Wednesday, 29 June 2022

FCC Commissioner Calls on Google and Apple to Ban TikTok

You have to assume that Twitter regrets giving up on Vine so soon — TikTok, which focuses on similar bite-sized videos, is one of the most popular apps in the world today with more than a billion monthly active users. That could be a problem, according to FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr. In an open letter to Apple and Google, Carr calls TikTok a “serious national security threat” and asks that the companies remove it from their app stores. The statement doesn’t carry any legal authority, but it could be a sign that the tide is turning against TikTok. 

The dispute traces back to agreements TikTok made with US regulators during the Trump administration. The then-president had a lot to say about TikTok, most of it involving the privacy impact of having a Chinese-owned app collecting so much user data. After threats to ban the app over concerns the Chinese government had access to its data, TikTok’s US arm pledged to keep US data away from the Chinese mothership. 

It seems, however, that TikTok never followed through on that promise. Last week, Buzzfeed reported on a series of leaked recordings in which China-based TikTok employees talk about their access to American user data. It is this report that Carr cites as the rationale for dropping the app from the Play Store and App Store. 

In the recordings, the employees are mostly discussing “Project Texas,” which is the initiative to segregate US data in an Oracle data center (in Texas, obviously). TikTok says it does not keep any US data in China, but the recordings prove that Chinese employees still have access to that data, which seems to run afoul of the promises made to regulators. Carr, one of two Republican members of the Federal Communications Commission, notes that TikTok is known to collect clipboard data, draft messages, device identifiers, and keystroke patterns. 

While Carr is a Republican, distrust of Chinese tech giants is one of the few issues that crosses party lines. For example, Trump came down hard on Huawei for its alleged ties to the Chinese government, and the Biden administration has not sought to ease those restrictions. If Carr is coming out strongly against TikTok, it may only be a matter of time before Google and Apple are forced to act. 

TikTok has not made any new statements on this latest twist. Previously, it sidestepped discussing the core of the Buzzfeed report with a non-denial denial. The secrecy is not working in its favor if a member of the FCC has resorted to public saber-rattling. In the event of a ban, Android users could still sideload the app (at increased security risk), but iPhone folks would be out of luck. If the US went as far as to block access to the service, you’d need a VPN to get your TikTok dance fix.

Now read:



Posted by at No comments:

NASA Kicks Off Artemis Lunar Program with CAPSTONE Launch

NASA has big plans for the next decade as humanity returns to the moon decades after the end of the Apollo program. While the agency is still fiddling with the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at the heart of the new Artemis program, it’s already making plans for the Lunar Gateway station. It all starts with the newly launched CAPSTONE mission, which will test that station’s proposed orbit around the moon. 

The future of Artemis is about big rockets like SLS and the SpaceX Starship, but CAPSTONE is a small test vehicle. So, NASA chose Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket to take it into space. CAPSTONE, which is an excellent NASA acronym for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, launched just before 6 AM today from Rocket Lab’s New Zealand launch facility. “While CAPSTONE’s journey to the Moon has only just begun, we’re proud to have safely delivered CAPSTONE to space,” said Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck. 

The satellite itself clocks in at just 25 pounds (55 kilograms), but that’s no small feat for Electron. According to Beck, CAPSTONE was the largest and most challenging payload ever launched on the light-duty Electron rocket. The spacecraft is currently en route to the moon, where it will not be a permanent fixture. NASA will use CAPSTONE to validate its plans for the upcoming Lunar Gateway. 

Early in the Artemis program, NASA plans to perform short excursions to the lunar surface with the aid of the Starship-based Human Landing System. Closer to 2030, the Lunar Gateway will come online to support longer trips to the surface, but NASA wants to put it in a fancy new kind of orbit. CAPSTONE is headed for the station’s proposed near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon. It will orbit at an altitude of 47,000 miles (76,000 kilometers) at the north pole but at just 2,100 miles (3,400 km) when passing over the south pole. This uneven orbit will ensure continuous communication, and it will be more fuel-efficient for station keeping thanks to gravitational interactions between the moon and Earth. 

CAPSTONE is in a stable Earth orbit after the launch, where it is still mated to Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft bus. In the coming days, Photon will use its HyperCurie engine to set CAPSTONE on the right trajectory before dropping off. CAPSTONE should be in its intended orbit in about four months, and the NRHO testing will take another six months after that.

