* Posts by diodesign

3253 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

It's not a barrier to communications -- it's a potential barrier to tracking, submitting, revising, reviewing, and accepting patches. Some people have better ways of tracking patches, submissions, and feedback, and it may not involve a mailing list.

And to stress: this sounds like an alternative interface to the underlying email-based patch system.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Where's the IT content?

Wha... what kind of IT are you in that doesn't have project management?

And what part is clueless? Have you tried recently submitting a patch to an open-source project that insists on plain-text email lists from a modern client? I have and it was a bit of an unexpected ritual.

Also, attributing the word "clueless" to someone with years of experience working with open-source at Google and Microsoft is rather unkind.

Edit: Before you get the wrong idea, I use plain-text email all the time -- at home and work. As I found out the hard way, no, modern clients don't format inlined patches well. And yes, it turns out there are command-line tools to send the email for you. OTOH GitHub is quite nice for submitting patches and following feedback etc IMHO...

If someone identifies a barrier to entry to a project -- particularly a project whose leader has said it's hard to find maintainers -- it's a bit shortsighted to dismiss those concerns and shoot down attempts to provide alternative means for submitting, reviewing and accepting code.

Keyword: alternative.

The exact quote is: "a text-based email-based patch system that can then also be represented in a way that developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years are more familiar with."

And to head off obvious arguments, lowering the barrier to entry doesn't mean lowering the quality. Being able to use 'git format-patch' and 'git send-email' doesn't guarantee you are a kernel-coding genius.

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Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: One of the most important bits missing from the article...

it didn't install TCP/IP by default and other OSes had it. And third-party stacks were available previously. I'll add it in anyway, ta.

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This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

UNIVAC

Yeah, OK. I've tweaked it to avoid confusion. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong.

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C++ still rules the Chromium roost though Rust has caught our eye, say browser devs

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

C v Rust

"unless the programmer didn't intend it"

Well, yeah, that's the bug. That's what you want to avoid. Stuff happening the programmer didn't intend. I know there are times when a fall-through is useful - Rust lets you do that. You just have to be explicit about it rather than have the compiler assume you know what you're doing.

Rust pretty much never gives you the benefit of the doubt. It's why I say Google has the language of Go and Mozilla has the language of No. With Rust you have to get used to the compiler telling you No a lot, and stopping compilation. It's annoying but you get over it. It's just software; it's not judging you.

"Also, -Wimplicit-fallthrough"

This is just a warning. It's a stop-the-build error in Rust. And without this __attribute__ ((fallthrough)) stuff.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Kinda sad.

"logic errors and faulty assumptions"

FWIW Rust is strict on trying to stop common errors. For example, Rust's equivalent of a switch-case block (called match) does not allow you to fall through it. You must match one of the arms, and this is checked at compile time. You can put a catch all in ( _ ) but you must explicitly set it up with a handler.

I skipped C++ and went from C to Rust and the thought of writing C now scares me. I've been meaning to do a 'Rust for C/C++ programmers' article for ages now.

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India selects RISC-V for semiconductor self-sufficiency contest: Use these homegrown cores to build kit

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Chip design is not enough

RISC-V is supported by the Linux kernel and LLVM and GNU toolchains at least, which feeds into other projects.

You can implement RISC-V cores in VHDL, SystemVerilog, nMigen, Chisel... There are plenty of professional-designed and homebrew open-source cores to look at and see for yourself.

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MediaTek pings Italy with '5G' Internet-of-Things data beam from geostationary satellite 35,000 kilometres up

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: 5G is not 5G is not 5G

It's 5G in that it uses NB-IoT networking, which is included under the 5G umbrella. I've added some extra detail.

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Psst, you want us to design you an Arm chip? 'Cause we can do that, says RISC-V processor darling SiFive

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: What 150 million?

For one thing, Samsung uses SiFive's RISC-V tech in its 5G smartphones, eg in the mmwave RF stage.

Also, SiFive says its SoC IP - keyword IP - has appeared in 150 million shipped parts, which given the scales of chips in embedded electronics, isn't unbelievable. That's basically where it's going: IoT and embedded kit. This was largely inherited from Open Silicon, from what I can tell.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Open Silicon

Fair point, though the examination of SiFive's motivations and goals was sparked by its rather public announcement of silicon design work involving non-RISC-V cores.

It could have migrated Open Silicon toward exclusively using its own CPUs but has instead kept that link with Arm going -- which is telling in of itself.

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How long does cookie permission last?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Cookie info

FWIW we have a page describing the cookies -- it's linked to from the bottom of every page on the site.

