Various news sources are reporting that as the nuclear waste containment tanks at the Hanford Site along the Columbia River in Washington State age well beyond their 50 year service life leaks are increasing with at least one tank in a condition that could charitably be described as complete failure (archived). A United States Department of Energy Politruk described the horrific outcome as an "anticipated" side effect of efforts to empty the failed tank. The Hanford site is a part of Manhattan Project National Historical Park and administered jointly by the National Park Service and the Department of Energy. Continue reading
Category Archives: Hardware
Raptor Engineering Laments Dire State Of x86 And CPU Industry At Large
Today Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering issue a dire lamentation to the Free Software Foundation Europe mailing list asking:
Are you willing to continue to use FOSS software inside the ever-shrinking x86 "software jail", or are you possibly willing to give up some cost or performance advantages in order to retain full control of the software running on your hardware?
20th Anniversary Of Kaczynski's Capture Today
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the capture of noted mathematician and widely published philosopher of technology Theodore Kaczynski by forces of the United States regime in Washington, DC. Theodore Kaczynski is also widely suspected to have been forcefully drugged and violated as a part of the CIA's MKULTRA program as an undergraduate at Harvard. In a rare feat for any author Kaczynski managed to get a 34 kiloword essay titled Industrial Society and Its Future published in print in the September 19th, 1995 editions of the New York Times and Washington Post in its entirety.1 After a political show trial the regime in Washington DC had locked Kaczynki up at their Florence, Colorado super maximum security prison where he remains a political prisoner.
The full text of Industrial Society and Its Future is reproduced below: Continue reading
This was before the Internet had emboldened both of those publications to adopt their present habit of routinely publishing whatever long for slop they can get their hands on. ↩
Qualcomm "Snapdragon" Chips Allegedly Riddled With Vulnerabilities
Trend Micro in a blog post is alleging that Qualcomm's "Snapdragon" family of system on a chip computers are riddled with numerous security vulnerabilities, particularly when paired with Google's Android operating system (archived). The continued plagues of leaky abstraction and faux compartmentalization which require ever larger collections of "teams" to design new chips in the popular style as well as the war on computing suggest that we are going to increasingly see security vulnerabilities baked into silicon. Instead of celebrating the death of Moore's law as occasion to move towards saner architectural decisions, the trend appears to be favoring further insanity and a proliferation of nooks and crannies for culturing security holes organically or placing them deliberately.
F-35 Software Requiring Hard Reboots While Airborne
Jane's reports that the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Developed by and for the armed forces of the United States and its allies has a new quirk gathering public attention (archived). Well, several quirks but the most notable is a software glitch that interferes with the aircraft's mission readiness by requiring hard reboots during flight to restore functionality to the radar. So far the F-35's ability to hemorrhage funds printed for the United States Department of Defense has lead to the early end of production for the more capable F-22 fighter, threatened the end of life for the more capable A-10 ground attack aircraft, and ended or hindered an uncountable other number of other things which may have been less embarrassing ends to direct the United States Government's money printing machine than the F-35. Sorry for your loss and peace in our time.
Intel Removes Skylake Feature Retroactively With Microcode Update
In further bad news for customers of Intel's Skylake chips, PC World is reporting that Intel has is issuing a microcode update which removes a feature present at shipping which allowed safely and easily overclocking the chips by increasing their base clock frequency (archived). Normally overclocking is done safely on other chips through increasing the multiplier applied to the base clock. This is because in other chips the base clock frequency is used to derive the frequency of a number of buses on the system which can begin exhibiting aberrant behavior when the base clock frequency is molested. Skylake however divorced the base clock from other system buses which reintroduced the possibility of overclocking the chips by increasing the base clock while leaving the locked multiplier alone. Continue reading
Intel: Chips To Get Slower
William Holt, General Manager of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing group, has now gone on the public record declaring their future chips will be getting slower in the name of energy efficiency as Moore's law comes to an end (archived). Continue reading
Intel Skylake Brings Optimized #ROWHAMMER Exploit
In spite of marketing that Intel's latest Skylake family of chips would be more resistant to the Rowhammer exploit through use of DDR4 memory, it has come out that not only does Rowhammer survive (archived), exploiting it is more optimizable than ever (archived) thanks to the new clflushopt instruction. Remember to watch your bits and be selective in the code and hardware you choose to run.
Radeon Refresh Gets Shrink To 14 nm
In what would have been Bitcoin mining news during the ancient stretch from summer 2010 and to the close of 2012, AMD's next refresh of their Radeon graphics cards will include a process shrink from 28 nm to 14 nm (archived). The new parts are set to arrive in the Summer of 2016 placing their availability within a few months of the next Bitcoin subsidy halving, if current trends in Bitcoin network difficulty continue.
Forever 21 Inc Tries Preventing Other Raspberry Pis From Running Software
Forever 21 Inc. raised $116mn in venture funding before a product or business plan was even announced. Earlier this fall the company announced the 21 Computer, a Frankenstein creation using a Raspberry-Pi 2 and a proprietary ASIC which will be obsolete soon given the continual difficulty increases. This computer can be bought for the low price of $400, which allows users to connect to 21 co.'s API a bastardization of the already functioning Web of Trust. Recently code was independently released allowing individuals to run the 21 co. software stack on a $40 Raspberry Pi, to which the CEO of 21 Inc. responded on reddit stating they will be patching the code to prevent non-21 Co. from connecting to their marketplace. Continue reading