on a desktop or laptop, minified versions of Linux like SUSE's SLE Micro are becoming essential in the enterprise, both for DevOps teams working in containerized environments and for IoT devices running at the edge.

Yesterday SUSE released a new version in one of its lines of SUSE Linux Enterprise operating systems — SUSE Linux Enterprise-Micro 5.2

Don't worry, this doesn't mean that if you're using SUSE to run your desktop you'll need to upgrade, even if you're using SUSE to run a server or two. This one's for DevOps teams who use SLE Micro as part of their container infrastructure or in edge deployments, or for manufacturers who embed it in their internet of things devices.

[...] With enterprises' ever increasing use of containers and IoT, all of the server-focused Linux distributions offer minified versions of their distribution. Canonical, for example, has Ubuntu Core, which has the distinction of supporting Snaps for installing sandboxed software, an addition that could be especially useful for IoT and for enterprise edge deployments.

Original Submission

zafiro17 writes:

South Korea the big winner in a year of supply struggles and continued shortages

Despite (and perhaps because) of ongoing shortages, the semiconductor industry posted $595 billion in revenue in 2021, an increase of 26.3 percent over 2020.

The numbers, from Gartner, also make plain the effects of US sanctions against China, whose market share fell, and which did not have a single manufacturer present in the top 10 list (sorted by total 2021 revenue).

The biggest news of the report was Samsung overtaking Intel in the top spot, albeit barely: Samsung's chip biz grew 28 percent from 2020 to 2021, while Intel lost 0.3 percent over the same period. Now Samsung sits atop the list with $73.2 billion in revenue and a 12.3 percent market share, while Intel nips at its heels with $72.5 billion in revenue and a 12.2 percent share of the spoils. It's a lead, but one that could easily evaporate by the end of 2022.

Other things to note from the report are that this profit is occurring despite the chip shortage, which appears that it will continue longer than expected, China has been feeling the squeeze as the result of US sanctions on Huawei and other companies, and that South Korea was the fastest growing country by market share.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/14/its-still-stupidly-ridiculously-difficult-to-buy-a-dumb-tv/

Historically, "smart" TVs aren't always particularly smart. They've routinely been shown to have lax security and privacy standards. They also routinely feature embedded OS systems that don't age well, aren't always well designed, don't perform particularly well over time, are slathered with ads, and are usually worse than most third-party game streaming devices or video game consoles.

Yet when if you go shopping for "dumb" televisions — as in just a high quality display with a bunch of HDMI ports and not much else, you're usually going to be out of luck. There are options, but guides on this front will usually shovel you toward computer monitors (too pricey at large sizes), or business-class displays (ditto).

[...] Of course it's challenging because TV manufacturers now make more money collecting and monetizing your personal data than they do selling the actual hardware. Last year Vizio noted it made $38.4 million in one quarter just from tracking and monetizing consumer viewing and usage data. It made $48.2 million on hardware (which also includes soundbars, and other products) in that same period.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Driverless car appears to flee the scene after being pulled over by cops:

A video showing a driverless car being stopped by the police and then attempting to drive away went viral over the weekend. San Francisco police stopped one of Cruise's autonomous Chevrolet Bolt EVs, likely because the car's headlights were not on despite it being night. In the video, first posted to Instagram on April 2, an officer can be heard saying, "There's nobody in it."

But a few seconds later, after the officer walks back to his police car, the autonomous vehicle—perhaps deciding that the traffic stop was over—tries to drive away before pulling over to a stop a few hundred feet away.

Cruise says that the car wasn't trying to make a run for it. The vehicle first yielded to the police vehicle, then pulled over to a safe spot for the actual traffic stop, the company says. One of the police officers contacted Cruise to inform it of the situation, and the driverless car did not receive a ticket. Cruise says it has fixed whatever caused the car to drive without its headlights at night.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

You're muted... or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen even when mic is off:

Kassem Fawaz's brother was on a videoconference with the microphone muted when he noticed that the microphone light was still on—indicating, inexplicably, that his microphone was being accessed.

[...] "It turns out, in the vast majority of cases, when you mute yourself, these apps do not give up access to the microphone," says Fawaz. "And that's a problem. When you're muted, people don't expect these apps to collect data."

