Miscellaneous Tech News
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Respawn point: The inevitable reincarnation of the corporate office
Forget the utopian visions—nothing ever happens neatly, or without struggle.
If you told any executive at a major corporation in mid-2019 that close to half of the US workforce would be working from home within the next year, they would have at least raised a skeptical eyebrow (and then probably called security to have you removed). Yet, here we are. Major technology companies, including Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, have closed their physical offices until well into 2021. Twitter has told many employees that they can work from home permanently. And now that we have nearly six months of involuntary widespread work-from-home behind us, many other organizations are also reconsidering the value of office space. -
Chinese phones with built-in malware sold in Africa
Malware which signed users up to subscription services without their permission has been found on thousands of mobiles sold in Africa.
Anti-fraud firm Upstream found the malicious code on 53,000 Tecno handsets, sold in Ethiopia, Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana and South Africa. Manufacturer Transsion told Buzzfeed it was installed in the supply chain without its knowledge. Upstream said it was taking advantage of the "most vulnerable". "The fact that the malware arrives pre-installed on handsets that are bought in their millions by typically low-income households tells you everything you need to know about what the industry is currently up against," said Geoffrey Cleaves, head of Upstream's Secure-D platform. -
Napster is still a thing?
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/25/napster-sold-british-startup-melodyvr-surprise-deal -
@Texkonc said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Napster is still a thing?
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/25/napster-sold-british-startup-melodyvr-surprise-dealEasy answer is... no.
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YouTube video removals doubled during lockdown
YouTube removed more videos than ever during the lockdown period, the company says.
The second quarter of the year saw more than 11 million videos taken down, up from six million at the start of the year. YouTube said that it had opted for "over-enforcement" in its automatic systems when it was short-staffed during lockdown. But that also meant that more videos were taken down in error. Normally, "harmful content" would be sent to human reviewers, it said, but due to Covid-19 there were fewer reviewers working. "One option was to dial back our technology and limit our enforcement to only what could be handled with our diminished review capacity," the company said in a blog post. -
5G in US averages 51Mbps while other countries hit hundreds of megabits
It's an upgrade over 4G but not a huge one due to reliance on low-band spectrum.
Average 5G download speeds in the US are 50.9Mbps, a nice step up from average 4G speeds but far behind several countries where 5G speeds are in the 200Mbps to 400Mbps range. These statistics were reported today by OpenSignal, which presented average 5G speeds in 12 countries based on user-initiated speed tests conducted between May 16 and August 14. The US came in last of the 12 countries in 5G speeds, with 10 of the 11 other countries posting 5G speeds that at least doubled those of the US. -
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@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
5G in US averages 51Mbps while other countries hit hundreds of megabits
It's an upgrade over 4G but not a huge one due to reliance on low-band spectrum.
Average 5G download speeds in the US are 50.9Mbps, a nice step up from average 4G speeds but far behind several countries where 5G speeds are in the 200Mbps to 400Mbps range. These statistics were reported today by OpenSignal, which presented average 5G speeds in 12 countries based on user-initiated speed tests conducted between May 16 and August 14. The US came in last of the 12 countries in 5G speeds, with 10 of the 11 other countries posting 5G speeds that at least doubled those of the US.That's because we don't have 5G in the US. We mostly didn't get actual 4G. They got permission to rebrand 3G as 4G under some conditions to avoid having to roll out actual 4G using LTE instead (LTE is a 3G tech with permission to be called 4G even though it didn't meet the requirements as it was an older generation tech.) There is no working 5G equipment allowed to be sold in the US, so they've allowed them to call some 3G and pretty much any 4G tech 5G to make it sound like we are rolling out 5G - at maximum speeds that are slower than 4G in the former USSR was doing in 2016!!
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
There is no working 5G equipment allowed to be sold in the US
Why not? Import restrictions?
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@Danp said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
There is no working 5G equipment allowed to be sold in the US
Why not? Import restrictions?
Yes, 5G providers with working equipment are few and far between, to the point that Huawei is the only key player. The US bans Huawei software (not hardware.) So while you can physically buy the hardware, you can't get the firmware for it legally. We support ISPs and have been through the "there's no vendor, at any price, that even offers 5G currently inside the US". What we can buy off of the shelf in the third world, is out of bounds here.
So US-friendly vendors, like Samsung, are scrambling to build 5G tower radios. But as of a couple months ago, no working hardware was on the market yet. There's some hardware that doesn't work. But nothing functional like Huawei has. So the focus now is 100% on rolling out 5G-branded 3/4G solutions.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
5G in US averages 51Mbps while other countries hit hundreds of megabits
It's an upgrade over 4G but not a huge one due to reliance on low-band spectrum.
Average 5G download speeds in the US are 50.9Mbps, a nice step up from average 4G speeds but far behind several countries where 5G speeds are in the 200Mbps to 400Mbps range. These statistics were reported today by OpenSignal, which presented average 5G speeds in 12 countries based on user-initiated speed tests conducted between May 16 and August 14. The US came in last of the 12 countries in 5G speeds, with 10 of the 11 other countries posting 5G speeds that at least doubled those of the US.That's because we don't have 5G in the US. We mostly didn't get actual 4G. They got permission to rebrand 3G as 4G under some conditions to avoid having to roll out actual 4G using LTE instead (LTE is a 3G tech with permission to be called 4G even though it didn't meet the requirements as it was an older generation tech.)
