• A Florida data broker called National Public Data collected the personal information of essentially everyone in the US, UK, and Canada, and then got hacked.  (The Register)
  
  2.9 billion records including names, addresses, and government ID numbers, plus information on relatives and address changes going back thirty years.
  
  Exactly how National Public Data got access to all this information is an unanswered question.  They certainly didn't ask the people the data refers to, nor did they make any public announcement that they were doing this.
  
  
  
• The solution to that "unfixable" AMD security flaw from yesterday turns out to be a $9 SPI flash programmer.

• Terraforming Mars for $15 a day. (Science)
  
  Or maybe slightly more than that, but still surprisingly cheap on a planetary scale.
  
  The plan is to glitter-bomb the Martian upper atmosphere with two million tons of iron and aluminium dust per year, manufactured from the Martian soil.
  
  The trick is that the dust doesn't have to be delivered directly - getting it a hundred meters off the ground should be enough for the sandstorms to pick it up and do the rest of the work.
  
  This should warm the planet sufficiently that you won't immediately freeze, just asphyxiate. Making the air breathable is left as an exercise for the student.
  
  
  
• The SLS Block 1B second stage booster being built by Boeing for NASA has been slipping its schedule by almost one year per year for seven years.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Originally due in February 2021 at a cost of $700 million, and rescheduled for April 2027 at a cost of $5 billion just last October - after a whole series of delays and overruns - it is now expected to cost at least $5.7 billion and won't be delivered until 2028 at the earliest.
  
  
  
• But $229 is $229.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The Asus Vivobook 14 is available for that price at Best Buy right now.
  
  That gets you a Core i3 1215U - two performance cores and four efficiency cores, 8GB of RAM plus a spare memory socket, a 128GB M.2 SSD that you would probably want to replace right away, and a 1920x1080 IPS screen that covers 60% of sRGB.
  
  The screen is the only real problem there for basic use.  Colours will more poop than pop with this one.  You can get cheaper laptops but they will probably also come with meh screens, and they will have Celeron CPUs with no performance cores, making them about half the speed.

• Users are fleeing X (formerly Twitter) in droves and signing up for Threads (Meta's, which is to say Facebook's, Twitter clone), except that not a single word of that is true.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In an article that looks suspiciously like legitimate reporting, Tech Crunch looks at claims circulating on Threads, finds them false, and spills the beans.
  
  In reality Twitter's user base is growing, and Threads is stagnant at best.

• A critical security vulnerability affects almost all AMD processors built since 2006.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It only affects systems that have already been hacked at the kernel level, so you don't need to worry.  If you're using cloud servers, you don't need to worry, because they don't allow root-level access.
  
  But if you are using dedicated servers in a datacenter - which I am - this is potentially a nasty problem.  To guarantee a previously used system is clean the datacenter would need to directly rewrite the BIOS using a debug cable.
  
  AMD has already issued updates for pretty much all their CPUs, so this reduces the scope of the problem signficantly.
  
  
  
• Tim Peters, a core member of the Python development team, has been suspended under the project's Code of Conduct for raising concerns about the Code of Conduct.  (The Register)
  
  We did warn you.
  
  
  
• A 512-bit RSA key gave a user access to an entire network of home energy systems.  (Ars Technica)
  
  512-bit RSA keys were first broken by researchers in 1999, and by 2015 could be broken by anyone for a few dollars in a few hours.  I've been using 4096-bit RSA keys for years.
  
  
  

• The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This model increases the RAM from 264k to 520k and the ROM from 2MB to 4MB.  The existing Arm Cortex M0+ cores have been replaced by two sets of cores, that you can select to run either Arm code on Cortex-M33 cores, or RISC-V code on Hazard3 cores.  Either way the clock speed has been bumped up slightly from 133MHz to 150Mhz.
  
  The new model also adds floating point support, something the entry-level M0+ core lacked, and also DSP extensions.
  
  The board costs $5 and the new chip it uses, the RP2350, starts at $0.80 in quantity.
  
