• Docker is a free and open source container management system.  Want to skip an update because it could interrupt your workflow?  That's a paid feature.
  
  

Tech News

• Trading places: AMD is now the choice for high-end desktops and Intel is the budget gaming pick.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Looking here at the 11400.  I'd recommend the 11500 if you want to run without a dedicated graphics card, but either one will work fine.  AMD's current desktop parts don't have integrated graphics at all.
  
  
  
• AMD's next-gen graphics processors could have 80 compute units and 5120 shader cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If you've been following along, you might be saying Wait a minute...  Because, yes, their current graphics cards also have 80 CUs and 5120 shaders.
  
  The difference is that the next gen cards will have two of these, bringing chiplets to GPUs.
  
  Intel is working on the same approach, but Intel has never built a high-end graphics card...  Well, not since the 82786, 35 years ago, and I think things have changed a little since then.
  
  
  
• Sued for copyright violation over three words: UK company What3Words threatened to sue a security researcher for offering a better alternative.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What3Words divides the world into a 3x3 meter grid and identifies each grid square with three words, so if you trapped by ravaging hyenas in the hinterlands of Mozambique you can tell rescuers you are at ambiguous polygonal calliope instead of, well, just sending them your GPS co-ordinates because obviously this only works if you have a smart phone anyway.
  
  The researcher noted that What3Words can often give similar names to locations relatively close together, so that rescuers might be searching ambivalent polygamous carrion a mile from your actual location while you are being rendered into exactly that, and offered a solution that doesn't do that, and was threatened with a lawsuit.
  
  When reached for comment on the legal basis for such a suit, the company responded, Uh.
  
  
  
• How to stop Window 10's virus scanner from uploading files to Microsoft.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Microsoft might be more trustworthy than Google or Facebook, but that's not saying a lot, and if you work with confidential data you might have a legal obligation to take this sort of measure.  At least there is an option to turn off, even if it should properly be off by default.
  
  
  
• Fuck Twitter with a piledriver and fifteen feet of curare-tipped wrought iron fence and no lubricant.  (ZDNet)
  
  Australia is considering a blanket ban of terrorist material on social media.  Google, Facebook, and Twitter pushed back against this idea.

  Twitter's senior director of public policy and philanthropy in the APAC region Kathleen Reen said it would be incredibly problematic to use a blunt force instrument like a ban.

  Fucking excuse me?

  "If you ban all discussion at all about it … you may find yourself effectively chasing it off our platforms where the companies are working to address these issues, and pushing it out into other platforms."

  You just fucking came up with that all by your fucking self, did you, Kath?

  "To be clear, stopping the conversation entirely won't address the problem in our view. In fact, it'll make it worse," she said.

  I'd invite you to burn in Hell, Kath, but that would probably violate multiple infernal toxic waste laws.
  
  
  
• To absolutely no-one's surprise, shady companies that offer to repair your reputation for a fee work hand in hand with shady companies that offer to ruin your reputation for a fee.  (New York Times)
  
  Also, ruination is much cheaper than repair, but that's just entropy.
  
  
  
• The shutdown of Samsung's foundry in Austin caused by frozen windmills cost at least $268 million.  (Austin American-Statesman)
  
  Nuclear reactors don't freeze.
  
  Just sayin'.

It Takes a Village Video of the Day

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• The Opera browser now supports decentralised domain name lookups.  (Tech Radar)
  
  Okay, the story is slightly more complicated than that, but ultimately it doesn't make much more sense.
  
  A company called Unstoppable Domains sells domains under the .blockchain name space - called a top-level domain or TLD.  They didn't buy the rights to .blockchain or register it with the appropriate authorities, they just did it.    And the secret there is that anyone can do this.  In fact, anyone has always been able to do this.
  
  The tricky part is getting other people to agree that you own .blockchain, but with the current bubble there's stupid amounts of money splashing around and money works great for convincing people to go along with stupid ideas.
  
  The stupid idea in this case is to use the blockchain to distributed domain name lookups, rather than DNS, which has been around since 1983.  (Before 1983 the internet was so small that there was just a file with a list of all the servers.)
  
  The rationale here is that the blockchain - they use Ethereum, but any blockchain - is inherently distributed; the reason this is stupid is that so is DNS.
  
