Since late January, most users running a pre-installed Lenovo image of Windows 10 has been bitten by a bug in Lenovo’s System Update Service (SUService.exe) causing it to constantly occupy a CPU thread. This was noticed by many ThinkPad and IdeaPad users as an unexpected increase in fan noise, but many desktop users might not notice the problem. I’m submitting this story to Slashdot because Lenovo does not provide an official support venue for their software, and the problem has persisted for several weeks with no indication of a patch forthcoming. While this bug continues to persist, anyone with a preinstalled Lenovo image of Windows 10 will have greatly reduced battery life on a laptop, and greatly increased power consumption in any case. As a thought experiment, if this causes 1 million systems to increase their idle power consumption by 40 watts, this software bug is currently wasting 40 megawatts, or about 1/20th the output of a typical commercial power station. On my ThinkPad P15, this bug actually wastes 80 watts of power, so the indication is that 40 watts per system is a very conservative number.
Lenovo’s official forums and unofficial reddit pages have seen several threads pop up since late January with confused users noticing the issue, but so far Lenovo is yet to issue an official statement. Users have recommended uninstalling the Lenovo System Update Service as a workaround, but that won’t stop this power virus from eating up megawatts of power around the world for those who don’t notice this power virus’s impact on system performance.
Synology has introduced its first-ever list of validated disks and won’t allow other devices into its enterprise-class NAS devices. And in a colossal coincidence, half of the disks allowed into its devices – and the only ones larger than 4TB – are Synology’s very own HAT 5300 disks that it launched last week.
Seeing as privately held Synology is thought to have annual revenue of around US$350m, rather less than the kind of cash required to get into the hard disk business, The Register inquired if it had really started making drives or found some other way into the industry.
The Taiwanese network-attached-storage vendor told us the drives are Synology-branded Toshiba kit, though it has written its own drive firmware and that the code delivers sequential read performance 23 per cent beyond comparable drives. Synology told us its branded disks will also be more reliable because they have undergone extensive testing in the company’s own NAS arrays.
[…]
So to cut a long story short, if you want to get the most out of Synology NAS devices, you’ll need to buy Synology’s own SATA hard disk drives.
The new policy applies as of the release of three new Synology NAS appliances intended for enterprise use and will be applied to other models over time.
The new models include the RS3621RPxs, which sports an unspecified six-core Intel Xeon processor and can handle a dozen drives, then move data over four gigabit Ethernet ports. The middle-of-the-road RS3621xs+ offers an eight-core Xeon and adds two 10GE ports. At the top of the range, the RS4021xs+ stretches to 3U and adds 16GB of RAM, eight more than found in the other two models.
Microsoft Corp. is working on in-house processor designs for use in server computers that run the company’s cloud services, adding to an industrywide effort to reduce reliance on Intel Corp.’s chip technology.
The world’s largest software maker is using Arm Ltd. designs to produce a processor that will be used in its data centers, according to people familiar with the plans. It’s also exploring using another chip that would power some of its Surface line of personal computers. The people asked not to be identified discussing private initiatives. Intel’s stock dropped 6.3% to close at $47.46 in New York, leaving it down 21% this year.
The move is a major commitment by Microsoft to supplying itself with the most important piece of the hardware it uses. Cloud-computing rivals such as Amazon.com Inc. are already well down the road with similar efforts. They’ve argued their chips are better suited to some of their needs, bringing cost and performance advantages over off-the-shelf silicon primarily provided by Intel.
[…]
AMD is the second-largest maker of chips that run PCs and it’s been staging a comeback in the server market after being largely shut out by Intel for most of the last decade. AMD stock declined 1% on Friday. Xilinx Inc., another chipmaker that AMD is acquiring, slipped 1.8%.
[…]
“The incredible demand for computing fueled by new workloads like AI is driving more silicon experimentation in the cloud. Building on decades of x86 ecosystem innovation, we are committed to providing customers the world’s best CPUs and new products from GPUs to AI chips,” Intel said in a statement. “In this expanding market, we expect to gain share in many areas like AI training, 5G networks, graphics and autonomous driving.”
Cerebras Systems and the federal Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory today announced that the company’s CS-1 system is more than 10,000 times faster than a graphics processing unit (GPU).
On a practical level, this means AI neural networks that previously took months to train can now train in minutes on the Cerebras system.
Cerebras makes the world’s largest computer chip, the WSE. Chipmakers normally slice a wafer from a 12-inch-diameter ingot of silicon to process in a chip factory. Once processed, the wafer is sliced into hundreds of separate chips that can be used in electronic hardware.
But Cerebras, started by SeaMicro founder Andrew Feldman, takes that wafer and makes a single, massive chip out of it. Each piece of the chip, dubbed a core, is interconnected in a sophisticated way to other cores. The interconnections are designed to keep all the cores functioning at high speeds so the transistors can work together as one.
Cerebras’s CS-1 system uses the WSE wafer-size chip, which has 1.2 trillion transistors, the basic on-off electronic switches that are the building blocks of silicon chips. Intel’s first 4004 processor in 1971 had 2,300 transistors, and the Nvidia A100 80GB chip, announced yesterday, has 54 billion transistors.
Feldman said in an interview with VentureBeat that the CS-1 was also 200 times faster than the Joule Supercomputer, which is No. 82 on a list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.
“It shows record-shattering performance,” Feldman said. “It also shows that wafer scale technology has applications beyond AI.”
