• To nobody's surprise the FCC has declined to intervene on California's plans to implement net neutrality.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The problem I always had with the FCC's push for net neutrality - which is back on the table for a vote later this month - is that the claim that the FCC even had the power to vote on such a rule is based on assumptions that would grant the agency massive control over all forms of communication in the US.
  
  If an individual state legislature wants to fuck up internet access for their own voters, on the other hand, they can do so, subject to the First Amendment.
  
  I'll have to read up on what California is proposing to do; it's probably bad, but probably legal.

• I've been trying to get the latest Hyte / Hololive limited edition PC cases for months without any luck.  There's only one Hyte distributor in Australia and they can't get them.
  
  I even looked into freight forwarding, but that worked out to cost as much as the cases themselves, and these are expensive cases.
  
  Now Hyte offers freight forwarding itself, and if I order both the cases it only costs 50% of the cost of the cases.  Which is still insane, but so am I.
  
  Then the cases will sit there for months because having spent that much money I won't have much to spare for new parts to fill them with.
  
  I did want to buy the new Lenovo Legion Tab, but Lenovo is assisting me with my budget because that is still not available anywhere.
   
  
  
• NASA has found the exact problem with Voyager 1 and expects to have it fixed...  Eventually.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yeah, I know that feeling, and I'm not even working with 46 year old hardware billions of miles away designed and built by people who have long since retired and aren't returning my emails.
  
  
  
• Do not buy the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It has a very nice 120Hz 2880x1800 OLED display, but it costs $1900, and you can get an Asus Vivobook with an almost identical OLED display for half of that.
  
  And the Asus has upgradeable memory, while the Samsung has 16GB soldered in place.
  
  Which if you're running Windows 11 will be fully used by the time you've booted the system and started a browser.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Asus Vivobook and it's beautiful OLED display...  Yeah, it's still in its box.
  
  
  
• The Maven is a $2000 e-bike -  (Ars Technica)
  
  Let me stop you there.
  
  First thought: $2000 for a bicycle?  So your only question is not if it gets stolen, but if it gets stolen before you get crushed by an SUV.
  
  Second thought: I mean, if you happened to live in a quiet country town with little traffic and lots of hills, it might be kind of nice.
  
  Third thought: And, it turns out, illegal where I live.  It has a 750W motor and the rules here set the limit at 500W.
  
  
  
• Apple is laying off 700 workers, including the entire team working on the Apple Car, which Apple still denies ever working on.  (9to5Mac)
  
  What exactly do you put on you resume when you worked for a decade on a project that was never officially acknowledged and never produced any real-world results?
  
  
  
• Testing out my modpack under 1.19.2.
  
  That enables several mods I wanted (Creatures and Beasts, Critters and Companions, Zoo Architect, and Oh the Biomes You'll Go) at the cost of a couple of smaller ones (Let's Do Brewery, Dye Depot, and Elytra Trims).
  
  I do also lose the 1.20 updates...  Which were kind of underwhelming.  I'll need find a mod that adds back the cherry tree biome; I've already reinstated camels and the bamboo upgrades.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 06 2024 10:12 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: wheels at Sunday, April 07 2024 01:04 AM (wBT5j)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Sunday, April 07 2024 09:27 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Sunday, April 07 2024 09:27 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Sunday, April 07 2024 09:27 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 07 2024 08:11 PM (PiXy!)

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• Quick one today as it has been a very long week.
  
  
  
• Is Google planning to buy marketing company HubSpot?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Sure.  Why not.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The benchmark numbers being quoted by Qualcomm for its new laptop chips are actually...  Pretty accurate.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Looks like it should comfortably beat Intel and not embarrass itself against Apple and AMD.  That's a huge improvement against earlier attempts which were just about capable of running Notepad.
  
  
  
• How we saved 98% in cloud costs by writing our own database.  (Hivekit)
  
  Turns out you can make databases run much, much faster if you don't care about the data.
  
  In this specific case, Hivekit can lose a second of data and not worry about it too much.  Conventional databases have to assume you want every single record to be saved, which is complicated and (relatively) slow.
  
  It's like...  If you don't care if the eggs arrive intact, you can speed up delivery by a lot.
  
  
  
• The new Razer Blade 18 has everything you could want in a laptop except the Four Essential Keys and an affordable price tag.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Though to be precise you could probably afford to buy the price tag, just not the laptop.
  
