• Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced head of failed crypto Ponzi scheme FTX, has had his $250 million bail revoked and been sent to jail to await trial, under new charges of witness tampering.  (CNBC)
  
  Because he spoke to the press.
  
  Bankman-Fried is a fool and a phony and I'm almost starting to believe he's innocent of the specific charges.  Not that I would ever let him within a dozen firewalls of my digital funds.

• Google wants content scraping by AI tools to be considered fair use.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Of course they do.
  
  But...  Why shouldn't it be?
  
  I can read whatever I like on the internet, and express my opinions here.  Well, not if Prime Minister Albonazi manages to shove his godforsaken misinformation bill through Parliament but until then we have the tacit assumption of freedom of speech down here, even if it is not specifically protected under our Constitution because nothing else is either.
  
  And not that those specific protections are worth much in the US anymore.
  
  Anyway.
  
  Why shouldn't training AIs on public material be fair use under the First Amendment?  How can we have free speech if we don't have free listening?
  
  
  
• Disabling the Efficiency cores on Intel CPUs nets a 50% performance boost on new game Atlas Fallen.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is apparently not an unauthorised sequel to Shrugged.
  
  I'm not sure who exactly screwed this up, but the article points the finger at the game developer and not Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Use text-to-speech to instantly create your own podcast.  (Hacker News)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• The You Can't Just Say That S25-0801 offers eight 2.5Gb ports and one 10Gb port, but the 10Gb port is SFP so it goes straight onto the trash pile.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Around $100.  Shame about, uh, that.

  The bottom of the switch has two mounting points. It also has a You Can't Just Say That product label. We will just quickly note that the "You Can't Just Say That" name was one of the most frequent points that commenters focused on in the YouTube video.

  You don't say.
  
  Probably because you can't.
  
  
  
• Austria's telecommunications regulator has ruled that courts can order DNS blocks for various nefarious activities, but cannot require ISPs to block IP addresses.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Which is a sport our own authorities in Australia are a little too keen on as well.
  
  The problem in this case is that a single IP address can host, say, 96,530 individual websites.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 13 2023 04:29 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, August 13 2023 08:25 AM (liVFZ)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 13 2023 09:06 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, August 13 2023 02:26 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 13 2023 04:23 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 13 2023 09:56 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 14 2023 03:39 PM (PiXy!)

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• LK-99 might not be a superconductor at all - let alone at room temperature - which is odd because one of the things that has been confirmed is that it works as a superconductor at least at liquid nitrogen temperatures.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What's going on?  It looks like the pure material may not be a superconductor, and its behaviour is very dependent on impurities.  Which lines up with recent theoretical analyses.
  
  The original lab in Korea is now providing samples of their own material to independent researchers, so the story is likely to resolve itself one way or another in the next couple of weeks.

• The Doogee T20mini is an 8.4" Android tablet with a 1920x1200 screen, an adequate CPU (two A75 cores and six A55 cores, all at 1.6GHz), 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a microSD slot, and a headphone jack, running on Android 13.  (Notebook Check)
  
  List price is $265 but it's available for pre-order at $135, shipping next week.
  
  Googles "doogee malware".
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  Do not want.
  
  
  
• Twitter is close to break even.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Before Elon Musk bought the company, it was losing $4 million per day on average.
  
  After he took over, advertisers fled fearing a backlash from leftist lunatics who don't buy their products anyway, and despite massive cost savings from firing its own horde of leftist lunatics, the company was still losing money.
  
  Tech Crunch is skeptical about all this when they post every press release in existence verbatim, because, well, they are also leftist lunatics.
  
  
  
• Samsung has announced 256TB SSDs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not much information about the exact specs, because (a) Samsung doesn't seem to have said and (b) none of the images in the article will load because the SSL certificate for the CDN has expired.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 12 2023 12:34 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 12 2023 12:38 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 12 2023 12:40 AM (BMUHC)

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• Seattle looks set to be the first city in the US to protect gig workers from being arbitrarily revoked.  (KUOW)
  
  Companies like Uber have a bad habit - well, they have lots of bad habits, but they have a particular bad habit of treating their workers like accounts on social networks: You get up in the morning and your job is gone.
  
  No warning, no explanation, no recourse, it's just not there anymore.
  
  I haven't read the legislation and I don't expect Seattle to get it right - though it's worth noting that two council members voted against it because they thought it was overbroad - but if you behave unreasonably for long enough, someone, somewhere, is going to hit you with a rock.