Above: The Cerebras WSE has 1.2 trillion transistors compared to Nvidia’s largest GPU, the A100 at 54.2 billion transistors.
These are fruits of the radical approach Los Altos, California-based Cerebras has taken, creating a silicon wafer with 400,000 AI cores on it instead of slicing that wafer into individual chips. The unusual design makes it a lot easier to accomplish tasks because the processor and memory are closer to each other and have lots of bandwidth to connect them, Feldman said. The question of how widely applicable the approach is to different computing tasks remains.
A paper based on the results of Cerebras’ work with the federal lab said the CS-1 can deliver performance that is unattainable with any number of central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs, which are both commonly used in supercomputers. (Nvidia’s GPUs are used in 70% of the top supercomputers now). Feldman added that this is true “no matter how large that supercomputer is.”
A new way to deposit thin layers of atoms as a coating onto a substrate material at near room temperatures has been invented at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of the University of Alabama System.
UAH postdoctoral research associate Dr. Moonhyung Jang got the idea to use an ultrasonic atomization technology to evaporate chemicals used in atomic layer deposition (ALD) while shopping for a home humidifier.
Dr. Jang works in the laboratory of Dr. Yu Lei, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. The pair have published a paper on their invention that has been selected as an editor’s pick in the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology A.
“ALD is a three-dimensional thin film deposition technique that plays an important role in microelectronics manufacturing, in producing items such as central processing units, memory and hard drives,” says Dr. Lei.
Each ALD cycle deposits a layer a few atoms deep. An ALD process repeats the deposition cycle hundreds or thousands of times. The uniformity of the thin films relies on a surface self-limiting reaction between the chemical precursor vapor and the substrates.
“ALD offers exceptional control of nanometer features while depositing materials uniformly on large silicon wafers for high volume manufacturing,” Dr. Lei says. “It is a key technique to produce powerful and small smart devices.”
[…]
“In the past, many reactive chemicals were considered not suitable for ALD because of their low vapor pressure and because they are thermally unstable,” says Dr. Lei. “Our research found that the ultrasonic atomizer technique enabled evaporating the reactive chemicals at as low as room temperature.”
The UAH scientists’ ultrasound invention makes it possible to use a wide range of reactive chemicals that are thermally unstable and not suitable for direct heating.
“Ultrasonic atomization, as developed by our research group, supplies low vapor pressure precursors because the evaporation of precursors was made through ultrasonic vibrating of the module,” Dr. Lei says.
“Like the household humidifier, ultrasonic atomization generates a mist consisting of saturated vapor and micro-sized droplets,” he says. “The micro-sized droplets continuously evaporate when the mist is delivered to the substrates by a carrier gas.”
The process uses a piezo-electric ultrasonic transducer placed in a liquid chemical precursor. Once started, the transducer starts to vibrate a few hundred thousand times per second and generates a mist of the chemical precursor. The small liquid droplets in the mist are quickly evaporated in the gas manifold under vacuum and mild heat treatment, leaving behind an even coat of the deposition material.
eBay is taking on Amazon Warehouse with a new destination called Certified Refurbished, selling used goods from brands like Lenovo, Microsoft and Makita. The idea is that you can buy second-hand products at significant discounts over new, but still get a two-year warranty (from Allstate), a money-back guarantee and 30-day “hassle-free” returns, along with new accessories, manuals and manufacturer-sealed packaging.
eBay’s Certified Refurbished has five priority categories: laptops, portable audio,power tools, small kitchen appliances and vacuums. It offers several brand exclusives, including De’Longhi, Dirt Devil, Hoover, Makita and Philips, along with inventory exclusives from Dewalt, iRobot and Skullcandy. It’s also selling products from participating brands including Dell, Acer, Bissel, Black & Decker, Cuisinart, KitchenAid, Lenovo, Microsoft, Miele and Sennheiser.
To make the cut, manufacturers must offer items in “pristine, like-new condition that has been professionally inspected, cleaned, and refurbished by the manufacturer, or a manufacturer-approved vendor,” according to eBay. It also must be in new packaging with original or new accessories.
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Tokyo’s Stock Exchange (TSE) went offline for most of Thursday, its longest-ever outage and a very unwelcome one as it is the world’s third-largest bourse, when measured by market capitalisation.
The exchange yesterday morning posted news that “a technical glitch occurred to distribution of market data,” and the market therefore stopped all trading. Later in the day the bourse also took down its after-hours trading platform, ToSTNeT, and then issued warnings that some market data distributed to investors was invalid.
The exchange explained the cause of the outage in a statement that said it experienced “hardware failure,” followed by a failure-to-failover.
The statement continued: “the switchover from the failed device to the backup device did not work properly, and as a result, market information could not be distributed.”
Which sounds very like someone hasn’t run a disaster recovery simulation for a while.
While the exchange thought it could replace the hardware and resume trading, doing so would have required a reboot that it felt “would cause confusion for investors and market participants, which would make it difficult to execute smooth trading.”
After talks with stakeholders, it was decided to just give up on the day and resume on Friday. At the time of writing – a few minutes after Friday’s opening bell – that plan appears to have worked.
The exchange has apologised for the outage, and taken responsibility for the situation, and also made it plain that mess was the result of its own mistakes and key technology provider Fujitsu was not at fault.
Fujitsu promotes TSE’s use of “approximately 200” of its Primergy servers and the Primesoft in-memory data management software.
