Apple, reaching a make-or-break point in its decade-old effort to build a car, has pivoted to a less ambitious design with the intent of finally bringing an electric vehicle to market. Bloomberg: After previously envisioning a truly driverless car, the company is now working on an EV with more limited features, according to people with knowledge of the project. Even so, Apple's goal for a release date continues to slip. With the latest changes, the company looks to introduce the car in 2028 at the earliest, roughly two years after a recent projection, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private.

Apple's secretive effort to create a car is one of the most ambitious endeavors in its history, and one of its more tumultuous. Since it began taking shape in 2014, the project -- codenamed Titan and T172 -- has seen several bosses come and go. There have been multiple rounds of layoffs, key changes in strategy and numerous delays. But it remains one of the company's potential next big things -- an entirely new category for the device maker that could help reinvigorate sales growth. Apple's revenue stalled last year as it contended with a maturing smartphone industry and a slowdown in China, its biggest overseas market.

FT Alphaville: Making fun of corporate brands embarrassing themselves online is like shooting fish in a barrel. It's not hard, but washing off the resulting splatter of blood, scales, innards and half-digested crab is, so no one wins. Honestly though, what the hell Franklin? Really? OK maybe Alphaville should tread carefully here, given some readers see our ~cough~ somewhat different approach to news and commentary as at odds with mainFT's brand. But like Meb Faber we prefer our trillion-dollar asset management groups to be boring. Stick to solid, sober and purportedly smart investing. Don't tweet that 60/40 retirement portfolios should include "assets" where it gleefully says "speculation is a feature, not a bug."

Especially when said asset manager was famously named after Benjamin Franklin, because according to founder Rupert Johnson he "epitomised the ideas of frugality and prudence when it came to saving and investing." We get that Franklin needs to revamp itself. Despite a spate of aggressive M&A swelling its assets to $1.4tn, its share price has sagged over the past decade, giving it a current market cap of $13.6bn. That's less than AppLovin, Domino's Pizza and the world's biggest producer of frozen potato chips. It's only barely enough for inclusion into the S&P 500. Beyond the obvious and well-documented challenges of being a very traditional active asset manager in a world that mostly loves alternatives and passive funds, Franklin also has a rep for being a bit old-fashioned. Promoting crypto therefore probably seems like an obvious, fellow-kids way to seem more cool and edgy.

AT&T, Google and Vodafone are investing a total of $206.5 million in AST SpaceMobile, a satellite manufacturer that plans to be the first space-based network to connect standard mobile phones at broadband speeds. Fierce Wireless reports: AST SpaceMobile claims it invented the space-based direct-to-device market, with a patented design facilitating broadband connectivity directly to standard, unmodified cellular devices. In a press release, AST SpaceMobile said the investment from the likes of AT&T, Google and Vodafone underscores confidence in the company's technology and leadership position in the emerging space-based cellular D2D market. There's the potential to offer connectivity to 5.5 billion cellular devices when they're out of coverage.

Bolstering the case for AST SpaceMobile, Vodafone and AT&T placed purchase orders -- for an undisclosed amount -- for network equipment to support their planned commercial services. In addition, Google and AST SpaceMobile agreed to collaborate on product development, testing and implementation plans for SpaceMobile network connectivity on Android and related devices. AST SpaceMobile boasts agreements and understandings with more than 40 mobile network operators globally. However, it's far from alone in the D2D space. Apple/Globalstar, T-Mobile/SpaceX, Bullitt and Lynk Global are among the others.

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: A security researcher in Germany has been fined $3,300 for finding and reporting an e-commerce database vulnerability that was exposing almost 700,000 customer records. Back in June 2021, according to our pals at Heise, an contractor identified elsewhere as Hendrik H. was troubleshooting software for a customer of IT services firm Modern Solution GmbH. He discovered that the Modern Solution code made an MySQL connection to a MariaDB database server operated by the vendor. It turned out the password to access that remote server was stored in plain text in the program file MSConnect.exe, and opening it in a simple text editor would reveal the unencrypted hardcoded credential.

