Monthly Archives: August 2020

Article note: There are few things I hate as much as Willy Loman bullshit. I'm filing this as a positive COVID-19 side-effect.

Article note: So much for that.

Article note: Ugh, she is my least favorite of the advertised front-runners, but I both will still take it over Trump &co. and was already braced for the Democrats to their best to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Article note: Revert the UI, fix local file playback, and remove the YouTube history commingling/contamination situation? Oh wait, that gets us back where we started.

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Google Play Music is shutting down soon, and the transition to YouTube Music currently leaves a lot to be desired. For users with uploaded music, the transfer tool will port your music over seamlessly, but once you're in the YouTube Music interface, you'll discover that plenty of features have gone missing, and things that used to work on the free tier suddenly don't. If my email inbox is any indication, hordes of people are searching for alternatives.

Google isn't turning a deaf ear to the concerns of the Google Music migrators, though. In response to articles we've written here, like "YouTube Music is holding my speakers for ransom," Google got in touch with us and sent over a statement:

We understand that uploaded content is an integral part of the listening experience for many of our users across YouTube Music. While several features for uploaded content aren't currently working in the free YouTube Music experience, we’re working hard to address these feature gaps and bring additional functionality to our free tier user. We look forward to sharing more updates soon.

While this is a bit vague, the shoutout for users of uploaded content is a change of tone from what the company was saying in June. Our YouTube Music article was mainly about the free-versus-premium feature changes in YouTube Music and Google Music, including the requirement of a monthly fee in order to play purchased and uploaded music on Google Home speakers. Before publishing that article, we double-checked with Google to ask if charging to use a Google Home from YouTube music was really what it was planning, and all the company would do is reaffirm the current restrictions.

Article note: There are few things that scare me like crass theocrats, which in the US always means Dominionists.

Article note: I was inspecting a batch of Apex APM32F103CB boards (drop-in clones of STM32F103 parts) I (knowingly) bought before reading this have been thinking about the ethics of the situation. From the die shots some other people have posted, it looks like they're not straight die rip-offs from this kind of BS, but it is a similar sort of parasitism.

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Taiwan has faced existential conflict with China for its entire existence and has been targeted by China's state-sponsored hackers for years. But an investigation by one Taiwanese security firm has revealed just how deeply a single group of Chinese hackers was able to penetrate an industry at the core of the Taiwanese economy, pillaging practically its entire semiconductor industry.

At the Black Hat security conference today, researchers from the Taiwanese cybersecurity firm CyCraft plan to present new details of a hacking campaign that compromised at least seven Taiwanese chip firms over the past two years. The series of deep intrusions—called Operation Skeleton Key due to the attackers' use of a "skeleton key injector" technique—appeared aimed at stealing as much intellectual property as possible, including source code, software development kits, and chip designs. And while CyCraft has previously given this group of hackers the name Chimera, the company's new findings include evidence that ties them to mainland China and loosely links them to the notorious Chinese state-sponsored hacker group Winnti, also sometimes known as Barium, or Axiom.

Article note: Oh, hey, traffic spike is because someone posted it to HN. Neat.

Article note: This reads disturbingly like "if you aren't willing to spend the whole semester locked in your dorm room, get out now." Which is probably accurate. We've already got people quarantined before campus gets dense. I'm also immediately curious what happens if people who get quarantined decide they aren't dealing with remote classes and withdraw (Refund dates are 100% until 8-16, 80% until 8-21, 50% until 9-14, and W day is 10-26).

Article note: 35 years of computer history can be summarized as "complexity without comprehension." We've been studiously ignoring the Wirth's law consequences, and other parts of the bill started arriving in the 90s with the graveyard of dead platform projects that tried to "do it right," FDIV and f00f bugs, etc. The speculative execution bug boom is the next round, probably of many.