Smartphone USB-C Hack (flipdot.org)

Lustig das ich dem Hacker auf dem RC3 über den Weg gelaufen bin 🙂 Sollte man öfters machen einfach Hardware upgraden 🙂

How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 (servethehome.com)

This is what an x86/ 10GbE Apple Mac Mini looks like in an EC2 rack. One can see that the unit is placed in a sled. Around the Mac Mini are a surprising number of wires being routed through the chassis.

Many of these wires terminate at the front of the sled. Here, we have an AWS Nitro controller. Amazon is now on its fourth generation of Nitro controller after starting the journey years ago.

Interesting insight into the world of DPUs – Also interesting is the fact that the DPU component might be more expensive than the rest of the AWS infrastructure on the sled.

Open Source Stash (opensourcestash.com)

A growing stash of privacy-focused, powerful and secure open-source alternatives for makers, marketers, designers and others.

Europe’s night trains are on track for a resurgence (edition.cnn.com)

Spearheaded by Austria’s ÖBB, in conjunction with Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, France’s SNCF and Swiss Federal Railways, the collaboration will see four new "Nightjet" routes over the next four years. By December 2021, Vienna-Munich-Paris and Zurich-Cologne-Amsterdam will be up and running. Two years later, a Vienna/Berlin to Brussels/Paris will launch. And in December 2024, sleeper trains will start running between Zurich and Barcelona.

Looking forward to this!

Why Is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast?. Real world experience with the new M1… (debugger.medium.com)

The second long read around the M1 Chip. The very interesting bit is here:

Why can’t Intel and AMD add more instruction decoders? This is where we finally see the revenge of RISC, and where the fact that the M1 Firestorm core has an ARM RISC architecture begins to matter. You see, an x86 instruction can be anywhere from 1–15 bytes long. RISC instructions have fixed length. Every ARM instruction is 4 bytes long. Why is that relevant in this case? Because splitting up a stream of bytes into instructions to feed into eight different decoders in parallel becomes trivial if every instruction has the same length. However, on an x86 CPU, the decoders have no clue where the next instruction starts. It has to actually analyze each instruction in order to see how long it is. The brute force way Intel and AMD deal with this is by simply attempting to decode instructions at every possible starting point. That means x86 chips have to deal with lots of wrong guesses and mistakes which has to be discarded. This creates such a convoluted and complicated decoder stage that it is really hard to add more decoders. But for Apple, it is trivial in comparison to keep adding more. In fact, adding more causes so many other problems that four decoders according to AMD itself is basically an upper limit for them. This is what allows the M1 Firestorm cores to essentially process twice as many instructions as AMD and Intel CPUs at the same clock frequency.

And when you are done with that article head over to this one: What Does RISC and CISC Mean in 2020?

sindresorhus/fast-cli: Test your download and upload speed using fast.com (github.com)

Test your download and upload speed using fast.com

An easy way to check the connection speed from your command line

Time to Say Goodbye to Google Fonts (wicki.io)

“Google Fonts resources will be redownloaded for every website, regardless it being cached on the CDN. Self-host your fonts for better performance. The old performance argument is not valid anymore.”

TIL! There’s no CDN benefit on webfonts anymore. Self-hosting fonts is anyways better 🙂

Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPV4 addresses (dangoldin.com)

While listening to a podcast discussing BGP I heard the fact that AWS owns more than $2B worth of IP addresses. I knew AWS was massive but this came as a big shock so I decided to do some digging around. I came across a site that listed the market prices of IP addresses and the range looks to be anywhere from $20 to $30 per IP depending on the block size. Now it was time to figure out the IP addresses owned by Amazon. I figured this would be difficult but lucky for us AWS actually publishes their entire set of IP addresses as JSON.

All hoarders!

The Beirut Port Explosion (forensic-architecture.org)

Forensic Architecture was invited by Mada Masr to examine open source information including videos, photographs, and documents to provide a timeline and a precise 3D model to help investigate the events of that day.

Stitching together all videos and finding a common timeline of all videos that have been posted somewhere is nice to see. Also the fact that if all safety regulations would have been adhered to that there would have been no harm to people.

Ryuk in 5 Hours (thedfirreport.com)

The Ryuk threat actors went from a phishing email to domain wide ransomware in 5 hours. They escalated privileges using Zerologon (CVE-2020-1472), less than 2 hours after the initial phish. They used tools such as Cobalt Strike, AdFind, WMI, and PowerShell to accomplish their objective.

From Phish to Pwned in 5 hours … impressive

Get started with 2-minute rule (hoanhan.co)

Whenever you find it hard to get started on a task, consider scaling it down into a 2-minute version. For example,

• Read a book → Read one page
• Write an essay → Write one sentence
• Run 10 miles → Wear my running shoes
• Do 100 push-ups → Do 1 push up
• Eat more vegetables → Eat an apple
• Study for interview → Skim through my notes
• Build a program → Code a function

A very good reminder on easy goal setting 🙂

A Guy Walks Into an Apple Store (birchtree.me)

Yes, removing the charging brick from each iPhone box will reduce waste, and it will allow Apple to ship more iPhones on fewer planes/trains/trucks. But if you expand your view just a bit, you can really see how none of their other marketing backs up this goal, and in fact runs counter to it. They’ve introduced a new charging method that is going to get lots of people to buy a new charging brick anyway, they’re pushing a wireless charging technology that wastes far more electricity than wired charging, and they have an iPhone Upgrade Program that encourages people to get a new iPhone every 12 months.

A good spin on the "we don’t ship a charger" and then basically forcing people anyways to get a new charger.

Warum die Fallzahlen trotz Masken so stark steigen (scilogs.spektrum.de)

Und zum anderen lässt sich das Problem, wenn denn meine Vermutung korrekt ist, leicht wieder korrigieren. Man beschränkt sich einfach wieder auf ein halbes Dutzend enge Kontakte und unterbindet damit das Superspreading. Das würde schon viel dazu beitragen, die Lage unter Kontrolle zu behalten.

Der Artikel ist zwar schon ein paar Monate alt, jedoch immer noch valide. Wobei Mensch sich derzeit eher auf 3-6 Kontakte halten sollte.

A Short Story for Engineers (userweb.cs.txstate.edu)

And last but not least: Enjoy a short story for engineers