  A 24 core Intel 14900HX, an RTX 4090 (laptop version, so basically an RTX 4080), up to 64GB of RAM (probably upgradeable to 96GB), 4TB of storage in two M.2 slots, a 3840x2400 200Hz screen, a Thunderbolt 5 port - the brand new 80Gbps version, four 10Gbps USB ports, HDMI, a full size SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a 2.5Gb Ethernet port.  
  
  Fully configured it's just $4800.
  
  Which is a lot of money, yes, but that's a lot of laptop.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, April 05 2024 09:59 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 06 2024 12:00 AM (BMUHC)

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• I think we've identified the problem.
  
  Microsoft, market cap $3.12 trillion: Hello random open source project, we have a customer-facing problem that we need fixed urgently.
  
  Open source project: We'll take a look, but our project is run by volunteers in their own time.  If it's an urgent issue affecting commercial use might we suggest our friends at Z who offer 24/7 support contracts at very reasonable rates?
  
  Microsoft, market cap $3.12 trillion: No.  (Reddit)
  
  Though it was a Microsoft researcher who found the xz security breach and averted global disaster.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, open-source friendly company Stability AI is apparently fast going broke because it's a little too friendly.  (The Register)
  
  There's always two sides to every story, and in this case the other side is $100 million per year spent on cloud servers.
  
  

• If you comply with the rules, we'll change the rules: The US Commerce Department has banned Nvidia's RTX 4090D from sale in China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 4090D was designed specifically to comply with the ruling that banned the 4090.
  
  A little too specifically, perhaps.  But maybe Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo should post the rules she wants companies to actually follow rather than expecting them to play some psychotic game of red light green light.
  
  
  
• The LSST camera did not cost $350 billion dollars.  (Gizmodo)

  To do this, the team needed a Rolls Royce of a digital camera. Mind you, the camera actually cost many million times that of an actual Royce Royce, and at 6,200 pounds (2,812 kilograms), it weighs a lot more than a fancy car.

  It's an amazing camera - the largest digital camera ever built, with a resolution of 3.2 gigapixels - but the entire LSST project - the buildings, the telescope assembly, the massive mirrors - the primary mirror is 28 feet across - and this camera is less than 0.2% of that.
  
  (A basic Rolls Royce Ghost costs around $350,000, and weighs 5700 pounds, so they're off on the weight too; just not by three orders of magnitude.)
  
  
  
• Can AMD's 3D Vcache improve game performance for low-end graphics cards?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  I was fully expecting the answer to be no, but if you're doing a budget build with a previous generation AMD chip and a card like AMD's own 7600, Intel's 750, or Nvidia's 3060, it might actually be worth the extra money for a 5000-series X3D chip.
  
  The biggest difference was Cyberpunk 2077 with an Intel Arc 750, where average frame rates jumped 30% from 46 to 60 fps just by upgrading from a 5800X to a 5800X3D.  About half the games tests showed negligible difference though.
  
  Which makes the newer 5700X3D an interesting proposition.  It's 10% slower than the 5800X3D but 25% cheaper, and if you're on a budget might just hit the sweet spot.
  
  
  
• Cannot remove files, disk is full.  Please remove file to free up space and try again.  Lol.  (Six Colors)
  
  Okay, Apple, I can understand that you were trying to make everything user-friendly so that you can un-delete files that were removed by accident, but what you actually achieved was users having to wipe and reinstall the entire system because you ran out of space.
  
  And these are experienced tech journalists we're talking about, who...  Yeah, off by three orders of magnitude.  Never mind.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 24.04 might become Ubuntu 24.05.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The unreleased beta version had the xz unpleasantness, and Ubuntu wants to be super-duper sure that it's been expunged with utmost prejudice.  So the planned release data of April 25 could slip into next month.
  
  I doubt that anyone would be upset about Ubuntu taking that precaution.  Except perhaps for North Korea.
  
  
  

Posted by: madrocketsci at Friday, April 05 2024 12:44 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 05 2024 10:30 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 05 2024 02:10 PM (rcPLc)

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• Taiwan has been hit with its strongest earthquake in 25 years, with an estimated magnitude between 7.2 and 7.7.  (MSN)
  
  The death toll currently stands at 7, with more than 700 injured.  Fortunately the epicenter was on the less-populated eastern side of the island; in the densely populated north and west such a strong earthquake could have been devastating.
  
