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Apple

Apple Watch Launches 174

An anonymous reader writes: The Apple Watch's release date has arrived: retailers around the world have quietly begun putting them on their shelves, and customers are beginning to receive their shipments. Reviews have been out for a while, including thoughtful ones from John Gruber and Nilay Patel. Apple has published a full user guide for the software, and iFixit has put up a full teardown to take a look at the hardware. They give it a repairability score of 5 out of 10, saying that the screen and battery are easily replaced, but not much else is. Though Apple designated the watch "water-resistant" rather than "waterproof", early tests show it's able to withstand a shower and a swim in the pool without failing. Ars has an article about the difficulty of making games for the Apple Watch, and Wired has a piece detailing its creation.

Comment Re:Common sense here folks (Score 2) 118

Nobody said that the nerves are going to work. Post transplant, the person will certainly be paralyzed from the neck down. That's why this kind of surgery is only appropriate for a paraplegic whose body is about to fail. He or she is not going to stop being a paraplegic, but might get many extra years of life by acquiring a robust new body.

Comment Such hyperbole in TFS (Score 2) 33

MIT Developing AI To Better Diagnose Cancer

FFS, it's not AI. It's a mindless program. Unthinking software. Data analysis software. Innovative to some degree perhaps, but AI? Hardly. No better than me stumbling in here and calling some DSP code I'd written "AI." Well, except I wouldn't do that. :/

When AI gets here, we'll have to call it something else what with all this crying wolf going on.

Comment Dual Homing Failover and IPv6 address aggregation (Score 1) 390

Yeah, that turned out to be one of the big problems with IPv6 address aggregation - sounds great in the ivory tower, doesn't meet the needs of real customers, which is too bad, because every company that wants their own AS and routable address block is demanding a resource from every backbone router in the world.

IPv6's solution to the problem was to allow interfaces to have multiple IPv6 addresses, so you'd have advertise address 2001:AAAA:xyzw:: on Carrier A and 2001:BBBB:abcd:: on Carrier B, both of which can reach your premises routers and firewalls, and if a backhoe or router failure takes out your access to Carrier A, people can still reach your Carrier B address. Except, well, your DNS server needs to update pretty much instantly, and browsers often cache DNS results for a day or more, so half your users won't be able to reach your website, and address aggregation means that you didn't get your own BGP AS to announce route changes with, but hey, your outgoing traffic will still be fine.

My back-of-a-napkin solution to this a few years ago was that there's an obvious business model for a few ISP to conspire to jointly provide dual-homing. For instance, if you've got up to 256 carriers, 00 through FF, each pair aa and bb can use BGP to advertise a block 2222:aabb:/32 to the world, and have customer 2222:aabb:xyzw::/48, so the global BGP tables get 32K routes for the pairs of ISPs, and each pair of ISPs shares another up-to-64K routes with each other using either iBGP or other local routing protocols to deal with their customers actual dual homing. (Obviously you can vary the number of ISPs, size of the dual-homed blocks, amount of prefix for this application (since :2222: may be too long, etc.)

Comment IPv6: Longer addresses + magic vaporware (Score 1) 390

IPv6 was originally supposed to solve a whole lot of problems - not only did it have longer addresses (which ISPs need to avoid having to deploy customers on NAT, and in general to avoid running out of address spaces and crashing into the "Here Be Dragons" sign at the edge), but it was also supposed to solve a whole lot of other problems, like route aggregation, security, multihoming, automatic addressing, etc.

A lot of that turned out to be wishful thinking, e.g. the hard part about IPSEC tunnels is the key exchange and authentication, not building the tunnels, route aggregation didn't really work out because enterprises weren't willing to use carrier addresses instead of their own, and small carriers also wanted their own addresses instead of sharing their upstream's address space, or if it wasn't wishful thinking, it was addressing problems that IPv4 found other solutions for, like DHCP for automatic addressing.

And while NAT is a hopeless botch, it does provide a simple-minded stateful firewall as default behaviour, while IPv6 users need explicit firewalling to get the same security with real addresses (which they needed to do anyway, but especially if you're using tunnels, you have to be sure to put it in all the right places.

Comment Future: IPv4 via NAT, IPv6 Native (Score 1) 390

Back when I was closer to the ISP business, the general plan of most consumer ISPs was to start supporting IPv6 (once they had all their hardware and operations support systems able to manage it - it's amazing how many moving parts there are), and migrate most users to dual-stack, with NAT for IPv4 plus native IPv6, or else to use NAT IPv4 with tunneled IPv6.

Comment Comcast was ahead of many US ISPs on IPv6 (Score 1) 390

Comcast may have lots of other issues as an ISP, such as banning customers from running server at home, and monthly usage caps (if they still do that), but they were ahead of most other US consumer ISPs on taking IPv6 seriously.

(My ISP supports IPv6 over tunnels, but doesn't run native dual-stack, at least on telco DSL. And I really should get around to actually trying it out, but I haven't...)

Comment Re:Yes, Old SATA SSD, not Rotating Disk (Score 1) 162

Anonymous Coward was asking if the "old SATA drives" referred to old SSD drives that use SATA (which wouldn't be too surprising if it were almost as fast), or old rotating hard disks that use SATA (which would be really surprising to find it faster than SSD.) Google results for the X25-m say yes, it's an SSD, just a bit older one that uses SATA instead of PCIe.

Bug

iOS WiFi Bug Allows Remote Reboot of All Devices In Area 117

New submitter BronsCon writes: A recently disclosed flaw in iOS 8 dubbed "No iOS Zone" allows an attacker to create a WiFi hot spot that will cause iOS devices to become unstable, crash, and reboot, even when in offline mode. Adi Sharabani and Yair Amit of Skycure are working with Apple for a fix; but, for now, the only workaround is to simply not be in range of such a malicious network.

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