• Not tech news but close to home: The conservative Coalition in Australia just committed political suicide.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  The bullshit lockdowns are supported by Labor voters - lefties - but opposed by a strong majority of conservatives.  The Liberal Party is about to find out that their voters don't appreciate this rapid swing to fascism.
  
  Labor voters are just fine with fascism, but aren't going to vote for the Liberal Party anyway.
  
  I wouldn't mind these useless fucks getting the boot except that the other party is significantly worse on every measure.
  
  But there is no way I will vote for either of our major parties again.  Not that I have ever voted Labor in the first place.
  
  Update: Plural of anecdote, yes, but I went out to the shops this evening.  Soldiers sighted: Nil.  Regular police sighted: Nil.  Mask compliance: Around 50%.  That's no excuse for our shithead politicians, though.  Into the volcano they go.
  
  
  
• Blockchains.  Can't live with them, can't nuke 'em from orbit.
  
  Major crisis at work today because a platform with a ten-figure market cap returns the same bland response for "transient network error, please retry" and "your wallet is empty you idiot".
  
  

• The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks are fighting again.  (New York Times)
  
  It will be fun to watch the New York communists try to take on the Beijing communists.
  
  
  
• Samsung is jacking up chip prices.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  RAM prices are already up 50% since last year, and flash memory prices are up too.
  
  It's not clear how this will affect non-commodity parts - CPUs and GPUs - because the great bulk of the cost there goes to designing, testing, and preparing for production.  Just prepping a minor update to a CPU to go into production on a leading-edge fabrication process can run over $100 million.
  
  That's why they patch problems in firmware; it's both too time-consuming and too costly to update the hardware every time.
  
  
  
• Static.Wiki is Wikipedia shoveled into and served directly from a SQLite database.  (Static.Wiki)
  
  A 48GB SQLite database.
  
  This isn't an app running on a SQLite database; every single page is rendered and stored in SQLite.
  
  
  
• Idiots and maniacs.  (Earthly.dev)
  
  Idiots are people who don't do what I do; maniacs are people who do what I don't do.  Most people are both.
  
  
  
• eBPF - the Extender Berkeley Packet Filter - lets user code run inside the Linux kernel in a sandbox.  Turns out that provides a local privilege escalation vulnerability for free.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  To the surprise of absolutely nobody.
  
  
  
• Amazon has been fined $888 million for GDPR violations, specifically targeted advertising.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I find it difficult to be offended on Amazon's behalf.
  
  
  
• I used to blithely install packages from PyPI whenever I needed to. 
  
  But baby that was years ago, I left it all behind.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  For my cheap wine and not having my credit cards stolen.
  
  
  
• Russian hackers continue their attacks despite Biden's warning.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Unexpectedly.
  
  
  
• Amazon's delivery partners routinely tell drivers to ignore safety checks.  (CNBC)
  
  What's a dead hobo here and there compared with free delivery?

Posted by: Richard Cranium at Sunday, August 01 2021 11:52 AM (769ST)

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• Intel 11500
• 64GB RAM
• 2 x 2TB WD Blue SN550 SSDs
• 1x 8TB WD Red Pro
• RTX 3060 on the Windows box

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 01 2021 06:25 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 01 2021 07:31 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 01 2021 07:31 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 01 2021 07:48 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 01 2021 02:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, August 02 2021 09:09 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 02 2021 10:36 AM (PiXy!)

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• My day job continues to drive me insane, but I have a very capable assistant and today got a raise, back-dated to the beginning of the month.  So I'll soon be insane but with a shiny new computer.
  
  Or two.  Figuring out whether to get one big system - probably a 5900X - or two smaller systems - 5600X or Intel 11500, one running Windows and the other Linux.  I think the latter might be good.
  
  
  
• The server hosting this blog did not crash overnight, so that was nice bad.
  
  
  
• AMD has announced the Radeon 6600 XT, set for release August 11.  (AnandTech)
  
  Suggested price is $379, but I wouldn't expect it to be going for less than $500.
  
  Wait for benchmarks on this one, because it's hard to predict how it will compare against the existing 6700 XT.  It has 80% of the compute capacity but only 33% of the on-chip cache, so it will likely depend on the individual games you want to play.
  
  It should be fine for any game at 1080p, though.  Only if you want to play at higher resolutions is there likely to be an issue.
  
