Sounds like somebody had a really bad day at work, as Western Digital reports that “factory contamination” caused a batch of flash memory chips to be spoiled. How much, you ask? Oh, only about 7 billion gigabytes! For those of you fond of SI prefixes, that’s 7 exabytes of storage; to put that into perspective, it’s seven times what Google used for Gmail storage in 2012, and enough to store approximately 1.69 trillion copies of Project Gutenberg’s ASCII King James Version Bible. Very few details were available other than the unspecified contamination of two factories, but this stands poised to cause problems with everything from flash drives to phones to SSDs, and will probably only worsen the ongoing chip shortage. And while we hate to be cynical, it’ll probably be prudent to watch out for any “too good to be true” deals on memory that pop up on eBay and Ali in the coming months.
Among the many facets of modern technology, few have evolved faster or more radically than the computer. In less than a century its very nature has changed significantly: today’s smartphones easily outperform desktop computers of the past, machines which themselves were thousands of times more powerful than the room-sized behemoths that ushered in the age of digital computing. The technology has developed so rapidly that an individual who’s now making their living developing iPhone applications could very well have started their career working with stacks of punch cards.
With things moving so quickly, it can be difficult to determine what’s worth holding onto from a historical perspective. Will last year’s Chromebook one day be a museum piece? What about those old Lotus 1-2-3 floppies you’ve got in the garage? Deciding what artifacts are worth preserving in such a fast moving field is just one of the challenges faced by Dag Spicer, the Senior Curator at the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California. Dag stopped by the Hack Chat back in June of 2019 to talk about the role of the CHM and other institutions like it in storing and protecting computing history for future generations.
To answer that most pressing question, what’s worth saving from the landfill, Dag says the CHM often follows what they call the “Ten Year Rule” before making a decision. That is to say, at least a decade should have gone by before a decision can be made about a particular artifact. They reason that’s long enough for hindsight to determine if the piece in question made a lasting impression on the computing world or not. Note that such impression doesn’t always have to be positive; pieces that the CHM deem “Interesting Failures” also find their way into the collection, as well as hardware which became important due to patent litigation.
Of course, there are times when this rule is sidestepped. Dag points to the release of the iPod and iPhone as a prime example. It was clear that one way or another Apple’s bold gambit was going to get recorded in the annals of computing history, so these gadgets were fast-tracked into the collection. Looking back on this decision in 2022, it’s clear they made the right call. When asked in the Chat if Dag had any thoughts on contemporary hardware that could have similar impact on the computing world, he pointed to Artificial Intelligence accelerators like Google’s Tensor Processing Unit.
In addition to the hardware itself, the CHM also maintains a collection of ephemera that serves to capture some of the institutional memory of the era. Notebooks from the R&D labs of Fairchild Semiconductor, or handwritten documents from Intel luminary Andrew Grove bring a human touch to a collection of big iron and beige boxes. These primary sources are especially valuable for those looking to research early semiconductor or computer development, a task that several in the Chat said staff from the Computer History Museum had personally assisted them with.
Towards the end of the Chat, a user asks why organizations like the CHM go through the considerable expense of keeping all these relics in climate controlled storage when we have the ability to photograph them in high definition, produce schematics of their internals, and emulate their functionality on far more capable systems. While Dag admits that emulation is probably the way to go if you’re only worried about the software side of things, he believes that images and diagrams simply aren’t enough to capture the true essence of these machines.
Quoting the the words of early Digital Equipment Corporation engineer Gordon Bell, Dag says these computers are “beautiful sculptures” that “reflect the times of their creation” in a way that can’t easily be replicated. They represent not just the technological state-of-the-art but also the cultural milieu in which they were developed, with each and every design decision taking into account a wide array of variables ranging from contemporary aesthetics to material availability.
While 3D scans of a computer’s case and digital facsimiles of its internal components can serve to preserve some element of the engineering that went into these computers, they will never be able to capture the experience of seeing the real thing sitting in front of you. Any school child can tell you what the Mona Lisa looks like, but that doesn’t stop millions of people from waiting in line each year to see it at the Louvre.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the transcripts posted to Hackaday.io make sure you don’t miss out.
This week, Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos fawn over a beautiful Italian split-flap clock that doesn’t come cheap, and another clock made of floppies that could be re-created for next to nothing. We’ll also sing the praises of solderless circuitry for prototyping and marvel over a filament dry box with enough sensors to control an entire house. The finer points of the ooh, sparkly-ness of diffraction gratings will be discussed, and by the end of the show, you’ll know what we each like in a microscope.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
(And if you’re wondering about what my joke about not having Kristina on the show for 28 seconds, and all the professionalism, was about — we both forgot to press record the first time through and got ~15 minutes into the show before noticing. Yeah. But we had a good time the second time around anyway.)
