The Government Hates C++, DNA Storage Advances, Microsoft’s Recall Fumble | Tech News of the Week

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Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, a very regal pumpkin.

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Ned: Welcome to Tech News of the Week. This is our weekly Tech News podcast, where Chris and I get into four items that caught our attention in the last week. I'm going to go ahead and kick it off with gene therapy opens avenues to epibits. Cast your mind back to 1987, or depending on our demographics, Just imagine it if you're not Gen X or older. The humble three and a half inch floppy disk, the thing that the save icon is based on, millennials, it could hold an astounding 1.4 for megabytes of information. That's almost one MP3 file with really, really lossy encoding. Now, imagine someone shows you a micro SD card that can hold 1.5 terabytes of data. That's about 1 million more times than what could be held on that humble floppy and in a fraction of the space. That's where we are today. But you can only pack so many bits into a silicon wafer, so science has turned to other storage media for higher density. One such media is the stuff that we're constructed from. No, not stardust, DNA. With a theoretical capacity of 215,000 terabytes per gram, DNA puts micro SDs to shame.

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Ned: Or at least it would if we could find a way to efficiently read and write the DNA. Scientists from Peking University, recently published a paper in Nature that demonstrates some strides in that department. They are making use of gene therapy technology to alter DNA in situ as opposed to fabricating it, known as de novo. Their technique, which they refer to as epibits because it's epigenetics, can be used by lay people, but it still has very slow read-write times. Bits can be written at roughly 40 bits per second, while to read the data, you have to sequence the entire strand. This is not a technology well adapted to random access either. Still, the synthesis free approach appears to have significant benefits over current approaches. Any actual consumer application is still years away. But then again, it took us 35 years to get from the floppy to the micro SD card. So don't be surprised if in 2060, you're storing petabytes in a Gelatinous blob of synthetic DNA.

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Chris: What'd you call me?

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Ned: I called you pretty. You're pretty.

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Chris: The government hates C and C++ Thanks, Obama. He's still in charge, right?

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Ned: I can't really keep up.

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Chris: In what can only be described as a provocatively titled report, the CISA, or Cyber Security Infrastructure Security Agency, has once again taken issue with what they are referring to as memory unsafe programming languages such as C and C++. The report, titled Product Security Bad practices. I told you it was provocative. It states quite clearly that using memory unsafe languages is dumb, and if you're writing code for use in, quote, national critical functions, unquote, such as infrastructure or defense, then you're dumb for using them. In not so many words, of course. While the report does not mandate anything, yet, it does say that road Roadmaps better be updated tootsweet for, quote, for existing products that are written in memory unsafe languages, not having a published memory safety roadmap by January first, 2026 is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety, unquote. Wow. That's an awful juicy defense contractor you got there. Lazy programmer company number 5. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it. Interestingly, C++ co-creator, Bjorn Straustrup, who historically and consistently railed against the idea that C++ is anything except perfect, has in the past year been on the memory safe train, saying just last year that C++ needs to be retooled to be more like rust.

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Chris: Again, not in so many words. But last month, the safe C++ proposal started making the rounds, which included memory safe modifications. And so far, Bjarn has not tried to burn it to the ground. So I think it's safe to say that he is on board.

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Ned: Wow. I know that Darpa has been working on a program called Tractor, which is an effort to convert all the C code over to Rust. That is DarPA related. I think this is part of that same effort. And it's a terrible acronym, so don't ask me what Tractor stands for. Our National McFlurry Nightmare might be over. Other national nightmares are to be determined. Have you ever had a craving for a McFlurry and driven to your local Mickey D's, only to discover their ice cream machine is broken? Again, I have personally experienced this dire situation, except it was not me, but a hungry eight-year-old who was dead set on the swirly goodness of McDonald's frozen treats. It did not go well. Why are these ice cream machines perpetually broken? We can lay the blame at the feet of the Taylor Company who produces the machines for McDonald's. They do not allow third parties to service the machines. So if something breaks, you have to wait for a Taylor-certified technician to come and help you. But that is primed to change. The US Copyright Office has granted an exemption to, quote, expand the repair exemption for consumer electronic devices to include commercial industrial equipment such as automated building management systems and industrial equipment, i.

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Ned: E, soft serve ice cream machines and other industrial kitchen equipment, end quote. And yes, they directly mentioned ice cream machines. This means that third parties, and even McDonald's employees, will now be able to fix these temperamental machines, and Taylor must make available service codes and manuals to assist in diagnosis and repair. In particular, the Taylor machine often fails during its daily pasteurization cycle. Seems important, but a digital lock prevents owners and repair professionals from performing the necessary repairs to get the device up and running. The petition for the exemption was brought by iFixit and nonprofit group Public Knowledge. So next time you're digging into some McDonald's soft serve, raise a coze to raise a coze? Good Lord. Raise a cone to them.

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Chris: Or you could just go to Wendy's because Frosties are better.

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Ned: Shut up and get out. There I said it. You're wrong. Everybody knows you're wrong, but it is good when you dip the fries in.

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Chris: Microsoft delays recall, again, citing December as a release date. For sure, Zee's though, no takesies, backsies.

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Ned: What?

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Chris: Why are you looking at me funny? That's word for word what the press release implied. Fair. Seemed to want to say, if you will. Microsoft recall the wholly insecure, we stored all your data in an unencrypted database that anyone can access, nightmare, that took regular screenshots of your desktop and just left them out there for anyone with a login to find, has been delayed again. One of the major changes was making the feature opt-in, which, duh, and also, quote, ensuring the database is fully encrypted, which, holy shit. What are we doing here? This week, in announcing the delay, Microsoft said in no uncertain terms that recall will not be mandatory, which is a funny thing that you would have to say out loud about basically any feature. Now, snark aside, I do think that there will be cases and people who do want to use this. And I also think that it is notable and laudable that Microsoft took the public and embarrassing step of pulling this so far back, basically back to square one and reworking it from the ground up. I still don't want it. Will never want it. And think it's crazy that anyone would ever want to use it because it's an unsafe nightmare.

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Chris: But then again, you could say that same thing about Windows. Zing. Got them.

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Ned: Yeah, I thought you were going to go with the Zoon or maybe the Kin, but Windows works, too.

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Chris: Does it, though?

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Ned: All right, that's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye.