Daily Archives: December 5, 2022

Senator Urges Automakers to Keep Making Cars with AM Radio

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he Boston Globe reports that U.S. Senator Ed. Markey just sent a letter to more than 20 car manufacturers asking them to continue including AM radios in future car models — including electric vehicles: Some EV manufacturers have raised concerns even as far back as 2016 about how the battery power of an EV can interfere with AM radio signals. However, Markey addressed these concerns saying, “car manufacturers appear to have developed innovative solutions to this problem.”
“The last time I listened to AM radio was in the late 1970s,” writes long-time Slashdot reader non-e-moose. “And then it was mostly because there were either no FM stations in reception range, or I was riding my bicycle and only had a transistor radio.”

But the Senator sees it differently: AM radio has long been an important source of information for consumers. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 90 percent of Americans ages 12 and older — totaling hundreds of millions of people — listened to AM or FM radio each week, higher than the percentage that watch television (56 percent) or own a computer (77 percent)…. Moreover, 33 percent of new car buyers say that AM radio is a very important feature in a vehicle — higher than dedicated Wi-Fi (31 percent), SiriusXM satellite radio (27 percent), and personal assistants such as Google Assistant (12 percent) and Amazon Alexa (9 percent). In other words, broadcast AM and FM radio remain an essential vehicle feature for consumers.

Moreover, broadcast AM radio, in particular, is a critical mechanism for government authorities to communicate with the public during natural disasters, extreme weather events, and other emergencies. AM radio operates at lower frequencies and has longer wavelengths than FM radio, so AM radio waves more easily pass through solid objects. As a result, AM radio signals can travel long distances, making them well-suited for broadcasting emergency alerts….

Despite innovations such as the smartphone and social media, AM/FM broadcast radio remains the most dependable, cost-free, and accessible communication mechanism for public officials to communicate with the public during times of emergency. As a result, any phase-out of broadcast AM radio could pose a significant communication problem during emergencies…. Given AM radio’s importance for emergency communications and continued consumer demand, I urge your company to maintain the feature in its new vehicles…

Source: Senator Urges Automakers to Keep Making Cars with AM Radio – Slashdot

Microsoft mistake took down Exchange Online and Teams on 2/12/22

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Microsoft’s flagship cloudy productivity services are down across the Asia-Pacific region.

“Our initial investigation indicates that there our service infrastructure is performing at a sub-optimal level, resulting in impact to general service functionality” states an advisory time-stamped 12:41PM on December 2.

The incident means customers of Exchange Online may not be able to access the service, send email and/or files, or use what Microsoft described as “General functionality”.

The impact on Teams means:

  • Users may experience issues scheduling/editing meetings and/or live meetings;
  • People Picker/Search function may not work as expected;
  • Users may be unable to search Microsoft Teams;
  • Users may be unable to load the Assignments tab in Microsoft Teams.

Messaging, chat, channels, and other core Teams services appear to be available.

Microsoft appears not to know what’s wrong.

[…]

Updated at 22:00 UTC, December 2nd The incident has ended! An update to Microsoft’s incident report time-stamped 2314 on December 2 offers the description of the preliminary root cause:

Processing components were not performing within optimal performance thresholds because of a legacy process that required tokens to be processed on specific components. In isolation this process wasn’t problematic, but combined with the large number of requests, this resulted in resource saturation, causing impact across multiple Microsoft 365 apps

Microsoft tested transitioning away from the problematic legacy process and restarting affected infrastructure.

Which worked, so the company did the same thing in its live environment.

The incident ran for nine hours and 59 minutes, from 1355 UTC on December 1st to 0954 UTC on December 2.

[…]

Source: Microsoft mistake took down Exchange Online and Teams • The Register

Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence

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Recently, I watched a fellow particle physicist talk about a calculation he had pushed to a new height of precision. His tool? A 1980s-era computer program called FORM

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Developed by the Dutch particle physicist Jos Vermaseren, FORM is a key part of the infrastructure of particle physics, necessary for the hardest calculations. However, as with surprisingly many essential pieces of digital infrastructure, FORM’s maintenance rests largely on one person: Vermaseren himself. And at 73, Vermaseren has begun to step back from FORM development. Due to the incentive structure of academia, which prizes published papers, not software tools, no successor has emerged

[…]

Since 2000, a particle physics paper that cites FORM has been published every few days, on average. “Most of the [high-precision] results that our group obtained in the past 20 years were heavily based on FORM code,” said Thomas Gehrmann, a professor at the University of Zurich.

Some of FORM’s popularity came from specialized algorithms that were built up over the years, such as a trick for quickly multiplying certain pieces of a Feynman diagram, and a procedure for rearranging equations to have as few multiplications and additions as possible. But FORM’s oldest and most powerful advantage is how it handles memory.

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FORM bypasses swapping and uses its own technique. When you work with an equation in FORM, the program assigns each term a fixed amount of space on the hard disk. This technique lets the software more easily keep track of where the pieces of an equation are. It also makes it easy to bring those pieces back to main memory when they are needed without accessing the rest.

Memory has grown since FORM’s early days, from 128 kilobytes of RAM in the Atari 130XE in 1985 to 128 gigabytes of RAM in my souped-up desktop — a millionfold improvement. But the tricks Vermaseren developed remain crucial. As particle physicists pore through petabytes of data from the Large Hadron Collider to search for evidence of new particles, their need for precision, and thus the length of their equations, grows longer.