  
  

Tech News

• There's now a standard for LPDDR5X -  faster memory for laptops and phones.  (AnandTech)
  
  It will run at up to 8.5GHz, which should be great when coupled with AMD's next-generation integrated graphics.  And Apple's Arm-based Macs too.
  
  
  
• Other gaming PC makers say they're not facing the same problems as Dell.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The California legislation is stupid, and the states that blindly adopt it are stupid, but Dell's standard configurations are also stupid.
  
  
  
• Intel has launched its new range of Ice Lake workstation CPUs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  With up to 38 cores and 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0, they will compete with AMD's Threadripper Pro, which has 64 cores and 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0.
  
  And is cheaper.
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• An enormous Tesla battery farm being built near Melbourne caught fire.  (The Age)
  
  Looks like just one of the pods - each the size of a half-length shipping container - was affected.  Oh, and everyone who lives within ten miles, because it belched toxic smoke everywhere and Melbourne is currently in lockdown.
  
  
  
• Safari is bad.  (HTTPToolkit)
  
  It's filled with bugs and lacks features available in every other browser, forcing developers to work around it.  I know our UI team flinches when they hear the name mentioned.
  
  It's the only browser available on iOS though, because fuck you that's why.  You can pretend to install another browser, and iOS will pretend to let you, but on the inside they're all Safari and all have the same bugs.
  
  
  
• It's a race to the bottom as China decides to suicide its own economy.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Tencent lost 23% of its market cap, and private education companies were forbidden from...  Basically forbidden from existing.
  
  China's strong economy in recent decades has been due to their switch from communism to fascism.  Looks like they may be switching back.
  
  
  
• One of the two HP notebooks I wanted to get - the new Envy 13 with the 4K display - is now listed on their Australian online store.  Not available, but listed.  About a 40% markup over the US price, but listed.

• In a speech at the National Counterterrorism Center, President Joe Biden named as America's greatest threats hackers from Russia and China and anyone who criticises the Democrats.  (Bleeping Computer)

  He named Russia and China as the USA's partners and "possibly mortal competitors down the road," saying that working together on existential threats such as climate change should prevent the US from keeping a "watchful eye on what the ultimate objective of the other team is."

  That makes no sense, but I'm not sure if it's Biden or the article who is confused there.

  "I think we also need to take on the rampant disinformation that is making it harder and harder for people to access — assess the facts, be able to make decisions," Biden added.  "The disinformation is coming from inside the House."

  
  
  
  
• A new US security memorandum bolsters critical infrastructure cybersecurity.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  A new Pixy memorandum bolsters critical Pixy is a 25 year old 6'4" blond billionaire security.
  
  
  

• Time to cut the cord?  (Six Colors)
  
  Already done.  I canceled all my streaming subscriptions and now throw my money at the girls from Hololive (and sometimes Nijisanji).  Many of the individual talents put out more and better content than the entirety of Hollywood.
  
  
  
• Google will require workers to be vaccinated.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This is the thirty-seven thousand nine hundred and sixteenth worst thing they have ever done.
  
  
  
• Facebook too.  (Reuters)
  
  Why does anyone need to go into the office at Facebook?  I mean, people managing the physical server farms, yes.  Everyone else?  No.
  
  
  
• AMD's revenues are - again - double those of the same quarter last year.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  And that's with supply constraints on pretty much everything they make.  Their CPUs at least seem to be consistently in stock now.
  
  
  
• Anyone pushing back against right-to-repair is a lying sack of shit.  (ZDNet)
  
  And should be launched from a catapult directly into the Sun.
  
  
  
• Apple is closing down internal Slack channels where employees have been discussing unauthorised topics.  (Cult of Mac)
  
  Unionise.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, July 30 2021 03:14 AM (DHVaH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 30 2021 10:02 AM (PiXy!)

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• At my day job, the first of our big product launches for the quarter went live at 1AM - the joys of living in Australia but having customers all over the world.
  
  The phone didn't ring.
  
  I went to be fully expected to get maybe two hours sleep, but I slept right through until 7AM when the dickhead next door with the detuned sports car who is probably breaking several emissions laws leaves for work.  Even in lockdown.
  
  Anyway, the site did not melt down in the face of a massive marketing campaign, though we did shake loose a couple of bugs and a slow query on a secondary database.
  
