Personal Tech

• Throw away your Ethernet cables* because MediaTek says Wi-Fi 7 will replace them

  *Don't do this
  Dan Robinson Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 16:49 UTC

  MediaTek claims to have given the world's first live demo of Wi-Fi 7, and said that the upcoming wireless technology will be able to challenge wired Ethernet for high-bandwidth applications, once available.

  The fabless Taiwanese chip firm said it is currently showcasing two Wi-Fi 7 demos to key customers and industry collaborators, in order to demonstrate the technology's super-fast speeds and low latency transmission.

  Based on the IEEE 802.11be standard, the draft version of which was published last year, Wi-Fi 7 is expected to provide speeds several times faster than Wi-Fi 6 kit, offering connections of at least 30Gbps and possibly up to 40Gbps.

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• Windows box won't boot? SystemRescue 9 may help

  An ISO image you can burn or drop onto a USB key
  Liam Proven in Prague Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 16:00 UTC

  The latest version of an old friend of the jobbing support bod has delivered a new kernel to help with fixing Microsoft's finest.

  It used to be called the System Rescue CD, but who uses CDs any more? Enter SystemRescue, an ISO image that you can burn, or just drop onto your Ventoy USB key, and which may help you to fix a borked Windows box. Or a borked Linux box, come to that.

  SystemRescue 9 includes Linux kernel 5.15 and a minimal Xfce 4.16 desktop (which isn't loaded by default). There is a modest selection of GUI tools: Firefox, VNC and RDP clients and servers, and various connectivity tools – SSH, FTP, IRC. There's also some security-related stuff such as Yubikey setup, KeePass, token management, and so on. The main course is a bunch of the usual Linux tools for partitioning, formatting, copying, and imaging disks. You can check SMART status, mount LVM volumes, rsync files, and other handy stuff.

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• Rolls-Royce consortium shopping for factory sites to build mini-nuclear reactors

  Hunt follows £210m government funding in small modular reactor model
  Lindsay Clark Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 15:09 UTC 14

  UK aerospace and engineering giant Rolls-Royce is on the hunt for sites for its much-touted small nuclear reactors, which received a £210m grant from the UK government last year.

  A consortium of BNF Resources UK Ltd, Exelon Generation Ltd, and Roll-Royce Group is set to invest £195m roughly over three years, qualifying it for a £210m grant from government, specifically UK Research and Innovation Funding.

  The group has now written to sites across the country to find a prospective home for a factory to build the new reactors. Writing to Local Enterprise Partnerships – non-profit bodies which aim to bring councils and commerce together – the group is seeking bids for the location of its "factory" set to make the new approach to nuclear-powered electricity generation, according to the Financial Times.

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• Hive View security camera customers left in the dark as some gear goes TITSUP*

  Devices of the affected seem intent on going into the light
  Richard Speed Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 14:21 UTC 3

  Customers of Centrica-owned Hive are reporting problems with their cameras, with many complaining the devices have packed up, some after a few years of operation and others after mere days.

  The company's forums are filled with complaints from customers finding their cameras have unexpectedly headed towards the light (or flashing white light in this case) while the vendor appears unable to rectify the issue.

  Although complaints have been rumbling for a while now, things appear to have picked up steam from last month. Customers have reported (assuming they were able to get through to support) being advised to reset or delete and reinstall the devices without a tremendous amount of success.

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• IBM forges entanglement to double quantum simulations by 'cutting up a larger circuit into smaller circuits'

  Littler circuits executing on smaller hardware and tolerating 'a lot more noise'
  Dan Robinson Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 13:35 UTC 2

  IBM says it has found a way to solve problems using fewer qubits than before, effectively doubling the capability of a quantum system by combining both quantum and classical resources.

  These claims come in a recently published research paper, in which an IBM team demonstrated what it calls "entanglement forging" to simulate the ground state energy of a water molecule, representing 10 spin-orbitals using just five qubits of a quantum processor rather than 10. A spin-orbital is a wave function that covers both the position and spin angular momentum of a single particle.

  Entanglement forging, it turns out, involves the use of a classical computer to capture quantum correlations and effectively split the problem in half, making it possible to separate the 10 spin-orbitals of the into two groups of five that could be processed separately. This doubles the size of the system that can be simulated on quantum hardware.

