A Daily Roundup of Exceptionally Interesting Tweets for Some Value of Interesting

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 27 2019 11:44 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 27 2019 11:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 28 2019 12:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Tech News

Social Media News

Don't Drop the Bunny of the Day

1 "I regret to report that Australia's Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is retarded."
Planning on getting re-banned immediately after your latest Twitter suspension is up, are you?

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 27 2019 12:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 27 2019 12:34 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 27 2019 12:35 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Kayle at Wednesday, March 27 2019 09:35 AM (magRz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 27 2019 10:16 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, March 28 2019 11:16 AM (jl9eJ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 28 2019 11:51 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: muon at Monday, April 01 2019 07:56 PM (vMYTH)

Posted by: muon at Monday, April 01 2019 07:58 PM (vMYTH)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, April 02 2019 03:07 PM (LZ7Bg)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Well, that should free up some time.
  
  
  
  I've appealed the suspension, but a platform that suspends users over such things is a platform that is rapidly dying, probably of sepsis. Now I just need to get back to work and push the little daisies and make them come up.*
  
  Currently not suspended on Facebook, YouTube, Reddit.  Actually I am still suspended on YouTube but because I'm a paying Google Music subscriber and have bought a couple of videos on Google Play they accidentally gave me a new premium account and linked it to my Gmail.  Shrug.
  
  Twitter could offer a new feature where for a monthly fee they have potential suspensions reviewed by a human being who is slightly smarter than paint before they take effect, but they seem to be doubling down on the social media equivalent of necrotising fasciitis.
  
  * I don't think I ever really listened to that song before, just heard snippets of it on the radio back in the day.  I just looked on YouTube (status: not banned).  First, that was a guy?  Second, fuck, that is terrible.
  
  
• Apple's future is cable TV only worse. (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's a bright sunshiny day for Cupertino.
  
  
• PyPy 7.1 is out.
  
  This is mainly an update to its Unicode string handling, with improvements to both performance and memory usage. Python 3.6 support is still beta, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need.
  
  
• Telegram now lets you delete any message you sent in the last 48 hours from both your device and the recipient's. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There's no possible way that will be immediately and massively abused baby one more time.
  
  
• New Zealand is... (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Seriously, their Prime Minister is a day tripper, possibly a one-way ticket.
  
  

  New Zealand isn't just BANNING the shooter's manifesto.
  They're SELLING it. https://t.co/987bzD6pfz
  
  Click on "Exemption info form The Great Replacement"
  A document will download.
  It says "to proceed with a formal application, please note that this will incur a fee of $102.20. " pic.twitter.com/siQmtL6Lct

  — Nick Monroe (@nickmon1112) March 25, 2019

  
  
• A team of quantum mechanics working late at the local quantum garage has built a thing that does stuff. (Quanta)
  
  But they don't have the wings and they wonder why.
  

• Discord also just banned oatmeal.  These people are retarded.
  
  
  
  And said "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?"
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 26 2019 12:44 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, March 26 2019 10:12 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 26 2019 10:52 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Moravec's Paradox: Thinking is easy.  Moving is hard.
  
  To put it another way, the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" is the easy part, and getting a motorised suitcase to navigate a busy airport terminal is the hard part.
  
  
• Apple wants to reinvent itself as a services company.  (Bloomberg)
  
  (Looks at iTunes.)
  
  Yeah, no.
  
  
  

Social Media News

• New Zealand's Ministries of Peace and Truth have worked together to make the anti-Muslim terrorist's manifesto illegal to read.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Great.  Wonderful.  What could possibly go wrong?

• Matt Taibbi has a long and mostly solid piece on the massive media malfeasance of "Russiagate".
  
  Worth reading.  Bring snacks.
  
  
• Garth Nix has a fifth book out in the Old Kingdom trilogy.
  
  Clariel (book 4) was a prequel.  Goldenhand (book 5) is a sequel simultaneously to Abhorsen (book 3), and to Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case from the short story collection Across the Wall.  You don't need to read that but it's worth it.

• Need a 21" 4K OLED monitor?  Got too much money?  Asus can solve both your problems!  (AnandTech)
  
  Their shiny new ProART PQ22UC starts at a mere £4,799.
  
  This is apparently one of those fancy new inkjet-printed panels.  Whatever the advantages of that process, price does not seem to be among them.
  
  
• Which is the better high-end chipset, AMD's X399 or Intel's X299?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A lot of this will depend on which CPU you have, because the compatibility between the two is zero.
  
  
• The Nokia 7 Plus stole your personal data and shipped it off to China.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This came down to an error in software installation.  Only models intended for sale within China were meant to have the violate-all-privacy feature enabled.
  
  (The data only consisted of phone identifying details, not your email address or passwords, so this is a worrying sign rather than a huge problem in itself.)
  
