Saturday, September 08
Daily News Stuff 8 September 2018
Tech News
- Acer's Predator Triton 900 is a convertible 17" gaming laptop. (AnandTech)
Convertible into what, exactly, they do not say.
- Phillips' 499p9h monitor is almost there. (AnandTech)
It's a 49" curved IPS display with a resolution of 5120x1440. That's pretty good, and a big step up from the more typical 3840x1080 for ultrawide monitors, but I'm holding out for 7680x2160. Which is, after all, what I already have.
- MSI's MEG X399 Creation is their latest Threadripper motherboard, with all the usual bits, including support for up to seven M.2 SSDs. That's quite a lot. (Guru3D)
- Popular Mac App Adware Doctor was spyware, shipping your browser history off to China. (Tom's Hardware)
Fourth highest grossing app in the Mac App Store. Way to go, world's first trillion-dollar company* and your nice safe walled garden.
- Hollywood is flooding Google with DMCA takedown requests targeting IMDB. (Techdirt)
This is because Hollywood is run by idiots.
- WPA3 is on its way. This will replace the ubiquitous WPA2 security on WiFi which has been getting increasingly wobbly of late as researchers came up with new ways to attack it.
If you have an old and/or cheap router, or are just unlucky, you'll probably need to buy a new one. Same goes if your phone or tablet has stopped receiving software updates. Computers should update automatically to the new standard when it arrives, unless they're really, really old, in which case they've probably already been hacked.
- Two words: Sand dams. The idea is that if you're in an arid region and a regular dam would simply evaporate in the dry season, you fill it with sand, the sand holds the water and protects it from evaporation, and you can pump it out through pipes at the bottom of the dam.
- Broadcom is shipping 802.11ax WiFi chips
Which one is that? No idea, sorry. Press release say, and I quote, "buzz buzz faster buzz".
- The Haiku operating system is expected to go into beta very soon.
Development started in 2002. This makes me feel much better about things.
- The clients for NordVPN and ProtonVPN allow possible privilege escalation attacks so patch now if you use those services.
- Techspot asks with the recent price cut, is the Threadripper 1920X an appealing platform?
Yes. The answer is yes.
Social Media News
- "I'm not biased, and I have no agenda" says Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to a congressional enquiry and then immediately bans the accounts of Alex Jones and InfoWars for confronting CNN operative Oliver Darcy who has been working tirelessly to get their accounts banned. (Mashable)
Franz Kafka eat your heart out.
- Feeling left out Apple banned the InfoWars app from their App Store after their earlier ban of the InfoWars podcast sent the app rocketing up the charts. (Axios)
I smell a lawsuit in the wind, because the App Store is the only way to get apps on to iPhones and iPads, which account for half of all mobile devices in the US. (Far less overseas, where we're not all rich idiots.)
Picture of the Day
* If you don't adjust for inflation, see article from whenever.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:24 PM
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; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">Re: Triton 900
; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">
; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">
"Can flip it into various modes, including laptop and tablet." ; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">
; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">I think that's what they mean. Nice looking laptop. Might be a bit heavy and hot for reading in bed. ; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">
; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">I'll wait for when they release the Cherry 2000 model.
"Can flip it into various modes, including laptop and tablet." ; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">
; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">I think that's what they mean. Nice looking laptop. Might be a bit heavy and hot for reading in bed. ; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">
; font-family: Arimo, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(246, 246, 246);">I'll wait for when they release the Cherry 2000 model.
Posted by: Armed and Larry at Sunday, September 09 2018 12:54 AM (rTqn/)
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Wow, I certainly didn't type all that out!
Posted by: Armed and Larry at Sunday, September 09 2018 12:55 AM (rTqn/)
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"Convertible into what, exactly, they do not say."
2" thick tablet? Sign me up!
"Hollywood is flooding Google with DMCA takedown requests"This kind of problem could be mitigated quite successfully by banning incompetent or malicious requesting entities.
802.11ax looks to mainly be moving from 256-QAM to 1024-QAM. Back in the dialup days, nn-QAM referred to the number of tones used to distinguish bits (kind of like how TLC flash uses 8 different voltages to represent 3 bits worth of info in one cell, instead of 3 cells using 2 voltages.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 09 2018 04:11 AM (ITnFO)
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Wow, nice styling on those blockquotes. They really stand out.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 09 2018 04:11 AM (ITnFO)
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Well, they were blockquotes when I entered them into the HTML editor.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 09 2018 04:12 AM (ITnFO)
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It's extremely unsafe to ban the requesting entities, though, because then if some of the requests are -legitimate-, and Google ignores them, then Google ends up liable for participating in the infringement (and subject to statutory damages).
The law is a little unbalanced in that Google (should it fail to heed the notice) becomes liable for statutory damages; but the damages for a report not filed "in good faith" are limited to -actual- damages, which are going to be pretty minuscule for any particular instance. So the only way that Google can legally respond would be in aggregate; "hey, you filed a hundred thousand bad notices last year!" But then the other party can turn around and say "we filed eight hundred thousand GOOD ones; if our responses aren't always great, it's just due to the huge scale of your lawbreaking!" That's not a good place for Google to be, legally speaking.
Of course you can say "it's not Google's fault there's all this copyright infringement going on" - after all, the law doesn't give them any responsibility to stop it, just to respond to the DMCA requests properly. But if they go in front of a judge and say "we can't comply with the law due to the scale of the problem," there's a non-zero chance the judge will come back with "it's your responsibility to ameliorate that by reducing the number of infringing uses yourselves!" And suddenly Youtube has a requirement to screen for stuff affirmatively, and the financials for running it go right out the window...
The law is a little unbalanced in that Google (should it fail to heed the notice) becomes liable for statutory damages; but the damages for a report not filed "in good faith" are limited to -actual- damages, which are going to be pretty minuscule for any particular instance. So the only way that Google can legally respond would be in aggregate; "hey, you filed a hundred thousand bad notices last year!" But then the other party can turn around and say "we filed eight hundred thousand GOOD ones; if our responses aren't always great, it's just due to the huge scale of your lawbreaking!" That's not a good place for Google to be, legally speaking.
Of course you can say "it's not Google's fault there's all this copyright infringement going on" - after all, the law doesn't give them any responsibility to stop it, just to respond to the DMCA requests properly. But if they go in front of a judge and say "we can't comply with the law due to the scale of the problem," there's a non-zero chance the judge will come back with "it's your responsibility to ameliorate that by reducing the number of infringing uses yourselves!" And suddenly Youtube has a requirement to screen for stuff affirmatively, and the financials for running it go right out the window...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, September 09 2018 06:52 AM (v29Tn)
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A lot of the take down craziness is being driven by technology outpacing both law and industries' ability to adapt to change. Much of our content distribution industry is still as outdated as buggy-whip manufacturers in their thinking and desperate for the 'good old days' when they were robber barons of content.
Bluntly I think we're (United States) going to need to go back to something more in line with the 'limited Times' portion of the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution. I suspect, given the much easier modes of publication today compared to the 1700s, it'll ultimately end up somewhere around 10 years +/- 5 years. Opening up all this material to the public domain and restraining the time the works need to be protected would rip away much of the incentive to invest in overly aggressive copyright protections.
Bluntly I think we're (United States) going to need to go back to something more in line with the 'limited Times' portion of the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution. I suspect, given the much easier modes of publication today compared to the 1700s, it'll ultimately end up somewhere around 10 years +/- 5 years. Opening up all this material to the public domain and restraining the time the works need to be protected would rip away much of the incentive to invest in overly aggressive copyright protections.
Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, September 10 2018 04:03 AM (06P2d)
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