• Deploying a new blockchain - I hate those things - for an urgent project.  Everything goes swimmingly in test.  It's complicated, but doesn't require an entire new programming language the way Ethereum does.
  
  Switch over to production.  Discover production network is significantly slower than test and the timeout is hard-coded in the API library, so ever transaction fails.
  
  Hack a sensible timeout into the library.
  
  Now only 25% of transactions fail.  We issue them and they disappear without trace.
  
  Contact the blockchain developers directly.
  
  "Yeah, 25% sounds about right."
  
  Never mind the commies, we need to throw the blockchain people into a volcano.
  
  
  
• Get an urgent ticket from hosting provider at 4AM.  I missed the previous ticket because it arrived two days ago - also at 4AM - when I got to sleep at 3AM, and by the time I woke up I had fifty other emails to go through.
  
  Report that a domain is hosting malware.  Ask for details.
  
  Get back a link with - literally - 77 virus checkers reporting it clean and one reporting a problem.  No information at all as to what the problem is, or why one positive outweighs 77 negatives.
  
  
  
• If Amazon's game New World killed your EVGA RTX 3090, it will be replaced under warranty immediately and without question.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Problems with the game have now been reported on multiple cards from both Nvidia and AMD, though, so it might be safest just to play Minecraft until this all blows over.
  
  

• A 14 core Alder Lake (Intel's upcoming 12th gen chip) mobile CPU is slower than a current 8 core AMD 5800H.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the other hand a 16 core desktop Alder Lake is reportedly faster than a 16 core Ryzen 5950X.  (Tech Radar)
  
  Something is sus here.
  
  
  
• Crappy GPUs assemble!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  When good cards are overpriced or unavailable, which is the least crappy of the crappy alternatives?  Intel's DG1 is likely a non-starter anyway since it's an OEM cart that won't run on most motherboards.  It can outperform Nvidia's bottom-of-the-barrel GTX 1030 on some games, though.  It's not complete garbage.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 6600 XT ain't gonna be cheap.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Expected retail pricing is close to recommended pricing for the much faster 6800 XT - which has 72 cores vs 32 on this new card.  You can't get for the 6800 XT for anything like recommended price, so this just reminds us how screwed up the market still is.
  
  
  
• The Framework laptop is now shipping.  (Frame.Work)
  
  This is the one with four tiny swappable I/O modules.  If you want a laptop with four HDMI ports, you can get it.  The modules start at $9 for USB so it's cheap to get extras if you want to swap it around.
  
  It doesn't currently come with the Four Essential Keys, but the keyboard is designed to be replaceable, so that could change.
  
  
  
• If you're a law-abiding citizen in a country where the government isnotlaw abiding and also hates your guts you have nothing to worry about. (Apple Inside)
  
  Fuck you, asshole.
  
  
  
• Eric Schmidt - Google's former token adult - says the US shouldn't break up the fascist Big Tech companies because that would weaken the US against fascist China.*  (Financial Times)
  
  He doesn't seem to have considered to option of not being fascist.
  
  * You can see on a chart the exact year when China switched from communism to fascism.  The famines stopped but the oppression kept right on going.
  
  
  
• 2% of Twitter users are deluded enough to think it's worth using two-factor authentication to protect their nonsense.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Actually, if you use Twitter for OAuth to sign into other sites, it definitely is worth enabling 2FA.  But given that Twitter bans users without review or recourse you might want to rethink that.
  
  
  
• Journalists for Censorship strike again.  This fucker got suspended from Facebook for what looked to the low-IQ crowd like a death threat as opposed to a quote from a terrible movie.  (ZDNet)
  
  Rather than learning the lesson that censorship is bad, we wants everyone he disagrees with censored.  Just not him.  Because he's the good guy here.
  
  
  
• The Jehovah's Witness's attempt to sue a stop-motion Lego animation YouTube channel out of existence has gotten stuck.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  They don't know who runs the channel and the court is uninclined to assist them.  Google has - quite correctly refused to hand over the user's personal information without a court order.

