Month: March 2021

Recently, I've heard the phrase "pandemic fatigue" come up in terms of people getting antsy about returning to "normal." I don't know how long we have left to go (though Ars has plenty of articles on the topic), but I can say that even through my vigilance about safety and health, my own patience sometimes gets seriously tested—especially whenever a hint of normalcy flashes before my eyes.

One example is watching a bombastic movie that gets me so amped up, it makes me finally dream of going to a movie theater again. And I'm absolutely shocked to admit that the film to test my patience the most in the past 12 months might very well be Godzilla vs. Kong, out today in theaters and on HBO Max. (Seriously, I am stunned to say this, after what I said about the last official Godzilla film.)

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  Everything I hoped for from a picture like this comes to fruition in Godzilla vs. Kong—and then some. [credit: Warner Bros. ]

As much as I enjoyed this film from the comfort of my living room, displayed on a nice television with a subwoofer cranked to near-max, its two hours had me craving a more collective, crowd-filled experience—perhaps more so than any film or TV series I've seen since the last time I was in theaters. This film is a lot like its titular beasts: big, splashy, and sometimes quite dumb on the surface, yet full of animal-like cunning and able to land massive blows at crucial moments.

Enlarge / There are two types of reactions to this marketing image: "ooh, shiny!" and "oh god no, all that particulate will get in the socket..." (credit: Arm)

On Tuesday afternoon, Arm held a Vision Day event at which it teased details about its upcoming Arm v9 architecture.

The short version: expect a massively altered security landscape, along with improvements to vector math (which in turn means improvements in AI/ML and Digital Signal Processing, among other applications).

Confidential Compute Architecture

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  If you're hoping for gritty technical detail on how realms actually work, we've got bad news for you—so far, Arm's not telling. [credit: Arm ]

The key concept introduced in Arm v9's new Confidential Compute Architecture is the realm. Realms are containerized, isolated execution environments, completely opaque to both operating system and hypervisor. The hypervisor itself will only be responsible for scheduling and resource allocation. Realms themselves are to be managed by the realm manager—a new concept that can apparently be implemented in 1/10th the code required for a hypervisor.

What comes to mind when you think of a Smart Home? Wi-Fi enabled light bulbs, video doorbells, cloud-connected robot vacuums, or smart fridges perhaps? Brands like Google/Nest or everything enabled with Amazon’s Alexa? While often providing some genuine convenience, these devices are also usually designed to invite and lock users into manufacturers' ecosystems. Create a cool piece of hardware, you’ll make one sale. Create a cool piece of hardware that extracts recurring monthly service fees for cloud storage or to unlock extra functionality, and you’ll have sales for life.

Compounding our collective frustration, these ecosystems are often incompatible with each other and require multiple different apps for control. Not only are subscriptions and upselling part of the game, the underlying business models for these products are built around planned obsolescence and mining user data.

Luckily, aspirational smart home folks in 2021 have at least one viable alternative: Home Assistant. This piece of open-source software is the proverbial ring “that in the darkness binds them.” It is the glue for smart home gear spanning all sorts of manufacturers from behemoths like Google to minnows like Shelly. It’s a project that has set out to change all of the smart home pitfalls listed above by putting local control, privacy, and interoperability first.