Miscellaneous Tech News
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Google Cloud gets a new family of cheaper general-purpose compute instances
As soon as someone mentions Google Cloud in News, I assume that they are shutting it down to pursue other projects.
Yeah. I usually look at these in terms of how it moves the whole cloud industry forward (and making it less expensive).
For sure. I just keep expecting Google to forget that they do this and shut it down with little warning.
Quite possible. It has happened to many of their higher-profile "products".
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@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Google Cloud gets a new family of cheaper general-purpose compute instances
As soon as someone mentions Google Cloud in News, I assume that they are shutting it down to pursue other projects.
Yeah. I usually look at these in terms of how it moves the whole cloud industry forward (and making it less expensive).
For sure. I just keep expecting Google to forget that they do this and shut it down with little warning.
Quite possible. It has happened to many of their higher-profile "products".
Exactly, Google has conditioned me to just assume everything is going to go away.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Google Cloud gets a new family of cheaper general-purpose compute instances
As soon as someone mentions Google Cloud in News, I assume that they are shutting it down to pursue other projects.
Yeah. I usually look at these in terms of how it moves the whole cloud industry forward (and making it less expensive).
For sure. I just keep expecting Google to forget that they do this and shut it down with little warning.
Quite possible. It has happened to many of their higher-profile "products".
Exactly, Google has conditioned me to just assume everything is going to go away.
How they manage to have customers still just amazes me (on everything but the selling of ads)... some day gmail will die because it doesn't make enough money behind the scenes.
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Nebula VPN routes between hosts privately, flexibly, and efficiently
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/nebula-vpn-routes-between-hosts-privately-flexibly-and-efficiently/"Last month, the engineering department at Slack—an instant messaging platform commonly used for community and small business organization—released a new distributed VPN mesh tool called Nebula. Nebula is free and open source software, available under the MIT license.
It's difficult to coherently explain Nebula in a nutshell. According to the people on Slack's engineering team, they asked themselves "what is the easiest way to securely connect tens of thousands of computers, hosted at multiple cloud service providers in dozens of locations around the globe?" And (developing) Nebula was the best answer they had. It's a portable, scalable overlay networking tool that runs on most major platforms, including Linux, MacOS, and Windows, with some mobile device support planned for the near future."
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@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Nebula VPN routes between hosts privately, flexibly, and efficiently
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/nebula-vpn-routes-between-hosts-privately-flexibly-and-efficiently/"Last month, the engineering department at Slack—an instant messaging platform commonly used for community and small business organization—released a new distributed VPN mesh tool called Nebula. Nebula is free and open source software, available under the MIT license.
It's difficult to coherently explain Nebula in a nutshell. According to the people on Slack's engineering team, they asked themselves "what is the easiest way to securely connect tens of thousands of computers, hosted at multiple cloud service providers in dozens of locations around the globe?" And (developing) Nebula was the best answer they had. It's a portable, scalable overlay networking tool that runs on most major platforms, including Linux, MacOS, and Windows, with some mobile device support planned for the near future."
It's like Napster, Limewire, Gnutella, Bit Torrent, etc with SSL. Only Nebula appears to actually be secure against side channel leaks.
Maybe Nebula (unlike all the other P2P before it) will actually take off and be used by many. Their first step in the right direction is to push the VPN nomenclature without ever mentioning P2P file sharing.
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@JasGot said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Their first step in the right direction is to push the VPN nomenclature without ever mentioning P2P file sharing.
It's just a VPN. P2P is a file transfer thing. This is a VPN thing. Not really related at all. This is like ZeroTier.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@JasGot said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Their first step in the right direction is to push the VPN nomenclature without ever mentioning P2P file sharing.
It's just a VPN. P2P is a file transfer thing. This is a VPN thing. Not really related at all. This is like ZeroTier.
I understand file sharing is just a rider in the transit system, but can you imagine how software piracy will take off when everyone is wearing a cloaking cape? ie; Mesh-VPN
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Nginx office raided
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/12/nginx_moscow_office_raided/
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@JasGot said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@JasGot said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Their first step in the right direction is to push the VPN nomenclature without ever mentioning P2P file sharing.
It's just a VPN. P2P is a file transfer thing. This is a VPN thing. Not really related at all. This is like ZeroTier.
I understand file sharing is just a rider in the transit system, but can you imagine how software piracy will take off when everyone is wearing a cloaking cape? ie; Mesh-VPN
People don't, though. Mesh VPNs were standard in the 1990s and companies like Pertino and ZeroTier have made them crazy accessible and basically no one uses them.
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@StuartJordan said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Nginx office raided
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/12/nginx_moscow_office_raided/
Interesting
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@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Nebula VPN routes between hosts privately, flexibly, and efficiently
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/nebula-vpn-routes-between-hosts-privately-flexibly-and-efficiently/"Last month, the engineering department at Slack—an instant messaging platform commonly used for community and small business organization—released a new distributed VPN mesh tool called Nebula. Nebula is free and open source software, available under the MIT license.
It's difficult to coherently explain Nebula in a nutshell. According to the people on Slack's engineering team, they asked themselves "what is the easiest way to securely connect tens of thousands of computers, hosted at multiple cloud service providers in dozens of locations around the globe?" And (developing) Nebula was the best answer they had. It's a portable, scalable overlay networking tool that runs on most major platforms, including Linux, MacOS, and Windows, with some mobile device support planned for the near future."
This is what we are trying to move away from, and move towards something with way more practicality in the enterprise, SDP.
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Speaking of VPNs, anyone know anything about Wireguard?
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@StuartJordan said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Nginx office raided
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/12/nginx_moscow_office_raided/
I read a little bit of that story. Sounds like they really don't have a case, but it is Russia, so who knows.
