• REvil has asked for $70 million to decrypt all the victims of their latest attack.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I can't be the only one wondering what would come out of comparison shopping that price against contracting the Russian mob to remove the problem entirely.
  
  REvil themselves appear to have been doing some calculations because they quickly lowered the price to $50 million.
  
  
  

• News you can use: How to uninstall Windows 11 and roll back to Windows 10.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, if you followed yesterday's news, step one is to delete your virtual machine.
  
  
  
• Don't buy a GPU!  (WCCFTech)
  
  They're actually in stock consistently right now, and prices are starting to trend downwards, but indications are this is going to accelerate in the next few weeks as Chinese crypto miners dump their cards onto eBay.
  
  
  
• QNAP has fixed a critical vulnerability in their backup and disaster recovery software.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  No, not that one, a new one.
  
  
  
• Is Audacity suddenly spyware?  (PC Magazine)
  
  If you have to ban children from using your product because it forcibly collects personal data, that's a pretty clear signal you're doing something you shouldn't.
  
  And it's proof that there are worse hosts for open-source projects than Oracle, who, amazingly, still haven't ruined MySQL.  I mean, it has some - quirks, shall we say - but it's still free.
  
  
  
• Facebook, Twitter, and Google have threatened to drop services to Hong Kong.  (WSJ)
  
  I mean....  Fuck everyone in this situation except for the citizens of Hong Kong.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 06 2021 11:06 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, July 07 2021 07:50 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 07 2021 08:29 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 07 2021 08:31 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, July 08 2021 12:36 AM (6y7dz)

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• The Russian ransomware attack that had hit over five hundred companies a couple of days ago has now expanded to thousands of victims in 17 countries.  (AP)
  
  The attack vector was managed services provider Kaseya.  (Who?)
  
  I look on all such companies as disease vectors.  I've had to integrate with some of them to meet customer requirements but those integrations live in their own little containers with tightly controlled access.
  
  Coincidentally, REvil, the group behind the attack, is also a managed services provider - of ransomware.
  
  
  
• Speaking of vtubers trying to kill me with Minecraft streams, today's lineup included Pomu and Elira from Nijisanji EN, Vyolfers, Mooyü, Nymroot, and Hyanna from VMN having a 4th of July fireworks party, Pina Pengin from PRISM, Ollie from Hololive Indonesia - live right now - and shortly Pikamee from VOMS.
  
  All in English, or at least multilingual.
  
  
  

Tech News

• How to install Windows 11 in a virtual machine.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not a bad idea.  It's very tempting, in fact.
  
  I'm not sure how well virtualisation handles gaming these days, not that I have time to play anything more demanding than Minecraft - and the last few weeks, not that either.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm might move to TSMC's 4nm node for the Snapdragon 895+.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The other reason the 888+ is barely faster than the 888 is that Samsung hasn't made much with its fab technology in the past year.  Qualcomm is using Samsung because - like Nvidia - they waited too long to book capacity at TSMC.
  
  Not that Samsung is bad; they're just a year or so behind the cutting edge.
  
  
  
• Well, you can't prove it wasn't a cosmic ray.  (Google Groups)
  
  An SSL certificate chain got derailed by a single-bit error in one of the entries.  The hashes used to verify this have no built-in error-checking or redundancy; that's expected to be handled at lower levels.  So if a bit flip happens in a way to escape those checks, the whole thing falls over.
  
  Well, one copy of the whole thing.  There are also multiple copies.
  
  
  
• PCIe 5.0 SSDs are on their way.  (Serve the Home)
  
  For servers, anyway.  Not for you just yet.
  
  One of the use cases is for redundant backplane links for high availability.  These drives can provide two x2 connections to different controllers, each as fast as an existing PCIe 4.0 x4 interface.
  
  
  
• Windows on Arm is not great.  (ZDNet)
  
  Microsoft's support is half-hearted, and Qualcomm's hardware is half-assed.  And the devices are not designed to be fixed when they go wrong.
  