O Fuck Canada Video of the Day

That Ryzen Alienware R10?  Yeah, Nah Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 25 2021 03:01 AM (eqaFC)

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Top Story

Tech News

• Global Foundries is doubling the capacity of its Fab 8 facility in upstate New York.  (AnandTech)
  
  And also building additional fab nearby.
  
  Global Foundries doesn't currently have a leading-edge process node - they're still at 12nm - but with all capacity booked out worldwide it's a good time to expand.
  
  
  
• The One Plus Nord 2 comes with a Dimensity 1200.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's one step behind current flagship phones, at 400 Euros.  I'm not sure if these models make it to the real world.
  
  
  
• The new Dell XPS 17 is a great system with a crappy keyboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Lot of that going around.  HP gets it right.
  
  
  
• The Washington Post accidentally published worthwhile material today.  (Motherboard)
  
  Long-defunct ad and video site Vid.me let its domain expire and it gone snapped up by a porn network.  And so broken embeds in old articles suddenly started working again - with brand new content.
  
  
  
• If you got hit with the Kaseya ransomware attack, you can now unlock your stuff for free.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Of course, you'd have been offline for three weeks by this point, which would have been awkward.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

• HoloEN defeated the Ender Dragon today.  Due to equipment mixups during the battle they ended up beating it to death with random bits of equipment - a bow, used as a melee weapon, a shovel, I think, and a bucket.
  
  But it worked.
  
  Update: Linked to an artist's impression.  Calli was indeed beating the Ender Dragon over the head with a shovel.
  
  
  
  They did some prep work last stream, but from starting the hunt for the Stronghold to the victory photo positioned around the dragon's egg was under two hours.
  
  Since that was the goal they'd set for themselves, they'll now be installing a mod to link their server to the JP server.  Let chaos reign.
  
  
  
• Vtubers might look like anime girls but they're real people.  Without going into details, I hope things improve soon for Iofi, Pomu, and Vyolfers, who are each going through a personal rough patch.
  
  
  
• Fuck off Gareth.  (news.com.au)
  
  And when you get there, fuck off from there too.
  
  The lockdown is not working, so the solution is more lockdown.
  
  
  

Miscellaneous Videos of the Day

• Don't use biometric ID if you live somewhere with 4th and 5th Amendment protections.
  
  
  
  For the rest of us, it might not matter a whole lot.
  
  
  
• Sounds like a 70s comedy: 18 conspirators, at least 12 of whom were FBI informants.
  
  
  
  
  
• He's running.  And his little dog too.
  
  
  
  
  
• CarAMElldansen.
  
  
  
  HoloEN doesn't have 3D models yet, so she made her own.
  
  
  
• GPU prices are...  A little less fucked.
  
  
  
  Down by about 5%, which is at least movement in the right direction.
  
  
  
• New York, New York, it's a wonderful town.  The mayor is a commie and the governor's a clown.
  
  
  
  On the other hand, they're not confined to their own homes.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 23 2021 11:03 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 24 2021 12:23 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, July 24 2021 12:34 AM (DHVaH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 24 2021 12:36 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 24 2021 01:33 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 24 2021 01:50 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 24 2021 02:02 AM (PiXy!)

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• Short one today because my yesterday sucked.  Twelve hours at work followed by another six fixing my own servers.
  
  
  
• Razer's new Blade 14 has a top-of-the-line Ryzen CPU, an RTX 3070, and a terrible keyboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not just my opinion on the keyboard, though it is also my opinion on the keyboard.
  
  
  
• Intel's new Beast Canyon NUC stretches the definition of NUC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What the hell is the definition of NUC, anyway?  I know what the letters stand for, but what is it supposed to mean?
  
  
  
• A 16 year old bug in HP's printer drivers could threaten 2400 million computers.  (Threatpost)
  
  That's 300 million real computers but with variable intensities.  Printer joke.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 22 2021 07:45 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 22 2021 10:08 PM (obo9H)

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• Ace went down due to a lost IP address - it just up and vanished from the container.  But all I had to do was put it back and things were fine.
  
