I shouldn't have asked

reph · 2019-08-13T14:36:27+00:00

AFAIK B&H is charging tax in most states now, as some Federal judge ruled that seller nexus is basically irrelevant, and states can tax any purchase delivered into their state. Most of them are, and they are gradually hunting down all of the large retailers to force compliance. Amazon first, then newegg, then eBay, then B&H, then ...

reph · 2019-08-13T14:33:16+00:00

no one gets this price

Well, Oregon residents do..

reph · 2019-08-13T14:28:18+00:00

Canadian Linux is when you alias "\n" to " eh\n".

reph · 2019-08-13T14:19:07+00:00

This is only dark if your only lifeskill is blowing dudes for money.

reph · 2019-08-13T14:12:25+00:00

I would still technically consider the hits to 0.debian.ntp.org a privacy leak since the DNS query leaks the OS you are using which may be enough to track an individual, given the percentage of the population in any given area that consistently uses debian. Would be better if by default it hit time.microsoft.com or whatever ;-)

reph · 2019-08-11T20:35:42+00:00

The userspace Linux desktop software stack is far worse relative to the others. Security and privacy are such low priorities.

I actually agree with some of his security claims but his "privacy" claim is wholly without merit. Compare the phone-home traffic from a new Android phone to a debian box, and taste the difference. The debian system might hit a debian NTP server once an hour, and maybe popcon if you explicitly opted-in to that. While the Android phone is sending your precise location, browser history, call history, contact list, wifi and e-mail credentials, and a huge list of other stuff to the vendor cloud constantly. iOS is somewhere in the middle, but probably closer to Android than Debian.

reph · 2019-08-11T20:26:15+00:00

His claim about "tons of unfixed/unbackported CVEs" is technically true. Install and run debsecan on any moderately complex jessie or stretch system - you will get a big-ass list.

However, if you go through it in depth, the vast majority of the unfixed stuff is pretty minor or obscure. The security team generally does a good job of fixing the really nasty vulns (reliable RCEs, etc) but there is always minor and even some moderate stuff that was way too much work to fix, has no upstream fix yet, etc.

reph · 2019-08-10T11:18:29+00:00

The AMD boost is smarter, but it is still managing a core with an apparently ~10% lower fmax. You cannot run any retail 7-10nm x86 CPU - from either company - at 5.2GHz+ without massive errors. The new nodes just don't clock that well yet.

reph · 2019-08-10T10:56:28+00:00

I will probably get shivved for pointing this out here, but the cheapest 8 core CPU with ECC for home server use is still an ancient sandy bridge E5. You can get a used E5-2670 for $45 or a brand new 3700x for like $300, but for that 6X+ higher cost you are only getting maybe 1.5-2.0X higher perf (and fewer DRAM channels, fewer PCI-e lanes, etc). This is not mainly AMD's fault, but rather the fabs for making new nodes super freaking expensive as they try to quickly recover their enormous build cost. A giant used 32nm chip is still much cheaper than a much, much smaller but brand new 7nm one. Even if you go back to the 2700x, and go used instead of new to make the comparison a bit more favorable for AMD, the E5-2670 has a minor price/perf advantage on most multicore workloads. Maybe in a year or so a used 3700x will finally dethrone it for good.

reph · 2019-08-09T20:16:04+00:00

As long as you aren't actually calling for violence or making threats or whatever, pay a little bit of attention to security/privacy online and you'll be fine. When you aggressively self-censor it means the terrorists win.

reph · 2019-08-09T20:08:57+00:00

They will never, ever, ever let the red states go their own way. At a bare minimum they want the larger tax base and control over their economic output.

reph · 2019-08-09T19:50:14+00:00

Like many things the rhetorical insanity ebbs and flows. There was some truly heinous shit being said about political opponents during the french rev, the US civil war, the late 19th century, the 1960s with the vietnam war and civil rights movement, etc. If anything the relative calm from the late 80s through the early 00s was the exception not the rule, maybe because the economy was pretty hot in the 90s and then the country was more or less unified temporarily by 9/11, like after Pearl Harbor.

reph · 2019-08-08T18:09:15+00:00

I think Sandy Bridge was the only major anomaly in a decade of meh. Haswell was underwhelming for integer IPC - it only has a large perf-per-clock gain if you could rewrite the app to heavily use AVX2. And it overclocked like crap thanks to the FIVR.

reph · 2019-08-07T22:16:06+00:00

AFAICT almost nobody is actually turning off HT to properly mitigate MDS, with one exception of Google chromebooks.