That combo can apparently handle 100 million orders a day, at a rate of 1.4 million order-per-minute, all with transaction time of 300 microseconds apiece. Well, sometimes.
Fujitsu has reportedly apologised for its role in the outage.
The exchange continues to do so at every opportunity, with its notification that it expects normal trading today ending with: “We would like to express our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience caused by the system failure of Tokyo Stock Exchange, and we would like to ask for your continued support and cooperation in the operation of the market.”
We are living in a golden age of flight and space simulation, with Flight Simulator, Star Wars Squadrons just out and Elite Dangerous and No Mans Sky fully established and finally Star Citizen playable to some degree. This means you can take out that old flight stick and throttle and TrackIR 5 that have been gathering dust for the last ten years and get it working again. Or you can buy a new one, together with a set of VR goggles.
What doesn’t show on the pictures though, is the amount of desk space these things take up and the tangle of wires that comes along with it. Ergonomically, having them on your desk is not the best place to have them as you sit to attention in order the get to them.
There are basically three philosophies to having a better home HOTAS setup: mounting them on your office chair, mounting them on your table and buying a dedicated chair setup.
Buying a dedicated chair (and not quite going the full cockpit route)
The nicest system I have seen is the Obutto, which is a system of not just chair, keyboard, mouse, joystick and throttle mounts, but also of monitor and speaker mounts. Expect to start at around EUR 900.
Wolf Hardware has blue and Red chairs as well as an armrest kit that will set you back around $375,-
In this category, Monstertech has a stand as well for EUR 255,-
This can be combined with the GT Omega ART Racing Simulator Cockpit RS6 Gaming Console Seat for Logitech G920, G29, G27, G25 Steering Wheel Pedals & Shifter Mount V2 PS4 Xbox One 360 TMX, with Stand & Reclinable for GBP 360,- if you really want to go the cockpit route
Your stick / throttle manufacturer will sell you under desk mounts but these can be prohibitively large and expensive.
Fortunately there are aftermarket sellers. Undoubtably the main player in this realm is Monstertech. They have attachment arms for your HOTAS but also for your MFD’s and tablets as well as a mount to put up your joystick in the centre position
Their table mounts are sized for the specific joystic / throttle that you have and start at EUR 89,- for silver and EUR 109,- for black.
Predator mounts offers a selection of very solid desk mounts with accessories in both silver and black. Plates are ordered custom to the jostick model. They will also sell accessories such as cable clips to keep your cabling nice, as well as an attachment plate for the VKB hanging box (in different colours), so that can be neatly clipped to the back of the mount. To unclip these you push downwards, so you knee won’t accidentally bang into them and assembly is very easy. Edit: Sadly, Predator Mounts has gone into receivership. Do not send money that way any more.
A new player to the game is AlphaBravoTango who offers Stowaway Mounts. These fold away easily under your desk when you are not using them. They are metal where it counts and 3d printed covers. The maker has a reddit thread here and you can buy them on Etsy.
AliExpress has similar mounts going for EUR 50,- a piece though that come with a mousepad
J-PEIN costs around $90 and is supposed to be solid too
There’s a company called Foxxmount which makes mounts that look a lot like the old Predator ones.
Amazon US has the J-PEIN (upgraded) desk mount for $70,-. This is the goto Korean cheaper version. These come with a lot of bolts.
Hikig is another manufacturer that looks like J-PEIN selling for around EUR 80,- on Amazon.
MEZA has a set of two mounts for $179,99 at Amazon, which look a lot like the J-PEIN. You can find the Meza website here. These come with a lot of bolts.
THTL-1v2 Stowable Fold-Away HOTAS Throttle Mount (Qty 1)
€164.12
Reddit user Sessine has an excellent writeup of a DIY HOTAS under desk folding attachment system which can be stowed away easily
Reddit User dlongwing has an alternate method of having a foldaway HOTAS rig under his desk
SciMonster has created a Thingiverse rail which you can 3D print yourself and allows you to slide the hotas to the sides and lock the joystick to the right and in the centre
Mount your Virpil Throttle and Stick to linear rails so you can slide them along your desk. This allows you to move your HOTAS aside when you use the computer for other work. When flying your aircraft or spaceship, a spring-loaded locking meachanism holds your HOTAS securely in place.
An adapter plate for Virpil Flightsticks (VPC WarBRD Base) is included (with and without a mounting option for the 15 button Elgato Stream Deck (MK.1). MongoosT Base untested.
For around GBP 55 you can buy a generic table bolting system from Amazon
Attaching your throttle and stick to your chair
This is the cheapest route which you can do with a fair amount easy of DIY. Although it’s ergonomically very comfortable, the downside, however, is that the wiring moves with your chair and you will always be in a tangle of wires all over the place.
Transistors based on carbon rather than silicon could potentially boost computers’ speed and cut their power consumption more than a thousandfold — think of a mobile phone that holds its charge for months — but the set of tools needed to build working carbon circuits has remained incomplete until now.
A team of chemists and physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, has finally created the last tool in the toolbox, a metallic wire made entirely of carbon, setting the stage for a ramp-up in research to build carbon-based transistors and, ultimately, computers.
“Staying within the same material, within the realm of carbon-based materials, is what brings this technology together now,” said Felix Fischer, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry, noting that the ability to make all circuit elements from the same material makes fabrication easier. “That has been one of the key things that has been missing in the big picture of an all-carbon-based integrated circuit architecture.”