Running Chrome or a Chromium-based browser? Check for version 98.0.4758.102, and update if you’re not running that release or better. Quick tip, use chrome://restart to trigger an immediate restart of Chrome, just like the one that comes after an update. This is super useful especially after installing an update on Linux, using apt, dnf, or the like.
CVE-2022-0609 is the big vulnerability just patched, and Google has acknowledged that it’s being exploited in the wild. It’s a use-after-free bug, meaning that the application marks a section of memory as returned to the OS, but then accesses that now-invalid memory address. The time gap between freeing and erroneously re-using the memory allows malicious code to claim that memory as its own, and write something unexpected.
Google has learned their lesson about making too many details public too early, and this CVE and associated bug aren’t easily found in in the Chromium project’s source, and there doesn’t seem to be an exploit published in the Chromium code testing suite. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Chrome 0-day,Cassandra, And A Cisco PoC”→
Along with many other natural phenomena, lightning is probably familiar to most. Between its intense noise and visuals, there is also very little disagreement that getting hit by a lightning strike is a bad thing, regardless of whether you’re a fleshy human, moisture-filled plant, or conductive machine. So it’s more than a little bit strange that the underlying cause of lightning, and what makes certain clouds produce these intense voltages along ionized air molecules, is still an open scientific question.
Many of us have probably learned at some point the most popular theory about how lightning forms, namely that lightning is caused by ice particles in clouds. These ice particles interact to build up a charge, much like in a capacitor. The only issue with this theory is that this process alone will not build up a potential large enough to ionize the air between said clouds and the ground and cause the lightning strike, leaving this theory in tatters.
A recent study, using data from Earth-based radio telescopes, may now have provided fascinating details on lightning formation, and how the charge may build up sufficiently to make us Earth-based critters scurry away to safety when dark clouds draw near.
For British teenagers in the 1980s, the delights of 8-bit computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, or BBC Micro were firmly restricted to the offline arena. We would read about the BBS scene on the other side of the Atlantic, but without cheap local calls and with a modem costing a small fortune, the chances of us ever experiencing one was zero. When we took the British school rite of passage of a trip to France though, we were astounded to see that every French person was not merely online, but that they were doing so with a neat little all-in-one terminal. We’d just been introduced to the French Minitel system, and in that minute shared a glimpse of the future.
Un Réseau Trés Français
My Alcatel Minitel terminal
In the 1970s and 1980s, so-called videotext systems, terminal-based phoneline access to information services on central computers, were seen as an obvious next step for telephone network operators with an interest in profitable new products. In most countries this resulted in services such as the UK’s Prestel, a subscription service relying on costly hardware, but France Télécom instead pursued the bold path of making the terminals free to subscribers with free access to phone listings and yellow pages, but a business model based on pay-to-use premium services.
Thus, through the 1980s all French households had a Minitel terminal beside the phone, and the service became a runaway success. Ever since seeing Minitel terminals as a tourist I’d been fascinated by the service, so here in the 2020s when a friend was visiting their family in France I asked whether he could pick up an old Minitel terminal for me. Thus I found myself parting with around $25 and being rewarded with a slightly battered Minitel cardboard box containing one of the familiar brown Alcatel terminals. I certainly wasn’t expecting one in its original packaging. Continue reading “Teardown: Alcatel Telic 1 Minitel Terminal”→
For big-ticket purchases, I tend to do a lot of research before I open my wallet. I like to at least have the illusion that when I send my money off to a far-away stranger, I’m likely to get back something of equal value in a reasonable timeframe that does what I want it to do. So I tend more toward the “analysis paralysis” end of the spectrum, where I pore over so many specs and reviews that I end up buying nothing.
While that sounds like a bad thing, and sometimes is, I find that it tends to help me avoid rashly spending money on things that aren’t going to work for me. This is especially true in the area of tools, where while I’m trapped in my analysis loop, I often find a workaround or substitute that’s good enough to get the job done.
For some things, though, there is no substitute, and when you start working with SMD components that you’d have a hard time telling from a grain of salt, you’re probably going to need a microscope. I recently determined that this was where I was in my electronics journey, and now that I’ve worked my way through the analysis and procurement phase of the process, I thought I’d share my first impressions of my microscope, and what it’s like to get used to working with one.