Now read:



Posted by at No comments:

Fan-Made 3dfx Driver Allows Widescreen Gaming

(Photo: Dolenc090 on YouTube)
The name 3dfx certainly warms a lot of, um, mature gamers’ hearts. For a lot of us, the Voodoo 2 was our first actual 3D graphics card. And it was glorious. Even though we were gaming at 800 x 600, we loved it. Going from software rendering to hardware rendering for the first time was absolutely incredible. For the younger readers, it was similar to going from a hard drive to an SSD for the first time. The difference in performance left us speechless. Since then a lot of hobbyists have recreated a similar retro gaming environment to bask in the nostalgia. The only problem is to truly experience old school gaming, you need a CRT monitor. Those are very hard to find, and until now, 3dfx drivers didn’t support widescreen displays like we use today. Now a 3dfx forum user has uploaded a new driver that allows widescreen gaming, finally.

It’s called the 3dfx Wide Driver, and if you’re into this sort of thing you have to grab it now. It will only be hosted on the forum for 15 days, so don’t hesitate. It might be moved to a more permanent home, eventually. According to Hothardware, a user named Dolenc at 3dfxzone modified the driver, and posted it for download. It will allow for widescreen display usage both in the Windows desktop and in gaming. It supports Direct3D, OpenGL, and even Glide games, but Glide might not always work perfectly. Note this is Windows 98 and Me we are talking about here. You can try it on Windows XP but nothing is promised. OpenGL and Direct3D games should work as expected, but Glide games have some limitations. The aspect ratio 16:9 has a maximum resolution of 1600 x 900. For 21:9 it will max out at 1920×800.

The driver allows support for 16:9, 16:10, and 21:9 aspect ratios. The driver-maker uploaded a video (above) showing 1080p gameplay in several ancient (but much-loved) titles. They include the original Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life: Opposing Force, and several others. As you can see in the video gameplay is smooth and seemingly with a very good frame rate. He’s using a Voodoo 5 5500 though, which is the most powerful GPU 3dfx ever released, and also its last. It sported two VSA-100 chips and 64MB of 166Mhz SDRAM. One interesting note is the VSA-100 was built on a 250nm process.

After the 5500’s release the company folded, with the IP eventually being purchased by Nvidia in 2001. Its fabled Voodoo 5 6000 with its quad-chip VSA-100 design was never released. However, it remains a much sought-after collector’s item even to this day. At one point there was an “announcement” that a group of people were going to bring the company back to life and launch the Voodoo 5 6000, but that never came to pass.

Now Read:



Posted by at No comments:

FTC Proposes New Rules to Rein in Shady Car Dealer Practices

(Photo: Ildar Garifullin/Unsplash)
It can’t be overstated: buying a car is ridiculously complicated. Between deceptive advertising, sleazy sales tactics, and confusing fees, most Americans rank buying their next ride as more stressful than getting married. Vehicle prices have also skyrocketed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in an extra layer of financial anxiety. 

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is hoping to change this. A new set of proposed rules announced Thursday would prohibit auto dealers from using bait-and-switch advertising practices or tacking on nonsense fees.

The first of the proposed rules would explicitly ban advertising that deceives customers into initiating a purchase, only to learn the real price or terms of the purchase are different from what was marketed. This usually takes the form of advertised low sticker prices, zero percent APR financing, and other hooks that end up being absent from the actual offered deal. After test-driving a vehicle or two, haggling with a salesperson, and undergoing a credit check, these bait-and-switch scenarios can feel confusing and even manipulative.

(Photo: Erik Mclean/Unsplash)

Another pair of proposed rules would prohibit dealers from implementing surprise or fraudulent “junk fees.” These are the miscellaneous items tacked onto the final price just before signing: “nitrogen-filled” tires, paint protection, UV coatings, and other (often invisible) add-ons that are not-so-conveniently forced upon unwitting buyers. Under the new rules, the FTC would require that dealers provide customers with the price of the car without these add-ons, and only add the extra items once the customer has provided their clear, written consent. 

A final rule rounds off the other proposals: dealers would be required to disclose to customers a vehicle’s true “offering price,” excluding only taxes and government fees. The price of any add-ons must be detailed in writing along with a disclosure stating such add-ons are not required to purchase or lease the vehicle.   

Automotive consumers generate a significant portion of FTC complaints. Despite previous attempts to engage law enforcement and mitigate deceptive auto dealer practices, complaints regarding vehicle sales and maintenance make up about 10,000 FTC complaints annually. A preliminary regulatory analysis estimates the rules’ net economic benefit would sit around $29 billion over a decade. 

As of now, the FTC’s proposed rules are just that; they don’t yet guide auto sales. The FTC is allowing 60 days for comments and questions from the public, which will help guide any revisions and determine whether the rules are implemented at all. 

Now Read:



Posted by at No comments:

Minor Software Bug Delays NASA’s Psyche Asteroid Mission by a Year

We’ll have to wait a little longer to find out what’s up with one of the most interesting asteroids in the solar system. NASA has confirmed that a minor software glitch will cause a delay for its upcoming Psyche mission, which was set to launch in September 2022. The motion of the planets is working against NASA here, so even a small delay means Psyche won’t be able to launch in 2022 at all, and that puts the science phase of the mission toward the end of the decade. 