  Ethereum has some advantages in that it is transactional and auditable, so you can see exactly what changes have been made, when, and by whom.  And everything is controlled by contracts so in theory no-one can steal your domain.  In practice of course that can still happen, and will.  If nothing else works they'll just break your kneecaps.
  
  Anyway, the real problem with all this is that it runs on Ethereum, and Ethereum is at a record high of $2900.  (CNBC)
  
  Every change you make to your DNS settings with this system is an Ethereum transaction, and Ethereum transactions are paid in Ethereum coins, at a price that depends on the value of Ethereum itself and the gas price, which varies depending on how busy the network is, rather like this:
  
  
  That spike has passed, but earlier today if you had wanted to apply a single, simple DNS update via Ethereum, it would have cost your upwards of $300.  And that's assuming that it really stopped at a gas price of 400 rather than breaking the tracking software and keeping right on going.
  
  This isn't registering a domain, it's just remembering to point www.my.domain at your web server as well as my.domain.  $300 just for that.
  
  I'm paying less than that, per year, for two high-end virtual machines each capable of hosting hundreds of websites.  In Australia, where hosting is a lot more expensive than the US or Europe.
  
  DNS updates, meanwhile, are free.
  
  

Tech News

• TSMC, which manufactures AMD's Epyc CPUs, is using AMD's Epyc CPUs to manufacture AMD's Epyc CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not a huge story on the surface, except that TSMC is running billions of dollars worth of incredibly advanced manufacturing equipment that can't be interrupted, ever, even for a moment, without risking weeks of production, and they rely on AMD systems to control it all.
  
  
  
• Turkey has pretty much banned cryptocurrencies.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They say this is because the currencies are being used for criminal activities and funding terrorism, which, this being Turkey, is almost certainly true, but the key problem is that they aren't being used for the right criminal activities and funding approved terrorism.
  
  
  
• Huawei may be releasing a 3:2 32" desktop monitor with a resolution of 4500x3000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm not sure why, though.  Microsoft's Surface Studio - is that even still available?  Okay, yes - has a 28" display with that resolution, but it's designed to lie almost flat so the whole thing can be used as a huge drawing surface by artists and animators.  That makes sense; it's a niche market but a real one.
  
  I'm not sure who wants a standalone monitor like that.  I currently have two 4K monitors each displaying two apps side-by-side.  What I'd really like is a single huge screen measuring something like 50" with a resolution of 10240x2880, so I can have five apps at once with the the main one centered in my vision and no nasty gaps in between.  The best I can currently get is 5120x1440, exactly half of what I want.
  
  
  
• Got a slight ding in your shiny new iPad Pro?  Didn't pay up-front for AppleCare+?  That will be $699.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Prefer to take it to an independent repair shop?
  
  You can't.
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• Shared libraries considered harmful.  (Kernel.org)
  
  Shared libraries were essential on early multi-user systems because they drastically reduced memory requirements when memory cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars per megabyte.  Now you get get as much second-hand server RAM as you want for $1 per gigabyte, so the complexities that shared code brings with it are coming to the fore.
  
  This is Linus Torvalds himself, and whatever you may think of him he does generally understand how Linux works.
  
  
  
• Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1 is here.  (Phoronix)
  
  A bit of history here: Once upon a time - 1995 to be precise - there was a popular Linux distribution called Red Hat.  After some years that was split into two separate versions - Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, which was stable and carefully tested and required a paid subscription, and Fedora, which was essentially the preview version of RHEL.
  
  Then the CentOS project came along, which took the source code for RHEL - which has to be published because it's all open source - stripped out any Red Hat proprietary content and trademarks, and gave it away.
  
  This being a pretty poor revenue model, the CentOS organisation ran short of funds, and Red Hat sponsored them because it was a good way of bringing in customers: Get them on CentOS, let them run into trouble, and sell them RHEL licenses and support agreements.
  
  Then IBM bought Red Hat, looked at this, decided that customers were not getting properly, I think the term is, serviced, and basically murdered the CentOS project.
  
  Rocky Linux, launched by one of the original CentOS creators and named after another (late) founder of that project, is funded in part by Amazon and Microsoft because, basically, lol fuck you IBM.
  
  Which is good for us, because we get a solid version of Linux for free.
  
