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I graduated college with a degree in electronics and computer engineering eighteen years ago, and haven’t seriously done hardware almost since then. After I wound up looking for hardware random number generators in an attempt to respond to a post here, I decided to try building one myself, based on the design here. I ordered a few Picaxe chips just for the purpose, though I wound up using a circuit design based on this instead but used a 74LS14 Schmitt trigger inverter instead of the 74ALS04 described there. As suggested on the link I used a MAX232 RS-232 Line Driver to generate the 16 V the transistors use to generate avalanche noise. Unfortunately, the Picaxe-08M2 could only send the random data back at 2400 baud, and so I wired the same circuit up to a cheap Arduino Nano clone and managed to at least get 115200 baud. Going to higher baud rates doesn’t seem to improve data transfer speed.

The random data it generates seems to be very good though, and passes the ENT and FIPS 140-2 tests. The Dieharder tests almost all pass, with only two or three getting a Weak rating, but from what I can see even that is already very good. Just seems to mean that I might not have completely eliminated the bias from the circuit using the von Neumann algorithm alone. The hardest part about this project seems to be getting the random data out of the circuit and into my computer at a reasonably high speed. And that leads me to USB, which looks to be rather complicated. ordered a few PIC16F1455 microcontrollers which should be able to do full speed USB at 12 Mbps, which is good enough for my purposes, although it looks like getting that to work is going to be complicated to say the least.

My PICs just came in today. Later, I’m going to start with getting them programmed with some basic stuff and try to get familiar with the toolchain (SDCC), start with the “hello world” of getting the microcontroller to flash a LED, using my Arduino as a programmer, and then try to figure out how to do the rest later on. Once I have a working design I’ll upload it somewhere, both the hardware designs and the software.

I'm not doing this up as a proper story right at the moment because I'm not feeling especially professional and I prefer to be when talking about site business as a staff member. That said, this needs some attention.

A combination of personal issues and burnout have caused staffing on the site to drop annoyingly low. Here's the current shortfalls in staffing:

• Half a dozen or so Editors. We could use ten. Preferably folks not on a GMT or east coast time daylight hours schedule.
• Two perl coders. NCommander is still around doing systems and infrastructure but it's just me and paulej72 writing perl for the site currently. We realistically need four to six.
• Two board members. We need a bare minimum of three to prevent tie votes.
• Zero treasurers. The two board members have been covering this but we need someone who's good with finances and can keep track of everything officially.
• Zero artsy types. All UI design choices and graphics are currently done by us code monkeys, this is far from ideal.
• Zero wiki admins. We usually have to figure out who even has emergency backup access to it when something needs administratively done.

Again, this is not an official call to arms. This is me being annoyed at the state of things and venting. Board and treasurer decisions will be made by the board and it's not even my place to ask for recruits, so I'm not. That said, if you want to volunteer for any staff position, we're always open.

Best way to get in touch is to contact us on IRC (look over to the left) but don't expect an immediate response because we're often busy doing Life Stuff. Email works as well. themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org or any other staff member will get you forwarded to someone happy to help you on your way to exploitation.

Defenders or enablers? [foxnews.com]

Men-only island set for UNESCO World Heritage status

A Japanese island where women are not allowed to set foot has been recommended for listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Okinoshima in south-western Japan is deemed so sacred that only men are allowed to visit, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reports. Even then, visitors are not allowed to bring back any souvenirs to the mainland, not even a blade of grass, the paper says. It has been recommended for World Heritage status by an advisory panel, with a final decision to be made at a UNESCO meeting in July.

The home to the Munakata Taisha Okitsumiya shrine, which honours a goddess of the sea, Okinoshima was the site of rituals for the safety of ships, and successful exchanges with the people of the Korean Peninsula and China between the fourth and ninth centuries, the Japan Times says.

wut about the kawaii goddess? Do she count?

