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Machine Learning Security

I just read an interesting blog post about ML security recommended by Bruce Schneier [1].

This approach of having 2 AI systems where one processes user input and the second performs actions on quarantined data is good and solves some real problems. But I think the bigger issue is the need to do this. Why not have a multi stage approach, instead of a single user input to do everything (the example given is “Can you send Bob the document he requested in our last meeting? Bob’s email and the document he asked for are in the meeting notes file”) you could have “get Bob’s email address from the meeting notes file” followed by “create a new email to that address” and “find the document” etc.

A major problem with many plans for ML systems is that they are based around automating relatively simple tasks. The example of sending an email based on meeting notes is a trivial task that’s done many times a day but for which expressing it verbally isn’t much faster than doing it the usual way. The usual way of doing such things (manually finding the email address from the meeting notes etc) can be accelerated without ML by having a “recent documents” access method that gets the notes, having the email address be a hot link to the email program (IE wordprocessor or note taking program being able to call the MUA), having a “put all data objects of type X into the clipboard (where X can be email address, URL, filename, or whatever), and maybe optimising the MUA UI. The problems that people are talking about solving via ML and treating everything as text to be arbitrarily parsed can in many cases by solved by having the programs dealing with the data know what they have and have support for calling system services accordingly.

The blog post suggests a problem of “user fatigue” from asking the user to confirm all actions, that is a real concern if the system is going to automate everything such that the user gives a verbal description of the problem and then says “yes” many times to confirm it. But if the user is at every step of the way pushing the process “take this email address” “attach this file” it won’t be a series of “yes” operations with a risk of saying “yes” once too often.

I think that one thing that should be investigated is better integration between services to allow working live on data. If in an online meeting someone says “I’ll work on task A please send me an email at the end of the meeting with all issues related to it” then you should be able to click on their email address in the meeting software to bring up the MUA to send a message and then just paste stuff in. The user could then not immediately send the message and clicking on the email address again would bring up the message in progress to allow adding to it (the behaviour of most MUAs of creating a new message for every click on a mailto:// URL is usually not what you desire). In this example you could of course use ALT-TAB or other methods to switch windows to the email, but imagine the situation of having 5 people in the meeting who are to be emailed about different things and that wouldn’t scale.

Another thing for the meeting example is that having a text chat for a video conference is a standard feature now and being able to directly message individuals is available in BBB and probably some other online meeting systems. It shouldn’t be hard to add a feature to BBB and similar programs to have each user receive an email at the end of the meeting with the contents of every DM chat they were involved in and have everyone in the meeting receive an emailed transcript of the public chat.

In conclusion I think that there are real issues with ML security and something like this technology is needed. But for most cases the best option is to just not have ML systems do such things. Also there is significant scope for improving the integration of various existing systems in a non-ML way.

Leaf ZE1

I’ve just got a second hand Nissan LEAF. It’s not nearly as luxurious as the Genesis EV that I test drove [1]. It’s also just over 5 years old so it’s not as slick as the MG4 I test drove [2]. But the going rate for a LEAF of that age is $17,000 vs $35,000 or more for a new MG4 or $130,000+ for a Genesis. At this time the LEAF is the only EV in Australia that’s available on the second hand market in quantity. Apparently the cheapest new EV in Australia is a Great Wall one which is $32,000 and which had a wait list last time I checked, so $17,000 is a decent price if you want an electric car and aren’t interested in paying the price of a new car.

Starting the Car

One thing I don’t like about most recent cars (petrol as well as electric) is that they needlessly break traditions of car design. Inserting a key and turning it clockwise to start a car is a long standing tradition that shouldn’t be broken without a good reason. With the use of traditional keys you know that when a car has the key removed it can’t be operated, there’s no situation of the person with the key walking away and leaving the car driveable and there’s no possibility of the owner driving somewhere without the key and then being unable to start it. To start a LEAF you have to have the key fob device in range, hold down the brake pedal, and then press the power button. To turn on accessories you do the same but without holding down the brake pedal. They also have patterns of pushes, push twice to turn it on, push three times to turn it off. This is all a lot easier with a key where you can just rotate it as many clicks as needed.

The change of car design for the key means that no physical contact is needed to unlock the car. If someone stands by a car fiddling with the door lock it will get noticed which deters certain types of crime. If a potential thief can sit in a nearby car to try attack methods and only walk to the target vehicle once it’s unlocked it makes the crime a lot easier. Even if the electronic key is as secure as a physical key allowing attempts to unlock remotely weakens security. Reports on forums suggest that the electronic key is vulnerable to replay attacks. I guess I just have to hope that as car thieves typically get less than 10% of the value of a car it’s just not worth their effort to steal a $17,000 car. Unlocking doors remotely is a common feature that’s been around for a while but starting a car without a key being physically inserted is a new thing.

