• Apple's response to new EU rules forcing it to open up its platform seems to be an epic saga of malicious compliance.  (The Register)
  
  They're just begging for a multi-billion-dollar fine at this point.
  
  
  
• Google meanwhile has suddenly started blocking some apps from being sideloaded.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  If it an app requests permission to manage SMS messages or notifications, it has to go through the official app store now.  Because the apps being sideloaded with those permissions were all malware.

• NASA's new PACE satellite for monitoring the state of the world's oceans has been launched into orbit.  (Space)
  
  By SpaceX.
  
  
  
• The BLM - no, the other one - is dynamiting fossils in New Mexico.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's a dirty job but someone has to do it.
  
  I guess.
  
  
  
• CableMod has recalled all models of its 12VHPWR power adaptors.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Like everything else 12VHPWR-related, they have a distinct propensity to catch fire.
  
  
  
• Minisforum's V3 is a 14" tablet PC that actually looks good.  (AnandTech)
  
  A 2560x1600 screen, an 8-core Ryzen 8840U, up to 32GB of RAM, a full-size M.2 2280 slot, dual USB4 ports, a keyboard with the four essential keys, and a pressure-sensitive pen are included.
  
  Pricing TBA.

• How Twitter's descent into chaos is paving the way for a new web.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  These people are really desperate for Twitter to fail.
  
  
  
• Twitter hits number one in App Store as leaked Drake nude goes viral.  (The Verge)
  
  Everyone involved in this story needs to find Jesus, or be launched out of a giant trebuchet directly into the Sun, or possibly both.

• Disney is investing $1.5 billion into Epic Games.  (The Verge)
  
  No wonder Epic can afford to give games away for free.  
  
  This investment and partnership comes after a similar $2 billion effort with Lego and Sony that resulted in Lego Fortnite.
  
  
  
• 23 and Me is considering meiosis.  (Seeking Alpha)
  
  You know it's right.
  
  
  
• Smaug-72B is the new best open-source AI.  (VentureBeat)
  
  It beats ChatGPT-3.5 on every test, and it's free.
  
  Not saying it's good, but it's free.
  
  Or free to download.  To run a 72B-sized LLM at acceptable speeds you need a $30,000 AI accelerator.
  
  
  
• Intel's 10th, 11th, and 12th generation CPUs have been banned from sale in Germany over a patent dispute.  (Notebook Check)
  
  How much this matters is unclear, because while Intel's current lineup is 14th generation, all 14th generation desktop chips are 13th generation, and some 13th generation chips are 12th generation.

• So, to sum up:
  
  Nijisanji fired Selen Tatsuki, blaming her for causing irreparable damage to the company's reputation.  (Dot eSports)
  
  Nijisanji followed up with a financial statement saying that firing Selen would have a "negligible" impact on the company's bottom line.  (Anime Corner)
  
  So the damage to the company is irreparable but it won't affect cash flow one bit, right.
  
  Hyte said "Negligible, are we?" and cancelled its line of custom Nijisanji-themed computer cases on the spot and refunded all pre-orders.  (Dexerto)
  
  Nijisanji's share price opened down 9.3% from the previous morning on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
  
  
  
• Dokibird - Selen's past and present personal vtuber account - re-debuted today, and the marketing Manager of Hyte was apparently watching the stream and posting live on Twitter to suggest sponsorships.
  
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, February 09 2024 03:53 AM (liVFZ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, February 09 2024 04:53 AM (r9O5h)

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• Three million infected toothbrushes have just invaded Switzerland.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Allegedly - details are sparse - the wifi-enabled electric toothbrushes (why?) were hacked, assembled into a botnet, and used for DDOS attacks.
  
  

• You can hack Bitlocker encryption in 43 seconds with nothing more than a Raspberry Pi Pico.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you laptop is ten years old, terribly misdesigned, and you can open it up and solder wires in places you shouldn't.
  
  
  
• The absolute minimum every programmer should know about Unicode.  (Tonsky)
  
  1. It encodes every known human language.
  2. Badly.
  
  
  
• Suzuki has announced a new model of the Omnichord.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The last model was introduced in 1999 and is getting hard to find.
  
  
  
• Adam Neumann is looking to buy WeWork out of bankruptcy.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This after cratering the company and burning tens of billions of dollars.
  
  
  
• Hyte recently announced three Nijisanji-themed PC cases for fans of Elira, Enna, and Rosemi.  (Hyte)
  
  If they'd had a Pomu case, I might have put that on my shopping list - though there is eventually a limit to the number of PC cases I need.
  
