Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

[Yuli Ban]

^ Windows 10's ending? Didn't know that! I feel no strong way about it compared to Windows XP or Windows 7, the former of which is burned into my childhood nostalgia.

[weatheriscool]

Analysts Predict Rapid DDR5 Adoption by 2023
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/3 ... on-by-2023
By Joel Hruska on June 15, 2021 at 11:51 am

Analysts are predicting a fast ramp for DDR5 by 2023 after it debuts in the server market last year. If these predictions are accurate, DDR5 would ramp much more quickly than DDR4 did when it launched.

Micronews, via THG, predicts that DDR5 will launch at the tail end of this year and then scale rapidly in 2022 thanks to widespread adoption in the server market. In 2023, DDR5 goes fully mainstream and begins pushing DDR4 out of the entire PC space.

[weatheriscool]

AMD Is Working on Its Own Hybrid x86 CPU: Patent Filing

By Joel Hruska on June 15, 2021 at 8:16 am
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/3 ... ent-filing

It’s become clear that hybrid cores — big.Little in ARM’s parlance — are going to be a feature of mainstream x86 CPUs as well. Intel’s Lakefield combines one Ice Lake “big core” with four Tremont “little” cores. Its upcoming Alder Lake platform will scale the solution up, with (rumored) up to eight low-power cores (Gracemont) and eight high-performance cores (Golden Cove).

[weatheriscool]

We’ve Tested Windows 11 Ahead of Next Week’s Launch
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/3 ... -11-tested
By Joel Hruska on June 16, 2021 at 10:48 am

On June 24, Microsoft will unveil its latest version of Windows, Windows 11. We spent some time with the OS today after a copy leaked online. The upgrade function didn’t work properly on our testbed and the system itself failed to recognize the OS image when we installed it on a bootable drive (both USB and not). Fortunately, VMWare Workstation Pro 16 can virtualize a TPM 2.0 module, provided you have one in your system. This specific OS image requires it. It took a few hours to get things squared away, but the eventual result was this desktop:

[Yuli Ban]

Ohio Republicans close to imposing near-total ban on municipal broadband

Ohio's Republican-controlled legislature is on the verge of imposing a state law to dramatically restrict the rights of cities and towns to build and operate municipal broadband networks.

The Ohio Senate on June 9 approved a budget bill that contains an anti-municipal broadband amendment. It's not a done deal yet, and advocates for public networks are urging the legislature to strip the amendment from the final budget. The budget bill is expected to be hammered out within the next two weeks.

If passed, the proposed law could kill existing broadband services and prevent new ones from being deployed. There are reportedly 30 or more municipal broadband providers in Ohio that "would not be allowed to operate so long as there is a private-sector company operating in the area, as there are in most, if not all of the cities."

"If the amendment contained in the Senate's budget survives the budget process, it would make Ohio the first state in a decade to erect barriers to the establishment and expansion of municipal broadband networks," according to the Community Networks team at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), which has been tracking the legislative process.

[wjfox]

Chip shortage addressed by US-EU tech alliance

21 hours ago

Manufacturing more computer chips in Europe and the US will be one of the key focuses of a new technology alliance between the two.

The Trade and Technology Council (TTC) was unveiled following talks between European commissioner Margrethe Vestager and US President Joe Biden.

The group will also seek to set common standards for new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

[...]

A statement on the summit, includes a pledge to build "an EU-US partnership on the rebalancing of global supply chains in semiconductors".

The pandemic has led to global chip shortages and exposed weaknesses in supply chains, causing shortages of consumer electronics, such as gaming consoles, as well as slowing down production of cars.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57512511

[Yuli Ban]

Tesla unveils its new supercomputer (5th most powerful in the world) to train self-driving AI

Tesla has unveiled its new supercomputer, which is already the fifth most powerful in the world, and it’s going to be the predecessor of Tesla’s upcoming new Dojo supercomputer.

It is being used to train the neural nets powering Tesla’s Autopilot and upcoming self-driving AI.

Over the last few years, Tesla has had a clear focus on computing power both inside and outside its vehicles.

Inside, it needs computers powerful enough to run its self-driving software, and outside, it needs supercomputers to train its self-driving software powered by neural nets that are fed an insane amount of data coming from the fleet.

