The lifespan of data on a USB flash drive depends on many factors: Under ideal conditions, data should remain preserved on a high-quality USB stick for at least 10 years or even longer. But what exactly does that mean and under what conditions does this hold true?

USB sticks or flash drives store data using NAND flash memory, in the form of binary valuesd (zeros and ones) in memory cells. Interestingly, it is electrons trapped in a kind of “floating gate” that represent these values. But these electrons can “leak” over time. This causes the data to degrade because it becomes harder to read whether the charge state represents a one or a zero. //

If the stick is exposed to high temperatures for a long time, this can cause the electrons to “leak” faster, which can damage the data and lead to its loss.

Amazon is an amazing technical company, but they lack in some ways. Technological prowess, culture, and/or business decisions will hamper them from capturing the next wave of cloud computing like they have the last two. This report will cover these 3 phases of cloud computing and how Amazon’s continued dominance in the first two phases doesn’t necessarily give them a head start in the battle for the future of computing. //

As Amazon ballooned in size with its retail business, it began to run into limitations of its monolithic 90s-era software practices. Metcalfe’s law sort of applied; as each additional service or developer was added, complexity grew at an n^2 rate. Even simple changes or enhancements impacted many downstream applications and use cases, requiring huge amounts of communication. As such, Amazon would have to freeze most code changes at a certain point in the year so the holiday season could focus on bug fixes and stability.

Ten years ago, the cloud was mostly used by small startups that didn’t have the resources to build and operate a physical infrastructure and for businesses that wanted to move their collaboration services to a managed infrastructure. Public cloud services (and cheap capital in a low interest-rate economy) meant such customers could serve a growing number of users relatively inexpensively. This environment enabled cloud-native startups such as Uber and Airbnb to scale and thrive.

Over the next decade, companies flocked en masse to the cloud because it lowered costs and expedited innovation. This was truly a paradigm shift and company after company announced “cloud-first” strategies and moved infrastructures wholesale to cloud service providers.

However, cloud-first strategies may be hitting the limits of their efficacy, and in many cases, ROIs are diminishing, triggering a major cloud backlash. Ubiquitous cloud adoption has given rise to new challenges, namely out-of-control costs, deepening complexity and restrictive vendor lock-in. We call this cloud sprawl.

In 2004, ASHRAE (the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) recommended an operating temperature range from 20°C to 25°C. In 2008, the society went further, suggesting that temperatures could be raised to 27°C.

Following that, the society issued Revision A1, which raised the limit to 32°C (89.6°F) depending on conditions.

This was not an idle whim. ASHRAE engineers said that higher temperatures would have little effect on the lifetime of components, but would offer significant energy savings.

Figures from the US General Services Administration suggested that data centers could save four percent of their total energy, for every degree they allowed the temperature to climb. //

Facebook quickly found it could go beyond the ASHRAE guidelines. At its Prineville and Forest City data centers, they raised the server temperatures to 29.4°C, and found no ill effects. //

Google went up to 26.6°C, and Joe Kava, then vice president of data centers, said the move was working: “Google runs data centers warmer than most because it helps efficiency.”

Intel went furthest. For ten months in 2008, the chip giant took 900 servers, and ran half of them in a traditionally cooled data center, while the other 450 were given no external cooling. The server temperatures went up to 33.3°C (92°F) at times.

At the end of the ten months, the chip giant compared those servers with another 450 which had been run in a traditional air-conditioned environment. The 450 hot servers had saved some 67 percent of the power budget.

In this higher-temperature test, Intel actually found a measurable increase in failure. Amongst the hot servers, two percent more failed. But that failure rate may have had nothing to do with the temperature - the 450 servers under test also had no air filtration or humidity control, so the small increase in failure rate may have been due to dust and condensation.

Even if you aren't in charge of the lighting design of a giant building, there's a valuable lesson here for anyone getting involved with smart home/building technology: make technology an addition to your setup, not a dependency. You still need to install physical light switches in every room, but as a bonus, you can pick light switches that are also controllable via some kind of network. All sorts of smart light switches meet this requirement—normal paddles or even toggles that can also be controlled via Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, probably Ethernet, or whatever you want. This way, if the Internet is down, or some server explodes, or some cloud company shuts down, the lights will still work.

What you definitely shouldn't do is hard-wire the electricity to be always on and then hope the network to the light fixtures or light bulbs will be around to power them off. That's apparently what happened at this school, and now taxpayers are paying the price.

AI image synthesis goes open source, with big implications. //

Realistic image synthesis models are potentially dangerous for reasons already mentioned, such as the creation of propaganda or misinformation, tampering with history, accelerating political division, enabling character attacks and impersonation, and destroying the legal value of photo or video evidence. In the AI-powered future, how will we know if any remotely produced piece of media came from an actual camera, or if we are actually communicating with a real human? On these questions, Mostaque is broadly hopeful. "There will be new verification systems in place, and open releases like this will shift the public debate and development of these tools," he said.

That's easier said than done, of course. But it's also easy to be scared of new things. Despite our best efforts, it's difficult to know exactly how image synthesis and other AI-powered technologies will affect us on a societal scale without seeing them in wide use. Ultimately, humanity will adapt, even if our cultural frameworks end up changing radically in the process. It's happened before, which is why the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus reportedly said, "the only constant is change."

In fact, there's a photo of him saying that now, thanks to Stable Diffusion.

USB4 vs. Thunderbolt 4—and everything else to know about the newest USB standard.

USB has come a long way since the 12Mbps days of the '90s. It has waved goodbye to USB-B and is inching away from USB-A in favor of the slim, reversible USB-C connector. Data transfer rates have increased so dramatically that we can run powerful setups with high-resolution monitors, speedy external storage, and numerous other devices from the USB Implementers Forum's latest open standard, USB4.

USB4 unifies the USB and Intel Thunderbolt protocols for the first time, expanding USB's capabilities while further dividing the technology into different performance classes. Adding features like dynamic bandwidth allocation ensures that USB4 is by far the most advanced USB generation.

its most groundbreaking and revolutionary product yet, the Newton MessagePad. It was released to great fanfare a year later, but as a product, it could only be described as a flop. Widely mocked in popular culture at the time, the Newton became a poster child for expensive but useless high-tech gadgets. Even though the device improved dramatically over time, it failed to gain market share, and it was discontinued in 1997. Yet while the Newton was a failure, it galvanized Apple engineers to create something better—and in some ways led to the creation of the iPad and the iPhone.

Emsisoft Emergency Kit is a virus scanner that’s a useful starting point, while Dr.Web CureIt! will scan your computer for common malware that may have taken root. Then there’s Avira Rescue System, which can scan for and repair various problems with the settings and configuration of Windows. Microsoft has its own virus scanner that can run from a USB drive too: Microsoft Safety Scanner.

Run a portable operating system
We’ve mentioned portable apps, but you can also carry an entire computer with you on a USB drive—operating system, applications, files, and all. The open-source Linux OS is perfect for this, and several distributions of Linux can be run in a portable mode, including Linux Lite, Puppy Linux, and MX Linux. Have a look around to see which distro might suit you best. //

As a safety net should something go seriously wrong with your PC, you can create a Windows recovery drive on a spare USB stick. In Windows, open the Start menu, and search for “create a recovery drive” to bring up the right utility. Follow the instructions on screen to copy over the necessary files to your chosen USB drive, but note that these files won’t include your personal files and data

Vulnerability in 3rd-party libraries can send devices' users to malicious sites. //

The flaw makes it possible for hackers with access to the connection between an affected device and the Internet to poison DNS requests used to translate domains to IP addresses, researchers from security firm Nozomi Networks said Monday. By feeding a vulnerable device fraudulent IP addresses repeatedly, the hackers can force end users to connect to malicious servers that pose as Google or another trusted site.

The vulnerability, which was disclosed to vendors in January and went public on Monday, resides in uClibc and uClibc fork uClibc-ng, both of which provide alternatives to the standard C library for embedded Linux. Nozomi said 200 vendors incorporate at least one of the libraries into wares that, according to the uClibc-ng maintainer, include the following:

Linksys WRT54G - Wireless-G Broadband Router
NetGear WG602 wireless router
Most Axis network cameras
Embedded Gentoo
Buildroot, a configurable means for building busybox/uClibc-based systems
LEAF Bering-uClibc, the successor of the Linux Router Project that supports gateways, routers, and firewalls
Tuxscreen Linux Phone

The legislation’s central idea is that a company that controls a marketplace shouldn’t be able to set special rules for itself within that marketplace, because competitors who object don’t have any realistic place to go. No business can afford to be left out of Google’s search index, and few online retailers can make a living if they’re not listed on Amazon. So the Klobuchar-Grassley bill, broadly speaking, prohibits self-preferencing by platforms that hit certain size thresholds, like monthly active users or annual revenue. To take a simple example, it would mean Amazon can’t give its in-house branded products a leg up over other brands when someone is shopping on its site, and Google can’t choose to give YouTube links when someone does a video search unless those links are objectively the most relevant. //

If Google and the other tech giants are right that their dominance stems purely from the superiority of their products, then perhaps they shouldn’t be too worried about the Klobuchar-Grassley bill. After all, in an open competition, the best offering should win. Perhaps Big Tech really is the best at everything. This law would just make them prove it.

In the past 30 days, over 70,000 IT professionals have fled Russia. The Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEC) expects them to be joined by an additional 100,00 by end of April.

According to RAEC, “The only things holding back the second wave are the high costs of tickets and housing in the countries of destination, and the fact that it’s now almost impossible to make international financial transactions”.

According to one poll, one third of Russia’s IT sector is looking for overseas employment, which would put the potential brain drain at more that 600,000.

This talent flight is particularly crippling since the most capable engineers are those who are able to leave first because their skills are in demand.

The main concern US politicians have raised about TikTok is that because it’s owned by China's ByteDance, the Chinese government could conceivably access any American data held by the company. The other big concern has been security risk. This deal would address both. Under the agreement, Oracle would store TikTok data for US users, ensure that data is not transferred to ByteDance, and be responsible for protecting user data from cybersecurity threats. Because this sensitive task will be performed by a US company with close ties to the government, TikTok should finally be able to put to rest the concern that its operations in the United States constitute a grave threat to American security. //

However, the agreement is almost certain to provide momentum to foreign governments who want to do exactly what the United States is doing: require companies to store data within their borders. Numerous countries have pushed these types of data localization requirements over the last decade, including Russia, India, and France. In response, the tech sector has made the case that this approach to data storage creates privacy risks, degrades performance, and imposes compliance costs that make it harder for small companies to compete.

If the US government succeeds in forcing TikTok to enter this local data-storing arrangement with Oracle, other governments will be more likely to impose comparable requirements on US companies operating within their borders. A principle that might be appealing to TikTok’s critics in the United States could seem much less desirable if it were applied to Apple, Meta, or Snap in countries like China or Russia. The war in Ukraine has highlighted why countries like Russia want to use localization to exert more control over global tech companies, and also why it’s so important that local data storage requirements remain the exception rather than the norm. //

In a written opinion halting President Trump’s ban, a federal judge found that while the government had successfully demonstrated that China posed a national security threat to the United States, its evidence linking TikTok to that threat was “less substantial.” TikTok currently has a data storage agreement with Google Cloud, and the government has not indicated why a hosting deal with Oracle provides better protection for US user data than the current agreement with Google.

Spinal cord injuries are life-altering, as they prevent the transmission of nerve impulses past the point of injury. That means no sensory inputs make it to the brain, and no signals from the brain make it to the muscles normally controlled by the brain. But improvements in our understanding of neurobiology have raised the hope that we can eventually restore some control over paralyzed limbs.

Some of these efforts focus purely on nerve cells, attempting to get them to grow through the damage at the site of injury and restore a functional spinal cord. Others attempt to use electronics to bypass the injury entirely. Today, there was very good news for the electronics-focused effort: researchers have designed a spinal implant that can control the leg muscles of paralyzed individuals, allowing those individuals to walk with assistance within hours of the implant being activated. //

An alternative to that type of biological repair is what you might consider an electronic bypass. In its most sophisticated form, a bypass would involve an implant that registers neural activity, located either in the brain or in the spinal cord closer to the brain than the injury. This is then paired with some sort of hardware—potentially another implant—on the far side of the injury that stimulates the nerves based on the information read by the other implant.

A less sophisticated version of this is to simply have preprogrammed behaviors you want to control, such as the leg movements involved in walking. That is the approach used in the recent work. But, as will become very clear, "less sophisticated" leaves a wide-open space for some very sophisticated work. //

The results were astonishing. Prior to activating the implant, none of the three participants could initiate any sort of muscle activity when attempting to take a step. The same day that the model was trained, all of the subjects could take steps on a treadmill if they were supported. The model was able to generate the right series of currents to stimulate the leg muscles appropriately.

Out for a walk and more
With three days of fine-tuning, the participants were able to walk around a room if given sufficient support. Eventually, they were able to stand unaided and walk supported only by a walker—their legs were controlled via an implant in their abdomen, which responded to triggers on the handles of the walker. One volunteer was even able to go up stairs.

Separate programs were also developed that allowed the subjects to ride recumbent bicycles or to paddle a kayak.

One striking thing is that two of the subjects actually regained the ability to exert a bit of voluntary muscle control in their formerly paralyzed limbs. Apparently, a bit of weak connectivity was still present but unable to provide a signal strong enough to trigger muscle activity. With extended activity, those weak connections were gradually strengthened, providing a complete pathway from brain to muscle.

Some Mazda owners in the Seattle area are stuck with bricked infotainment systems after listening to a particular radio station.

According to the Seattle Times, the problem began on January 30 and afflicted Mazdas from model years 2014 to 2017 when the cars were tuned to the local NPR station, KUOW 94.9. At some point during the day's broadcast, a signal from KUOW caused the Mazdas' infotainment systems to crash—the screens died and the radios were stuck on 94.9 FM.

From there, the infotainment systems became trapped in a rebooting loop, never successfully completing the task. When afflicted owners took their cars to be checked at local Mazda dealers, they were told that the "connectivity master unit" was dead and needed to be replaced.

The snag? A new CMU costs $1,500—if you can find one, which you can't, because of supply chain problems.

The problem, according to Mazda, was that the radio station sent out image files in its HD radio stream that did not have extensions, and it seems that Mazda's infotainment system of that generation needs an extension (and not a header) to tell what a file is. No extension, no idea, and the system gets corrupted.

Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, has been cleared of six out of seven civil charges during a trial in a Miami court on Dec. 7 that put him up against the estate of his deceased business partner.

Trial and claims: The plaintiff of the civil court case declared that Wright and David Kleiman, a computer forensics expert and Wright’s friend, pre-mined 1.1 million bitcoin together (worth $54 billion), fueling an argument over whether Wright owed half of his assets to Kleiman’s family.

But wait, should we believe it?

An artificial intelligence warning AI researchers about the dangers of AI sounds like the setup of a delightful B movie, but truth is often stranger than fiction.

A professor and a fellow at the University of Oxford came face to face with that reality when they invited an AI to participate in a debate at the Oxford Union on, you guessed it, the ethics of AI. Specifically, as Dr. Alex Connock and Professor Andrew Stephen explain in the Conversation, the prompt was "This house believes that AI will never be ethical." The AI, it seems, agreed. //

So what should we make of this apparent warning from the silicon realm? Thankfully, not too much. That's because the AI also argued the counterpoint: "AI will be ethical."

"When I look at the way the tech world is going, I see a clear path to a future where AI is used to create something that is better than the best human beings," it continued.

The machines, it would appear, aren't ready to take over quite yet.

OUI Lookup is a website that provides up-to-date information about MAC Addresses and OUI Vendors. Using the search bar, you can look for a OUI and find all vendors associated with the information you provided.

u/ABC_AlwaysBeCoding (OP)
....
A few days in I started to see some unexplained panics/freezes. Some Steam games would fail validation... Something was wrong. I ran btrfsck and... it reported problems. I couldn't repair them without booting off another disk so I found my Manjaro USB key I made and booted off that again and attempted to --repair the btrfs drive.

FAIL. It was unable to do it. Unrecoverable errors. The partition was basically hosed! WTF? Luckily I only had "game data" on it and it was all synced with the cloud!

Initially I blamed BTRFS. I was mad. I had heard Ubuntu 19.10 now has experimental ZFS-on-root support out of the box. I was intrigued. I said "fuck it", made an installer key and wiped my disk and ran with it.

Things went fine until... I was installing some big game and... things just stopped. But not like "hang" stopped, I could still move windows around and keyboard input still appeared on the screen, which told me the CPU and GPU weren't the cause... fuck, it's something with the drive. It only cleared on reboot. I was afraid my data or filesystem got corrupt... turns out the former did not happen and the latter is virtually impossible with ZFS (yessss), so I tried again. Again, under heavy usage things eventually just froze. I kept trying different things now that I could duplicate it. I had the idea of forcing heavy activity via manually triggering a scrub and then watch zpool status in another window.

And then sonofabitch, I finally saw it. The drive that had just reported as ONLINE during the scrub, suddenly reported "SUSPENDED: One or more devices are faulted in response to IO failures." zpool clear did not clear it. But now I KNEW it was a drive (or enclosure, or cable, or mobo) issue. I immediately suspected the drive cable (as one does, who has been doing this sort of thing for a while), finally found another USB-A 3.1 to USB-C cable from Plugable that looked solidly built, and substituted it.

BOOM. ALL PROBLEMS WENT AWAY.

So OK, the enclosure guys (really cool enclosure, btw) sent me a bad cable with it. It happens. But...

SOLD... on ZFS. //

u/atemu12
The things btrfs check reported might've been benign warnings, false positives and/or fixed on mount.

--repair the btrfs drive.

RTFM

Warning

  Do not use --repair unless you are advised to do so by a developer or an experienced user, and then only after having accepted that no fsck successfully repair all types of filesystem corruption. Eg. some other software or hardware bugs can fatally damage a volume.

Not reading the manual results in:

Unrecoverable errors. The partition was basically hosed! //

u/ABC_AlwaysBeCoding (OP)
Fair enough. Thing is, --repair may be dangerous but it seems to be impossible to corrupt a ZFS filesystem because there isn't even a way to run any sort of --repair short of a resilvering/scrub. But yeah, I was inexperienced with both of these filesystems, as you can tell.

Btrfs will try to continue regardless of error

This is absolutely the wrong strategy. Once corruption starts, it usually spreads. I think ZFS does the right thing here, even if it is inconvenient (and to be fair, if I had a mirror, it probably would have just continued as well... I think? Maybe I'll keep the bad cable to do resilience testing).

BTRFS basically uses the Golang strategy (ignore errors, be squishy and nondeterministic, just keep going), ZFS uses the Erlang/Elixir strategy (fail fast, fail hard, be brittle and deterministic, restart cleanly) and I am most definitely in the latter camp based on 20+ years in the industry getting paid to program while doing sysadmin for fun or necessity.

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