Britain's newest capital ship, the 3.1 billion once sterling pound helicopter carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth had to return to port after taking on roughly a quarter million liters of water and putting three crew members into mortal peril (archived). The ship was undergoing sea trials when a pipe carrying sea water burst leading to flooding and accompanying bucking, bending, and splitting damage to the ship. This is the third confirmed time that the sea has breached HMS Queen Elizabeth during her short life. Lacking catapults and arrestors for launching and landing traditional fixed wing aircraft, the ship is expected to carry a mix of the 'B' V/STOL variant of the beleaguered F-35 fighter and a complement of helicopters should the boat survive to reach initial operational capacity in 2021.
Category Archives: Hardware
Intel Goes On Media Push For "New Interpretations" Of Moore's Law
As Intel is mired a mess wrought by more than two decades of "optimizations" that weren't, the firm is making of marketing push for a new interpretations and reimaginings of Moore's law reflecting the compound sadness since their 2016 resignation to produce slower future chips in the name of "energy efficiency" (archived).
Intel has been stuck producing all but a few chips on the 14 nm lithograpy process they started shipping in 2014, while all of their major competitors including Huawei, Samsung, and TMSC are shipping 7nm chips and enjoying a two generation lead in process nodes. In the PC and server markets, Intel has conceded the performance lead to AMD while the performance of existing Intel processors falls due to ongoing patches mitigating the "optimizations" which once gave Intel the "speed" crown.
FedEx Sues FedGov Over Export Control Burdens
FedEx has sued the US Department of Commerce and Madame Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross over the impossibility of complying with the full extent of USG export control regulations. In the filing FedEx swears that they have a sophisticated system for checking sender and recipient identities against the USG's restricted entity list, but that determining whether any particular item entrusted to them as a common carrier is export controlled presents an excessive burden such that effective checks would require them to discard any pretense of customer privacy while forcing them to violate other laws in the process.
FedEx further laments that in other contexts common carriers enjoy protection from liability with respect to the contents of the package they are conveying, but not in this case. Either FedEx implements a regime of intensive package inspection trying to comply with US export controls and in the process breaks numerous other laws in their global area of operations, or they perpetually sit exposed to liability if the USG catches something going through under their care in violation of US export controls. Thusly, FedEx seeks relief under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, because these burdens were placed upon them without due process. The full filing is below: Continue reading
Week In Review: Iran's "Come At Me Bro" Posture Exposing USG Empire's Impotence
This week has seen tensions between the US and Iran escalate to the brink of a shooting war with a 100+ million USD drone's obliteration following its violation of Iran's airspace. The shootdown was followed by several hours of drama over whether or not the USG would answer Iran's act of border defense with retaliatory airstrikes. While the details of the process remain unclear, US President Donald Trump decided not to strike in defiance of staff of career USG national security advisors (archived). Instead, sometime tomorrow new sanctions and an escalation of the USG's economic war against Iran will be announced raising tensions still higher.
After the USG's embarrassing regime change miss in Venezuela, it is clear that the USG has never been weaker or less influential on the international stage since William Henry Seward nearly provoked Europe to end the US as Abraham Lincoln's Madame Secretary of State. With US warfighters wrecked in the aftermath of their own color revolution, the US Department of "Defense" briefly published a document outlining a hypothetical doctrine suggesting the US could achieve "strategic rebalance" by winning a nuclear war (archived).
And so the USG empire enters this next week with the a serious dilemma. Earlier this year their intelligence apparatus failed to buy regime change in Venezuela. A very sophisticated drone that was supposed to enjoy protection from airdefense missiles through its high flight altitude was taken down by an airdefense missile. What can the USG possibly do that demonstrates anything other than the empire's increasing impotence?
Yubikey FIPS Products Suffer Reduced Randomness
Yubico has published an advisory warning that their Yubikey FIPS products offer reduced randomness under a wide variety of conditions. While Yubikey is offering a replacement program, this does nothing to alleviate the damage rendered to those who fired their devices in anger. No Such lAbs has produced a dedicated, auditable random number generator which has strangely seen no competition in the market.
ROWHAMMER Being Used To Read From Vulnerable RAM
The ROWHAMMER vulnerability in DRAM which allows running processes to fuck with memory allocated to other processes is being developed into reliable side channel leaks reading from memory (archived). The importance of computing hygiene continues to be supported by the unforgiving march of time.
The full text of the academic paper is presented below: Continue reading
China Squeezes US As Tensions Rise: Windows Out In The PLA, Rare Earth Exports On The Chopping Block
As the US amps up its efforts to squeeze Chinese tech giant Huawei out of existence, China has begun countering with its own moves. The Chinese People's Liberation Army is dumping its Microsoft Windows licenses out of "hacking" fears (archived). With Anglophone firms breaking contracts and refusing to sell to Chinese firms, any last incentive of the Chinese side to continue paying is gone.
In a serious flashing of teeth, the Chinese are considering an export ban on rare earth metals to the United States (archived). Such a move would very well fuck US industries including the graftastic "alternative" power racket and force the US and their Australian collaborators to rapidly scale up their own rare earth mining and processing and make do with less. A stronger, not immediately likely though not unimaginable ban on the export of finished goods with rare earth components would of course mean the end of "consumer tech" in the United States.
Blueprints And Files Related To USG License Plate Scanner Dumped Online
Perceptics, the sole provider of fixed location license plate scanners for US land border crossings has seen a number of blueprints and other files related to their scanners leaked online (archived).
British Firm ARM Breaking Contracts With Huawei
British chip designer ARM is breaking their active and pending contracts with Chinese giant Huawei over the potential interpretations of a vague US foreign policy declaration (archived). US firms including intelligence contractor Google have broken relations with Huawei, but in this case a foreign firm is breaking their commerical agreements with Huawei over speculation.
Semiconductor Market Headed Towards Downturn As More Intel Data Leak Flaws Emerge
The growth outlook for the global semiconductor market are eroding for the year as 2019 marches on thanks to an increase in NAND flash memory production and just about everything else in the space being materially worse than offerings from a decade ago in many important measures (archived). Meanwhile the Intel "optimization" induced data leaks keep rolling in (archived). The ongoing Intel optimization fraud has lead Google to disable Intel's "Hyperthreading" in their ChromeOS spyware with other vendors considering similar measures (archived).