Day: December 19, 2018

This is a photographic triptych captured by a person standing in front of their house with a cell phone of a cloud formation that very clearly looks like a person vaping. Mother Nature, am I right? “What about her?” Her nipples can cut glass. “How do you know?” She broke into my car once while I was still in it.

Thanks to Allyson S, who agrees the fidget spinner must be behind the house.

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A few months ago, Microsoft let slip a forthcoming Windows 10 feature that was, at the time, called InPrivate Desktop: a lightweight virtual machine for running untrusted applications in an isolated environment. That feature has now been officially announced with a new name, Windows Sandbox.

Windows 10 already uses virtual machines to increase isolation between certain components and protect the operating system. These VMs have been used in a few different ways. Since its initial release, for example, suitably configured systems have used a small virtual machine running alongside the main operating system to host portions of LSASS. LSASS is a critical Windows subsystem that, among other things, knows various secrets, such as password hashes, encryption keys, and Kerberos tickets. Here, the VM is used to protect LSASS from hacking tools such that even if the base operating system is compromised, these critical secrets might be kept safe.

In the other direction, Microsoft added the ability to run Edge tabs within a virtual machine to reduce the risk of compromise when visiting a hostile website. The goal here is the opposite of the LSASS virtual machine—it’s designed to stop anything nasty from breaking out of the virtual machine and contaminating the main operating system, rather than preventing an already contaminated main operating system from breaking into the virtual machine.

Windows Sandbox is similar to the Edge virtual machine but designed for arbitrary applications. Running software in a virtual machine and then integrating that software into the main operating system is not new—VMware has done this on Windows for two decades now—but Windows Sandbox is using a number of techniques to reduce the overhead of the virtual machine while also maximizing the performance of software running within the VM, without compromising the isolation it offers.

Traditional virtual machines have their own operating system installation stored on a virtual disk image, and that operating system must be updated and maintained separately from the host operating system. The disk image used by Windows Sandbox, by contrast, shares the majority of its files with the host operating system; it contains a small amount of mutable data, the rest being immutable references to host OS files. This means that it’s always running the same version of Windows as the host and that, as the host is updated and patched, the sandbox OS is likewise updated and patched.

Sharing is used for memory, too; operating system executables and libraries loaded within the VM use the same physical memory as those same executables and libraries loaded into the host OS.

Standard virtual machines running a complete operating system include their own process scheduler that carves up processor time between all the running threads and processes. For regular VMs, this scheduler is opaque; the host just knows that the guest OS is running, and it has no insight into the processors and threads within that guest. The sandbox virtual machine is different; its processes and threads are directly exposed to the host OS’ scheduler, and they are scheduled just like any other threads on the machine. This means that if the sandbox has a low priority thread, it can be displaced by a higher priority thread from the host. The result is that the host is generally more responsive, and the sandbox behaves like a regular application, not a black-box virtual machine.

On top of this, video cards with WDDM 2.5 drivers can offer hardware-accelerated graphics to software running within the sandbox. With older drivers, the sandbox will run with the kind of software-emulated graphics that are typical of virtual machines.

Taken together, Windows Sandbox combines elements of virtual machines and containers. The security boundary between the sandbox and the host operating system is a hardware-enforced boundary, as is the case with virtual machines, and the sandbox has virtualized hardware much like a VM. At the same time, other aspects—such as sharing executables both on-disk and in-memory with the host as well as running an identical operating system version as the host—use technology from Windows Containers.

At least for now, the Sandbox appears to be entirely ephemeral. It gets destroyed and reset whenever it’s closed, so no changes can persist between runs. The Edge virtual machines worked similarly in their first incarnation; in subsequent releases, Microsoft added support for transferring files from the virtual machine to the host so that they could be stored persistently. We’d expect a similar kind of evolution for the Sandbox.

Windows Sandbox will be available in Insider builds of Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise starting with build 18305. At the time of writing, that build hasn’t shipped to insiders, but we expect it to be coming soon.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company unveiled its latest transportation experiment in Los Angeles last night. The Loop, not to be confused with the Hyperloop, was supposed to be a high-speed urban transportation system of the future. And the first reviews are in, but they’re pretty disappointing, to say the least.

