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hubie writes:

From Cory Doctorow's blog:

Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into discussions of AI. Unlike you, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026.

A week ago, I turned that book into a speech, which I delivered as the annual Nordlander Memorial Lecture at Cornell, where I'm an AD White Professor-at-Large. This was my first-ever speech about AI and I wasn't sure how it would go over, but thankfully, it went great and sparked a lively Q&A. One of those questions came from a young man who said something like "So, you're saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that's going to burst and take the whole economy with it?"

I said, "Yes, that's right."

He said, "OK, but what can we do about that?"

So I re-iterated the book's thesis: that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. "pivot to video," crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now "super-intelligence." Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

The only thing (I said) that we can do about this is to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt. To do that, we have to take aim at the material basis for the AI bubble (creating a growth story by claiming that defective AI can do your job).

Last week the U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon produced the latest attack on academia, "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," which was addressed to a small group of well known US universities. If you missed it, there is a description at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_for_Academic_Excellence_in_Higher_Education

Today (10/10/2025) MIT was the first of the group to reject the offer. Here is the letter from MIT's president, https://orgchart.mit.edu/letters/regarding-compact
It's not long and worth a read, here is the punch line,

In our view, America's leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.

And here's one of her bullet points,

MIT opens its doors to the most talented students regardless of their family's finances. Admissions are need-blind. Incoming undergraduates whose families earn less than $200,000 a year pay no tuition. Nearly 88% of our last graduating class left MIT with no debt for their education. We make a wealth of free courses and low-cost certificates available to any American with an internet connection. Of the undergraduate degrees we award, 94% are in STEM fields. And in service to the nation, we cap enrollment of international undergraduates at roughly 10%.

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upstart writes:

Baseload power is functionally extinct:

Much has been made of the notion that "renewables can't supply baseload power". This line suggests we need to replace Australia's ageing coal fleet with new coal or nuclear. The fact of the matter is that, already, "baseload" is an outdated concept and baseload generators face extinction.

Traditional utility grid management suggests there are three types of load: baseload, shoulder, and peak. Baseload is underlying 24/7 energy demand. Peak load is regular, but short-lived periods of high demand and shoulder loads are what lie in between. Under this model, system planning is straightforward – assign different types of energy generation to the different loads according to the price and qualitative characteristics.

Traditional, simple dispatch of generation technologies according to cost and flexibility

Historically in Australia, coal supplies most baseload demand since it is relatively cheap and very slow to ramp its output up or down. In some countries, baseload is met with nuclear since it is even less flexible than coal, but only two countries generate more than 50% of their energy from nuclear.

With the roles of different generators clearly delineated, power planners' jobs are much easier in this idealised system than today's grid.

In a system with lots of solar, prices fall dramatically at around midday because solar has no fuel cost. Because much of Australian solar is on rooftops, grid demand also falls. For those hours, baseload generators must either operate at a loss or shut down. Continuing to generate produces more energy than the grid requires at very low or negative prices. This is not a conscious choice—it is the structure of the market that the cheapest bid gets dispatched first.

In practice, most baseload generators are simply not capable of ramping up and down fast enough – they must bear loss-making prices in the middle of the day and try to make it up with high prices at peak periods. Moreover, this daily up/down ramp (called "load-following") brings efficiency losses and extra maintenance costs.

canopic jug writes:

David C Brock interviewed Ken Thompson for the Computer History Museum. It's a long interview with a video with a written transcript. The video is just over 4.5 hours long. The transcript weighs in at 64 pages as a downloadable PDF locked behind a CPU- and RAM-chewing web app.

This is an oral history interview with Ken Thompson, created in partnership by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer History Museum, in connection with his A.M. Turing Award in 1983. The interview begins with Thompson's family background and youth, detailing the hobbies he pursued intently from electronics and radio projects, to music, cars, and chess. He describes his experience at the University of California, Berkeley, and his deepening engagement with computers and computer programming there.

