Unfortunately you canâ(TM)t disable speculative execution. Itâ(TM)s been relied on to make CPUs fast since at least the pentium, perhaps the 486? For sure the pentium.

Itâ(TM)s based on some very old research from the 70â(TM)s (?), but back then they called it super scalar architecture.

Intel isnâ(TM)t the only one who does speculative execution. Most ARM platforms do as well, even all the way down to things like your smart watch.

The real issue that keeps tripping up intel is the effects on CPU cache are preserved after the âoespeculative executed codeâ is disposed of.

The simplest way to think of this is: you create an array of 256 elements. Then you preform an action to flush all that out of CPU cache. Then you trick the CPU to read a byte that it shouldnâ(TM)t read for you because you donâ(TM)t have the privileges to read that byte, and inside the speculative branch you read back into cache the offset in the array that matches the byte value.

Then, outside the speculative branch you read the entire array and time access speed. The array element that read fast was in the cache and is the value of the byte you shouldnâ(TM)t have been able to read.

The part of the speculative execution engine that undoes the work done in a branch that should not have been followed, at a minimum, probably needs to be extended to reverse effects on cache too. But thatâ(TM)s probably very hard to do in silicon.

This has nothing to do with bankruptcy or "defaulting."

Many companies, and a lot of Medical companies, don't want to chase ... shall we call them "exceptionally delinquent accounts." People who haven't paid in 90-180 days or more.

So a whole industry pops up in the debit reclamation space. A patent owes them (let's keep this simple math) $1,000 and is six months past due. So they sell the debt to a collection agency for $500. The debt collection agency has "bought the right" to attempt to claim $1,000 of debt from the delinquent payee. The hospital has "washed their hands of the issue," regardless if the collection agency actually collects or not doesn't matter to hospital. They got $500 and they are done with it, the item is closed on their books.

It's not uncommon to see these debts get resold a couple of times as well as various agencies struggle to collect. By the time these repeats itself a couple of times, the amount "the next agency" is paying to "buy the right to claim the $1000 debit" could be as low as $10 or less.

That's where originations like these step in. They raise money, and then step in as that 3 or 4th "debt collection agency." But instead of trying to collect the debt, they forgive it and stop the cycle.

They are doing great work! And it's a great way to donate money to if you're trying to make a lot of people's lives much better with just a few dollars.

And, then, once the debt is forgiven. The tax man steps in and says "hey, somebody gave you $1000 in forgiving that debt, you owe us income tax on that."

Also, if you are somebody who's very past due on their bills: try negotiating. Whoever you are talking with may very well no longer be the original person you owed the debt to, and may have "purchased" that debt for a fraction of the original dollar value. Any amount above that dollar value they purchased it for is making them money, and getting them out of your life.

I'm so terribly sorry that you are confused on this.

ECC memory stores 4 bits for parity for every 8 bits of data. With "this much parity" it is very possible to detect a single bit flip in either the data or the party and correct it. This is why ECC is so attractive to servers and other "mission critical systems," precisely because it CAN (to a limited extent) correct damaged data. It's very common for high end server to keep counters on the number of corrections preformed on each DIMM, and when it finally exceeds a threshold throw a warning light.

The next step past that is keeping a DIMM spare on hand and being able to copy the memory on that DIMM onto a good one. And/or hooks down in the operating system to get the kernel to start relocating pages. Which, can be tricky, lots of times some key kernel pages are difficult to relocate ... which is when it's nice to have hardware that can turn on a spare at the hardware level.

There's a whole subset of math called hamming codes that are all about how to "expand" data via "more parity bits" or some other system to not only detect errors but correct them. They are used very VERY commonly in radio protocols (WiFi and cellular) where bit corruptions are very frequent, and sending "extra" data and allowing the receiver to regenerate the lost data is more efficient that trying to signal for and do complete retransmits.

Also, old spinning rust disk drives rely on hamming codes A LOT. Like ... A LOT A LOT. Like: nearly never does the data read correctly from the platter a lot, it needs to be recovered on read. And if the % bits read exceeds a threshold, the sector is rewritten, and if it exceeds an even higher threshold the sector is relocated.

Itâ(TM)s MY computer apple. I paid a very large amount of money for it. I âoeget toâ run the programs I want to run on it.

If you want to toss in a bunch of warning dialogues that I have to tap through, fine.

But past that, let me run the apps I want to run.