[…]
“Nanoribbons allow us to chemically access a wide range of structures using bottom-up fabrication, something not yet possible with nanotubes,” Crommie said. “This has allowed us to basically stitch electrons together to create a metallic nanoribbon, something not done before. This is one of the grand challenges in the area of graphene nanoribbon technology and why we are so excited about it.”
Metallic graphene nanoribbons — which feature a wide, partially-filled electronic band characteristic of metals — should be comparable in conductance to 2D graphene itself.
“We think that the metallic wires are really a breakthrough; it is the first time that we can intentionally create an ultra-narrow metallic conductor — a good, intrinsic conductor — out of carbon-based materials, without the need for external doping,” Fischer added.
Crommie, Fischer and their colleagues at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will publish their findings in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science.
[…]
Several years ago, Fischer and Crommie teamed up with theoretical materials scientist Steven Louie, a UC Berkeley professor of physics, to discover new ways of connecting small lengths of nanoribbon to reliably create the full gamut of conducting properties.
Two years ago, the team demonstrated that by connecting short segments of nanoribbon in the right way, electrons in each segment could be arranged to create a new topological state — a special quantum wave function — leading to tunable semiconducting properties.
In the new work, they use a similar technique to stitch together short segments of nanoribbons to create a conducting metal wire tens of nanometers long and barely a nanometer wide.
The nanoribbons were created chemically and imaged on very flat surfaces using a scanning tunneling microscope. Simple heat was used to induce the molecules to chemically react and join together in just the right way. Fischer compares the assembly of daisy-chained building blocks to a set of Legos, but Legos designed to fit at the atomic scale.
“They are all precisely engineered so that there is only one way they can fit together. It’s as if you take a bag of Legos, and you shake it, and out comes a fully assembled car,” he said. “That is the magic of controlling the self-assembly with chemistry.”
Once assembled, the new nanoribbon’s electronic state was a metal — just as Louie predicted — with each segment contributing a single conducting electron.
The final breakthrough can be attributed to a minute change in the nanoribbon structure.
“Using chemistry, we created a tiny change, a change in just one chemical bond per about every 100 atoms, but which increased the metallicity of the nanoribbon by a factor of 20, and that is important, from a practical point of view, to make this a good metal,” Crommie said.
The two researchers are working with electrical engineers at UC Berkeley to assemble their toolbox of semiconducting, insulating and metallic graphene nanoribbons into working transistors.
“I believe this technology will revolutionize how we build integrated circuits in the future,” Fischer said. “It should take us a big step up from the best performance that can be expected from silicon right now. We now have a path to access faster switching speeds at much lower power consumption. That is what is driving the push toward a carbon-based electronics semiconductor industry in the future.”
Samsung may have first made an ECG-capable smartwatch with the Galaxy Watch Active2, but it wasn’t until earlier this summer that it actually got clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to enable the medical-grade feature. That announcement came in dramatic fashion at its Unpacked event in August, where the company unveiled yet another ECG-capable smartwatch, the excellent Galaxy Watch 3. Still, even with clearance, we didn’t know exactly when the ECG feature would be available on either watch. Well, the answer is today.
“Beginning September 23, users will have access to yet another next-generation feature, as on-demand electrocardiogram (ECG) readings come to Galaxy Watch 3 and Galaxy Watch Active2,” Samsung said in a press statement. “This tool recently received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and will soon be available through the Samsung Health Monitor app when connected to a compatible Galaxy smartphone.”
It appears that Samsung’s ECG app will operate similarly to Apple’s. After opening the Samsung Health Monitor app, you’ll be advised to put your arm on a flat surface and place your finger on the top button. The watch will identify you as having either a normal Sinus Rhythm or atrial fibrillation. Once the reading is done, you can log symptoms like dizziness or fatigue. (Atrial fibrillation is often unaccompanied by symptoms.) You’ll also be able to send a PDF report to your healthcare provider.
The catch here is that, at least for now, the ECG app will only be available on Samsung Galaxy phones with Android Nougat or higher—meaning, if you have one of these watches paired to a non-Samsung Android phone or an iPhone, you’re out of luck. That’s only sort of surprising. While Samsung’s smartwatches are among the best currently available for Android users, Samsung is like Apple in that it likes to push its own ecosystem. As a result, some features are only available to Samsung phone owners. It looks like, for the time being, ECG is one of them.
Image: Samsung
Gizmodo reached out to Samsung to see if this feature might eventually make its way to non-Samsung Android phones. In response, a Samsung spokesperson said, “We’re always looking to address consumer feedback, however we cannot speak to additional phone compatibility outside of Galaxy smartphones at this time.”
While it’s great that Samsung’s ECG app is finally here, it is majorly disappointing that not all Android users will be able to access it. That means currently, in the U.S. only Apple and Samsung smartwatch owners have access to any sort of on-the-wrist ECG. The Galaxy Watch 3 felt like a real win for all Android users, but leaving non-Samsung Android users out of this update takes the shine off that a bit. Hopefully, Samsung will fix that going forward.
For non-Samsung Android users, the only FDA-cleared ECG smartwatch is the newly launched Fitbit Sense. However, Fitbit only just got clearance, meaning the ECG feature on the Sense is not live yet. You’ll have to wait until next month before it’s available. The good news is that Fitbit is platform-agnostic. Provided that there aren’t any delays, this means you’ll have at least one FDA-cleared ECG smartwatch option, regardless of what phone you use.