[...] They found that all of the apps they tested occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated, with one popular app gathering information and delivering data to its server at the same rate regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not.

The researchers then decided to see if they could use data collected on mute from that app to infer the types of activities taking place in the background. Using machine learning algorithms, they trained an activity classifier using audio from YouTube videos representing six common background activities, including cooking and eating, playing music, typing and cleaning. Applying the classifier to the type of telemetry packets the app was sending, the team could identify the background activity with an average of 82% accuracy.

[...] "With a camera, you can turn it off or even put your hand over it, and no matter what you do, no one can see you," says Fawaz. "I don't think that exists for microphones."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

ACE Shuts Down Massive Pirate Site After Locating Owner in Remote Peru:

In October 2021, TorrentFreak learned that the Motion Picture Association and its anti-piracy partner Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment had taken an interest in one of the world's most popular pirate streaming sites.

In a DMCA subpoena application filed at a California court, MPA/ACE asked Cloudflare to hand over all information held on several pirate platforms including movie, TV show and anime streaming site Pelisplushd.net.

The site was not particularly well-known in English-speaking regions but in Latin America, its status as a giant was undisputed – 58 million visits per month according to SimilarWeb data. In the following months the site grew by millions more visitors but in the third week of March, locals reported problems accessing the site. We now know why.

In a statement published Wednesday, ACE officially announced that it was behind the closure of Pelisplushd.net. The anti-piracy group labeled the platform the second-largest Spanish-language 'rogue website' in the entire Latin American region with 383.5 million visits in the past six months and nearly 75 million visits in February 2022.

upstart writes:

We've Heard Of Bricking A Hard Drive, But...:

Mass storage has come a long way since the introduction of the personal computer. [Tech Time Traveller] has an interesting video about the dawn of PC hard drives focusing on a company called MiniScribe. After a promising start, they lost an IBM contract and fell on hard times.

We'd heard of MiniScribe, but a lot of companies from those days came and went. What we didn't remember is that once it was taken over by a turnaround firm, pressure to perform caused the company's executives to do some creative bookkeeping which finally came back to haunt them.

Apparently, the company was faking inventory to the tune of $15 million because executives feared for their jobs if profits weren't forthcoming. Once they discovered the incorrect inventory, they not only set out to alter the company's records to match it, but they also broke into an outside auditing firm's records to change things there, too.

upstart writes:

NASA Hardware Techniques: Soldering Space Electronics Like It’s 1958:

PeriscopeFilm on YouTube has many old TV adverts and US government reels archived on their channel, with some really interesting subjects to dive in to. This first one we’re highlighting here is a 1958 film about NASA Soldering Techniques (Video, embedded below), which has some fascinating details about how things were done during the Space Race, and presumably, continue to be done. The overall message about cleanliness couldn’t really be any clearer if they tried — it’s so critical it looks like those chaps in the film spend far more time brushing and cleaning than actually wielding those super clean soldering irons.

[...] As you would expect (and it’s not exactly a big secret) NASA has some very exacting standards for assembly of all hardware, like this great workmanship standard, which is well worth studying. Soldering is an important subject for many of us, we’ve covered the subject of solder metallurgy, as well as looking at how ancient hardware hackers soldered without the benefit of much modern knowledge.

I'm not sure my first Heathkit project would have passed NASA standards.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Meta announces plans to monetize the Metaverse, and creators are not happy:

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, announced some initial plans on Wednesday to allow content creators to monetize in its would-be Metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds. Meta's planned revenue share for contributors' creations could add up to nearly 50 percent.

[...] First off, Horizon Worlds will support in-world purchases. A handful of creators will be able to sell virtual items from within user-generated areas. Meta also plans to introduce a creator bonus program that awards money to creators based on how much other users engage with their content.

[...] When users purchase an item in Horizon Worlds, Meta confirmed to CNBC that it would take a 25 percent cut—but that's after any amount a hardware platform might take. Right now that just means Meta's Oculus store, which takes a 30 percent cut. So content creators will have to hand over 30 percent to the Oculus store (or the applicable percentage for whatever platform stores Horizon Worlds ends up on later, like Google Play), then they'll have to cede 25 percent of what's left to Horizon Worlds.

That leaves creators with just over half of their content's revenue before any applicable taxes.

The announcement has drawn ire from creators in the loosely related NFT community, who are accustomed to single-digit percentage platform takes. There are also accusations of hypocrisy from game developers and others who have seen Meta publicly criticize companies like Apple for charging 30 percent on similar transactions around in-game content.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D Review: 3D V-Cache Powers a New Gaming Champion

On average at 1080p, the 5800X3D is ~9% faster than the 12900K, which costs 30% more, and ~7% faster than the Core i9-12900KS, which costs a whopping 64% more. That means the Ryzen 7 58000X3D is now both the fastest gaming chip in our test suite and a better value for gaming specifically than the Core i9 models.

Overclocking either of Intel's Core i9 models requires a beefy cooler and robust motherboard. However, despite its much tamer overall power requirements, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is still ~3% faster than the overclocked 12900K in our cumulative measurement.

[...] AMD's marketing claim is that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is, on average, 15% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900X. The 3D V-Cache doesn't improve performance in all games, so this will vary, but we recorded a 21% increase over the 5900X at 1080p in our test suite, which is incredibly impressive.

The 5800X3D and the 5800X are built from the same basic design, but the X3D model has a 200 MHz lower boost and 400 MHz lower base clock than the 5800X. Despite that limitation, we recorded a massive 28% gain over the 5800X at 1080p, which is impressive. However, overclocking the 5800X3D's [DDR4] memory yielded an average performance increase of only about 1%, which isn't too meaningful.

[...] These results clearly show that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a chip designed specifically for gaming, not for leading-edge performance in application workloads. We've highlighted the 5800X3D beating the 12900K in gaming, but we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that the 12900K is 29% faster in single-threaded work and 62% faster in threaded applications. That chasm grows even larger with the Core i9-12900KS.

AnonTechie writes:

Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock. But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously. How can that be, and what would it mean? It'll take a little while to explain, but don't worry: even if time doesn't exist, our lives will go on as usual.

upstart writes:

US warns of govt hackers targeting industrial control systems:

A joint cybersecurity advisory issued by CISA, NSA, FBI, and the Department of Energy (DOE) warns of government-backed hacking groups being able to hijack multiple industrial devices using a new ICS-focused malware toolkit.

The federal agencies said the threat actors could use custom-built modular malware to scan for, compromise, and take control of industrial control system (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices.

"The APT actors' tools have a modular architecture and enable cyber actors to conduct highly automated exploits against targeted devices. Modules interact with targeted devices, enabling operations by lower-skilled cyber actors to emulate higher-skilled actor capabilities," the joint advisory reads.

"The APT actors can leverage the modules to scan for targeted devices, conduct reconnaissance on device details, upload malicious configuration/code to the targeted device, back up or restore device contents, and modify device parameters."

ICS/SCADA devices at risk of being compromised and hijacked include:

• Schneider Electric MODICON and MODICON Nano programmable logic controllers (PLCs)
• Omron Sysmac NJ and NX PLCs, and
• Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) servers

DOE, CISA, NSA, and the FBI also found that state-sponsored hackers also have malware that leverages CVE-2020-15368 exploits to target Windows systems with ASRock motherboards to execute malicious code and move laterally to and disrupt IT or OT environments.

upstart writes:

Google to invest $9.5B in US offices and data centers this year:

Google plans to invest $9.5 billion in US offices and data centers this year, the company said Wednesday. That's an increase from $7 billion spent on real estate in 2021.

The planned spending comes as the company begins to roll out its hybrid work strategy, which will allow many employees to work remotely part of the week.

"It might seem counterintuitive to step up our investment in physical offices even as we embrace more flexibility in how we work," said Sundar Pichai, Google and Alphabet CEO, in a blog post. "Yet we believe it's more important than ever to invest in our campuses and that doing so will make for better products, a greater quality of life for our employees, and stronger communities."

Google highlighted investments in offices across the country, including the opening of new premises in Atlanta and ongoing construction of an office in Austin, with work also under way on existing offices in New York, as well as campuses in Boulder, CO., Cambridge, MA., Pittsburgh, and Seattle. The company also expects to create 12,000 additional jobs this year.

Original Submission