  Like Apple, only somehow worse.
  
  
  
• Rent seekers gonna rent seek.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  "The Smart Fund is not a tax, as a tax would be paid to government.  It's good old-fashioned extortion," The Smart Fund says.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, July 05 2021 11:16 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 06 2021 03:03 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 06 2021 03:06 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 06 2021 07:16 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 06 2021 07:21 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 06 2021 07:22 AM (eqaFC)

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• Happy Independence Day, everyone!
  
  
  
• Windows 11 is all about security.  (PC Perspective)
  
  For Microsoft.  Not for you.
  
  It's kind of refreshing to see a blatant money grab instead of a company refusing to take your business because you once were within 400 yards of someone who expressed an unapproved opinion.
  
  Because when a corporation only cares about money, the problem can be solved with money.
  
  
  
  

• Samsung has a new small tablet - the 8.7" 2021 A7 Lite.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  8.7" is rather pushing the boundary of small, and this is heavier than my 2013 Nexus 7.  That's not the problem, though; it's still smaller and lighter than my 10.4" Lenovo tablet
  
  It uses the same CPU as the Lenovo - an 8-core A53 - so it's not super fast.  But it's adequate.  That's not the problem either.
  
  It's not sold in Australia, so I have to import it, which gives a budget tablet a mid-range price.  That's still not the problem.
  
  The problem is that it has a 1340x800 screen.  That's essentially the same as the original model of the Nexus 7 from 2012, and everyone remarked how much better the 2013 model was with its 1920x1200 screen.
  
  That resolution is not good enough for reading books or web pages on a screen that size.  The defects in the typography are very noticeable.  You can maybe get away with it on a 6" phone screen, but I went with the Oppo A91 specifically because it had a 1080p screen and most of the competition at that price point didn't.
  
  Though they did last year.  Things have gone backwards.
  
  Given the cost of importing this, I might as well get Lenovo's 8" tablet at less than half the price.  It also has an inadequate screen, but at least it's priced to match.
  
  
  
• If you can't get a graphics card right now the Ryzen 5700G provides the fastest desktop integrated graphics around without skimping on the CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't get the 5700G either, or not as a retail part.  It's shipping in prebuilt systems already and should be available as a retail component next month.
  
  Really looking forward to seeing what Rembrandt can do.  The 5700G can play current games on low settings at reasonable frame rates - but at 720p.  Rembrandt updates the graphics hardware to RDNA2 - the same as used by the current Xbox and PlayStation - and supports DDR5 RAM.  That should deliver the same frame rates as the 5700G but at 1080p.
  
  
  
• What's the difference between the Snapdragon 888 Plus and the original Snapdragon 888?  (WCCFTech)
  
  In short, one CPU core is 5% faster.
  
  Yay.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm is going back to custom CPU cores.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  They shut down their internal CPU design team after the Snapdragon 820 - which wasn't great - and have been sticking to Arm designs since then.
  
  Recently they bought Arm server chip startup Nuvia for $1.4 billion.  (Android Authority)  Nuvia was founded by two of the top CPU architects at Apple, and Apple's CPU designs - while not as good as the tame Apple press likes to claim - are genuinely good.
  
  I hope Qualcomm succeeds with this.  The quality of Apple's hardware designs is irrelevant to me because their software environment is locked down to the point where I can't use it for the work I do.  Getting something equally good out into the open market and running Linux, or even Windows, will be a big advance.
  
  I questioned the move at the time, but if the best they can do with a mid-cycle refresh using Arm's core designs is a 5% speed bump, you can see why it was worth over a billion bucks.
  
  
  
• Intel might be bringing their next-gen Sapphire Rapids server platform to the desktop as well.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Right now Intel has abandoned the workstation market to AMD.  Intel's workstation parts peak at 28 cores, while AMD goes up to 64 cores.  The new chips are expected to ship in Q2 of next year and go up to 56 cores.
  