According to my browser, the cookies set by The Register last one year, except:

* Cloudflare's __cfduid, which lasts one month

* Google/Doubleclick's __gads which lasts two years

* Google Analytics' __gads which lasts two years

* Your account session cookie, which lasts one month

* There are a couple of UI-based cookies that last a few seconds

Depending on your browser and plugins, you may have other cookies set by advertising networks and the like, which may have their own duration.

Basically, I recommend you use your browser to inspect the cookie duration if you're interested. If you find yourself being asked to accept cookies repeatedly, it's probably your browser or plugins removing them.

This comment does not in any way supersede, negate nor alter The Register's privacy policies or terms of service and use or other agreements.

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Whatever happened to???

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Writers

I gonna respond in general terms 'cos I don't think it's appropriate to comment on specific people.

El Reg's editorial team is made up of staff writers and editors who keep the site ticking over during work hours, and outside freelancers who contribute regularly or irregularly.

When the pandemic started to bite into the economy and tech world, as might be apparent from our article output, we dialed back the use of our freelance pool as a precaution.

I'm happy to say - hopefully without jinxing anything - that we're continuing positively commercial-wise, and I very much look forward to seeing our regular outside contributors on The Reg's pages again, and new people join the full-time team at some point.

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ZX Spectrum reboot promising – steady now – 28MHz of sizzling Speccy speed now boasts improved Wi-Fi

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

You're welcome

I've added a link to the main site.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Hardware

Um, yeah, it's all on the website....

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America's largest radio telescope blind after falling cable slashes 100-foot gash in reflector dish

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

That incident

For England, James?

Bratty Uber throws tantrum, threatens to cut off California unless judge does what it says in driver labor rights row

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: 100% market share for Lyft

Probably why Lyft is keeping quiet....

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IBM quits facial recognition because Black Lives Matter

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Bad citation

That paper was retracted on July 10 because it did not adequately "address racial disparities in the probability of being shot."

See the retraction page:

"Our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general.

"To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.

"While our data and statistical approach were appropriate for investigating whether officer characteristics are related to the race of civilians fatally shot by police, they are inadequate to address racial disparities in the probability of being shot.

"Given these issues and the continued use of our work in the public debate on this topic, we have decided to retract the article."

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

America

"black kids shoot each other at a rate well over white kids"

This is a rather overly-simplistic view of quite complex societal failings involving poverty, prospects and living conditions, all stemming from discrimination, ultimately driving or forcing young, impressionable people into dangerous and regrettable situations.

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Steve Wozniak at 70: Here's to the bloke behind Apple who wasn't a complete... turtleneck

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Cue the downvotes"

I don't think this is an opinion that'll get many downvotes in a Reg forum ;-)

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NCC Group admits its training data was leaked online after folders full of CREST pentest certification exam notes posted to GitHub

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Uh... false?"

Well, true in that the offending GitHub repo has been taken down. But I understand it's been forked. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you think something's wrong.

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Peer-to-peer takes on a whole new meaning when used to spy on 3.7 million or more cameras, other IoT gear

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"To me that sounds like the exact opposite of a P2P system"

Er, well, even classic P2P networks have a pool of central systems that you connect to initially to find other clients. This is just like that.

The P2P nature comes into play when machines relay connections between each other, and when endpoints talk to each other directly. See the talk for details (it's also covered later on in our article.)

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Super Cali COVID count is somewhat out of focus, server crash and expired cert makes numbers quite atrocious

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

a Sun newspaper headline

AIUI the Sun in 2000 nicked it from / paid homage to the Liverpool Echo, which in the 1970s, decades earlier, ran the original:

SUPER CALLY GOES BALLISTIC, QPR ATROCIOUS

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UK puts £200m on table for dynamic purchasing system to supply public sector with AI

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I need help to decipher this article!

> What on earth is "a dynamic purchasing system"?

I've added it to the article. It's standard UK govt jargon for an electronic purchasing system that new suppliers can join at any time. That's the dynamic part.

> what the hell do they need an AI for even if it did exist?

There are loads of applications machine learning can be used in. Spotting patterns in road traffic, optimizing emergency service shifts, predicting supply and demand. YMMV. You'd hope there is human oversight involved so the computers don't run amok.

> Isn't the country broke?

No. The UK is still in the top 10 richest countries by GDP.