  
  
• Amazon is closing its automated grocery stores that delivered the magical experience of walking in, picking out whatever you needed, and walking out again, and then having an amount possibly even related to what you had taken deducted from your credit card.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Automated.
  
  Well, as to that, all those cameras weren't hooked up to some carefully trained visual AI system, but to a warehouse full of people in India keeping track of your every move.
  
  Not sure if that's better or worse.

• Dell's new Inspiron 14 Plus is HP's Pavilion 14 Plus only worse.  (Liliputing)
  
  The Dell has a 2880x1800 display but it's half as bright as the HP's OLED panel, and the Four Essential Keys are absent as they are on all of Dell's current laptops.  Since it's the same price as the HP I see no reason for anyone to buy it.
  
  
  
• How to hack any AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Be very annoying.
  
  
  
• Wait, is Qualcomm's new laptop CPU actually good?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Maybe so.  It's only one benchmark, but it beat AMD and Intel chips on both single-threaded scores (narrowly) and multi-threaded scores (by a substantial margin).
  
  Qualcomm's previous efforts in this space have been underwhelming, but all reports on this venture have been positive so far.
  
  
  
• Google Podcasts was an opportunity to do something innovative and genuinely useful.  (The Verge)
  
  But instead Google killed it and put all their efforts into generating racially diverse Nazis.
  
  
  
• The highest-rating vtuber debut of all time is Hololive's Usada Pekora's mother.
  
  Her April 1 stream pulled in more than 180,000 concurrent viewers.
  
  
  
• Frieren, Maomao, and Tanya are all the same person.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, April 03 2024 08:35 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 04 2024 07:13 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 04 2024 05:00 PM (PiXy!)

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Top Story

• How Vice Media fell down a hole and died.  (The Verge)
  
  By taking a formerly interesting news site and infecting it with woke nonsense written by lazy, greedy, stupid illiterates.
  
  Kind of like The Verge.

Tech News

Not Even Remotely Tech News

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 03 2024 12:56 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 03 2024 08:30 AM (bg2DR)

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• New York city is installing expensive security scanners to protect passengers on its plague-ridden subway system.  Scanners that may not actually work.  (MSN)
  
  The "AI enabled" (because of course) scanners cost around $3000...  Per month.  Each.
  
  And the company behind them, Evolv, is currently under investigation by the SEC and FTC and being sued by its own shareholders.
  
  The BBC had its own article on Evolv two years ago.

  "Metallic composition, shape, fragmentation - we have tens of thousands of these signatures, for all the weapons that are out there," chief executive Peter George said last year, "all the guns, all the bombs and all the large tactical knives."

  
  "Can we test it?" asked research firm IPVM.
  
  "No way, get fucked, fuck off" came the reply.

  Further:

  Asked why Evolv had been able to edit what was labelled an independent report, NCS4 told BBC News it "did not allow Evolv to directly edit the report".

   

  "The 'track changes' feature was used as a means to collect feedback," an official said.  "And to change inconvenient findings.  Don't print that."

  
  

• How Facebook spied on Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon.  (Observer)
  
  By installing fake root certificates on users' phones to intercept and decrypt traffic to competitors sites.
  
  Somewhere a volcano waits for the people who came up with this little scheme.
  
  
  
• Intel's second-generation "Battlemage" graphics cards are on their way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Since launch the first generation "Alchemist" cards have slowly progressed from an interesting curiosity to an affordable alternative through numerous software updates.  Given the pricing on graphics cards right now any competition is welcome.
  
  
  
• You're gonna need a bigger phone: Only the most expensive model of the Pixel 8 will come with full AI support.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because the 8GB of RAM on the cheaper model isn't enough.
  
  Which is great if you don't want AI on your phone.

• A little more background on that security disaster that almost was.  (Substack)
  
  It looks like it started with "social engineering" - a confidence scam - two years ago, with one person attacking the maintainer of the xz utility and another one offering to help, and then actually helping.  That warped over time into slipping more and more suspect code into the package, until they got caught.
  
  It's a bit of an odd one because it took a lot of care and planning but was guaranteed to get caught and removed if it ever went mainstream.  So it's not a targeted attack on particular groups, and not subtle enough to pass unnoticed long-term.
  
  If you infect one server you're likely to get away with it, but if you infect every server in the world, there are literally hundreds of honeypot servers set up by security researchers specifically to detect weird stuff like this.
  
  Purely speculation but I'm wondering if this was North Korea rather than China or Russia.  It looks like the kind of miscalculation they would make.
  
