Update: Hogan, Mars, Australia, Solarwinds

I don't normally do these updates this frequently, and never before have I produced an update on a post from just a week ago.

Jim Hogan RIP

One of my mentors passed over the weekend from a heart attack. Jim was one of the earliest employees of SDA, one of the two companies that combined to form Cadence. He worked here for many years, including during my first tour of duty at Cadence around the turn of the millennium. He wasn't just a mentor to me, but to practically everyone in EDA. After he left Cadence, he worked at Artisan until Arm acquired them. For many years, he has run his own one-man angel investing company, Vista Ventures. He was on my board at Envis where I came to work one morning to do some marketing consulting and found myself CEO of the company by the end of the day. It was Jim who encouraged me to write and set me up at EDN with my original blog EDAgraffiti. Until the pandemic, I would have dinner with him in Los Gatos every few months.

Jim was also the soundtrack of the EDA industry. He was a singer, a guitarist, and a songwriter. His various bands played at many EDA events, in particular, every DAC he organized and played at the HOT party, raising money for charity. The picture shows Jim's band Vista Roads (and left of Jim is Randy Smith, another EDA industry veteran, who passed suddenly last year).

I will do a blog post on Jim once I'm over the shocking news.

Mars

Update to It's Mars Month.

I'm sure you know that NASA's Perseverance rover (and helicopter) successfully landed on Mars. The helicopter hasn't flown yet (its batteries are charging) but it is still amazing that we have put a helicopter on another planet.

When Perseverance landed, all NASA got was the telemetry (eight minutes later) so it knew the landing was successful. But there were cameras all over the various units involved in the landing. The downlink from Mars is apparently 2Mb/s so downloading video takes time. But it happened. If you haven't seen it before, here is the extraordinary video of the landing including opening the parachute, jettisoning the heat shield, slowing down with rockets as the Martian surface is approached, and lowering Perseverance onto the ground (Skycrane) before firing its rockets one final time to clear the area and crash somewhere it won't crush Perseverance.

The video combines the actual commentary from the landing itself (actually delayed by eight minutes from what was actually happening on Mars) and video that was not available at the time and was downloaded later.

Don't forget there are two other missions to Mars arriving this month. First, the UAE's Mars Hope. This is not going to land on Mars, just go into orbit around it and make atmospheric measurements. That happened successfully, too:

China's Tianwen-1 also entered orbit. It is planned that it will eventually land a rover but not for some time.

So all three missions to Mars have, so far, been a success. The craft that were intended to enter orbit have done so, the only craft scheduled to land has done so. All three missions are sending back photos and telemetry.

Australia

Update to The Death of Distance.

I can't do better than a couple of paragraphs from Ben Evan's Tuesday newsletter (that you should be signed up for anyway):

Australia's link tax reached a crisis point. Google did deals with local newspapers (and with Newscorp globally)—but crucially those are deals for the 'News Showcase' in Google News, not (yet) for the links and search results that the government proposed, and this means that Australia now won't apply its law to Google. Facebook called their bluff and turned off news in Australia (as the law would require!), triggering a big global row, and then the Australian government folded, changing the terms of the law to allow Facebook to opt out with a side deal as well. So now Google and FB are paying something, but we don't know what, and not on the basis of this law. Indeed, as of today the law doesn't appear to apply to anyone except maybe Microsoft, which endorsed it in a piece of crass opportunism to try to cause trouble for a competitor. This has been a spectacular mess, and no-one looks good, least of all Australia, which used an impossible law to extort subsidies for a politically connected lobby group.

Solarwinds

Update to The Biggest Security Breach Ever and Update: DATE, Achronix, SolarWinds, Batteries, Economist.

There is a ton of information about this coming to light every day, and I don't claim to have the time to try and keep up. One good summary from Tuesday is this Guardian article SolarWinds hack was work of 'at least 1,000 engineers', tech executives tell Senate. Here are a couple of paragraphs from that article:

Brad Smith, the Microsoft president, said its researchers believed “at least 1,000 very skilled, very capable engineers” worked on the SolarWinds hack. “This is the largest and most sophisticated sort of operation that we have seen,” Smith told senators.

Smith said the hacking operation’s success was due to its ability to penetrate systems through routine processes. SolarWinds functions as a network monitoring software, working deep in the infrastructure of information technology systems to identify and patch problems, and provides an essential service for companies around the world.

“It’s a little bit like a burglar who wants to break into a single apartment but manages to turn off the alarm system for every home and every building in the entire city,” he added. “Everybody’s safety is put at risk. That is what we’re grappling with here.”

The bottom line is the subtitle for this article:

True scope of the breach, which affected 100 companies and several federal agencies, is still unknown

 

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