  Except that I moved on to Ubuntu years ago, because CentOS 7 kind of sucked and CentOS 8 took seven forevers to finally arrive.
  
  Ubuntu certainly isn't perfect, but it ships like clockwork.  Every two years there's a long-term support release, and then you wait three months for the critical bugs to be shaken out by other people so you can deploy it.
  
  (Actually 20.04 was pretty solid from day one.  Depending on where you are reading this, you are likely connecting to a server running on Ubuntu 20.04.)
  
  
  
• Chrome is getting a new feature that will let web apps read your computer's filesystem.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There is no way this will immediately go horribly wrong.
  
  
  
• Python has the same bug when dealing with retarded IP addresses as Perl and Node.js.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  8.8.8.8 is the IP address of Google's DNS service.  010.8.8.8 should be the same IP address, because you're supposed to interpret numbers with a leading 0 as octal ( base 8 ) rather than just decimal numbers entered by a sloppy typist or a programmer with OCD who insists that every three-digit field actually contain three digits.
  
  Up through Python version 3.8.0a3, what it actually did instead was tell you to fuck off.  While technically incorrect, this was at least safe.
  
  With Python version 3.8.0a4 through to the current version 3.9.4 and preview releases of 3.10, it accepted your horrible IP address and passed it through to the underlying library... 
  
  Which turned out to be broken, such that 010.8.8.8 was interpreted as 10.8.8.8, and whoever actually owned that IP address could steal all your data.  Well, your DNS lookups anyway.
  
  
  
• You can download Windows 10 21H1 update right now.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  But why?
  
  
  
• The developers of AI Dungeon developed a filter to look for child pornography.  (Vice)
  
  Neglecting the fact that fantasy role-playing games are a 24-hour all you can eat murder buffet, the creators of the game went hunting for...  Okay, look, these people are idiots.  They read everyone's content in case someone engaged in inappropriate fiction.
  
  
  
• A California appeals court has ruled that Amazon is liable for the products it sells to exactly the same degree any other company engaged in the same business activities would be.  (MSN)
  
  Amazon is awash with blatant fraud and they have never done anything about it.  About time someone called them on the carpet.

Anime Notes

• With Escaflowne, watch the TV series.  If you're curious you can then also watch the movie, but don't watch it first.  It tries to compress a 26-episode TV series down to 98 minutes, and it simply doesn't work.
  
  
• With Fushigi Yuugi, watch the TV series, and then for the love of all that is holy, stop.  There are three OVA sequels, but they are the anime equivalent of necrotising fasciitis.

Posted by: Jay at Sunday, May 02 2021 10:50 PM (0jVI9)

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It was, of course, a descendent of these eccentric poets who invented this curious tale of impending doom which enabled the people of Golgafrincham to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The other two-thirds, of course, stayed at home and lived full, rich, and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

• After Basecamp recently clamped down on the woke bullshit compromising their business they are now seeing exactly the desired result: An entire useless third of their employees have boarded the Ark.  (Gizmodo)
  
  If I ever see a Basecamp resume crossing my desk - at least, one from this mass exodus - I will laugh myself sick before binning it.
  
  And then pull it out of the bin, laugh some more, tear it up, and bin it again.

• Intel's future Sapphire Rapids server CPUs could have as many as 80 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This will be Intel's first chiplet-based CPU.  AMD started this trend in 2017, largely because they simply didn't have the budget to design and manufacture huge server chips with a then-unknown market acceptance.
  
  Instead, AMD's engineers added three high-speed interconnects to the standard desktop CPU, so that four eight-core parts could be linked together as a single 32-core part.
  
  It worked, and AMD now has server market share they haven't seen in 15 years, leaving Intel playing technical - if not sales - catchup.
  
  It's not clear when Sapphire Rapids will actually ship; the only official word so far is that Intel will be using these parts in a supercomputer for Argonne National Lab starting this year.
  
  
  
• Taiwan has banned recruitment for semiconductor industry jobs located in West Taiwan.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Chinese government is scrambling to build up its semiconductor industry, after being banned from purchasing both latest-generation chips and latest-generation manufacturing equipment by the Trump Administration.
  