  Anyway...  They're gone, as much as Pomu and Selen and Kyo and Nina and Zaion and Yugo and...
  
  Hyte was lucky enough not to produce a case design for a Nijisanji talent who left the company before the product could ship - yet.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, February 07 2024 06:42 PM (cARBX)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 08 2024 08:15 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 08 2024 02:02 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 08 2024 05:44 PM (PiXy!)

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• Intel's upcoming W5-3535X high-end desktop CPU has been benchmarked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It costs $1589.
  
  What are the benchmark results, you ask?
  
  No idea.  The article leaves those details to your imagination.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Oh, were you using that?  Facebook is deprecating its Groups API.   (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you use that to maintain communication with customers, well, it's gonna be dead in three months.  Enjoy it while it lasts.
  
  
  
• The new Barnes & Noble Nook 9" is a Lenovo Tab M9.  (Liliputing)
  
  The problem is, the Tab M9 has a low-resolution, 1340x800 display, about the same as the original 2012 model of the Nexus 7.  The hardware is far better than that old tablet in every other respect - four times the RAM and storage, and probably ten times the CPU performance - but the screen is just plain inadequate.
  
  
  
• There's probably more news somewhere. 

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 07 2024 01:11 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, February 07 2024 10:41 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 07 2024 10:53 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 08 2024 01:45 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 09 2024 12:21 AM (BMUHC)

6 OK! I managed to upload the pic fine with Edge, so it must be an FF issue.
Let's see if I can do this right!

Posted by: RickC at Friday, February 09 2024 03:02 PM (BMUHC)

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• 80% of all tech startup proposals now involve AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's the new blockchain.  5% potential, 95% bullshit.
  
  Just waiting for the scams and inevitable looting.

• The rise of techno-authoritarianism.  (The Atlantic)
  
  "You can't lie and censor people for power and profit!  That's our job!"
  
  
  
• Google is rebranding Bard as Gemini.  (Thurrott)
  
  Yeah, that'll fix it.
  
  
  
• With shipments of RTX 4090 graphics cards banned to China, enterprising individuals are now buying entire systems with RTX 4090s in nearby Asian countries, shipping them home, and selling the graphics card to AI companies at a hefty profit over the cost of the entire system.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Surprise!

Not At All Tech News

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 06 2024 12:29 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Fairfax VA at Tuesday, February 06 2024 09:22 PM (lCtY0)

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• Important update from the Everything Game: Somebody created Pipkin Pippa.  (Twitter)
  
  That rabbit's dynamite.
  
  
  
• Quora raised $75 million to grow its AI chatbot, Poe.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A Poe - as in Poe's law - is an online personality who posts things so off kilter that you can't tell whether they're trolling or mentally ill.
  
  
  
• How Quora died.  (Slate)
  
  It Poed itself.

• Palworld is spending half a million dollars a month on game servers.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  That is sure to come down.  To cope with the game's exploding popularity the company deployed servers "without regard to cost" to give players the best experience possible - considering the game is still in beta.
  
  At this rate, the company will go broke in, uh, never.  Sales have slowed but the first two weeks already cover that server bill for forty years.
  
  
  
• One million machine learning specialists will be needed by 2027.  (Fortune)
  
  This is not an article, but an ad for programming "bootcamps", which are mostly scams. 
  
  The premise is total garbage anyway.  See the demise of Quora, for example.
  
  
  
•  A Mastodon vulnerability allowed attackers to take over user accounts.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Fortunately Mastodon is distributed, so...  The bug will persist until every single Mastodon node has been individually updated.

• Looks like we can't count Mark Zuckerberg out just yet: Facebook's market cap grew by $200 billion.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  In one day.
  
  I don't use Facebook - not anymore.  But there's no denying that an awful lot of people do use it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Infinite Craft is a fun little word-based crafting game.  (Neal.Fun)
  
  You start with four words: Water, Fire, Wind, and Earth, and from there you have to create everything, by dragging words from the right onto the main screen and then on top of other words.
  
  Some things are simple and obvious: Water + Fire = Steam.
  
  Others are more subtle: Snake + Death = Cleopatra, and Moses + Barbecue = Burning Bush.
  
  Still others are way out there: Behead + Reincarnation = Chicken.
  