With that easy-to-find password in hand, anyone could log into the remote server and access data belonging to not just that one customer of Modern Solution, but data belonging to all of the vendor's clients stored on that database server. That info is said to have included personal details of those customers' own customers. And we're told that Modern Solution's program files were available for free from the web, so truly anyone could inspect the executables in a text editor for plain-text hardcoded database passwords. The contractor's findings were discussed in a June 23, 2021 report by Mark Steier, who writes about e-commerce. That same day Modern Solution issued a statement [PDF] -- translated from German -- summarizing the incident [...]. The statement indicates that sensitive data about Modern Solution customers was exposed: last names, first names, email addresses, telephone numbers, bank details, passwords, and conversation and call histories. But it claims that only a limited amount of data -- names and addresses -- about shoppers who made purchases from these retail clients was exposed. Steier contends that's incorrect and alleged that Modern Solution downplayed the seriousness of the exposed data, which he said included extensive customer data from the online stores operated by Modern Solution's clients.

In September 2021 police in Germany seized the IT consultant's computers following a complaint from Modern Solution that claimed he could only have obtained the password through insider knowledge â" he worked previously for a related firm -- and the biz claimed he was a competitor. Hendrik H. was charged with unlawful data access under Section 202a of Germany's Criminal Code, based on the rule that examining data protected by a password can be classified as a crime under the Euro nation's cybersecurity law. In June, 2023, a Julich District Court in western Germany sided with the IT consultant because the Modern Solution software was insufficiently protected. But the Aachen regional court directed the district court to hear the complaint. Now, the district court has reversed its initial decision. On January 17, a Julich District Court fined Hendrik H. and directed him to pay court costs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRadar: Thanks to new Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research, which was part-funded by Lamborghini, we could soon see the end of difficult-to-source and often problematic rare metal materials featuring in the batteries of future electric vehicles. The MIT study's aim was to replace cobalt and nickel, typically used as a cathode in today's lithium-ion battery technology, with organic materials that could be produced at a much lower cost. This would also reduce the impact on the planet and conduct electricity at similar rates as cobalt batteries. [...] The research, which has been running for six years, has culminated in a novel organic material that could be a direct replacement for cobalt and nickel. According to details recently released by MIT, this material consists of many layers of TAQ (bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone), an organic small molecule that contains three fused hexagonal rings.

It's a complicated subject for those not donning lab coats for a living, but these TAQ layers can extend outward in every direction, forming a structure similar to graphite. Within the molecules are chemical groups called quinones, which are the electron reservoirs, and amines, which help the material to form strong hydrogen bonds, which ensure they don't dissolve into the battery electrolyte (something that has previously blighted organic cathode compounds), thus extending the lifetime of the battery. It comes as no surprise that Lamborghini has licensed the patent on this technology, seeing as it funded the research and has a certain Lanzador high performance electric vehicle in the pipeline.

Researchers say that tests of the material revealed that its conductivity and storage capacity were comparable to that of traditional cobalt-containing batteries. Also, batteries with a TAQ cathode can be charged and discharged faster than existing batteries, which could speed up the charging rate for electric vehicles. This speedy rate of charge and discharge could help give something like Lamborghini's Lanzador a performance edge, while super-fast charging capabilities will negate the need for lengthy charging stops -- something the Italian marque's discerning clientele will likely be opposed to. However, Lamborghini is also part of the wider Volkswagen Group and seeing that the primary materials needed to manufacture this type of cathode are already commercially available and produced in large quantities as commodity chemicals, we may see the battery tech filter down to more affordable EVs in the future.

To comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act, Meta is rolling out changes to give users in Europe the ability to unlink their Facebook, Messenger and Instagram accounts. Neowin reports: One key choice users will have is how information is shared between Facebook and Instagram. Instagram and Facebook users will be able to choose whether or not they want information shared between the apps. Those who currently have connected Instagram and Facebook accounts can opt to keep sharing data between the apps or separate their accounts. Furthermore, Messenger is getting a standalone option. Users can continue using Messenger with their Facebook account or create a new account completely independent of Facebook. This new Messenger account will still offer core features like messaging, chat, and voice/video calls, but without Facebook.

For Facebook Marketplace, the options will be a personalized marketplace experience that taps into Facebook profiles or an anonymized experience where buyers and sellers only communicate via email instead of Messenger. For gamers, Meta offers a similar choice to Facebook Gaming. Users can keep their Facebook info linked for access to features like multiplayer, in-game purchases, and personalized recommendations. Alternatively, they can opt for a Facebook-free gaming experience. Finally, an option introduced in November 2023 remains relevant -- European users can choose to pay a subscription to Facebook and Instagram ad-free. It ensures that their information is not used for targeted advertising.

According to analyst Min-Chi Kuo, Apple may have sold somewhere between 160,000 to 180,000 Vision Pro headsets during the past weekend. "This already far exceeds Kuo's earlier production figures of 60,000 to 80,000 units targeting the initial release on February 2, which is no wonder that the Vision Pro was sold out immediately after pre-orders opened," notes Engadget. From the report: While this sounds like positive news, Kuo pointed out that with shipping times remaining unchanged within the first 48 hours, this might indicate a quick drop in demand after the heavy users and hardcore fans were done pre-ordering. In contrast, iPhone orders would usually "see a steady increase in shipping times 24 to 48 hours after pre-orders open." But of course, the Vision Pro isn't meant for the average consumer in its current state, especially given the lack of some mainstream apps like YouTube, Spotify or Netflix. Not to mention the eye-watering $3,499 base price either, though Apple may later release a cheaper model in the ballpark of $1,500 to $2,500, according to an earlier report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

Kuo added that even with the device being sold out based on the upper initial production figure of 80,000 units, that only accounts for about 0.007 percent of Apple's 1.2 billion active users, which makes the Vision Pro "a very niche product" in the eyes of Cupertino. That is to say, the tech giant will need to somehow drum up and sustain demand for the headset before its global launch, which is rumored to take place some time before this year's WWDC -- likely in June. Meanwhile, Apple is also busy setting up demo areas at its US flagship stores, in the hopes of making a few more sales with their 25-minute sessions.

Alphabet's lab for pioneering technology is laying off dozens of employees as it turns to outside investors to help fund its ventures. From a report: The division, known as X, has in recent months ramped up discussions on funding with venture capitalists and other investors, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named as it is private. The lab is adopting a new structure that'll enable its projects to more easily spin out of X as independent startups with support from Alphabet and outside backers, according to one of the people and an email to staff obtained by Bloomberg. X seeks bold approaches to major challenges like climate change and connectivity, but its efforts have yielded few durable businesses thus far.

AI can't replace the majority of jobs right now in cost-effective ways, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a study that sought to address fears about AI replacing humans in a swath of industries. From a report: In one of the first in-depth probes of the viability of AI displacing labor, researchers modeled the cost attractiveness of automating various tasks in the US, concentrating on jobs where computer vision was employed -- for instance, teachers and property appraisers. They found only 23% of workers, measured in terms of dollar wages, could be effectively supplanted. In other cases, because AI-assisted visual recognition is expensive to install and operate, humans did the job more economically. [...] The cost-benefit ratio of computer vision is most favorable in segments like retail, transportation and warehousing, all areas where Walmart and Amazon are prominent. It's also feasible in the health-care context, MIT's paper said. A more aggressive AI rollout, especially via AI-as-a-service subscription offerings, could scale up other uses and make them more viable, the authors said.