In 2015, German sportswear manufacturer Adidas acquired a plucky Austrian IoT startup called Runtastic, which, among other things, manufactured a $129.99 “smart” scale called Libra. Now that product is being discontinued, preventing owners from synchronising their data or even downloading the app required to use it.
In a post published yesterday, Adidas announced the discontinuation of key functionality from the Libra smart scale.
“We wanted to let you know that we’ve decided to stop supporting the Libra app. This means that we’ve taken the app off the market and that login won’t work anymore,” the company said. “A login and the synchronisation of your weight data from the Libra scale is no longer possible.”
Owners can still see how much timber they’ve put on during lockdown by glancing at the Libra’s LCD screen, much like they could with an ordinary £10 scale from Tesco. However, the core functionality that initially attracted them to the product is long gone.
While the Libra app is no longer searchable on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, those who have previously downloaded it are able to visit its page, where they can still leave “feedback”. Predictably, this has prompted a flood of one-star reviews and furious comments.
El Reg has contacted Adidas for comment.
Users of Libra are not alone in having their expensive IoT kit discontinued after just a few years of ownership.
In April 2016, the servers supporting a smart home hub product called Revolv were shut down, leaving owners unable to control their other Wi-Fi-connected gizmos. This stung for a couple of reasons: firstly, the hub cost £210 and was explicitly sold with a “lifetime subscription”. Secondly, Revolv wasn’t a fledgling startup with tenuous cash flow, but rather a subsidiary of Alphabet – one of the largest and wealthiest companies on the planet.
Another shocking example comes from last year, when Den Automation, a crowdfunding sensation that raised $4.5m in equity crowdfunding for a family of smart plugs and light switches, entered administration. As it found itself unable to pay for server costs, people suddenly found themselves burdened with non-functional and hugely expensive kit.
The assets and intellectual property of Den Automation were subsequently acquired by a previous investor through a new company called Den Switches, which has said it intends to restart the service. It’s not clear when that will happen.
More recently, the Will.i.am-owned startup Wink sent out an email to users of its smart home products demanding they pay for a subscription service in order to continue using their products as the revenue obtained from one-time purchases of its equipment proved insufficient to support long-term maintenance.
The problem with most IoT products isn’t necessarily that they rely on back-end servers to run. It’s that, for the most part, it’s impossible to perceive the trajectory of a given company. Will they be acquired by new owners with aggressive cost-cutting strategies and leaner product roadmaps?
Or will they financially struggle, eventually swirling the toilet basin of insolvency, and leave nothing behind but a bunch of electronic waste and angry one-star app reviews?
A rural village in Wales has been suffering through internet outages and slowdowns for 18 months. The situation baffled technicians until they realized that turning off one man’s TV solved everything.
On Tuesday, U.K.-based broadband provider Openreach explained in a release that every morning, around 7 a.m., residents of the Aberhosan village found themselves experiencing issues connecting to the internet, and when they could log on, loading times slowed to a crawl. According to the provider, engineers were deployed to the area on multiple occasions only to find the network was functioning normally. The company went as far as replacing some cable, but its efforts were fruitless.
Openreach engineer Michael Jones explained that “as a final resort” a team visited the village to test for electrical interference. “By using a device called a Spectrum Analyser we walked up and down the village in the torrential rain at 6 a.m. to see if we could find an ‘electrical noise’ to support our theory,” Jones said. “And at 7 a.m., like clockwork, it happened! Our device picked up a large burst of electrical interference in the village.”
The team was able to trace the signal to a residence and found that the occupant had an aging TV that was producing electrical interference known as SHINE (Single High-level Impulse Noise). The TV’s owner had a habit of switching it on every morning at 7 a.m. as they started their day. “As you can imagine when we pointed this out to the resident, they were mortified that their old second-hand TV was the cause of an entire village’s broadband problems, and they immediately agreed to switch it off and not use again,” Jones said.
Openreach’s network is still on the outdated ADSL Broadband standard with plans to deploy fiber later this year. SHINE is a type of interference that screws with the frequencies that ADSL utilizes. When a device is powered on, a burst of frequencies is emitted that can knock devices offline or cause reduced speeds as a result of line errors. While SHINE is a single event that occurs when turning a device off and on, it can result in DSL circuits failing and losing sync. UK telecom Zen has some tips from identifying SHINE on your own using an AM radio.
Last week, RTX 3080 scalpers pissed off a lot of Nvidia GPU fans by buying up all the graphics cards and attempting to resell them for hundreds of dollars more than the actual MSRP. Unfortunately, this is a common scalper tactic: Buy up as many items of a single product as possible, create a false scarcity, and sell them at a higher price to make a huge profit. People did this at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic with hand sanitizers and other disinfecting products, and it happens all the time with consoles and PC components, too. Scalpers may have created bots to snatch up all those cards, but it looks like bots aren’t just helping the scalpers. They’re also hurting them.
Now RTX 3080 GPUs are being listed on eBay with bids that exceed $10,000. But those ridiculously high bids might be the result of bots created by fed-up potential buyers. After I wrote about who in the hell would buy a RTX 3080 for $70,000, I quickly received dozens of messages from people pointing me to a post on the Nvidia forums where a user claimed that they wrote a bot to inflate scalper prices. The post on Nvidia’s forums has since been removed, but I was able to connect with the post’s author. They confirmed they did not place that winning $70,000 bid, but they claimed they modified the source code for a free eBay bidding bot and ran that code on 10 spoof accounts. They said they were also able to use the same phone number on all 10 of those accounts, and that number was fake as well.