  Only problem is, later next year AMD is expected to release 128 core CPUs for both servers and workstations.
  
  This goes back to why Intel is signing up to produce CPUs at TSMC. Without that they're locked out of key markets by the delays in updating their own fabs.
  
  
  
• Swedish supermarket chain Coop had to close 500 stores after the company running their cash registers got hit by that ransomware attack I mentioned yesterday.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  <deep breath>
  
  STOP OUTSOURCING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE!
  
  
  
• Here's a handy list of Apple devices to steer clear of if you have a pacemaker.  (ZDNet)
  
  Yes, the list includes pretty much everything Apple makes.  But the safe distance is 6-12 inches.  So just don't go to sleep with your iThis or MacThat resting on your chest and you should be fine.
  
  
  
• Out: Death panels.  In: Death algorithms.  (The Guardian)
  
  "Sure, we left you alone to see whether you'd starve or freeze first", said a government spokesman.  "But it wasn't us, it was the algorithm."
  
  
  

I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Entire Site From Orbit Where by "Site" I Mean Twitter Video of the Day

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, July 04 2021 02:07 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 04 2021 02:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, July 04 2021 09:57 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, July 05 2021 01:37 PM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 05 2021 03:20 PM (PiXy!)

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• Facebook has gone full Stasi, asking users to report anyone expressing unapproved opinions.  (The Verge)
  
  The Verge, it turns out, has learned to love Big Brother:

  Facebook, like other platforms, has had issues with extremism for a long time, and though it’s good that it’s trying to combat it, some of its efforts feel like they should’ve been implemented long ago.

  No, you fascist-fellating bumblefucks, what Facebook is doing is extremism.

• Asus is bringing its ZenFone 8 to the US.  (AnandTech)
  
  It delivers a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 888 CPU and starts at $599 with 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 5.9" 2400x1080 OLED display.  That's pretty small for a modern phone, because there's almost no bezel.  The diagonal on my new Oppo A91 is 0.1" greater than my old Xperia Z Ultra, but overall it's tiny next to the old phone.
  
  The ZenFone 8 has a proper headphone jack, but no SD card slot, because we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Oppo, they're merging with OnePlus, and merging their versions of Android as well.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  The corporate merger doesn't mean a whole lot since OnePlus is a subsidiary of Oppo which is a subsidiary of BBK.  I had to look that up; I couldn't remember which was the parent company.
  
  OnePlus flagship devices will now be guaranteed to receive three Android updates and four years of security updates.
  
  My A91 - not exactly a flagship - just updated painlessly to Android 11, so there's that.
  
  
  
• The PCI Express 6.0 spec is expected to be finalised this year.  (AnandTech)
  
  That full-size PCIe SSD I mentioned last year, with 28GB/s transfer rates, will be possible with a simple M.2 device with PCIe 6.0.
  
  But it will likely need a hefty heatsink.  Power consumption went up sharply from PCIe 3 to 4, and is going up again with 5 later this year.  6 is hardly going to reverse that trend.
  
  The most likely place for this is in servers, where high-speed network cards already saturate a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot.  PCIe 6.0 will allow for 400Gb Ethernet, which is currently limited to high-end switches and routers.
  
  
  
• The first customers to sign up for TSMC's 3nm process are Apple and...  Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  3nm promises 70% more logic transistors per square millimetre - only a 20% improvement for memory though - when compared to 5nm.
  
  Since Apple is eating most of the world's 5nm capacity, though, the most direct comparison is with 7nm, which AMD is using for its CPUs, APUs, and GPUs, and for the Xbox and PlayStation 5.  TSMC's 5nm is 80% denser than 7nm for logic, so 3nm is 3x as dense as 7nm.
  
  So AMD could in theory deliver a 48 core desktop CPU or a 192 core server CPU when 3nm arrives.
  
