There are ways to protect communication links end-to-end yet allow access to messages. If an employer wants access to messages in a particular chat, that can be built in by centralizing their archival at the same time they're sent through a cryptographic chain of trust. It's not trivial, but I don't buy that unencrypted communications are the alternative for the reasons they state.

If I were Slack, I'd be much more worried about Microsoft Teams. Microsoft is pouring huge sums of money into Teams at the moment to make it the new paradigm and push for online, with the added benefit of tighter Office/O365 integration as well as integration of other pieces to make a unified communication solution. I get a bit concerned in that respect for market dominance by MS, but it is what it is.

The TV business has been in a race towards the bottom as far as margins go for more than a decade. Costs are literally down to fractions of pennies in TVs except at the very high end. Even there, costs are a big consideration given retail margins, customer support and future product development.

Given OnePlus' positioning, this isn't a smart move. They can't possibly compete on cost, and other companies are much better at differentiating their offerings.

Ask the idiots who wrote in and on Mill Valley city council what the difference is, and if they have scientific evidence corroborating health dangers.

This is the most aggravating thing about California...it's all about science until it isn't.

The remnants of AT&T's ancient SS7 are still infecting voice calls today. Back then, it made sense to not authenticate caller ID information because the threat model required physical access to phone company switches and a lot of equipment to implement. It wasn't feasible.

Now that VoIP and packet-switched networks have replaced circuit-switch voice band twisted pair landlines, we still lack a way to enable secure authentication to a trusted root of who is actually calling. The FCC is supposedly looking into solutions, but implementing PKI in the network can prevent these calls from ever getting to people. Many of these scams are on VoIP gateways that have default passwords.

Normally I'm against a lot of government involvement in people's lives, but this is one place where it's required. If Congress could pass the CALM act to end annoying loudness changes in broadcast TV, the passing of which had little economic consequence, then Congress can definitely get their act together and pass a law to do the same for authenticating phone calls using PKI and removing security holes. Inaction in this area already has a tremendous negative economic consequences, particularly for the elderly and other vulnerable individuals who are defrauded systematically and who are typically more reliant on phone services due to their ease of use and familiarity.

The real tell in all of this will be what the carriers do when this is enacted. I suspect there will be tremendous resistance spearheaded by the argument that it will require equipment replacement. I'm not sure that's the case given that the magic is in firmware, but more on the system engineering side. In that case, let them put a deadline down to get their act together. Where there's a will (and a law), there's a way.

There were a lot of people whose blood work went through this scam and may have had all sorts of false negatives that caused them harm or death.

While I sympathize with the investors, its the patients that I feel far more sorry for. You can work another day to make another dollar. You can't undo the type of harm that false blood tests can create.

when he said this...

All cryptocurrencies are underpinned by the belief that people will trade something of value for them. That usually means currency, but it could also be material goods or intellectual property.

On top of that value, you have speculation based on other factors; in this case, scarcity and demand. The more the perceived mania continues, the more volatility there will be.

What is different here is that a number of early adopters held onto the currency, and others bought in late. That distorted people's perception of the cryptocurrency where they thought they could all make money fast. Well, lo and behold, the currency crashed since its peak, and seems to be teetering currently.

That there are systemic problems with exchanges and blockchain goes without saying. This is unlike traditional currency because the transaction costs are increasing exponentially and putting additional pressure that a normal paper currency managed by a sovereign central bank doesn't have. That reduces monetary velocity through the system and impedes cryptocurrency use for fine-grained transactions. I won't get into the back door idea or breaking the cryptography, although those might become factors in the future. These translate to additional volatility and uncertainty that hurt the value.

The other big difference between an independent cryptocurrency and a regular currency is who and what backs it. That's probably the greatest concern for The Economist and for those who favor classic economics. This is uncharted territory, and uncertainty will always be punished by the market by participatory withdrawal and diminished value. Only time will tell, but something tells me that Bitcoin and the like may be a game of musical chairs.

This from a guy whose party has sanitized the killing of tens of millions of its own people, is now ruler for life, has a social credit score to force people to behave according to the CCP's wishes, could care less about the 300 million people in abject poverty without regular access to clean water, and won't acknowledge the Tiananmen Square massacre to the point of banning the term "63+1", or 6/4.