The interview then moves to his recruitment to the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and his experience of the Multics project. Thompson next describes his development of Unix and, with Dennis Ritchie, the programming language C. He describes the development of Unix and the Unix community at Bell Labs, and then details his work using Unix for the Number 5 Electronic Switching System. Thompson details his Turing Award lecture, the work on compromised compilers that led to it, and his views on computer security.

Next, he details his career in computer chess and work he did for Bell Labs artist Lillian Schwartz. Thompson describes his work on the Plan 9 operating system at Bell Labs with Rob Pike, and his efforts to create a digital music archive. He then details his post Bell Labs career at Entrisphere and then Google, including his role in Google Books and the creation of the Go programming language.

Previously:
(2025) Why Bell Labs Worked
(2022) Unix History: A Mighty Origin Story
(2019) Vintage Computer Federation East 2019 -- Brian Kernighan Interviews Ken Thompson

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AnonTechie writes:

From the Trenches

An interesting article about software quality over the years - by Denis Stetskov

The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM.

Not used. Not allocated. Leaked. A basic calculator app is haemorrhaging more memory than most computers had a decade ago.

Twenty years ago, this would have triggered emergency patches and post-mortems. Today, it's just another bug report in the queue.

We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence.

The Numbers Nobody Wants to Discuss:

I've been tracking software quality metrics for three years. The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential.

Memory consumption has lost all meaning:

VS Code: 96GB memory leaks through SSH connections

Microsoft Teams: 100% CPU usage on 32GB machines

Chrome: 16GB consumption for 50 tabs is now "normal"

Discord: 32GB RAM usage within 60 seconds of screen sharing

Spotify: 79GB memory consumption on macOS

These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix.

This isn't sustainable. Physics doesn't negotiate. Energy is finite. Hardware has limits.

The companies that survive won't be those who can outspend the crisis.

There'll be those who remember how to engineer. We're living through the greatest software quality crisis in computing history. A Calculator leaks 32GB of RAM. AI assistants delete production databases. Companies spend $364 billion to avoid fixing fundamental problems.

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Rich writes:

Qualcomm on Tuesday said it has acquired Arduino, an Italian not-for-profit firm that makes hardware and software for developing prototypes of robots and other electronic gadgets, Reuters reports at https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/qualcomm-buys-open-source-electronics-firm-arduino-2025-10-07/.

Arduino's own announcement can be found at https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/10/07/a-new-chapter-for-arduino-with-qualcomm-uno-q-and-you/.

Along with the news that might confuse those that could not imagine "Arduino" itself as a tangible sales item, Arduino introduced a new model in the Uno form factor that comprises a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 to run Linux, an STM32U585 microcontroller for hardware interfacing, and some new high density connector on the bottom side. It is priced at $44 in the Arduino store.

Reception of the news seems to be mixed in various channels, many doubt Qualcomm with its history would be a good steward for an ecosystem like Arduino.

The new Arduino Q moves squarely into Raspberry Pi territory, where the Pi 5 currently sells for around $55 with mostly comparable features, at least if the RP2040-like features in the RP1 I/O controller are counted in.

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hubie writes:

Turning dissolved carbon dioxide from seawater to biodegradable plastic is an especially powerful way to clean up the ocean:

Not-so-fun fact: our oceans hold 150 times more carbon dioxide than the Earth's atmosphere. Adding to that causes ocean acidification, which can disrupt marine food chains and reduce biodiversity.

Addressing this could not only help restore balance to underwater ecosystems, but also take advantage of an opportunity to sustainably use this stored CO2 for a variety of purposes – including producing the industrial chemicals needed to make plastic.

The first towards this is called Direct Ocean Capture – which refers to removing dissolved carbon directly from seawater – happens through electrochemical processes. While there are a bunch of companies working on this, it hasn't extensively been applied at scale yet, and the cost benefit doesn't look great at the moment (it's estimated that removing 1 ton of CO2 from the ocean could cost at least US$373, according to Climate Interventions).

Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China – both in Shenzhen, China – have devised a DOC method which involves converting the captured CO2 into biodegradable plastic precursors. This approach is also described as operating at 70% efficiency, while consuming a relatively small amount of energy (3 kWh per kg of CO2), and working out to an impressive $230 per ton of CO2.