If this person was doing that, how many other people were doing the same thing, and how far were they driving up RTX 3080 auction prices? We analyzed 2,723 bids across 179 live auctions on Monday morning, Sept. 21, that totaled $966,927 worth of bids, and came away with some interesting results.
[…]
Without going through every single RTX 3080 auction, it’s hard to know how many automatic bids or bots are getting into bidding wars like this. And the way eBay presents bidding information sometimes makes it hard to parse through that information. But it’s clear there’s a huge chunk of people out there hoping to get these listings deleted and the sellers banned from eBay by inflating bid prices. eBay has a policy against price gouging, or “offering items at a price higher than is considered fair or reasonable,” and artificially inflating RTX 3080 auction prices seems to have grabbed eBay’s attention. It has started taking actions against some of these sellers.
One seller sent me a screenshot of an email they received from eBay saying their account, which they first activated in March 2014, has been suspended permanently.
The suspended seller told me they received about 100 messages from other eBay users, ranging from, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” to,“Fucking kill yourself.” While the latter type of message is definitely abusive, anger directed toward scalpers trying to make a quick buck is not misplaced.
We reached out to eBay, but the company has yet to respond.
Nvidia has responded to the chaos by publishing a full FAQ about the steps it’s taking to prevent scalpers and bots from getting the jump on real customers in the future.
“We moved our Nvidia Store to a dedicated environment, with increased capacity and more bot protection,” Nvidia announced. “We updated the code to be more efficient on the server load. We integrated CAPTCHA to the checkout flow to help offset the use of bots. We implemented additional security protections to the store APIs. And more efforts are underway.”
The company confirmed that it manually canceled hundreds of orders linked to malicious reseller accounts, and more cards will be available for purchase soon. Hopefully, both Nvidia and eBay take additional steps to address this issue before the launch of the RTX 3090 and RTX 3070.
Scores of websites and services went down Friday afternoon due to problems with Cloudflare’s DNS service, sparking rampant speculation about the cause. After all, a global DDOS attack would totally fit the real-life apocalypse movie that 2020 is increasingly turning into.
The outage, which started shortly after 5 p.m. ET, brought down popular sites and services like Discord, Politico, Feedly, and League of Legends for roughly half an hour on Friday. Once connections were restored, Cloudflare issued an incident report stating that the issue “was not as a result of an attack” and that it “has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
Turns out the real explanation’s nothing so nefarious. Evidently, half the internet briefly went dark because of a crappy router in Atlanta.
“It appears that a router in Atlanta had an error that caused bad routes across our backbone. That resulted in misrouted traffic to PoPs that connect to our backbone,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince tweeted Friday. “We isolated the Atlanta router and shut down our backbone, routing traffic across transit providers instead. There was some congestion that caused slow performance on some links as the logging caught up. Everything is restored now and we’re looking into the root cause.”
According to the incident report, this issue with Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service impacted its data centers internationally, from Frankfurt to Paris and Schiphol, as well as several in major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, and San Jose. Reports on Downdetector showed the outages appeared to be concentrated in the U.S. and northern Europe.
Designers often rely on their smartphones for snapping a quick photo of something that inspires them, but Pantone has found a way to turn their smartphone into a genuine design tool. As part of a new online service, it’s created a small card that can be used to accurately sample real world colors by simply holding the card against an object and taking a photo.
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There are existing solutions to this problem. Even Pantone itself sells handheld devices that use highly-calibrated sensors and controlled lighting to sample a real-life color when placed directly on an object. After sampling, the device lets you know how to recreate it in your design software. The problem is they can set you back well north of $700 if the design work you’re doing is especially color critical and accuracy is paramount.
At $15, the Pantone Color Match Card is a much cheaper solution, and it’s one that can be carried in your wallet. When you find a color you want to sample in the real world, you place the card atop it, with the hole in the middle revealing that color, and then take a photo using the Pantone Connect app available for iOS and Android devices.
The app knows the precise color measurements of all the colored squares printed on the rest of the card, which it uses as a reference to accurately calibrate and measure the color you’re sampling. It then attempts to closely match the selection to a shade indexed in the Pantone color archive. The results can be shared to design apps like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator using Pantone’s other software tools, and while you can use the app and the Color Match Card with a free Pantone Connect account, a paid account is needed for some of the more advanced interoperability functionality.
This latest device succeeds the previous Librem 13 laptop, which ran for four generations, and includes a slightly bigger display, a hexa-core Ice Lake Intel Core i7 processor, gigabit Ethernet, and USB-C. As the name implies, the Librem 14 packs a 14-inch, 1920×1080 IPS display. Purism said this comes without increasing the laptop’s dimensions thanks to smaller bezels. You can find the full specs here.
Crucially, it is loaded with the usual privacy features found in Purism’s kit such as hardware kill switches that disconnect the microphone and webcam from the laptop’s circuitry. It also comes with the firm’s PureBoot tech, which includes Purism’s in-house CoreBoot BIOS replacement, and a mostly excised Intel Management Engine (IME).
The IME is a hidden coprocessor included in most of Chipzilla’s chipsets since 2008. It allows system administrators to remotely manage devices using out-of-band communications. But it’s also controversial in the security community since it’s somewhat of a black box.
There is little by way of public documentation. Intel hasn’t released the source code. And, to add insult to injury, it’s also proven vulnerable to exploitation in the past.