Psyche (the spacecraft) is named after the asteroid it will eventually visit. 16 Psyche (the asteroid) sits in the great asteroid belt along with uncountable other space rocks, but this one is special enough that NASA wants to get a closer look. It’s the largest known M-type asteroid, meaning it’s rich in metals. Scientists have speculated that Psyche is the exposed core of a planet that was smashed to pieces by impacts early in its formation. 

Naturally, getting a closer look at a planetary core is an alluring possibility. Researchers at MIT released the best map of Psyche’s surface yet, which could help NASA plan its observational campaign, and now the team will have more time to go over it. 

NASA says that it found a small issue with the flight software, which caused the initial delay from August to September. However, testing and validation of the fix won’t be done in time. The software in question manages the probe’s orientation and trajectory, and that system needs to work perfectly to ensure it can point its antennas at Earth. No communication, no mission.  

falcon heavy

Even with the powerful Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, NASA is at the mercy of physics here. The launch window closes on October 11 — after that, Earth will be moving away from Psyche, and NASA won’t have time to complete testing before the window closes. The only choice is to wait for Earth to make an orbit and launch Psyche in 2023. 

Before the delay, NASA expected Psyche to reach its target by 2026. If the 2023 launch goes ahead, the probe should reach the asteroid in 2029. There’s also a 2024 window that is not entirely out of the question, which would deliver the spacecraft by 2030. NASA was also hoping to use the Falcon Heavy’s massive payload capacity to send two “ride-along” missions with Psyche. The Janus mission was set to study binary asteroids, and the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration is intended to test hi-speed laser communications with Psyche. NASA is evaluating both missions to see if they will go ahead as planned.

Now Read:



Posted by at No comments:

AMD Looking Into Alleged Data Theft

Earlier this year Nvidia was the victim of a hack on its network. The fallout was not trivial, as the group released a lot of proprietary information. It dumped the DLSS source code, information about upcoming GPUs, and also created workarounds for its anti-mining LHR technology. Now it’s AMD’s turn in the barrel, according to a new report. AMD has allegedly been hacked, with the perpetrators exfiltrating over 50GB of data. At this time it’s not clear if the data was taken directly from AMD or one of its partners.

The actual hack happened back in January of this year, but we’re just now learning about it. It’s not clear which group is responsible, as the outfit that is talking about it is either a middleman or bought the data from someone else. This group, known as RansomHouse, says on their website they don’t hack nor do they use malware. However, they are allegedly trying to negotiate a ransom from AMD. The group recently included AMD in an ominous list of companies on its website. It says the companies in the list “have either considered their financial gain to be above the interests of their partners/individuals who have entrusted their data to them or have chosen to conceal the fact they have been compromised.” This sounds like it should translate to “they haven’t paid the ransom.”

The RansomHouse group posted this summary on its darkest site. (Image Source: RestorePrivacy.com)

According to a summary by RestorePrivacy, the stolen data included network files, system information, and some AMD passwords. The group posted a sample of the data it has in its possession, but RestorePrivacy doesn’t say if it was able to verify the data or not. The group claims the data was easy to get as AMD used common passwords. These include the actual word “password,” as well as “123456” and “AMD!23” among others. The group says it has “more than 450 Gb” of AMD’s data. It’s not clear why it refers to it as gigabits instead of gigabytes. (Possibly to make the hack look larger – Ed)

RansomHouse claims its a “professional mediators community” instead of a hacking group. It claims it doesn’t create or deploy malware, nor does it encrypt any victims’ data. So far it lists six victims on its darknet website, including ShopRite, and the Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority (SLGA).

AMD has responded to questions about the breach with an official statement. “AMD is aware of a bad actor claiming to be in possession of stolen data from AMD. An investigation is currently underway,” said an AMD spokesperson.

Now Read:



Posted by at No comments:

Towards PCIe 7.0 and Blazing-Fast Storage: Why Engineers Have Hit The Gas on Interconnect Standards

Feature image by Eric Kilby, CC BY-SA 2.0
This week, the PCI-SIG working group that controls the PCI Express standard announced that it was on track to finalize and release the PCIe 7.0 standard by 2025. The amount of time between finalization and commercialization varies, but is typically 12-18 months. We might reasonably expect PCIe 7.0 devices in-market by 2026, with support for up to 512GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth.

At present, the PCIe 4.0-compliant platforms that are available today support transfer rates of up to 64GB/s in bidirectional mode. PCIe 5.0 is technically available, but GPUs and SSDs don’t widely support the standard yet, so PCIe 7.0 represents an effective 8x increase in bandwidth compared to what’s actually available today. The first PCIe 5.0 devices should be buyable towards the end of this year.