CEO Elon Musk has been teasing Tesla’s Dojo project, which apparently consists of a supercomputer capable of an exaFLOP, one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second, or 1,000 petaFLOPS – making it one of the most powerful computers in the world.

Tesla has been working on Dojo for the last few years, and Musk has been hinting that it should be ready by the end of this year.

But the company has developed other supercomputers on its way to Dojo, and now Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s head of AI, has unveiled the latest one during a presentation at the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

During the presentation, Karpathy gave a shoutout to Tesla’s supercomputing team and showcased their latest work, Tesla’s third supercomputer cluster:

[weatheriscool]

John McAfee dies by suicide inside prison in Barcelona

https://nypost.com/2021/06/23/john-mcaf ... barcelona/

MADRID, June 23 (Reuters) - The Spanish High Court has authorised the extradition of John McAfee, an antivirus software creator, to the United States where he faces tax evasion charges, a court document released on Wednesday showed.

McAfee, 75, who was arrested at Barcelona airport in October 2020, said during an extradition hearing this month that the accusations against him were politically motivated. He can still appeal against the court's extradition authorisation.

He has linked the charges filed by the Internal Revenue Service to his failed bid to run as a Libertarian Party candidate in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a second such attempt.

[weatheriscool]

World Wide Web source code is latest NFT for sale
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-wor ... -code.html
Tim Berners-Lee's code for the World World Web is being sold as an NFT by Sotheby's.

Tim Berners-Lee's source code for the World Wide Web is the latest non-fungible token (NFT) to go up for sale.

Sotheby's in New York is selling the program that paved the way for the internet we know today more than 30 years after its creation.

The sale started June 23 and ends on Wednesday. Bidding had reached $2.8 million on Friday.

The lot includes an animated version of Berners-Lee's nearly 10,000 lines of code and a letter from the British-born computer scientist himself.

"Ten years ago, we wouldn't have been able to do this," said Cassandra Hatton, vice-president at Sotheby's, referring to the recent boom in NFTs.

[caltrek]

The Biden administration today indicated that it is issuing an Executive Order with potentially far reaching economic consequences. The internet service industry will be one of several sectors to be impacted. Here is that portion of a White House statement that concerns internet service:

The Order tackles four issues that limit competition, raise prices, and reduce choices for internet service.

Lack of competition among broadband providers: More than200 million U.S. residents live in an area with only one or two reliable high-speed internet providers, leading to prices as much as five times higher in these markets than in markets with more options. A related problem is landlords and internet service providers entering exclusivity deals or collusive arrangements that leave tenants with only one option. This impacts low-income and marginalized neighborhoods, because landlord-ISP arrangements can effectively block out broadband infrastructure expansion by new providers.

In the Order, the President encourages the FCC to:

Prevent ISPs from making deals with landlords that limit tenants’ choices.

Lack of price transparency: Even where consumers have options, comparison shopping is hard. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), actual prices paid for broadband services can be 40% higher than advertised. During the Obama-Biden Administration, the FCC began developing a “Broadband Nutrition Label”—a simple label that provides basic information about the internet service offered so people can compare options. The Trump Administration FCC abandoned those plans.

In the Order, the President encourages the FCC to:

Revive the “Broadband Nutrition Label” and require providers to report prices and subscription rates to the FCC.

High termination fees: If a consumer does find a better internet service deal, they may be unable to actually switch because of high early termination fees—on average nearly $200—charged by internet providers.

In the Order, the President encourages the FCC to:

Limit excessive early termination fees.

Companies discriminatorily slowing down internet access: Big providers can use their power to discriminatorily block or slow down online services. The Obama-Biden Administration’s FCC adopted “Net Neutrality” rules that required these companies to treat all internet services equally, but this was undone in 2017.

In the Order, the President encourages the FCC to:

Restore Net Neutrality rules undone by the prior administration.

Technology

The Order tackles three areas in which dominant tech firms are undermining competition and reducing innovation:

Big Tech platforms purchasing would-be competitors: Over the past ten years, the largest tech platforms have acquired hundreds of companies—including alleged “killer acquisitions” meant to shut down a potential competitive threat. Too often, federal agencies have not blocked, conditioned, or, in some cases, meaningfully examined these acquisitions.