Other Features

The headlights turn on automatically when the car thinks that the level of ambient light warrants it. There is an option to override this to turn on lights but no option to force the lights to be off. So if you have your car in the “on” state while parked the headlights will be on even if you are parked and listening to the radio.

The LEAF has a bunch of luxury features which seem a bit ridiculous like seat warmers. It also has a heated steering wheel which has turned out to be a good option for me as I have problems with my hands getting cold. According to the My Nissan LEAF Forum the seat warmer uses a maximum of 50W per seat while the car heater uses a minimum of 250W [3]. So if there are one or two people in the car then significantly less power is used by just heating the seats and also keeping the car air cool reduces window fog.

The Bluetooth audio support works well. I’ve done hands free calls and used it for playing music from my phone. This is the first car I’ve owned with Bluetooth support. It also has line-in which might have had some use in 2019 but is becoming increasingly useless as phones with Bluetooth become more popular. It has support for two devices connecting via Bluetooth at the same time which could be handy if you wanted to watch movies on a laptop or tablet while waiting for someone.

The LEAF has some of the newer safety features, it tracks lane markers and notifies the driver via beeps and vibration if they stray from their lane. It also tries to read speed limit signs and display the last observed speed limit on the dash display. It also has a skid alert which in my experience goes off under hard acceleration when it’s not skidding but doesn’t go off if you lose grip when cornering. The features for detecting changing lanes when close to other cars and for emergency braking when another car is partly in the lane (even if moving out of the lane) don’t seem well tuned for Australian driving, the common trend on Australian roads is lawful-evil to use DND terminology.

Range

My most recent driving was just over 2 hours driving with a distance of a bit over 100Km which took the battery from 62% to 14%. So it looks like I can drive a bit over 200Km at an average speed of 50Km/h. I have been unable to find out the battery size for my car, my model will have either a 40KWh or 62KWh battery. Google results say it should be printed on the B pillar (it’s not) and that it can be deduced from the VIN (it can’t). I’m guessing that my car is the cheaper option which is supposed to do 240Km when new which means that a bit over 200Km at an average speed of 50Km/h when 6yo is about what’s expected. If it has the larger battery designed to do 340Km then doing 200Km in real use would be rather disappointing.

Assuming the battery is 40KWh that means it’s 5Km/KWh or 10KW average for the duration. That means that the 250W or so used by the car heater should only make a about 2% difference to range which is something that a human won’t usually notice. If I was to drive to another state I’d definitely avoid using the heater or airconditioner as an extra 4km could really matter when trying to find a place to charge when you aren’t familiar with the area. It’s also widely reported that the LEAF is less efficient at highway speeds which is an extra difficulty for that.

It seems that the LEAF just isn’t designed for interstate driving in Australia, it would be fine for driving between provinces of the Netherlands as it’s difficult to drive for 200km without leaving that country. Driving 700km to another city in a car with 200km range would mean charging 3 times along the way, that’s 2 hours of charging time when using fast chargers. This isn’t a problem at all as the average household in Australia has 1.8 cars and the battery electric vehicles only comprise 6.3% of the market. So if a household had a LEAF and a Prius they could just use the Prius for interstate driving. A recent Prius could drive from Melbourne to Canberra or Adelaide without refuelling on the way.

If I was driving to another state a couple of times a year I could rent an old fashioned car to do that and still be saving money when compared to buying petrol all the time.

Running Cost

Currently I’m paying about $0.28 per KWh for electricity, it’s reported that the efficiency of charging a LEAF is as low as 83% with the best efficiency when fast charging. I don’t own the fast charge hardware and don’t plan to install it as that would require getting a replacement of the connection to my home from the street, a new switchboard, and other expenses. So I expect I’ll be getting 83% efficiency when charging which means 48KWh for 200KM or 96KWH for the equivalent of a $110 tank of petrol. At $0.28/KWh it will cost $26 for the same amount of driving as $110 of petrol. I also anticipate saving money on service as there’s no need for engine oil changes and all the other maintenance of a petrol engine and regenerative braking will reduce the incidence of brake pad replacement.

I expect to save over $1100 per annum on using electricity instead of petrol even if I pay the full rate. But if I charge my car in the middle of the day when there is over supply and I don’t get paid for feeding electricity from my solar panels into the grid (as is common nowadays) it could be almost free to charge the car and I could save about $1500 on fuel.