Yeah, you can go fuck yourself Xi Jinping. We'll keep trying to show your people how the rest of the world works and hopefully they'll finish what was started in 1989.

You are correct - it's "The Alberta government". I have never once heard one single person in Alberta refer to it as "The Albertan government" no matter what their socioeconomic background.

At the outset, I just want to say how happy I am that AV1 has taken off, and how seriously it is viewed by so many technology companies as a way around H.264 and (even worse) HEVC. Particularly with respect to HEVC, there are three separate patent pools with different participants. HEVC is, in many ways, already set up to fail due to a large number of participants that participate in either none or one of the pools (see https://streaminglearningcente... for how chaotic it is). There are some other proprietary technologies such as Perseus that are out there that claim better performance than HEVC from a PSNR/SSIM perspective, but they will likely remain fringe.

What is of more concern to me is how carefully AV1 has been constructed in terms of its coding tools to avoid patent trolling and patent submarining (e.g. Rambus at JEDEC with DDR). This is a very serious and very technically complex issue, as any company could easily assert patents on AV1 if they feel there is infringement on their claims as pertains to any of the coding tools. There are increasingly limited ways of dealing with spatiotemporal entropy in non-infringing ways that do not involve exponential increases in gates or CPU cycles.

A recent and simple example of this is the MPEG-LA claiming they license patents related to the MPEG-DASH streaming framework. MPEG-DASH is, essentially, an XML schema for a streaming manifest combined with either MPEG-4 Part 12 (the MP4 container originally specified by Apple as the MOV format), or MPEG-2 Transport Streams encapsulating H.264 video. Nobody on the DASH Industry Forum really thought that MPEG-DASH would be subject to this type of activity, yet magically MPEG-LA began waiving it agreement around about two years ago.

As a result, many in the industry have held onto the virtually universally-supported HTTP Live Streaming, which is an M3U playlist with tag extensions and MPEG-2 Transport Stream container for the codecs. Even that standard developed by Apple has never become a fully ratified within the IETF, and nobody knows if the same thing will happen there either.

Incidentally, any time Google has presented VP8 or VP9 at previous conferences and is asked about patents, they avoid answering questions and the audience usually laughs. I've seen it personally, and I think it's the industry's cynicism for the various patent holders and some of their past actions. Where it becomes critical is for silicon suppliers, whose front-loaded costs are now in the neighborhood of nine figures to launch some SoCs, and for content distributors, who invest a tremendous amount of time and money encoding all of the required profiles for streaming to new codecs. Commitment to efficient hardware acceleration by them for the codec is risky, as they could easily be legally enjoined from selling their products if they didn't get their patent licenses in order, and this would also leave content holders scrambling to fall back to already-established codecs.

I will admit I'm cynical here too. While I'd love to see a patent-free open standard, I'm not optimistic that someone will not come out of the woodwork claiming infringement on a key coding tool. I wish Google and the rest of the AV1 participants luck. They'll need it.

You will work very hard, and this next year will -- my wife hates it when I say this -- feel like childbirth... - you will work 80+ hour weeks for at least the next year with no additional bonuses for anyone lower than VP level, so good luck keeping your personal life intact!

You'll look back on it and be very fond of it, but it's not going to feel great while you're in the middle of it. - if you don't get fired or quit, you get a gold star for making it through!

She says, 'What do you know about this?' I just observe, 'Honey. We love our kids. - The kids are going to feel pain and stress to toughen them up and be ready for anything in the real world!

(I wish the existing employees luck. Things were already insanely busy at HBO.)

So what if I'm listening to one of these stations with spurious emissions or exceedingly high dBm level near their broadcast area with a drifting transmitter, and an EAS message comes through on an adjacent station? Now all of a sudden, the PLL lock on the radio does the funky chicken trying to figure out what signal to lock onto and an entire area listening to the emergency message doesn't get all of it because of the pirate station. That puts lives at risk.

There's a reason we regulate spectrum. We don't want to go back to the days before the FCC when rescue ships were being sent to the middle of the North Atlantic in the winter because of fake distress calls just so we could avoid another Titanic disaster. We certainly don't want existing licensees who have paid good money and are subject to regulations and fines to be run over by unlicensed idiot operators. I have enough problems as a ham and shortwave listener dealing with RFI from poorly choked solar inverters and other garbage out there.

