• Do not squeeze the lime.  (Ars Technica)
  
  A man who did squoze the lime developed a nasty case of phytophotocitrolimeodimeodermatititis.

  Specifically, the toxic chemicals are furocoumarins, which are found in some weeds and also a range of plants used in food. Those include celery, carrot, parsley, fennel, parsnip, lime, bitter orange, lemon, grapefruit, and sweet orange. Furocoumarins include chemicals with linear structures, psoralens, and angular structures, called angelicins, though not all of them are toxic.

  Avoid all of these things.  Stick to safe inorganic ingredients, like arsenic.

• A combination of PFAS and microplastics is more toxic than either one by itself - to fleas.  (The Guardian)
  
  A warning that it is important to keep in mind if you happen to be a flea.
  
  
  
• The Fifth Circuit has thrown out the Treasury Department's sanctions on Tornado Cash, an online program that lets anyone anonymise blockchain transactions.  (CoinDesk)
  
  The Treasury Department claimed that "anyone" included people that the department didn't like.  The Fifth Circuit told the department to go squeeze a lime:

  "Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts (the lines of privacy-enabling software code) are not the 'property' of a foreign national or entity," according to a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuitruling, so they can't be blocked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control "overstepped its congressionally defined authority" when it did so.

  
  
  
• Data broker SL Data Services left background checks on 600,000 people behind in a taxi.  (The Register)
  
  Well, a taxi called Amazon S3.  Which means that anyone on the world could read all the files, not just the next person to catch that particular cab.
  
  When informed of this oversight, the company said the documents were in an opaque folder and nobody could read them without opening it.
  
  
  
• Baldur's Gate 3 is getting another free update.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There will be no sequel or DLC because developer Larian so despised working with Dungeons and Dragons owner Hasbro that they would rather forego the hundreds of millions of dollars in profit just so they never have to talk to them again.
  
  But they continue to update the game for free.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 29 2024 02:55 AM (NEIix)

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• Intel has received a $7.9 billion grant from the US government under the CHIPS Act.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This is not a different grant to the previous $8.5 billion grant though.  That one had not been completed, and has been reduced by $600 million due to the $3 billion contract Intel has received to produce secure chips for the Pentagon.
  
  Which when compared to the nonsense the government so often gets up to - this grant goes to pay Americans working at American companies in America - seems almost quaint.
  
  
  
• I am reminded as I am every couple of years that Perth exists.
  
  That USB storage device I bought was in stock and shipped just hours after I placed my order with Amazon...  From the far edge of the asteroid belt.
  
  
  

Tech News

• ISPs told an FCC inquiry that the reason their customers don't simply leave is down to the excellence of their customer service.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Still funnier than Saturday Night Live.
  
  
  
• Is Redis going full WordPress?  (GitHub)
  
  After abandoning open source itself, Redis is going after open-source libraries supporting Redis and suggesting they sell out to Redis or else.
  
  
  
• The US Senate is proposing a minimum security standards law for healthcare providers.  (The Register)
  
  On the one hand, security standards of US healthcare providers are shit.
  
  On the other hand, this is the Senate.  They are idiots who take advice from idiots to draft legislation for idiots.  And this is bipartisan, which means there are twice as many idiots involved.
  
  
  
• Huawei's Mate 70 phones will run the new Android-free HaronyOS.  (The Verge)
  
  Which is Android.
  
  
  
• Apple offered Indonesia a $100 million bribe to un-ban the iPhone 16.  (The Register)
  
  Indonesia is holding out for more money.
  
  
  
• Britain meanwhile is trying to shake down Google for $8.8 billion.  (The Register)
  
  And you get a tariff, and you get a tariff...
  
  
  
• The Pilet 5 and Pilet 7 are hand-held computers from an alternate universe 1990s that went in a very interesting direction.  (Liliputing)
  
  Resolutely function-over-form, these devices are big and clunky and have not just physical buttons but trackballs and trackpads and joysticks and dials and rollers and actual physical I/O ports.
  
  They're based on the Raspberry Pi 5 so they're quite capable as well.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 28 2024 03:49 PM (bg2DR)

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• Do Not Stab: Google has released an update to the Google App for iOS that...  Inserts Google Search links into third-party web sites.  (9to5Google)
  
  There isn't even a Do Not Stab header for this one:

  The feature, Google says, will offer an opt-out for website owners through a form. It’s pointed out by SERoundTable that opting out can take up to 30 days, while the feature is live now.

