• Well, that's one way to handle things. PolyNetwork - the crypto site that got hacked recently and lost $600 million - has its money back and has offered the hacker half a mil and a job as Chief Security Advisor.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Meanwhile down south Reichskaren Ardern of New Zealand just locked down the entire country over one case of Bat Flu.
  
  And Tasmania in turn has declared New Zealand to be a high-risk zone.
  
  No matter how bad your political leadership may be, there's worse nearby.

Tech News

• Memory prices are starting to come back down.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Still well above the all-time low of A$3 per GB, but at that price half the world's DRAM manufacturers went out of business.
  
  Good news for me because I'm looking to buy 128GB pretty soon.
  
  
  
• Package specs for AMD's Zen 4 server CPUs have leaked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Max instantaneous power draw on the new server parts is 700W, up from 450W.  That lines up with the leaked increase of maximum continuous power from 280W to 400W, and that lines up with the increase from 64 to 96 cores.
  
  The I/O die by itself can use up to 126W, but it's driving 12 Infinity Fabric links, 12 channels of DDR5 (actually 24, but let's not go into that), and 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 so that's not really a surprise.  A lot of it seems to go to the Infinity Fabric links, since the smaller parts have all the PCIe and memory channels active but fewer links, and have much lower I/O die power.
  
  
  
• Zen 3 Threadripper and Threadripper Pro parts are expected to arrive soon.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I considered getting a low-end Threadripper system for my new PC, but I think I'll be better off with two Ryzen systems - running Windows and Linux respectively.
  
  
  
• Scientists at LLNL triggered a fusion reaction that released 10% as much energy as all the sunlight hitting the Earth.  (NYT)
  
  More than enough to power human civilisation.
  
  For 0.1 nanoseconds, anyway, which is how long it lasted.
  
  
  
• A critical security flaw affects 83 million IoT devices.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The flaw is called IoT.
  
  
  

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wednesday, August 18 2021 11:54 PM (cOJsr)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 19 2021 05:37 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, August 19 2021 09:41 AM (DHVaH)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 19 2021 11:43 AM (obo9H)

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Not something restricted to the US, either:

On a lighter note, this is why we permit Twitter to exist:

Chowderheads To The Left Of Me Mostly Edition

• The US Federal Fucking Government appears to have stuck the secret terrorist watchlist in an Elasticsearch database without a password and connected it directly to the internet. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  In Bahrain.
  
  And it got picked up by search engines and indexed.
  
  The DHS was notified on the 19th of July, and three weeks later the site was taken down.

• Memorial Health System got hacked and patent data was stolen. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oh, and the attack also disrupted internal computer systems causing radiology and surgical procedures to be cancelled.
  
  
  
• T-Mobile has confirmed it was hacked. (Motherboard)

  We have determined that unauthorized access to some T-Mobile data occurred.

  Well, thanks, T-Mobile spokesbot.
  
  
  
• Chase Bank wasn't hacked. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They just had a "technical issue" where they leaked your private data to other customers.
  
  
  
• Rambus (yeah, those jerks) have pushed HBM3 to 8.4GHz.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The point of HBM - high bandwidth memory - is that it has a very wide bus (1024 bits) but originally ran at modest clock speeds (1GHz).  Running a very wide bus with a very high clock speed is even better.

In a totally unexpected turn of events, Cover Corp has announced Hololive English don't-call-it-gen-2.

Two of them have already had their accounts locked by Twitter.  It's something of a tradition.

Right now they all have between 60 and 70,000 subscribers - a few hours after launch and before their major markets have woken up.

Debut streams are this weekend - Sunday JST, exact times TBA.

I talk a lot about Hololive (and other vtubers), but honestly, when the alternative is Hollywood and the dying shreds of the publishing industry, one takes refuge where one can find it.

---

It started out with Korone - her English wasn't great but she's so much fun that it didn't matter - and then Coco and Haachama.  Then HoloEN launched, and I found out about VOMS and particularly Pikamee, then I realised that HoloID streams in English a lot of the time, and then they doubled their numbers.

Then it was Vyolfers and her little crew, and Pomu and the gang at Nijisanji EN, and then Pina & Co. at PRISM Project.  And now back to HoloEN, increasing their group from 5 to 11 in the space of a month.