In the Order, the President:

Announces an Administration policy of greater scrutiny of mergers, especially by dominant internet platforms, with particular attention to the acquisition of nascent competitors, serial mergers, the accumulation of data, competition by “free” products, and the effect on user privacy.
Big Tech platforms gathering too much personal information: Many of the large platforms’ business models have depended on the accumulation of extraordinarily amounts of sensitive personal information and related data.

In the Order, the President:

Encourages the FTC to establish rules on surveillance and the accumulation of data.

Big Tech platforms unfairly competing with small businesses: The large platforms’ power gives them unfair opportunities to get a leg up on the small businesses that rely on them to reach customers. For example, companies that run dominant online retail marketplaces can see how small businesses’ products sell and then use the data to launch their own competing products. Because they run the platform, they can also display their own copycat products more prominently than the small businesses’ products.
In the Order, the President:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-roo ... n-economy/

[Yuli Ban]

The Internet Is Rotting
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone

So far, the rise of the web has led to routinely cited sources of information that aren’t part of more formal systems; blog entries or casually placed working papers at some particular web address have no counterparts in the pre-internet era. But surely anything truly worth keeping for the ages would still be published as a book or an article in a scholarly journal, making it accessible to today’s libraries, and preservable in the same way as before? Alas, no.

Because information is so readily placed online, the incentives for creating paper counterparts, and storing them in the traditional ways, declined slowly at first and have since plummeted. Paper copies were once considered originals, with any digital complement being seen as a bonus. But now, both publisher and consumer—and libraries that act in the long term on behalf of their consumer patrons—see digital as the primary vehicle for access, and paper copies are deprecated.

From my vantage point as a law professor, I’ve seen the last people ready to turn out the lights at the end of the party: the law-student editors of academic law journals. One of the more stultifying rites of passage for entering law students is to “subcite,” checking the citations within scholarship in progress to make sure they are in the exacting and byzantine form required by legal-citation standards, and, more directly, to make sure the source itself exists and says what the citing author says it says. (In a somewhat alarming number of instances, it does not, which is a good reason to entertain the subciting exercise.)

[erowind]

.

[wjfox]

[Yuli Ban]

Japan Just Shattered the Internet Speed Record at 319 Terabits per Second

Engineers in Japan just shattered the world record for the fastest internet speed, achieving a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s), according to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in June. The new record was made on a line of fibers more than 1,864 miles (3,000 km) long. And, crucially, it is compatible with modern-day cable infrastructure.
This could literally change everything.

The new data transfer method breaks signals up into various wavelengths

Note well: we can't stress enough how fast this transmission speed is. It's nearly double the previous record of 178 Tb/s, which was set in 2020. And it's seven times the speed of the earlier record of 44.2 Tb/s, set with an experimental photonic chip. NASA itself uses a comparatively primitive speed of 400 Gb/s, and the new record soars impossibly high above what ordinary consumers can use (the fastest of which maxes out at 10 Gb/s for home internet connections).
As if there's no limit to this monumental achievement, the record was accomplished with fiber optic infrastructure that already exists (but with a few advanced add-ons). The research team used four "cores", which are glass tubes housed within the fibers that transmit the data, instead of the conventional standard core. The signals are then broken down into several wavelengths sent at the same time, employing a technique known as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). To carry more data, the researchers used a rarely-employed third "band", extending the distance via several optical amplification technologies.

[BaobabScion]

Japan Just Shattered the Internet Speed Record at 319 Terabits per Second

Engineers in Japan just shattered the world record for the fastest internet speed, achieving a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s), according to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in June. The new record was made on a line of fibers more than 1,864 miles (3,000 km) long. And, crucially, it is compatible with modern-day cable infrastructure.
This could literally change everything.

The new data transfer method breaks signals up into various wavelengths

Note well: we can't stress enough how fast this transmission speed is. It's nearly double the previous record of 178 Tb/s, which was set in 2020. And it's seven times the speed of the earlier record of 44.2 Tb/s, set with an experimental photonic chip. NASA itself uses a comparatively primitive speed of 400 Gb/s, and the new record soars impossibly high above what ordinary consumers can use (the fastest of which maxes out at 10 Gb/s for home internet connections).
As if there's no limit to this monumental achievement, the record was accomplished with fiber optic infrastructure that already exists (but with a few advanced add-ons). The research team used four "cores", which are glass tubes housed within the fibers that transmit the data, instead of the conventional standard core. The signals are then broken down into several wavelengths sent at the same time, employing a technique known as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). To carry more data, the researchers used a rarely-employed third "band", extending the distance via several optical amplification technologies.