• Silicon Motion is preparing a PCIe 5 SSD controller with a power consumption of 3.5W.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's about one third of current PCIe 5 controllers and in line with existing PCIe 4 models.  If they can also cut the price drastically, PCIe 5 SSDs might actually have a reason to exist.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix meanwhile is sampling 321-layer flash memory chips.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The very first multi-layer flash chips were introduced 10 years ago this week with 24 layers.  At the time the flash memory industry was approaching a crisis because flash cells couldn't be made smaller without becoming so unreliable as to be basically useless.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel's 1TB 670p is available on Amazon for $34.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a QLC model with DRAM cache, so not amazing but also not terrible.  
  
  It launched in 2021 with an MSRP of $154, so that's a 75% price reduction in two years.
  
  
  
• CNET is deleting thousands of old articles in order to improve its Google search ranking.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Google says this won't work, but what would they know?
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, August 11 2023 01:31 AM (zx18t)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, August 12 2023 01:33 PM (BzEjn)

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• After raising $22 billion in funding and soaring to a peak valuation of $47 billion, WeWork now boasts a market cap of $166 million.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's a 99.7% decline, but still better than I thought because I was under the impression that they went bankrupt last year. 
  
  So how's it going?

  Today, the 13-year-old company announced a net loss of $397 million for the second quarter on revenue of $877 million.

  That good huh?

  As such, WeWork went on to say its ability to continue operating is contingent upon "successful execution of management’s plan to improve liquidity and profitability over the next 12 months."

  It's worse than that, he's dead, Jim.

• Lyft wants to kill surge pricing.  (Tech Crunch)

  "[Primetime pricing] is a bad form of price raising," said Risher.  "It’s particularly bad because riders hate it with a fiery passion. And so we’re really trying to get rid of it, and because we’ve got such a good driver supply ... it’s decreased significantly."

  Getting rid of something because all your customers hate it.  Imagine if Apple or Microsoft heard of this.
  
  
  
• It's time to change how we cover Elon Musk, says news outlet that covers Elon Musk in a form of frothing psychosis that approaches performance art.  (The Verge)
  
  The plan is more psychosis.
  
  
  
• A new bug called Downfall in Intel's CPUs up to 11th generation allows for bad stuff.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The latest version of your operating system should have a patch for this.
  
  
  
• A new bug called Inception in AMD's Zen CPUs up to, well, all of them, allows for bad stuff.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The latest version of your operating system should have a patch for this.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has new workstation GPUs out - the RTX 4000, 4500, 5000, and 6000.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There was already a half-height version of the 4000 available, but this announcement includes a full-height version that runs up to 30% faster.
  
  Prices range from a not entirely unreasonable $1250 for the RTX 4000 to $6800 for the RTX 6000.
  
  
  
• More leaks of specific Radeon 7700 and 7800 models - this time from ASRock - indicate that an announcement is close.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Count on AMD to screw up the pricing so that they land with a resounding meh.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 09 2023 08:37 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, August 10 2023 05:25 AM (R7Z4D)

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• Zoom has announced that su casa es mi casa.  (Stack Diary)

  What raises alarm is the explicit mention of the company's right to use this data for machine learning and artificial intelligence, including training and tuning of algorithms and models. This effectively allows Zoom to train its AI on customer content without providing an opt-out option, a decision that is likely to spark significant debate about user privacy and consent.

  Zoom has always been run by scumbags.  It's a miracle they haven't been sued out of existence by now.

  Additionally, under section 10.4 of the updated terms, Zoom has secured a "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license" to redistribute, publish, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content.

  This kind of language is normal, but usually specifies that this is to be done solely to provide the service to the customer, not just for whatever the company wants.
  
  This predictably blew up on Hacker News, eliciting this response from Zoom:

  Hi there - this is Aparna from Zoom, our Chief Operating Officer. Thank you for your care and concern for our customers - we are grateful for the opportunity to double click on how we treat customer content.

  Double click?

  To clarify, Zoom customers decide whether to enable generative AI features (recently launched on a free trial basis) and separately whether to share customer content with Zoom for product improvement purposes.

  There may be a button to do so in the application.
  
  The problem is with your terms of service, in which you grant yourself license to do whatever the fuck you want, buttons be damned.