The Bandwidth Bonanza

PCI Express debuted on the desktop with the launch of AMD’s Socket 939 platform back in 2004. With support for up to 4GB of unidirectional bandwidth (8GB bidirectional), it blew the doors off the old PCI standard. The reason I mention PCI instead of AGP is because high-end GPUs have never been particularly limited by interface bandwidth. Comparisons back in 2004 showed that the gap between 8x AGP and PCIe 1.0 performance was essentially nil, while moving from PCI to PCIe (and from a shared bus topology to a point-to-point interconnect) immediately improved the performance of ethernet adapters, storage controllers, and various other third-party devices.

From 2004 – 2011, the PCIe standard moved ahead at a brisk pace, with PCIe 2.0 and 3.0 each approximately doubling bandwidth. Then, from 2011 – 2018, the consumer bandwidth market stood still. We didn’t see PCIe 4.0 until 2018, with the launch of AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture and X570 motherboard chipset. Since then, however, the PCI-SIG has been on a tear. PCIe 5.0 deployed with Alder Lake in 2021, even if consumer hardware isn’t available yet. We don’t know when PCIe 6.0 might be available in consumer products, but 2023 – 2024 is a realistic time frame. Now we see those chips won’t even be in-market for more than a few years before PCIe 7.0 hardware starts pushing in.

So what changed?

Some of the issues were technical — there were real difficulties associated with continuing to ramp up bandwidth between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0, and some new signaling and material engineering challenges had to be solved. It’s also true, however, that there wasn’t a lot of pressure to beef up system interconnects during the same time period. That’s changed in the past few years, probably at least partly due to the increased presence of GPUs and multi-GPU servers. Intel and AMD are both much more concerned with interconnects and maximizing connection between the CPU and other accelerators like FPGAs and GPUs.

Another major difference between the late aughts and the present day is the near-ubiquitous nature of SSD storage. Mechanical spinning drives are slow enough that faster PCIe speeds above 1.0 offered limited benefits. That’s not the case any longer. We can reasonably assume that new PCIe 5.0 drives will deliver an appreciable fraction of maximum bandwidth. Ditto for PCIe 6.0 and 7.0 when these standards arrive.

PCIe performance increases are typically associated with GPUs, but it’s storage that’s been the greatest beneficiary, as shown in the chart below. Bandwidth figures are unidirectional instead of bidirectional, which is why values are half of what they are in the chart above.

From 2004 – 2022, main memory bandwidth increased by ~12x, while PCIe bandwidth grew by 16x. Consumer storage bandwidth, on the other hand, has risen by approximately 94x over the last 18 years. If you remember the days when faster storage performance was defined by onboard 8MB caches, 7200 RPM spindle speeds, and NCQ support, this is pretty heady stuff.

These improvements in storage bandwidth are why Sony and Microsoft are both focused on using fast PCIe storage as memory with their latest console launches instead of dramatically increasing the total available system RAM. Microsoft’s DirectStorage standard will extend these capabilities to Windows PCs as well. Windows systems may ship entirely with SSDs in the future (this does not mean that Windows would not install to a hard drive, only that hard drives would not ship as boot drives in Windows systems). We have long since reached the point where even a modest eMMC storage solution can outpace the performance of a hard drive.

We have also reached the point at which PC storage bandwidth is rivaling main memory bandwidth from 20 years ago. Bandwidth, of course, is just one aspect of a memory technology and the access latencies on NAND accessed via the PCIe bus are several orders of magnitude higher than what 2004-era DRAM could deliver, but it’s still an achievement that companies can leverage to improve overall system performance. A system is only as strong as its weakest chain, and HDDs were always the weakest link in PC performance. The shift to NAND has unlocked PC performance that was previously gate-kept by spinning media.

I do not know enough low level details to speculate on how operating systems and file systems might be improved if they were designed for an SSD first and foremost instead of for spinning media, but I suspect we’ll start to find out over the next decade. The encouraging thing about the continued development of these interconnect standards is that consumer devices should continue to benefit, even at the low end. The M2’s storage might be only half the speed of the M1 (and I understand why that could irk some buyers), but the half-speed storage of the M2 MacBook is literally faster than racks of hard drives in the pre-SSD era.

The PCI-SIG is making up for lost time by firing new standard versions, one right after the other. Our dates of 2024 and 2026 for adoption are speculative at this juncture, but we’d expect both in-market by 2025 / 2028 at the outside. Thus far, SSD vendors have been able to take advantage of the additional bandwidth unlocked by new storage standards almost as soon as those standards reach market. This is in stark contrast to GPUs, which typically show no launch performance difference at all between a new version of PCIe and the immediately previous version of the standard.

We can collectively expect PC storage to keep getting faster — and to reap the long-term benefits of that performance increase.

Now Read:



Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)