What's also worth noting is the use of modified marine bacteria for the last step. Here's a breakdown of the process, described in a paper appearing in Nature Catalysis:

First, electricity is used in a special reactor to acidify natural seawater. This converts the invisible, dissolved carbon into pure gas, which is collected. The system then restores the water's natural chemistry before returning it to the ocean.

Next, the captured CO2 gas is fed into a second reactor containing a bismuth-based catalyst to yield a concentrated, pure liquid called formic acid. Formic acid is a critical intermediate because it is an energy-rich food source for microbes.

Engineered marine microbes, specifically Vibrio natriegens, are fed the pure formic acid as their sole source of carbon. The microbes metabolize the formic acid and efficiently produce succinic acid, which is then used directly as the essential precursor to synthesize biodegradable plastics, such as polybutylene succinate (PBS).

That's a pretty good start. The researchers note there's room for optimization to boost yields and integrate this system into industrial processes. It could also be altered to produce chemicals for use in fuels, drugs, and foods.

It also remains to be seen how quickly the team can commercialize this DOC method, because it may have formidable competition. For example, Netherlands-based Brineworks says it will get to under $200/ton by 2030 with its electrolysis-based solution. The next couple of years will be worth watching in this fascinating niche of decarbonization.

Journal Reference: Li, C., Guo, M., Yang, B. et al. Efficient and scalable upcycling of oceanic carbon sources into bioplastic monomers. Nat Catal (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-025-01416-4

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upstart writes:

The transistor was patented 75 years ago today:

75 years ago, the three Bell Labs scientists behind the invention of the transistor would, at last, have the U.S. Patent in their hands. This insignificant-looking semiconductor device with three electrodes sparked the third industrial revolution. Moreover, it ushered in the age of silicon and software, which still dominates business and human society to this day.

The first working transistor was demonstrated in 1947, but it wasn't until October 3, 1950, that the patent was secured by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. The patent was issued for a "three-electrode circuit element utilizing semiconductor materials." It would take several more years before the significant impacts transistors would have on business and society were realized.

Transistors replaced the bulky, fragile and power-hungry valves, that stubbornly remain present in some guitar amplifiers, audiophile sound systems, studio gear, where their 'organic' sound profile is sometime preferred. We also still see valves in some military, scientific, and microwave/RF applications, where transistors might be susceptible to radiation or other interference. There are other niche use cases.

Beyond miniaturization, transistors would deliver dramatic boosts in - computational speed, energy efficiency, and reliability. Moreover, they became the foundation for integrated circuits and processors, where billions of transistors could operate reliably in a much smaller footprint than taken up by a single valve. Processors featuring a trillion transistors are now on the horizon.

For PC enthusiasts, probably the best known piece of transistor lore comes from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. Of course, we are talking about Moore's Law, which was an observation by the pioneering American engineer. Moore's most famous prediction was that "the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years with minimal rise in cost." (Law was revised from one to two years in 1975).

Obviously, prior to 1965, when Moore's Law was set out, the startling advance in transistor technology indicated that such an extrapolation would be reasonable. Even, now, certain semiconductor companies, engineers, and commentators reckon that Moore's Law is still alive and well. You can see Intel's position in the slides, above.

Whatever the case, it can't be denied that since the patenting of the transistor, we have seen incredible miniaturization and advances in computing and software, expanding the possibilities of minds and machines. The current tech universe is actually buzzing with firms that reckon they can make machines with minds - artificial intelligence.

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looorg writes:

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has been awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize

Somewhat better then the IG Nobel is the actual Nobel prizes. Winners started to be announced this week. So far Medicine and Physics, others to be revealed in the following days as I write this.

Physics. "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit"
Medicine. "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance"

Chemistry.
Literature.

Peace.
Economic Science.

https://www.nobelprize.org/all-nobel-prizes-2025/

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hubie writes:

StatCounter reports that Windows 7 has gained almost 10% market share in the last month, just as Windows 10 support is coming to an end. It's clear people aren't ready to switch to Windows 11.

