Informatics

Fastly network's status after being back to normal

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On Tuesday, a lot of websites worldwide suffered malfunctions that led to some parts missing up to being impossible to connect to them. That was due to a serious problem of Fastly, a CDN (Content Delivery Network o Content Distribution Network) supplier, which means a service that normally allows faster access to a website. The problem started when it was night in the USA with consequences all around the world then it was solved about an hour after being recognized at Fastly. The trouble didn’t last long but show how something going bad in the system of a very important Internet operator can have consequences on a lot of websites. In this case, it was a bug introduced in a recent update that was supposed to be discovered before it caused any damage.

TikTok's website home page

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The USA government has announced that the social networks TikTok and WeChat will be banned in the USA starting from September 20. It’s another step of President Donald Trump’s administration in the clash with Chinese social media, accused of spying on American citizens. In particular, TikTok’s situation is complicated because in recent days the news of a partnership with Oracle arrived, however, it didn’t satisfy the White House, which demands the social network’s sale to an American company. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce accused the USA of bullying. Behind this clash there’s the problem of controlling user activity, the reason why some American social networks are banned in China.

Arm CEO Simon Segars

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The leading graphics processor company NVIDIA has reached an agreement to buy the British microprocessor company Arm Ltd. from the Japanese telecommunications holding SoftBank Group Corp. for $12 billion in cash and $21.5 billion in shares. The agreement provides for an additional $5 billion that SoftBank could receive under certain conditions and $1.5 billion for Arm employees for a total of 40 billion dollars. The operation is expected to close in 18 months.

Parts of the Fugaku supercomputer (Photo courtesy RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS))

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The Japanese supercomputer Fugaku was crowned the new king of the Top 500 ranking by passing Summit, which held the title for two years. Fugaku has almost triple performance compared to its predecessor with a computing power of 415.5 Petaflops against 148.6 for a theoretical peak of 513.8 Petaflops against 200.8. As has been common for supercomputer kings for a long time, it uses the Linux operating system, specifically the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 distribution. An interesting novelty is that Fugaku is the first supercomputer king based on ARM architecture being built around 2.2GHz A64FX 48C processors. In the Top 500 ranking, only three other supercomputers are based on ARM architecture.

GW-BASIC

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Microsoft has announced the release of the sources of GW-BASIC, the programming language that was part of the MS-DOS operating system up to version 4. They were made available on the GitHub website under the free / open source MIT license. Microsoft will not accept requests for changes sent through the GitHub system, but anyone can freely not only go to read the assembly code but also experiment with it, probably using a virtual machine. The published sources date back to February 10, 1983, and, as for versions 1.25 and 2.0 of the MS-DOS operating system released in September 2018, this was done for historical and educational reasons.