  If you want just the chip it is available with 2MB of stacked QSPI flash - so you don't need a second chip for that - and as either a 60-pin chip with 30 available I/O pins or an 80-pin chip with 48 I/Os.
  
  It still has the fancy PIO controller - the feature that let the Pi Pico output HDMI video without any video hardware - and that has been upgraded from 8 state machines to 12.  So in theory you could run three monitors off this version.

Tech News

Posted by: normal at Friday, August 09 2024 08:54 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 09 2024 10:45 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 10 2024 12:19 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 10 2024 10:29 AM (PiXy!)

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• The first two Ryzen 9000 CPUs are here and....  Hmm.  (AnandTech)
  
  Compared to the Ryzen 7700X, the new 9700X is typically 13% faster on single-threaded integer benchmarks, and 27% faster on floating point, while cutting the power consumption by 40% from 105W to 65W.
  
  On multi-threaded benchmarks things are less rosy, with the new chip only being 5% faster in some tasks.
  
  That makes it look like the power has been cut a little too much.
  
  We'll soon see, because the 9900X should appear next week, with 50% more cores but a TDP 85% higher at 120W.
  
  So right now the 9700X is a fast chip that outruns Intel's 14600K at most tasks while using less than half the power, but not a remarkable chip.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel is preparing its Arrow Lake family to try to retake the desktop CPU market after dropping it on the floor.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These will use 100W less power than comparable 14th generation chips - that is, the power reduction will be more than AMD's chips use in the first place.
  
  Early indications are that they might be slightly slower than existing chips, but at least they won't die.  Maybe.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, will my vendor replace my dead Intel CPU?  Probably.  (The Verge)
  
  Asus and HP, along with most of the smaller system builders, confirmed the two year warranty extension would apply to their customers.  Dell was less specific but did say that if you were impacted by this fault, all costs would be covered in fixing your PC.
  
  
  
• A judge has fined financial blockchain Ripple - which makes it easy to exchange currencies through intermediaries - $125 million in a case brought by the SEC.  (CoinDesk)
  
  The SEC is expected to appeal because it wanted fines totaling $1.9 billion.
  
  
  
• Dell is expected to lay off more people after disappointing quarterly results.  (Silicon Angle)
  
  Numbers floating around go as high as 12,500 - after layoffs of 13,000 last year - but the company is yet to make an announcement.
  
  
  
• NASA says that the Starliner astronauts might return home on SpaceX's Crew Dragon.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Next year.

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Friday, August 09 2024 12:56 AM (YBLgY)

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• Lots of juicy details from that Google antitrust ruling.  (The Verge)
  
  Google pays device makers enormous amounts of money to direct search requests to them.  20% of Apple's profits come directly from Google.
  
  Estimates from the two companies suggest that it would cost Apple $20 billion in development costs and $6 billion per year in operating expenses to replace Google Search with its own platform, and when Google is paying you $20 billion a year not to do that the decision is pretty simple.
  
  The only problem is that if you are deemed to have a monopoly - which doesn't necessarily mean an absolute monopoly - this is illegal.
  
  Exactly what will happen is still anyone's guess, but Google has few friends on either side of the political aisle.  Deemed insufficiently woke for the Democrats, the company has burned every imaginable bridge on the conservative side, many of them twice.

• Western Digital has announced 32TB hard drives, 128TB enterprise SSDs, 16TB external SSDs, 8TB SD cards, and 4TB micro SD cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Coming soon.  No prices, no shipping dates.
  
  
  
• Micron meanwhile has announced the first PCIe 6.0 SSDs with transfer rates of 26GB per second.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Coming soon.  No prices, no shipping dates.  No surprise, since PCIe 6.0 doesn't exist yet.
  
  
  
• Where does Facebook's AI slop come from?  (404 Media)
  
  Curiously enough, mostly from Facebook.
  
  
  
• Google is discontinuing the Chromecast, a $29 smart TV device that does everything you need for watching streaming services.  (The Verge)
  
  Oh no.  I was going to...  No, that was the Fire TV.  Never mind.
  
  
  
• Googler has announced the Google TV Streamer, a $99 smart TV device that does everything you need for watching streaming services.  (The Verge)
  
  What a coincidence.
  