Back when the concept was first announced, Musk promised that the Loop would utilize fully autonomous 16-passenger vehicles gliding along at speeds of 150 miles per hour. But the system that was demonstrated last night featured just regular Tesla cars driven manually on an underground one-mile track. And at an underwhelming speed of just 35-50 miles per hour.

The first concept videos for the tunnel system were impressive and got people really excited about what Musk was building in Hawthorne, California near the SpaceX headquarters. And Musk bent over backwards last night to explain that the test tunnel still had kinks to work out. But the reviews will disappoint even the most diehard Musk supporters.

Laura J. Nelson at the Los Angeles Times:

The trip through the tunnel took about two minutes, illuminated by the car’s headlights and a strip of blue neon lights tacked to the ceiling. The Model X rolled on two molded concrete shelves along the wall, which were so uneven in places that it felt like riding on a dirt road.

[…]

“We kind of ran out of time,” Musk said, attributing the rough ride to problems with a paving machine. “The bumpiness will not be there down the road. It will be as smooth as glass. This is just a prototype. That’s why it’s just a little rough around the edges.”

Matt McFarland at CNN:

Red lights atop the tunnel suddenly turned green. The Model X jolted forward and we were off. The trip was bumpy at times as we jostled against the tunnel. The narrow space made the low speeds — we traveled mostly at 35 mph — feel faster. It felt like an amusement park ride. After about two minutes, the car emerged from the tunnel into a large pit in the SpaceX parking lot.

Ivan Penn at the New York Times:

Angie Reyes English, a former member of Hawthorne’s city council, was among the first visitors to go through the tunnel. She said she had voted for the project and was glad to see the result.

“It’s a little bumpy,” Ms. English said. “I believe it’s going to be improved. It’s a test tunnel. I think it was cleverly done.”

Amanda Lee Myers at the Associated Press:

Guests boarded Musk’s Tesla Model S and rode along Los Angeles-area surface streets about a mile away to what’s known as O’Leary Station. The station, smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood — “basically in someone’s backyard,” Musk says — consists of a wall-less elevator that slowly took the car down a wide shaft, roughly 30 feet (9 meters) below the surface.

The sky slowly fell away and the surprisingly narrow tunnel emerged.

“We’re clear,” said the driver, who sped up and zipped into the tunnel when a red track light turned green, making the tube look like something from space or a dance club.

The car jostled significantly during the ride, which was bumpy enough to give one reporter motion sickness while another yelled, “Woo!”

Musk was reportedly making excuses throughout the night about why his system looked nothing like what he promised. And his concept now relies on every persona having their own cars.

“It’s much more like an underground highway than it is a subway,” Musk said, according to the Associated Press.

Not only that, the cars are simply retrofitted with $300 guides to keep them on the track, not unlike the system you might see at theme park rides in Disneyland during the 1950s.

Where does all of this leave Elon Musk’s vision of futuristic transportation? Only time will tell. But the most radical difference between the proposal and the real thing so far isn’t just the speed, it’s the decision to use regular cars instead of 16-passenger vehicles.

Again, this is what was promised:

And this is what was delivered:

Hopefully Musk and his engineers will be able to make the ride feel less like a dirt road sometime in the future, especially if they want to build this concept in Chicago, as they promised in a high-profile press conference with the mayor back in June.

But even if they make the ride more pleasant, where does that leave this transportation concept more broadly? There are plenty of underground highways in America. But they haven’t offered a very futuristic alternative. They’ve only delivered more single-family cars—which appears to be exactly what Elon Musk is putting in the pipeline.

Elon Musk has done some very impressive things with SpaceX and Tesla. But his futuristic Loop transportation system leaves a lot to be desired. Namely, the futuristic part.

Heading into the 2020 Democratic primaries, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll has a warning for Democrats: Americans are largely against the country becoming more politically correct.

