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Show of 12-12-2020

Tech Talk

December 12, 2020

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from Paul in Minneapolis: Dear Tech Talk. I’m a little confused. I had Carbonite backing up my files for a couple of years and they didn’t back up any of my Windows files. I learned that the hard way after my hard drive crashed on me. What exactly is backed up when you create a System Image Backup? Paula in Minneapolis, MN
  • Tech Talk Responds: When you create a System Image you are effectively backing up the entire hard drive. Everything you have stored on the drive will be saved as a backup set on your backup drive. And yes, that includes your Windows installation. When you create a System Image Backup you are basically taking a “snapshot” of the contents of the drive. You can use then that backup at a later time to recreate that same exact configuration after a drive failure, a critical virus attack or some other system failure.
  • Therefore, if you have a recent System Image Backup on hand you’ll be able to get your PC back up and running with Windows along with all the programs, settings, data, photos and other files that you had on there at the time that backup was created.
  • Email from Arnie in Colorado Springs: Hi Dr. Shurtz. How will Cloudflare & Apple improve Internet security? Something to do with DNS & IPAD addresses? Anything to improve Internet security would be helpful. Tech Talk is great to keep everyone informed. Many thanks, Arnie in Colorado Springs, CO
  • Tech Talk Responds: Engineers at Apple are working with Cloudflare and Fastly to create Oblivious DNS, a new standard that can make it harder to track a user’s online activities. The Domain Name System is effectively the address book for the Internet, DNS data is currently sent and received in clear text, which is not secure.
  • In a bid to make DNS more private and less trackable, a group of engineers at Apple, Cloudflare, and Fastly have come up with Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH).
  • The system works by relying on both public key encryption and a network proxy sitting between the client and the DoH server. The query is encrypted by the client and dispatched to the DoH server via the proxy. The DoH server is able to decrypt the query, produces an answer to it, encrypts that answer, and sends it back to the proxy, which then sends it back to the client.
  • In effect, the proxy is aware of encrypted messages between the client and the DoH server, but not the message content. Meanwhile, the DoH server knows the content of the message itself, but only the address of the proxy, not the client. Since the proxy and DOH server are independent entities, the query is secure.
  • The standard still must be submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to become an accepted standard that will be used by developers.
  • Email from Jane in Washington, DC: Dear Dr. Shurtz, Jim and Mr. Bigvoice. I listen every chance I get, and really enjoy the history. However, back at the desktop on my nice HP Envy Windows 10, that I have Macafee running, Bing sneaks in all the time.   I want to use Chrome with the DuckDuckGo feature. But, Bing pops in.  Not only that, I lose my sessions, where I used to just tap through back and forth with Alt Tab, among many sessions, now they are like submerged somewhere.  So that is two questions, how to get rid of BING and also how to retrieve open sessions. Janet Bo Peep in Washington DC
  • Tech Talk Responds: First you must get rid of Bing in your Chrome browser. Microsoft seems to have placed it everywhere.
    • Step 1: Open Google Chrome, click three dots and choose Settings.
    • Step 2: Go to the Appearance section, click Show home button to see if it is enabled and Bing is set to the home page. If so, delete Bing and choose New Tab page as Chrome’s home page.
    • Step 3: In the Search engine used in the address bar section, ensure any search engine other than Bing is selected. In your case DuckDuckGo.
    • Step 4: Click Manage search engines, choose Bing and click Remove from list. You will click on the three dot on the right to see this menu.
    • Step 5: Click On startup in the left panel, if Bing is listed in Open a specific page or set of pages, click the menu of Bing and choose Remove.