• One of the videos purportedly showing magnetic levitation of much-hyped potential room-temperature superconductor LK-99 has been retracted and taken down.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though it's worth noting that of the videos produced so far, this is the one that immediately denounced as being as fake as a three-dollar Confederate bill:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Kioxia (Toshiba) has announced a new range of PCIe 5 SSDs with transfer rates up to 12GB per second and capacities up to 30TB, in a traditional 2.5" size or the new E3.S form which looks like a roided-up M.2.  (AnandTech)
  
  Compact SSDs are now readily available in capacities exceeding any hard drive.  They're still significantly more expensive, but that's fallen from a factor of 10 to a factor of 2 in a remarkably short time.  And they are much, much, much faster.
  
  
  
• The Galaxy Tab A9 could be the replacement form the current A7 Lite.  (Liliputing)
  
  I have the A7 Lite.  It's an adequate small tablet except for the screen, which is trash.  If the A9 is a small tablet - in the 8" range - and has a 1920x1200 or better screen, I will buy three of them.
  
  
  
• Need a passively-cooled eight core four port 2.5Gb Ethernet router/firewall device with up to 32TB of storage?  Here's on.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Not terrible either, by the look of things.

• Yes, we can regulate online toxicity.  (PC Magazine)
  
  Now I'll grant you that this article mostly focuses on the platforms' recommendation algorithms and not the users' content, so it's far less a Journalists for Censorship piece than most.
  
  But attempting to regulate complex software systems that are poorly understood even by their own developers and are only fourth-order-tangentially related to any of the ascribed harm is likely just to make things worse.
  
  Instead mandate transparency.  Got a magical new recommendation algorithm that gives you an edge over your competitors?  Too bad, so sad, you have to publish that code.
  
  Or just stop using recommendation algorithms and hand control back to the users themselves.

• It's a real tech news wasteland today.
  
  
  
• SpaceX launched yet another 22 satellites and landed the rocket flawlessly on the recovery ship.  (Space)
  
  Ho hum.
  
  
  
• The company also carried out a static test fire of Booster 9, a new Super Heavy booster for Starship, made up of 33 Falcon 2 rockets.  (Space)
  
  It didn't explode.  So dull.
  
  
  
• The ninth Dedekind Number has been discovered.  (Quanta)
  
  It was in Madagascar, hiding under a log.

  Another way of thinking of the Dedekind number is in set-theoretic terms. Think of a set with n elements, say the numbers {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …n}. That set has 2n different subsets, which form a mathematical structure called a lattice. Now collect those subsets according to the following rule: No subset in your collection can be a part of another subset in the collection. Such a collection is called an anti-chain, because it combines points on the lattice in a way that doesn’t form a chain. (For example, {{1}, {2, 3}, {3, 4, 5}} forms an anti-chain.) The number of anti-chains for a given n is, again, the Dedekind number.

  I'm not sure exactly why I would want that, but I at least understood it.
  
  
  
• Don't buy Chromebooks.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Chromebooks generally have fixed lifespans after which they stop receiving updates, because Google is a garbage company in a garbage industry.
  
  Amazon and Walmart are selling Chromebooks that have already expired, at full price, because garbage companies in garbage industries.
  
  And they do not make any note of the fact that they are selling the digital equivalent of rancid meat, anywhere.
  
  Unsurprisingly, none of the companies involved have responded to questions.

Freieren News

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 07 2023 10:44 PM (zx18t)

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• There's nothing quite like getting woken up at 3AM because the websites your company runs are in the middle of a firehose vulnerability scan from the latest botnet.
  
  Every single attempt was failing because we don't run any of the crap they were trying to break into (or at least, not on the public internet) but the volume was so high it tied up every single thread on all the back-end servers.
  
  
  
• A second group has now replicate room-temperature magnetic levitation in LK-99.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While another group reports that the material is really fussy to work with.
  
  It may be a room-temperature superconductor if you win the synthesis lottery.  It is pretty consistently a normal high-temperature superconductor, but "high temperature" there means liquid nitrogen rather than liquid helium.
  
  Also so many researchers are playing with this stuff that the raw materials aren't available from regular suppliers right now.  Out of stock globally.  None of it is rare, it's just not made in bulk because nobody wanted it much.

• A new acoustic attack steals keyboard data with 95% accuracy if you live in a quiet place and use a high-quality microphone and give the hacker access to your computer to make detailed recordings of your keyboard while you are typing on it.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  So don't do that.
  
  
  
• Polish spyware company LetMeSpy has shut down after hackers broke in and stole all their stolen data.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  So don't do that.
  