I'm hoping the market will support them all.  HoloEN is guaranteed success and Nijisanji EN seems to be doing well enough for them to go full-time.  I hope PRISM can stay the course too; they're putting together quite a pool of talent.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 17 2021 11:25 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, August 18 2021 12:28 AM (DHVaH)

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• Everyone from Apple to Andrew Cuomo is now wishing they had just waited a week.
  
  
  
• Microsoft wants to be the Blockchain Stasi of Anti-Piracy.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The plan is to bribe people with cryptocurrencies to report software pirates, which means, because the blockchain is public data, that there is not even the pretense of anonymity for the informants.
  
  

• Russian ransomware gangs are working with Russian intelligence services.  (CBS News)
  
  No shit, Sherlock.
  
  
  
• Huawei is pressuring smaller companies to install backdoors in software so that Huawei can then spy on the users.  (Mint)
  
  See above.
  
  
  
• A hacker may or may not have breached T-Mobile's database and stolen personal details of 100 million customers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They're offering 30 million social security numbers, drivers licenses, and other personal details for 6 Bitcoin.
  
  
  
• Don't buy third-tier SSDs, I said.  Stick to the manufacturers who own their own fabs and design their own controllers, like...  I guess Samsung?  But previously also Toshiba and Intel and Micron/Crucial.
  
  But definitely not the Crucial P2.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This was originally a budget TLC drive.  Now it's a budget QLC drive.  Same model number, same DRAMless controller, but cheap QLC flash.
  
  DRAMless TLC drives have their place - for the typical desktop user, they work just fine.  QLC drives have their place - if you want a large cheap SSD for stuff that you want to load fast but don't update all that often.
  
  DRAMless QLC drives are an abomination before God.  Performance is terrible - as little as a quarter the speed of a similar TLC model - and lifespan is drastically reduced.
  
  
  
• This incident report.  (Facebook)
  
  An SUV collided with a bus.  The bus collided with a power pole, which fell on the bus and took power out.
  
  The fire station is right next door, but the doors are electrically operated.  When they crank them open manually, there are live electrical cables blocking access.  The rear exit is blocked by an electrically operated gate.
  
  Meanwhile the SUV is on fire but the passengers on the bus are trapped by the downed power cables.
  
  Then things get complicated.
  
  
  
• Nestflix and chill.  (Nestflix)
  
  This is your one-stop streaming service for movies and TV shows that...  Don't actually exist.
  
  Although...  I swear I've seen some of them.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 16 2021 11:54 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 16 2021 11:55 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 17 2021 01:44 AM (LADmw)

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This was posted after the Afghan president fled the country.

Update: Democrat voters - at least those who continue to vote thus - are retarded.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, August 16 2021 03:36 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, August 16 2021 07:26 AM (DHVaH)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, August 16 2021 10:45 AM (MuaLM)

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• I was wondering if I really need 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD for my new desktop replacement notebook.  So I ran some tests on an older notebook with 16GB.
  
  Now I'm wondering if 64GB will be enough.  Probably.
  
  Also the Dell model I want went on sale Friday and is already out of stock, and  now probably won't ship until mid-September.  Great.
  
  
  
• On the upside it looks like I've figured out how to safely migrate mee.nu - at a binary level - from the old 32-bit CentOS VM to shiny new 64-bit Ubuntu 20.04.  Full migration will come later when we're on stable (and much faster) hardware.
  
  We used to use OpenVZ but it's basically dead now, so I can't just copy the container across this time.  But with some compatibility libraries I can migrate the exact Python setup intact.  The databases were moved to MySQL 5.7 last year, so that part is reasonably current.
  
  
  
• Apple will keep clarifying this CSAM mess until morale improves.  (Gizmodo)
  
  That's not my headline.  That's the literal headline on the article.  Apple screwed this one up good.
  
  
  

• If you were hoping the Radeon 6600 XT would reduce pressure on the video card market we've got bad news.  (VideoCardz)
  
  Although the 6600 XT is not particularly fast at mining Ethereum, it's very power-efficient - it mines about 30% more coins per watt than any other current card.
  