  
  
• Twitter has joined a long list of tech companies moving out of downtown San Francisco.  (San Francisco Standard)
  
  Employees apparently aren't as fond as they used to be of wading through the daily swamp of human excrement and used needles.
  
  
  
• NASA has had to reschedule the next SpaceX flight to the ISS because the Boeing Starliner is still stuck there.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Literally stuck, it would seem.  A software issue means that it can't safely undock.
  
  Boeing is working on it.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 08 2024 05:19 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 13 2024 08:55 AM (bg2DR)

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• How dare That Devil Trump and his Ventriloquist Puppet Vance suggest that the government take action against Google?  (The Verge)
  
  They are clearly fascist racists and their racist fascism is illegal under the First Amendment and they and everyone they know and all their families should be imprisoned without trial immediately and forever.  Also, Peter Thiel!!!1!
  
  
  
• A federal judge has ruled that Google is maintaining an illegal monopoly in the search and advertising markets.  (The Verge)
  
  Amit Mehta of the District Court for DC, an Obama appointee, ruled in favour of the Biden Administration's antitrust lawsuit against Google, saying that the company had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
  
  This is clearly the work of That Devil Trump.  His perfidy knows no bounds.

• Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art has been found.  (The Silicon Underground)
  
  A former Commodore engineer - the same person who trained Warhol on how to use a computer - came forward and said he had had copies of the art on display in his home for the past forty years.  He just didn't realise that nobody else had a copy.
  
  
  
• The most expensive bug ever.  (Quora)
  
  Now sadly the second most expensive bug ever.
  
  
  
• Silicon Valley parents are sending kindergarten age children to AI-focused summer camps.  (San Francisco Standard)
  
  This is actually a lot less worse than the headline would suggest.  The younger kids are playing with Lego robots, and the older ones working with image recognition systems.  
  
  Nothing to do with generative AI.
  
  
  
• Video game actors are on strike over AI.  (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Is the Asus ROG Ally X any good?  Yes.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This is a hand-held gaming PC similar to the Steam Deck - or the Nintendo Switch or PlayStation Vita - only more powerful and more expensive than it's competitors.
  
  If that's what you want, it fills the role pretty well.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, August 06 2024 11:51 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 07 2024 12:11 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 07 2024 12:22 AM (PiXy!)

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• Venture capitalists have flushed $1.6 billion down the drain trying to make lab-grown meat a reality.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The most optimistic proponents are now hoping to someday capture 0.03% of the global meat market.
  
  Farm grown meat is cheaper, tastes better, is readily available, and probably won't devour the world in a Gray Goo apocalypse.
  
  Though the chickens might try.  You can't trust 'em.
  
  

• How to run DOS on modern hardware.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The way the economy is going this might be useful information.
  
  
  
• Adding RAM to an RP2040.  (Dmitry)
  
  This is the chip used in the Raspberry Pi Pico.  It doesn't have a memory bus in the usual sense, but supports external serial (SPI) ROM and has an onboard cache to keep things fast.
  
  You can also wire up SPI RAM - but it will be read-only because the RP2040 is expecting ROM, not RAM.
  
  You can get around that, but it's, uh, interesting.
  
  
  
• The Breville Oracle Jet is a $2000 computer that makes coffee.  (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• KOSA - the Kids Online Safety Act - is dead.  For now.  (TechDirt)
  
  I haven't linked TechDirt much lately since Mike Masnick went insane, but he seems to be having a lucid day.  He praises the House GOP for killing the train wreck bipartisan Senate bill, and approvingly quotes Rand Paul's scathing letter.
  
  
  
• Need for Speed: SSD Edition.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is Kioxia's (formerly Toshiba) latest datacenter drive aimed at low latency rather than transfer rates.  It's about twice as fast as typical SSDs - access times of around 25 microseconds vs. a more typical 50 microseconds.
  
  It's intended to replace phase-change drives in heavy workloads, now that Intel and Micron have abandoned phase-change memory entirely.
  
  Intel's Optane drives could get access times down to 10 microseconds, but they were power hungry and expensive, and ultimately not commercially successful.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, August 05 2024 09:43 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 05 2024 11:21 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 05 2024 11:30 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Monday, August 05 2024 11:53 PM (/VxY7)

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• Should we try cooling the planet with sulphur dioxide? (Japan Times)
  
  I mean, we know that it works. What's the catch?

  "The whole notion of spraying sulfur compounds to reflect sunlight is arrogant and simplistic," Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki said. "There are unintended consequences of powerful technologies like these, and we have no idea what they will be."

  Yeah, we have no idea what would happen if large amounts of sulphur dioxide were suddenly released into the upper atmosphere because such a thing has never happened before.

  Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Oxford, said he considered solar geoengineering a grave threat to human civilization.
  
  "It's not only a bad idea in terms of something that would never be safe to deploy," he said. "But even doing research on it is not just a waste of money, but actively dangerous."

  I'll just pause here to say that this is a wonderful case of nominative determinism, because this is precisely what you would expect to hear from someone named Raymond Pierrehumbert.

  Opponents of solar geoengineering cite several main risks. They say it could create a "moral hazard," mistakenly giving people the impression that it is not necessary to rapidly reduce fossil fuel emissions.

  In other words, I don't want to solve the problem. I want global communism.

• The Starbook from Starlabs is a 14" burger with the lot. Starlabs)
  
  A 4k screen, the Four Essential Keys, a 16 core Intel 165H processor, up to 96GB of DDR5 RAM, an M.2 2280 SSD (there's also what looks like an M.2 2230 slot but that may be for wifi), two Thunderbolt 4 ports, three USB ports, HDMI, a micro SD slot, and a headphone jack.
  
  It comes with a choice of six flavours of Linux preinstalled, or you can load Windows onto it yourself.
  
  
  
• The Ars commentariat is absolutely foaming at the mouth at the thought that Congress might have to write laws that actually say what they mean. (Ars Technica)
  
  This is probably the craziest I have ever seen them.
  
  
  
• Intel knew about its CPU oxidation issue in late 2022. (WCCFTech)
  
  That's 18 months before the company told customers about it.
  
  Some people have asked if Intel CPUs can be considered reliable once the new microcode update is out. Unfortunately, we don't know, because information from Intel itself has not been reliable.
  
  
  
• Though Puget Systems says it has seen more failures with AMD chips than with Intel. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sort of. Worth taking a look at the article if you plan to buy.
  
  Failures in Ryzen 5000 CPUs seem high, but those are approaching four years old now, much older than Intel's 13th and 14th gen chips. Failures in Ryzen 7000 are also high, but those failures are almost all before systems are sold to the customer.
  
  The best reliability on this chart comes from Intel's 12th gen chips, which you basically can't get anymore.
  
  
  
• Zen 5 benchmarks show that hyperthreading provides 18% better performance for 2% more power consumption. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel is removing hyperthreading from its own chips to make the performance cores smaller. Instead the plan is to add more efficiency cores - which never had hyperthreading - in the space saved to get back that performance.
  
  That will certainly work, but it's also part of why Intel's consumer chips don't have AVX-512 support right now. The efficiency cores don't have it, only the performance cores, and that made software support just too complicated. Moving a task from one core to another in the same chip could cause it to fail.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 04 2024 11:00 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, August 05 2024 02:32 AM (rcPLc)

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• Intel shares are down 30% overnight.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.  How did that happen?
  
  And down 50% for the year so far.
  
  This helps explain why AMD delayed its biggest CPU release in years over a much smaller problem.  They basically did exactly the opposite of Intel: Catch the problem before selling the CPUs and recall everything.
  
  AMD hasn't been entirely forthcoming on the nature of their problem either, but they weren't selling chips with known faults.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The DOJ is suing TikTok over violations of privacy of children on a massive scale.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They allege that not only does TikTok knowingly allow children to register as adults, but that even the children's version of the app violates COPPA.
  
  Which allows for a $50,000 fine per infringement, which given the scale of this could run to $100 billion or more.
  
