• Well, not news exactly, but I bought a new phone and a new tablet today.  I've wanted a new tablet for quite a while, but I've been looking for an 8" Android tablet with at least a 1920x1200 screen to replace my ancient Nexus 7, and those to a first approximation do not exist.  A Kindle Fire might suit, but those simply aren't sold in Australia.  Before Amazon opened operations here they were hard to get; now they're impossible.
  
  So instead I got a Lenovo M10 FHD 2nd Gen (apparently also called the FHD Plus) which as the name suggests is a 10" tablet with a 1920x1200 screen.  It's about 50% heavier than the Nexus 7, but that puts it at the same weight as premium tablets like the iPad Air - at a quarter of the price.
  
  And it has expandable storage and a headphone jack, which iPads don't.  4GB RAM and 128GB storage built in, which will be a relief because the ever-growing Google apps have choked the 32GB available on the Nexus 7.  Price was A$250 on a one-day sale; it's now gone back up to A$300.
  
  Phone is an Oppo A91, last year's model, because for some unfathomable reason this year's cheap models have all gone back down to 720p screens.  It's a 2400x1080 90Hz AMOLED screen with 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage.  Again, it includes a headphone jack and expandable storage.  And I have two spare 400GB microSD cards that I bought in the Cyber Monday sale last year, so those are finally going to see use.  Price just under A$350.
  
  If I can't get one device the size I prefer, at least I can bracket it with two devices.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Future tense, present tense, what's the difference?

  "Today, approximately 3.5 million premises across Australia can access the NBN Home Ultrafast wholesale speed tier with wholesale download speeds of 500 Mbps to close to 1 Gbps, on demand."

  Oh, really?  I'd like to sign up then.
  
  I can't?  No fucking surprise, because it took you bastards twelve fucking years just to wire up suburban Sydney.
  
  I do at least have 80M down and 40M up now, though, which is a hell of an improvement from the 14/2 I had a year ago.
  
  
  

• You can still get the Ryzen 3700X.  (AnandTech)
  
  It may not be the very latest technology, but it's a solid chip, and it's reasonably priced.  The i9-11900K is 12% faster on multi-threaded workloads, but costs twice as much - and even in theory uses twice as much power.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's new 3080 Ti has started showing up on this side of the International Date Line which is slightly odd because the difference is only a day and launch date isn't for two weeks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Right now, checking my local store, I can get a 3060 for $1000 or a 3090 for $3000.  One model of each.  That's it.
  
  There are several AMD 6700XT and 6900XT cards in stock, though.  AMD's current cards aren't as good at mining as Nvidia's, even when you line them up by similar game performance, so they are slightly less impossible to obtain.
  
  The difference in mining performance is probably down to AMD's new design, where they reduced memory bandwidth and compensated with a very large (96MB or 128MB, depending on the card) on-chip cache.  That works fine for most games, but poorly for crypto mining.
  
  
  
• Macromedia Flash is disappearing from Windows in July.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Adobe abandoned it at the end of last year, so that's no surprise.
  
  If you just realised that you'll never again be able to play Penguin Golf, fear not.  Blue Maxima's Flashpoint has you covered.
  
  All the Penguin Golf games and 70,000 more, plus 8000 Flash animations.  You'll need a little over a terabyte of disk to download the entire archive, though.  It's a 478GB 7Z file that uncompresses to 532GB of individual games.
  
  They also have an installer that just downloads the games you want; that's a mere 500MB download and 2GB minimum disk space.
  
  
  
• Sony has taken an ownership stake in Discore and will be integrating it into their PlayStation Network.  (Polygon)
  
  Again, not a surprise.  Discord recently broke off acquisition talks with Microsoft, and it's unlikely they'd have done that without some other funds being on the table.
  
  
  
• Awful high-tech fashion company meets awful game exclusivity company in court, observers try to figure out how they can both lose.  (9to5Mac)
  
  This is Epic's lawsuit against Apple over the business practices of the App Store.  Epic paints Apple as overbearing all-devouring monopolistic bastards, which is true.  Apple in turn paints Epic as bottom-feeding vermin who want everything for free and never produced anything of value, which is also true, but - and this is the one point in Epic's favour - not illegal.

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• 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.

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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.
  
  
  

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