Jamie Bartlett, a technology columnist, argues that social media platforms constantly pressure users to share opinions on events they may not fully understand, contributing to an atmosphere of performative outrage and conformity rather than thoughtful discussion. However, he also acknowledges the counterpoint that silence in the face of injustice can enable harm. From the column: One of the trickier aspects of digital life is the constant pressure to opine. To have a strong opinion on a subject, and to share it with the world. It's literally baked into the design of the most popular platforms. [...] If I am honest, I know very little about most bad things going on in the world. Certainly not enough that sharing my view will inform or educate or enlighten. Yet whenever I see a news report, an urgent need rises up: what shall I say about this? I have a feeling about it -- which must be shared! (And ideally in emotionally charged language, since that will receive more interactions).

What's wrong with calling out the bad stuff going on? Nothing per se. And certainly not on an individual level. The problem is when people feel a soft and gentle pressure to denounce, to praise, to comment on things they don't feel they fully understand. Things they don't feel comfortable speaking about. Things that are contentious and difficult to discuss on heartless, unforgiving platforms where the wrong phrase or tone might land you in hot water. What social media has done is to make silence an active -- rather than the default -- choice. To speak publicly is now so easy that not doing it kind-of-implies you don't know or don't care about what's going on in the world. Who wants to look ignorant or indifferent? And besides, who doesn't want to appear kind or wise, or morally upstanding in front of others?

But the result is an undirected anger from all sides: frenetic, purposeless, habitual and above all moralising. There's nothing wrong with occasionally saying what you think and sometimes it's very important.

Tens of thousands of people have fallen victim to predatory loan apps, which extort users using sensitive information from their phones. Google has changed its policy to prevent the loan apps from being listed on the Play store, but enforcement is unreliable. Rest of World: According to Mexico City's Citizen Council for Safety and Justice, a consumer watchdog group, 135 reports to local authorities have been filed against JoyCredito for fraud and extortion. But despite the government attention, the app is still available to download from the Google Play store. For years, apps like JoyCredito have been exploiting borrowers from Mexico to India. They lend small amounts of money with few requirements and very high interest rates to financially vulnerable people -- and then extort them when the loan is due. After years of mounting pressure from watchdog groups, Google explicitly banned the apps from the Play store in October. But stories like those of Macias Gonzalez show how widespread the apps still are -- and how ineffective Google has been at enforcing its own policy.

Rest of World presented Google with 15 instances of exploitative loan apps based in Mexico that explicitly violate the terms of the Play store. All of them were still available in the store as of press time. Of the 15 apps, 12 explicitly asked for access to either the camera roll or contacts in the Google Play store's terms of services. Two others specified full access only in external documents. One other gave no data access information. Rest of World also found 10 apps in Peru that have been flagged as exploitative by SBS, a national body that oversees banking, insurance, and private pension. All the apps are still available for download on the Google Play store.

"Bell Labs, the historic headwaters of so many inventions that now define our digital age, is closing in Murray Hill," writes journalism professor Jeff Jarvis (in an op-ed for New Jersey's Star-Ledger newspaper).

"The Labs should be preserved as a historic site and more." I propose that Bell Labs be opened to the public as a museum and school of the internet.

The internet would not be possible without the technologies forged at Bell Labs: the transistor, the laser, information theory, Unix, communications satellites, fiber optics, advances in chip design, cellular phones, compression, microphones, talkies, the first digital art, and artificial intelligence — not to mention, of course, many advances in networks and the telephone, including the precursor to the device we all carry and communicate with today: the Picturephone, displayed as a futuristic fantasy at the 1964 World's Fair.

There is no museum of the internet. Silicon Valley has its Computer History Museum. New York has museums for television and the moving image. Massachusetts boasts a charming Museum of Printing. Search Google for a museum of the internet and you'll find amusing digital artifacts, but nowhere to immerse oneself in and study this immensely impactful institution in society.

Where better to house a museum devoted to the internet than New Jersey, home not only of Bell Labs but also at one time the headquarters of the communications empire, AT&T, our Ma Bell...? The old Bell Labs could be more than a museum, preserving and explaining the advances that led to the internet. It could be a school... Imagine if Bell Labs were a place where scholars and students in many disciplines — technologies, yes, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, ethics, economics, community studies, design — could gather to teach and learn, discuss and research.
The text of Jarvis's piece is behind subscription walls, but has apparently been re-published on X by innovation theorist John Nosta.