O'Lord, imagine using up the entirety of your yearly internet budget in 1/26th of a second!

[weatheriscool]

Flexible 32-bit microprocessor could pave the way to fully flexible smart integrated systems
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-07-fle ... fully.html
by Bob Yirka , Tech Xplore

A team of researchers at ARM Inc., has developed a 32-bit microprocessor on a flexible base which the company claims could pave the way to fully flexible smart integrated systems. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how they used metal−oxide thin-film transistors along with a type of plastic to create their chip and outline ways they believe it could be used.

Microprocessors power a wide range of products, but what they all have in common is their stiffness. Almost all of them are made using silicon wafers, which means that they have to be hard and flat. This inability to bend, the researchers with this new effort contend, is what is preventing the development of products such as smart clothes, smart labels on foods, packaging and even paper products. To meet that need, the team has created what they describe as the PlasticARM—a RISC-based 32-bit microprocessor set on a flexible base. In addition to its flexibility, the new technique allows for printing a microprocessor onto many types of materials, all at low cost.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

AMD’s New 6-Core and 8-Core APUs Are a Bigger Deal Than They Might Seem
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/3 ... might-seem
By Joel Hruska on August 5, 2021 at 10:30 am

This week, AMD launched new desktop silicon for gamers and enthusiasts who want the horsepower of the latest Zen 3 CPU but at a more reasonable price. The 5600G won more accolades in that regard than the 5700G, but both chips are a bigger deal than they might seem — and not just because we’re in the middle of an ongoing GPU shortage.

AMD has been talking about combining CPU and GPU on the same piece of silicon for well over a decade. The company’s entire “APU” concept relies on the idea of CPU and GPU as equal co-processors. AMD took a shot at creating this future when it launched its HSA initiative, but not much ever came of it. AMD had too little market power and its CPUs were not attractive enough to attract much developer attention back in 2012 – 2015. While the GPU could be used, in some cases, to accelerate workloads beyond what the CPU could deliver, only a small amount of software was ever HSA accelerated.

[weatheriscool]

Starlink Is Already Getting Close to Wired Broadband Speeds
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/325 ... and-speeds
By Ryan Whitwam on August 6, 2021 at 11:00 am

SpaceX has only been deploying satellites for its Starlink internet service for a couple of years, but it’s already putting traditional satellite internet to shame. According to the latest data from Ookla Speedtest, Starlink has seen substantial speed improvements that put it close to wired broadband. It’s even managed this while increasing subscriber counts by more than 25 percent.

For the uninformed, Starlink is one of several next-gen satellite internet systems. Elon Musk’s outfit is far in the lead thanks to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. This flight-proven vehicle can take 60 Starlink nodes into orbit at a time, and the costs are low thanks to the reusable design. As of now, Starlink has more than 1,600 functional satellites in various orbits, including some that are much lower than traditional satellite internet, which improves speed and latency compared to these solutions.

[caltrek]

The Internet Archive* Has Been Fighting for 25 Years to Keep What’s on the Web From Disappearing
by Kayla Harris, Christina Beis, and Stephanie Shreffler
August 13, 2021

https://theconversation.com/the-interne ... elp-163867

Introduction:

(The Conversation) This year the Internet Archive turns 25. It’s best known for its pioneering role in archiving the internet through the Wayback Machine, which allows users to see how websites looked in the past.

Increasingly, much of daily life is conducted online. School, work, communication with friends and family, as well as news and images, are accessed through a variety of websites. Information that once was printed, physically mailed or kept in photo albums and notebooks may now be available only online. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed even more interactions to the web.

You may not realize portions of the internet are constantly disappearing. As librarians and archivists, we strengthen collective memory by preserving materials that document the cultural heritage of society, including on the web. You can help us save the internet, too, as a citizen archivist.

Disappearing act

People and organizations remove content from the web for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s a result of changing internet culture, such as the recent shutdown of Yahoo Answers.

It can also be a result of following best practices for website design. When a website is updated, for example, the previous version is overwritten – unless it was archived.

*https://anniversary.archive.org/