The issue with 4G in general was/is that unlike 3G, there was never any minimum bandwidth requirements, so operators could roll out equipment that provided dial-up speeds and call it 4G. I guess it's the same story with 5G.
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TikTok CEO quits as company reportedly plans sale to Microsoft, Walmart
Can’t do global work if the White House is forcing sale of US business, Mayer said.
TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer, who only began the job on June 1, is heading right back out the door again as the company plans a sale under pressure from the White House. "In recent weeks, as the political environment has sharply changed, I have done significant reflection on what the corporate structural changes will require, and what it means for the global role I signed up for," Mayer wrote in an email to TikTok employees late Wednesday. "Against this backdrop, and as we expect to reach a resolution very soon, it is with a heavy heart that I wanted to let you all know that I have decided to leave the company." -
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
TikTok CEO quits as company reportedly plans sale to Microsoft, Walmart
Can’t do global work if the White House is forcing sale of US business, Mayer said.
TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer, who only began the job on June 1, is heading right back out the door again as the company plans a sale under pressure from the White House. "In recent weeks, as the political environment has sharply changed, I have done significant reflection on what the corporate structural changes will require, and what it means for the global role I signed up for," Mayer wrote in an email to TikTok employees late Wednesday. "Against this backdrop, and as we expect to reach a resolution very soon, it is with a heavy heart that I wanted to let you all know that I have decided to leave the company."I'd be completely happy if the whole of the US blocked TikTok... but - then someone else would walk in to fill the void.
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Going all-in on remote work: The technical and cultural changes
The new way of work requires a new way of managing, whether you like it or not.
Welcome to the fifth installment of our Future of Business series. Over the last few weeks, we've talked about home office ergonomics, the challenges of collaborating with remote colleagues, work strategies, and the inevitable return to the office. We've also asked Ars readers to weigh in on what has been working for them as they work remotely. -
Lenovo launches Fedora laptop.
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Interesting read from Cloudflare on yesterday's cluster from CenturyLink
Analysis of Today's CenturyLink/Level(3) Outage
Today CenturyLink/Level(3), a major ISP and Internet bandwidth provider, experienced a significant outage that impacted some of Cloudflare’s customers as well as a significant number of other services and providers across the Internet. While we’re waiting for a post mortem from CenturyLink/Level(3), I wanted to write up the timeline of what we saw, how Cloudflare’s systems routed around the problem, why some of our customers were still impacted in spite of our mitigations, and what appears to be the likely root cause of the issue.
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@JaredBusch said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Interesting read from Cloudflare on yesterday's cluster from CenturyLink
Analysis of Today's CenturyLink/Level(3) Outage
Today CenturyLink/Level(3), a major ISP and Internet bandwidth provider, experienced a significant outage that impacted some of Cloudflare’s customers as well as a significant number of other services and providers across the Internet. While we’re waiting for a post mortem from CenturyLink/Level(3), I wanted to write up the timeline of what we saw, how Cloudflare’s systems routed around the problem, why some of our customers were still impacted in spite of our mitigations, and what appears to be the likely root cause of the issue.
With the latest couple of outages I wonder about the availability, at least for some of Cloudflare's customers. It has to be way below 99.9% by now.
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@Pete-S said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@JaredBusch said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Interesting read from Cloudflare on yesterday's cluster from CenturyLink
Analysis of Today's CenturyLink/Level(3) Outage
Today CenturyLink/Level(3), a major ISP and Internet bandwidth provider, experienced a significant outage that impacted some of Cloudflare’s customers as well as a significant number of other services and providers across the Internet. While we’re waiting for a post mortem from CenturyLink/Level(3), I wanted to write up the timeline of what we saw, how Cloudflare’s systems routed around the problem, why some of our customers were still impacted in spite of our mitigations, and what appears to be the likely root cause of the issue.
With the latest couple of outages I wonder about the availability, at least for some of Cloudflare's customers. It has to be way below 99.9% by now.
It's hitting them hard. But hitting other customers, too. It's hard to classify something as a CloudFlare outage when the outage is not at CloudFlare but "somewhere on the Internet" after it has left CloudFlare and before it gets to the customer.
Like.... McDonald's is closed when it's driveway is closed. But is it closed when the road in front of the driveway is closed? What about if the highway between your house and there is closed? Or what if your car won't start?
There's a clear demarcation that when it's on premises and there is an outage, it's their outage. And when your car won't start, it's a car outage. But in between, in road terms we consider all of it an infrastructure outage and it is not an outage to you or the vendor, but the public utility space that you share between yourselves.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
It's hitting them hard. But hitting other customers, too. It's hard to classify something as a CloudFlare outage when the outage is not at CloudFlare but "somewhere on the Internet" after it has left CloudFlare and before it gets to the customer.
If it's CF's job to route their traffic around the "outage" and they're not able to (for whatever reason), then as long as that is the case CF has an outage as well.
Only those that are single homed to CenturyLink's network should have been affected. Datacenters that are single homed are unusual though, because you have zero redundancy.
But whatever...
