Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2018-01-08 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by mcyoung. In attendance were Student keyholders: emmabat, mcyoung, alvareza, cela, mtheng, andersk, ikdc, iannucci Associate keyholders: '() Members: amigdal, mcameron, sargentd, wmoses, twang6 Guests: '() Administrivia: ejchu: I would like to allocate $50 for snacks for SIPB IAP classes mcyoung: An event for teachers after the classes are over ikdc: Seconded. How many instructors are there? ejchu: About 10 total, not a lot cela: Motion to white ballot mcyoung: The allocation passes Project Reports: cela: It's IAP -- my main project for the next month is Hyades. If you want to contribute, I'll be in the office a lot. Just email me iannucci : Just to be clear, Hyades is *not* a portmanteau of hyena and Pleiades? mcyoung: Someone had already taken Pleiades. ikdc: It means the crying ones? mcyoung: It means the rainy ones. There's a great image of the relevant water nymphs dancing sparkily ikdc: Nymphs were often associated with bodies of water on land mcyoung: These are associated with bodies of water in the air. Very small ones. On the topic, Hyades needs machines and I think we'll have enough money to purchase them. I think we can get the order by the end of the month, let's try so I'll still have the bits ejchu: SIPB IAP classes start next week. Can we allocate money for the snacks? mcyoung: Also, Cel forgot the most important part -- Hyades now has graphs iannucci: This started from me talking to Lizhou about the FCC, but MIT used to have a mesh network providing free internet to people in the nearby area by putting antennas in their homes. We could get a gigabit wifi connection over long distances with $50 hardware, and there's been a lot of interest since the FCC. The New York City mesh saw a bunch of applications. I believe SIPB has its own autonomous system number, a bunch of IP addresses, and some former SIPB member might know about free internet backbone but we could run this off MITnet -- it could be relatively inexpensive to provide internet to a bunch of people and have a wifi network seeping through a large part of the Cambridge area that IS&T might not block crap on.... mcyoung: You want to turn SIPB into an internet service provider? wmoses: Not exactly but kind of cela: We're already becoming a cloud service provider twang6: How does this circumvent ISP stuff? wmoses: People in the area wouldn't have to go through Verizon but MIT which presumably wouldn't impose these rules. The potential benefits are free wifi, don't have to worry about traffic being blocked or slowed, circumvent IS&T, make a network over a large scale which sounds fun and interesting... mcyoung: Nice as this sounds, there's a couple important details being glossed over -- if we are announcing with our AS number, SIPB has in practice only 65000 IP addresses -- a lot, but not huge for people just putting devices on. We also have a lot of IPv6 but it's not amazing yet andersk: IPv6 servers are the barrier there wmoses: In response to that, the two answers are, start small-scale on IPv4 or screw it and go IPv6 mcyoung: Also who would we peer with? I imagine MIT, but there's a distinct difference between us providing infrastructure and simply expanding MITnet which IS&T wouldn't love mcyoung: You may want to research this more, being an ISP is not as easy as it sounds wmoses: Only those connected to the mesh got internet access from it, you had to sign an agreement with the makers of the mesh...I believe mcyoung: It's certainly an interesting idea, but one to research more ejchu: A lot of classes are posted online for SIPB IAP andersk: The new CokeComm interface is almost finished. If you're interested you should talk to Will mcyoung: Also I heard that dzaefn laundered the sofa blankets Other: mcyoung: Intel continues to be on fire, since not only is its management engine shit...isn't technology amazing? Isn't it great that everything sucks? cela: Are we going to be able to buy hardware for Hyades that doesn't have this flaw? mcyoung: Your Gameboy's not affected andersk: The latest AMD bios can disable this mcyoung: The Intel management issue can be killed iannucci: Can we have a speculative branch in the meeting minutes? mcyoung: There are two hardware exploits floating around...Meltdown and Specter. Both involve branch prediction, andersk: Meltdown is not branch prediction ikdc: I think it's speculative execution through traps, Specter uses branch prediction. The point is that speculatively executing loads from memory influence the cache even if that line is aborted later. That allows attackers to extract information through the timing of the cache, such as reading kernel memory iannucci: Whoever named them must've not been a fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson. They could've referenced "the road not taken" iannucci: With fire ikdc: If you wait a few years maybe? mcyoung: All the CPUs that everybody uses are shit iannucci: There are mitigations, and upcoming versions of operating systems will contain them. mcyoung: I think they're a week too late? Should I rant about the Java cloud file format? I will. I decided over winter break to write an assembler, apparently the Java compiler produces very strange binaries... it really likes to put pointers to data that occurs later in cloud files, which I think is kind of strange, I would think you'd want to point to things before. I'm just wondering what the compiler's doing, it seems strange. iannucci: Does it support circular references pre-initialization time? Does the array of all arrays contain itself? Only in Java because generics mcyoung: Arrays in Java are covariant, and no other type is iannucci: Mathematicians like to take terms from physics and use them wrong mcyoung: Everyone knows the only correct thing to call covariant is a functor iannucci: Here's a rule: If you break it, you get to fix it, and contact all the users and explain to them that you're very sorry. And soon XVM will be able to ride off into the sunset and live out its twilight years in peace mcyoung: The AFS servers are probably safe from Meltdown and Specter, they're so old. And DoorPi is safe andersk: Ubuntu hasn't released any mitigated kernels yet ikdc: Oh good I was hoping we'd be okay iannucci: A news embargo is when you have a big project set for publishing and you can't publish articles until that date ikdc: There's been a lot of speculation iannucci: Speculation ha ha ikdc: About subsequent events, but things are probably fine a couple days won't make much of a difference Other Other: mcyoung: IAP has finally arrived ikdc: IAP 2019 is sooner than you think mcyoung: Spring 2018 is sooner than you think, then CPW then summer then fall 2018 THEN IAP 2019 ikdc: Mystery hunt is soon mcyoung: It's too cold. It took me two days to get here because of all the snow ikdc: You found your red sweater mcyoung: Yes The meeting was adjourned at 20:12 Minutes taken and submitted by emmabat.