So ... if my phone company decides to sell copies of my phone calls for $/minute, does this mean that phone tap warrants are no longer needed?

You need to read the article.

The referenced people are not saying "it's taking a day or three to move my funds."

They are saying "it's taking weeks to move my funds." "Sometimes they are telling me that I can't transfer it to the bank I told them to."

And other times yet the funds simply disappear. Goldman is showing the transaction happened and the funds never arrive at the destination bank.

These are not small "apple people are stupid and think it's a checking account" problems.

Trust me, I'll bring this back around to the AI topic.

To me and many of my friends google's search is getting terrible. And no, I'm not talking about potential political censorship. I'm talking "I need the answer to this tech problem" and finding a page that's more than marketing speak about a product some company wants to sell me that might solve my problem is all I get. Or some other page that's "this is what this technology does" without technical detail I want comes up.

When you search with Google, they watch every link you click, and the "last link visited" they assume had the right answer. When really, that might have been when I finally tossed my hands up in frustration and went over to try bing or some other engine. Or found a chat room, or broke out an old school book, etc to finally find my answer.

For many many years I stopped bookmarking useful web pages. I've started using bookmarks again in the last few years because google can't find me back the page that is actually useful anymore.

Here's where this interests with AI. Yea, they trained this AI on the prior "conversations." And now their low-skill employees are better. Great! Amazing!

But as they continue to train the AI on the prior conversations, we're going to see the same effect that we're seeing with google. The bad data will slowly corrupt and spread its way through the signal, and soon the AI will be making poor recommendations. Especially as other comments have suggested in the case of people who are exceptions.

We need to be careful as we train these AI systems on the responses "from the masses." It's useful input, but it needs to be weighted very carefully. It's not expert data or training cases.

My Wife recently took an interest in Bees, and we've decided to get a Bee Hive (we're rural enough we can do this). It's much more her project than mine. But, here's a few things I've learned from her as she took her classes on how to do this, and read a few chapters of the books.

Bees are not native to North America. The colonists brought them over from Europe, and the Native American's used to call them "white man's fly." That fact alone massively shifted my thought process around the scare around colony collapse. The "native" ecosystem survived for a very long time here in North America without them. Now that still leaves open question about: did we eliminate the other native pollinators to an extent that now the native ecosystems are depending on bees? Did we bring in other plants for which those are dependent on bees? It's not to say to ignore the colony collapse issues, but it should shift your perception of it if you let the idea of "they are a non-local species" float around in your head for a day or two.

The person teaching the class says that we should think of bees as "more domesticated than Dogs." Which, shouldn't be too surprising if you think about it evolutionarily. While we may have been domesticating dogs for longer, bees have a much shorter lifecycle. With a shorter lifecycle, you can shift the direction of evolution quite a lot faster.

The majority of colony collapse comes known issues that are actually NOT "there might be a peptide from a herbicide that's bothering them" and really are: there are mites and other bugs that live on the bees. It's was impressed often in the classes and the books that you need to be opening and inspecting your hives WEEKLY for infestations. And then taking steps to control them if found. Half the class was on identifying things that live on your bees, and what to do about them.

This is where the impression that "they are more domesticated than Dogs" starts. There are a lot of NATURAL things that collapse a colony. And the colony is dependent on humans to intervene and deal with that problem for them.

In your northern climates, they emphasize the need when your hive "swarms" to capture the 1/3 of the hive that takes off. Not just because having another hive is good for you. But that in northern climates they do not survive the winter on their own anymore. Very few bee colonies survive on their own more than 2-3 years. They don't find places that are big enough for the honey reserves they need for the winter. Or warm enough. Or, in the worst case, if you're watching your hive and they start running low on food you can supplement them with sugar water until spring comes.

The books and the classe really shifted my views on colony collapse to: if this is something that truly worries you ... you should probably host your own bee hive. It seems like it is truly the only way that they survive due to the extent they have been domesticated, and are also non-native to the continent.

Reply to both.

I didn't imply that Android could not do the same. I'm not an Android user, I'm glad you spoke up.

There is truth that on a USB bus you can't pull more than 500 mA without negotiating with the bus controller for more. There's a few different signaling mechanisms for doing so. Some are very dumb, and don't require full participation on the bus to accomplish. Others very much do, especially in the case of USB-C. When you have to fully register on the bus, the attack surface that can be "hacked against" grows, considerably.

But, in the case of Apple (and, reporitly android) you can choose to prevent the loading of this like HID drivers (keyboards, mice), video converts, mass storage drivers, on and on and on. And by preventing those from loading you do drastically reduce the amount opportunities to find exploits. It is this that apple appears to do. Enough to do power negotiations. Nothing more.

That is, until you lock your phone. Once your phone unlocks, those drivers CAN and you should assume WILL load if there are devices on the bus that need them. And then holes in those drivers can be exploited too.

Remember: apple implemented USB restricted mode in response to a company that was selling tools to police departments to bypass the iOS security and download phone drive contents. They worked very much in this space of "juice jackers," you'd attach them and they would download your phone for the police department.

I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm not saying that there are no vulnerabilities in that very basic USB power negation protocols that can't be exploited. Or issues in the IC that apple uses to help run the USB bus. These are all places where real issues could live.

I was making the point: if you must use a charger you don't know, turn your phone OFF, plug it in, don't unlock it while it charges. It's the most safe you can make your phone.

And yes, USB-C makes this all harder. Because in USB-C land even the cable itself is an active device on the bus that needs to be negated with to determine to what spec it was built and how many watts can it move safely.

Since iOS 11.4.1 apple intruded usb restricted mode. On boot, or if your device has been locked for more than an hour, the USB subsystem is unloaded from the kernel. Itâ(TM)ll do some basic charging, but ⦠thatâ(TM)s it.

So if you power off your phone and plug into a untrusted charger will your phone turn back on: yes. Will it have a reduced security footprint that the untrusted device can attempt to exploit: as long as you donâ(TM)t unlock it, also yes. Could somebody figure out how to exploit even that: people are damn clever, probably yes.

If youâ(TM)re both concerned, and in a pinch: turn off your phone, plug it in, DONâ(TM)T unlock it, cross your fingers.

For GM, itâ(TM)s remote start via an app on your phone that costs money.

Itâ(TM)s slightly justified because it requires servers to mediate the requests, and a cell module with active cell service in the vehicle to receive the request. So, some real cash GM is paying to another company (AT&T) to make that work.

Doing work in the IoT space I would be shocked if GM doesnâ(TM)t have this basic connectivity cost down to a few dollars a month per active vehicle.

So is there a reason to charge for it: yea. Is it $180 charge: no, it should probably be 1/5th that.

key fobs work all the time, as long as your in range.

So, doing work in the embedded, IoT and IoT + Cellular space I can tell you: there are a LOT of chips that combine WiFi and Bluetooth.

Was there a problem in the early days with them co-existing: yes. But, there has been a lot of work done to control transmit timing to enable peaceful co-existance. So much so that when you're building an embedded plant for you look FOR the combined chipsets, so that you can rely on somebody else having done all the co-existance timing stuff for you.

For example, I build products around this LTE for IoT chipset from Telit: https://www.telit.com/devices/... It's a 'nice' chip for embedded IoT space. Does most of the cellular work for you. A few dozen AT commands at startup should get it running correctly every time. You can talk to it over USB and get things that behave like Ethernet interfaces, or bring PPP over USB or if have a very simple platform it has an embedded TCP stack that you can interact with using AT commands over RS232 (an option if your processor is something very simple like an Arduio where a full IP stack on that end takes up a lot).

They make a "daughter" chip that works with it: https://www.telit.com/devices/... This is a combined WiFi+Bluetooth module. You don't wire your main processor at all to the "daughter" chip. They're a few pads between the "cellular" chip and the "wifichip" that you connect, and all the data/commands relay via the cellular chip.

If you pull the product spec sheets, you'll see that some of this pads you connect are timing pads. This is so that the main "cellular" chip can control when any of the radio are transmitting, or signal to kindly hold their data burst for a bit while another of the radios IS transmitting.

Point is: if you are SERIOUS about this space, you DO want a combined chipset that is handling all the control of the radio timings between Cellular, WiFi and Bluetooth. Apple isn't really "pioneering" a path here, they are following the direction the industry has already realized it needs to go.

Apple isn't doing anything new. They are just choosing to do it themselves. And, I wish them the best of luck at it. They didn't do anything "new" when they started making their own custom CPUs, but have really taken the lead in showing the world what ARM CAN do if you really take your time to really do it right. I hope they do the same in this space. But I expect the first generation or two to be ... a learning process.

"Nobody ever gets arrested."