In one of the most interesting passages, Jarvis remembers visiting Bell Labs in 1995. "The halls were haunted with genius: lab after lab with benches and blackboards and history within. We must not lose that history."

"Some of the most convenient fast-charging stations — mostly those located off major highways — have become gridlocked, especially on busy weekends," complains the opinion editor for California's Tribune newspaper in San Luis, Obispo. Drivers are reporting waits of half an hour or more — sometimes much more. One driver who posted on Reddit waited three hours to charge in Kettleman City on Thanksgiving weekend, turning a five-and-a-half-hour trip into a 10-and-a-half-hour ordeal... Look, it's one thing to spend 30 or 40 minutes charging a battery, which is a given when you take an EV on a road trip. But having to wait in a long line just to get to an open charging bay? What's happening now is "potentially a nightmare for drivers as more EVs hit the road," described GreenBiz transportation writer Vartan Badalian [after a March visit to New York State]...

Badalian, the transportation writer, has an idea on how to deal with gridlock. "As you approach a full charging location, your EV (of any make) connects to the charging location and enters itself into a virtual queue, with entry to the queue dependent upon close geographical proximity. Drivers then park in an available normal parking spot, and only when prompted, proceed to plug in and charge. If a driver attempted to charge before their turn, the chargers would simply not communicate with the vehicle..."

If only that would work. Unfortunately, plug-in chargers have a tough enough time fulfilling their basic task of delivering electricity. Here's how bad it is: A survey of non-Tesla chargers conducted in the Bay Area in 2022 found that 27% of chargers were not working. This would be a good time to point out that Tesla superchargers have a much better performance record than other types of chargers, and that Tesla is opening "select" supercharger stations to other types of vehicles. Also, efforts are being made to increase the reliability of public chargers; the U.S. Department of Transportation just awarded $149 million in grants for the repair and replacement of broken chargers. The biggest share, $64 million, is going to California. In other words, hope is on the horizon. For now, though, we seem to be relying on a haphazard honor system.

How hard would it be to use some orange cones to designate a "waiting lane"? That way drivers pulling in could get an immediate read on how long they might have to wait... Also, limit drivers to an 80% charge, and require them to drive away within, say, five minutes after the charger has stopped. That might be hard to enforce, but peer pressure can be a powerful incentive. The point is, somebody has to step up and make charging stations more driver-friendly, and the obvious choice is whoever is in charge of the chargers.

"Would you pay $15 a month so Android doesn't track you and send all of that data back to Google?" asks Stuff South Africa: A new Swiss-based privacy company thinks $15 is a fair fee for that peace of mind. "A person's data is the original digital currency," argues Apostrophy, which has created its own operating system, called Apostrophy OS.

It's based on Android — don't panic — but the version that has already been stripped of Google's intrusiveness by another privacy project called GrapheneOS, which used to be known as CopperheadOS. Launched in 2014, it which was briefly known as the Android Hardening project, before being rebranded as GrapheneOS in 2019. Apostrophy OS is "focused on empowering our users, not leveraging them," it says and is "purposely Swiss-based, so we can be champions of data sovereignty".

What it does, they say, is separate the apps from the underlying architecture of the operating system and therefore prevent apps from accessing miscellaneous personal data, especially the all-important location data so beloved of surveillance capitalism... Apostrophy OS has its own app store, but also cleverly allows users to access the Google Play Store. If you think that is defeating the point, Apostrophy argues that those apps can't get to the vitals of your digital life. Apostrophy OS has "partitioned segments prioritising application integrity and personal data privacy".
The service is free for one year with the purchase of the new MC02 phone from Swiss manufacturer Punkt, according to PC Magazine. "The phone costs $749 and is available for preorder now. It will ship at the end of January." Additional features include a built-in VPN called Digital Nomad based on the open-source Wireguard framework to secure your activity against outside snooping, which includes "exit addresses" in the US, Germany, and Japan with the base subscription.

