Monthly Archives: October 2024

What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs?

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: The answer is easy: Have a culture that allows people to earnestly engage in well-resourced research with expected payouts measured in decades instead of the current demand for a regular stream of "accomplishments." The _how_ is the hard part. Bell could easily swing it because they were an abusive monopoly with deep ties to the government, so they had all the money and were accountable to nothing. That part is less than ideal. Now research career arcs are completely governed by short-term metrics, so any early-career researcher that isn't primarily hustling the next hyped-up incremental paper, the next funding source, next product, next patent, is going to be driven out (denied tenure if they even make it that far in academia, fired or demoted to technician work in commercial labs). Because of that filter, late career researchers will mostly be hustlers who have lost any interest in big ideas if they had them to start with, and if they still _do_ have the mindset for big long work, they will be retired or dead by the time they're in a position to see it through. Look at Katalin Karikó (MRNA), who was basically driven out of academia before society desperately needed the MRNA work she was being punished for spending too long chasing. Look at Shuji Nakamura (Blue LEDs), who was only not ejected from the industry thanks to the patronage of Nichia's founder/CEO and a massive supply of stubbornness and insubordination that lead to, arguably, the most socially important advance in semiconductors since the transistor and a Nobel prize. We _don't_ hear about all the people who responded to the incentive structure and became a metric-chasing hypebeast, left in disgust, or were driven out. Instead, we hear about hype-cycles that suck all the funding and attention in a field for a few years, then end in disillusionment because every little incremental advance in a technology that probably _had_ a payoff measured in decades gets treated as a massive breakthrough (the hype treadmill means that in modern academic writing, anything less than effusive is condemnation), until the level of over-promise-and-under-deliver brings the cycle crashing down, and almost everyone decamps for the next hype cycle until we come back around in a decade or two.

It’s been said that the best way to stifle creativity by researchers is to demand that they produce immediately marketable technologies and products. This is also effectively the story of Bell Labs, originally founded as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. in January 1925. As an integral part of AT&T and Western Electric, it enjoyed immense funding and owing to the stable financial situation of AT&T very little pressure to produce results. This led to the development of a wide range of technologies like the transistor, laser, photovoltaic cell, charge-coupled cell (CCD), Unix operating system and so on. After the break-up of AT&T, however, funding dried up and with it the discoveries that had once made Bell Labs such a famous entity. Which raises the question of what it would take to create a new Bell Labs?

As described in the article by [Brian Potter], one aspect of Bell Labs that made it so successful was that the researchers employed there could easily spend a few years tinkering on something that tickled their fancy, whether in the field of semiconductors, optics, metallurgy or something else entirely. There was some pressure to keep research focused on topics that might benefit the larger company, but that was about it, as the leadership knew that sometimes new technologies can take a few year or decades to come to fruition.

Bell Labs Nobel prizes: comparing year winner was hired vs year of discovery. (Credit: Brian Potter, Construction Physics)
Bell Labs Nobel prizes: comparing year winner was hired vs year of discovery. (Credit: Brian Potter, Construction Physics)

All of this came to an rapid stop following the 1982 court-ordered breakup of AT&T. Despite initial optimism at Bell Labs that things could remain much the same, but over the following years Bell Labs would be split up repeatedly, with the 1996 spinning off of Western Electric into Lucent Technologies that took much of Bell Labs with it being the first of many big splits, ending for now with five pieces, with Nokia Bell Labs (formerly Lucent Bell Labs) and AT&T Labs being the largest two. To nobody’s surprise, among all these changes funding for fundamental and theoretical research effectively vanished.

A blue LED held up by its inventor, [Shuji Nakamura].
A blue LED held up by its inventor, [Shuji Nakamura].
The article then raises the question of whether Bell Labs was a historical fluke that could exist solely due to a number of historical coincidences, or that we could create a new ‘Bell Labs’ today. Theoretically billion-dollar companies such as Google and Apple are more than capable of doing such a thing, and to a certain extent they also are, funding a wide range of seemingly unrelated technologies and business endeavors.

Ultimately Bell Labs would seem to have been at least partially a product of unique historical circumstances, especially the highly specialized field of telecommunications before the same transistors and other technologies that Bell Labs invented would make such technological fields something that anyone could get started in. It’s possible that even without court order, AT&T would have found itself facing stiff competition by the 1990s.

The short answer to the original question of whether Bell Labs could be recreated today is thus a likely ‘no’, while the long answer would be ‘No, but we can create a Bell Labs suitable for today’s technology landscape’. Ultimately the idea of giving researchers leeway to tinker is one that is not only likely to get big returns, but passionate researchers will go out of their way to circumvent the system to work on this one thing that they are interested in. We saw this for example with [Shuji Nakamura], who cracked the way to make efficient blue LEDs, despite every effort by his employer to make his research unnecessarily difficult.

If there’s one thing that this world needs more of, it are researchers like Nakamura-san, and the freedom for them to pursue these passions. That, ultimately could be said to be the true recreation of Bell Labs.

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Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS

Source: OSNews

Article note: If this is reasonably high-quality it should be delightful. Termux, which is currently the best analog, is one of my must-haves, and their play store version (which ...isn't the one I use) is currently crippled because the whole point is that you can download and run software in the app, and google has been forbidding that for security and/or anti-competitive reasons.

Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM.

↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority

There already are a variety of ways to do this today, but having it as a supported feature implemented by Google is very welcome. This is also going to greatly increase the number of spammy articles and lazy YouTube videos telling you how to “run Ubuntu on your phone”, which I’m not particularly looking forward to.

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You’ll soon be able to safely and easily move your passkeys between password managers

Source: Engadget

Article note: They've now met the _absolute baseline requirements_ for being a credible auth mechanism. I wasn't sure if they were going to, or if the big players were just pushing passkeys as a lock-in mechanism.

By now, most people know passkeys offer a better way to protect their online credentials than passwords. Nearly every tech company of note, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, supports the protocol. Moreover, despite a slow start, adoption has dramatically increased in the last year, with, for instance, password manager Dashlane recently noting a 400% increase in use since the beginning of 2024. Still, not everyone knows they don’t need to rely on passwords to protect their online identity, and transferring your passkeys between platforms isn’t as easy as it should be.

That’s why the FIDO Alliance, the coalition of organizations behind the technology, is working to make it easier to do just that. On Tuesday, the group published draft specifications for the Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) and Credential Exchange Format (CXF), two standards that, once adopted by the industry, will allow you to safely and seamlessly move all your passkeys and passwords between different apps and platforms. 

With some of the biggest names in the industry collaborating on the effort (including Apple, Google, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, to name a few), there’s a very good chance we’re looking at a future where your current password manager — particularly if you use one of the first-party ones offered by Apple or Google — won’t be the reason you can’t switch platforms. And that’s a very good thing.

“It is critical that users can choose the credential management platform they prefer, and switch credential providers securely and without burden,” the FIDO Alliance said. “Until now, there has been no standard for the secure movement of credentials, and often the movement of passwords or other credentials has been done in the clear.”

The CXP and CXF standards aren’t ready for prime time just yet. The FIDO Alliance plans to collect feedback before it publishes the final set of specifications and gives its members the go-ahead to implement the technology.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/youll-soon-be-able-to-safely-and-easily-move-your-passkeys-between-password-managers-161025573.html?src=rss
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The Future of Big Iron: An Interview with IBM’s Christian Jacobi

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat read, the interviewer is Ian Cutress (wrote a bunch of the best architecture deep dive stuff for AnandTech; More than Moore is his own substack that he's been posting writing to) talking with the lead of the IBM Z (modern descents of the S/360, 370,390 mainframe line) about chip design and market trends. It's not a world I get much perspective on.
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FreeBSD: How Can We Make It More Attractive to New Users?

