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matjaon Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

ECC is a must-have if you want to minimize the risk of corruption, but that is true for any filesystem.

Sun (and now Oracle) officially recommended using ECC ever since it was intended to be an enterprise product running on 24/7 servers, where it makes sense that anything that is going to be cached in RAM for long periods is protected by ECC.

In that sense it was a "must-have", as business-critical functions require that guarantee.

Now that you can use ZFS on a number of operating systems, on many different architectures, even a Raspberry Pi, the business-critical-only use-case is not as prevalent.

ZFS doesn't intrinsically require ECC but it does trust that the memory functions correctly which you have the best chance of achieving by using ECC.

matjaon The Unsustainability of Moore's Law

For mining, If a GPU was failing in such a way that it was giving completely wrong output for functions during mining, that'd only be visible as a lower success hash-rate which you might not even notice unless you did periodic testing of known-target hashes.

For graphics, the same defect could be severe enough to completely render the GPU useless.

matjaon Fun with Telnet (2024)

Nope, it's still live

matjaon Helion: A modern fast paced Doom FPS engine in C#

Or you could say 540Hz is the odd one out for not being a multiple of 24Hz, the standard since ~1930.

matjaon Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

Going from the ratio of adjectives on the page, it is 2.5 times less functional than beautiful.

matjaon Calendars, Contacts and Files in Stalwart

This is interesting because Stalwart has a built-in clustering feature and can use distributed databases as its storage layer, so you get high-availability options out of the box. I've struggled with doing similar HA on Dovecot, never quite being true HA (for the open source version of Dovecot) for a while and never found a good other open source option.

matjaon Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

So a JSON parser that cannot store a 2 is technically compliant? :(

matjaon Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

Lucky that 415031 is prime :)

The steps described in the article sound familiar to the process done in the early 2000's, but I'm not sure why you'd want to make it hard for yourself now.

I use certbot with "--preferred-challenges dns-01" and "--manual-auth-hook" / "--manual-cleanup-hook" to dynamically create DNS records, rather than needing to modify the webserver config (and the security/access risks that comes with). It just needs putting the cert/key in the right place and reloading the webserver/loadbalancer.

matjaon Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

Aren't JSON parsers technically not following the standard if they don't reliably store a number that is not representable by a IEEE754 double precision float?

It's a shame JSON parsers usually default to performance rather than correctness, by using bignums for numbers.

matjaon Branch Privilege Injection: Exploiting branch predictor race conditions

"Don't mind me running this piece of WASM in a webworker to collect all the useful encryption keys and cookies in your RAM..."

matjaon Branch Privilege Injection: Exploiting branch predictor race conditions

For reads across different VMs on the same CPU, theoretically TME-MK could mitigate the usefulness of the memory reads by having each VM access memory using a different memory encryption key, but I don't know of any hypervisors that implement this.

AMD has had SEV support in QEMU for a long time, which some cloud hosting providers use already, that would mitigate any such issue if it occurred on AMD EPYC processors.

matjaon Branch Privilege Injection: Exploiting branch predictor race conditions

The Linux kernel has had microcode loading support (`CONFIG_MICROCODE` / `CONFIG_MICROCODE_INTEL`) but many years, but it does require that Intel release the microcode files necessary for distribution maintainers to update the packages, then it should be included in a system update.

matjaon I hacked a dating app (and how not to treat a security researcher)

Eliminate your database costs with this one easy trick!

matjaon Vision Now Available in Llama.cpp

For every image I try, I get the same response:

> This image shows a diverse group of people in various poses, including a man wearing a hat, a woman in a wheelchair, a child with a large head, a man in a suit, and a woman in a hat.

No, none of these things are in the images.

I don't even know how to begin debugging that.

matjaon 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

Kind of, there isn't a 1:1 mapping of protobuf wire types to schema types, so you need to package the protobuf schema with the data and compile it to parse the data, or decide on the schema before-hand. So now you need to decide on a file format to bundle the schema and the data.

matjaon 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

4 generations?

5950x is Zen 3

9950x is Zen 5

matjaon Find the Odd Disk

18/20. I struggled most with the blue ones, but it was actually a purple and a green one that I got wrong - which wasn't what I was expecting! ASUS sRGB OLED at 50% brightness.

matjaon The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

> was a stupidly complex beast compared to IPv4

How are you measuring complexity?

IPv4 started simple, but had a lot of extensions (literally header "options") to fix and mitigate various issues and underspecified behaviour.

IPv6 started more complex, but had a lot of those shortcomings addressed from decades of experience in the real world.

In the Linux kernel, IPv6 is actually implemented with fewer lines of code than IPv4 (as of 6.12.19, IPv4 = 82kloc, IPv6 = 58kloc).

matjaon Send Data with Sound

There's also http://www.whence.com/minimodem/ which implements some standard methods:

> standard FSK protocols such as Bell103, Bell202, RTTY, TTY/TDD, NOAA SAME, and Caller-ID

matjaon Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

When a company that makes quantum computers is on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge

matjaon How to Run DeepSeek R1 671B Locally on a $2000 EPYC Server

How would it use 1kW? Socket SP3 tops at 280W and the system in the article has a 850W PSU so I'm not sure what I'm missing.

matjaon Google Pixel 4a old firmware is gone, trapping users on the buggy battery update

Are these not the old images? : https://developers.google.com/android/images#bramble

matjaon Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

Was it a key affected by CVE-2008-0166 ? :)

matjaon Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

I don't think this rationale is correct. DKIM doesn't authenticate a user, since the user doesn't the private key - DKIM authenticates that the MTA knows the private key on behalf of the domain owner, which isn't necessarily the users using that domain to send email.

What's more dangerous is that a jury wouldn't know the difference.

matjaon Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs

The integrator decides the form factor, not NVIDIA, and there were a few 2-slot 3080's with blower coolers. Technically water-cooled 40xx's can be 2-slot also but that's cheating.

matjaon All clocks are 30 seconds late

The same technique is how computer RTCs are set/read, but to sub-second precision instead of minute precision, because the most common register standard allows only storing whole seconds but they keep relatively accurate time.

matjaon The saga of the color brown in the early years of the PC (2023)

TheRasteri on YouTube made a video on how CGA works at the hardware level, specifically the brown detection, and how to make a CGA to EGA converter: https://youtu.be/vwKA1z8tg1g?t=184

matjaon Just: Just a Command Runner

FYI to some people trivializing self-harm in a technical discussion is rather tasteless.