In a country experiencing extreme cold — and where almost 1 in 4 cars are electric — a roadside assistance company says it's still gas-powered cars that are experiencing the vast majority of problems starting.

Electrek argues that while extreme cold may affect chargers, "it mainly gets attention because it's a new technology and it fails for different reasons than gasoline vehicles in the cold." Viking, a road assistance company (think AAA), says that it responded to 34,000 assistance requests in the first 9 days of the year. Viking says that only 13% of the cases were coming from electric vehicles (via TV2 — translated from Norwegian) ["13 percent of the cases with starting difficulties are electric cars, while the remaining 87 percent are fossil cars..."]

To be fair, this data doesn't adjust for the age of the vehicles. Older gas-powered cars fail at a higher rate than the new ones and electric vehicles are obviously much more recent on average.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the article.

The Washington Post looks at "a small but growing group of commercial medium-to-heavy-duty truck drivers who use electric trucks."

"These drivers — many of whom operate local or regional routes that don't require hundreds of miles on the road in a day — generally welcome the transition to electric, praising their new trucks' handling, acceleration, smoothness and quiet operation. "Everyone who has had an EV has no aspirations to go back to diesel at this point," said Khari Burton, who drives an electric Volvo VNR in the Los Angeles area for transport company IMC. "We talk about it and it's all positivity. I really enjoy the smoothness ... and just the quietness as well." Mike Roeth, the executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency, said many drivers have reported that the new vehicles are easier on their bodies — thanks to both less rocking off the cab, assisted steering and the quiet motor. "Part of my hypothesis is that it will help truck driver retention," he said. "We're seeing people who would retire driving a diesel truck now working more years with an electric truck."

Most of the electric trucks on the road today are doing local or regional routes, which are easier to manage with a truck that gets only up to 250 miles of range... Trucking advocates say electric has a long way to go before it can take on longer routes. "If you're running very local, very short mileage, there may be a vehicle that can do that type of route," said Mike Tunnell, the executive director of environmental affairs for the American Trucking Association. "But for the average haul of 400 miles, there's just nothing that's really practical today."
There's other concerns, according to the article. "[S]ome companies and trucking associations worry this shift, spurred in part by a California law mandating a switch to electric or emissions-free trucks by 2042, is happening too fast. While electric trucks might work well in some cases, they argue, the upfront costs of the vehicles and their charging infrastructure are often too heavy a lift."

But this is probably the key sentence in the article: For the United States to meet its climate goals, virtually all trucks must be zero-emissions by 2050. While trucks are only 4 percent of the vehicles on the road, they make up almost a quarter of the country's transportation emissions.
The article cites estimates that right now there's 12.2 million trucks on America's highways — and barely more than 1% (13,000) are electric. "Around 10,000 of those trucks were just put on the road in 2023, up from 2,000 the year before." (And they add that Amazon alone has thousands of Rivian's electric delivery vans, operating in 1,800 cities.)

But the article's overall message seems to be that when it comes to the trucks, "the drivers operating them say they love driving electric." And it includes comments from actual truckers:

• 49-year-old Frito-Lay trucker Gary LaBush: "I was like, 'What's going on?' There was no noise — and no fumes... it's just night and day."

• 66-year-old Marty Boots: Diesel was like a college wrestler. And the electric is like a ballet dancer... You get back into diesel and it's like, 'What's wrong with this thing?' Why is it making so much noise? Why is it so hard to steer?"

It's "a free and open-source, software-defined storage platform," according to Wikipedia, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage "built on a common distributed cluster foundation". The charter advisory board for Ceph included people from Canonical, CERN, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, Red Hat, SanDisk, and SUSE.

And Nite_Hawk (Slashdot reader #1,304) is one of its core engineers — a former Red Hat principal software engineer named Mark Nelson. (He's now leading R&D for a small cloud systems company called Clyso that provides Ceph consulting.) And he's returned to Slashdot to share a blog post describing "a journey to 1 TiB/s". This gnarly tale-from-Production starts while assisting Clyso with "a fairly hip and cutting edge company that wanted to transition their HDD-backed Ceph cluster to a 10 petabyte NVMe deployment" using object-based storage devices [or OSDs]...) I can't believe they figured it out first. That was the thought going through my head back in mid-December after several weeks of 12-hour days debugging why this cluster was slow... Half-forgotten superstitions from the 90s about appeasing SCSI gods flitted through my consciousness...

Ultimately they decided to go with a Dell architecture we designed, which quoted at roughly 13% cheaper than the original configuration despite having several key advantages. The new configuration has less memory per OSD (still comfortably 12GiB each), but faster memory throughput. It also provides more aggregate CPU resources, significantly more aggregate network throughput, a simpler single-socket configuration, and utilizes the newest generation of AMD processors and DDR5 RAM. By employing smaller nodes, we halved the impact of a node failure on cluster recovery....

The initial single-OSD test looked fantastic for large reads and writes and showed nearly the same throughput we saw when running FIO tests directly against the drives. As soon as we ran the 8-OSD test, however, we observed a performance drop. Subsequent single-OSD tests continued to perform poorly until several hours later when they recovered. So long as a multi-OSD test was not introduced, performance remained high. Confusingly, we were unable to invoke the same behavior when running FIO tests directly against the drives. Just as confusing, we saw that during the 8 OSD test, a single OSD would use significantly more CPU than the others. A wallclock profile of the OSD under load showed significant time spent in io_submit, which is what we typically see when the kernel starts blocking because a drive's queue becomes full...

For over a week, we looked at everything from bios settings, NVMe multipath, low-level NVMe debugging, changing kernel/Ubuntu versions, and checking every single kernel, OS, and Ceph setting we could think of. None these things fully resolved the issue. We even performed blktrace and iowatcher analysis during "good" and "bad" single OSD tests, and could directly observe the slow IO completion behavior. At this point, we started getting the hardware vendors involved. Ultimately it turned out to be unnecessary. There was one minor, and two major fixes that got things back on track.
It's a long blog post, but here's where it ends up:

• Fix One: "Ceph is incredibly sensitive to latency introduced by CPU c-state transitions. A quick check of the bios on these nodes showed that they weren't running in maximum performance mode which disables c-states."

• Fix Two: [A very clever engineer working for the customer] "ran a perf profile during a bad run and made a very astute discovery: A huge amount of time is spent in the kernel contending on a spin lock while updating the IOMMU mappings. He disabled IOMMU in the kernel and immediately saw a huge increase in performance during the 8-node tests." In a comment below, Nelson adds that "We've never seen the IOMMU issue before with Ceph... I'm hoping we can work with the vendors to understand better what's going on and get it fixed without having to completely disable IOMMU."

• Fix Three: "We were not, in fact, building RocksDB with the correct compile flags... It turns out that Canonical fixed this for their own builds as did Gentoo after seeing the note I wrote in do_cmake.sh over 6 years ago... With the issue understood, we built custom 17.2.7 packages with a fix in place. Compaction time dropped by around 3X and 4K random write performance doubled."

The story has a happy ending, with performance testing eventually showing data being read at 635 GiB/s — and a colleague daring them to attempt 1 TiB/s. They built a new testing configuration targeting 63 nodes — achieving 950GiB/s — then tried some more performance optimizations...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at Georgia Tech, in Atlanta, have developed what they are calling the world's first functioning graphene-based semiconductor. This breakthrough holds the promise to revolutionize the landscape of electronics, enabling faster traditional computers and offering a new material for future quantum computers. The research, published on January 3 in Nature and led by Walt de Heer, a professor of physics at Georgia Tech, focuses on leveraging epitaxial graphene, a crystal structure of carbon chemically bonded to silicon carbide (SiC). This novel semiconducting material, dubbed semiconducting epitaxial graphene (SEC) -- or alternatively, epigraphene -- boasts enhanced electron mobility compared with that of traditional silicon, allowing electrons to traverse with significantly less resistance. The outcome is transistors capable of operating at terahertz frequencies, offering speeds 10 times as fast as that of the silicon-based transistors used in current chips.