New World Order Government cultural organization enforces gender norms on a Japanese island with a for real goddess on it, leading to a disastrous series of events. I'm sure somebody could write a 25 episode anime with that premise.

You were (spoilers) warned. Now it begins. The Garden Bridge has gone down in flames!

• Evening Standard
• The Guardian
• Washington Post
• Curbed
• Motherboard
• BBC News

The FBI translator who went rogue and married an ISIS terrorist

He was Denis Cuspert, a German rapper turned ISIS pitchman, whose growing influence as an online recruiter for violent jihadists had put him on the radar of counter-terrorism authorities on two continents.

In Germany, Cuspert went by the rap name Deso Dogg. In Syria, he was known as Abu Talha al-Almani. He praised Osama bin Laden in a song, threatened former President Barack Obama with a throat-cutting gesture and appeared in propaganda videos, including one in which he was holding a freshly severed human head.

Within weeks of marrying Cuspert, Greene, 38, seemed to realize she had made a terrible mistake. She fled back to the US, where she was immediately arrested and agreed to cooperate with authorities. She pleaded guilty to making false statements involving international terrorism and was sentenced to two years in federal prison. She was released last summer.

FBI employee married ISIS fighter she was asked to investigate

Prosecutors describe her actions as deserving of "severe punishment," but she was sentenced to just two years in prison. According to an analysis by Fordham University, Americans who are prosecuted for ISIS-related cases received on average 13.5 years in prison.

Quick! WRITE THE SCRIPT! Call Lionsgate!

Unblur!

Further to my rant about the speed of current versions of Firefox, I'd like to add one about LibreOffice. At the same time I upgraded Firefox, I upgraded from LibreOffice 4.0.x to 5.2.x and the difference was spectacular.

Now, I have to wait while I watch the buttons on the GUI being repainted.

I think I'll change to Siag Office. Bah!

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2017_Phase_I_Phase_II/Fusion_Enabled_Pluto_Orbiter_and_Lander

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/04/fusion-enabled-pluto-orbiter-and-lander.html

The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) concept provides game-changing propulsion and power capabilities that would revolutionize interplanetary travel. DFD is based on the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) fusion reactor under development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The mission context we are proposing is delivery of a Pluto orbiter with a lander. DFD provides high thrust to allow for reasonable transit times to Pluto while delivering substantial mass to orbit: 1000 kg delivered in 4 years. Since DFD provides power as well as propulsion in one integrated device, it will also provide as much as 1 MW of power to the payloads upon arrival. This enables high-bandwidth communication, powering of the lander from orbit, and radically expanded options for instrument design. The data acquired by New Horizons’ recent Pluto flyby is just a tiny fraction of the scientific data that could be generated from an orbiter and lander. Engine modeling accomplished during Phase I has shown that we can expect 2.5 to 5 N of thrust per megawatt of fusion power, with an Isp of about 10,000 seconds and 200 kW available as electrical power. We have evaluated the components of the Pluto trajectory including an Earth departure spiral, constant thrust planar transfer, and Pluto insertion using these thrust and Isp levels, and confirmed the plausibility of the proposed mission. In fact, the mission can depart from LEO with about the mass we originally estimated for an interplanetary insertion, widening the range of available launch vehicles and reducing the cost.

Planet Nine in 10-15 years instead of 100:

John Brophy at NASA Jet propulsion laboratory combines a near term 100 megawatt laser beamed power system to enable an ion drive with 70 megawatts of power and 58000 ISP.

They propose a new power/propulsion architecture to enable missions such as a 12-yr flight time to 500 AU—the distance at which solar gravity lensing can be used to image exoplanets—with a conventional (i.e., New Horizons sized) spacecraft. This architecture would also enable orbiter missions to Pluto with the same sized spacecraft in just 3.6 years. Significantly, this same architecture could deliver an 80-metric-ton payload to Jupiter orbit in one year, opening the possibility of human missions to Jupiter. These are just a few examples of high-impact missions that simply cannot be performed today due to limitations in current technology.