EPA has been cracking down on the the people who provide the diesel delete kits. In like 10 seconds of google searching you can find the EPA talk about it:
https://www.epa.gov/enforcemen... $1.1 million dollar settlement.

You can find the shops that "install" the kits being sued as well:
https://www.desmoinesregister....
$75,000 settlement from some random on the street corner car repair shop.

Getting the parts to do deletes are getting HARD, the EPA has been putting them out of business. Getting them installed is HARD, finding places that will put them on for you is basically probation era "you need to be introduced to be let in" now. Unless you have the tools and shop space to do it yourself (and like, it's not easy).

Making a car LOUD is different. That's typically just different pipes downstream from all the EPA mandated equipment. That's still pretty easy to come by and easy to find people who will help you get it put on.

Removing the emissions controls is very VERY different. And like something we really should have a more honest conversation about. Gen-4 diesels have what equates to a very aggressive air filter in the EXASUT to capture particulates (partially burned diesel particles). Then, when the filter starts to get "plugged," intentionally make that filter run hot (550-650 Centigrade) to "finish the burn." This has an unavoidable side effect: steep decline in MPG performance.

It's at least worth pondering: if you're out in rural Iowa, what's the lesser impact? The particulates the particulate filters can grab, or the extra CO2 generated to grab those particulates? And gen-4 emissions controls apply to Tractors on Farms now. It's ... a serious question. Should those tractors out in the middle of massive empty acres be emitting more CO2 to control the particulate problem?

Now if you're in a big city ... the choice is simple: yea, you've got enough engines in one place you want the particulate control.

You need to read the book guns, germs and steal. He does explains very well why they lost. And it had very little to do with culture or relative intelligence.

Europe and Asia had more native animals that could be both be domesticated for food and as beasts of burden. The beasts of burden part is important, as that is how you bootstrap a pre-industrial society. Very difficult otherwise.

Also, because there were many more domesticated animals in Europe and Asia, people lived with more animals. And I mean literally lived with, frequently in the same buildings. When people and animals live in proximity like that you get more viruses that jump species, and when virus jump species the can be very deadly for a while (I think we may have recently had an example of that).

This means that when âoethe westâ arrived with early explorers ⦠we also (unintentionally) brought diseases that we were partially immune to but literally decimated local populations. No, this was not intentional. There was no concept of âoegerm theoryâ at this time. We still thought they were punishments from god, not viruses that spread.

Time moved different back then too. Columbus was 1492. The mayflower was 1620.

But the effect still was: the American continents looks a bit like how the movies depict a post apocalypse. Many major cities depopulated. Government institutions in collapse and disfunction. Reversion to nomadic tribes for many of the survivors.

The âoecolonizersâ walked into the wreckage of a plague collapsed civilization with superior technology (driven by their access to more beasts of burden).

Not to say there were at all well behaved with regard to the remaining survivors.

But it does explain why overpowering the native populations was easy without resorting to concepts like âoesuperior culturesâ on one end or âoetoxic male colonialismâ on the other.

The native societies had collapsed, due to a plague. They lacked the ability to mount a response. There was massive tracts of unused land. People can be aweful for a number of reasons. History.

Yea ... it's because apple was so far out in front on security at first that this lagged.

Apple had the first phones that we very hard to hack locally. Couldn't root it (easily). Couldn't connect a thing (there were a few companies that sold devices, but apple closed those holes as they were known). Couldn't lift a chip and read the crypto keys. They were way WAY out in front of everybody else. I mean, the secure enclave was released with the 5S in 2013 and nobody had anything like it for a few years.

And at the same time apple was increasing the crypto security on their iCloud things too. And ... suddenly there was all this talk from the FBI and others about how we were going to have to mandate backdoors in everything because this was interfering with legitimate police work too much. Too many iPhones that if we could only get the data out of them we could unwind the web of terrorists they were working with and "keep everybody safe."

It was obvious that apple halted their end-to-end crypto work at the phone in a kind of ... stalemate with the surveillance state: the phone is going to be really hard to get into, and we're going to keep making it very hard to get into. But we're going give away enough iCloud storage with every apple ID to do phone backups, and encourage everybody to turn that on. And if you want a copy of the phone (and they have iCloud backups on ... which we encouraged them to do, and gave them the storage for free to do) ... we'll give you a copy of that with a simple subpoena.

This was ... very VERY obvious to anybody who paid attention.

In fact when I saw the story about apple doing end-to-end crypto of backups my first thought was: so how soon will the FBI be complaining?