Wednesday, June 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 June 2019

Hot Fix Sundae Edition

Tech News

  • There's a serious flaw in Linux networking that lets attackers remotly DOS or even crash your server.  (Ars Technica)

    Fortunately there's a simple mitigation; it just slows down new connections slightly.  No impact if the network is robust, a few tens of milliseconds if there's packet loss.  

    Poke poke.

    And we're safe.  In theory.

  • PCI Express 6.0 is on its way.  (AnandTech)

    This will be double the speed of PCIe 5.0, which will be double the speed of PCIe 4.0, which is double the speed of PCIe 3.0 that everyone currently uses.

    Yes, this is a dramatic acceleration of upgrades.  We were all stuck on PCIe 3.0 far longer than anyone had planned, and the PCI-SIG committee is trying to catch up again.

    PCIe 6.0 uses the same signal rates as 5.0 but encodes two bits per clock using four voltage levels - a technique called PAM4 and used in high-speed networking - much the same as MLC flash encodes two bits per cell by having two intermediate levels between empty and full.

    This means it can work with similar materials and designs as PCIe 5.0, while keeping full backward compatibility.  The downside is that it makes the controller circuitry a lot more complicated; you not only have to deal with intermediate levels, you have to deal with intermediate levels accurately and consistently within 60 picoseconds.

    The final spec is due in 2021 and first products in 2023, but I wouldn't expect this to reach consumer systems for a while.

    The impetus for this is terabit networking, which requires a ton of expansion slot bandwidth.  And the impetus for that is cloud-scale virtualisation: If your interconnect is fast enough your entire datacenter becomes one huge massively fault-tolerant server that you can dynamically subdivide to suit needs that change from one second to the next, without needing the level of over-provisioning that currently entails.

  • Facebook is gearing up to launch its own currency, spinning off a new subsidiary called Calibra to focus on financial services.  (Tom's Hardware)

    All I have to say is Danger, Will Robinson!

  • Australia has blocked HorribleSubs and hundreds of other sites.  (TechDirt)

    Nobody tell them.

  • Apparently President Trump is allowed to block people again.  (Tech Dirt)

  • Out of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers 500 run Linux.  (ZDNet)

  • Apple Stores suck.  (ZDNet)

  • Don't link accounts.  (ZDNet)

    Important note: Even if your online storage provider promises that all your files are encrypted and safe from hackers, even if that's true, it doesn't help if the hacker has your login.

  • Google plans to spend a billion dollars on worker housing.  (Thurrott.com)

    Or they could move offices to somewhere that isn't a blighted far-left hellscape.  Just a thought.
    You code sixteen apps, what do you get?
    Another year older and deeper in debt.
    Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go -
    I owe my soul to the Google Play Store.

Video of the Day



A review of a computer you've never heard of...  Unless you read Daily News Stuff.


Disclaimer: Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:49 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 520 words, total size 5 kb.

1 Remember when Mac & Linux zealots swore how their OS was sooo much safer than Windows because there were no sploits?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 20 2019 01:19 AM (Iwkd4)

2 I'd read an article about PCIe 6 earlier today, maybe somewhere else, but didn't see a discussion of what PAM4 was.  That makes sense, and as you point out, this is something we more or less already know how to do.  Modems have been doing something similar, QAM, although with tone (?), not voltage, for decades.  As I recall, the last dialup standard that gave us a nominal 56Kbps used a 256-step modulation, and I believe modern cable modems do something similar.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 20 2019 01:23 AM (Iwkd4)

3 SIM swap story:  there used to be a guy who was in charge of security for a major bank and years ago he said NEVER do mobile banking on your phone.  That one thing would've saved the guy a bunch of trouble.
Having said that it is insane that you can't lock your account to protect you from the SIM swap scam.  A customer-focused carrier (hah!) would roll that feature out and brag about it on TV.
As for Google, Twitter, etc., they go out of their way to make it hard to find an actual person to talk to, with the single exception of Google Fi (at least when I briefly had them in 2017).  Fi actually encourages you to request a phone call, and they'll call you back (in my limited experience) in a couple of minutes.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 20 2019 02:04 AM (Iwkd4)

4 <blockquote>Hot Fix Sundae Edition </blockquote>
Which falls on a Tuesdae this year?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 20 2019 09:15 AM (Iwkd4)

5 I still don't do electronic banking.  I use Paypal, but it's only linked to my credit card, not to my bank account.  This means once a month I have to actually go to the bank, but that seems like a reasonable price to pay.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 20 2019 05:44 PM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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