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The World Relies on China's Surveillance Technology
China supplies AI surveillance to most of the world, positioning the country to have control over the growing $60 billion industry.
Surveillance technology is projected to be a $62 billion industry by 2023, and it looks like that market will be controlled by China. In 2019, the world relies on Chinese surveillance technology, with a majority of countries that use AI surveillence and facial recognition getting it from China. While many countries use American and Chinese surveillance tech together, China has far more exclusivity around the world. According to a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tech from America and China are used in Australia, Brazil, India, Russia, and many European countries, as well as in the US and China themselves. Many countries in Africa, the Middle East, South-East Asia, and South America use Chinese tech only. Meanwhile, Canada and New Zealand are the only countries that rely solely on American technology. -
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/-aw-snap-crash-makes-a-comeback-in-chrome-79/
Speaking of google..... We got nailed on this again. This time we knew what to do. Last time it was a "no its you" "its not me, its you" pissing contest.
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A sobering message about the future at AI’s biggest party
AI leaders say that simply throwing more computers at a problem isn't sustainable.
More than 13,000 artificial intelligence mavens flocked to Vancouver this week for the world’s leading academic AI conference, NeurIPS. The venue included a maze of colorful corporate booths aiming to lure recruits for projects like software that plays doctor. Google handed out free luggage scales and socks depicting the colorful bikes employees ride on its campus while IBM offered hats emblazoned with “I
️A
.” Tuesday night, Google and Uber hosted well-lubricated, over-subscribed parties. At a bleary 8:30 the next morning, one of Google’s top researchers gave a keynote with a sobering message about AI’s future. Blaise Aguera y Arcas praised the revolutionary technique known as deep learning that has seen teams like his get phones to recognize faces and voices. He also lamented the limitations of that technology, which involves designing software called artificial neural networks that can get better at a specific task by experience or seeing labeled examples of correct answers. -
UK Regulator Proposes Ban on Locked Cell Phones
Ofcom says locked cell phones create additional hassle for customers and can stop them from switching altogether, leading to an unfair experience for users.
The UK's telecom regulator Ofcom has proposed a ban on locked mobile phones - devices that can only be used on a specific carrier's network - in order to make it fairer and easier for broadband and mobile customers to switch between providers. The proposal document, published today, states that locking smartphones "creates additional hassle and can put someone off from switching altogether. We are proposing to...remove this hurdle for customers." In the UK, two of the four major providers, EE and Vodafone, as well as Tesco Mobile, sell devices that are locked and cannot be used by other networks. O2 and Three sell unlocked devices, as does Sky and Virgin Mobile. It's possible to unlock a device so that it can be used by another network, but currently this is costly and inconvenient. -
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
UK Regulator Proposes Ban on Locked Cell Phones
Ofcom says locked cell phones create additional hassle for customers and can stop them from switching altogether, leading to an unfair experience for users.
The UK's telecom regulator Ofcom has proposed a ban on locked mobile phones - devices that can only be used on a specific carrier's network - in order to make it fairer and easier for broadband and mobile customers to switch between providers. The proposal document, published today, states that locking smartphones "creates additional hassle and can put someone off from switching altogether. We are proposing to...remove this hurdle for customers." In the UK, two of the four major providers, EE and Vodafone, as well as Tesco Mobile, sell devices that are locked and cannot be used by other networks. O2 and Three sell unlocked devices, as does Sky and Virgin Mobile. It's possible to unlock a device so that it can be used by another network, but currently this is costly and inconvenient.I'm a bit on the fence on this.
I can see requiring lock-in on devices that aren't paid off yet. Though, this is not yester-year, where the phone was 'included' in the price of the service - you see the cost of the phone broken out on your bill, and know what your remaining balance is to pay it off.
Removing a lock should be simple - in the past it was a HUGE PITA. That said, I just went through an unlock process on AT&T and it took around 45 mins - most of that just waiting for AT&Ts system to approve the unlocking.
My main question is/was - what took so long? Did a human actually have to verify that the phone was indeed paid off before the unlock code was released? That seems like something that should be super easy to verify all by computer. -
@Dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
UK Regulator Proposes Ban on Locked Cell Phones
Ofcom says locked cell phones create additional hassle for customers and can stop them from switching altogether, leading to an unfair experience for users.
The UK's telecom regulator Ofcom has proposed a ban on locked mobile phones - devices that can only be used on a specific carrier's network - in order to make it fairer and easier for broadband and mobile customers to switch between providers. The proposal document, published today, states that locking smartphones "creates additional hassle and can put someone off from switching altogether. We are proposing to...remove this hurdle for customers." In the UK, two of the four major providers, EE and Vodafone, as well as Tesco Mobile, sell devices that are locked and cannot be used by other networks. O2 and Three sell unlocked devices, as does Sky and Virgin Mobile. It's possible to unlock a device so that it can be used by another network, but currently this is costly and inconvenient.I'm a bit on the fence on this.
I can see requiring lock-in on devices that aren't paid off yet. Though, this is not yester-year, where the phone was 'included' in the price of the service - you see the cost of the phone broken out on your bill, and know what your remaining balance is to pay it off.
Removing a lock should be simple - in the past it was a HUGE PITA. That said, I just went through an unlock process on AT&T and it took around 45 mins - most of that just waiting for AT&Ts system to approve the unlocking.
My main question is/was - what took so long? Did a human actually have to verify that the phone was indeed paid off before the unlock code was released? That seems like something that should be super easy to verify all by computer.I think locked cell phones are a bigger problem than most people realize. In many countries, rapidly switching SIM cards is a necessity of life. A locked phone is a broken phone if you are traveling, it doesn't function as designed. It's crippled. If they are going to sell locked models, they shouldn't be allowed to advertise it as the phones that they are because you look up their features, but then don't get the features you've paid for.