Someone must be wishing really hard, as according to StatCounter, Windows 7 is gaining market share in the year 2025, five years after support for it officially ended. As of this week, Windows 7 is now in use on 9.61% of Windows PCs within StatCounters pool of data, and that's up from the 3.59% it had just a month ago.

For years, Windows 7 has hovered around 2% market share on StatCounter. After mainstream support ended, the last few holdouts very quickly made the move to Windows 10, but with support for Windows 10 ending now just two weeks away, it looks like many are giving Microsoft's best version of Windows another try.

Of course, StatCounter isn't an entirely accurate measure when it comes to actual usage numbers, but it can give us a rough idea about how the market is trending, and it seems people are not happy with the idea of upgrading to Windows 11 from Windows 10. Windows 7's sudden marketshare gain is likely a blip, but interesting nonetheless.

Taking a closer look at StatCounter, it appears Windows 11 market share stalled in the last month, maintaining around 48% share. Windows 10 continued to drop, as expected, and is now on just 40% of PCs. While I wouldn't be surprised if some people had experimented with going back to Windows 7 recently, I highly doubt it's a number as high as 9.61%.

[...] Windows 11 failing to gain any market share in the final month before Windows 10's end of support is frankly shocking, and if the numbers are accurate, should be setting alarm bells off for Microsoft internally. It's clear that much of the market has rejected Windows 11, whether that be because of its high system requirements or insistence on AI features, people aren't moving to it.

In recent months, it seems Windows' reputation has fallen off a cliff. With enshittification slowly moving in, a lack of innovative new features and experiences that aren't tied to AI, and monthly updates that consistently introduce unnecessary changes and issues, people are getting tired of Microsoft's antics.

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upstart writes:

Are VPNs Under Attack? An Anti-Censorship Group Speaks Out:

"Leave VPNs alone." That's the plea from anti-online censorship and surveillance group Fight for the Future, which designated Sept. 25 as a VPN Day of Action to press lawmakers not to ban virtual private networks. A week later, there's still an opportunity to get involved and raise awareness.

The group of activists, artists, engineers and technologists is asking people to sign an open letter encouraging politicians to preserve the existence of VPNs and "defend privacy and to access knowledge and information online." Virtual private networks encrypt internet connections and can hide your physical location.

Joining the action on Thursday was the VPN Trust Initiative -- comprised of NordVPN, Surfshark and ExpressVPN -- and the VPN Guild, which includes Amnezia VPN.

The open letter refers to recent "age-verification" laws propelling legislative moves to ban or restrict VPN usage. Such measures would lead to increased online surveillance and censorship, which "has a huge chilling effect on our freedoms, particularly the freedoms of traditionally marginalized people," the letter notes.

Lia Holland, Fight for the Future's campaigns and communication director, said VPNs are vital for "people living under authoritarian regimes" to avoid censorship and surveillance, and have become an essential tool in exercising basic human rights.

Half of all US states have passed age-verification laws requiring internet users to prove their age with government-issued IDs, credit card checks and other methods. The laws have spurred consumers to sign up for VPNs to avoid giving out sensitive information, with one recent VPN sign-up spike in the UK.

Michigan is considering a bill banning adult content online and VPNs. If it becomes law, Michigan would be the first US state to ban VPNs. Many countries, including China, India and Iran, already ban or heavily restrict VPNs.

"Amid a moral panic, ignorant 'save-the-children' politicians are getting very close to kicking the hornet's nest of millions of people who know how important VPNs are," Holland said.

Banning VPNs would be "difficult," according to attorney Mario Trujillo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international digital rights group.

Trujillo told CNET that VPNs are best for routing your network connection through a different network. "They can be used to help avoid censorship, but they are also used by employees in every sector to connect to their company's network," he said. "That is a practical reality that would make any ban difficult."

Trujillo added that the US lags behind the rest of the world in privacy regulation, and that lawmakers should focus more on privacy than VPN bans.

Fight for the Future identifies local lawmakers and provides templates for contacting them. This information is on the same page as the open letter.