  Despite the changeover in Washington DC those bans are still in effect.  China is five years behind Taiwan, and while that might not sound like much, five years ago Taiwan's semiconductor industry was a mess.  Back in 2016 TSMC was still mostly producing 28nm parts, because the 20nm process was a disaster and 16nm was still ramping up.
  
  This year they plan to start production of 3nm.
  
  So five years behind actually means ten times worse.
  
  
  
• The unannounced Zen 3+ core for Ryzen 6000 may have been cancelled.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Or not. 
  
  It looks like there won't be a new desktop lineup from AMD this year, with Zen 4 expected to arrive in Q1 of 2022.  With manufacturing constrained and demand consistently outstripping supply across AMD's entire product range, it makes sense for them to focus on major new generations rather than trying to fill in gaps in the schedule to keep marketing happy.
  
  Intel will ship Alder Lake late this year, and that will introduce support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 - double the memory bandwidth and double the I/O bandwidth - but that doesn't look like a great part for desktop systems, since it's limited to 8 full-size cores where AMD already goes to 16.
  
  For laptops, possibly yes, since it also has up to 8 low-power cores, similar to the recent Arm based MacBook.  That could help deliver all-day battery life in a lightweight notebook.
  
  
  
• Do not buy the PNY CS2130 SSD.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Instead of office chair, shipment contained live bobcat.  Would not buy again.
  
  
  
• Pornhub received 500,000 DMCA takedown notices lat year - and issued nearly ten times that number.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  They all deserve each other, frankly.
  
  
  

British Panda Accent Video of the Day

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• The Chia blockchain has consumed over 1 exabyte of storage in its first month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you stored it all on 3.5" floppies and stacked it up, it would reach five times further than the Moon.
  
  And it is entirely useless data.
  
  Here's a motherboard designed so you can plug 32 SSDs into it directly.
  
  Just because something is entirely useless doesn't mean there's no market for it.
  

• Meanwhile Nvidia is planning to cripple its video cards so they're useless for crypto mining.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Again, with new hardware releases, because the first time they did this they accidentally released a test driver that uncrippled them and they can't put those worms back in the can.
  
  
  
• HP is building a 10 petaFLOP supercomputer for Singapore.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It will have 110,000 CPU cores and, um, 352 video cards.  They're big expensive video cards, but it's a little unusual to have a system like this so heavily focused on the CPU side of things these days.
  
  I'm guessing though that the people spending the $30 million know what they need.
  
  
  
• Dammit Walter.  (Help Net Security)
  
  
  
  If you have a QNAP NAS, unplug it from the network, unplug the power, unplug all the drives, and probably just kind of leave it that way.
  
  They thought that the reason they were all getting infected with ransomware was that there was a SQL injection vulnerability.  Reasonable belief because there was a SQL injection vulnerability.
  
  Turns out though that the vector was a hard-coded login for the backup service.  Username walter.  Password walter.
  
  
  
• Protocol analysis doesn't work on the new Arm-based Macs.  (Intuibits)
  
  The Arm based Macs aren't general-purpose computers.  You don't control them, and you barely own them.  They're tablets with delusions of adequacy.
  
  
  
• The Vivaldi browser can now block those stupid EAT MY COOKIES messages that have infested websites ever since GDPR came into effect.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Vivaldi is one of the four browsers I'd recommend.  The others are Brave, Waterfox, and in a corporate environment, Edge.
  
  Microsoft isn't particularly trustworthy, but they still prefer making lots of money to getting likes on Twitter.
  
  
  
• The IRS wants help hacking cryptocurrency wallets.  (Motherboard)
  
  Good luck with that.  You'd have to start out by banning arithmetic.

Never Trust a Squirrel With Fireworks Video of the Day

Cowboy Bebop Opening Theme Video of the Day

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• Chia is bad news.
  
  The new and extra-stupid cryptocurrency based on storage rather than compute has spiked Adata's SSD sales by 500%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's good for Adata, right up until their regular customers can't find SSDs anymore, so, about a week.
  
  Also, Chia's write-heavy workloads might void your warranty.
  
  The original main server here has an enterprise SSD rated at 5 DWPD - drive writes per day - and since it's a 3.2TB drive that's 16TB of writes.  (The second main server I just added has two Samsung 970 Evo drives - 1TB for the system and backups, 2TB for VM storage.)
  