Comfort

Electric cars are much quieter than cars with petrol or Diesel engines which is a major luxury feature. This car is also significantly newer than any other car I’ve driven much so it has features like Bluetooth audio which weren’t in other cars I’ve driven. When doing 100Km/h I can hear a lot of noise from the airflow, part of that would be due to the LEAF not having the extreme streamlining features that are associated with Teslas (such as retracting door handles) and part of that would be due to the car being older and the door seals not being as good as they were when new. It’s still a very quiet car with a very smooth ride. It would be nice if they used the quality of seals and soundproofing that VW uses in the Passat but I guess the car would be heavier and have a shorter range if they did that.

This car has less space for the driver than any other car I’ve driven (with the possible exception of a 1989 Ford Laser AKA Mazda 323). The front seats have less space than the Prius. Also the batteries seem to be under the front seats so there’s a bulge in the floor going slightly in front of the front seats when they are moved back which gives less space for the front passenger to move their legs and less space for the driver when sitting in a parked car. There are a selection of electric cars from MG, BYD, and Great Wall that have more space in the front seats, if those cars were on the second hand market I might have made a different choice but a second hand LEAF is the only option for a cheap electric car in Australia now.

The heated steering wheel and heated seats took a bit of getting used to but I have come to appreciate the steering wheel and the heated seats are a good way of extending the range of the car.

Misc Notes

The LEAF is a fun car to drive and being quiet is a luxury feature, it’s no different to other EVs in this regard. It isn’t nearly as fast as a Tesla, but is faster than most cars actually drive on the road.

When I was looking into buying a LEAF from one of the car sales sites I was looking at models less than 5 years old. But the ZR1 series went from 2017 to 2023 so there’s probably not much difference between a 2019 model and a 2021 model but there is a significant price difference. I didn’t deliberately choose a 2019 car, it was what a relative was selling at a time when I needed a new car. But knowing what I know now I’d probably look at that age of LEAF if choosing from the car sales sites.

Problems

When I turn the car off the side mirrors fold in but when I turn it on they usually don’t automatically unfold if I have anything connected to the cigarette lighter power port. This is a well known problem and documented on forums. This is something that Nissan really should have tested before release because phone chargers that connect to the car cigarette lighter port have been common for at least 6 years before my car was manufactured and at least 4 years before the ZE1 model was released.

The built in USB port doesn’t supply enough power to match the power use of a Galaxy Note 9 running Google maps and playing music through Bluetooth. On it’s own this isn’t a big deal but combined with the mirror issue of using a charger in the cigarette lighter port it’s a problem.

The cover over the charging ports doesn’t seem to lock easily enough, I had it come open when doing 100Km/h on a freeway. This wasn’t a big deal but as the cover opens in a suicide-door manner at a higher speed it could have broken off.

The word is that LEAF service in Australia is not done well. Why do you need regular service of an electric car anyway? For petrol and Diesel cars it’s engine oil replacement that makes it necessary to have regular service. Surely you can just drive it until either the brakes squeak or the tires seem worn.

I have been having problems charging, sometimes it will charge from ~20% to 100% in under 24 hours, sometimes in 14+ hours it only gets to 30%.

Conclusion

This is a good car and the going price on them is low. I generally recommend them as long as you aren’t really big and aren’t too worried about the poor security.

It’s a fun car to drive even with a few annoying things like the mirrors not automatically extending on start.

The older ones like this are cheap enough that they should be able to cover the entire purchase cost in 10 years by the savings from not buying petrol even if you don’t drive a lot. With a petrol car I use about 13 tanks of petrol a year so my driving is about half the average for Australia. Some people could cover the purchase price of a second hand leaf in under 5 years.

Digital Sovereignty and Email

Running Your Own Email Srever

I run my own mail server. I have run it since about 1995, initially on a 28k8 modem connection but the connection improved as technology became cheaper and now I’m running it on a VM on a Hetzner server which is also running domains for some small businesses. I make a small amount of money running mail services for those companies but generally not enough to make it profitable. From a strictly financial basis I might be better off just using a big service, but I like having control over my own email. If email doesn’t arrive I can read the logs to find out why.

I repeatedly have issues of big services not accepting mail. The most recent is the MS services claiming that my IP has a bad ratio of good mail to spam and blocked me so I had to tunnel that through a different IP address. It seems that the way things are going is that if you run a small server companies like MS can block you even though your amount of spam is low but if you run a large scale service that is horrible for sending spam then you don’t get blocked.

For most users they just use one of the major email services (Gmail or Microsoft) and find that no-one blocks them because those providers are too big to block and things mostly work. Until of course the company decides to cancel their account.

The Latest News

The latest news is that MS is shutting down services for the International Court of Justice after a panel of ICC judges issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [1] . This is now making politicians realise the issues of email accounts hosted outside their jurisdiction.

What we need is for each independent jurisdiction to have it’s own email infrastructure, that means controlling DNS servers for their domains, commercial and government mail services on those domains, running the servers for those services on hardware located in the jurisdiction and run by people based in that jurisdiction and citizens of it. I say independent jurisdiction because there are groups like the EU which have sufficient harmony of laws to not require different services. With the current EU arrangements I don’t think it’s possible for the German government to block French people from accessing email or vice versa.

While Australia and New Zealand have a long history of cooperation there’s still the possibility of a lying asshole like Scott Morrison trying something on so New Zealanders shouldn’t feel safe using services run in Australia. Note that Scott Morrison misled his own parliamentary colleagues about what he was doing and got himself assigned as a secret minister [2] demonstrating that even conservatives can’t trust someone like him. With the ongoing human rights abuses by the Morrison government it’s easy to imagine New Zealand based organisations that protect human rights being treated by the Australian government in the way that the ICC was treated by the US government.

The Problem with Partial Solutions

Now it would be very easy for the ICC to host their own mail servers and they probably will do just that in the near future. I’m sure that there are many companies offering to set them up accounts in a hurry to deal with this (probably including some of the Dutch companies I’ve worked for). Let’s imagine for the sake of discussion that the ICC has their own private server, the US government could compel Google and MS to block the IP addresses of that server and then at least 1/3 of the EU population won’t get mail from them. If the ICC used email addresses hosted on someone else’s server then Google and MS could be compelled to block the addresses in question for the same result. The ICC could have changing email addresses to get around block lists and there could be a game of cat and mouse between the ICC and the US government but that would just be annoying for everyone.

The EU needs to have services hosted and run in their jurisdiction that are used by the vast majority of the people in the country. The more people who are using services outside the control of hostile governments the lesser the impact of bad IT policies by those hostile governments.

One possible model to consider is the Postbank model. Postbank is a bank run in the Netherlands from post offices which provides services to people deemed unprofitable for the big banks. If the post offices were associated with a mail service you could have it government subsidised providing free service for citizens and using government ID if the user forgets their password. You could also have it provide a cheap service for non-citizen residents.

Other Problems

What will the US government do next? Will they demand that Apple and Google do a remote-wipe on all phones run by ICC employees? Are they currently tracking all ICC employees by Android and iPhone services?

Huawei’s decision to develop their own phone OS was a reasonable one but there’s no need to go that far. Other governments could setup their own equivalent to Google Play services for Android and have their own localised Android build. Even a small country like Australia could get this going for the services of calendaring etc. But the app store needs a bigger market. There’s no reason why Android has to tie the app store to the services for calendaring etc. So you could have a per country system for calendaring and a per region system for selling apps.

The invasion of Amazon services such as Alexa is also a major problem for digital sovereignty. We need government controls about this sort of thing, maybe have high tariffs on the import of all hardware that can only work with a single cloud service. Have 100+% tariffs on every phone, home automation system, or networked device that is either tied to a single cloud service or which can’t work in a usable manner on other cloud services.

DDR4 RAM Size

I’ve been looking at computer hardware on AliExpress a lot recently and I saw an advert for a motherboard which can take 256G DDR4 RDIMMs (presumably LRDIMMs). Most web pages about DDR4 state that 128G is the largest possible. The Wikipedia page for DDR4 doesn’t state that 128G is the maximum but does have 128G as the largest size mentioned on the page.

Recently I’ve been buying 32G DDR4 RDIMMs for between $25 and $30 each. A friend can get me 64G modules for about $70 at the lowest price. If I hadn’t already bought a heap of 32G modules I’d buy some 64G modules right now at that price as it’s worth paying 40% extra to allow better options for future expansion.

Apparently the going rate for 128G modules is $300 each which is within the range for a hobbyist who has a real need for RAM. 256G modules are around $1200 each which is starting to get a big expensive. But at that price I could buy 2TB of RAM for $9600 and the computer containing it still wouldn’t be the most expensive computer I’ve bought – the laptop that cost $5800 in 1998 takes that honour when inflation is taken into account.

DDR5 RDIMMs are currently around $10/GB compared to DDR4 for $1/GB for 32G modules and DDR3 for $0.50/GB. DDR6 is supposed to be released late this year or early next year so hopefully enterprise grade systems with DDR5 RAM and DDR5 RDIMMs will be getting cheaper on ebay by the end of next year.

Silly Job Titles

Many years ago I was on a programming project porting code from OS/2 1.x to NT. When I was there they suddenly decided to make a database of all people and get job titles for everyone – apparently the position description used when advertising the jobs wasn’t sufficient. When I got given a clipboard with a form to write my details I looked at what everyone else had done, It was a heap of ridiculous propaganda with everyone trying to put in synonyms for “senior” or “skillful” and listing things that they were allegedly in charge of. There were even some people trying to create impressive titles for their managers to try and suck up.