  On the other hand, if the miners buy all of those, they might leave some of the other cards which are better for gaming but worse for mining.
  
  
  
• 1Password is abandoning its native Mac app for a clumsy cross-platform Electron replacement.  (Six Colors)
  
  The article blames the developer for deciding that the Mac wasn't an important enough platform to maintain a custom app.  But really, didn't Apple already decide that for us?  If they won't support their platform, why should we?
  
  
  
• The Perl development community is disintegrating over code of conduct issues.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Codes of conduct are a cancer on open source development, a takeover by people who contribute nothing, and - you committed what into the source code?  Jesus Tapdancing Christ, dude, take some time off.  Like forever maybe.
  
  
  

Well, sort of anime.  It was two weeks ago that they dropped the first teaser, and this confirms exactly what we all thought - Hololive EN Gen 2 with a full five members is coming very soon - likely just before the Gen 1 anniversary.  It's also likely to be the only full generation debut this year, though I'd be happy to be wrong.

This is a much slower pace than last year, when they debuted Hololive ID Gen 1, CN Gen 2, JP Gen 5, EN Gen 1, and ID Gen 2.  (And the last couple of members of JP Gen 4 were early January.)

But with the launch of EN Gen 1 the company went from I think this might be working, keep putting more talents out there to holy crap, it's working, whatever you do, don't screw this up.  Out of dozens of members only three now have fewer than half a million subscribers.  The one that left a few weeks ago to pursue an indie career already has 800,000 subscribers of her own.

Let's Check In On Haachama Video of the Day

Haachama is the youngest member of Hololive and simultaneously one of the oldest, having joined in 2018 when she was still in high school.  About six months ago she discovered the classic Bruegel painting of the Tower of Babel - or one of them, since there are two - and decided she was going to build it in Minecraft.

And did.

You can't grasp the full scale of it from this clip, since she's flying around inside it and has the render distance turned up.  With the Minecraft default settings you can't see one wall from the other.

She completed her last year of high school here in Australia.  Trapped by the Bat Flu travel restrictions and with only a potato computer and two tin cans and a length of string for internet access, she had to get creative with her content.  And she certainly did that.

Oh, and that food?  She was looking after herself much of the time, so the weird stuff she created for her channel is what she ate.  Thankfully she was able to zip back home to Japan late last year when both countries were out of lockdown at the same time.

• The usual suspects are distraught that the NSW government is refusing to implement an indefinite lockdown and plans to open up again as soon as vaccination numbers are up or case numbers are down.  (Australia waited for more safety data before rolling out vaccines so we're a few months behind the US.)
  
  I'm surprised that they've shown even that much sense, given their recent history, but I'll take it.
  
  
  
• Apple "regrets" "confusion" over iPhone scanning.  (BBC)
  
  What they actually regret is being criticised for spying on children.
  
  
  
• Apple is rolling out propaganda checklists to staff to "explain" to customers why the company is spying on children.  (Bloomberg)

  Some users have been concerned that they may be implicated for simply storing images of, say, their baby in a bathtub. But a parent’s personal images of their children are unlikely to be in a database of known child pornography, which Apple is cross-referencing as part of its system.

  That's not how it fucking works.  It doesn't take a hash of the file; that's too easy to cheat.  It uses perceptual hashes, the sort of thing that classifies a cat as an avocado.
  
  
  
• It's so bad they've lost the Ars Technica commentariat.  (Ars Technica)
  
  That used to be a great site up until about five years ago; it was one of the first to get taken over by brain worms.  Today the comments are full of Apple-loving Biden voters, and yet, and yet, on this topic they are absolutely scathing.

  - I'll be OK with this if all governments super-pinky-swear they won't abuse the hash-repository for their own interests.
  
  

  - It’s a brave new world, my sentient brethren.

  
  - In related news, Apple noted that "ignorance is strength". Additionally, sources familiar with the matter opined "War is peace."

  
  - I guess you can technically claim this is an "advancement" on privacy, as long as you don't think too hard about what direction Apple is advancing.

  All of those have 90%+ upvotes too.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Turns out the WD Black SN750 4TB model is real.  I'm going to put one in my next laptop - assuming I get the laptop and it works well.  With 64GB RAM and 4TB (maybe 5TB) of SSD I won't need to worry about a new desktop system for a long while.
  