T-Mobile’s network is having an issue with voice and data service. There was a huge spike in outage reports on Down Detector starting at around 1 PM ET today, with many people across the US suggesting on that site and Twitter that they’re having problems. By around 3:30 PM ET, Down Detector had collected more than 82,000 outage reports.
Some people are unable to make or receive calls, but Wi-Fi calling still seems to work (in case you’re wondering why you can still call someone else from a T-Mobile phone right now). There are problems with data service too. T-Mobile’s president of technology Neville Ray confirmed the issue and said the company’s engineers are working to resolve them:
A scientist at the University of Sydney has achieved what one quantum industry insider has described as “something that many researchers thought was impossible”.
Dr. Benjamin Brown from the School of Physics has developed a type of error-correcting code for quantum computers that will free up more hardware to do useful calculations. It also provides an approach that will allow companies like Google and IBM to design better quantum microchips.
He did this by applying already known code that operates in three-dimensions to a two-dimensional framework.
“The trick is to use time as the third dimension. I’m using two physical dimensions and adding in time as the third dimension,” Dr. Brown said. “This opens up possibilities we didn’t have before.”
His research is published today in Science Advances.
“It’s a bit like knitting,” he said. “Each row is like a one-dimensional line. You knit row after row of wool and, over time, this produces a two-dimensional panel of material.”
Fault-tolerant quantum computers
Reducing errors in quantum computing is one of the biggest challenges facing scientists before they can build machines large enough to solve useful problems.
“Because quantum information is so fragile, it produces a lot of errors,” said Dr. Brown, a research fellow at the University of Sydney Nano Institute.
Completely eradicating these errors is impossible, so the goal is to develop a “fault-tolerant” architecture where useful processing operations far outweigh error-correcting operations.
“Your mobile phone or laptop will perform billions of operations over many years before a single error triggers a blank screen or some other malfunction. Current quantum operations are lucky to have fewer than one error for every 20 operations—and that means millions of errors an hour,” said Dr. Brown who also holds a position with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems.
“That’s a lot of dropped stitches.”
Most of the building blocks in today’s experimental quantum computers—quantum bits or qubits—are taken up by the “overhead” of error correction.
“My approach to suppressing errors is to use a code that operates across the surface of the architecture in two dimensions. The effect of this is to free up a lot of the hardware from error correction and allow it to get on with the useful stuff,” Dr. Brown said.
Dr. Naomi Nickerson is Director of Quantum Architecture at PsiQuantum in Palo Alto, California, and unconnected to the research. She said: “This result establishes a new option for performing fault-tolerant gates, which has the potential to greatly reduce overhead and bring practical quantum computing closer.”
Amazon built robot that is designed to kill the novel coronavirus with ultraviolet light.
The robot looks a little like a hotel luggage cart, with a tall metal frame attached to a rectangular wheeled bottom. One side of the frame is outfitted with at least 10 ultraviolet tube lights.
In a video shared with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” the robot rolls down the freezer aisle of a Whole Foods store, aiming UV light at the freezer doors.
The robot could be used in warehouses and at Whole Foods stores to kill the virus on surfaces such as food, packaging, and door handles.
Oh look, here’s another cautionary tale about buying cloud-based IoT kit. On 29 May, global peripheral giant Belkin will flick the “off” switch on its Wemo NetCam IP cameras, turning the popular security devices into paperweights.
It’s not unusual for a manufacturer to call time on physical hardware. Like software, it has a lifespan where, afterwards, it’s deemed not economically viable for the vendor to continue providing support.
But this is a little different, because Belkin isn’t merely ending support. It also plans to decommission the cloud services required for its Wemo NetCam devices to actually work.
“Although your Wemo NetCam will still connect to your Wi-Fi network, without these servers you will not be able to view the video feed or access the security features of your Wemo NetCam, such as Motion Clips and Motion Notifications,” Belkin said on its official website.
“If you use your Wemo NetCam as a motion sensor for your Wemo line of products, it will no longer provide this functionality and will be removed as an option from your Wemo app,” the company added.
Adding insult to injury, the ubiquitous consumer network gear maker only plans to refund customers with active warranties, which excludes anyone who bought their device more than two years ago. The window to submit requests is open from now until 30 June.
Storage vendors, including but reportedly not limited to Western Digital, have quietly begun shipping SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) disks in place of earlier CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) disks.
SMR is a technology that allows vendors to eke out higher storage densities, netting more TB capacity on the same number of platters—or fewer platters, for the same amount of TB.
Until recently, the technology has only been seen in very large disks, which were typically clearly marked as “archival”. In addition to higher capacities, SMR is associated with much lower random I/O performance than CMR disks offer.
Storage vendors appear to be getting much bolder about deploying the new technology into ever-smaller formats, presumably to save a bit on manufacturing costs. A few weeks ago, a message popped up on the zfs-discuss mailing list:
WD and Seagate are both submarining Drive-managed SMR (DM-SMR) drives into channels, disguised as “normal” drives.
For WD REDs this shows as EFRX (standard drive) suffix being changed to EFAX suffix (DM-SMR) […] The only clue you’ll get about these drives being SMR is the appalling sequential write speeds (~40MB/s from blank) and the fact that they report a “trim” function.
The unexpected shift from CMR to SMR in these NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives has caused problems above and beyond simple performance; the user quoted above couldn’t get his SMR disks to stay in his ZFS storage array at all.