  
  
• Thought I was going to get away with just a ten-hour day today, but no.
  
  
  
• Having ruined everything else, the commies are coming for gaming PCs.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  If you live in a third-world shithole like California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington, you are no longer permitted - get that, permitted - to buy a high-end gaming system.  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• Closer to home:
  
  
  
  
  Go jump in a volcano you fascist fucks.
  
  Yeah, this is one of those bullshit proposals that pops up all the time, with slim to no chance of ever making it to a bill, much less becoming the law, but still, volcano.

• Microsoft says there's no getting around Windows 11's absurd minimum requirements.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  They've also said they'll be providing Windows 11 licenses without those requirements to certain hardware makers, so they're full of shit on this one.
  
  
  
• AMD is shipping is Instinct  MI200 compute cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What they haven't shipped yet is a spec sheet, but the MI200 is believed to be as much as three times as fast as their current top of the line GPU, the RX 6900 XT - and has as much as 128GB of on-board RAM.
  
  
  
• Kioxia - formerly Toshiba's flash memory division - has demonstrated six and eight-level flash cells.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The six-level cell can retain data for almost two hours when bathed in liquid nitrogen, so this one is not quite ready for production.
  
  
  
• Apache Cassandra 4.0 is out.  (Phoronix)
  
  And so is MongoDB 5.0.  Neither release seems to be overly burdened with shiny new features.
  
  
  
• Twitter plans to let you log in with your Google account, if you are crazy enough to try it.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  So you can lose access to Twitter, YouTube, and email the next time you mildly insult some left-wing cretin.
  
  
  
• 10% of Apple's revenue comes from the Mac division.  (Six Colors)
  
  And 71% from shiny toys.  Small wonder they're focusing on turning the Mac into another shiny toy.
  
  
  
• The EFF has sued to Post Office to force them to disclose details of their program to spy on social media.  (EFF)
  
  Good.  I've donated to the EFF before, and will do so again.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 29 2021 01:34 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, July 30 2021 03:55 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 30 2021 06:01 AM (eqaFC)

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• If you can't beat 'em, rename 'em: Intel's second-generation 10nm process is now simply called Intel 7.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's not entirely unreasonable; Intel's 10nm is closer in density to TSMC's 7nm than to their 10nm.  Still, TSMC is in mass production on 5nm right now and preparing to roll out 4nm.
  
  Intel 7 will be followed next year by Intel 4 - their 7nm process - and then by Intel 3 in 2023 and Intel 20A the year after that.
  
  20A is the new 5nm.
  
  
  
• The integrated graphics in Meteor Lake, the followup to Raptor Lake, which will follow Alder Lake, will have 192 EUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And will likely require yet another new motherboard.
  
  Double the number of graphic cores might keep it from losing too horribly compared to AMD's Raphael, which will arrive rather sooner.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AMD's 7900 XT could have three times the shaders of the current top-of-the-line 6900 XT.  (WCFTech)
  
  Using two chiplets to do so.  Even at 5nm that would be unfeasibly large for a single chip.  And between 256MB and 512MB of cache - probably using the die stacking they recently showed off on Ryzen CPUs.
  
  
  
• Executives of the Tether stablecoin are reportedly being investigated for possible bank fraud charges.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Just throw them all in a volcano.  Faster, less painful, better for the environment.
  
  
  
• The EU is seeking to sue Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Croatia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia and Slovakia over failure to implement incomprehensibly tortuous new copyright laws.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Why yes, that would be every single member state other than Germany.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 27 2021 11:49 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Gmac at Wednesday, July 28 2021 12:40 AM (qZdIZ)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 28 2021 01:26 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 28 2021 08:56 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 28 2021 11:20 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, July 28 2021 12:34 PM (MuaLM)

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• Whose stupid plan was this anyway?
  
  
  
• Never look a duck bearing lemons in the mouth.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The duck is probably mining Monero, or something equally unwelcome.
  
  
  
• There will be a new iMac next year.  Probably.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In the meantime if you want a Mac with more than 16GB of RAM, your only option is to buy a system that is explicitly marked for the dustbin.
  
  
  
• Of the top 30 Google hits on registering a user in PHP 16 contained SQL vulnerabilities.  (Warit Schlager)
  
  The other 14 caught fire.
  