  Second and third-tier consumer drives from companies like Adata and Galax don't come anywhere near that endurance and will die if you write to them continuously day after day.
  
  Actually, I've fried a 7.6TB enterprise MLC drive with a 2.5 million hour MTBF, but I think that was a freak event and not an endurance issue, since we had six of them in production and only one failed.

Tech News

• The Acer Nitro XV272U KVbmiiprzx is a 27" 170Hz 1440p gaming monitor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It supports DisplayHDR 400 and a 90% DCI-P3 colour gamut.  I'd much prefer a 4K monitor at 60Hz though.
  
  But they can't seriously be that short of names.
  
  
  
• AI Dungeon leaks data.  (GitHub)
  
  Details of your dungeon may have been [reads article] definitely were publicly accessible.  Not your username or password or email address or driver's license or credit score or phone number or date of birth or blood type...  Just the information about the adventure you were working on.
  
  More significantly, the imbeciles running AI Dungeon were busy filtering private content.
  
  
  
• Speaking of imbeciles Experian.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  If you jumped from just the name to the conclusion they leaked my personal information and credit score you are mostly correct.  They leaked everyone's personal information and credit score.
  
  
  
• Australia's corporate watchdog, the ACCC - more-or-less equivalent to the US FTC - is investigating Apple and Google over unfair practices in their respective app stores.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  International watchdogs are more likely to have teeth here than US ones because if they can find an excuse to levy huge fines, it's basically free money.  And Big Tech spends an inordinate amount of time generating exactly that sort of excuse.
  
  Also, the comments on that article are full of the kind of people who would have reported their parents to the Stasi and then declined the reward.  Disappointing, because Paul Thurrott, who runs the site, is more sensible than that.
  
  
  

Megumi Hayashibara - Excuse Me - Reliant K Music Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, April 29 2021 11:07 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 29 2021 11:40 PM (LADmw)

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• I have two brand new development servers.  Well, virtual servers, but big ones: 12 cores, 48GB RAM, 720GB of SSD.  I already had a development server, but it was smaller - only 6 cores and 24 GB of RAM - but more importantly it was in Los Angeles.
  
  These are right here in Sydney, so they're a 7ms ping away rather than 180ms.  If you've never spent your days maintaining servers on the other side of the planet I can just say, you haven't missed much.
  
  These are really going to make my life easier.  They're big enough that I can drop a complete copy of this site on there to try things out in isolation.
  
  If these work out well I won't need to keep a Linux server at home anymore.  At $20 per month for the pair (prepaid for a year) it makes little economic sense to run my own, plus they have faster internet connections than I can get where I live.
  
  (In theory Australia's NBN has offered gigabit speeds for years.  In practice, you simply can't get it.  I remember one mid-sized ISP here saying that they had a total of four customers on the gigabit plan.  I could get 5G, but I barely rate one bar even on 4G.)

Tech News

Akai Haato Video of the Day

Atsuko Kagari Video of the Day

Megumi Hayashibara Theme Song Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, April 29 2021 02:14 AM (ZlYZd)

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• Basecamp, long a thought leader in woke bullshit in the tech industry, has woken up and smelled the brokeness.  (Hey)
  
  They've announced just a few small changes:
  
  
• Political discussions on work accounts are banned.
• No more woke benefits. You get paid. It's your money, spend it however you want.
• No more committees.
• No worrying about the past.
• No more peer reviews. Your manager is expected to manage.
• The world is big enough to look after itself. Or not. We're a business, we're here to make money.

The usual suspects are up in arms. Sane people are cautiously pessimistic.

• Is AMD selling defective Xbox CPUs as desktop systems?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Looks like it.  With the ongoing chip shortage it makes no sense to throw out an Xbox CPU just because the graphics core isn't up to scratch; just disable the graphics and you have a solid (if previous generation) eight core processor.
  
  The system in question appears to use GDDR6 memory, which means that it's not a mainstream Ryzen part, but a custom chip from either the recent Xbox or PlayStation lineups.
  
  
  
• TSMC is on track to deliver 4nm and 3nm chips next year.  (AnandTech)
  
  Compared to current 7nm parts (Apple is shipping 5nm parts from TSMC, but no-one else is yet) these will use half the power and be as little as one-third the size.  They'll also be faster - up to 30% - but that's a bit more complicated; it's measured at optimum power usage, rather than maximum performance.
  