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I tried FreeBSD 14 on a spare laptop the other day because I had a "Let's see what's going on in BSD Land" urge. Maybe refresh my perspective on the Linux stack. Two hours of fucking around later I determined that the QCA9565 wireless chip-set driver seems to be "half working" and intermittent, or their alarmingly-static-looking wireless configuration system has subtleties I couldn't figure out, as someone who is "pretty good at computers." Next I tried booting the installer on a coreboot'd ex-Chromebook just for sport, it couldn't handle the i2c input devices, so no. It runs OK in a VM but... not on any real hardware I have on hand, and not with any user-facing features that really distinguish it. I do still adore the simplicity of BSD-style rc init, and like the ifconfg extended for the modern era better than the command line soup that is the ip tool, and some other details in that vein, but the overall experiment was not wildly favorable. Also, their much-vaunted documentation is frankly not as comprehensive as the Arch wiki. The HN thread makes it sound like their power management/suspend situation is not really up to snuff for running on laptops right now anyway, though there are reports of a major effort to improve it.
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Archive.org, a repository storing the entire history of the Internet, has a data breach

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Well that's not good.

Archive.org, possibly one of the only entities to preserve the entire history of the Internet, was recently compromised in a hack that revealed data of roughly 31 million users.

A little after 2 PM California time, social media blew up with screenshots showing what the archive.org homepage displayed.

It read:

Read full article

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China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor

Source: Schneier on Security

Article note: Entirely predictable problem was entirely predictable. Backdoors for anyone work as backdoors for everyone who figures out (or steals) how they work. Don't make them or they will be abused.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994.

It’s a weird story. The first line of the article is: “A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers.” This implies that the attack wasn’t against the broadband providers directly, but against one of the intermediary companies that sit between the government CALEA requests and the broadband providers.

For years, the security community has pushed back against these backdoors, pointing out that the technical capability cannot differentiate between good guys and bad guys. And here is one more example of a backdoor access mechanism being targeted by the “wrong” eavesdroppers.

Other news stories.

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We need a real GNU/Linux (not Android) smartphone ecosystem

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Someone who wasn't around for the Maemo era discovers how far we've fallen.
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A Field Guide to the University of Kentucky Graduate School

Having now collected two graduate degrees myself, and been related many stories by friends and acquaintances doing grad school at UK, some advice for those behind me.

UK’s graduate school is the absolute archetype of the rule of thumb that, at UK, every individual you deal with will be nice and helpful, but as an organization they’re the most useless, obstructive motherfuckers you’ll ever have the displeasure of dealing with. You will never find an individual to punch in the face when something deserving happens, because responsibility has been diluted sufficiently that there isn’t usually an individual bad actor responsible for whatever bullshit is going on; the problem is that there are half a dozen overpaid people with inflated titles not dealing with the thing, and an assortment of folks in lower-titled, public-facing positions having to scramble to make things work around the administrative dysfunction.
The fact that UK just went into administrative bloat overdrive by dissolving the faculty senate with no concrete plans to replace their functions, then started hiring random assholes who don’t even have the context to know how things have to work to take over matters the senate used to handle has made it even worse this year than usual.

Detailed Notes Below

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No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems

Source: Hacker News

Article note: There certainly are unhealthy things about social media, but I think a LOT of the finger-pointing is the traditional, horrible, "Pointing at the things young people do to escape/work around the actual problems in their life as though the workarounds are the problems." We've done a _really through_ job of excluding young people from most public spaces with explicit policy (You'd get CPS called on you if you let your kids have as much autonomy as used to be normal), over-scheduling to meet dubious competitive pressures, and car-centric (sub)urban design. They are facing broadly diminished prospects in careers and home ownership relative to earlier cohorts, climate change is kicking into high gear, they had developmental years in the pandemic... and now there's an increasing mixture of rent-seeking and policing in the online spaces they gather in as a workaround.
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