• Bunch of stuff happened.

• There's a vulnerability in OpenSSH, which is used on, basically, every server in the world and most networking equipment.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It lets you check if a user name exists on the server.
  
  That's it.
  
  It's been fixed.
  
  
• Just in case you were wondering why no-one listens to "experts" any more.  (Axios)
  
  
• The return of 24 cores and I can't type an email.
  
  Yeah.  Try rendering SVG to transparent PNGs some time.

• Everything is stupid.

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, August 24 2018 01:40 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 24 2018 12:18 PM (PiXy!)

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• Hot Chips!  Get yer Hot Chips!  Fresh from AnandTech.
  
  
• NEC's new vector processor for supercomputers is also available in a handy PCIe card.
  
  
• IBM's Power9 "scale up" edition supports up to 16 sockets and 128TB of RAM.
  
  
• Fujitsu's A64FX Arm processor is probably not coming to your phone since it kind of has 48 cores and is also aimed at supercomputers.
  
  
• Tachyum's Prodigy is a VLIW chip with 64 cores, 8 channel DDR5, 72 lanes of PCIe 5.0, and 2x400Gb Ethernet.  As you might have guessed, it's all on paper right now, expected to tape out next year, delivery some time after that.
  
  VLIW is kind of dead as a general purpose CPU architecture; Intel and HP bet big on it with Itanium and lost billions.  I doubt this version will fare any better.
  
  
• Nantero are making memory out of carbon nanotubes.  Many potential industrial applications of nanotubes are stalled because we can't make them long enough; this uses very, very short tubes so that's a non-issue.  Interesting if it works out.
  
  
• Google's Titan is a security processor for the cloud that with any luck does not ship with 97 known zero-day exploits.
  
  
• NVIDIA have announced a new GPU architecture but that doesn't mean they're about to drop the old architecture.  (PCPer)
  
  The main benefit of the new Turing chips is the dedicated cores for AI and ray tracing; for traditional graphics processing they're not much better than the previous generation, and significantly more expensive.  That goes double for the professional editions - particularly if you need double precision.
  
  

Social Media News

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, August 23 2018 01:36 PM (BcQU4)

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• Paper launch day for Nvidia's RTX 2000 family.  Cards will actually be available following Talk Like a Pirate Day.  (I don't know why either.)  (AnandTech)
  
  Despite WCCFTech being WCCFTech, their leaks on these cards were 100% accurate.  Top of the line 2080 Ti will have 4352 shaders and 11GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory.
  
  More interesting (potentially) is that these are the new Turing architecture with Tensor cores for AI processing and a dedicated ray-tracing unit.  When Nvidia talk about huge performance gains, they are talking about these new functions, not about the actual graphics, which look to be only 10-20% faster depending on the card. 
  
  Also, price increases across the board, so you have that to look forward to.  Though to be fair, these are far cheaper than the recently announced professional versions, and I don't think you'll find the same AI or ray-tracing performance cheaper anywhere.
  
  
• The annual Hot Chips conference is on and one of the first presentations is on Samsung's M3 chip, a high-end fully custom ARM design.  Samsung are working to catch up with Apple here, because Qualcomm are dragging their feet in that department.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Apple may release a new MacBook Air and a replacement for the 97-year-old Mac Mini.  Or not.  (Bloomberg, via Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Shuttle announced this chunky little nugget.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No, I don't know why either.
  
  
• Template languages always end up Turing complete.  The Minx template language is Turing complete, if you really want to do that.  (Well, mostly.  The template engine solves the Halting Problem by nuking your page if your template code issues too many instructions.)
  
  So either plan for that, or don't implement a template language.
  
  
• There is a new vulnerability that impacts everything.  Unless there isn't or it doesn't.  It gave me a headache and I closed the page, and now I've lost the link.  Just assume you've already been hacked and everything is gone.

• Turkeys of a feather flock together.  Does that chart stack vertically, or overlap?  Either way, it's bad.  Turkey is responsible for something between 40% and 80% of the censored Twitter accounts worldwide, depending.  (Techdirt)

• JavaScript client and server apps are vulnerable to regex attacks.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Well, the headline refers to JavaScript, but the real culprit is single-threaded event-driven model for server applications.  We invented multitasking for a reason, you clowns.  All these problems were solved in the early sixties, but nooo, you had to go and reinvent everything.
  
  
• Slow news day, busy work day.  More tomorrow.

Anime News

Pixy is Watching

Videos of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, August 21 2018 01:43 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 21 2018 06:40 AM (Q/JG2)

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Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, August 21 2018 10:02 AM (tgyIO)

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• The T2 chip in the new MacBook Pro crashes randomly.
  

  The new MacBook Pros with T2 chips do indeed kernel panic randomly, as shown in the attached image. I'd hold off buying if you can; Apple has work to do. /cc @pschiller@tim_cook@Apple@AppleSupportpic.twitter.com/zKVQAtJkQB

  — Bryan Jones (@bdkjones) August 16, 2018

  The T2 chip controls the touchbar.  Oh, and also storage encryption.  So if it stops working it bricks your laptop.  It does automatically reboot after crashes, but it would be kind of nice if it didn't crash in the first place.
  
  Here's a thirty-seven page forum thread from users whose $4800 MacBooks crashed with related errors.  (MacRumors)
  
  
• If you read AnandTech's Threadripperoo review before, well, they've updated it slightly.  Like, another 12,000 words.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• The wonderful thing about standards, is standards are wonderful things.  Wait, no, that's tiggers.  Meanwhile here's 13 next-generation form factors for high density NVMe SSDs.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Testing AMD's StoreMI with Intel's Optane produces terrible results.  Credit to Linus for persisting and finding out why - not a fault specifically in either product, but StoreMI likes to cache everything, and a 32GB Optane drive isn't big enough to produce good results on huge game files.  Giving it 256GB of SSD for the cache fixed everything.
  
  
  
  But warning: Once you have used a drive under StoreMI you have to hard reformat it before you can use it anywhere else.
  
  Oh, wait, now you don't need to watch the video.  Oops.

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 19 2018 02:02 PM (Ix1l6)

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• RAM prices may drop 25% next year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, it's a start, but it would still leave prices at more than twice their low point five years ago.
  
  
• ARM unveiled their client CPU roadmap and intentions to challenge Intel. (AnandTech)
  
  Ooh! New architecture?
  
  No.
  
  Well, new cores then?
  
  No.
  
  So... Marketing?
  
  Marketing.
  
  
• MSI's PS42 laptop is a 14" model with 1080p screen (adequate), quad core CPU (good), optional discrete GPU (great - oh, it's a crappy MX150, never mind) and A SENSIBLE KEYBOARD LAYOUT. (AnandTech)
  
  Wait, why is the trackpad all the way over there? And... Is that the webcam? DAMMIT MSI!
  
  
• New Jersey's court IT is run by idiots. Claiming changes done in order to comply with NIST recommendations, they have done exactly what NIST recommends against - maximum (not minimum!) password lengths, mandatory expiry, and security questions. (TechDirt)
  
  
• FASTER is a fast open source key-value store (the core of a database) from Microsoft. How fast? Up to 160 million operations per second fast.
  
  Ooh! It supports some sort of binary tree for sorting?
  
  No, only hashes. (PDF)
  
  Well fuck.
  
  (You can build any data structure on top of a binary tree. You can only build unordered structures on top of a hash, which is far more constraining.)
  
  
• 24 cores and I can't type an email.
  
  A day in the life of a Chrome developer at Google gives you great insight into why everything sucks so much on modern computers.
  
  
• The Protectli FW4A is a four-port firewall appliance for small(ish) offices. Install your own OS - there are various BSD and Linux distributions designed for exactly this. All the network controllers are Intel, so it should be compatible with anything and everything. (ServeTheHome)
  
  The thing I noted is that it has a VGA port. That's pretty much essential because the alternative is rigging a serial connection somehow. But I don't have anything on my desk that takes VGA in - I'd have to dig an old monitor out of the spare room.
  
  Its big brother (sister?) the FW6A has six ports (fairly obvious) and includes HDMI. It's not much more expensive - $419 vs $349 including memory and storage, and includes a lot more USB ports - and you don't need to dumpster dive for a monitor to set it up. Go for that one. Or just air gap your coworkers, that's pretty good too.
  
  
• Princess Evolution RaaS is not a poorly translated FM Towns game from 1993. Well, it might be that too, who knows. But the gameplay in the 2018 version sucks. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• AMD is now shipping their 35W low-power desktop APUs, the 2200GE and 2400GE. These have the same specs as the 2200G and 2400G except for clock speed. Capped at 35W instead of 65W they will throttle under load much sooner. (FanlessTech)
  
  AMD is also believed to be planning a 45W high-power laptop chip to complement their existing 25W laptop parts. And when I say "believed to be planning" I mean "everything except the price and ship date has been leaked".
  
  
  

Social Media News

• The US government saw what our elected idiots in Australia are doing and decided they wanted some of that too. (Reuters, via Axios)
  
  They want to make a hole-without-a-hole in the encryption of Facebook Messenger, which would of course destroy the security of the app, affecting about three hundred trillion users.
  
  It's Reuters, so they blame this on President Trump for saying mean things about MS-13, a criminal gang that practices ritual torture and mutilation of murder victims.
  