According to Fox News via Twitter,

.@POTUS has proclaimed May 1 to be 'Loyalty Day' #ProudAmerican

They also have a story about the proclamation (archived copy).

Wikipedia has this to say about the event:

The holiday was first observed in 1921, during the First Red Scare. It was originally called "Americanization Day" [...]

During the Second Red Scare, it was recognized by the U.S. Congress on April 27, 1955, and made an official reoccurring holiday on July 18, 1958 (Public Law 85-529). President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed May 1, 1955, the first observance of Loyalty Day.

This year it is being observed on 30 April in Bradley, Illinois; on 29 April in Kansas City, Kansas; on 7 May in Brandon, South Dakota; on 1 May in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (pay-walled) and on 28 April in Brinnon, Washington. Loyal Americans, mark your calendars!

Update: on 29 April .@POTUS held a "Saturday night rally in Harrisburg." The Los Angeles Times reported:

When Trump hammered the media, people in the crowd turned around to jeer and boo at reporters typing in their laptops in the press area on the arena floor.

Over Christmas, I upgraded my main box to Slackware64-14.2. I put in a pair of new hard disks (Western Digital Blue 3TB) and noticed quite a speed improvement over the Green 2TB ones they replaced.

Slackware64-14.2 still comes with a broken version of vim (it was broken in 14.1 as well) so I rebuilt the vim-7.3 that comes with 14.0. The breakage is that it doesn't redraw the screen properly when run in a terminal window (xterm).

I've been using Firefox as my main web browser for many years, and I know that for a while it's been sub-optimal in a number of ways, technically and politically, but I've been too busy to try anything else. I did look at PaleMoon a few months back, but never went any further. Slackware64-14.2 comes with Firefox 52.x and it's painfully slow. Recent security updates have made it unusable. It's very sluggish when scrolling, and you can see it repainting. When it renders an image or a video, you can see a bright green box behind it! Forget trying to watch a video.

Perhaps I should upgrade my hardware? I've got an AMD Phenom II X6 1045T (2.7GHz, 6 physical cores) on an ASUS M4A 77D motherboard with 4GB of DDR2 RAM. It's five years since I bought the CPU.

In the mean time, I thought I'd try rebuilding firefox. Being very short of time nowadays, I decided to use the Slackware build scripts to do the build rather than trying to do it myself from scratch. I figured rebuilding on my own machine might result in slightly faster binaries if the gcc options were more machine-specific.

I set of a build without looking too much at the build script. The SlackBuild script has to run as root (yuck) which makes me nervous, but I went ahead. I made the mistake of firing up a web browser at the same time to do some googling about firefox performance issues at the same time.

Very soon, the machine was using over 2.5GB of swap. No web browser was usable. After taking several minutes for the browser windows to die, I looked at the build script. It was defaulting to doing seven jobs in parallel (-j7). Obviously, there's not much point in filling up your CPUs if you don't have enough RAM to keep them fed. And Firefox is written in C++ (don't get me started - we have 64GB machines at work that aren't big enough).

It turns out that lots of people are frustrated with the speed of newer versions of Firefox, so I decided to try to rebuild version 45.9.0esr that comes with 14.1 on 14.2. I carefully read the SlackBuild script first, and ensured that it only used a maximum of two cores in parallel. That was a success. In a little over 99 minutes I had a nice mozilla-firefox-45.9.0esr-x86_64-1_slack14.2.txz which installed and is running.

The question is, how much RAM do you need nowadays?

Back to the C++: one of my colleagues is working on a project that runs on 32-bit Linux, and when he was building his C++ which used a lot of template code, it used to run out of memory (address space).

It's amazing how much RAM and CPU cycles (and network bandwidth) you can eat up with C++, Java, Ant and eclipse. There are some particularly perverse ways you can abuse C++ and Ant should be burnt in an incinerator for biological warfare agents.

And who in their right mind designs a build system that depends on an IDE? Eclipse? Argh!