  
• GitHub 11.9 is out with automatic secrets detection.  (GitLab)
  
  That is, it will tell you if you've put passwords and API keys into your project.  Which, as we noted yesterday, is something that happens a lot.
  
  
• FEMA leaked the personal details of 2.3M disaster survivors and the Oregon Department of Human Services (do they have a department of inhuman services?) leaked 2 million emails.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Good work.
  
  
• The latest version of Chrome is bloody annoying.
  
  
• Apple is phasing out support of 32 bit apps and with it a whole bunch of video codecs and other QuickTime functionality that they haven't bothered to port to 64 bit.  (Six Colors)
  
  Which means that some older video files will simply become unplayable on new Macs.
  
  
• Security researchers have found 36 new flaws in the LTE protocol.  (ZDNet)
  
  LTE is the new secure mobile protocol that replaced the old insecure protocols.
  
  
• Google's Stadia streaming game platform will be dead within 3 years because Google is run by idiots.  (One Angry Gamer)

Posted by: Kristophr at Tuesday, March 26 2019 08:52 AM (9759K)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Ryzen motherboards are getting BIOS updates to support the upcoming Ryzen 3000 series chips and as a result new details of the design and configuration are leaking.  (TechPowerup)
  
  Highlights:
  
  
• Infinity Fabric 2 at 100GB/s is twice as fast as Infinity Fabric 1, and that's apparently down to increased clocks and not wider channels.  And that means the latency is potentially halved, which will help mitigate the off-die memory controller.
  
  
• The AM4 dual-die parts will have an IF link between the two dies as well as the necessary link from CPU die to I/O die.  That means 100GB/s between the CPUs in addition to the 100GB/s to the system.
  
  It's not entirely clear how this will work for Epyc and Threadripper, which can have up to 8 CPU chiplets.  Certainly there won't be 56 separate IF interconnects.  AMD are supporting additional NUMA layouts, so some chiplets will be directly connected, and others will need to hop via the I/O die.  (And in a two-socket system potentially CPU<->I/O<->I/O<->CPU, which is one more hop than the current Naples platform.)
  
  
• Over 100,000 GitHub repos have security keys in them.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is disturbingly easy to do if you don't follow safe practices at all times.  Git will happily hoover up every single file in your project directory, and many IDEs will do so by default.
  
  
• Julia, a rather nice language for scientific computing, now comes in interpreter flavour.
  
  This is mainly for interactive development and debugging, but might also make Julia attractive as an alternative to languages like Python and Ruby, sine a fully-supported JIT compiler is just a config flag away.
  
  There is also a static compiler, though it's an optional package.  If they can get that better supported and integrated it will make the Julia option that much more enticing.
  
  
• Got a bunch of laptops and/or all-in-one dekstops with 5Gbps USB but only 1Gbps Ethernet?  Club 3D has you covered.  (AnandTech)
  
  They offer Type A and Type C versions delivering 2.5GBASE-T.  The effective throughput of USB 3.0 is only 3.2Gbps, so there's not much reason for going faster.  Also, 2.5GBASE-T works over standard Cat 5e and will probably work over short runs of older Cat 5, so it's a drop-in replacement for gigabit Ethernet.
  
  Now you just need a switch.  MicroTik, how's that pricing coming along?
  
  
• Google's Stadia game streaming service may run aground on the rocks of reality.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Intel announced their 9th generation Core i9 H-series chips only they somehow managed to do it without saying what they were.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  45W parts with 8 cores, actual specs to arrive eventually.  The Ryzen 2700E is also an 8 core 45W part and came out last September, so Intel is play catch up again.
  
  
• Need 1TB of RAM in your iMac Pro?  Samsung has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Not sure if that configuration will actually work, but 256GB LRDIMMs are here.
  
  
• VirtualBox and VMWare have new exploits.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Also Safari.  Updates inbound.
  
  
• If a 1TB NVMe SSD for $100 doesn't do it for you how about 2TB for $200?  (Tech Report)

• Facebook stored hundreds of millions of passwords in plain text.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  Don't worry though.  They were only accessible by 20,000 Facebook employees for 7 years who only accessed the data 9 million times.
  
  The article mentions that GitHub and Twitter have had the same problem: Passwords are stored securely in the authentication database, and encrypted over HTTPS, but if you keep a full log of the request stream on internal servers for operations or debugging, and you don't employ a secure password protocol like SRP then a minor log configuration error can store handily decrypted passwords all over your proxy servers.
  
  Now, most companies don't employ SRP, but most companies aren't running the single largest website in the world with billions in profits, and most companies don't have this sort of problem sitting undetected for seven years.

Complete Goddamn Movie of the Day

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, March 23 2019 01:20 AM (PzbzM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 24 2019 12:16 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Samsung has announced its 3rd generation HBM2 lineup, Flashbolt (ah-ah).  (AnandTech)
  
  This version increases die capacities to 16Gb and speeds to 3.2Gb/s, so just over 400GB/s per module, and a total of 64GB capacity and 1.6TB/s of bandwidth for a four-module graphics card.
  