  If you get a word or phrase that no-one has ever found before, it shows up with a "First Discovery" tag.  I'm proud to be the first to discover Gnorc - the creatures from the game Spyro the Dragon - and The Amazing Surfing Nun On Fire.
  
  
  
• Another day, another recall.  Today it's the Bambu Ai 3d printer.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This one can short circuit and deincarnate your chicken, so best do as they say.
  
  
  
• Running your Ryzen 8700G with DDR5-10346 RAM can improve performance even more.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Seriously just buy a video card if you're that concerned about performance.
  
  
  
• Maybe Nvidia's "new" 6GB RTX 3050.  (WCCFTech)
  
  When I first saw this, I thought, oh, did they take the 3060, halve the RAM, maybe downclock it a bit, but keep the 192-bit memory bus, and sell it at a cheaper price?
  
  Because that would make a decent card.
  
  No.  They did not do that.
  
  They took the 3050, which had a 128-bit memory bus, and reduced it to 96 bits.
  
  That does not make a decent card...  But is still faster than the built-in graphics on a Radeon 8700G.  After all, it has about 50% more memory bandwidth (graphics card RAM runs about twice as fast as CPU RAM) and doesn't need to share it with the CPU.
  
  
  
• Google is officially killing its cached pages feature in search results - about five years after it stopped working.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a bit like Ford announcing it is planning to stop selling the Edsel.  In 2024.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, February 04 2024 03:29 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, February 04 2024 08:50 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: benzeen at Sunday, February 04 2024 03:40 PM (RXJpR)

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• Total Pixy Recall: Snap has issued a recall of every Pixy.  (The Verge)
  
  More specifically, they are recalling the Pixy battery, but since they are recalling the Pixy battery because it catches fire, they very much do not want you to send back the battery.
  
  They want you to send back the Pixy, without the battery, although the Pixy itself is perfectly fine and it's the battery that's the problem.

• Pairing the new Ryzen 8700G with DDR5-9000 memory increases performance by 15%.  (Guru3D)
  
  Moving from DDR5-6400 to 8000 already doubles the price, and I couldn't find DDR5-9000 for sale at all.
  
  Pairing the slightly cheaper Ryzen 7700 with a Radeon 6600 would cost no more and would deliver around twice the graphics performance.
  
  The 7800G is a good all-rounder chip if you mostly use your computer for work with some occasional light gaming.  If you care about that extra 15% of graphics performance, just buy a graphics card.
  
  
  
• Speaking of memory, you can now add 256GB of RAM to regular Intel desktop systems except you can't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  64GB memory modules should be here soon, but right now it's just a check box on the motherboard feature list.
  
  
  
• Speaking of check boxes on motherboard feature lists, it seems that Intel started supporting ECC memory - two years ago.
  
  The Core i5 12500 and up, 13500 and up, and 14500 and up all support ECC RAM, both with DDR4 and DDR5.
  
  Finding a motherboard that enables that support is harder, but Gigabyte looks to be a good bet.  Several of their motherboards, again both DDR4 and DDR5 models, enable ECC.
  
  
  
• There's another security vulnerability in GitLab.  (Tech Radar)
  
  This one is marked critical, but it's a privilege escalation bug, so it only applies to users who are already logged in to your GitLab server.
  
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, February 02 2024 08:48 PM (liVFZ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 03 2024 06:00 PM (PiXy!)

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• Senate hearing with five social media CEOs was a missed opportunity.  (The Verge)
  
  A missed opportunity for what, they do not say.
  
  
  But reading between the lines, apparently they mean it was a missed opportunity for the largest censorship and propaganda program in human history, so we can only ne glad they dropped the ball again.
  
  Also, Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of Twitter, is utterly useless.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Proposals to revive FTX as a working business have sunk because nobody was stupid enough to put any money into it.  (The Guardian)
  
  Proof that people can learn not to put their finger back in the fire if you first burn it off up to the elbow.
  
  
  
• AMD has announced that it will be launching Zen 5 CPUs for desktops, laptops, and servers this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Sometime between July and December is all we know at this point.
  
  
  
• IPFS just kind of doesn't work.  (Neiman's Lab)
  
  IPFS is intended to be a distributed filesystem such that even if the server originally hosting the file goes away - permanently - the content still persists out there on the net, potentially forever.
  
  What happens in practice is often that even when the original server is still active and everything is working fine, you can't access the content, or it is out of date.
  
  They are trying to solve a hard problem, true, but they're mostly just making things worse.
  
  
  
• Could we be living in a simulation?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well yes, but actually no.