  COPPA is impossible for online platforms to enforce perfectly, but you are expected to at least not issue internal instructions instructing your employees not to enforce it.  Which TikTok apparently did.
  
  
  
• Looks like Net Neutrality is dead.  Again.  (KSL)
  
  The Sixth Circuit, which had already issued an administrative stay, has now blocked the rules pending a full hearing to begin late October.
  
  
  
• Apple is apologising for one of its ads again.  (The Verge)
  
  This time the company seems to have annoyed Thailand specifically, where the "Crush" add was more generally offensive.
  
  What's the ad?  I don't know, they seem to have scrubbed it from the internet.
  
  
  
• Meanewhile Google is in full retreat over its own "Dear Sydney" ad, showing how you can use AI to write a heartfelt personal letter.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  These people literally never talk to anyone outside their own bubbles.
  
  
  
• Bitcoin is the new orange.  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, the people at The Verge are having another totally normal day, meandering between foaming outrage and passive voice like a grammarian on peyote:

  A panel that was ostensibly about the risks and rewards of public mining companies gave way to discussions of President Joe Biden's "whole-of-government attack" on cryptocurrency, as Jason Les, the CEO of the Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms, put it. "President Trump, on the other hand, has been very positive."

  This is no secret.  Biden's SEC has been virulently anti-crypto, though they somehow managed to miss FTX's $10 billion fraud entirely.

  A bullet had narrowly missed Trump’s skull at a rally two weeks prior, so security was extra tight.

  Yes, a wild bullet attacked Trump out of nowhere.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman has been accused of being shady about OpenAI's safety efforts.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I am shocked, shocked, to find that shading is going on in here.
  
  
  
• Metropolis 1998 is an isometric city builder that lets you customise every building.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Looks cool if you like 90s pixel art aesthetics.
  
  It's very much not a 90s game though; it's designed to individually simulate over 100,000 people and vehicles.
  
  Free demo is available on Steam.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 04 2024 04:54 PM (bg2DR)

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• Intel announced its earnings report for Q2 of 2024, and it's less than wonderful.  (AnandTech)
  
  While the company did post a profit and issue a dividend, it also announced plans to slash costs before things going into freefall.
  
  This includes suspending future dividends, cutting capital and operating expenses, and...  Firing between 15,000 and 17,000 workers.
  
  
  
• The company also bit the bullet and announced two years of additional warranty on its failing 13th and 14th generation desktop processors.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which would be a bigger deal if Intel hadn't been rejecting warranty returns for the past year, all the while knowing that the problems were of its own creation.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel is also running into production issues with its next-generation Meteor Lake desktop CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are needed to replace the fault-ridden 13th and 14th generation chips.  Meteor Lake actually has multiple chips on the package, similar to some AMD CPUs, and the problem lies with the components manufactured by Intel itself.
  
  The response has been to crank up production - since Intel owns the factories, it can do that - and discard the failed parts.  That will allow Meteor Lake to launch on time but it will not come cheap.
  
  
  
• Micron meanwhile has announced its new 276 layer 1Tbit TLC flash chip.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is about 30% smaller than its previous 1Tbit TLC chips, or about the same size as existing 1Tbit QLC.
  
  
  
• Testing out a 5Gb network card.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These are great because they use much less power than a 10Gb card, are twice as fast as common 2.5Gb Ethernet, and run just fine over twenty year old Cat-5 cables.
  
  They are less great because 5Gb Ethernet switches basically do not exist.
  
  
  
• With the Boeing Starliner capsule now entering the eighth week of its planned eight day stay at the ISS, NASA is facing up with its most difficult choice yet: Admitting failure and asking Tony Stark Elon Musk to rescue its astronauts.  (Ars Technica)
  
  There is a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked at the ISS right now, but that's the lifeboat in case of catastrophic failure, so the plan would be to send up a second capsule to ferry Butch and Suni home.

Posted by: normal at Friday, August 02 2024 11:30 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 03 2024 12:48 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, August 03 2024 02:52 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 03 2024 03:19 AM (LADmw)

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