  That's quite a lot.
  
  
• Intel has released more details of their 11th generation graphics architecture.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This, they say, will be the one that doesn't suck.  We'll see.  It increases the graphics core count from 24 to 64, though some versions of the current generation already have 48 graphics cores and an external L4 cache.  (In the HP Spectre x2 for example.)
  
  
• California does something right for a change and backs the "right to repair".  (TechDirt)
  
  This is the radical notion that you are allowed to repair things you own if they break.
  
  
• A Lithuanian man has pleaded guilty to stealing $122 million from Google and Facebook.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  An age-old scam using fake companies and letterheads and invoices.
  
  
• He should have worked for the EU.  They just stole $1.7 billion from Google and it's totally legal.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Actually in this case I'm with the EU.  What's in question here is Google's use of advertising exclusivity clauses - if you used Google ads on your website you were prohibited from also having ads from other networks.  That's blatantly anti-competitive and Google deserves to be nailed to the wall.
  
  
• The Outer Worlds is the first big-budget game I've been looking forward to for quite a while.  Remember this?
  
  
  
  Well, Obsidian - or more likely, their publisher, Take Two - saw that they had a good thing going and decided that they needed to fuck it up.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  The Outer Worlds will release as an Epic game store exclusive.  And remain so for a year.
  
  
• Meanwhile New Zealand continues to block everyone and everything and arrest anyone who somehow evades their blocks.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  

Posted by: Andrew Horn at Thursday, March 21 2019 09:53 PM (uEGFG)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, March 22 2019 03:01 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 22 2019 05:50 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 22 2019 10:26 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, March 22 2019 10:35 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 22 2019 01:01 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, March 23 2019 09:46 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 23 2019 11:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 23 2019 05:21 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Apple upgraded the iMac, for the first time offering more than four cores.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 21" model now offers up to a 6 core / 12 thread i7 CPU and Vega 20 graphics.  The 27" model goes up to an 8 core / 16 thread i9 and Vega 48.  I wonder how badly that config is going to be thermally constrained, because that's a lot of heat to dump into an all-in-one.  My 2015 iMac is basically silent, but the i9 parts run notoriously hot.  Assuming the internals don't cook themselves, though, the high-end iMac is now faster than the entry model iMac Pro.
  
  The rest of the configuration is unchanged, but was already mostly very good.
  
  Pricing however is...  Not cheap.
  
  Despite the steep pricing, the 21" base model comes with a 5400 RPM hard disk drive.  (Six Colors)
  
  Not an SSD, not even a Fusion Drive.
  
  They also don't have the T2 chip found in Apples recent laptops and in the iMac Pro, but given that chip's history of issues this might not be such a bad thing.
  
  
• SilverStone's EP14 is a USB-C hub with 100W power pass-through.  (AnandTech)
  
  I noticed while ordering my groceries yesterday that my local supermarket sells USB-C hubs.  They're next to the frozen cauliflower.
  
  
• Google announced Stadia, their game streaming service.  (AnandTech)
  
  Whatever the opposite of caring about this is, I'm that.  I would be perfectly happy if it failed so hard it took the rest of the company down with it.
  
  
• Opera's built-in VPN is back.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Opera is now owned by a Chinese company.  You do the math.
  
  
• Intel hired Kyle from HardOCP after running out of people to steal away from PC Perspective.  (HardOCP)
  
  Is this the new getting acquired by Facebook?  To be fair, a lot of these guys have been doing it for ten years or more and really know the technology and the community.  It's a good move from Intel's perspective.
  
  
• Nvidia showed off a photorealistic AI paint-by-numbers app.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You do a little doodle and it takes it as a cue for a 3d-rendered landscape.  You have 20 different materials to paint with - trees, water, rock, and so on - and the computer does the magic for you.  Your doodle has to make some kind of sense, though, or you get back garbage.
  
  
  
  
• ASRock Rack's UCPE-EPYC3000 is an Epyc 3000 server appliance.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's a mini-ITX based 1U platform - very shallow depth, though - with room for four half-height / half-length PCIe cards on two risers.
  
  There are two SATA ports and an M.2 slot, but no actual drive bays as far as I can see, so this is designed for networking rather than storage.  The config shown has two built-in 10GbE ports, another 12 Ethernet ports on added cards (which can be whatever you want), and a WiFi adaptor, which is great for customer premises but less useful in the server room.

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, March 21 2019 01:12 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 21 2019 02:41 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 21 2019 03:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, March 21 2019 09:40 AM (xOgT9)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, March 21 2019 09:41 AM (xOgT9)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 21 2019 11:26 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, March 21 2019 11:43 AM (xOgT9)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, March 21 2019 11:46 AM (LMsTt)

Hide Comments | Add Comment