  This server went down for almost the same reason - if I bind the IP that was used for the websites (separate from the main host IP) the host blinks in and out of existence.
  
  No idea why.  It's been running fine for years.  The host hasn't even been rebooted for three years, though the containers have.
  
  But that meant I couldn't log in to the host - or if I did log in, I didn't stay that way for very long.  And in the ensuing reboots we suffered some index corruption, and that required a repair, and that segfaulted.  Fun all the way down.
  
  Some of the individual sites might still be down, but all the data is intact and they'll be back soon.  And as I learned just now, the twice-daily backups do in fact work.
  
  
  
• Windows local privilege escalation vulnerability of the day.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Yes, another one.

• Amazon's new game New World kills the RTX 3090.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And I don't mean that it runs slowly even on the fastest graphics card you can get.  I mean it kills the RTX 3090 specifically.  Or certain models of it.
  
  Good luck getting a warranty replacement right now.
  
  
  
• Crystal has hit 1.1.  (Crystal)
  
  Not a huge amount of changes in this version, but they tried to get all the breaking changes in before 1.0, so that's exactly what they wanted.  Full Windows support is still pending.
  
  
  
• China breached 13 US oil and gas pipeline operators between 2011 and 2013.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And we're only hearing about it now.
  
  
  
• The EU plans to ban arithmetic.  (BBC)
  
  They want to ban anonymous crypto wallets, but all a wallet is on many blockchains is a very, very large number that's hard to guess.
  
  
  
• Fuck systemd.  (ZDNet)
  
  Trying to escape all the Windows vulnerabilities by moving to Linux?  Too bad, now you have systemd vulnerabilities instead.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, July 22 2021 01:50 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 22 2021 05:06 PM (PiXy!)

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• Facebook is not killing people, says Facebook President Joe Biden.  (CNBC)
  
  With additional reporting by Journalists for Censorship representative Kara Swisher.
  
  Facebook responded angrily to Biden's earlier remarks, with a company spokesperson insisting that Facebook's death toll for June had been the lowest in several years, and warning that the President's behaviour had been flagged as "problematic".
  
  

• The Radeon 6600 XT and 6600 non-XT are set to launch August 11.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They'll be overpriced, at least initially, but they should make solid cards for 1080p gaming and only cost a leg, leaving you both hands to hold the controller.
  
  
  
• Black 3.0 is the world's blackest black.  (Culture Hustle)
  
  It was developed after some asshole bought exclusive rights to Black 2.0 so no-one else could use it.
  
  I am not making this up.
  
  
  
• The new owners of Audacity are threatening to kill their users.  (GitHub)
  
  More details at Reddit.
  
  It's one thing to sue people over intellectual property you don't even own.  It's rather another to threaten to report them to the CCP for counter-revolutionary speech.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which the US, EU, UK, and NATO are all pointing the finger at China over a recent wave of Microsoft Exchange attacks.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And they're not buying the line about rogue hacking groups either.  They've explicitly blamed the Chinese government.
  
  Not that this is likely to change anything, but it is at least something more than the less than nothing we usually get from these oxygen thieves.
  
  
  
• iFixit has specifically targeted Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft over their deliberate efforts to make their products unrepairable.  (ZDNet)
  
  Dell may have its faults, but the service manual for my all-in-one desktops details how to replace absolutely every component.  The motherboard is a custom Dell design, but memory, storage, WiFi interface and so on are all standard swappable modules.
  
  
  
• Android TV has been updated to jam its own ads into the user interface, on top of all the other ads everyone else is jamming in.  (Gizmodo)
  
  The story discusses Nvidia's Shield TV but his sounds like it's Google's fault.
  
  
  
• Amazon asked Apple to delete an app that detected fake reviews on Amazon's website.  Apple did so.  (CNBC)
  
  Fakespot - the app in question - so far lives on in the Google Play Store.  It will be worth watching how tight the cartel is here, because there is in general not a lot of love lost between Google and Amazon.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 20 2021 11:16 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Kurt Duncan at Wednesday, July 21 2021 01:10 AM (y8o1E)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 21 2021 01:34 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: My life is insanity at Wednesday, July 21 2021 06:06 PM (DEzaZ)

5 You brought the curse with you! 
Got Ace fixed, then this server went down and took several more hours to get back.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 22 2021 02:57 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 22 2021 06:35 PM (PiXy!)