Fifty-two percent of Americans, including a majority of independents, said they are against the country becoming more politically correct and are upset that there are too many things people can’t say anymore. Only about a third said they are in favor of the country becoming more politically correct and like when people are being more sensitive in their comments about others.

That’s a big warning sign for Democrats heading into the 2020 primaries when cultural sensitivity has become such a defining issue with the progressive base.

“If the Democratic Party moves in a direction that is more to its base on this issue, it suggests independents are going to be tested to stay with the Democrats electorally,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll.

“Political correctness” has been fundamental to the Trump phenomenon.

“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” then candidate-Trump said during a Republican primary debate, adding “and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness, and to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.”

On a host of issues, though, over the first two years of the Trump presidency, independents have sided with Democrats. That was proven in the 2018 midterm elections, as independents, despite their past GOP leanings, broke for Democrats and helped them win control of the House.

“If you’re the Democrats, do you feed into this cultural gap?” Miringoff asked. “Do you step on the accelerator on the impeachment stuff, or do you stay with things like the environment, women’s issues, health care, gun control — substantive issues that have been moving independents to Democrats’ side?”

Big divides

There are huge partisan, racial and gender divides on the question of sensitivity. The only groups in which majorities said they were in favor of people being more sensitive were Democrats, adults under 30, African-Americans and small city/suburban women.

Don’t see the graphic above? Click here.

Majorities of whites, Latinos, Americans over 30 and small city/suburban men, though, said the opposite. Just 1 in 7 Republicans and a third of independents said they like the country becoming more politically correct and people being sensitive in their comments.

There’s also a big gender divide by place and education. Women who live in small cities or the suburbs say people need to be more sensitive by a 52-to-37-percent margin. But just a quarter of men who live in the same place say so (27 to 57 percent), making for what have to be some very divided dinner tables.

White women with college degrees are split, but slightly more of them than not say people should be sensitive by a 46-to-43 percent margin. Nearly two-thirds of white men with college degrees, however, say the country is becoming too politically correct. (Roughly the same percentage of white men without a college degree feel the same way.)

What’s more, Americans are split 47-to-47 on whether they feel they can speak their minds more freely compared to a few years ago. And here, interesting divides emerge as well. Those same suburban/small city kitchen tables are split — with a 27-point gender gap on this question in those places. (Men in those areas are 20 points more likely to say they feel censored, while women there are 7 points more likely to say the opposite.)

About half of Republican men (52 percent) and Republican women (55 percent) say they feel they cannot speak their minds as freely as a few years ago, but so do Democratic men (50 percent). Among, Democratic women, though, 51 percent say they can speak their minds more freely now.

Notably, however, there are a couple things going on — in addition to some groups feeling stifled by a culture of political correctness, some are feeling the opposite, and that may be because of President Trump’s election.

Trump’s largest base of support, for example, is in the south, and by a 50-to-45-percent margin, southerners feel like they can speak more freely now. That’s the highest percentage of any region.

Civility declined since Trump’s election

When it comes to the overall tone and level of civility in Washington between Republicans and Democrats, 70 percent of Americans believe it’s gotten worse since Trump was elected. And there isn’t much of a partisan divide on this one, as nearly two-thirds of Republicans also say so.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans also think people overall are less respectful of each other than they were a few years ago. People across party lines agree on this point as well — with 72 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of independents and 64 percent of Republicans all saying so.

Notably, slightly more people blame the media (37 percent) for the tone in Washington than Trump (35 percent). As between the two parties, 13 percent of people blame Democrats in Congress while 8 percent blame Republicans in Congress. Predictably, there’s a partisan divide: About two-thirds of Democrats blame Trump; 58 percent of Republicans, on the other hand, blame the media.

The dynamic of Americans overall faulting the media has become more pronounced since Democrats won the House in November. In the November NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, 40 percent blamed Trump and just 29 percent blamed the media.

And Americans have little faith that the overall tone and level of civility will get better now that there will be divided government in Washington beginning in January — 41 percent think it will get worse, 35 percent think it will stay the same and 1 in 5 do think it will improve.

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This poll of 1,075 adults was conducted Nov. 28 to Dec. 4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.