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Foreshadow returns to the foreground: Secrets-spilling speculative-execution Intel flaw lives on, say boffins

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Exploitation

It's too much hassle to exploit in real-world scenarios given the slow rate of exfiltration and that the code to abuse spec-ex is non-trivial (bar Meltdown, perhaps), and that there was an immense amount of engineering work poured into closing the side channels (or attempting to).

Thus, if you're an exploit developer, you'll probably go back to attacking bugs in the Windows kernel or tricking people into running email attachments as administrator - it's far easier.

That isn't to say it's been a complete waste of time. If Meltdown, and the Spectre variants that can be exploited via a browser or virtual machine, hadn't been addressed, I think there would have been shenanigans by now.

I think, perhaps, it's a case of this: if nothing was done, someone would find a way to leak stuff from browsers or virtual machines at least; and if mitigations are in place, no exploitation happens, and people wonder what all the fuss was about.

One thing it's done is highlight the semiconductor world's rush to put speed over security, and also the holes in Intel's SGX.

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Is El Reg georestricting stories?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Is El Reg georestricting stories?

Further to add what Marco posted, out of the 500-ish stories we typically publish a month, a handful are marked US, UK, or Australia-only on the front page.

It's mainly so that, for instance, if you live in America, you don't wake up to a UK-dominated front page about stuff you've never heard of, and vice-versa.

You can still find all stories in the Latest News page and other pages that aren't regionalized. And in future, we'll adjust the homepage design so that all the news is listed but the stuff we want to highlight is tailored for where you are in the world.

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Venerable text editor GNU Nano reaches version 5.0 and adds the modern frippery that is scrollbars

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Cult?

As in, it's a cult classic. Which it is.

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This investor blew nearly $300,000 on Intel shares the day before 7nm disaster reveal. Yup, she's suing

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Buying on day of quarterly report

Probably expected the share price to go up. Buy low, sell high, etc.

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Astroboffins map engine of a solar flare: Magnetic mega-fields and Earth-dwarfing blankets of electric current

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Watts

Yeah, 10^23 W or 100 sextillion watts.

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Raytheon techie who took home radar secrets gets 18 months in the clink in surprise time fraud probe twist

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Editing

A lot of us are really burnt-out this month. And I can honestly say quite a few of the typos were mine while working late into the evening.

"Some of even ended"

That's fixed.

BTW I'm not asking you to work full-time for us. I'm asking for an email, please, if possible. Think of it as a pull request. Maybe we can make it easier to report errors, in article or via a form.

"Would be easier to make a list of the El Reg article that DON'T have any errors"

Software has bugs, articles have typos. We're not perfect and we're quite a small team, relatively speaking. We're trying our best.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Massachusetts

It's fixed. The writer put "Sharon, MA" in the article copy, and during the edit, it was mistakenly expanded to Sharon, Maryland, not Massachusetts.

Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong.

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Russia tested satellite-to-satellite shooter, say UK and USA

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Point of order

The treaty states:

"If a State Party to the Treaty has reason to believe that an activity or experiment planned by it or its nationals in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, would cause potentially harmful interference with activities of other States Parties in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, it shall undertake appropriate international consultations before proceeding with any such activity or experiment."

Which we take to mean the treaty frowns upon the use of potentially destructive force without consultation, which may have happened here. We've expanded that part of the article with our thinking.

PS: Please email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything you think is wrong in an article so we can take a look immediately.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Point of order

"Outer Space Treaty doesn't prohibit conventional weapons in space"

It rather frowns upon destructive force without consultation, stating:

"If a State Party to the Treaty has reason to believe that an activity or experiment planned by it or its nationals in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, would cause potentially harmful interference with activities of other States Parties in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, it shall undertake appropriate international consultations before proceeding with any such activity or experiment."

We've added this to the piece to expand upon our thinking.

PS: If you think we've got something wrong, email corrections@theregister.com and let us know, please.

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'First ever' snap emerges of something vaguely resembling our solar system 300 ly away. We'll take 10 tickets

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Are those numbers right???

Yes, from the paper:

"The companion has a projected physical separation of 320 au" and the other "is orbiting the primary at 160 au"

If you think you've spotted something wrong, don't forget to drop corrections@theregister.com an email.

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Nvidia may be mulling lopping Arm off Softbank: GPU goliath said to have shown interest in acquiring CPU design house

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: What is the point ?

Fair point. It does feel like Arm's backed into a corner.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: What is the point ?

> For Nvidia, if all they want is custom ARM designs then buying a suitable license from ARM would be far cheaper than buying the company

I think they perhaps don't want it to die or be asset stripped under Softbank or as a public company.

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Networking boffins detect wide abuse of IPv4 addresses bought on secondary market

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Holy URL, Batman

All our slip-ups, er, moments of genius are deliberate irony.

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Apple warns developers API tweaks will flow from style guide changes that remove non-inclusive language

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Hello? Anyone? Am I invisible?

PoC means non-White in the US.

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FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Wording

It means the same thing - it's to give you a specific list of services to monitor for activity. Admittedly, DNS, HTTP and TLS are quite heavily used in normal business but the point is: you don't have to go looking for weird ports or obscure protocols.

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Oh sure, we'll just make a tiny little change in every source file without letting anyone know. What could go wrong?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Reply all

When a tech vendor or some other organization writes to us to complain about an article, they like to CC in their lawyers and insist they stay CC'd, presumably to scare us into thinking this is a Potentially Big Problem.

And, depending on the tone and weight of the complaint, sometimes I enjoy replying with those uninvited guests flicked off the CC list.

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SoftBank: Oi, we paid $32bn for you, when are you going to strong-Arm some more money out of your customers?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: MIPS

I think in all honesty MIPS is looking a bit dead in terms of future generations using it. Sure it's still out there in a load of chipsets...

...but university courses are teaching RISC-V as an example CPU architecture now as it's pretty close to MIPS and all open-source and royalty-free yadda, yadda. In fact, the Berkeley team came up with RISC-V because they didn't want to teach MIPS internals any more, Arm wouldn't provide an academic core they could pull apart in an open way, so they made their own.

If you want to go beyond FPGAs and simulations, RISC-V does have a downside in that you're fairly limited for SoC suppliers. SiFive, Greenwaves, Microchip, Kendryte and NXP spring to mind, though.

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Rust code in Linux kernel looks more likely as language team lead promises support

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"No competent C developer...."

I give you exhibit A: The Windows Server DNS server. Heap buffer overflow in C code with SYSTEM privs --> root RCE. See Patch Tuesday this month.

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(Yeah, I know the comment above is a stack overflow; same sort of principle.)

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"the actual error is still the result of a developer making a mistake"

Rust FWIW works hard to prevent at *compile-time* stuff like double frees, null pointer deref, buffer overflows, etc

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Std and no-std code

You're forgetting that Rust by default links with its large std library.

Kernel-level code doesn't (and can't) use std so this hello, world stuff is comparing apple and oranges. You're comparing a std-linked executable to no-std kernel code, which has little overhead.

Anyway, build hello, world (hw) as a std binary with dynamic library loading and suddenly it's <15kB.

$ ls -l target/release/hw

-rwxr-xr-x 2 chris chris 14304 Jul 13 20:09 target/release/hw

$ size target/release/hw

text data bss dec hex filename

2009 632 8 2649 a59 target/release/hw

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Rust and kernel

"My understanding of RUST suggests that this language is really _NOT_ well-suited towards the kind of programming that KERNEL programmers do. I'd like to suggest that a language like RUST might have a negative impact on kernel efficiency, memory footprint, and even reliability."

You're completely wrong. Rust is designed to be a systems language. It's perfectly possible to write reliable, efficient bare-metal code using Rust.

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Trump U-turns on foreign student crackdown: F-1, M-1 visa holders allowed to study online mid-pandemic in the US

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"If a policy is turning out to be ineffective, you change it"

Can you read the article? The bit about how the policy was put in place with no consultation or other grown-up processes designed to develop well-rounded, beneficial strategies. It was doomed from the start and injected a lot of stress into people's lives.

Enough of the hysteria? How about enough of the apologizing for idiotic government.

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If the Solar System's 'Planet Nine' is actually a small black hole, here's how we could detect it... wait, what?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"More informative than the article, in fact"

Please bear in mind we're trying to summarize a paper without reproducing all of it. That's why we link to the original paper.

Thanks for all the feedback, we'll tweak the article.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Corrections

Yeah, sorry, it's Earth masses, not solar. We're routinely working into the evenings and brains are tired and mistakes sail through.

Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong so we can fix it right away.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"I know there's a way to report this, but I can't remember what this is"

It's at the bottom of every article -- corrections@theregister.com.

Think of them as bug reports or pull requests. They're much appreciated.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Earth masses

Yeah, it should have been Earth masses, not solar masses. Late-night editing and brain was broken. It's fixed.

Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong. We check that address all the time whereas we have time to read the comments at the end of the day.

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Trump's bright idea of kicking out foreign students unless unis resume in-person classes stuns tech, science world

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Obama left the US without stockpiles of PPE"

Fact check.

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