SoylentNews

Submission in the queue at the time of writing: https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=39288%ACe=&title=FCC+Forced+by+Court+to+Ask+the+Public+(again)+If+They+Think+Tearing+Up+Net+Neutrality+Was+a+Really+G

I have just left a comment for the FCC to consider, and I hope that you will too. As noted in the submission, the court ordered comments are obfuscated by the FCC, apparently in the hopes that no one does comment in favor of Net Neutrality. Ajit Pai is a sweetheart, isn't he?

Web address for commenting: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express

The first block at the top of the page is "Proceeding(s)", where you will enter 17-108 Once that number is entered, you find a dropdown menu, from which you select "17-108 | restoring internet freedom".

From that point, it's a normal page, where you fill in your name, address, email, and who you represent. Miss any of those required boxes, and your comment won't be counted I suppose.

At the bottom, there is a box that you can tick, if you want email confirmation that your comments were recieved.

Also at the bottom is a warning,

Note: You are filing a document into an official FCC proceeding. All information submitted, including names and addresses, will be publicly available via the web.

Don't type anything into the form that you don't want law enforcement to follow up on. ;^)

I think I still burned them, without saying all the things I would like to have said. Be imaginative, and/or be factual, but get your views recorded. Let's not allow Ajit to smother Net Neutrality again!!

Edit: Your email confirmation will contain your full comment, along with all the information you entered into the various boxes. More, that email has the exact formating of your comment as you typed it. When you submit the form, it appears that the formatting (paragraphs, etc) is lost. What you see on the final page is a single paragraph, all mashed together.

And so I've managed to get my hands on a few FIDO2 keys, and have begun using them to provide two-factor authentication for my systems. I'm trying to figure out how to use them to provide an extra layer of security for my local systems, though a lot of such support seems to be experimental as of now. PAM has had support for FIDO2 for a while, so that's something I'm thinking of setting up. There's a project to help provide FIDO2 support for encrypted volumes, though the project appears to support only Arch for now. I'll see what I can do about getting Debian/Ubuntu support for it too, but adding this to my laptop's encrypted volume looks like something that will need to be done after I am able to make a full backup. Seems like a small hacking project I can try though. Password managers don't yet seem to have much support, but that seems to be changing, and I'll see about contributing to those efforts too. FIDO2 support for SSH is already in the mainline branch from what I can see, but I'll wait for it to filter to the distro packages.

What seems to be a bit more concerning is how few online services have support for this. Google seems to have some pretty good support for it, and a good thing too, since my GMail accounts are the "password reset central" for many of my other accounts. Namecheap seems to have good support as well. There are some very strange omissions though. First of all is Amazon. They don't support FIDO2 but supposedly support TOTP two-factor auth, but the only backup authentication they provide if the TOTP authenticator is lost is via SMS. That means entrusting to my mobile phone provider the security of my account, so forget it. I'd rather get a list of backup codes that I'd keep in a safe place the way most other TOTP implementations out there do. PayPal also has no support for FIDO2 and they have a similarly broken implementation of TOTP which also uses SMS as the only backup method. And Amazon and PayPal are both board members of the FIDO alliance and had a hand in the drafting of the standards. I get that these are relatively new standards but it still seems rather inexcusable for them not to provide proper 2FA support when these are exactly the sorts of high-value accounts that would benefit the most from 2FA. Hopefully they can get on the ball soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

The Night watch is next! Get paid to snitch...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/politics/john-mcentee-disloyal-white-house-staffers/index.html

What's TLC is SLC Again: MEMXPRO Introduces PC32 Full-Drive Pseudo-SLC SSDs

Pseudo-SLC caches for TLC-based SSDs are almost as old as TLC NAND itself, serving as a simple and practical solution to TLC's lower sustained throughput. But like all caches, pseudo-SLC caches have a finite size; and once you run over it, you're back to directly hitting the TLC. So what is a user or system builder to do if they need a drive with SLC-like performance all the time? For a while, the answer to that has been MLC drives, but with MLC slowly but surely on its way out as well, other solutions are needed. And to that end, MEMXPRO is introducing a series of new drives that go the opposite direction, embracing pseudo-SLC mode to its very core by making the entire drive pseudo-SLC.

Based on 64-layer 3D TLC memory, MEMXPRO's PC32 drives use drive-wide pseudo-SLC mode to give the drives MLC-like performance and reliability. This setup is overkill for most applications, but for use cases that require SSDs with long lifespans, and high [durability] – MEMXPRO's specialty – the PC32 fills an important niche.

The MEMXPRO PC32 drives in are based on the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller as well as Micron’s B17A 64-layer 3D TLC NAND memory, which is rated for 10,000 P/E cycles. By putting the drives in pseudo-SLC mode, the manufacturer is able to increase their durability to 40,000 P/E cycles, albeit at the cost of capacity. Since TLC NAND that offers 3-bits of storage per cell is otherwise reduced to 1-bit per cell, the drives are available in capacities from just 80 GB to 320 GB. As for throughput, with the high-end controller used for the drive, MEMXPRO has rated the drives' sustained sequential read and write performance 3,250 and 2,980 MB/s respectively, which is in line with other modern SSDs featuring a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface.

If you can figure out what kind of die size this uses (e.g. 512 Gb), you could forecast how much capacity pseudo-SLC drives of given dimensions can store in the future. NAND will eventually reach at least 256 layers, and that can be multiplied with string stacking and other techniques.

Bloomberg School of Public Health: No Evidence ‘Assault Weapon’ Bans Reduce Mass Shootings

A new study from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has found that there is no evidence that “assault weapon bans” have any impact on “the incidence of fatal mass shootings.”

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, named after notorious anti-Second Amendment activist billionaire Michael Bloomberg, released the results of its study last week.

The study “did not find an independent association between assault weapon bans and the incidence of fatal mass shootings after controlling for the effects of bans on large-capacity magazines.”

The study, which analyzed fatal mass shootings in 45 states between 1984 and 2017, did find that “firearm purchaser licensing laws that require an in-person application or fingerprinting are associated with an estimated 56 percent fewer fatal mass shootings in states that have them.”

Bloomberg, who is running for president as a Democrat, has a history of trying to destroy Second Amendment rights. His anti-gun organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, has a history of using misleading or outright false statistics manufactured by gun control groups that he has financially backs to assist in his efforts.

The most recent example happened during the Super Bowl when Bloomberg aired a one-minute commercial that was full of false information.

The emotional ad claimed in writing: “2,900 CHILDREN DIE FROM GUN VIOLENCE EVERY YEAR.”

The claim from Bloomberg was categorically false at the cited number included adults and counted suicides as examples of gun violence.

Reason Magazine reported:

According to to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FactCheck.org notes, the average number of firearm-related deaths involving Americans 17 or younger from 2013 through 2017 (the period used by Everytown for Gun Safety) was about 1,500, roughly half the number cited by Bloomberg. Furthermore, nearly two-fifths of those deaths were suicides, meaning the number of minors killed each year by “gun violence,” as that term is usually understood, is about 73 percent smaller than the figure cited in Bloomberg’s ad.

The Daily Wire highlighted Bloomberg’s views on guns in an extensive profile piece on him last September:

Bloomberg’s anti-gun advocacy is perhaps the single most defining issue of his recent private citizen activism — and perhaps the single most defining issue of his 2020 presidential bid. He is very closely affiliated with and has helped fund Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action, which are both groups deeply hostile to Second Amendment rights. He also co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns while he was mayor of New York City. Bloomberg supports “universal” background checks, which often serve as a rhetorical euphemism for the government serving as an intermediary in all private firearms transfers. Bloomberg believes that every gun owner should need a permit before making a gun purchase. He supports a ban on the undefinable sub-class of firearms referred to as so-called “assault weapons” — a line of thought that, if taken to its logical conclusion, could lead to the banning of all semi-automatic firearms in America.

In addition to promulgating false information about guns, Bloomberg has also repeatedly displayed ignorance on the issue, both on how guns operate and on what gun laws exist.

Bloomberg told Rolling Stone in 2014 that he did not know whether a minor was allowed to own a rifle, and later claimed that anyone who owns a gun is “pretty stupid.”

In a 2012 interview with ABC News, Bloomberg demonstrated that he does not know basics when it comes to guns, including what the difference between a semi-automatic and fully-automatic firearm is.

Democrat presidential candidate billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who spends tens of millions of dollars pushing for extreme gun control laws, demonstrates that he knows literally nothing about firearms.pic.twitter.com/SCjpNdQm6h

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra)

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-school-of-public-health-no-evidence-assault-weapon-bans-reduce-mass-shootings

Sheriff: Prison Reform Advocate Planted Guns for Jail Break
Tennessee authorities say a longtime prison reform advocate was preparing to stage a jail break when he hid loaded guns and ammunition in a new jail that was under construction.
By Associated Press, Wire Service Content Feb. 19, 2020, at 4:43 p.m.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A longtime prison reform advocate was preparing to stage a jail break when he hid loaded guns and ammunition in a new jail that was under construction, Tennessee authorities said Wednesday.

Alex Friedmann, a former prisoner turned crusader against private prisons and a longtime editor at Prison Legal News, was charged last month with attempted burglary. He was accused of gaining access to the new jail by dressing as a construction worker and stealing keys.

As the investigation continued, “it was discovered that Mr. Friedmann, over many months, had developed and implemented an extremely deliberate and, in my opinion, evil plan,” Nashville Sheriff Daron Hall said during a Wednesday news conference announcing Friedmann’s re-arrest on upgraded charges.

Friedmann is now charged with vandalism of $250,000 or more, with his bond set at $2.5 million.

Friedmann's attorney, Ben Raybin, issued a statement late Wednesday.

“I am currently unable to comment on any of the factual allegations,” Raybin said. “Mr. Friedmann is presumed innocent and will respond through the appropriate legal processes.”

Hall said he believes Friedmann was designing a massive jail break that would endanger “every inmate, every visitor and our entire community.”

“Virtually everything I’m telling you is on video” Hall said, noting that investigators have poured through hundreds of hours of video to identify the areas of the building that were compromised.

Hall currently serves as president of the National Sheriff’s Association and said no one there has ever seen anything like this before.

“It will forever change how correctional facilities are built,” he said.

Prison Legal News is a project of the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center. Friedmann resigned as editor after his earlier arrest in January, executive director Paul Wright said in a telephone interview.

[ED: What this AP story doesn’t mention is that this celebrated “prison reform advocate” had spent ten years in a Tennessee prison for attempted murder, armed robbery, and attempted aggravated robbery.]

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2020-02-19/sheriff-prison-reform-advocate-planted-guns-for-jail-break

Don't you just love those liberal activists? Is it necessary to state the obvious? Non-violent, non-dangerous offenders locked up for weeks or months for being bad don't even WANT weapons. It would only be dangerous, violent offenders who are looking for weapons.

And, I almost missed the romanticized side of things. Attempted murder, armed robbery, and attempted aggravated robbery - much the same thing that Patty Hearst was involved in. Awwww, to bad he's not an heir to some rich old bastard, huh?

SpaceX nailed the launch but missed a landing on Monday [Updated]

SpaceX launches fifth batch of Starlink satellites, misses booster landing

Despite the reduced workload, Falcon 9’s reusable first-stage booster missed the droneship “Of Course I Still Love You,” splashing down nearby in the Atlantic Ocean.

On the live stream, it looked like a "space snake" came off of the booster. Critical component?

If the booster is too salty or smashed to be refurbished, that is an expensive batch of Starlink sats.

2 more launches to go until the lower bound for launching a service. 8 more for "moderate coverage".

Did you know that SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team? It has been a long while since status on our team's progress has been provided to the community, so here goes!

What IS Folding@Home?