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• A critical vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler lets a sneaky hacker take over your machine.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  No, not that one.  And not that one either.  Yes, this is yet another problem with Windows printing.
  
  In this case, if the attacker can set up a Trojan Horse printer on the network, it can follow the flow upstream and get system-level access to any PC that sends it a print file.  The printer tells the PC that it needs to install a specific driver, and the PC simply obeys.
  
  This one is unlikely to happen on a properly managed network.  If you're letting random people wander about the office plugging in strange devices, you're going to have problems no matter how secure your operating system might be.
  
  
  

• Prior art: Amelia Watson's BubbaBot.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The idea is neat: Rather than playing copyrighted music over your YouTube or Twitch stream and lose your account, have a synchronised playlist people can play on Spotify or some similar service.
  
  It's so neat that people are already doing it.  Amelia Watson from Hololive calls hers BubbaBot after her dog.  (She has two dogs and two cats and some sort of perpetual hiccup condition, so her streams are...  Entertaining.)
  
  
  
• Against SQL.  (Scattered Thoughts)
  
  SQL is a general purpose language for expressing the manipulation of relational data.  What it is not is nice to use.  The Progress 4GL - now OpenEdge - solved many of these issues 30 years ago.  It was one of the first programming languages I used for an actual job (the very first was Basic), and I still miss it.
  
  Not its performance though.  It was dog slow.
  
  
  
• The Cytron Maker Pi RP2040 is a Pi Pico with a swarm of Grove - and other - connectors for ten bucks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Pi Pico is pretty neat but you pretty much have to solder t into your project.  This is much more tinker-friendly, with a total of ten sockets for connecting sensors, motors, and other widgets for robotics projects.
  
  
  
• Inserting a billion rows into SQLite in under a minute.*  (Avi.im)
  
  The * is because it's a work in progress; currently achieving 100 million inserts in 34 seconds.  On a 2019 MacBook Pro, which is not a bad system but is maybe half the speed of a current high-end laptop.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 19 2021 11:52 PM (eqaFC)

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• Why Though Part 1: How to make Windows 11 look and feel like Windows 10.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It seems to me that you could achieve the same result by not installing Windows 11.
  
  
  
• Why Though Part 2: Qnap has launched a NAS using the Chinese Zhaoxin CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These chips are designed in China for the Chinese market with embedded support for Chinese encryption standards, which is to say, broken ones.
  
  This is not a reassuring move from Qnap.
  
  
  
• Why Though Part 3: Prosegur has built a bunker to protect crypto assets.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which are stored publicly on the blockchain, making this not merely useless, but retarded.
  
  
  

• HP makes some nice laptops that fit my needs perfectly.  Four essential keys, 4K displays, 8 core Intel or AMD CPUs, dedicated graphics, upgradeable memory.  A fully-upgraded Envy 15 for example runs about $2400.
  
  
  
  In Australia the best I can get is last year's model, in just one configuration, at A$6000 - close to $4500.
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's new  Yoga AIO 7 will feature Radeon 6600M graphics.  (WCCFTech)
  
  With a 4K screen - that even pivots to vertical if you want - covering 99% of DCI-P3, and an 8 core AMD laptop CPU, it looks like it could be a great replacement for my aging twin Dell Inspiron 27s.  And with laptop components replacing the desktop parts it should run cool and quiet.
  
  Can I actually get one in Australia?  Or even last year's model?
  
  Don't be silly.
  
  
  
• AMD will be launching Epyc Genoa parts with integrated HBM (high bandwidth memory) unless they won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is aimed at upcoming Intel CPUs which are in turn aimed at the supercomputer market.
  
