Web Excursions 2022-06-18
Quick Look at Rosetta on Linux – Random Blog
RosettaLinux is located at
/Library/Apple/usr/libexec/oah/RosettaLinux
.A rosetta ELF executable is present on that directory.
Does it do AoT [ahead-of-time]?
No. Rosetta on Linux exclusively operates in JIT mode, at least for the time being.
Mapping to the VM
That directory is mapped through
virtiofs
to the virtual machine.binfmt_misc
is then used to make execution attempts of x86_64 binaries run through Rosetta.
When the Rosetta directory is mapped to the virtual machine, all of the VM runs in Total Store Ordering mode.
This provides the guarantees needed by Rosetta to provide x86-compatible memory model semantics.
Rosetta has a mechanism to restrict it to
Virtualization.framework
virtual machines.The
ioctl
is passed throughvirtiofs
to the host.
Running it on non-Apple CPUs?
My first thought was the Tegra Xavier processor, which provides sequential consistency in hardware.
As such, it satisfies the programmer-visible memory ordering constraints required for Rosetta to be functional.
However, Rosetta relies on
FEAT_FlagM
flag manipulation instructions. Those are not implemented on Carmel
Graviton3 testing
Which Arm platforms are easily accessible with flag manipulation instructions?
There are some, such as the AWS Graviton3 processor, which uses Arm’s Neoverse V1 core.
Rosetta supports
CNTFRQ_EL0
timer frequencies of 24 MHz and 1.00GHz,which is unlike the 1.05 GHz value used by the Graviton3 platform.
Let’s override the value reported to Rosetta with 1.00 GHz.
This allows to make a Geekbench 5 run,
showing ~70% of native performance for Rosetta 2 on a c7g.large dual-core instance.
Anecdotally, the HDR subtest of Geekbench anomalously gives higher performance inside of the Rosetta environment than outside for this configuration.
However, a reminder that x86 memory ordering semantics aren’t provided is required to put that score into perspective.
The Fight to Hold Pornhub Accountable | The New Yorker
Rachel stopped sleeping, and spent her days and nights searching for the videos and filling out dozens of removal-request forms. “Hi, I’m underage and had many videos and photos posted of me on here,” she wrote to Pornhub in December, 2018. “They keep getting reuploaded onto this site and I am only 15 in them and I don’t have the links. I don’t know what to do because every time I get them removed you keep allowing them to be uploaded its ruining my life.” In response, Pornhub asked for a link to each video, the username of the account used to upload it, the title of the file, or screenshots of the page. Rachel sent the information when she had it, but the videos were often uploaded in tiny clips that she found impossible to track. Each time one was taken down, more appeared. Finally, she gave up. “I was spending all my time reporting videos,” she said. “It was taking a lot out of me.”
MindGeek’s policies stated that videos on its site were vetted, to make sure that they didn’t feature minors, and were uploaded with the consent of the people who appeared in them. But the company had recently been in the news after being accused of failing to adequately screen its content.
MindGeek is registered in the tax haven of Luxembourg, but its main office is in Montreal. The company employs around sixteen hundred people, and the online platforms it owns, which include Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, and Brazzers, received approximately 4.5 billion visits each month in 2020.
Pornhub’s origins date back to 2007, when an entrepreneur named Matt Keezer bought the domain for about three thousand dollars, after cold-calling its owner. Keezer joined with several business partners, including Stephane Manos and Ouissam Youssef, whom he had met through Foosball tournaments when they were all students at Concordia University, in Montreal. A few of the business partners had recently started a paid porn site called Brazzers. Folding Brazzers and Pornhub into a new company, the partners named it Mansef, a combination of “Manos” and “Youssef.”
In October, 2009, agents from the U.S. Secret Service Organized Fraud Task Force obtained warrants to seize more than six million dollars from two accounts held by a Mansef-linked company called Premium Services. The company seemed to have no address aside from a rented mailbox in Cumming, Georgia, a town of five thousand people. But, in two months, it had received $9.4 million and wired out four million dollars. None of the money seemed to have been used for paying salaries or for other legitimate expenses.
In 2011, the government settled the case, agreeing to return $4.15 million. The company was saved. More significant, the case was an indication that the government had not caught up to the realities of the new business of Internet pornography.
The launch of YouTube, in 2005, made it easy to upload videos that could be viewed by anyone; soon afterward, entrepreneurs started what came to be known as “tube sites”—including RedTube and YouPorn—which allowed users to upload and view pornographic videos for free. Many were pirated copies of professional films, and the revenue that once flowed to the California movie studios was redirected to the operators of the tube sites. The resulting copyright battles in the porn industry mirrored those in traditional entertainment.
Today, MindGeek relies on the same legal statute that Mark Zuckerberg cites when defending Facebook from charges that it allows the proliferation of disinformation: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which states that an “interactive computer service” cannot be treated as a publisher of information provided by a third party.
. In the early years of online pornography, the tube sites were despised by many in the porn industry for giving away their content for free, but Thylmann seemed to relish his image. “Fabian’s approach was: We’re a porn company, we’re going to flaunt it.
after Thylmann was released, he boasted about how well he’d been treated in jail. “Some guards told him, ‘Oh, you’re the owner of this and that?’ ” Pschorr said. “ ‘My girlfriend is an amateur performer. Do you have some tips about how she could make some money?
MindGeek’s corporate structure is complicated, with dozens of subsidiaries around the world whose names can obscure their ownership. It maintains offices in Luxembourg, the U.K., and Romania; the office that handles MindGeek’s content is in Cyprus. The company’s headquarters is an aquamarine glass office building in Montreal, where Antoon surrounds himself with a tight group of confidants that some employees referred to as the “bro club.” Antoon has a full face, small, bright eyes, and a trim.
Some executives hid the fact that they worked in the porn industry, occasionally using pseudonyms. “They wanted to really come across as an engineering.
Employees later said that concealing their identities was a safety issue, because they were harassed and threatened by anti-porn protesters; the hundred-and-eighty-page document left by the racist mass shooter in Buffalo included a rant about the harms caused by pornography and a list of executives at MindGeek and Pornhub interposed with anti-Semitic imagery. But the secrecy also served to protect employees’ reputations. “This industry is different,” the former executive told me. “When I met someone and they said, ‘I’m Tom,’ it was absolutely clear that the guy was not called Tom. In porn, as an executive, you just don’t use your own name. One of the biggest assets is that you keep your personal life absolutely secret.
They will purposely delay,” the former employee said. “They’ll say, ‘We’ll get back to you in two, three days once we do our review.’ ” By the time a review was complete, a video could have been up for several days, and ad space sold against it.
the formatters did not notify law enforcement, ostensibly because many uploaders use virtual private networks to disguise their identities and locations, which could cause the police to target the wrong person. Formatters sometimes suggested blocking the I.P. addresses of people who repeatedly violated the policies, or requiring that uploaders provide valid identification and e-mail addresses, the former employee said, but their supervisors said that this would discourage use of MindGeek’s sites.
answering to financial institutions was typical in the porn business. “Once everything moved online, it shifted from ‘The government said you can’t do this’ to ‘The banks said you can’t do this,’ ” he said. “You were no longer arguing with a state attorney general or the F.B.I., you were arguing with a middle manager at a bank who was worried about the bank’s reputation. And with Visa and Mastercard you have a duopoly. If you lose either of them or both of them, it ruins your business.
most porn performers were not eager to side with the Christian right, but that nonconsensual content and child-sexual-abuse material on Pornhub made the industry less safe for them.
MindGeek’s top executives testified. It seemed as if they hadn’t prepared for even the most elementary questions. Antoon was unable to say how much money the company made, how many complaints it received about nonconsensual videos, or why it hadn’t made any substantive policy changes until Visa and Mastercard pulled their business.
Last year, as MindGeek’s legal troubles grew, Antoon began efforts to sell the company. The rise of OnlyFans—a Web site that allows performers to set up their own channels with paying subscribers—and the flurry of bad press seemed disastrous for Pornhub. According to a corporate presentation reviewed by the Logic, a Canadian tech-news site, Pornhub’s traffic declined by forty per cent in the year after the Kristof column was published.
Last February, two women filed a lawsuit in Alabama alleging that videos of them being sexually assaulted as teen-agers were posted on Pornhub without their consent—and that the company had shared revenue from the videos with their rapists, who had uploaded the material. (The company denies the allegations.) MindGeek argued to have the case dismissed, citing Section 230, which, the company wrote, granted it “broad immunity from liability for content posted to its websites by third parties.” The judge denied MindGeek’s motion, stating that, by providing incentives for the creation of child-sexual-abuse material, the company had forfeited Section 230 protection. “Child pornography is not lawful ‘information provided by another information content provider’ as contemplated by Section 230,” the judge wrote. “Rather, it is illegal contraband, stemming from the sexual abuse of a child, beyond the covering of First Amendment protection, and wholly outside any other protection or immunity under the law.” The judge noted that individuals were prosecuted for possessing such material on a regular basis, adding, “How, then, could a corporate defendant escape punishment for the same illegal conduct.”