  
  
• If it sounds too good to be true, check your wallet.  (Daniel is a Dev)
  
  Freenom, a site that gives you free domains, is basically set up to hold users to ransom.
  
  Of course, you can just register lots of domains for free and bankrupt them.
  
  
  
• Nuclear power's reliability is dropping as extreme weather increases.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Reducing output efficiency by, um, an estimated 0.5% over 30 years.
  
  Doom.
  
  
  
• Someone - probably Russia - was looking to bribe YouTubers to spread anti-Bat-Flu-vaccine propaganda.  (BBC)
  
  Not clear exactly why.  There are enough real issues with the Bat Flu vaccines that it's unnecessary, but this sort of pointless malice is a Russian specialty.
  
  
  
• RNA demethylation can increase yields of staple crops like rice and potatoes by up to 50%.  (Nature)
  
  Club of Rome hardest hit.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, July 26 2021 10:15 PM (DHVaH)

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 26 2021 11:15 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Mumberthrax at Wednesday, July 28 2021 04:02 AM (YVq1I)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, July 28 2021 05:16 AM (DHVaH)

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Posted by: Bathroom Renovations Sydney at Tuesday, October 17 2023 10:40 AM (WUOhQ)

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• Yesterday's post came with bonus typos thanks to lack of sleep and interruptions from work even on a Saturday afternoon.  I have spell check turned on of course, but on these posts it's a sea of red squiggles anyway so it doesn't help as much as you might expect.
  
  But I didn't have as bad a day as some poor Google engineer who pushed an update to the login routine for ChromeOS that prevented anyone from logging in.  (Ars Technica)
  
  On the downside, ChromeOS updates itself automatically, so it automatically downloaded and installed the bug and prevented you from logging in.  On the upside, ChromeOS updates itself automatically even if you can't log in so the patch will find its way to you...  Sometime in the next week. 
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Nvidia's next generation of graphics cards will be built on TSMC's 5nm process.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The current generation - which are great cards, you just can't buy them - is built on Samsung's 8nm process, a couple of steps behind the leading edge, but what was available for mass production.  So the new cards, when they arrive, and when you are actually able to purchase them, which are not the same thing, should be a significant advance.
  
  
  
• At the other end of the graphics scale AMD's 5600G and 5700G desktop APUs are starting to show up at retail.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Official launch is still a couple of weeks out, I think.  Early August.
  
  Ryzen motherboards have HDMI and DisplayPort outputs but there's been a shortage of good processors with integrated graphics to actually drive them.
  
  
  
• China's new Loongson 3A5000 is quite competitive - for 2010.  (Phoronix)
  
  Or about one tenth the speed of a modern low-end desktop CPU.
  
  
  
• Apple fixed the WiFiDemon bug that soft-bricked iOS devices if you joined a network called .  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And also another bug that could instantly hack your phone if you joined a network called DDDD%x%x%x%@.
  
  I seem to recall this was an episode of Doctor Who.  Ah, right, The Bells of Saint John.  That was the first time Clara survived to the end of a story.
  
  
  
• On the other side of the hilarious mess that is operating system security these days you know where you are with a PetitPotam.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  An NTML relay attack allowed hackers to compromise Windows domain controllers.
  
  No, I don't know what that means either.
  
  
  
• Apple's mantra, as always, is Fuck Developers.  (Litchie.com)
  
  iDOS - a DOS (and Windows 3.1) emulator for the iPad - has been banned because it potentially allow for very old software to be installed on an Apple device without Apple getting its 30%.
  
  
  
• Amazon wants the key to your apartment building.  (PennLive)
  
  Which they will hand to delivery drivers who are so overworked they have to pee in bottles.
  
  Nothing bad could possibly come of this.
  
  
  
• Amazon says the number of $2000 graphics cards destroyed by its new turkey-smashing simulator New World is relatively small.  (GameSpot)
  
  Oh.  Well, that's good to know.
  
  
  
• A new bullshit study of an old bullshit study that predicted that everyone was going to die has predicted that everyone is going to die.  (LiveScience)
  
  Fifty years on the infamous Limits to Growth is back and we're double-doomed this time unless we all eat bugs and live in pods.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, July 25 2021 11:02 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 26 2021 03:48 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 26 2021 04:07 AM (eqaFC)

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