  The article also mentions the reason for the confusion as to whether next-gen Epyc CPUs would have 96 or 128 cores is that the answer is yes.  Genoa models will go up to 96 cores, and Bergamo up to 128.  Same socket and same CPU chiplets, just more of them squeezed in on Bergamo.
  
  There are also stacked-cache versions coming of both of those, and the upcoming Chagall Zen 3 Threadrippers as well, so up to 1.5GB just of cache on the highest-end parts.
  
  
  
• A review of the great UK Post Office "embezzlement" debacle.  (ACM)
  
  700 Post Office workers were prosecuted because of a buggy accounting system.

  They were sentenced based on evidence from an IT system, which... ehhh... to be honest, we don't actually know what that IT system did, except we know it did it really, really badly.

  The article argues for IT review boards similar to those for plane crashes, and while I'm against new government agencies generally, when a public system fails this badly, I support the idea of an equally public tarring and feathering.
  
  
  
• Installing z/OS on your laptop.  (Colin Paice)
  
  Step 1: Fork over $5000 for a single-user developer license.
  Step 2: Wait two weeks for your USB security key to arrive.
  Step 3: Wonder why you didn't just go with BSD.
  
  
  
• Hello Kitty is attacking SonicWall.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Even the US government is now heeding my advice: Unplug that shit now.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Google has extended its deadline for forcing apps to use their in-house payment processing for all in-app purchases after getting hit with an anti-trust lawsuit over exactly that sort of shit.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Note that Apple does this already.
  
  
  
• Fascism is the marriage of government and corporate power to produce a single authoritarian entity.
  
  Not all marriages run smooth, though.  (The Verge)

  Reached for comment, a Facebook representative defended the platform’s record of fighting vaccine misinformation. "We will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts,” said a Facebook spokesperson. "The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet. More than 3.3 million Americans have also used our vaccine finder tool to find out where and how to get a vaccine.”

  "The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives,” the spokesperson continued. "Fuck you, Joe, you senile old bastard.  We made you.  We can unmake you.  Don't print that.”

  
  

• Rumours of our doom are greatly exaggerated.  (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  We might not be about to be wiped out by climate change after all.  Huh.  Who'da thunk.  I mean, except everyone.
  
  
  

• The Freedom Phone is an Umidigi A9 hastily rebadged.  (PC Magazine)
  
  And marked up 300%.
  
  Yeah, the guy who wrote the article is an asshole, but so is the guy hawking fake phones.
  

Sashimi Clip of Kiara Reacting to a Sashimi Clip of Calli and Gura Reacting to Kiara Reacting to Calli and Gura Wrecking Her Minecraft Village Video of the Day

Posted by: David Eastman at Sunday, July 18 2021 07:51 PM (t/97R)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 18 2021 11:38 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 19 2021 03:02 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, July 19 2021 12:48 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 19 2021 06:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, July 19 2021 10:36 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 19 2021 11:34 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, July 20 2021 05:55 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, July 20 2021 06:43 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 20 2021 08:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 20 2021 08:54 AM (PiXy!)

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• Google has banned distributing what they deem to be "content that deceives, misleads or confuses users" - on Google Docs.
  
  Yeah, they're watching you, you and your sneaky words.
  
  Top comment on Hacker News is from a Google employee who now loathes the company.  
  
  
  
• Oh, and when they ban you and your sneaky words - probably for telling the truth - the federal government expects the rest of Big Tech to follow suit.
  
  
  
  

But they're totally not fascists, because fascism is the other guys.

Tech News

• Oberon+ is a cross-platform Oberon compiler and IDE.  (GitHub)
  
  It compiles down to LuaJIT bytecode rather than native code, which is fine by me.  LuaJIT is a work of art in the compiler space and it makes total sense for smaller projects to reuse it.
  
  
  
• A closer look at Threadripper Pro.  (AnandTech)
  
  Threadripper Pro starts at 16 cores for $1150, vs. $800 for a 16 core Ryzen.  And the cores are slower (though the base clock is higher).
  
