Edge TV Now Online-Only
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
If there is anybody else besides me who wondered what happened to Edge
TV, as of the beginning of this month it is no longer on Freeview, it
can now only be viewed as an online stream
<https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/113928839/the-edge-tv-remo...>.
In the last few days of June, there was a promo announcing that it
was going HD, but I don’t recall it mentioning that it was leaving the
broadcast airwaves.
Quote:
MediaWorks chief executive Michael Anderson says the move is in
line with audience trends, which show people primarily consume
music videos online.
While that may be mostly true, personally I would go look for videos on
YouTube after seeing them first on Edge TV.
1 month, 1 week
The State Of Video Streaming In NZ
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Apple’s TV+ streaming service is coming soon, followed by Disney’s one
<https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=1226...>.
Note:
Disney+ will break Sky's longtime near-monopoly on Disney content
in these parts. Disney says that, ultimately, Disney+ will be the
exclusive home of its content.
So to get a comparable range of TV content to that you currently have
free-to-air, you are going to have to subscribe to two or three or
maybe more different streaming services. The increasing multitude of
things to pay for isn’t about choice, but about no choice at all.
3 months, 4 weeks
Mozilla Moves To Monetize Thunderbird, Transfers Project To New Subsidiary
by Peter Reutemann
'The Mozilla Foundation announced today that it was moving its
Thunderbird email client to a new subsidiary named the MZLA
Technologies Corporation. From a report:
Mozilla said that Thunderbird will continue to remain free and open
source, but by moving the project away from its foundation into a
corporate entity they will be able to monetize the product and pay for
its development easier than before. Currently, Thunderbird is
primarily being kept alive through charitable donations from the
product's userbase. "Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not
only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but
will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services
that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation," said Philipp
Kewisch, Mozilla Product Manager. "The move will allow the project to
collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations,
which in turn can be used to cover the costs of new products and
services," Kewisch added.'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/01/29/1430253
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
4 months
64-Bit Times On 32-Bit Linux
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Some more patches have gone into the Linux kernel
<https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/30/linux_5_6_2038/> to allow
32-bit builds to deal with times past the year-2038 barrier. Basically
the fix involves offering a 64-bit alternative to the original time_t
type, without the whole app having to go 64-bit.
One point I noticed is that certain filesystems (e.g. ext2, presumably
ext3 as well) store on-disk fields with 32-bit timestamps, so if you’re
using one of these, you’ll have to reformat the disks as well. And that
would apply even if you’re already using a 64-bit OS.
4 months
autoremove
by john
Hi all,
At our last meeting Tom was concerned about Linux bloating with surplus
files. I have always found this to seldom be the case due to :
a. The new download removes the older files or:
b. The command autoremove clears the unused kernels and other not
required files.
eg.
john@polomint:~$ sudo apt autoremove
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
linux-headers-4.15.0-72 linux-headers-4.15.0-72-generic
linux-image-4.15.0-72-generic linux-modules-4.15.0-72-generic
linux-modules-extra-4.15.0-72-generic
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 5 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
After this operation, 332 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
Cheers John..
4 months
Intel Is Patching Its 'Zombieload' CPU Security Flaw For the Third Time
by Peter Reutemann
'For the third time in less than a year, Intel has disclosed a new set
of vulnerabilities related to the speculative functionality of its
processors. On Monday, the company said it will issue a software
update "in the coming weeks" that will fix two more microarchitectural
data sampling (MDS) or Zombieload flaws. This latest update comes
after the company released two separate patches in May and November of
last year.
Compared to the MDS flaws Intel addressed in those two previous
patches, these latest ones have a couple of limitations. To start, one
of the vulnerabilities, L1DES, doesn't work on Intel's more recent
chips. Moreover, a hacker can't execute the attack using a web
browser. Intel also says it's "not aware" of anyone taking advantage
of the flaws outside of the lab.
In response to complaints of the company's piecemeal approach, Intel
said that it has taken significant steps to reduce the danger the
flaws represent to its processors.
"Since May 2019, starting with Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS),
and then in November with TAA, we and our system software partners
have released mitigations that have cumulatively and substantially
reduced the overall attack surface for these types of issues," a
spokesperson for the company said. "We continue to conduct research in
this area -- internally, and in conjunction with the external research
community.'
-- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/01/27/2126231
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
4 months
European Processor Initiative
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Here’s a report
<https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/01/27/european-processor-initiative-rea...>
on a Europe-wide effort to produce a processor chip for an “exascale”
supercomputer. It will have an ARM CPU core, with a RISC-V-based
accelerator and a few other special-purpose units on the side.
I was intrigued to see mention of an “AI-inspired bfloat16 format”.
Floating-point numbers commonly come in 32-bit and 64-bit sizes. There
is also a “half-precision” 16-bit format, with reduced precision and
dynamic range, commonly used in computer graphics, for example. This
new format keeps the full dynamic range of 32-bit floats, at the
expense of even further reduced precision. Apparently this works better
for various machine-learning algorithms.
4 months
ProtonVPN Open Sources All Its Code
by Peter Reutemann
'ProtonVPN open sourced its code this week, ZDNet reports:
On Tuesday, the virtual private network (VPN) provider, also known for
the ProtonMail secure email service, said that the code backing
ProtonVPN applications on every system -- Microsoft Windows, Apple
macOS, Android, and iOS -- is now publicly available for review in
what Switzerland-based ProtonVPN calls "natural" progression.
"There is a lack of transparency and accountability regarding who
operates VPN services, their security qualifications, and whether they
fully conform to privacy laws like GDPR," the company says. "Making
all of our applications open source is, therefore, a natural next
step." Each application has also undergone a security audit by SEC
Consult, which ProtonVPN says builds upon a previous partnership with
Mozilla...
The source code for each app is now available on GitHub (Windows,
macOS, Android, iOS). "As a community-supported organization, we have
a responsibility to be as transparent, accountable, and accessible as
possible," ProtonVPN says.
"Going open source helps us to do that and serve you better at the same time."
They're also publishing the results of an independent security audit
for each app. "As former CERN scientists, publication and peer review
are a core part of our ethos..." the company wrote in a blog post.
They also point out that Switzerland has some of the world's strongest
privacy laws -- and that ProtonVPN observes a strict no-logs policy.
But how do they feel about their competition? "Studies have found that
over one-third of Android VPNs actually contain malware, many VPNs
suffered from major security lapses, and many free VPN services that
claimed to protect privacy are secretly selling user data to third
parties."'
-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/01/27/0352244
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
4 months
Do Emails Contribute to Global Warming?
by Peter Reutemann
'"Cut back on email if you want to fight global warming," read the
headline on a recent article at Bloomberg:
[A]ll those messages require energy to preserve them. And despite the
tech industry's focus on renewables, the advents of streaming and
artificial intelligence are only accelerating the amount of fossil
fuels burned to keep data servers up. Right now, data centers consume
about 2 percent of the world's electricity, but that is expected to
reach 8 percent by 2030. Moreover, only about 6 percent of all data
ever created is in active use today, according to research from
Hewlett Packard Enterprise. That means 94 percent is sitting in a vast
"landfill" with a massive carbon footprint.
"It's costing us the equivalent of maintaining the airline industry
for data we don't even use," said Andrew Choi, a senior research
analyst at Parnassus Investments, a $27 billion environmental, social
and governance firm in San Francisco. Kirk Bresniker, chief architect
of Hewlett Packard Labs, said these server farms use energy both to
retain your data and when you use it... And when you empty the email
trash, you probably aren't actually erasing the data. Multiple copies
of even decade-old emails are stored on servers around the world,
still using energy...
Bresniker says the tech industry is "flying blind" when it comes to
the true cost of storing data. The picture is clouded by a constant
stream of efficiency and memory upgrades, increased renewable power
and AI aimed at data-center efficiency. "We don't really understand
what the footprint is," he said... The sum of all the world's data in
2018 was 33 zettabytes — 33 trillion gigabytes — but by 2025 it could
increase fivefold, to 175 zettabytes, according to International Data
Corp. Every day, the world produces about 2.5 quintillion bytes of
data... Computing workloads are likely to more than double as more AI
comes online, more devices are connected and people do more work in
the cloud...
Choi says the problem is getting too big, too fast... Training an AI
model emits about as much carbon as the lifetime emissions associated
with running five cars'
-- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/01/27/0149253
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
4 months