  Next year.
  
  AMD won't be able to get capacity right away, but TSMC is aggressively expanding production in multiple locations, so things should improve.
  
  
  
  
  Intel is probably booking what capacity it can so it can show off a CPU that beats AMD.  Even if supply is limited, taking back that position would be a psychological victory.
  
  
  
• A closer look at AMD's Broken Xbox motherboard, the 4700S.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This reuses Xbox chips with broken graphics as Ryzen CPUs.  The problem is the chips have limited I/O and can't use regular DDR4 RAM, so it's more of a curiosity than a practical platform.
  
  If it had even some of the GPU section functional it would be a different story, but possibly AMD's agreement with Microsoft forbids that.
  
  
  
• OpenZFS 2.1 is here with support for distributed hot spares, automatic worker scaling, and InfluxDB for tracking statistics.  (Phoronix)
  
  InfluxDB isn't built in, I take it; it feeds live statistics to your specified database so that you can monitor I/O across all your servers.
  
  It runs on Linux kernel 3.10 or later (3.10 is pretty old at this point), and FreeBSD 12.2 or later (12.2 is very recent).
  
  
  
• How to avoid the TPM report requirement for Windows 11.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  At least for the preview release.  I don't expect this to survive to the final version.
  
  
  
• How about that: Another massive Russian cyber-attack on US businesses.  (BBC)
  
  Funny how this is happening now.
  
  Some have asked why I believe the fingers pointing conveniently at Russia, and the reason is that this pointless destruction is exactly Russia's style.  China's hacking efforts are even more pervasive, but aim mostly at stealing information without getting caught.  Everyone knows about it but it rarely makes the news.
  
  It's another supply chain attack on a company providing monitoring software.  (ZDNet)
  
  I hate this crap.  I mentioned one company I have personal experience with - their name rhymes with "DataDog" - whose monitoring agent was 750MB of crap including a complete standalone Python install.
  
  They're idiots, yes, but they're hardly alone in that market.
  
  
  
• Microsoft was warned of a critical vulnerability in PowerShell.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Joy.
  
  
  
• Tame Apple press delighted to embed themselves ever deeper into Big Brother's embrace.  (Six Colors)
  
  The article celebrates being able to move from Authy - a perfectly functional application for secure two-factor authentication - to Apple's iCloud Keychain.
  
  So now he has the ability to automatically fill in two-factor auth codes.
  
  Which means he doesn't have two factor auth.
  
  His passwords are synced with Apple.  His 2FA codes are synced with Apple.  The first breach that happens, he'll have Zero Factor Auth.
  
  
  
• If you factory-reset your Amazon device before selling it or giving it away, congratulations, you just handed over all your passwords.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you have an IoT - Internet of Things - device, the only appropriate security measure is to take it out behind the barn and kill it with an axe.
  
  My goddamn washing machine is IoT-enabled, but I'm not stupid enough to let it connect to my WiFi.  I can hear its jaunty little your sheets have finished drying tune just fine without it.
  
  
  
• The EU has told Apple to quite with the transparently self-serving excuses for its monopolistic behaviour.  (Reuters)
  
  The EU doesn't actually care about competition, but they care a lot about being able to soak foreign companies for billions of dollars over imagined infractions.
  
  It's a start.
  
  
  
• Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app, says photo-sharing app Instagram.  (Engadget)
  
  And I'm no longer a 19-year-old anime girl.
  
  Wait.
  
  
  
• Twitter is working to provide idiots new facilities to protect their stupid opinions from well-deserved ridicule.  (The Verge)
  
  They have to do this, because their target market is the room-temperature IQ crowd, which is as fragile as a cut crystal decanter in a ball bearing factory.
  
  
  

News From the Crapping All Over Everything Wars Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 03 2021 08:11 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: N.A. Ferrell at Sunday, July 04 2021 01:04 AM (+T/rd)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, July 04 2021 03:05 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 04 2021 05:52 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 04 2021 11:51 AM (PiXy!)