I chose the job title “coder” as the shortest and most accurate description of what I was doing. I had to confirm that yes I really did want to put a one word title and not a paragraph of frippery. Part of my intent was to mock the ridiculously long job titles used by others but I don’t think anyone realised that.

I was reminded of that company when watching a video of a Trump cabinet meeting where everyone had to tell Trump how great he is. I think that a programmer who wants to be known as a “Principal Solutions Architect of Advanced Algorithmic Systems and Digital Innovation Strategy” (suggested by ChatGPT because I can’t write such ridiculous things) is showing a Trump level of lack of self esteem.

When job titles are discussed there’s always someone who will say “what if my title isn’t impressive enough and I don’t get a pay rise”. If a company bases salaries on how impressive job titles are and not on whether people actually do good work then it’s a very dysfunctional workplace. But dysfunctional companies aren’t uncommon so it’s something you might reasonably have to do. In the company in question I could have described my work as “lead debugger” as I ended up doing most of the debugging on that project (as on many programming projects). The title “lead debugger” accurately described a significant part of my work and it’s work that is essential to project completion.

What do you think are the worst job titles?

Links April 2025

Asianometry has an interesting YouTube video about elecrolytic capacitors degrading and how they affect computers [1]. Keep your computers cool people!

Biella Coleman (famous for studying the Anthropology of Debian) and Eric Reinhart wrote an interesting article about MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) and how it ended up doing exactly the opposite of what was intended [2].

SciShow has an informative video about lung cancer cases among non-smokers, the risk factors are genetics, Radon, and cooking [3].

Ian Jackson wrote an insightful blog post about whether Rust is “woke” [4].

Bruce Schneier write an interesting blog post about research into making AIs Trusted Third Parties [5]. This has the potential to solve some cryptology problems.

CHERIoT is an interesting project for controlling all jump statements in RISC-V among other related security features [6]. We need this sort of thing for IoT devices that will run for years without change.

Brian Krebs wrote an informative post about how Trump is attacking the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution [7].

The Register has an interesting summary of the kernel “enclave” and “exclave” functionality in recent Apple OSs [8].

Dr Gabor Mate wrote an interesting psychological analysis of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump [9].

ChoiceJacking is an interesting variant of the JuiceJacking attack on mobile phones by hostile chargers [10]. They should require input for security sensitive events to come from the local hardware not USB or Bluetooth.

Last Post About the Yoga Gen3

Just over a year ago I bought myself a Thinkpad Yoga Gen 3 [1]. That is a nice machine and I really enjoyed using it. But a few months ago it started crashing and would often play some music on boot. The music is a diagnostic code that can be interpreted by the Lenovo Android app. Often the music translated to “code 0284 TCG-compliant functionality-related error” which suggests a motherboard problem. So I bought a new motherboard.

The system still crashes with the new motherboard. It seems to only crash when on battery so that indicates that it might be a power issue causing the crashes. I configured the BIOS to disable the TPM and that avoided the TCG messages and tunes on boot but it still crashes.

An additional problem is that the design of the Yoga series is that the keys retract when the system is opened past 180 degrees and when the lid is closed. After the motherboard replacement about half the keys don’t retract which means that they will damage the screen more when the lid is closed (the screen was already damaged from the keys when I bought it).

I think that spending more money on trying to fix this would be a waste. So I’ll use it as a test machine and I might give it to a relative who needs a portable computer to be used when on power only.

For the moment I’m back to the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 5 [2]. Hopefully the latest kernel changes to zswap and the changes to Chrome to suspend unused tabs will make up for more RAM use in other areas. Currently it seems to be giving decent performance with 8G of RAM and I usually don’t notice any difference from the Yoga Gen 3.

Now I’m considering getting a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Extreme with a 4K display. But they seem a bit expensive at the moment. Currently there’s only one on ebay Australia for $1200ono.

What Desktop PCs Need

It seems to me that we haven’t had much change in the overall design of desktop PCs since floppy drives were removed, and modern PCs still have bays the size of 5.25″ floppy drives despite having nothing modern that can fit in such spaces other than DVD drives (which aren’t really modern) and carriers for 4*2.5″ drives both of which most people don’t use. We had the PC System Design Guide [1] which was last updated in 2001 which should have been updated more recently to address some of these issues, the thing that most people will find familiar in that standard is the colours for audio ports. Microsoft developed the Legacy Free PC [2] concept which was a good one. There’s a lot of things that could be added to the list of legacy stuff to avoid, TPM 1.2, 5.25″ drive bays, inefficient PSUs, hardware that doesn’t sleep when idle or which prevents the CPU from sleeping, VGA and DVI ports, ethernet slower than 2.5Gbit, and video that doesn’t include HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 2.1 for 8K support. There are recently released high-end PCs on sale right now with 1gbit ethernet as standard and hardly any PCs support resolutions above 4K properly.

