Windows 10 and 11 use the same exact license key namespace. The activation software isn't able to differentiate a Win10 key from a Win11 key. This is just a way to charge an extra $10 for the same keys.

USB-C adds a feature called alternate mode that creates a standardized method for both sides of the USB-C cable to negotiate using the USB-C cable to carry a completely different signal than USB. The USB-C connector has a dedicated pin for a new low speed sideband connection called USB PD (Power Delivery) the main use of USB PD is to negotiate a higher Vbus voltage between a computer and a USB-C charger. But the other big use case of USB PD is to negotiate alternate modes. With DisplayPort alternate mode, after negotiation to go into DP Alt Mode suddenly your USB-C cable is carrying a DisplayPort signal, not a USB signal.

So what does this have to do with HDMI? Well every USB-C to HDMI dongle you see on the market right now has a little microcontroller in it uses the USB PD sideband link to negotiate DisplayPort Alt Mode and then the dongle has an active converter between DisplayPort and HDMI.

So why did the HDMI LA not like that? Because USB-C doesn't have anything like "DisplayPort Dual Mode" where the DisplayPort connector still has to support HDMI output. This basically removed the need to support HDMI directly on the laptop and hence per-device royalties evaporated.

So they added an HDMI Alt Mode that enables HDMI signals to travel over a USB-C cable directly. This enables cheaper passive USB-C to HDMI adapters. The thing is those passive adapters would not work on most systems AND they would only support HDMI 1.4 AND economies of scale have already pushed the price of the active DP to HDMI converters down enough to make adding them to every dongle a non-issue. So really this was just a cash grab to try to get per-device HDMI royalties again.

Because if Apple puts an HDMI port directly on the Macbook then HDMI Alt Mode isn't needed to get per device HDMI licensing revenue from Apple anymore. That is all HDMI Alt Mode was about in the first place. Getting per-device royalties from Apple.

Commoditize all intellectual property, equipment, etc. required to run a cloud service advertising business... with the exception of IP owned by either Google or Meta (aka Facebook). The only IP that is allowed to be valuable is the algorithm that decides what piece of content shows up at the top of a webpage... that might be a search engine or it could be a Facebook news feed.

Everything other than that must be worth as close to ~$0 as possible because if other types of viable business exists in the technology sector then it dilutes Wall St. investment in cloud advertising firms which could finally burst the bubble on their astronomically inflated Market Caps.

With consoles it is a bit better than that. The discs are impossible to replicate with a Blu-Ray burner. They have a holographic band on the inner ring past the normal readable surface that contains the game's encryption key, consoles have special drives that can seek past the normal readable section to read that key.

Hence, the physical disc serves as a secure way of proving the user owns a license to the game. Which means you can still borrow/rent/sell game discs as a means of transferring ownership of that license to someone else. Once your friend puts the disc in their console they do need to install the game files on to their console's SSD and download updates, but it makes the license transferrable and allows you to retain some equity in the games you buy.

Now on PC... I actually bought a physical copy of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice for PC in 2019. I opened the DVD case and there literally was a circular piece of paper where the disc was supposed to be that had a Steam key printed on to it. Buying the physical copy didn't even save me any download time. Unsurprising that they did not bother making a physical release of Elden Ring for the PC.

The bottom line on all of this is the same as it always has been. Microsoft very much wants to be the gatekeeper that controls access to video gaming. The reason they want to be that gatekeeper is to keep users locked-in to their ecosystem. They have used many technologies and tactics to accomplish that end goal over the years. A few examples are DirectX, XBox, Games for Windows, and WinRT. The newest iteration of this decades old strategy is Xbox Game Pass.

MSFT's old playbook centered on the fact that they had the army of programmers needed to create big APIs like DirectX that no-one else had the engineering team to implement. WinRT shows us that is still largely true. However, the difference this time around is middleware like Unity has gotten so good that one uses MSFT's APIs directly anymore. Combine that with how good compatibility technologies like Wine/Proton have gotten and the Oracle v. Google outcome means that today APIs are no longer a viable method of achieving lock-in.

So instead of going after APIs, now MSFT is going after DRM to achieve lock-in. The Steam DRM is very cross-platform friendly, which combined with Proton makes all those Windows games available outside the MSFT ecosystem. In order to keep gaming contained to MSFT's ecosystem, they now realize that they need to be the DRM platform for video games. That is what XBox Game Pass is all about. You can download and play games using that service just fine on Windows... but not on SteamOS even though SteamOS has a good implementation of Win32 and DirectX. It also aligns with their larger corporate strategy of creating perpetual subscription revenue streams.

The acquisition of Activision creates a lot of leverage. For example, what if 5 years from now all Activision games are only available to Xbox Game Pass Subscribers? Sure you can play them on your Playstation, but you have to link your XBox account with your Playstation account, and you need to be a $15/month Game Pass subscriber, and you have to pair an XBox controller with your PS5.

Sure, intentionally generating space debris like what the Russians did should probably not be allowed. But it is completely inappropriate to compare that with Starlink. Starlink satellites are designed to de-orbit themselves after they have reached the end of their operational life. Moreover, they are specifically set to a low enough altitude that even if one of them lost control atmospheric drag would de-orbit it after a few years. Its not like Starlink is completely unregulated, the FCC and FAA did extensive reviews before it was approved to fly.

Oh and by the way... all currently operating Starlink satellites are >=100 miles above the Tiangong space station, there is approximately zero chance they had to perform an evasive maneuver.

It is very unlikely there is any truth in any of this. This is just posturing as a precursor to try to create an international regulatory body that decides who gets to access low Earth orbit. The rest of the world realizes that Starlink is how Starship is going to get financed. And Starship will enable the US to become a much more dominant presence in space than it already is. Europe seems pretty on board with trying to create legal hurdles to protect their inferior aerospace industry as well. Its all incredibly petty when you consider the new possibilities that Starship will open for mankind.

Also why are we suddenly seeing PRC (mainland China) propaganda on /.? Between this article's summary calling into question the very real plight of the Uyghurs and now this article... what the hell is going on? The worst thing we can do is give the PRC a platform. They are fighting for relevancy on the global stage, the best thing we can do is ignore them and continue to operate without giving them any concessions. Look what happened when the UK gave them concessions on Hong Kong... we cannot afford another mistake like that.

Given Malaysia's history of corruption, a broad and vague law like this will in no way be used arbitrarily detain political adversaries. Oh you donated to the opposition leader's campaign and happen to be a manager at a company where one employee watched an illegal stream once while on the job. Obviously management incompetence is the problem here. The fact that employee wasn't in your reporting structure does not matter. That employee gets a $100 fine. You on the other hand get 20 years in jail. The rest of the company's management is fine too, we found the true person responsible for this!

Its not just a 64-bit CPU is required. They basically have drawn an article line in the sand that says "All PCs that are >3 years old cannot upgrade". On the Intel side, you must have a 8th Gen Core or later, or Apollo Lake and newer on the Atom side. On the AMD side, you must have Zen+ or later.

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/windows-processor-requirements

Between the constant layoffs of Mozilla's engineering staff and the huge spending on "advocacy" (aka galas where people talk about how important the open web is) and the huge executive pay, Mozilla is not the organization is used to be. The only reason they care about Firefox at all is because the Google search deal keeps the money trains coming in. They have minimized R&D on Firefox to the bare minimum level necessary to keep it sorta functional. Mozilla is a shell of its former self after being hollowed out by MBAs. At this point if they go away I would not shed one tear.

The reason why it is cheaper is because Amazon controls the price of all three. And they are heavily discounting the price of Gravition instances right now because they want people to switch to Gravition. Don't be surprised if one day >50% of AWS workloads are running on Gravition the price will slowly creep up to almost the same amount as Xeon instances.

Gravition is nothing more than a trap designed to make it harder to run your workloads on non-AWS clouds or on-premises, just like most of the AWS APIs. To be fair, Azure is also moving in this direction.

While it is good that Apple has built Rosetta 2 to help with this transition, it's not going to be nearly as important this time around. The Intel transition was a pretty big lift for a lot of software developers. During the PPC --> Intel transition most large Mac applications were built with Metrowerks CodeWarrior. CodeWarrior was the first PPC C compiler, and had the ability to produce binaries that ran on both OS X and classic Mac OS. It was the tool of choice for most large OS X applications during that era, though even in the early 2000s most could see the writing on the wall for it. At the same time, the free availability of XCode killed any further development of CodeWarrior. Many applications had considerable quantities of hand written PPC assembly code as well. If you were already using XCode and didn't have any assembly code, it was very easy but not everyone was so fortunate.