First off, what is Folding@Home? Here is an extremely brief synopsis of F@H taken from Wikipedia:

Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. The project uses the idle processing resources of hundreds of thousands of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems.[citation needed] Its main purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding, which is the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure, and to examine the causes of protein misfolding. This is of interest to medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases. To a lesser extent, Folding@home also tries to predict a protein's final structure and determine how other molecules may interact with it, which has applications in drug design. Folding@home is developed and operated by the Pande Laboratory at Stanford University, under the direction of Prof. Vijay Pande, and is shared by various scientific institutions and research laboratories across the world.[4]

The Very Beginning:

Our F@H team got its start when Sir Finkus posted an entry to his journal. He announced (on 2016-02-09 04:04:00 UTC) that team SoylentNews.org had been created. There was an initial flurry of activity, which eventually settled down to a core group who have been contributing ever since. Of late we have had a couple members upgrade their rigs and graciously donated them to the cause. This made a much-appreciated impact on the team's productivity.

Team Rankings Over Time:

At the time of its creation we were team number 230,319; since we had not yet earned any points that made us tied for last place. I could find no records of the team' score before 2016-04-12 at which point we were at 1125th place in the world. Back when F@H got started, all work was done on CPUs and they were much slower, then. By the time we joined, it was much easier for a current-day CPU or GPU to complete a work unit and thus advance a team's score. So, in the early days, we were skipping right by those who gave it a try, saw their very slow progress, and quit. We were gaining hundreds of places in each of those first days! For the curious, here are our rankings on the first day of each month for which I have a record:

Current Ranking:

Team SoylentNews.org, at the time of this writing, (2020-02-16) is at 213th place in the entire world!

Woo Hoo!

There are two places on-line where one can get the latest statistics on our team. (1) On the official F@H team status page (2) Any of the different views compiled by ExtremeOverclocking.com such as their team summary page.

Our Team's Top Ten:

For posterity's sake, the 10 top folders on our team are:

1. cmn32480
2. LTKKane
3. Runaway1956
4. tibman
5. warlord
6. phred420
7. Booga1
8. EricAlbers
9. ealbers
10. malloc

Joining Up:

Are you interested in joining our team? Reply in the comments here and one of our team will help you get started.

I saw this blog post on the Kodi news ticker on LibreELEC:

In Defence of Our Good Name

Kodi is undoubtedly synonymous with streaming 🏴‍☠️piracy🏴‍☠️, although it is useful software even when "clean" and you can do a decent amount with the official add-ons repo (YouTube, Pluto.TV, internet radio, etc.).

Are they going through the obligatory motions to distance themselves from 🏴‍☠️yarrrrr🏴‍☠️ or are they legitimately pissed off? It's probably a bit of both.

Exclusive: Intel Xe HP 4-Tile 500W GPU EU Count Leaked, No It’s Not 512

This is a follow-up to an earlier story I linked.

• Intel Xe HP (Gen 12.5) 1-Tile GPU: 512 EUs [Est: 4096 Cores, 12.2 TFLOPs assuming 1.5GHz, 150W]
• Intel Xe HP (Gen 12.5) 2-Tile GPU: 1024 EUs [Est: 8192 Cores, 20.48 TFLOPs assuming 1.25 GHz, 300W]
• Intel Xe HP (Gen 12.5) 4-Tile GPU: 2048 EUs [Est: 16,384 Cores, 36 TFLOPs assuming 1.1 GHz, 400W/500W]

That's 81.3, 68.3, and 72-90 GFLOPS/Watt, if accurate.

Compare to about 44.2 GFLOPS/W for Radeon RX 5700, 53.8 for RTX 2080 Ti, or 116.3 for Tesla T4. I'm just getting those numbers by dividing the FP32 GFLOPS by TDP, so YMMV.

400-500 Watts sounds extreme but it might not be as hard to cool as you think since the die area of a 4-tile multi-chip module (basically chiplets) would be huge. An advantage of the MCM approach is better yields. It would be difficult to create a 1,600 mm² monolithic GPU, while putting four 400 mm² tiles together is easier.

If this is a success, Intel will probably shoot for a design with 8 tiles eventually (2024?).