So while not all pirates are harmful, they most certainly can be at the wrong moment. There needs to be a crackdown and proper enforcement by the FCC.

As a former lead ASIC designer, I can say this is one of the most ambitious projects likely ever undertaken in EDA. Companies like Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys have been working on these problems for literally decades now. Everyone wants an easy solution for push-button design, but it is hardly that simple. Consider the following:

- Synthesis from RTL-to-gate level
- Functional design rule checks
- Place and route, including clock routing, PLLs/DLLs, etc.
- Timing extraction and static timing analysis
- I/O/SSO and core power
- Internal signal integrity and re-layout
- Test insertion and test vector generation
- Formal verification
- Functional verification
- Packaging and ball-out/bonding, especially with core I/O
- Physical design rule checks / Netlist vs. layout checks

A suite of tools that does all of this costs into the millions of dollars today, and is really a subscription as there are always bugs and improvements to be made. It also assumes physical design rule decks from the silicon vendors that have gone extensive characterization on limits such as minimum feature widths and notch rules can yield to a sufficient level economically, and that the gate and hard IP/mixed IP libraries have been validated. Front end functional design often requires re-architecture due to considerations when physically implementing the chip. All of this, of course, presumes that we don't run into additional phenomena that were irrelevant at larger process nodes (e.g. at ~250nm/180nm, wire delay dominated gate delay, and at 90nm/65nm, RC signal integrity models gave way to RLC, plus power/clock gating, multi-gate finFETs vs. single-gate planar past 22nm, etc.).

A push-button tool would have to take all of this into consideration. But let's face it...as well-intended as this is, you probably need another couple of orders of magnitude of money thrown at this to even begin succeeding under the fundamental assumption you don't have additional phenomena like alternatives to manufacturing. And that's the fundamental catch that is not captured in the article: we are chasing an ever-changing animal called process technology advancement that has created issues for us over the last few decades and likely will continue until we reach the limit of physics as we can manipulated them.

Bottom line: love the idealism, but don't buy into this hype with this piddle of investment.

Welcome to the new Slashdot. Rob Malda sends his warm regards.

At some point, you have to start asking why you need certain quality of experience in limited environments, and what infrastructure it takes to get there.

The biggest ongoing cost for streaming movies today is CDN storage, in the sense of having enough bitrates and resolutions to be able to accommodate all target devices and connection speeds. As much as people would like to deliver an HD picture to a remote village in the Philippines over a mobile connection on a feature phone, it isn't feasible at the moment for two reasons: they don't need or care about that level of experience, and it isn't technically feasible. The goal of CDN storage is to ensure the edge delivers the content, and the industry has toyed with real-time edge transcoding/transrating to address some of these issues, but fundamentally we are dropping asymptotically to a point on visual quality for a given bitrate and amount of computing power that a codec can deliver at the playback device.

In that sense, I'm shocked that Anne's post didn't mention Netflix's own VMAF, which is a composite measure of different flavors of PSNR, SSIM and some deep learning. But even here, the fundamental is that we are still using block-based codecs for operations simply because of the fundamental nature of most video, i.e. objects moving around on a background. I'm also shocked that Anne didn't discuss alternative coding methods like wavelet-based (e.g. JPEG 2000), but - again - these approaches have their own limitations and don't address interframe encoding in the same way that a block-based codec can. If there was a novel approach to coding psychovisually-equivalent video that would address computing power, bitrate and quality reasonably, I believe it would have been brought forward already.

I think 5G deserves a big mention here that was lacking in Anne's post, because faster connections may solve many of the types of issues that affect perceived visual quality at low bitrates. Get more bandwidth, and you have a better experience. Hopefully 5G will proliferate quickly, but this will be tricky in the developing world where its inherently decentralized nature and the political environments will make its ubiquitous deployment a serious challenge.

In the end, we're all fighting entropy, particularly when it comes to encoding video. Our ability to perceive video is affected by an imperfect system - the human eye and brain. That's why we've made such gains in digital video since the MPEG-1 days. But the fantasies of ubiquitous HD video to everyone in the world on 100kbps connections are just that. When you're struggling to get by and don't have good health care or clean drinking water, the value of streaming high-quality video isn't there from a business perspective, much less a technical perspective. Everyone will get an experience relative to the capabilities of technology and the value it brings to them accordingly. All else is idealistic pipe dreams until otherwise proven.