There has been speculation that the drives got kicked out of the arrays due to long timeouts—SMR disks need to perform garbage-collection routines in the background and store incoming writes in a small CMR-encoded write-cache area of the disk, before moving them to the main SMR encoded storage.
It’s possible that long periods of time with no new writes accepted triggered failure-detection routines that marked the disk as bad. We don’t know the details for certain, but several users have reported that these disks cannot be successfully used in their NAS systems—despite the fact that the name of the actual product is WD Red NAS Hard Drive.
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What really grinds our gears about this is that the only conceivable reason to shift to SMR technology in such small disks—lowered manufacturing costs due to fewer platters required—doesn’t seem to be being passed down to the consumer. The screenshot above shows the Amazon price of a WD Red 2TB EFRX and WD Red 2TB EFAX—the EFRX is the faster CMR drive, and the EFAX is the much slower SMR drive.
Western Digital doesn’t appear to be the only hard drive manufacturer doing this—blocksandfiles has confirmed quiet, undocumented use of SMR in small retail drives from Seagate and Toshiba as well.
We suspect the greater ire aimed at Western Digital is due both to the prominent NAS branding of the Red line and the general best-in-class reputation it has enjoyed in that role for several years.
Modern transistors, which function as a computer’s brain cells, are only a few atoms long. If they are packed too tightly, that can cause all sorts of problems: electron traffic jams, overheating, and strange quantum effects. One solution is to replace some electronic circuits with optical connections that use photons instead of electrons to carry data around a chip. There’s just one problem: Silicon, the main material in computer chips, is terrible at emitting light.
Now, a team of European researchers says they have finally overcome this hurdle. On Wednesday, a research team led by Erik Bakkers, a physicist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, published a paper in Nature that details how they grew silicon alloy nanowires that can emit light. It’s a problem that physicists have grappled with for decades, but Bakkers says his lab is already using the technique to develop a tiny silicon laser that can be built into computer chips. Integrating photonic circuits on conventional electronic chips would enable faster data transfer and lower energy consumption without raising the chip’s temperature, which could make it particularly useful for data-intensive applications like machine learning.
“It’s a big breakthrough that they were able to demonstrate light emission from nanowires made of a silicon mixture, because these materials are compatible with the fabrication processes used in the computer chip industry,” says Pascal Del’Haye, who leads the microphotonics group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and was not involved in the research. “In the future, this might enable the production of microchips that combine both optical and electronic circuits.”
Purism has dropped the veil on the latest computer in its privacy-focused lineup – a small form-factor PC designed for space-conscious free software enthusiasts.
Available to pre-order now, the Librem Mini packs an eighth-generation, quad-core Whiskey Lake i7-8565U processor, modified with Purism’s Pureboot technology. At its heart, this aims to minimise any potential third-party interference with the operation of the computer – particularly during the boot phase, where it is potentially vulnerable.
It accomplishes this by thoroughly excising the Intel Management Engine, which Purism regards as an untrustworthy black-box baked into the heart of the processor, along with other software-level approaches. These include the use of the free software Coreboot BIOS, as well as the Purism-developed Heads, which aims to identify potential tampering within the BIOS, Kernel, and GRUB config.
In terms of expansibility, the machine packs a SATA and M.2 slot, and comes with two SODIMM slots, which can be filled with up to 64GB of RAM. There’s no dedicated graphics to speak of, but it does include Intel’s UHD 640 integrated graphics. Aside from a smattering of USB-A and USB-C slots, the Librem Mini also includes both Display and HDMI slots.
There’s also a standard RJ45 Ethernet slot – although you can add WiFi and Bluetooth via an optional Atheros ATH9k jack.
The Librem Mini has a small footprint, measuring just 5 inches across and weighing just 1kg – which is lighter than many laptops.
This machine is the latest in a growing lineup of machines that cater to the privacy-centric punter, including the Librem 13 and 15 laptops. Purism is also in the process of developing a smartphone platform to run on its own Linux-based PureOS operating system, and a baseband fully separate from the CPU. The firm has raised $2 million via crowdfunding for this effort and is expected to ship the first units later this year.
Pre-orders for the Librem Mini are open now. Retailing at $699, the base model packs 8GB of RAM and 256GB of NVMe storage. Units will ship one month after the firm has reached its (relatively modest) $50,000 pre-order goal.
Purism touts the Librem Mini as a potential mini-desktop or media server, although El Reg feels the use-case isn’t really as relevant as the potential customer. Greater awareness of privacy – and the way it’s gradually being eroded – has created an appetite for such devices, as demonstrated by Purism’s previous crowdfunding accomplishments. And if you want to excise a greater control over how you use your computer, this machine will undoubtedly appeal to you. ®
The repurposed industrial robot serves drinks in is own corner of a Japanese pub operated by restaurant chain Yoronotaki. An attached tablet computer face smiles as it chats about the weather while preparing orders.
The robot, made by the company QBIT Robotics, can pour a beer in 40 seconds and mix a cocktail in a minute. It uses four cameras to monitors customers to analyze their expressions with artificial intelligence (AI) software.
“I like it because dealing with people can be a hassle. With this you can just come and get drunk,” Satoshi Harada, a restaurant worker said after ordering a drink.
“If they could make it a little quicker it would be even better.”
Finding workers, especially in Japan’s service sector, is set to get even more difficult.
The government has eased visa restrictions to attract more foreign workers but companies still face a labor shortage as the population shrinks and the number of people over 65 increases to more than a third of the total.