  I will get the Linux lab set up, since I'll have memory and SSDs on hand to fill up three NUCs.  Plan is to name the desktop and the three Linux nodes Ina, Pina, Pika, and Pomu.
  
  Update: Ina (big laptop), Pina, Pika, and Pomu (NUCs), Gwem (small laptop), and Kson (desktop system).
  
  
  
• A WHO expert had concerns about a lab close to the site where the first COVID cases appeared.  (AP News)
  
  Well, it now seems that the first COVID cases actually appeared at that lab, but the first reported cases were at a market 500 metres away.
  
  That actually understates things.
  
  The Wuhan Bat Virus Lab where they were studying bat coronaviruses is diagonally across an intersection from the Wuhan Live Bat Market where the bat coronavirus outbreak was first reported.
  
  Concerns my bat coronavirus ass.
  
  
  
• Apple has released MacOS 11.5.2, a 2.5GB bug fix.  (ZDNet)
  
  What does it fix?
  
  Dunno.  Apple didn't say.  Microsoft might give you reams of incomprehensible tech jargon to wade through for each individual patch, but it's still better than "macOS 11.5.2 includes bug fixes for your Mac".
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has released a statement on their exploding power supplies.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It reads, and I quote, Oops.
  
  A couple of models rebadged and sold by Gigabyte - they don't actually manufacture them - had the overload cutout set at 150% of rated peak load, which was much too high for some of the components.
  
  They still cut out, they just did so rather permanently.
  
  
  
• A look at the QNAP TS-873A 8-bay NAS.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The unit has a Ryzen V1500B - a first-generation quad-core embedded part with a TDP of 16W.  It's a lot slower than current generation parts, but it's cheap, supports ECC RAM, and is rated for ambient temperatures up to 105C so it's not likely to die on the first warm day of spring.
  
  Apart from the 8 3.5" bays the unit ships with 8GB of RAM - upgradeable to 64GB, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, two PCIe slots, and two M.2 NVMe slots for caching.
  
  There's also a slightly cheaper 6-bay model - the TS-673A.
  
  Oh, and I completely forgot about this: The TS-H973AX-8G is a 9-bay model, with 5 3.5" and 4 2.5" hot-swap drive bays.  It has the same Ryzen CPU but includes a 10Gb Ethernet port as well as the two 2.5GbE.  It has no M.2 slots but two of the 2.5" bays support U.2 NVMe drives as well as the more common SATA.
  
  All three models support ZFS rather than BtrFS, which is more common in low-end NAS devices.  ZFS works by magic; it's hard to overstate how much better it is than classic filesystems like NTFS or Ext4.  Need to back something up?  One click, you have a backup.  Need to enable database compression?  Don't need to mess with the database settings, one click and it's compressed.  Need to de-duplicate 18 million images?  One click.
  
  ZFS does need a fast CPU and plenty of RAM to work well, and if you have a really huge array stuffed full of photos and want deduplication, you'll need more than the stock 8GB.    But we'd be talking about hundreds of thousands of raw camera files before that became a problem.
  
  
  
• Facebook is rolling out end-to-end encryption for Messenger.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Facebook now has a stronger privacy story than Apple.  How the turn worms.
  
  
  
• You can get a Threadripper surprisingly cheap now.  (Newegg)
  
  That's the first-generation 8-core model, though.  It's slower than the 6-core 5600G - a lot slower in single-threaded workloads, slightly slower in multi-threaded - but if you need a ton of PCIe slots and/or 256GB of RAM but not super-high CPU performance, motherboards for it are also available and not crazy expensive.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 14 2021 11:10 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 15 2021 12:07 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 15 2021 02:03 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 15 2021 02:05 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 15 2021 02:38 AM (PiXy!)

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Top Story

Tech News

• More Radeon 6600 XT reviews are popping up.  (PC Perspective)
  
  General consensus is that it is, indeed, a video card.
  