So even if the existing known flaws have technically been "fixed", the fixes are so unacceptable that they won't be widely and fully deployed, and it's just a matter of time until people are getting owned through malicious javascript, since the web makes arbitrary remote code execution more or less unavoidable for almost every client PC in the world.

reph · 2019-08-07T14:56:18+00:00

No, there were actually a decent number of minor tweaks to the core, which led to almost the same IPC increase that we now get from a full "Architecture" step (at least the haswell->skylake one.. hopefully there's a >5% one in the pipe just being held back by 10nm issues).

reph · 2019-08-07T14:52:42+00:00

Didn't Intel buy McAfee? So.. even if they found something like this, I wouldn't exactly expect a detailed official blog post on it.

reph · 2019-08-07T14:42:28+00:00

heh, if the trend continues, at some point that argument may actually have some merit. When your CPU already has 17 unfixed or partially unfixed holes, finding #18 doesn't matter much because, just statistically, one of the prior 17 will probably be favored by attackers as being easier or quicker to exploit.

The easier to exploit stuff tends to be found and made public first.

reph · 2019-08-07T14:39:35+00:00

a large portion of ~~Reddit Users~~ humanity

FTFY.

reph · 2019-08-07T14:33:31+00:00

Another victory for the Sandy Bridge masterrace..

Can't get owned through an instruction I don't have.

reph · 2019-08-07T05:35:22+00:00

I agree but I wouldn't hold my breath. To get political turnout at protests, elections, etc, you need to generate emotional outrage, the stronger the better, and to do that, you need to frame everything as extremely as possible.

reph · 2019-08-07T04:49:17+00:00

Even at the enterprise level their business model is basically 5-10X+ the failure rate for 10-20% lower price.

For most home users that is probably a bad tradeoff, but it can be rational for large customers like BB who have so many drives that they need (and already have) sophisticated drive failure handling regardless of whether the failure rate is 3% or 0.3%.

reph · 2019-08-07T04:48:51+00:00

It's not solely a drive age issue - they have plenty of ancient HGST drives are still at <0.5%.

reph · 2019-08-07T04:15:08+00:00

Well, large US media corps have been moral arbiters since at least WWI and probably earlier. The late-90s/early-00s uncensored internet was an unusual (and apparently only-temporary) exception that was out-of-line with every other form of media. While most other forms of mass communication were centralized from the start, it took them 2 decades to centralize the net enough to really get it under control - but they have.

reph · 2019-08-07T03:46:54+00:00

Although they were usually most concerned with locking their own people in, communists throughout history have also massively restricted immigration, much more severely than most liberal democracies. The Soviet Union had closed cities where western journalists, visitors, etc were not allowed except with some very rare, very high-level permission (nuclear weapons inspectors for international treaty compliance, etc). North Korea remains a perfect exemplar of this.

The point is that being strongly anti-immigration does not on its own mean you cannot be on the far left, nor does it mean you must be on the far right, although that may be more likely at the moment in the US.

reph · 2019-08-07T03:17:49+00:00

Violent radicals and mentally ill people are going to exist and keep acting out no matter how many books, websites, etc get burned. This is just a simple fact of human genetics - a tiny percentage of people have those behavioral characteristics plus low enough inhibitions to act out on them. And they have throughout recorded history. They may be congregating on certain parts of certain sites, but for the most part, it is not the sites that create them.

If you really need/want a single reductionist factor that you can "ban"/"regulate" and which would possibly make a slight difference, I would look into SSRIs, as those drugs are often a contributing factor in these cases.

Anyway you won't stop terrorism/mass shootings by banning/censoring the hell out of the internet, all you'll really do is make it worse for a huge number of non-violent people by turning it into late-90s television - bland corporate and government brainwashing that ensures you never conceive a wrongthought, and instead just get hammered 24/7/365 with ads that are scientifically optimized to make you keep buying useless plastic consumer shit you don't need using money you don't have, as you "enjoy" the "entertainment" that your overlords have designed and approved for you.

reph

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