  On the other hand, you get 120 PCIe lanes instead of 20, 8 memory channels instead of 2, and a maximum of 2TB of RAM compared to 128GB.  So if your work depends on any of that it's not a particularly costly option.
  
  The motherboards are certainly more expensive than even a top-of-the-line Ryzen board, but you get up to 7 PCIe x16 slots, dual 10GbE ports, up to 16 SATA ports, and official rather than just unofficial ECC support.
  
  
  
• Speaking of unofficial ECC support, unbuffered ECC DDR4-3200 modules seem to be readily available for about 25% more than non-ECC.  So if I do build a new system this year it will be AMD with ECC RAM.  Easily worth the extra hundred bucks on 64GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• More details on the Steam Deck.  (PC Perspective)
  
  One thing not on the specs list but reported by Linus Tech Tips is that the storage is user-upgradeable.  You'll need an M.2 2230 drive - the smallest size available.  Regular drives are 2280, meaning 22x80mm.  A quick look around only showed 128GB drives, though and the next size up, 2242, you can easily get 2TB.
  
  There will also be a dock coming so you can plug it into monitors and keyboards and such.  Personally I'd prefer a 1080p screen, but the GPU isn't really up to 1080p gaming on recent titles, and people would complain.
  
  
  
• Oh, and while it's called the Steam Deck, it supports other app stores too.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's an open PC running Linux with a gaming compatibility layer, and you can do whatever the hell you want with it.  In fact, it's so open that some games won't run because they have embedded anti-cheating measures depending on locked-down hardware.
  
  
  
• NASA dug yet another C64 out of the garage and got the Hubble working again.  (Science)
  
  One of the onboard computers failed.  They have multiple backup systems, but after switching to a backup they still got the same error, and couldn't work out why.
  
  Turns out that two of the onboard computers have failed.  Good thing there are four of them.
  
  
  
• There was a remote execution vulnerability in Cloudflare's CDNJS.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There was a bug in the handling of build scripts that could have compromised 12% of all the world's websites.
  
  More generally, build scripts for interpreted / JIT-compiled languages are cancer.
  
  
  
• Sea walls might simply make floods someone else's problem, study suggests.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The oldest known standing wall is in Theopetra Cave in Greece, and dates to around 23,000 BC.  Scientists, meanwhile, are just now figuring out that the entire purpose of walls is to make problems happen somewhere else.
  
  
  
• Pocket Casts - the podcast app - has been bought by Automattic, which runs WordPress and the ashes of what used to be Tumblr.  (The Verge)
  
  I like Pocket Casts and used it for years before half of the podcasts I listened to got eaten by brain worms.  But it's also been losing money for years - not a lot of money, but consistently in the red.
  
  So I hope this works out for them.

Totally Not Fascism Video of the Day

Posted by: Jay at Sunday, July 18 2021 12:27 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 18 2021 07:11 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 18 2021 07:39 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 18 2021 08:34 AM (obo9H)

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• It's not censorship if it's a private company, say the communists, who have all  somehow simultaneously seized upon a new talking point.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Yes, it's Gleen Grennwald, and I haven't forgotten his history.  But I have to give him credit for announcing that the emperor's pants are on fire when the emperor's pants are, in fact, on fire.
  
  At this point every country in the world should either be banning American Big Tech, shaking them down for cash, or both.  Australia has so far gone for the shakedown route.  I'd prefer an outright ban, but at least it's something.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel is in talks to buy Global Foundries for $30 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Global Foundries was formerly AMD's in-house chip manufacturing division, spun off as a separate company in the dark days when AMD was bleeding cash and uncertain to survive at all.  They don't have a leading-edge process node - 12nm, not 7 or 5 - but they do have production capacity and there's a shortage at pretty much every process node right now.
  
  
  
• Ukraine shut down an illegal footballer mining operation.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Eyebrows were raised at the announcement that the authorities there had closed down a crypto mining facility and seized - among other items - 3800 PlayStation 4 consoles.
  
  Turns out that alongside Ethereum they were farming rare unlockable characters in FIFA 21.
  
  
  
• Samsung's Exynos 2200 will have 6 RDNA2 cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This apparently beats even Apple's A14, which is not a slow chip.
  
  AMD's own upcoming - I think it's called Raphael - next-gen laptop chip will have 12 RDNA2 cores.  The Xbox Series X has 52, but runs slightly hotter than a mobile phone.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has shared guidance on its Windows Print Spooler vulnerability.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  No, not that one.  Another one.
  
  They just patched a major remote vulnerability.  This new one is a local privilege escalation vulnerability.
  
  
  
• A new mathematical proof indiciates that it may be possible to know how many numbers there are.  (Quanta)
  
  Cantor's diagonalisation argument is a simple proof that not all infinities are the same size, but doesn't in itself establish what size of infinity the set of real numbers is, just that it's bigger than the - also infinite - set of integers.
  
  Cantor hypothesized that the infinity of real numbers was the immediate next larger infinity than that of integers, but couldn't prove it.  The new result indicates that either Cantor was correct, or that it is the next larger infinity after that - where other hypotheses in the intervening century proposed much, much larger infinities.
  
  
  
• The US CPSC has filed a complaint against Amazon for selling dangerous crap.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Go after them for the fake microSD cards too, guys.
  
  
  
• The US State Department is offering a $10 million report for information on state-sponsored hackers.  (The Record)
  
  Russia.  China.  Iran.  North Korea.
  
  Wait, the article actually lists those countries, in that order.  Huh.  Someone isn't asleep, it seems.
  
  
  
• If you have a Chevy Bolt, park it outside, next to your Ring doorbell.  (CBS News)
  
  So they can keep each other company when they catch fire.
  
  
  
• The Steam Deck is a pretty nice PC for $399.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Quad core Zen 2 CPU with RDNA2 graphics - which means that this really is a custom chip, because currently those are only made for Microsoft and Sony - 16GB of RAM, and up to 512GB of NVMe SSD.
  
  And a 7" 1280x800 display, which kind of sucks.  It really needs to be 1920x1200 if you want to do anything with it other than playing games.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 17 2021 04:18 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 17 2021 04:27 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 17 2021 07:31 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 17 2021 10:34 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 17 2021 10:37 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, July 17 2021 12:29 PM (Ix1l6)

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• How the Kaseya hack - that led to at least 1500 companies being hit with ransomware - went down.
  
  
  
  
  Short answer: These people are idiots.
  
  
  
• China has been caught hacking hundreds of government systems across Southeast Asia.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  With a particular focus on the Philippines.
  
  Apparently this particular plague spreads via USB devices, just like the good old days with floppy disks.
  
  
  
• In completely unrelated news Microsoft just patched 117 vulnerabilities.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That does include their server platform and applications, not just Windows, but still.
  
  
  
• Side note: Anyone who thinks I am bigoted against Apple is simply not paying attention.  I hate everyone.
  
  Well, sometimes not AMD.
  
  

• Russia is planning to launch its own RISC-V processor.  (Anandtech)
  
  Eight cores, 2GHz, on a 12nm process, due in 2025.
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Intel is planning to launch a new 38-core workstation CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It will cost 15% more than AMD's existing 64-core workstation processor.
  
  
  
• China continues to expand its crypto mining ban, which is good news for everyone.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  EVERYONE.
  
  
  
• Android 12 Beta 3 is available for Google Pixel devices, which you also shouldn't buy.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I don't care about this in the slightest, but I will note that my phone recently updated to Android 11 without a single hiccup.  If I'm going to be pestered with pointless updates, late and painless is the way to go.
  
  
  
• Twitter's Fleets feature will soon delete itself automatically.  (Twitter)
  
  Fleets were designed to make Twitter more attractive to people who don't want to use Twitter in the first place.  Instead it was used primarily by people who use Twitter.
  
  Twitter is at a loss to explain this, because the company is run by idiots.
  
  
  
• If you own an older SonicWall security device, patch that shit now.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Or just unplug it and throw it away, and live without internet access like we did back in the Dark Ages.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 16 2021 01:34 PM (obo9H)

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