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hubie writes:

The ship wasn't designed to withstand the powerful ice compression forces—and Shackleton knew it:

In 1915, intrepid British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew were stranded for months in the Antarctic after their ship, Endurance, was trapped by pack ice, eventually sinking into the freezing depths of the Weddell Sea. Miraculously, the entire crew survived. The prevailing popular narrative surrounding the famous voyage features two key assumptions: that Endurance was the strongest polar ship of its time, and that the ship ultimately sank after ice tore away the rudder.

However, a fresh analysis reveals that Endurance would have sunk even with an intact rudder; it was crushed by the cumulative compressive forces of the Arctic ice with no single cause for the sinking. Furthermore, the ship wasn't designed to withstand those forces and Shackleton was likely well aware of that fact, according to a new paper published in the journal Polar Record. Yet he chose to embark on the risky voyage anyway.

Author Jukka Tuhkuri of Aalto University is a polar explorer and one of the leading researchers on ice worldwide. He was among the scientists on the Endurance22 mission that discovered the Endurance shipwreck in 2022, documented in a 2024 National Geographic documentary. The ship was in pristine condition partly because of the lack of wood-eating microbes in those waters. In fact, the Endurance22 expedition's exploration director, Mensun Bound, told The New York Times at the time that the shipwreck was the finest example he's ever seen; Endurance was "in a brilliant state of preservation."

[...] Once the wreck had been found, the team recorded as much as they could with high-resolution cameras and other instruments. Vasarhelyi, particularly, noted the technical challenge of deploying a remote digital 4K camera with lighting at 9,800 feet underwater, and the first deployment at that depth of photogrammetric and laser technology. This resulted in a millimeter-scale digital reconstruction of the entire shipwreck to enable close study of the finer details.

It was shortly after the Endurance22 mission found the shipwreck that Tuhkuri realized that there had never been a thorough structural analysis conducted of the vessel to confirm the popular narrative. Was Endurance truly the strongest polar ship of that time, and was a broken rudder the actual cause of the sinking? He set about conducting his own investigation to find out, analyzing Shackleton's diaries and personal correspondence, as well as the diaries and correspondence of several Endurance crew members.

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-forensic-recovers-fingerprints-ammunition-casings.html

A pioneering new test that can recover fingerprints from ammunition casing, once thought nearly impossible, has been developed by two Irish scientists.

Dr. Eithne Dempsey, and her recent Ph.D. student Dr. Colm McKeever, of the Department of Chemistry in Ireland's Maynooth University have developed a unique electrochemical method which can visualize fingerprints on brass casings, even after they have been exposed to the high temperature conditions experienced during gunfire. The study is published in the journal Forensic Chemistry.

For decades, investigators have struggled to recover fingerprints from weapons because any biological trace is usually destroyed by the high temperatures, friction and gas released after a gun is fired. As a result, criminals often abandon their weapons or casings at crime scenes, confident that they leave no fingerprint evidence behind.

"The Holy Grail in forensic investigation has always been retrieving prints from fired ammunition casings," said Dr. Dempsey. "Traditionally, the intense heat of firing destroys any biological residue. However, our technique has been able to reveal fingerprint ridges that would otherwise remain imperceptible."

The team found they could coat brass casings with a thin layer of specialized materials to make hidden fingerprint ridges visible. Unlike existing methods that need dangerous chemicals or high-powered equipment, the new process uses readily available non-toxic polymers and minimal amounts of energy to quickly reveal prints from seemingly blank surfaces.

It works by placing the brass casing of interest in an electrochemical cell containing specific chemical substances. When a small voltage is applied, chemicals in the solution are attracted to the surface, coating the spaces between fingerprint ridges and creating a clear, high contrast image of the print. The fingerprint appears within seconds as if by magic!

"Using the burnt material that remains on the surface of the casing as a stencil, we can deposit specific materials in between the gaps, allowing for the visualization," said Dr. McKeever.

Tests showed that this technique also worked on samples aged up to 16 months, demonstrating remarkable durability.

The research has significant implications for criminal investigations, where the current assumption is that firing a gun eliminates fingerprint residues on casings.