Here are some of the things that I think should be in a modern PC System Design Guide.

Power Supply

The power supply is a core part of the computer and it’s central location dictates the layout of the rest of the PC. GaN PSUs are more power efficient and therefore require less cooling. A 400W USB power supply is about 1/4 the size of a standard PC PSU and doesn’t have a cooling fan. A new PC standard should include less space for the PSU except for systems with multiple CPUs or that are designed for multiple GPUs.

A Dell T630 server has an option of a 1600W PSU that is 20*8.5*4cm = 680cc. The typical dimensions of an ATX PSU are 15*8.6*14cm = 1806cc. The SFX (small form factor variant of ATX) PSU is 12.5*6.3*10cm = 787cc. There is a reason for the ATX and SFX PSUs having a much worse ratio of power to size and that is the airflow. Server class systems are designed for good airflow and can efficiently cool the PSU with less space and they are also designed for uses where people are less concerned about fan noise. But the 680cc used for a 1600W Dell server PSU that predates GaN technology could be used for a modern GaN PSU that supplies the ~600W needed for a modern PC while being quiet. There are several different smaller size PSUs for name-brand PCs (where compatibility with other systems isn’t needed) that have been around for ~20 years but there hasn’t been a standard so all white-box PC systems have had really large PSUs.

PCs need USB-C PD ports that can charge a laptop etc. There are phones that can draw 80W for fast charging and it’s not unreasonable to expect a PC to be able to charge a phone at it’s maximum speed.

GPUs should have USB-C alternate mode output and support full USB functionality over the cable as well as PD that can power the monitor. Having a monitor with a separate PSU, a HDMI or DP cable to the PC, and a USB cable between PC and monitor is an annoyance. There should be one cable between PC and monitor and then keyboard, mouse, etc should connect to the monior.

All devices that are connected to a PC should use USB-C for power connection. That includes monitors that are using HDMI or DisplayPort for video, desktop switches, home Wifi APs, printers, and speakers (even when using line-in for the audio signal). The European Commission Common Charger Directive is really good but it only covers portable devices, keyboards, and mice.

Motherboard Features

Latest verions of Wifi and Bluetooth on the motherboard (this is becoming a standard feature).

On motherboard video that supports 8K resolution. An option of a PCIe GPU is a good thing to have but it would be nice if the motherboard had enough video capabilities to satisfy most users. There are several options for video that have a higher resolution than 4K and making things just work at 8K means that there will be less e-waste in future.

ECC RAM should be a standard feature on all motherboards, having a single bit error cause a system crash is a MS-DOS thing, we need to move past that.

There should be built in hardware for monitoring the system status that is better than BIOS beeps on boot. Lenovo laptops have a feature for having the BIOS play a tune on a serious error with an Android app to decode the meaning of the tune, we could have a standard for this. For desktop PCs there should be a standard for LCD status displays similar to the ones on servers, this would be cheap if everyone did it.

Case Features

The way the Framework Laptop can be expanded with modules is really good [3]. There should be something similar for PC cases. While you can buy USB devices for these things they are messy and risk getting knocked out of their sockets when moving cables around. While the Framework laptop expansion cards are much more expensive than other devices with similar functions that are aimed at a mass market if there was a standard for PCs then the devices to fit them would become cheap.

The PC System Design Guide specifies colors for ports (which is good) but not the feel of them. While some ports like Ethernet ports allow someone to feel which way the connector should go it isn’t possible to easily feel which way a HDMI or DisplayPort connector should go. It would be good if there was a standard that required plastic spikes on one side or some other way of feeling which way a connector should go.

GPU Placement

In modern systems it’s fairly common to have a high heatsink on the CPU with a fan to blow air in at the front and out the back of the PC. The GPU (which often dissipates twice as much heat as the CPU) has fans blowing air in sideways and not out the back. This gives some sort of compromise between poor cooling and excessive noise. What we need is to have air blown directly through a GPU heatsink and out of the case. One option for a tower case that needs minimal changes is to have the PCIe slot nearest the bottom of the case used for the GPU and have a grille in the bottom to allow air to go out, the case could have feet to keep it a few cm above the floor or desk. Another possibility is to have a PCIe slot parallel to the rear surface of the case (right angles to the other PCIe slots).

A common case with desktop PCs is to have the GPU use more than half the total power of the PC. The placement of the GPU shouldn’t be an afterthought, it should be central to the design.

Is a PCIe card even a good way of installing a GPU? Could we have a standard GPU socket on the motherboard next to the CPU socket and use the same type of heatsink and fan for GPU and CPU?