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• Not so humble: Humble Bundle won't let you give the full amount of a purchase to charity.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They don't care whether you pay anything to the content creators, but they are making damn sure they get a cut themselves.
  
  They previously tried removing the sliders that let you change the allocation of your payment - between the creator, the designated charity, and Humble Bundle.  That provoked enough anger that they put it back.
  
  Now they're just limiting the minimum amount you can give to them.
  
  The article notes that Humble Bundle was taken over by IGN in 2017.

• Looking for a very fast, pathetically small, and hugely overpriced SSD?  Intel has you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Optane P1600X comes in a range of sizes up to 118GB, a perfect size for...  Basically nothing, since individual games are often larger than that.
  
  
  
• Looking for a very fast, huge, and hugely expensive SSD?  Gigabyte has you covered.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The AORUS Extreme AIC has a capacity of 32TB and a transfer rate of 28GB/s.  It's a full-size PCIe card with dual fans, looking very much like a graphics card.
  
  
  
• The FTC voted yesterday to expand the FTC's regulatory powers, with an eye to pursuing antitrust claims.  (The Hill)
  
  Can I vote myself a raise the same way?
  
  Just asking.
  
  
  
• Amazon is not happy about the FTC's actions.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, good.
  
  
  
• Subaru - the duck girl - just hit a million subscribers.  Also, it's her birthday.

• The world's fastest SSD...  Ish.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Intel's Optane P5800X has a 6 microsecond access time.  That's about ten times faster than regular flash SSDs.
  
  On most benchmarks that doesn't matter.  Sequential access performance is the same as a PCIe 4.0 SSD, and multi-threaded I/O too.
  
  Where this helps is if you have a single task that requires fast access to data.  Which isn't that common; if you have a large busy database you probably have a lot of active threads.
  
  Optane is also good for very heavy write loads - the drive is rated for 100 drive writes per day, where an enterprise SSD might go as high as 3.
  
  
  

• How to install Windows 11 on a Raspberry Pi.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Neither asked nor answered: Why to install Windows 11 on a Raspberry Pi.
  
  
  
• Intel's next-generation Xeons will come with up to 64GB of RAM.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's not a lot for a server, but that's 64GB attached directly to the CPU.  Close to two terabytes per second bandwidth to the local memory.
  
  It's HBM2e, which is pretty power hungry, so don't expect to see these parts in a laptop.  They'll likely be in the 300W range, maybe 400W.
  
  
  
• Windows 11 includes DNS over HTTPS.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Regular DNS lookups are plaintext, so even if the three-letter agencies can't break your SSL encryption, they can easily find out which sites you are visiting.
  
  DNS over HTTPS fixes that.  Only problem is, depending on where you live - and what ISP you're stuck with - it may be blocked anyway.
  
  Chrome, Edge, and Firefox already support it, but requests directly from your operating system don't.
  
  
  
• Yes, we have no Xboxes.  We have no Xboxes today.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Or tomorrow.  Or most of next year.
  
  Whatever hardware you have, try to make it last.
  
  
  
• Virgin Orbit launched seven - small - satellites from its LauncherOne system.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is notable because it takes off in mid air from a Boeing 747.
  
  
  
• A wireless carrier got caught embedding ads in Google authentication SMS messages.  (9to5Google)
  
  SMS prices are - always have been - a massive scam anyway.  They cost carriers almost nothing.  Embedding ads is like rubbing sulfuric acid into a papercut.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 02 2021 01:34 AM (LADmw)

2 Normal:  well, for one thing, it'd be "c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\resolv.conf".

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 02 2021 04:20 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 02 2021 08:37 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 03 2021 06:56 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, July 05 2021 06:29 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 06 2021 07:14 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Business Listings at Friday, December 17 2021 07:14 PM (Kulw7)

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