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As crucial as software like FORM is for physics, the effort to develop it is often undervalued. Vermaseren was lucky in that he had a permanent position at the National Institute for Subatomic Physics in the Netherlands, and a boss who appreciated the project. But such luck is hard to come by. Stefano Laporta, an Italian physicist who developed a crucial simplification algorithm for the field, has spent most of his career without funding for students or equipment. Universities tend to track scientists’ publication records, which means those who work on critical infrastructure are often passed over for hiring or tenure.

“I have seen over the years, consistently, that people who spend a lot of time on computers don’t get a tenure job in physics,” said Vermaseren.

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Without ongoing development, FORM will get less and less usable — only able to interact with older computer code, and not aligned with how today’s students learn to program. Experienced users will stick with it, but younger researchers will adopt alternative computer algebra programs like Mathematica that are more user-friendly but orders of magnitude slower. In practice, many of these physicists will decide that certain problems are off-limits — too difficult to handle. So particle physics will stall, with only a few people able to work on the hardest calculations.

In April, Vermaseren is holding a summit of FORM users to plan for the future. They will discuss how to keep FORM alive: how to maintain and extend it, and how to show a new generation of students just how much it can do. With luck, hard work and funding, they may preserve one of the most powerful tools in physics.

Source: Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence | Quanta Magazine

Grad Students Analyze, Hack, and Remove Under-Desk Surveillance Devices Designed to Track Them – at  a privacy institute!

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graduate students at Northeastern University were able to organize and beat back an attempt at introducing invasive surveillance devices that were quietly placed under desks at their school.

Early in October, Senior Vice Provost David Luzzi installed motion sensors under all the desks at the school’s Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex (ISEC), a facility used by graduate students and home to the “Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute” which studies surveillance. These sensors were installed at night—without student knowledge or consent—and when pressed for an explanation, students were told this was part of a study on “desk usage,” according to a blog post by Max von Hippel, a Privacy Institute PhD candidate who wrote about the situation for the Tech Workers Coalition’s newsletter.

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In response, students began to raise concerns about the sensors, and an email was sent out by Luzzi attempting to address issues raised by students.

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“The results will be used to develop best practices for assigning desks and seating within ISEC (and EXP in due course).”

To that end, Luzzi wrote, the university had deployed “a Spaceti occupancy monitoring system” that would use heat sensors at groin level to “aggregate data by subzones to generate when a desk is occupied or not.” Luzzi added that the data would be anonymized, aggregated to look at “themes” and not individual time at assigned desks, not be used in evaluations, and not shared with any supervisors of the students. Following that email, an impromptu listening session was held in the ISEC.

At this first listening session, Luzzi asked that grad student attendees “trust the university since you trust them to give you a degree,” Luzzi also maintained that “we are not doing any science here” as another defense of the decision to not seek IRB approval.

“He just showed up. We’re all working, we have paper deadlines and all sorts of work to do. So he didn’t tell us he was coming, showed up demanding an audience, and a bunch of students spoke with him,”

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After that, the students at the Privacy Institute, which specialize in studying surveillance and reversing its harm, started removing the sensors, hacking into them, and working on an open source guide so other students could do the same. Luzzi had claimed the devices were secure and the data encrypted, but Privacy Institute students learned they were relatively insecure and unencrypted.

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After hacking the devices, students wrote an open letter to Luzzi and university president Joseph E. Aoun asking for the sensors to be removed because they were intimidating, part of a poorly conceived study, and deployed without IRB approval even though human subjects were at the center of the so-called study.

“Resident in ISEC is the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, one of the world’s leading groups studying privacy and tracking, with a particular focus on IoT devices,” the letter reads. “To deploy an under-desk tracking system to the very researchers who regularly expose the perils of these technologies is, at best, an extremely poor look for a university that routinely touts these researchers’ accomplishments.

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Another listening session followed, this time for professors only, and where Luzzi claimed the devices were not subject to IRB approval because “they don’t sense humans in particular – they sense any heat source.” More sensors were removed afterwards and put into a “public art piece” in the building lobby spelling out NO!

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Afterwards, von Hippel took to Twitter and shares what becomes a semi-viral thread documenting the entire timeline of events from the secret installation of the sensors to the listening session occurring that day. Hours later, the sensors are removed

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This was a particularly instructive episode because it shows that surveillance need not be permanent—that it can be rooted out by the people affected by it, together.

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“The most powerful tool at the disposal of graduate students is the ability to strike. Fundamentally, the university runs on graduate students.

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“The computer science department was able to organize quickly because almost everybody is a union member, has signed a card, and are all networked together via the union. As soon as this happened, we communicated over union channels.

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This sort of rapid response is key, especially as more and more systems adopt sensors for increasingly spurious or concerning reasons. Sensors have been rolled out at other universities like Carnegie Mellon University, as well as public school systems. They’ve seen use in more militarized and carceral settings such as the US-Mexico border or within America’s prison system.

These rollouts are part of what Cory Doctrow calls the “shitty technology adoption curve” whereby horrible, unethical and immoral technologies are normalized and rationalized by being deployed on vulnerable populations for constantly shifting reasons. You start with people whose concerns can be ignored—migrants, prisoners, homeless populations—then scale it upwards—children in school, contractors, un-unionized workers. By the time it gets to people whose concerns and objections would be the loudest and most integral to its rejection, the technology has already been widely deployed.

[…]

Source: ‘NO’: Grad Students Analyze, Hack, and Remove Under-Desk Surveillance Devices Designed to Track Them