  To be fair it is on average both faster and cheaper than Nvidia's RTX 3060 - unless you want to play Minecraft with ray tracing, anyway.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the RTX 3060, it looks like I'll be getting that - the laptop version, anyway.  I missed out on the sale of the Dell model with the 3050, but this week they have a sale on the model with twice the RAM and storage and a 3060 instead.  Much better value.
  
  
  
• Early high-latency DDR5-4800 modules are the new low-latency DDR4-3200.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In bandwidth tests, where the DDR5 modules have a significant edge, they are slower, but in latency tests, where the DDR5 modules are slower, they are faster.
  
  No, I have no idea what the hell is going on, unless they accidentally swapped the results.
  
  
  
• Physicists have created a Wigner Crystal made entirely of electrons.  (Quanta)
  
  I don't know what that means either.
  
  
  
• Internet for thee...  (Islander Nes)
  
  The US Senate has threatened to provide free internet access to Cuba.
  
  
  
• But not for me.  (Ars Technica)
  
  AT&T has had to delay half a million fiber connections...  Because they've run out of fiber.
  
  
  
• Reddit is valued at $10 billion.  (The Verge)
  
  Reddit was an also-ran, a downmarket version of Digg.  Then Digg pushed a really unpopular site update and refused to listen to its users, and they all jumped ship.
  
  
  
• Twitter just pushed a really unpopular site update and is refusing to listen to its users.  (CNet)
  
  Their strength is their weakness: They are incapable of learning from mistakes.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, August 13 2021 10:55 PM (DHVaH)

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• The problem with having redundant virtual servers is you don't necessarily know if they are redundant or not....  Until your cloud provider has to reboot a hardware node and your primary and secondary API servers both drop dead.
  
  That wouldn't have been so bad except one of the nodes came back up with two copies of the core software running, with competing restart scripts fighting over the network port and overwriting each other's log files.
  
  So downstream apps were getting random, intermittent errors depending on where the load balancer sent them and which instance was active at that moment, but there was nothing to indicate a problem in the server logs because only the instance that was working at that moment was logging anything.
  
  Fun.
  
  
  
• Samsung announced their new Flip and Fold.  (AnandTech)
  
  The Flip is squarish and unfolds into a rather tall but otherwise normal phone.  The Fold is a normal-sized phone that unfolds into a squarish tablet.
  
  They look quite nice and could actually be great devices if the folding screens are robust now.  But not cheap - starting at $999 for the Flip and $1799 for the Fold.
  
  
  

Tech News

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 13 2021 12:34 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, August 13 2021 01:32 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, August 13 2021 04:05 AM (DHVaH)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Friday, August 13 2021 09:46 AM (zuQbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 13 2021 10:01 AM (PiXy!)

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Top Story

• The Radeon RX 6600 XT is here and it's definitely a video card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD jacked up the MSRP on this one because with cards selling as fast as they can produce them, why should the scalpers have all the fun?
  
  And that seems to be the main point of contention in all the reviews - performance is fine, but the price hike means value is no better than AMD's cards from two or three years ago.
  
  Well, performance is fine unless you want to run Minecraft with ray tracing enabled at 2560x1440.  Then it plunges to 15fps - half the speed of Nvidia's competing RTX 3060.  You can, of course, just turn off ray tracing, and then Minecraft will run on an elderly potato.
  
  
  
• There's also a professional version, the W6600, and there things are slightly different.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  In this case it's only slightly faster than the old model - but half the price.  That really is progress.

• You can now run Windows 11 on an Arm-based Mac.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Under virtualisation, just to make things as miserable as possible.
  
  
  
• Hackers stole $600 million from crypto site Poly Network.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• What's wrong with Ethereum.  (Tomer Strolight)
  
  What's wrong - according to Tomer - is a pragmatic approach that tries to solve the problem that simple bugs can lead to irrecoverable losses of billions of dollars.
  
  
  
• Ransomware is now targeting both Synology and QNAP storage devices.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not mine, though, because they're currently unplugged and switched off.
  
  
  
• Amazon has been awarded a secret $10 billion contract to provide cloud services to the NSA.  (The Hill)
  
  We know about it because Microsoft protested the bidding process.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 11 2021 11:26 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 12 2021 12:58 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 12 2021 02:38 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 12 2021 11:25 AM (obo9H)

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