  • It’s easy to accidentally close a tab in Google Chrome and lose a web page you were But you can easily restore the tab you just closed by using a keyboard shortcut: CTRL + Shift + T on a PC. This will reveal your most recent tabs on the top of screen. You can also see a list of tabs in a history list.
    • Click the three vertical dots at the top right of the window.
    • In the menu, click “History.”
    • You should see a list of all the most recently used tabs divided by device. Choose the tab you want to re-open.
  • Email from Bob in Maryland: Dear Doc, Jim and the irreplaceable Mr. Big Voice. I have been reading about something called “BGP hijacking”. What is this? Thanks. Love the show! As Always, your faithful listener, Bob in Maryland.
  • Tech Talk Responds: The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the protocol used throughout the Internet to exchange routing information between networks.
  • It is the language spoken by routers on the Internet to determine how packets can be sent from one router to another to reach their final destination.
  • The challenge with BGP is that the protocol does not directly include security mechanisms and is based largely on trust between network operators that they will secure their systems correctly and not send incorrect data.
  • When internet service providers “advertise a bad route,” they send data on a haphazard, ill-advised journey across the internet and often into oblivion.
  • The weaknesses can also be exploited intentionally by bad actors to reroute data over networks they control for interception. This practice is known as BGP hijacking.
  • The group known as Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) is announcing a 600-member task force specifically dedicated to securing BGP.
  • The group promotes is RPKI, or “Routing Public Key Infrastructure,” a public database of routes that have been cryptographically signed as a testament of their validity. Over the last two years, RPKI has gained real momentum, and is now in use by ISPs like AT&T, Telia, NTT, Cogent, and RETN (European). More will follow.
  • Email from Bob in Maryland: Dear Mr. Big Voice and Doc and Jim. I just ran across this article on “hard drive shucking”. I have heard of shucking corn, but this was something new to me. Is this a good idea and a way to save money? What do you think? Bob in Maryland.
  • Tech Talk Responds: The bare drive inside of an external hard drive is often cheaper than buying a brand-new drive. Removing that drive is call hard drive shucking.
  • For instance, a Western Digital 14TB Ultrastar internal drive on Newegg was recently priced at $350. Compare that to a recent sale of a 14TB external drive from the same manufacturer, selling for as low as low $190. That’s a $160 savings over the standalone bare drive. If you’ve got a desktop, NAS system, or home media server to fix or upgrade, consider trying your hand at the art of shucking.
  • It is easy to disassemble most external hard drives without damaging anything, especially the WD Elements series. The whole process using nothing but a Jimmy (blade) and a Phillips screwdriver. Check out the YouTube videos.
  • They are the same server-grade hard drives the manufacturer normally sells for dozens of dollars more. When companies manufacture a product at a large scale, there are variances in the quality of the finished product. The lower-quality units aren’t good enough for enterprise server farm customers, but instead of throwing them out, the manufacturer sells them in external drives, with a shorter warranty.
  • Keep in mind, not all external drives are shuckable. Laptop-size 2.5-inch drives can be a toss up, as some have their USB controller boards soldered directly to the hard drive. Western Digital, in particular, has consistently been guilty of this. However, popular 3.5-inch series like Western Digital’s Easystore and Elements, as well as Seagate’s Expansion and Backup Plus lines are easily shuckable.
  • Email from Lois in Erie: Dear Tech Talk. We have two computers in our home office, but only one USB printer. Is there a way to print from both computers without having to switch the print cable? Love the podcast. Lois is Erie, Kansas
  • Tech Talk Responds: You in luck. There is a device called a USB Printer Auto Sharing Switch that makes it easy to connect a single printer to two or more computers. When it detects that one computer is sending a print job to the printer it automatically “connects” that computer to the printer. The IOGEAR 2-Port USB 2.0 Automatic Printer Switch is $28.18 on Amazon.