  

Tech News

• Software needs to be more expensive.  (Glyph)
  
  There's a well-known XKCD cartoon illustrating that the modern world is utterly dependent on some random bit of code maintained by one guy in Nebraska since 2003.
  
  Not specifically true, but true in general; we nearly had a global disaster with a small but useful library called xz because the maintainer wasn't getting paid anything despite the code being used on hundreds of millions of computers.  (If it's included in iOS or Android, which it probably is, billions.)
  
  The solution proposed here is to make it easy to pay these people.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AT&T is resetting customer passcodes after millions of customers' account details were leaked...  In 2019.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or possibly earlier.  AT&T doesn't know or isn't saying.  But yeah, the data has been out there for five years and they're responding now.
  
  
  
• The world needs more gadgets like this (checks notes) overpriced underwhelming 27" 1080p monitor in a briefcase.  (The Verge)
  
  The world needs fewer websites like The Verge.  If that leaves me with nobody to mock, so be it.
  
  
  
• Banning TikTok could harm blah blah blah.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Don't care, didn't ask.

Not sure what I expected going into this, but this show goes in every direction at once.  It's no Frieren but it's not objectionable either, and it just got a second season so we won't be left hanging for too long.

I really like the quiet competence of the main character.  He's not out to save the world; he's just trying to do his job, no matter how weird things get.

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 01 2024 02:57 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, April 01 2024 03:24 AM (tSpjU)

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I'm a major fan of Prism - and not just because they have a dangerous concentration of Aussies for such a small agency, though that helps - and I'm sorry to see it go.  Thankfully the talents are almost all staying with it; Sony has handed them their designs and all online accounts, so there's just a short break while payment accounts get sorted out and then they'll be back online.

The exceptions are Kou Tsubame from Gen 5 who will be stepping back from streaming, although her channel will stay up and she'll still be in contact with the rest of the talents, and Naki Kamizuki from Gen 4 who will move away from regular vtubing and pursue other creative forms instead.

From now on if you need to find them, Gen 1 is Cosmia, Gen 3 is Requiem, and Gen 4 is Ever After.  They're working on a new name for the whole group since they can't use "Prism" and they are all planning to continue working together.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, March 30 2024 11:48 PM (tSpjU)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 31 2024 06:19 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, April 01 2024 10:22 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 01 2024 05:26 PM (PiXy!)

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• The man who saved the world:  Andres Freund noticed that SSH logins - used by every server in the world - were taking half a second longer than they should.  (Ars Technica)
  
  He was curious so he poked at it a bit and found the equivalent of the demon core being added for free to every school lunch in the world.
  
  In essence, had this been done with more care and not caught before it was added to production releases of Linux, a state actor - this is almost certainly the work of some place like China or North Korea - could have had access to everything, everywhere.
  
  You might be at AWS and have all your services behind a VPN, but that wouldn't help you at all because they'd just need to hack AWS first.
  
  All the development for this hack was done in public, either by a developer who spent a lot of time building up trust by writing useful code, or by hacking that developer's GitHub account.
  
  Expect GitHub to force 2FA on all users in short order, even if that wouldn't have prevented this incident.  Every warning sign has a story behind it, and Andres is the Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin of the age, except that he didn't die of radiation poisoning.
  
  
  
• However, some not-really-production releases of Linux were impacted.  (CyberKendra)
  
  Fedora Rawhide and Kali Linux were affected for the past three days.  Arch Linux has been affected for five weeks, and Debian's unstable release seems to be the worst hit, with the new packages added eight weeks ago.
  
  Fedora 40 Beta might be affected if you set up the test library versions as well as the regular beta libraries.
  
  AWS Linux is not affected, nor are stable releases like Ubuntu LTS or RedHat Enterprise Linux.
  
  
  

• Microsoft and OpenAI are planning to build a $115 billion supercomputer with the goal of answering all the world's questions...  Incorrectly.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I can do that for half as much.
  
  
  
• And I'm pretty sure that New York spent less than $115 billion on its useless lying chatbot.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It might be difficult, but owners can still evict tenants who refuse to pay their rent.
  
  Which means that both parties can sue the city for providing false legal advice.
  
  
  
• AMD's upcoming Zen 5 chips could be over 40% faster than Zen 4.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's a lot, but AMD's progress over the past five generations has been impressive, ]with single-core Passmark scores climbing from 1600 on the last mainstream core before Zen to 4300 with the Zen 4 based 7950X, an average of 28% improvement across four generational upgrades.
  