  
• When "don't be evil" hits the bottom line: Google are reportedly lying to their own staff over the planned censored search engine for the booming dystopian surveillance state sector. (The Intercept)
  
  The Intercept says "misled", but it doesn't look like it was a mistake. And while The Intercept occasionally fluffs a story pretty badly (or simply burns its sources), this one has been widely reported.
  
  
• So, this has been going on:
  

  I'm gonna build my own credit card company after Mastercard revokes my account.

  — Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 16, 2018

  Ace has the details, and explains why the social media mafia might be setting fire to their own legal feet under the DMCA.
  
  
• Oh, and this:
  

  Yesterday the SJWs ran an interesting experiment. They pointed to a specific GoFundMe page using us as "the bad people" for not hiring based on ideology and demanding people not buy Star Control. Pre-orders of Star Control jumped far more than the gofundme did.

  — Brad Wardell (@draginol) August 17, 2018

  The delightful own goal by crazed injustice warriors aside, NEW STAR CONTROL GAME. Unfortunately due to legal wrangling Star Control 1 & 2 are not available for sale at present, though I managed to grab them before they disappeared. But there is a pretty much legal, approved, and complete open-source port of Star Control 2 so not all is lost.  It's available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and Amiga. (No, really.)
  
  
• Please hold off destroying Twitter and Facebook for a few more weeks, I'm working as fast as I can.
  
  
• This will not stand.
  

  An account that tweets pictures of ducks
  
  You show 'em, @Jackpic.twitter.com/e1tv6OhDF1

  — Old Holborn✘ (@Holbornlolz) August 18, 2018

Posted by: Kayle at Saturday, August 18 2018 03:13 PM (JIRac)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 18 2018 03:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, August 19 2018 03:32 AM (BcQU4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, August 19 2018 03:34 AM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 19 2018 08:55 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 19 2018 10:55 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 19 2018 11:07 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: benzeen at Sunday, August 19 2018 03:00 PM (JpDcM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 19 2018 03:38 PM (PiXy!)

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• RetroManCave reviews the Sharp X68000 Pro.
  
  
  
  The original X68000 with its distinctive dual vertical slices pops up in manga from time to time.
  
  
  
  Art by @xiao_woo.  Frequently NSFW.
  
  
• Google says "We don't collect your location if you turn location tracking off.  We don't do that.  We don't.  Okay, we collect a little bit.  Rather a lot, really."  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Microsoft's Cortana exposed as double-agent.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you had certain "skills" enabled, locking your computer didn't really do much, because Cortana is still active.  This is fixed in the most recent Windows 10 update, which is why it's being publicly announced now.
  
  
• As any D&D player knows, you need to use fire to properly kill a troll.  Works on patent trolls too.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• NVIDIA's 2080 Ti might have 4352 shaders and 14Gbps GDDR6 RAM up from 3584 shaders and 11Gbps GDDR5X RAM on the 1080 Ti.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Normally I suggest taking anything from WCCFTech with a pound of salt, but this is so unexciting that it's probably entirely accurate.
  
  
• TinyWL is a Wayland compositor in 500 lines of C.  That's more than 39 lines of Python, but these things are commonly enormous masses of unreadable code, so it's nice to see.
  
  
• If you need a 56 core dual Xeon workstation with 768GB RAM and 7.1 audio the Supermicro X11DAC might be the motherboard for you.  (ServeTheHome)
  
  One caveat: It has 16 DIMM slots.  It has 12 memory channels.  16 is not divisible by 12.  (Apple shipped a Mac Pro with a similar arrangement, years ago.)
  
  
• After noting that AMD's 32 core 2990WX runs dramatically faster on Linux than on Windows 10, Phoronix went back and ran those tests under Windows Server as well, both 2016 and the 2019 preview.
  
  Windows Server was generally no better and sometimes significantly worse.  (Phoronix)
  
  Linux has the benefit here of having been ported to hundreds of weird architectures over the years.  The unbalanced memory paths of the 2990WX are nothing compared to some of the crazy shit out there.
  
  
• Mozilla has stomped on another 23 nosy browser extensions.  Which means they will be automatically disabled in your browser, so no particular need to worry.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  

Social Media News

• The Daily Wire fires back at Twitter's plan to reduce echo chambers by removing users' choice over the what they see, thus creating a single big echo chamber that Twitter controls.  (Daily Wire)
  
  
• For the articles!  Penthouse Australia (yes, that Penthouse) has a good article on the fallout from Google's summary defenestration of James Damore.  The article is written by Claire Lehmann of Quillette.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 18 2018 12:02 AM (Q/JG2)

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Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 18 2018 06:02 AM (Q/JG2)

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Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 18 2018 10:06 AM (ITnFO)

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• SemiEngineering offers a roundup of new memory technologies including Intel's 3D XPoint / Optane, how each works, and what we can expect. Some of these are already shipping in products, though not even Optane has made it to the mainstream yet. (SemiEngineering)
  
  
• Istio is a thing what does stuff with bits. If you read that article and end up crosseyed, don't worry, I do this for a living and it had the same effect on me. (The Next Platform)
  
  
• TinyWM is a window manager in 50 lines of C.  Or 39 lines of Python if you prefer.
  