  
  
• The year of Linux on the desktop, for reals.  (The Register)
  
  Counting Android and Chromebooks, Linux accounts for 45% of all computer use now.  Not counting those, it's closer to 3%.
  
  But if Windows keeps shitting itself it will soon be 3.1%.

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 07 2023 05:32 AM (obo9H)

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• Karl Nehammer, chancellor of Austria, has proposed enshrining into the country's constitution the right to pay with cash.  (AP News)
  
  Nehammer did not kill himself.

• Threads says it will be adding search and web access "soon".  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, it launched without those.
  
  
  
• Researchers at MIT have invented an entirely new kind of battery using only cement, water, and carbon black.  (The Register)
  
  Plus: Safe and reliable, can power a house using only cheap, common materials.
  Minus: It's a cube twelve feet on a side weighing eighty tons.
  
  Just in case you thought I was joking about battery research yesterday, there's enough information in the article to run that calculation yourself.
  
  
  
• Cloud Provider CoreWeave (who?) has obtained a $2.3 billion debt facility to buy Nvidia H100 AI accelerator cards using its Nvidia H100 AI accelerator cards as collateral.  (AnandTech)
  
  Unfortunately CoreWeave is not publicly traded so you can't short them.
  
  
  
• GPT-4 is a room-temperature non-deterministic piece of garbage.  (GitHub)
  
  We know that GPT-4 can't give the same answer twice, even if the question is something with only one correct answer, like is 17077 a prime number.
  
  This article examines why, and comes to the conclusion that GPT-4 is poo.
  
  
  
• A look at the Red Hat source distribution brouhaha by someone who has been involved in open source since before there was a term for it.  (LPI)
  
  From John "maddog" Hall, the discussion edges into my previous comments on You can't beat free.
  
  
  
• A Snake game for DOS.  (GitHub)
  
  

  6800b81fb9a00fb80
  300cd10bfd0078d76
  fc0fafdd21cb382f7
  4f7880fe460bb0400
  241e7a0288cb24147
  402f7db29df39cf77
  d3d1fb8d4102f6f12
  0e474c8382d74c489
  7e004545380d882d7
  4c426ad938827ebc8

  That's it.  That's the entire binary file encoded as hexadecimal.  Without the encoding it's half that size.
  
  
  
• Now that Intel and Micron have given up on phase-change memory, what's next?  DapuStor's Xlenstor2 X2900P, maybe.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's SLC flash, which is very easy to make but nobody does.
  
  800GB is not a lot by current standards, but it has a 20 microsecond read latency, and an 8 microsecond write latency.  That write time is about six times faster than a good TLC SSD.
  
  Side-by-side with Intel's discontinued Optane drive it delivers exactly the same single-threaded random write performance, but only half the random reads.  Which is probably fine for many applications, since the critical thing is getting data safely written to permanent storage as quickly as possible.
  
  The other advantage of SLC is that it's much more robust than common TLC or QLC cache.  (SLC stores one bit per memory cell; MLC two; TLC three; and QLC four.)
  
  With this particular drive you can rewrite its entire contents 100 times per day, every day, for five years.  Solidigm's 61TB drive is rated for only 0.6 drive writes per day, though being 75 times bigger the amount of data you can safely write each day to a low-endurance QLC drive works out to half that of the high-endurance specialised SLC drive.
  
  
  
• It costs how much?  (Tech America)
  
  Not either of those drives, but an entirely different Solidigm model, an E1.S format 7.68TB drive for $217, which is insane.
  
  Only problem is you need specific server hardware or fiddly adapters to run an E1.S drive.
  
  
  
• But while I was looking up the price of E1.S adapters (turns out they can be found for as little as $20) I tripped over the Sabrent PC-P3X4.  (Extreme HW)
  
  It's a PCIe 3.0 x4 card that takes four PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSDs.  At around $140 it's more expensive than similar cards that take four PCIe 4.0 SSDs, but it has a very neat trick up its silicon sleeve.
  
  Those PCIe 4.0 cards use a full x16 slot - of which you likely have exactly one - and rely on CPU support for PCIe lane bifurcation to treat the x16 slot as if it were four x4 slots.  Not all CPUs support that, and not all motherboards enable it even if the CPU does support it.
  
  This Sabrent card has a PCIe switch chip on it, so it doesn't need that.  It works in any slot that can fit a x4 connector.  The switch provides four lanes to the slot and two to each drive.  That means individual drives max out at around 1.7GBps, which is merely extremely fast, but any two drives running simultaneously can max out the slot bandwidth.
  
