What happened?
Twelve years!
You hit me with a cricket bat!
Ha! Twelve years!
Twelve years!
You hit me with a cricket bat!
Ha! Twelve years!
Tuesday, August 03
Daily News Stuff 3 August 2021
Hack All The Things Edition
Hack All The Things Edition
Top Story
- Huawei has set up an entirely Arm-based datacenter in Moscow. (Tom's Hardware)
Free pen-testing with every server!
Tech News
- Need a motherboard with up to 128 cores and 4TB of RAM? Gigabyte has you covered. (AnandTech)
At just over $1000 the board itself isn't that expensive as things go. A pair of 64 core CPUs could set you back fifteen grand, though, and 4TB of RAM gets expensive fast.
- Google has teased pictures of the upcoming Pixel 6. (AnandTech)
With its mismatched colours it looks like a $79 Vietnamese knock-off.
- Windows 10 will soon start automatically blocking PUPs. (Bleeping Computer)
Potentially unwanted programs - that is, programs that aren't explicitly viruses but that you don't want running.
Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on how well it is implemented. MacOS has the same feature, and when a server at Apple went down no Mac users anywhere in the world could run anything for a couple of hours.
- China is now hacking phone companies throughout Southeast Asia. (ZDNet)
And by "is now" we probably mean "always has been but just got caught at it".
- The Pentagon believes its new AI system can predict events days in advance. (Engadget)
The examples given are spectacularly unimpressive.
Disclaimer: They're fictional, and they're spectacularly unimpressive.
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Monday, August 02
Daily News Stuff 2 August 2021
Indoctrinate All The Things Edition
Indoctrinate All The Things Edition
Top Story
- Its propaganda efforts failing, despite having all the newspapers, all the television networks, all of social media, and all of academia on its side the US federal government is now enlisting children. (New York Times)
That'll work.
Tech News
- Thunderbolt 5 is trinary. (AnandTech)
Rather than using just two voltage levels - 0 and 1 - it uses -1, 0, and 1, and then composes two trinary digits into three bits, with the sequence 00 being unused and treated as an error.
This isn't the first time it's been done, but the more common approach these days is what is called PAM-4, using four levels which maps easily to two bits. PCIe 6.0 - coming soon at least to the server market - uses PAM-4.
Thunderbolt 5, when it ships, will deliver speeds up to 80Gbps bidirectionally. The length and price of the cable that will support that speed is not mentioned, but you can expect it to be short and expensive.
- Google scrapped Google Reader, and that was bad. (The Ringer)
Now you don't need to read the article, which is insufferable.
- How to get admin access on any Windows machine where you have a login. (Bleeping Computer)
Yes, it's yet another print server problem.
- There are two big red things in the asteroid belt. (New York Times)
They're named 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, and they're not supposed to be there. Or they're supposed to be there, but they're not supposed to be that colour. One of those.
- There will be a new Mac Mini by November.... 2022. (9to5Mac)
Well, that's exciting.
I'm probably going to end up with some kind of Mac to do support for work. It won't be my main system, but when there's a Mac-related issue I need a Mac so I can fix it, or at least see it. We run into a lot of problems with Safari, but we have an entire team of UI developers so I mostly don't have to get involved.
- Paul Hansmeier, of the infamously infamous Prenda Law, will not be getting time off for good behaviour. (TorrentFreak)
Because, as it turns out, he has been continuing the schemes that earned him a 14 year prison sentence from prison.
Disclaimer: Nuts to you, fresh from Eta.
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We Heard You Liked Clusters
Rather than building a big Linux box, I think I might get three of the current Intel NUCs and set up a lab for clustering, replication, and failover testing.
They're pretty fast - faster single-threaded than anything I currently own - and have 2.5GbE so networking is also good. And they take the same memory as my Dell all-in-ones so I already have 64GB for them, and a couple of 1TB NVMe drives I can re-use. So three of those works out about the same as one completely new system.
Rather than building a big Linux box, I think I might get three of the current Intel NUCs and set up a lab for clustering, replication, and failover testing.
They're pretty fast - faster single-threaded than anything I currently own - and have 2.5GbE so networking is also good. And they take the same memory as my Dell all-in-ones so I already have 64GB for them, and a couple of 1TB NVMe drives I can re-use. So three of those works out about the same as one completely new system.
Plus three of the slim models stacked up form an almost perfect cube - 117x112x114mm.
TP-Link has some affordable switches out - A$360 for 8x2.5Gb and A$500 for 5x10Gb. So all the new stuff I get will be running at least 2.5Gb, finally. We've been stuck at gigabit speeds for twenty years now.
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Sunday, August 01
Daily News Stuff 1 August 2021
Double Double Toil And Trouble Edition
Hololive English please-don't-call-it-Generation-2 inbound. Probably within a week; they don't let much time pass between these teases and the launch.
The voice is IRyS, the HoloEN "vsinger" - that is, a vtuber who focuses on music - who debuted three weeks ago and already has over half a million subscribers.
As to what the hell the video is talking about... Nobody knows. I think they put Haachama in charge of marketing.