  
• Badly behaved MacOS apps can click on security alerts to grant themselves access to your computer.
  
  This is not good. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• The Australian government is run by idiots. And this is the good bunch, of the two choices of idiots.  They are proposing to force back doors into all cryptographic security, without, they claim, weakening the security.  Which is a mathematical impossibility, but there you have it.
  

  We can’t afford to give terrorists and paedophiles a place to hide. Our new Assistance and Access Bill will modernise law enforcement and national security investigations in a digital age without requiring companies to weaken their systems. https://t.co/BXFK1HDOGG

  — Angus Taylor MP (@AngusTaylorMP) August 14, 2018
  

• Twitter is run by idiots.
  

  Twitter is "experimenting with features that would promote alternative viewpoints in Twitter’s timeline to address misinformation and reduce 'echo chambers.'" https://t.co/lYUomRmZsa

  — Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) August 15, 2018

• Twitter's app ecosystem is imploding with API features being cut with no clear guidelines for how the replacement methods will work or what they will cost developers. Some apps have cut functionality, others have shut down entirely.
  
  Twitter did offer some sample pricing for very small numbers of users. Only problem is, it's insane:

  Pricing for Premium access is $2,899 per month for 250 users. To cover this cost, a third-party app would need to charge over $16 per month to break even.

Bonus Video of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, August 17 2018 10:49 AM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 17 2018 11:03 AM (PiXy!)

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• For Intel, it's a new day so there's a new speculative execution vulnerability. This one is called Foreshadow by researchers and L1TF by Intel - Level 1 Terminal Fault because it relates to the level 1 cache permission checking termination logic. (Ars Technica)
  
  Fortunately I didn't get around to migrating to Digital Ocean just yet. We run VMs for mee.nu - half a dozen of them with more on the way - but on dedicated rather than shared hardware, so this exploit mostly doesn't apply. (Digital Ocean)
  
  An interesting point is that Intel has already provided a patch that largely resolves the problem, unless you are running hyperthreading. I'm not sure about other cloud providers, but my understanding is that Amazon run customer-specific CPUs with hyperthreading disabled, and have done for years. As core counts increase we may start seeing a trend towards disabling hyperthreading by default - as seen in the upcoming eight core i7 chips. (Or so rumour has it.)
  
  
• Google still tracks your location when you turn off location tracking. Because "don't be evil" got too complicated. (Fudzilla)
  
  
• NVIDIA's new high-end graphics cards are using Samsung's new 16Gb GDDR6 memory. This is another thing that will trickle down to consumer parts fairly quickly. It's 40% faster than the fastest commonly-used GDDR5 memory (14Gbps vs. 10Gbps).
  
  
• Faxes are now haxes. Network-attached multi-function printers too. (The Register)
  
  If you have an HP multi-function printer on your network, the time to update the firmware is right now. Some of the more recent models apparently update themselves automatically, but it's definitely something to check. You may have a wonderful high-tech firewall that blocks every single thing, but hackers can just dial straight in to your fax machine.
  
  This sort of thing has been going on for some time, really. There was a story years ago about a company that kept having outbreaks of computer viruses even after patching every single PC and server on the network.
  
  Turned out the source of the infection was a colour laser printer, which had an internal hard drive for storing fonts and print jobs.... And viruses.
  
  
• PCWorld tested the Threadripper 2990WX just like everyone else (not me) and found something interesting.  Though it trails behind the fastest Intel chips on some tests (because of memory latency, OS scheduling, or something else) that's when you are testing one application at a time.
  
  They tried running Blender and Cinebench at the same time - and it ran Cinebench as fast as the 18 core Intel i9-7980X running Cinebench alone.  (PCWorld)

• Twitter have apparently Level Two Restricted Alex Jones' account. Not suspended, but restricted, so his account is still active and his tweets are still up, he just can't tweet any more for a few days. (CNet)
  
  I have had two Level 2 restrictions and seventy-one Level One restrictions so far this year. The most recent was this:
  
  Alex Jones is like tiny baby.
  
  
• TechDirt has some nice You CAN yell FIRE! in a crowded theatre t-shirts.
  
  
• TwitterSafety says: The beatings will continue until morale improves.
  

  This week, we are suspending accounts for attempting to evade an account suspension. These accounts were previously suspended for abusive behavior or evading a previous suspension, and are not allowed to continue using Twitter.

  — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) August 14, 2018

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 15 2018 11:42 PM (Q/JG2)

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