  If you want to take advantage of cheap SSD prices to shove a whole lot of fast storage into a PC, this is perfect.

  As I was attempting to wrap up this review, I struggled to identify anything negative. Not that it is expected to have something bad to talk about, but there is almost always something about a product you wish were different. No tinkering in the BIOS is required. No software needs to be downloaded and installed. No drivers need to be installed or kept updated. Nothing here to annoy you or nag you to death about registering your product. I literally could not identify anything to complain about.

  
  
  
• Meanwhile, the most annoying thing of the day: Windows 11 updated itself on my new laptop and lost the touchpad driver.  This is something Windows 10 does too, and it's utter garbage.
  
  You either have to dig a USB mouse out of a drawer or remember keyboard shortcuts you haven't used since the last time Windows fucked this up and try to fumble your way through repeatedly removing and reinstalling the driver until Windows decides that yes, your laptop actually does have a touchpad, just as it did ten minutes ago before Windows decided to update itself.
  
  
  
• Least annoying thing of the day: I've had a couple of issues with my new HP laptop - though much less since I stopped messing around trying to get MongoDB 5 running inside VirtualBox - but the built-in tests accessed by pressing F2 during boot are great.
  
  There's a test for everything, including the touchpad.  Takes ten seconds to confirm there is nothing wrong with the hardware and it's just Windows being Windows.  I'd rather not need to run the tests, but it's the best built-in test suite I've seen in consumer hardware, and the Pavilion 14 is not a premium model either.
  
  
  
• Not annoying at all thing of the day: Pathfinder redemption codes on Humble Bundle.  I saw there was a new Pathfinder bundle up and realised that I hadn't redeemed the previous bundle, and sure enough the codes expired three days ago.
  
  So I thought, maybe, maybe they'll still work.
  
  They did.
  
  I checked for any other expired codes I might have, found some from two years ago, and tried those as well.
  
  They also worked.
  
  Thumbs up for Paizo.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 05 2023 12:48 PM (g7p4x)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 05 2023 12:58 PM (g7p4x)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, August 05 2023 03:50 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 06 2023 09:57 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 06 2023 02:23 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, August 07 2023 02:05 AM (B/ILD)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 07 2023 02:29 AM (PiXy!)

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• The Chinese researchers who filmed a video of LK-99 demonstrating superconductive magnetic levitation at room temperature have published their findings.  (Arxiv)  (PDF)
  
  They note that they measured cutoff temperatures ranging from 299K to 340K depending on the size and purity of the sample - so anywhere from 26C / 78F which is a warm spring day to 67C / 152F which is well above the temperature of any room you would want to find yourself in - but still well below the cutoff temperature measured in the original paper.
  
  
  
• A second paper from researchers familiar with the superconductive properties of thin-film lead-based heterophase crystalline structures sheds light on why results may have varied between teams attempting to replicate the discovery.  (Arxiv)  (PDF)
  
  In short, it's a tricky bastard.  It's not a single molecular compound but a complex structure made up of superconducting and non-superconducting crystals of varying sizes.  While it may be the genuine article, it may not be of any practical use until we find a consistent and cost-effective way to synthesize it in bulk.
  
  We see this sort of issue with battery research too:
  
  Plus: Stores 10x the energy of the best existing lithium-polymer batteries.
  Minus: Detonates instantly if you look at it.

• AMD has announced its W7600 low-end professional graphics card.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And also the even lower-end W7500, which only uses 70W of power and runs entirely off the power provided by the PCIe slot.
  
  While I say low-end, at 12 TFLOPS the W7500 is 20% faster than the previous-generation W6600, and the 20 TFLOPS W7600 is twice as fast.  All three cards have 8GB of RAM on a 128-bit bus.
  
  W7500 costs $429, W7600 $599, which is actually cheaper than the $649 W6600 as well.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile full specs have leaked for AMD's 7800 XT unprofessional GPU.  (WCCFTech)
  
  3840 shaders delivering up to 38 TFLOPS, and 16GB of RAM on a 256-bit bus.
  
  This is from a production model card from PowerColor, so those details are pretty reliable.
  
  Final MSRP has not leaked but is expected to be $549.
  
  
  
• LG's new 27" OLED monitor is ushering in a new age where they almost don't completely suck.  (The Verge)
  
  Don't buy an OLED monitor, yet.