De Heer describes the method used as a modified version of an extremely simple technique that has been known for over 50 years. "When silicon carbide is heated to well over 1,000C, silicon evaporates from the surface, leaving a carbon-rich surface which then forms into graphene," says de Heer. This heating step is done with an argon quartz tube in which a stack of two SiC chips are placed in a graphite crucible, according to de Heer. Then a high-frequency current is run through a copper coil around the quartz tube, which heats the graphite crucible through induction. The process takes about an hour. De Heer added that the SEC produced this way is essentially charge neutral, and when exposed to air, it will spontaneously be doped by oxygen. This oxygen doping is easily removed by heating it at about 200C in vacuum. "The chips we use cost about [US] $10, the crucible about $1, and the quartz tube about $10," said de Heer. [...]

De Heer and his research team concede, however, that further exploration is needed to determine whether graphene-based semiconductors can surpass the current superconducting technology used in advanced quantum computers. The Georgia Tech team do not envision incorporating graphene-based semiconductors with standard silicon or compound semiconductor lines. Instead, they are aiming for a paradigm shift beyond silicon, utilizing silicon carbide. They are developing methods, such as coating SEC with boron nitride, to protect and enhance its compatibility with conventional semiconductor lines. Comparing their work with commercially available graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs), de Heer explains that there is a crucial difference: "Conventional GFETs do not use semiconducting graphene, making them unsuitable for digital electronics requiring a complete transistor shutdown." He says that the SEC developed by his team allows for a complete shutdown, meeting the stringent requirements of digital electronics. De Heer says that it will take time to develop this technology. "I compare this work to the Wright brothers' first 100-meter flight. It will mainly depend on how much work is done to develop it."

China's Huawei will not support Android apps on the latest iteration of its in-house Harmony operating system, domestic financial media Caixin reported, as the company looks to bolster its own software ecosystem. From a report: The company plans to roll out a developer version of its HarmonyOS Next platform in the second quarter of this year followed by a full commercial version in the fourth quarter, it said in a company statement highlighting the launch event for the platform in its home city of Shenzhen on Thursday.

Huawei first unveiled its proprietary Harmony system in 2019 and prepared to launch it on some smartphones a year later after U.S. restrictions cut its access to Google's technical support for its Android mobile OS. However, earlier versions of Harmony allowed apps built for Android to be used on the system, which will no longer be possible, according to Caixin.

A resident in Virginia has urged the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider canceling $886 million in federal funding for SpaceX's Starlink system. But rival satellite company Viasat has gone out of its way to oppose the citizen-led petition.ÂPCMag: On Jan. 1, the FCC received a petition from the Virginia resident Greg Weisiger asking the commission to reconsider denying the $886 million to SpaceX. "Petitioner is at an absolute loss to understand the Commission's logic with these denials," wrote Weisiger, who lives in Midlothian, Virginia. "It is abundantly clear that Starlink has a robust, reliable, affordable service for rural and insular locations in all states and territories."

The petition arrived a few weeks after the FCC denied SpaceX's appeal to receive $886 million from the commission's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which is designed to subsidize 100Mbps to gigabit broadband across the US. SpaceX wanted to use the funds to expand Starlink access in rural areas. But the FCC ruled that "Starlink is not reasonably capable of offering the required high-speed, low latency service throughout the areas where it won auction support." Weisiger disagrees. In his petition, he writes that the FCC's decision will deprive him of federal support to bring high-speed internet to his home. "Thousands of other Virginia locations were similarly denied support," he added.