Profiles in IT: Jeffrey Adgate Dean

  • Jeffrey Adgate Dean is the programmers behind Google’s scalable architecture. He is a programming legend within Google and treated as a rock star.
  • Jeff Dean was born in July 1968 in Hawaii.
  • In 1981, he skipped the last three months of eighth grade to help his parents at a refugee camp in Somali
  • While in high school, he wrote software for analyzing vast sets of epidemiological data that he says was “26 times faster” than what professionals were using at the time.
  • The system, called Epi Info, has been adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and translated into 13 languages.
  • In 1990, he received a BS in Computer Science from University of Minnesota.
  • From 1990 to 1991, he worked for the World Health Organization‘s Global Programme on AIDS. He developed software to do statistical modelling, forecasting and analysis of the HIV pandemic.
  • He received an MS and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Washington in 1993 and 1996, respectively.
  • While in graduate school, he invented several new techniques for optimizing object-oriented languages, many of which are now in commercial C++ and Java compilers.
  • In September 1996, he joined DEC/Compaq’s Western Research Laboratory, where he worked on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture, and information retrieval.
  • In February 1999, he became a Senior Member of Technical Staff at mySimon, Inc, where he developed a system for retrieving and caching electronic commerce content including a crawler and custom full-text indexing system, increasing speed 20X.
  • In August 1999, was hired by Google as employee number 20 and is currently a Google Senior Fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group.
  • He was co-designer and co-implementer of five successive generations of Google’s crawling indexing and query retrieval systems.
  • He was co-designer and implementer of the initial version of Google’s advertising serving system.
  • He was co-designer and implementer of MapReduce, a system for large-scale data processing applications on large clusters of machines.
  • He was co-designer and implementer of BigTable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system used underneath approximately 50 Google products.
  • He was designer and developer of the initial version of Google’s AdSense for Content product involving both the production serving system as well as work on developing and improving the quality of ad selection algorithms based on the contents of pages.
  • He was co-designer and implementer of many aspects of the production system design for Google Translate, a statistical machine translation system.
  • He was co-designer and implementer of Spanner, a large-scale globally distributed storage system used for several important products at Google.
  • He was co-designer and implementer of system for large-scale distributed neural network training. System has been used to make significant improvements in image understanding, speech recognition and natural language processing applications.
  • He was co-founder and leader of Google’s deep learning, including Google Brain
  • He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009, which recognized his work on large-scale distributed computer systems.
  • He received the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (2012)
  • Jeff was granted 1% in Google equity, which is worth $11.93 B today (December 2020).

Observations from the Bunker

  • Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
  • Timnit Gebru was dismissed from her role as co-leader of Google’s Ethical AI team.
  • Google had refused to give permission for Gebru and other Google researchers to attach their name or the company’s name to an AI ethics paper that had been accepted for publication.
  • Previously she co-authored a paper that “is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them.
  • Google managers asked her to withdraw her name from an as-yet-unpublished paper called “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?”
  • Gebru sent her superiors an e-mail with several demands and said that if those conditions could not be met she would work out a timeline for her to leave Google.
  • Google said it was ‘accepting her resignation’ and cut off her access to e-mail.”
  • The issue at hand is the fact that we do not fully understand how these systems work or the rules that they discern from massive data sets.
  • Jeff Dean was implicated in her dismissal. Many felt she was a threat to future Google products based on big data AI unsupervised learning applications.

Tesla, HP, and Oracle are moving to Texas from Silicon Valley

  • Hewlett-Packard traces its origins to 1938, when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard rented a garage in Palo Alto, California.
  • HP’s success in Palo Alto kick started the Northern California region’s tech scene, eventually landing it the name “Silicon Valley.”
  • In HP’s first year, Hewlett and Packard invented their first product: the HP Model 200A, an audio oscillator used to test sound equipment.
  • The company built its first computer in 1966 and the famous HP-35 in 1972 — the world’s first hand-held scientific calculator.
  • In 2015, the company split into HPE and hardware maker HP Inc. (HPQ).
  • Now, HP Enterprises, a descendant of the pioneering company, is moving to Texas.
  • SignEasy, QuestionPro and DZS (formerly known as Dasan Zhone Solutions) also moved from California to Texas.
  • Dell’s headquarters is in Round Rock, Texas, near Austin, and many other tech companies are considering moving to Texas for tax reasons.
  • After the HP announce, both Tesla and Oracle announced they were moving from Silicon Valley to Texas.
  • In fact, a patch of Austin has been nicknamed “Silicon Hills” because of its cluster of tech companies in the metro Austin area.

