• In a shock to everyone, the security of Microsoft's Azure cloud service turns out to be poop.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This is completely unprecedented and nothing like this has ever happened before.  (Firewall Times)
  
  
  

Tech News

• The internet con: How to seize the means of computation.  (Kickstarter)
  
  A Kickstarter?  For a book?  By Cory Doctorow?  Titled "The Internet Con"?
  
  You don't say.

  My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. Verso will publish it on September 5. It's a book that distills 20 years' experience, fighting for digital rights. It explains how the internet curdled - and how we'll get it back.

  So, looking around the internet, that would be twenty years of utter failure.
  
  
  
• Dime-store Bond villain Sam Altman-Fried says he will allow companies and governments use his privacy-eradicating crypto scam Worldcoin.  (Reuters)
  
  Sam is also CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Facebook has released its Audiocraft suite of AI-driven music tools as open source.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Much as I love dumping on Facebook - much as the company deserves it - it has been releasing a lot of AI research as open source rather than using it to steal all your personal information.
  
  Mostly because Facebook already has all your personal information.  Just as with Apple, which cracks down on privacy-damaging apps on its platform because nobody else is allowed to have all your personal data, Facebooks motives here are black as coal but I'll take a win where I can find it.
  
  
  
• Putting that Solidigm 60TB SSD to the test.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It works.  It's not a high-end SSD, but 60TB in a single 2.5" drive for around $5000 is a steal.  That's about the same capacity (after RAID) as my four second-hand Synology NAS boxes combined, and probably about as reliable.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 03 2023 09:04 PM (zx18t)

Posted by: FreeKnight at Thursday, August 03 2023 10:59 PM (gXw+B)

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• Google Assistant - which is apparently a thing - is getting a big reboot using generative AI.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Could we not?
  
  
  
• Facebook plans to use chatbots to boost its user numbers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I can't wait until social networks are all just chatbots screaming at each other and we can get on with stuff.
  
  
  
• YouTube meanwhile is planning to use AI to summarise YouTube videos.  (The Verge)
  
  If it can make sense of Pippa's stream today - where she returned in spider form after celebrating reaching 250,000 subscribers by eating a tarantula - I'll be impressed.
  
  

• Remember that amazing new room-temperature superconductor announcement?  It might not be rubbish after all.  (In the Pipeline)
  
  Yes, the experimental data is imperfect, but the details provided are sufficient for both empirical testing and theoretical analysis.
  
  There's an unconfirmed report of an independent replication demonstrating the Meissner effect in a small sample of the material, and the video doesn't look like any cooling is involved at all.
  
  Separately, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory took a look at the structural data on the material - called LK-99 - and said:

  I present the calculated spin-polarized electronic structure in Fig. 3. Remarkably, I find an isolated set of flat bands crossing the Fermi level, with a maximum bandwidth of ∼130 meV (see Fig.4) that is separated from the rest of the valence manifold by 160 meV. Such a narrow bandwidth is particularly indicative of strongly correlated bands. . .unlike other correlated-d band superconductors, in this system the Cu-d bands are particularly flat – there is minimal band broadening from neighboring oxygen ions. If previous assumptions about band flatness driving superconductivity are correct, then this result would suggest a much more robust (higher temperature) superconducting phase exists in this system, even compared to well-established high-TC systems.

  Which is saying that on a purely theoretical basis this looks just like what we'd expect from a high-temperature superconductor.
  
  Lowe (the author of In the Pipeline) concludes:

  I am guardedly optimistic at this point. The Shenyang and Lawrence Berkeley calculations are very positive developments, and take this well out of the cold-fusion "we can offer no explanation" territory. ... This is by far the most believable shot at room-temperature-and-pressure superconductivity the world has seen so far, and the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely damned interesting.

  
  
  
• Testing graph databases and reporting the results as seventy pages of text and a handful of illegible microscopic scatter plots.  (Mihai)
  
  Well, that was a waste of time.
  
  
  
• Nim 2.0 is out.  (Nim)
  
  If you want a statically compiled, statically typed Python, this is your best bet.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's new AI image generate fits on a floppy disk and takes 4 minutes to train.  (Decrypt)
  
  And not one of those fancy 1.44MB floppies either, we're talking about an Apple II single-sided single-density jobbie.
  
  
  
• Facebook's ban on Canadian government propaganda - laughingly referred to as "news" - takes effect today.  (Engadget)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Twitter is suing "hate speech researchers" - which is to say fascists - for scaring off advertisers - which is to say mostly also fascists. (Ars Technica)

  Lawsuit comes as Musk and Yaccarino seize control of X's trust and safety team.

  Now? Only now you are doing this?
  
  Day one you should have fired them all. Every single one.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Twitter, they've made changes to the ads to get around AdBlockPlus.
  
  It sucks. And that's with supposedly reduced ads on a paid account.
  
  
  
• Apple asked users why they were turning off the "conversation awareness" feature on their AirPods.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Users: Because it sucks.
  
  
  
• Anker's new USB-C power adapter can fast-charge a 16" MacBook Pro.  (The Verge)
  
  It can put out 140W on one port for a large laptop while still having 100W left over to charge your phone and tablet.
  
  USB-C itself now supports charging at up to 240W - 48V at 5A - though I haven't seen anything using that full power yet.  The Framework Laptop 16 comes with a 180W USB-C charger, which is getting there, and hopefully dedicated chargers will soon disappear even for gaming laptops.
  
  
  
• The Galaxy Z Fold 5 is here, which is odd because it seems the Z Fold 4 only came out a week ago.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  As before, it's expensive and awkward, too narrow when folded up and too wide when unfolded.  You'd be better off in almost every way with a regular phone and a regular small tablet EXCEPT THERE ARE NO GOOD SMALL TABLETS SAMSUNG I'M LOOKING AT YOU.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, August 02 2023 10:04 PM (JqCHh)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 02 2023 11:24 PM (zx18t)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 02 2023 11:25 PM (zx18t)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 02 2023 11:57 PM (BMUHC)

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• An FBI investigation into the US government agency that paid a contractor for an infamous piece of Israeli spyware used in unconstitutional warrantless surveillance has turned up the fact the culprit is the FBI.  (New York Times - archive site)
  
  If you guessed that at the start of the sentence you win some Kewpie mayonnaise.
  
  
  
• Massachusetts legislators are planning a tax of streaming services to fund 200 community access cable channels.  (Boston Globe - archive site)
  
  Nobody tell them about the internet.  They might cry.
  
  
  
• The US and Europe are growing alarmed that, having been denied access to the latest technologies for producing the most advanced chips, China is now using older technologies to produce less advanced chips.  (Time - archive site)
  
  Judging from this story the US and Europe are not very bright.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Dell is all-in on generative AI.  (The Verge)
  
  Oh, they're not planning to use it.  It's crap.
  
  But if you want to deploy your own crap generative AI, they are happy to sell you very expensive servers to run it on.
  
  
  
• Basic computer games has been translated.  (GitHub)
  
  The 1978 classic book Basic Computer Games has been translated into a dozen other languages.  Not French or Spanish, though, but C and Java and Python.
  
  Why?  I don't know why.  But there it is.
  
  
  
• Samsung is losing billions of dollars on DRAM and flash production.  (AnandTech)
  
  The company still managed to eke out a small profit thanks to its other divisions, but while cheap memory is great for consumers, it's not so great for memory companies.  
  
  Of which there are only about three left in the world because the last time this happened the rest of them went bankrupt.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 02 2023 12:05 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 02 2023 05:47 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 02 2023 05:48 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, August 04 2023 02:11 PM (BzEjn)

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