• 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.

• The governor of Oregon took a break from her busy schedule of - reportedly - day drinking and nervous breakdowns to sign a new right-to-repair bill that is actually good.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The legislation bans "parts pairing", where you not only need an exact replacement part, you need the exact replacement part, because all the parts have built-in clique identifiers and won't talk to interlopers.
  
  The rules come in to effect next year, and exempt a few classes of device like medical devices, where there might be an argument for strict controls over repairs, and...  Electric toothbrushes.

• Amazon is investing another $2.75 billion into AI company Anthropic, developer of Claude.  (CNBC)
  
  If you haven't heard of Claude you are not alone, but it is a thing that exists.
  
  
  
• FTX - what's left of it - is selling off most of its stake in Anthropic to raise funds to pay back customers.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  FTX misused customer funds to - among other things - buy a $500 million stake in Anthropic.
  
  That stake is now worth $1.35 billion, and may be the key to FTX customers getting all their money back.
  
  
  
• There's a mod for that.
  
  Untamed Wilds adds 24 new animals to Minecraft, with anything up to 17 species of each animal.  (So it counts "Big Cat" as one animal, but it actually includes lions, mountain lions, jaguars, leopards, snow leopards, and tigers.)
  
  Only problem is it also includes camels, giant pandas, and polar bears, which are already in Minecraft, and the config file doesn't let you turn off individual species.
  
  Bad Mobs, though, does.  When you load your modpack it automatically generates a config file of all the creatures existing in your game and lets you turn off any of them.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 29 2024 01:13 AM (rcPLc)

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• Canva, an online design collaboration platform, is buying Affinity, a traditional software development house that creates good applications and sells them to you.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm hoping Canva doesn't turn Affinity into a subscription service, because right now you can buy the entire Affinity suite - photo editing, design, and publishing apps for Windows, Mac, and iOS - for around $120. 
  
  Not per year; once.

• The Lenovo Legion Tab is officially coming to Europe and Asia.  (Lenovo)
  
  This month.  Better get a move on, because there's not much of this month left.
  
  Downside is that at 599 Euros the price is not much cheaper than importing the Japanese version.
  
  On paper though it's a great device, with a 2560x1600 8.8" screen, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.  CPU is a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, which has a Cortex X2 as its main core, so it's both recent and fast.
  
  It includes a microSD slot and two USB-C ports.  Either one can be used for charging, so you can charge while it is connected to a monitor or a headphone adapter (no separate headphone port).
  
  I'll buy one since there is no real competition.  Not two though, not at that price.
  
  
  
• I did buy the Asus M1505, the cheaper of the two Asus models I've highlighted recently.
  
  Ryzen 7730U CPU (8 Zen 3 CPU cores and 8 Vega graphics cores), 16GB of RAM which I'm upgrading to 40GB, 512GB of SSD which I'm upgrading to 2TB, the Four Essential Keys in the form of a three-column numeric keypad - not ideal but better than not having them, and the standout feature, a 15.6" 2880x1620 120Hz OLED display.
  
  Roughly $1000 as configured.
  
  
  
• If you have Mac Studio envy the FN60G sold by Topton is basically a shrunk-in-the-wash version.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's bigger than a regular NUC but still very small; it uses an Intel desktop CPU and a laptop graphics module.  No expansion slots apart from memory and storage, so what you buy it with is all you get.
  
  Apart from those two memory slots and two M.2 slots, it has two HDMI ports, two DisplayPort ports, one USB-C port which can also drive a display for up to five monitors in total; two 2.5Gbit network ports, and four USB-A ports on the back.  On the front, another two USB-A ports, one USB-C, headphone jack, and a full-size SD card slot.  Which is a pretty good complement of ports for a small system.
  
  Prices fully configured start around $1000 and go up to $2000, which is not terrible but you can certainly build a regular PC for the same price.
  
  
  
• No further Minecraft crashes since I disabled the Strawberry Fields in Mystic's Biomes.  Though given the number of new biomes in the modpack (over 200) and the number I've seen during testing (maybe 30) there could be something still lurking.
  
  It's not entirely happy running in the default 4GB heap, but it certainly runs smoothly with 16GB of RAM, which my original efforts didn't.
  
  If I don't trip over anything else I'll publish it to Curseforge this weekend.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 28 2024 01:40 AM (rcPLc)

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So judging by this crash log, somewhere between the strawberry bushes from Mystic's Biomes, Oculus, Ferrite Core, Better End Island, Immersive Weathering, Serene Seasons, Friends and Foes, and Better Desert Temples, my modpack seems to crash randomly when creating new chunks.

I suspect the culprit is Mystic's Biomes, which would be a shame, but it's not essential.

Update: Probably Mystic's Biomes; it had a big update just three days ago. I'll test some more and see if I can report something useful back to the dev. Something more than "one of these 200 mods is breaking my game and I blame you". It's configurable enough that I can turn off just the strawberry fields and see if the bug is specific to that biome.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 27 2024 06:30 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 27 2024 07:24 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 27 2024 08:20 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, March 27 2024 08:59 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, March 27 2024 12:25 PM (cARBX)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 27 2024 05:37 PM (PiXy!)

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