Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2020-07-27


The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by wmoses.

In attendance were

        Student keyholders: bds, wmoses, emmabat, asahteck, dbopp | jnoguera, rihn

        Associate keyholders: quentin, kenta | wqian94, efjepsen

        Members: arpl, rdedhia | fsdi321, fionalin, nchinda2

        Guests: Dexter Chua

Administrivia:

        wmoses: Welcome to the SIPB meeting!

	wmoses: Set up a new meeting with Mark Silis, Olu.

	wmoses: Email forwarding meeting happened. Met with Nikolai to discuss email
	        forwarding infrastructure. They are currently looking into more
	        research on how to encourage people to email things more and what
	        exactly people use their email for. Interestingly, people who have
	        been at MIT longer tend to use their MIT emails for personal uses
	        and younger people don't. Also, lots of people have been using personal
	        Google accounts for MIT-affiliated things.

	asahteck: Isn't it currently also currently really hard to get a MIT Google account?

	wmoses: Yes, I think this is a thing they are planning to work on.

Project Reports:

        quentin: mrittenb and I have been doing a lot of work on MacAthena. We now have
	         a much more convenient install and it works on Catalina.

	asahteck: Minecraft continues! On Saturday, August 1, we are teaching a bunch
	          of kids in Minecraft.

	wmoses: If anyone wants to help finish the Jupyter Notebook deployment, poke me.

	fsdi321: Uplink continues! We are working on getting Touchstone working.

Other:

        fsdi321: Oof for Intel stocks.

	wmoses: Intel has been stuck on a transistor size for several years. They recently announced
	        another delay which dropped their stocks 14%.

	quentin: Was the Twitter hack last week?

	emmabat: Who even knows right now.

	quentin: Basically, someone hacked an internal service using credentials on a Slack channel.

	rdedhia: On a Slack channel???

	quentin: They accessed the admin panel for Twitter support and so basically had full access.
	         People are confused why they just did a crypto scam when they had so much power.

	arpl: They could have started WWIII!

	efjepsen: Trump's account apparently has special protections though due to an employee
	          deleting his account on their last day.

	quentin: Nobody has explained how exactly they got into the Slack.

	rdedhia: How many companies are vulnerable to this?

	emmabat: Basically don't put admin passwords in totally insecure locations and it's not a problem.

	quentin: It's incredible that all you need is a password anyways to get into that panel. I think there's more going on here.

	wmoses: NVidia is rumoured to be buying ARM. Apple finally has a NVidia chip in their computers again!

	quentin: Intel is also going to be using a third party foundry to make their chips.

	wmoses: Very likely related to their chip shrinking woes.

	kenta: To clarify, ARM is more of an IP company than a manufacturing company. They license the architecture to chip builders.
	       Buying ARM means buying a lot of IP.

	wmoses: NVidia doesn't produce their own chips, they use TSMC just like AMD and evidently, Intel.

	fsdi321: Apparently an Apple engineer said that Microsoft needs to go to ARM too.


Other Other:

        quentin: There was big news from the FAA this week. All the 737s flying have engine problems.
	         That's in addition to the 737 MAXes that also have problems.

	fionalin: Mushroom update! I found a red mushroom in the middle of the woods. It is in the kitchen.

	emmabat: That seems kind of dangerous!

	quentin: Apparently it required a federal justice to say that you can't shoot tear gas at journalists.
	         Additionally, this is so obvious that employees don't have Qualified Immunity, so you can
		 directly sue the person who did it rather than just the government.

	fsdi321: Wasn't there also a governor that was tear gassed?

	quentin: Yep. Welcome to America.

	dbopp: I saw a bathtub fly. On Reddit, not in person. It flew over a field.

	kenta: I am reminded of Garry's Mod.

	wqian94: Is anyone interested in talking about consulate closures this week?

	quentin: We closed a consulate in China and China closed one in America.

	rdedhia: How do people feel about using Jitsi?

	wmoses: We tried it out, but it didn't fit our needs. We needed it to be efficient and be able to call in.

	emmabat: My experience is that it is fine for small meetings but quickly falls apart for larger meetings.

	Dexter Chua: We have set up Big Blue Button which seems to work pretty well for meetings of this size.
	             It is a bit strange to set up though.

	rdedhia: What do people feel about migrating to GitLab or migrating to something self-hosted?

	quentin: We actually already have git hosting available on scripts.

	wmoses: Project maintainers would also be someone good to talk to about migrating things.


The meeting was adjourned at 19:58.

        Minutes taken and submitted by bds.