This looks to be a horror game of some kind, voiced by the Hololive talents. Hololive - well, Cover Corp, which manages Hololive and Holostars and INNK Music - has a money printer going brrr right now, and it looks like they're trying do diversify before the money printer burns out.
Which I don't think is likely any time soon; they are very good at finding talent, and pretty good at nurturing it.
Double Double Toil And Trouble Edition
Top Story
- So I went out to the shops last night here in occupied Sydney and... Yeah, nothing. Number of soldiers sighted: Nil. Number of police sighted: Nil. Number of bored security guards: One. Mask compliance: 50%.
Which doesn't mean that I'll ever vote for these fascists again, just means they're lazy fascists.
Yeah, I'm gonna need you to arrest yourself tomorrow. So if you could arrange that for, mmm, 9AM, that'd be great.
- The SolarWinds hackers - which is to say, the Russian government - also hacked at least 27 US Attorneys' offices. (Bleeping Computer)
Which is just more evidence that it was always a state actor and not a criminal gang. And that it was Russia and not China in this case, because China simply buys the people it needs.
More details at AP:The department said 80% of Microsoft email accounts used by employees in the four U.S. attorney offices in New York were breached. All told, the Justice Department said 27 U.S. Attorney offices had at least one employee’s email account compromised during the hacking campaign.
- The Darkside hacking group - the one behind the Colonial Pipeline attack - has rebranded itself BlackMatter. (Bleeping Computer)
They're easily identified because they use home-brewed encryption.
And, again, it's Russian government.
- Meanwhile Chinese hackers - by which of course we mean the Chinese government - are hacking insecure home routers to build a mesh network from which to attack everything else. (The Record)
Do us all a favour. Skip the small stuff and just breach Amazon's mesh network so they'll be forced to shut it down.
Tech News
- Physicists have built the first time crystal, a device that oscillates perpetually without consuming energy. (Quanta)
It's only a handful of atoms, it has to be kept at cryogenic temperatures inside a diamond inside a quantum computer, it doesn't do anything useful, and if you look at it too hard it breaks - literally - but it's still better than Wish.Com.
- Chromebook sales grew 75% in Q2. (Thurrott.com)
I understand the appeal, but you're handing complete control of your data to crazy people.
- Virtual contact is worse than no contact for people over sixty in locked down cities. (The Guardian)
I'm in the latter but not the former category, but I can confirm my life would be vastly improved if Skype stopped ringing at two in the morning.
- The GAO has told Jeff Bezos to fuck off. (CNBC)
He sued over the award of a lunar lander contract to SpaceX, and the ruling affirms that everything about the contract followed regulations. Also that SpaceX actually gets shit done.
- GitHub now provides free legal assistance to projects hit by DMCA takedown notices. (VentureBeat)
That... Sounds good. Waiting for it to go horribly wrong somehow.
- The Asus ProArt Studiopro Pro 16 Pro leaked on Amazon China. (WCCFTech)
Wait, Amazon China?
Anyway, it has a top-of-the-line Ryzen 5900HX (actually I think there's a 5950HX that is the tiniest smidgen faster), Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics, a 16" 3840x2400 OLED display, 32GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and probably the Four Essential Keys. The current 15" and 17" models have them.
Around $3000, so not cheap, but there's literally nothing wrong with it.
- Samsung will be producing 24Gb DDR5 chips. (WCCFTech)
One thing I noted immediately in the DDR5 spec was support for 24Gb memory sizes. Generally only powers of 2 are supported, and current chips are all either 8Gb or 16Gb.
Problem is memory technology hasn't been shrinking as fast as processors, and 32Gb chips aren't quite economical yet. So the committee planned ahead and fitted in a half-node increase.
So in a year or so you'll start seeing 12GB, 24GB, and 48GB modules. The spec allows for modules up to 128GB - and up to 512GB total on a typical DDR5-enabled desktop CPU - but those sizes will take a lot longer to arrive.
- Exactly 20 years later, Intel's Itanium is dead. (Tom's Hardware)
This was Intel's attempt to lock up the server market, by designing a brand new 64-bit architecture and not licensing it to anyone.
It ran headlong into the torpedo of AMD's own 64-bit chips, which were faster, much, much cheaper, and could run all existing software. Intel had to license AMD's architecture but had long-term contracts and were stuck supporting Itanium as well.
Hololive Teaser Trailer of the Day #1
Hololive English please-don't-call-it-Generation-2 inbound. Probably within a week; they don't let much time pass between these teases and the launch.
The voice is IRyS, the HoloEN "vsinger" - that is, a vtuber who focuses on music - who debuted three weeks ago and already has over half a million subscribers.
As to what the hell the video is talking about... Nobody knows. I think they put Haachama in charge of marketing.
Hololive Teaser Trailer of the Day #2
This looks to be a horror game of some kind, voiced by the Hololive talents. Hololive - well, Cover Corp, which manages Hololive and Holostars and INNK Music - has a money printer going brrr right now, and it looks like they're trying do diversify before the money printer burns out.
Which I don't think is likely any time soon; they are very good at finding talent, and pretty good at nurturing it.
Disclaimer: I'll get you, my pretty, and the horse you rode in on.
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