Breaking News: Apple Silicon Has Arrived

  • Apple announced its first personal computers powered using chips that are more like those in an iPhone than those in a typical PC.
  • The machines are the $999 13-inch MacBook Air, the $699 Mac Mini and the $1,299 MacBook Pro.
  • Starting with these machines, Apple is going to throw its weight behind its Apple Silicon chips.
  • For the past 14 years, Apple has relied on Intel-made chips to power its laptop and desktop computers.
  • Apple has spent more than a decade on research and development, and at least $1 billion buying more than half a dozen companies, to create the M1, a chip similar to those in iPhones and iPads and that takes on Intel.
  • Now Apple’s first computers powered by the M1 have been made available for preorder and will start shipping next week.
  • Apple says the M1 is more powerful and energy efficient, allowing for potentially smaller and slimmer designs, longer battery life and new technologies as well.
  • In another development, Apple has started building its own cellular modem for future devices, a move that would replace components from Qualcomm. A cellular modem is one of the most important parts of a smartphone, enabling phone calls and connection to the internet via cellular networks. The $1 billion acquisition of Intel’s modem business in 2019 helped Apple build a team of hardware and software engineers to develop its own cellular modem.

ACLU Sues DHS Over Use of Cellphone Tracking Data

  • The American Civil Liberties Union is suing federal authorities over their alleged use of cellphone location data — particularly in immigration enforcement.
  • The nonprofit organization filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to force the agencies to release records about purchasing cellphone location data for immigration enforcement and other purposes.
  • The lawsuit follows multiple news reports earlier this year about the Trump administration buying access to commercial databases that track cellphone locations and then using that data to detect people who might be entering the country illegally.
  • Senate Democrats, such as privacy advocate Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), had written a letter to DHS asking for more information on how such data was being used.

Net Neutrality Debate is back with a Biden Win

  • FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, an appointee of President Donald Trump, announced he’ll be stepping down from his post on Jan. 20, the day Biden is sworn in.
  • Reinstating Obama-era net neutrality rules thrown out under the Trump administration will likely be a top priority for the agency.
  • At stake in this battle is who, if anyone, will police the internet to ensure that broadband companies aren’t abusing their power as gatekeepers.
  • The 2015 rules adopted under FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, a Democrat, prevented broadband providers from blocking or slowing access to the internet or charging for faster access.
  • Reclassifying broadband as a Title II service would also ensure the FCC is on firm legal footing to modernize its Universal Service Fund programs, which help provide subsidies to poor Americans for phone service and broadband.
  • Net neutrality is the principle that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally.
  • Supporters of net neutrality say rules are necessary to ensure broadband companies aren’t abusing their power as gatekeepers.
  • But the FCC and broadband companies say the old rules gave the FCC too much power, stifling broadband investment.
  • This debate has always been about the FCC’s authority. The question is really about whether there should be an agency to oversee the broadband market.
  • There are five seats in total on the FCC. Three of those seats will go to Democrats, while two are reserved for Republicans. With Pai’s departure in January, there will be two seats vacant on the commission.
  • The only way to finally put the issue to rest would be for Congress to act.
  • If Congress does not act, the net neutrality rules and the FCC’s authority to regulate broadband will continue to ping-pong back and forth depending on which party controls the White House.

Looking for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

  • Astronomer Eamonn Kerins with the University of Manchester has developed an approach to looking for intelligent extraterrestrial beings on other planets that involves using game theory.
  • The current approach to looking for intelligent life on other planets is basically two-pronged. One approach involves scanning the skies looking for signals from space that could be created by intelligent beings. The other involves scanning the sky for evidence of exoplanets that appear to be habitable.
  • Kerins suggests that a way to meld the two approaches into a logical systematic search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to use some of the logic inherent in game theory.
  • Kerins starts by noting that it seems possible that the reason scientists on Earth have not discovered signals from beings on other planets is because they are not sending any, fearing that doing so might draw the attention of unfriendly adversaries.
  • He further suggests that if others are out there, they might be listening just as intently as we are. This leads to the SETI paradox, in which everyone is listening but no one is sending. And it also leads to the question of how such a paradox could be resolved.
  • He notes that game theory suggests that both parties should agree that the party with more access to information should be the one that transmits first to the other.
  • He further notes that such signaling should begin with something very basic.
  • He concludes that following such an approach based on data currently available would narrow the search to just one exoplanet: K2-155d. He suggests that because it is more visible to us than the other way around, that we be the first to send a signal—and then to watch and listen for any reply.
  • from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology.