Enlarge / A vintage 1981 BBC Micro computer. Fun fact: it was rather tricky to determine which version of BBC Basic a Micro was actually running. (credit: Getty Images)

BBC Basic did a lot of things, and often quite well. During the early 1980s, it extended the BASIC languages with easier loop structures, like IF/THEN/ELSE, and ran faster than Microsoft's version. It taught an entire generation of Brits how to code, both in BASIC and, through an inline interpreter, assembly language. And it's still around to teach newcomers and anybody else—except it's now on far, far more platforms than a mail-order computer from the telly.

BBCSDL, or BBC Basic for SDL 2.0, uses Simple DirectMedia Layer's OS abstraction to make itself available on Windows, x86 Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi's OS, Android, iOS, and inside browsers through WebAssembly. Version 1.38a arrived in mid-November with quite a few fixes and niceties (as first noticed by Hackaday and its readers). On the project's website, you can see BBCSDL running on all these devices, along with a note that on iOS and in browsers, an assembler and a few other functions are not available, due to arbitrary code-execution restrictions.

BBCSDL, or BBC Basic for SDL 2.0, running on iOS devices, in graphical mode. (credit: Richard Russell / R.T. Russell)

Richard Russell has been working on ports, interpreters, and other variations of BBC BASIC since 1983, starting with interpreters for Z80 and Intel processors. By 2001, BBC BASIC for Windows was available with a graphical interface and was still compatible with the BBC Micro and Acorn computers from whence it came. BBCSDL has been in development since 2015, providing wider platform offerings while still retaining decent compatibility with BBC BASIC for Windows.

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Enlarge / Nineteenth-century naturalist and solicitor Morton Allport, based in Hobart, built a scientific reputation by exchanging the remains of Tasmanian Aboriginal people and Tasmanian tigers for honors from elite societies. (credit: Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania)

When Australian naturalist and solicitor Morton Allport died in 1878, one obituary lauded the man as "the most foremost scientist in the colony," as evidenced by his position as vice president of the Royal Society of Tasmania (RST) at the time of his death, among many other international honors. But according to a new paper published in the journal Archives of Natural History, Allport's stellar reputation was based less on his scholarly merit than on his practice of sending valuable specimens of Tasmanian tigers (thylacines) and aboriginal remains to European collectors in exchange for scientific accolades. Allport admits as much in his own letters, preserved in the State Library of Tasmania, as well as to directing grave-robbing efforts to obtain those human remains.

“Early British settlers considered both thylacines and Tasmanian Aboriginal people to be a hindrance to colonial development, and the response was institutionalised violence with the intended goal of eradicating both,” said the paper's author, Jack Ashby, assistant director of the University Museum of Zoology at Cambridge in England. “Allport’s letters show he invested heavily in developing his scientific reputation—particularly in gaining recognition from scientific societies—by supplying human and animal remains from Tasmania in a quid pro quo arrangement, rather than through his own scientific endeavors.”

Thylacines have been extinct since 1936, but they were once the largest marsupial carnivores of the modern era. Europeans first settled in Tasmania in 1803 and viewed the tigers as a threat, blaming the animals for killing their sheep. The settlers didn't view the Aboriginal population much more favorably, and there were inevitable conflicts from the settlers displacing the aborigines and from the increased competition for food.  In 1830, a farming corporation placed the first bounties on thylacines, with the government instituting its own bounty in 1888. (Ashby writes that the true sheep killers were the dogs the settlers bred to hunt kangaroos.).

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There seems to be no end to warrantless surveillance:

According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—­a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.

A bipartisan group of 18 lawmakers in the US Congress have recently amplified a request to the White House and the Secretary of Commerce to place restrictions on Americans working with RISC-V (see also the initial request from the Senate) in order to prevent China from gaining dominance in CPU technology.

The request is facially misguided; any restrictions would only serve to reduce American participation in an important emerging technology, while bolstering ARM’s position as an incumbent near-monopoly provider of embedded CPUs.

When the first report came out, I hoped it was just a blip that would go away, but with the broader bi-partisan group asking for restrictions, I felt I could no longer just stand by and watch: I am an active participant in the RISC-V ecosystem. I’m also subject to US law.

I did the one thing any American can do, which is write a letter summarizing my thoughts on the issue, and sending it to the White House, Department of Commerce, and the relevant members of Congress. Unfortunately, I don’t have a PAC, lobbyists or any sort of high-level connections to US politicians, so I don’t have much hope the letter will be received in time.

However, I do have a blog. I’m posting a copy of the letter I sent to the White House here, in far-flung hopes that maybe someone with more political connections than I might pick it up and send it on.

Finally, if you disagree with my stance or have a different perspective, I also encourage you to send a letter expressing your thoughts to various government officials. It doesn’t have to be “my way”, but a show of broad public interest in the topic may at least encourage policymakers to think a bit more carefully about the issue, and to hear out more perspectives.

The Letter

To President Biden and the White House staff:

Recently, a letter was sent to the White House and the Secretary of Commerce by 18 lawmakers asking how the US plans to prevent China “from achieving dominance in … RISC-V technology and leveraging that dominance at the expense of US national and economic security”.

I am a Michigan-born American with a PhD from MIT in electrical engineering. I’m also a small business owner who designs and manufactures electronics. I am writing to urge you to not place any restrictions on the sharing of RISC-V technology.

My products’ CPUs are based on the open source RISC-V standard. RISC-V’s openness specifically benefits small businesses such as mine. I get tools and designs from the open source community, and I contribute my improvements back to the pool. Barrier-free participation in this vibrant open source ecosystem keeps overhead low, allowing me to be competitive in the cutthroat hardware business.

Like the Internet, RISC-V is already a global phenomenon. There are already prolific contributions from the EU, India, China, and more [1]; the US is not the sole proprietor of RISC-V implementations. I use an implementation of RISC-V called the VexRiscv, which is developed in the EU. Any barrier for US persons’ participation will only slow American progress in developing and adopting this technology. It will have an effect opposite of that intended by lawmakers.

A further subtlety is that RISC-V is simply a standard. It defines a set of words used to tell a chip to do something, similar to how we rely on a dictionary to define the meaning of English words. Just as one can write secret documents using openly defined words, designs using the RISC-V standard can be proprietary, even if the standard is open. The benefits of open standards are so well established that the US has an entire agency – NIST – to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness by publishing open standards.

Furthermore, it is not practical to police the use of an established standard: once a book is published, it is impractical to ensure that none of America’s enemies obtain a copy of it. This has long been a trade-off of American innovation philosophy: we can freely exercise our First Amendment rights to share ideas, creating a vibrant intellectual exchange, even at the risk of others benefiting from reading our textbooks, journals and patents.

I believe this trade-off has been in our favor. With every exchange – even with potential competitors – we learn more. Chilling our freedom of expression to achieve administrative outcomes is a page out of other more oppressive regimes’ playbooks: it is fundamentally un-American to restrict the flow of ideas.

In summary, any restrictions placed on US persons sharing RISC-V technology would only serve to diminish America’s role as a technological leader. Over-broad restrictions could deprive educators of a popular tool used to teach students about computers on American campuses, for fear of also accidentally teaching to an embargoed entity. And even narrow restrictions on RISC-V could deprive US tech companies with any potential exposure to the Chinese market of access to a cost-effective, high-performance CPU technology, forcing them to pay royalties to the incumbent near-monopoly provider, ARM Holdings plc – a company that isn’t American. This weakens American competitiveness and ultimately harms the US’s best interests.

If the administration agrees that RISC-V is a technology so critical to US economic and military interests that it deserves special attention, instead of trying to restrict its expression with a federally-mandated licensing regime, it should invest in programs to develop more home-grown American RISC-V chip maker success stories. It is already within the four corners of existing US legal framework, and the RISC-V contractual framework, for companies to choose to develop proprietary implementations of RISC-V CPUs. The US has strong precedents for companies navigating the boundaries of open standards and finding success without the need for federal guidance: Intel and AMD are American industrial juggernauts built around proprietary implementations of an otherwise openly documented “x86” computer standard. What the US needs is an American answer to ARM Holdings plc’s monopoly, and that answer comes from investing in US companies that embrace RISC-V.

President Biden, I urge you: have faith in American innovation. Have faith in American values. Do not place any restrictions on the sharing of RISC-V technology. We can work together to build more US chip maker success stories, while embracing the American value of freedom of expression!

Very truly yours,

Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang
An American Hacker, Maker, and Author

[1] https://github.com/riscvarchive/riscv-cores-list

Enlarge (credit: ANGELA WEISS / Contributor | AFP)

On Friday, Sam Bankman-Fried began his first day testifying before a jury with a loss. The FTX co-founder had intended to explain exactly how much he relied on lawyers to steer his decision-making amid the cryptocurrency exchange's rise and collapse, but US District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that particular part of his proposed testimony could not be heard by the jury, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Bankman-Fried had testified on Thursday that his in-house legal team oversaw paperwork for "hundreds of millions of dollars in personal loans to himself and other founders of the platform," CNBC reported. He told the court that having his legal team's blessing was something that he "took comfort in."

“That evidence would in my judgment be confusing and prejudicial,” Kaplan said, dealing what many outlets considered a serious blow to Bankman-Fried's defense.

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We’ve had about a week to digest the pending arrival of the Raspberry Pi 5, and it’s safe to say that the new board from Cambridge has produced quite some excitement with its enhanced specifications and a few new capabilities not seen in its predecessors. When it goes on general sale we expect that it will power a slew of impressive projects in these pages, and we look forward with keen anticipation to its companion Compute Module 5, and we sincerely hope eventually a Raspberry Pi 500 all-in-one. It’s the latest in a line of incrementally-upgraded single board computers from the company, but we think it conceals something of much greater importance than the improvements that marked previous generations. Where do we think the secret sauce lies in the Pi 5? In the RP1 all-in-one PCIe peripheral chip of course, the chip which provides most of the interfacing on the new board.

A Board Maker Becomes a Chip Designer

So far we’ve seen three pieces of custom silicon from Raspberry Pi, the RP1, the RP2040 microcontroller which is effectively an RP2, and the RP3 system-on-chip found in the Pi Zero 2 W. The numbering denotes their development timetable, and the RP1 project dates back to 2016.

The RP2040 uses a vanilla set of ARM parts joined by those Pi-designed PIO peripherals, while the  RP3 is the same Broadcom SoC as found in the original Raspberry Pi 3 sharing a package with 512 MB of RAM. It’s evident that they are becoming more of a chip design house than they are a maker of boards with each successive new product, and with each iteration their capabilities increase.

The RP1 is a chip that puts nearly all of the Pi’s external interfaces onto a PCIe peripheral, but in reality we think it’s more than that. What they have done is take everything that makes a Raspberry Pi a Raspberry Pi, and take it away from the SoC into a chip of its own. From a hardware perspective this makes some of the interfaces faster and adds a few new capabilities, but we think that the true value of this chip to the Raspberry Pi folks is a strategic one.

All of their previous boards used the built-in peripherals of the Broadcom SoC with the addition of a third-party Ethernet and USB hub chip, but an RP1-based Pi frees them from reliance on the SoC for the interfaces. Because the RP1 is now a Pi-in-a-chip that just needs an application processor, memory, and GPU to run, they can now make a Pi with any processor and GPU which will work just like the previous models if they maintain their rock-solid operating system support record.

A Pi Beholden To No Other

In theory then with the RP1 in hand they could make a Pi with any CPU that’s powerful enough and which has a PCIe interface, but this is unlikely to mean a radical departure in terms of architecture. We don’t expect a RISC-V Pi or an x86 Pi then, but this does mean that there doesn’t necessarily have to be an ARM Pi with a chip from Broadcom. They can now make a Pi with another manufacturer’s silicon at its heart, but if we had a chance to place a bet we’d be guessing that their roadmap has Raspberry Pi silicon front and centre. Our crystal ball is a little cloudy, but if there’s an RP4 or an RP5 in the works it wouldn’t stretch the imagination too far for them to put application cores and a GPU in it as the driving force behind a future Raspberry Pi 5 or 6.

Whatever happens in the future, the RP1 is definitely more than just a peripheral and its true importance to the Raspberry Pi as a product will become apparent as their product cycle evolves. We’ve been treated to a limited data sheet which has revealed a few new capabilities such as an analog-to-digital converter, and there are hints of a few more revelations to come. If we had a wishlist it would be for an RP1 with some of those RP2040-style PIOs. Meanwhile the mere thought of a future Pi with a Raspberry Pi application processor is intriguing, not least because they might be more amenable to releasing their blob source than Broadcom have been.

We’re reminded of the famous Rolling Stones song then, in that we can’t always get what we want, but if even a few of the above predictions for the RP1 come to pass, we just might find we get what we need.