  So it's meaningful for mobile phones at the low end, and servers with hundreds of cores at the high end, but not so much for desktop systems, which focus on a different part of the performance-per-watt curve.
  
  While shortages are expected to continue into next year, TSMC is planning to pump $30 billion a year over the next three years for updates and expansion.
  
  
  
• All your Mac are belong to us.  (Objective-See)
  
  A bug introduced in MacOS 10.15 lets hackers slide malware right past all of Apple's multi-layered protection schemes and simply take over your Mac.
  
  Your Mac.  My Mac is still running 10.14, because every release - both major releases and point releases - since then has been a bug-ridden pile of crap.
  
  It's a long article.  If you have the time and you want to see how security guys earn their keep, it's worth reading through it, and just imagine that any words you don't understand are witchcraft.  You won't be far wrong.
  
  
  
• A laser-toting robot can zap 100,000 weeds per hour.  (Freethink)
  
  Downside: It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.  To get that speed it uses high-powered carbon-dioxide lasers, not cheap solid-state ones.
  
  I for one welcome our new weed-zapping overlords.
  
  
  
• Canada is offline after a beaver gnawed through the phone cord/  (Gizmodo)
  
  Or maybe only part of Canada.  I'm hazy on the details.  It's Canada.
  
  
  

Megumi Hayashibara Theme Song Video of the Day

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Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 28 2021 12:33 AM (LADmw)

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Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, May 01 2021 09:46 AM (ZlYZd)

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• No reasonable person, says Apple, would assume that they owned the products they had bought.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Apple is about to discover that the world is full of unreasonable people.

• Hackers breached Apple contract manufacturer Quanta and pilfered schematics of existing and new devices.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They are demanding $50 million in ransom or they will release the documents, which would potentially allow people to repair Apple devices rather than replace them.
  
  
  
• Apple is also being sued over misleading claims of water-resistance ratings on iPhones.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Apple, it seems, rates water resistance with regards to distilled water.  Unless you have some very specific living or working conditions, it is unlikely that this is what your phone will encounter.
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Strix G15 has the four essential keys.
  
  I know this because a colleague's work laptop died this morning, and our boss being sensible about this stuff told her to go to the local electronics store, buy whatever she preferred, within reason, and expense it.
  
  She needed 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD to handle our development environment, and the ROG Strix is what they had in stock.  It also happens to have a 144Hz screen, a six-core i7-10750H CPU, and an RTX 2060, so it's probably better for gaming than anything I own.
  
  
  
• Twitter is blocking tweets that criticise the Indian government.  (The Wire)
  
  In India, yes, but that is where they are most relevant.
  
  India still has a tendentious relationship with free speech.  They're not blatantly totalitarian like China, but they certainly tend towards the authoritarian.
  
  
  
• This is why we can't have nice things.  (LayerCI)
  
  Many providers of CI - continuous integration testing tools - offered free tiers useful for individual programmers and baby startups.  That's fast disappearing because people are abusing these facilities to mine cryptocurrencies.
  
  This is spectacularly inefficient - one commenter noted it cost them $50 for a user to mine $1 worth of Monero - but that doesn't matter because they are not personally bearing the cost.
  
  If that reminds you of anything - or indeed everything - in politics, that just means you're paying attention.
  
  
  
• Note to self: Look into Envoy.  (Better Programming)
  
  Envoy is an application router - similar to a reverse proxy like Caddy or Nginx, but smarter and more automated at directing requests for pages to the right endpoint.  I ran into some issues trying to load-balance servers last week when we came under some sort of weird garbage-HTTP-request attack, because Caddy's routing isn't flexible enough.
  
  It also offers caching, what they call "circuit breaking", where you'll automatically get the cached content if the back-end server is overloaded, and fault injection, which basically acts as the Handicapper General from Harrison Bergeron to make sure that when things actually do go wrong, your configuration will handle it.
  
  
  
• Linux Foundation to UMN: Bite me.  (Kernel.Org)
  
  Apology not accepted.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 27 2021 12:02 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 27 2021 12:06 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: ReallyBored at Tuesday, April 27 2021 02:00 AM (cp/J1)

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