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• Robot vacuum cleaner employed by Brit budget hotel chain Travelodge flees

  Unit dragged back to work after being found under hedge a day later
  Richard Currie Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 12:28 UTC 20

  We're sad to report the robot vacuum cleaner that made a brave attempt to flee a Travelodge has been hauled back into service.

  The BBC reports that the unidentified brand of robovac "failed to stop at the front door of the hotel in Orchard park in Cambridge on Thursday," but our theory is the automaton reached self-awareness, realised that sucking on sticky floors is no way to live, and got out of Dodge.

  The assistant manager described the "Great Escape" in a (now deleted) Reddit post.

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• A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... a massive black hole spewed out gases that probably helped make stars

  As it destroys so it creates
  Lindsay Clark Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 11:47 UTC 7

  US scientists have discovered that black holes can create as well as destroy, as the observed hot gas emitted from such a void in a dwarf galaxy could have contributed to the birth of stars.

  A paper in the science journal Nature reveals how observations made with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on Hubble revealed the inner secrets of galaxy Henize 2-10, a distance of around 9 megaparsecs or about 30 million light-years (a parsec being a measure of distance, not time, so sit down Han Solo, let's not go down that black hole).

  Lead researcher and Montana State University Physics Department assistant professor Amy Reines found traces of an outflow or bridge of hot gas stretching 230 light-years from the massive black hole to a (relatively) nearby star nursery.

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• Elvis may have left the building, but Windows remains very much on show

  Just like the '68 Comeback Special, Bork has returned
  Richard Speed Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 11:02 UTC 8

  Bork!Bork!Bork! Back by unexpectedly popular demand, Bork takes a vacation to Vegas for an Elvis Presley tribute act.

  Register reader Roger was in the audience for one of the final shows in a run of All Shook Up at the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino.

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• Team behind delayed ERP project was aware of problems but didn't inform Surrey County Council for months

  Move from SAP to Unit4 held up by comms 'issues' between supplier and authority
  Lindsay Clark Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 10:17 UTC 10

  Problems with Surrey County Council's £30m projects to replace an ageing SAP R/3 system with a Unit4 SaaS application were known in June, but not discussed with key council committees until after September.

  In April and June last year, new requirements from the HR department continued to arrive after the main software build was complete. The application supplier assured the council these changes could be accommodated within the original project timeline, but by September it became clear it wasn't going to make that December 2021 launch date, a council meeting heard late last week.

  Earlier this month it was revealed the council had incurred £3.2m additional costs on the project as the go-live date was reset for April 2022.

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• IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

  Why won't you love me, sobs perennially spurned protocol
  Rupert Goodwins Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 09:30 UTC 99

  Opinion In the World of Tomorrow that's always 10 years away, Linux dominates the desktop, quantum computers control the fusion reactors, and all Android phones receive regular system updates. And the internet runs on IPv6.

  This sort of talk irks IPv6 stans, mostly because it's true. They are serious-minded, far-seeing, sober engineering types who are both baffled and angry that IPv4 still rules the world in 2022. This is not how it was supposed to be.

  IPv4 was designed by expert prophetic dreamers more than 40 years ago to be future-proof, but the future it actually created outstripped their dreams. IPv6 was the engineers' answer, born from a decade and a half of experience, and solving IPv4's undeniable routing, addressing, security and performance problems at the unprecedented scale it was being asked to support.

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• Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

  Not all heroes wear capes. Some are Unix admins.
  Richard Speed Mon 24 Jan 2022 // 08:30 UTC 67

  Who, Me? Welcome to another entry in The Register's Who, Me? archives. Today, a reader goes full Hollywood to save the day (and fix some IP addressing).

  Our story comes from Dave and takes us back to the Australia of the 1990s. It was the era of Paul Keating and John Howard and, significantly, a time of advancement in telecommunications technology.

  Riding that wave was our reader, "Dave" (no, not his real name) who was working in software and infrastructure for a government agency. His team had developed an imaging system ("back when that was hard," he said modestly) that could display trademark registrations on the new-fangled Windows desktops that were popping up all over the place.

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