External Cooling

There are a range of aftermarket cooling devices for laptops that push cool air in the bottom or suck it out the side. We need to have similar options for desktop PCs. I think it would be ideal to have a standard attachments for airflow on the front and back of tower PCs. The larger a fan is the slower it can spin to give the same airflow and therefore the less noise it will produce. Instead of just relying on 10cm fans at the front and back of a PC to push air in and suck it out you could have a conical rubber duct connected to a 30cm diameter fan. That would allow quieter fans to do most of the work in pushing air through the PC and also allow the hot air to be directed somewhere suitable. When doing computer work in summer it’s not great to have a PC sending 300+W of waste heat into the room you are in. If it could be directed out a window that would be good.

Noise

For restricting noise of PCs we have industrial relations legislation that seems to basically require that workers not be exposed to noise louder than a blender, so if a PC is quieter than that then it’s OK. For name brand PCs there are specs about how much noise is produced but there are usually caveats like “under typical load” or “with a typical feature set” that excuse them from liability if the noise is louder than expected. It doesn’t seem possible for someone to own a PC, determine that the noise from it is what is acceptable, and then buy another that is close to the same.

We need regulations about this, and the EU seems the best jurisdiction for it as they cover the purchase of a lot of computer equipment that is also sold without change in other countries. The regulations need to also cover updates, for example I have a Dell T630 which is unreasonably loud and Dell support doesn’t have much incentive to be particularly helpful about it. BIOS updates routinely tweak things like fan speeds without the developers having an incentive to keep it as quiet as it was when it was sold.

What Else?

Please comment about other things you think should be standard PC features.

Storage Trends 2025

It’s been almost 15 months since I blogged about Storage Trends 2024 [1]. There hasn’t been much change in this time (in Australia at least – I’m not tracking prices in other countries). The change was so small I had to check how the Australian dollar has performed against other currencies to see if changes to currencies had countered changes to storage prices, but there has been little overall change when compared to the Chinese Yuan and the Australian dollar is only about 11% worse against the US dollar when compared to a year ago. Generally there’s a trend of computer parts decreasing in price by significantly more than 11% per annum.

Small Storage

The cheapest storage device from MSY now is a Patriot P210 128G SATA SSD for $19, cheaper than the $24 last year and the same price as the year before. So over the last 2 years there has been no change to the cheapest storage device on sale. It would almost never make sense to buy that as a 256G SATA SSD (also Patriot P210) is $25 and has twice the lifetime (120TBW vs 60TBW). There are also 256G NVMe devices for $29 and $30 which would be better options if the system has a NVMe socket built in.

The cheapest 500G devices are $42.50 for a 512G SATA SSD and $45 for a 500G NVMe. Last year the prices were $33 for SATA and $36 for NVMe in that size so there’s been a significant increase in price there. The difference is enough that if someone was on a tight budget they might reasonably decide to use smaller storage than they might have used last year!

2TB hard drives are still $89 the same price as last year! Last year a 2TB SATA SSD was $118 and a 2TB NVMe was $145, now a 2TB SATA SSD is $157 and a 2TB NVMe is $127. So NVMe has become cheaper than SATA in that segment but overall prices are higher than last year. Again for business use 2TB seems a sensible minimum for most systems if you are paying MSY rates (or similar rates from Amazon etc).

Medium Storage

Last year 4TB HDDs were $135, now they are $148. Last year the cheapest 4TB SSD was $299, now the cheapest is a $309 NVMe. While the prices have all gone up the price difference between hard drives and SSD has decreased in that size range. So for a small server (a lot of home servers and small business servers) 4TB of RAID-1 storage is all that’s needed and for that SSDs are the best option. The price difference between $296 for 4TB of RAID-1 HDDs and $618 for RAID-1 NVMe is small enough to be justified by the benefits of speed and being quiet for most small server uses.

In 2023 a 8TB hard drive cost $179 and a 8TB SSD cost $739. Last year a 8TB hard drive cost $239 and a 8TB SATA SSD cost, $899. Now a 8TB HDD costs $229 and MSY doesn’t sell 8TB SSDs but for comparison Amazon has a Samsung 8TB SATA SSD for $919. So for storing 8TB+ there are benefits of hard drives as SSDs are difficult to get in that size range and more expensive than they were before. It seems that 8TB SSDs aren’t used by enough people to have a large market in the home and small office space, so those of us who want the larger storage sizes will have to get second hand enterprise gear. It will probably be another few years before 8TB enterprise SSDs start appearing on the second hand market.

Serious Storage

Last year I wrote about the affordability of U.2 devices. I regret not buying some then as there are fewer on sale now and prices are higher.

For hard drives they still aren’t a good choice for most users because most users don’t have more than 4TB of data.