"Currently, the best case of forensic analysis of ammunition casings is to match it to the gun that fired it," said Dr. McKeever. "But we hope a method like this could match it back to the actual person who loaded the gun."

The team focused specifically on brass ammunition casings, a substance that has been traditionally resistant to fingerprint detection and is the most common type of material used globally.

The researchers believe that the test for fingerprints on brass they have developed could be adapted for other metallic surfaces, expanding its range of potential forensic applications, from firearm-related crimes to arson.

This technique uses a device called a potentiostat, which controls voltage and can be as portable as a mobile phone, making it possible to create a compact forensic testing kit.

"With this method, we have turned the ammunition casing into an electrode, allowing us to drive chemical reactions at the surface of the casing," said Dr. McKeever.

While promising, the new technology faces rigorous testing and validation before it could potentially be adopted by law enforcement agencies worldwide.

More information: Colm McKeever et al, Electrodeposition of redox materials with potential for enhanced visualisation of latent finger-marks on brass substrates and ammunition casings., Forensic Chemistry (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.forc.2025.100663

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upstart writes:

Guess how much of Britain's direct transatlantic data capacity runs through two cables in Bude?:

Feature The first transatlantic cable, laid in 1858, delivered a little over 700 messages before promptly dying a few weeks later. 167 years on, the undersea cables connecting the UK to the outside world process £220 billion in daily financial transactions. Now, the UK Parliament's Joint Committee on National Security Strategy (JCNSS) has told the government that it has to do a better job of protecting them.

The Committee's report, released on September 19, calls the government "too timid" in its approach to protecting the cables that snake from the UK to various destinations around the world. It warns that "security vulnerabilities abound" in the UK's undersea cable infrastructure, when even a simple anchor-drag can cause major damage.

There are 64 cables connecting the UK to the outside world, according to the report, carrying most of the country's internet traffic. Satellites can't shoulder the data volumes involved, are too expensive, and only account for around 5 percent of traffic globally.

These cables are invaluable to the UK economy, but they're also difficult to protect. They are heavily shielded in the shallow sea close to those points. That's because accidental damage from fishing operations and other vessels is common. On average, around 200 cables suffer faults each year. But as they get further out, the shielding is less robust. Instead, the companies that lay the cables rely on the depth of the sea to do its job (you'll be pleased to hear that sharks don't generally munch on them).

The report praises a strong cable infrastructure, and admits that in some areas at least we have the redundancy in the cable infrastructure to handle disruptions. For example, it notes that 75 percent of UK transatlantic traffic routes through two cables that come ashore in Bude, Cornwall. That seems like quite the vulnerability, but it acknowledges that we have plenty of infrastructure to route around if anything happened to them. There is "no imminent threat to the UK's national connectivity," it soothes.

But it simultaneously cautions against adopting what it describes as "business-as-usual" views in the industry. The government "focuses too much on having 'lots of cables' and pays insufficient attention to the system's actual ability to absorb unexpected shocks," it frets. It warns that "the impacts on connectivity would be much more serious," if onward connections to Europe suffered as part of a coordinated attack.

"While our national connectivity does not face immediate danger, we must prepare for the possibility that our cables can be threatened in the event of a security crisis," it says.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-qnx-operating-system

Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge were finishing their time at the University of Waterloo in Ontario in 1979. In pursuit of their masters degrees, they'd worked on a system called Thoth in their real-time operating systems course. Thoth was interesting not only for having been real-time and having featured synchronous message passing, but also for originally having been written in the B programming langue. It was then rewritten in the UW-native Eh language (fitting for a Canadian university), and then finally rewritten in Zed. It is this last, Zed-written, version of Thoth to which Bell and Dodge would have been exposed. Having always been written in a high-level language, the system was portable, and programs were the same regardless of the underlying hardware. Both by convention and by design, Thoth strongly encouraged programs to be structured as networks of communicating processes. As the final project for the RTOS course, students were expected to implement a real-time system of their own. This experience was likely pivotal to their next adventure.

A very deep and excellent dive into the world/history of QNX:

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