  And Zen 1 was nearly 40% faster than its predecessor on single-threaded tasks, and 140% faster on multi-threaded.
  
  
  
• Barnes and Noble is dropping support for its Nook tablets...  For models more than ten years old.  (Liliputing)
  
  If you have the original Nook Color from 2010 and you're still using it, well, first congratulations on not dropping it in all that time, and second, it will keep right on working for all the content you have bought and downloaded.  You won't be able to buy new content on that device, and you won't be able to download new content directly from B&N, though you can still side-load files and read them.
  
  14 years of support is pretty decent; that's about the rate at which Apple completely changes hardware platforms.
  
  
  
• The top model of the new Minisforum V3 tablet costs under $1000...  In China.  (Liliputing)
  
  This might be the perfect replacement for my late, lamented HP Envy X2 tablets, which expired from terminal battery bloat a couple of years ago without me ever having much time to use them.
  
  The top-of-the-line V3 has a 2560x1600 165Hz 14" screen with 100% DCI-P3 and 500 nits max brightness, a Ryzen 8845H CPU, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.  Actually it lists an M2 2280 SSD, so if you're brave enough to open it up you can expand it to 8TB. 
  
  Ports include two USB 4 ports (basically Thunderbolt 3), a full size SD card slot, a USB-C port with VLink, and a headphone jack, plus a 2Mpixel front camera and a 5Mpixel rear camera.
  
  Apart from the screen (which was 3000x2000 on the HP) it's better in every way, as you'd expect after five years.
  
  The CPU is ten times faster than the HP on multi-threaded tasks, and nearly three times faster single-threaded, it has the Four Essential Keys, and that VLink port supports video input - so you could buy two of them, install Linux on one, take both with you, and have a complete dual monitor working environment everywhere you go.
  
  Which I had some idea of doing with those HPs before they ate too many electrons and died.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 30 2024 09:47 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Kurt Duncan at Sunday, March 31 2024 12:55 AM (dMQGF)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 31 2024 01:39 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, April 01 2024 01:42 AM (rcPLc)

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• With Sam Bankman-Fraud headed to prison for 25 years, the era of blockchain grifters is over, and we are entering the era of blockchain grifters.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And AI grifters as well.
  
  The article tries to paint Bitcoin as something different and better because it is deliberately slow, painful, and expensive to use, but those aren't actually good qualities in a currency.  You want something fast, simple, and cheap to use, and merely slow, painful, and expensive to fake, or to steal.
  
  That's hard, and nobody has solved that problem yet.*
  
  

• FuryGPU is completely open-source - including the hardware - and can run Quake at 60 fps.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not the 2021 version; the 1996 version.  Which would run on most domestic appliances these days.
  
  
  
• Unless you source your domestic appliances from Russia, where half the CPUs don't work.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Russia, like China, has been cut off from advanced chip production facilities.
  
  China has its own 14nm production.  That's a long way behind TSMC, Intel, or Samsung, but it's not terrible.
  
  Russia is still at 90nm.
  
  
  
• The race to replace Redis.  (LWN)
  
  Redis isn't a conventional database, but rather a kind of Swiss army chainsaw for short-term data storage and manipulation.  It's extremely useful and justifiably popular and has been included in most Linux distributions for the past decade - and it just stopped being open source.
  
  So the race is on to replace it because otherwise you won't be able to update to new Linux releases without things breaking.
  
  
  
• The race to replace VMWare ESXi.  (Serve the Home)
  
  VMWare ESXi was a free, entry-level version of VMWare's enterprise platform, intended for engineers to run on their own computers so that they could experiment with the software and provide better support.
  
  VMWare got bought by Broadcom, which appears determined to kill it.
  
  Proxmox VE can now import and run your VMWare ESXi servers, which solves your problem if you were using it, but does nothing for Broadcom's self-inflicted wounds.
  
  
  
• Oh, outrage.  Cloud hosting provider Vultr has hastily removed some wording from its terms of service after users noticed.  (The Register)
  
  The legalese was supposed to grant Vultr rights to reproduce your content that you posted to their online support forums, which is normal because you can't run an online forum without that.
  
  But the way it was worded made it look like they could just make off with the data on your servers.  Which would be bad.

** He proposed making currency out of plutonium.