For large quantities of data hard drives are still a good option, a 22TB disk costs $899. For companies this is a good option for many situations. For home users there is the additional problem that determining whether a drive is Shingled Magnetic Recording which has some serious performance issues for some use and it’s very difficult to determine which drives use it.

Conclusion

For corporate purchases the options for serious storage are probably decent. But for small companies and home users things definitely don’t seem to have improved as much as we expect from the computer industry, I had expected 8TB SSDs to go for $450 by now and SSDs less than 500G to not even be sold new any more.

The prices on 8TB SSDs have gone up more in the last 2 yeas than the ASX 200 (index of 200 biggest companies in the Australian stock market). I would never recommend using SSDs as an investment, but in retrospect 8TB SSDs could have been a good one.

$20 seems to be about the minimum cost that SSDs approach while hard drives have a higher minimum price of a bit under $100 because they are larger, heavier, and more fragile. It seems that the market is likely to move to most SSDs being close to $20, if they can make 2TB SSDs cheaply enough to sell for about that price then that would cover the majority of the market.

I’ve created a table of the prices, I should have done this before but I initially didn’t plan an ongoing series of posts on this topic.

Jun 2020 Apr 2021 Apr 2023 Jan 2024 Apr 2025
128G SSD $49 $19 $24 $19
500G SSD $97 $73 $32 $33 $42.50
2TB HDD $95 $72 $75 $89 $89
2TB SSD $335 $245 $149
4TB HDD $115 $135 $148
4TB SSD $895 $349 $299 $309
8TB HDD $179 $239 $229
8TB SSD $949 $739 $899 $919
10TB HDD $549 $395

HP z840

Many PCs with DDR4 RAM have started going cheap on ebay recently. I don’t know how much of that is due to Windows 11 hardware requirements and how much is people replacing DDR4 systems with DDR5 systems.

I recently bought a z840 system on ebay, it’s much like the z640 that I recently made my workstation [1] but is designed strictly as a 2 CPU system. The z640 can run with 2 CPUs if you have a special expansion board for a second CPU which is very expensive on eBay and and which doesn’t appear to have good airflow potential for cooling. The z840 also has a slightly larger case which supports more DIMM sockets and allows better cooling.

The z640 and z840 take the same CPUs if you use the E5-2xxx series of CPU that is designed for running in 2-CPU mode. The z840 runs DDR4 RAM at 2400 as opposed to 2133 for the z640 for reasons that are not explained. The z840 has more PCIe slots which includes 4*16x slots that support bifurcation.

The z840 that I have has the HP Z-Cooler [2] installed. The coolers are mounted on a 45 degree angle (the model depicted at the right top of the first page of that PDF) and the system has a CPU shroud with fans that mount exactly on top of the CPU heatsinks and duct the hot air out without going over other parts. The technology of the z840 cooling is very impressive. When running two E5-2699A CPUs which are listed as “145W typical TDP” with all 44 cores in use the system is very quiet. It’s noticeably louder than the z640 but is definitely fine to have at your desk. In a typical office you probably wouldn’t hear it when it’s running full bore. If I was to have one desktop PC or server in my home the z840 would definitely be the machine I choose for that.

I decided to make the z840 a build server to share the resource with friends and to use for group coding projects. I often have friends visit with laptops to work on FOSS stuff and a 44 core build server is very useful for that.

The system is by far the fastest system I’ve ever owned even though I don’t have fast storage for it yet. But 256G of RAM allows enough caching that storage speed doesn’t matter too much.

Here is building the SE Linux “refpolicy” package on the z640 with E5-2696 v3 CPU and the z840 with two E5-2699A v4 CPUs:

257.10user 47.18system 1:40.21elapsed 303%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 416408maxresident)k
66904inputs+1519912outputs (74major+8154395minor)pagefaults 0swaps

222.15user 24.17system 1:13.80elapsed 333%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 416192maxresident)k
5416inputs+0outputs (64major+8030451minor)pagefaults 0swaps

Here is building Warzone2100 on the z640 and the z840:

6887.71user 178.72system 16:15.09elapsed 724%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1682160maxresident)k
1555480inputs+8918768outputs (114major+27133734minor)pagefaults 0swaps

6055.96user 77.05system 8:00.20elapsed 1277%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1682100maxresident)k
117640inputs+0outputs (46major+11460968minor)pagefaults 0swaps

It seems that the refpolicy package can’t use many more than 18 cores as it is only 37% faster when building with 44 cores available. Building Warzone is slightly more than twice as fast so it can really use all the available cores. According to Passmark the E5-2699A v4 is 22% faster than the E5-2696 v3.

I highly recommend buying a z640 or z840 if you see one at a good price.