Photoshop had many filters written in hand-optimized assembly. Perhaps most strange was that Microsoft Office was one of the worst hit. The entire Visual Basic macro interpreter was written in PPC assembly. While the Windows version was x86 assembly, it had a ton of Win32 calls mixed in and was not portable. The first version of Office for Intel Macs didn't have VBA support at all.

Take any negative article about GrubHub with a grain of salt right now. Uber is trying to buy GrubHub, so they have a financial incentive to orchestrate a smear campaign to drop the stock price. That said, it would not surprise me if GrubHub does actually charge for phone calls, does anyone on ./ know a restaurant owner to ask and confirm?

I read through the paper... and there really is very little in the way of substance here. I think Intel is justified in not issuing CVEs for any of this. He starts with the assumption that DMA attacks are possible. For new designs that is not the case since the addition of IOMMU support in WIndows 10 1803/RS4. All the new Ice Lake laptops have IOMMU enabled for their Thunderbolt controllers, which eliminates the need for using ACLs for security. On new Ice Lake laptops you plug the Thunderbolt device in and it works without approval, with the IOMMU it is secure without needing to trust the device.

So, let's assume it's an older laptop with Thunderbolt 3 where the ACLs are important for security. Unless the victim happens have a (circa 2011) Thunderbolt 1 device already registered as approved in their ACL... all of his attacks require physical disassembly of either the device or the laptop to read secret keys off an onboard EEPROM. Thing is... if you are disassembling the laptop, it would be far easier to just replace a M.2 SSD or M.2 Wifi card with a malicious device then try to rip some keys out of the Thunderbolt controller. Most of his attacks can also be mitigated by just clearing the ACL before leaving the system unattended.

Where he really goes off the rails is by stating that Macs are partially vulnerable. Macs have had the IOMMU in place since 2012. His claim that Apple's use of device fingerprints constitutes a security vulnerability is a straight up lie. First of all, Apple uses a blacklist, not a whitelist. The reason for the blacklist is because there are a few early Thunderbolt 3 devices that are extremely buggy (For example this POS: https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/HP-ZBook-Dock-with-Thunderbolt-3/11122586/model/9822169) and has nothing to do with security.

You are very welcome!

The spec explicitly differentiates between hubs and ports on computers. The ports on a computer are "root ports" and they are NOT required to be Thunderbolt 3 compatible. Remember, Thunderbolt 3 has a different Alternate Mode ID number, so even though the protocol is identical a USB4 root port might not be able to negotiate with a Thunderbolt 3 device just because it doesn't advertise the Thunderbolt alt mode (even thought it could totally talk to it fine.) So the weird behavior that I described in the OP also goes in reverse... If you plug a Thunderbolt 3 only device directly into a USB4 only port on a laptop... it won't work. But... if you plug a USB4 hub into that USB4 port, and then plug the Thunderbolt 3 only device into the hub... it will work!!! However, there is no good mitigation here other than buying a new USB4 hub.

I get where you are going, but I don't think it will be that simple. Any Thunderbolt 3 device you buy today will be compatible with future Thunderbolt 4 laptops (which Intel has already said will support both USB4 and Thunderbolt 3.) But a USB4 only laptop, like something with an AMD CPU for example, you will need that hub in the middle to communicate with the Thunderbolt 3 device.

Flow control algorithms help a lot here. As long every connected device isn't trying to transfer the full 40Gbps at the same time you won't notice any difference. For example, Intel's PCH designs have 20 lanes of PCIe on them, but only 4 lanes of DMI going to the CPU. Turns out most of those lanes are not fully saturated most of the time.

I'm reading between the lines the same way you are... but really want I think this means is that every USB4 hub is going to end up also being a Thunderbolt 4 hub, with an Intel certification and royalty payment. The other implication of this is that it is likely that Intel's upcoming Thunderbolt 4 controllers will be the only USB4 hub designs for the first 2-3 years. That is until ASMedia/Fresco Logic/the other usual suspects get their own USB4 hub chips certified by Intel.

So in the end, basically every USB4 hub sold ends up netting Intel a small royalty payment kind of like how everything with a HDMI port nets Intel a small royalty payment.