  Thanks Google.
  
  
  
• Both sides of the Google antitrust case blathered incoherently in closing arguments.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Can't they both lose?

• I bought myself a Terramaster D8 which is a small, cheap, and fairly dumb hybrid storage box.
  
  It holds 4 x 3.5" drives and 4 x M.2 NVMe SSDs, attached over 10Gb USB.   So it's much faster than my old Synology boxes, but it only does RAID-0 and RAID-1 and even that only on the first two drives.  You want to configure that on the system it's attached to.
  
  But it is cheap; I paid about $250 including tax and shipping, and you are not getting an 8-bay 10Gb Synology solution for that.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, QNAP.  (The Register)
  
  They issued a timely software update.
  
  It bricked users' devices.
  
  
  
• Amazon's new Kindle Colorsoft is kind of good except kind of not.  (The Verge)
  
  It's a 7" colour e-ink device with a resolution of 300 dpi, which is pretty good, and 4096 colours, which is tragic for an LCD but again pretty good for e-ink.
  
  But in colour mode the resolution is cut in half taking it from pretty good territory to pretty bad.
  
  And while Amazon claims a battery life of 8 weeks on a charge, that assumes that you barely use the device; the reviewer estimated it will last for 20 hours of actual reading.  Which again, is not bad, but is a lot less than 8 weeks.
  
  Also it doesn't seem to be available in Australia.
  
  
  
• Teamgroup has announced a 16TB external SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's basically the size of a 2.5" external hard drive, probably because it's a 2.5" SSD in a metal box, only it stores more, runs ten times faster, is a lot more robust, and costs an estimated $2000.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 26 2024 11:04 PM (NEIix)

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• RFC 35140: The Do-Not-Stab flag in the HTTP Header.  (5SNB)
  
  An idea whose time has come.

  Over the last 50 years, advancements in peripherals have allowed websites to stab users. A number of industries have popped up to provide SaaS (Stabbings as a Service). Some users have expressed discomfort when a knife is plunged into their chest, and this header allows those users to express their personal preferences.

  A user preference can, of course, be ignored by bad actors. However, most stabbings are not done by malicious actors, they are simply law-abiding companies which will gladly stop stabbing you if you ask. This standard provides a method for a user to easily opt-out of all stabbings, except those mandated by law, and ones that the company wants to do anyways.

  Seems entirely fair.  Who could possibly object to this?

  Syntax

  The header has only one form, Do-Not-Stab: 1.  This is because the lack of a header indicates a clear preference that the user wants to be stabbed.

  Understandable.

  Defaults

  A user-agent MUST NOT adopt Do-Not-Stab: 1 as the default preference. If a user-agent were to do this, web services SHOULD ignore the preference and stab the user anyways.

  This is of course a parody of...  Well, pretty much everything the big tech companies do these days.
  
  Or is it?

• This website is hosted on Bluesky.  (Daniel Mangum)
  
  Well, not this one.  And not the one linked above, either.  But the one linked in the article linked above.
  
  I mean, sort of.  It requires jumping through several flaming hoops and is entirely pointless, but...  Not sure there is a but.
  
  
  
• Outlandish recursive query examples with SQLite.   (SQLite)
  
  Like solving Sudoku with a database query.  Or plotting the Mandelbrot set...  With a database query.
  
  
  
• Yes, we seem to have run out of tech news.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 26 2024 08:29 AM (rcPLc)

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• Elon Musk is directing harassment towards individual federal workers.  (The Verge)
  
  Is he indeed, O Verge?
  
  The example cited - the only example cited - is of Musk suggesting that Director of Climate Diversification at the International Development Finance Corporation was a "fake job".
  
  Now, "climate diversification" in this sense means recommending alternative crops to grow to make the food supply more robust against short and long term changes in weather.
  
  Which is a task that could easily by filled by a fairly small book.
  
  And in this case, it involves making those recommendations to other countries.
  
  So, never mind "individual workers".
  
  USAID, its 10,000 employees, and its $50 billion budget: Afuera!

• In a small bit of welcome news in the never-ending shitfest that is Australian federal politics, the government has abandoned one of its attempts to strangle free speech across the entire world.  (ABC)
  
  The so-called "misinformation bill" would have set up the government as the arbiter of truth, and anything untrue would have become illegal speech.  The bill did not specify how this was supposed to work; it just legislated it into reality.
  
  And now it's dead for the current session of Parliament, and the left-wing Labor government is likely to be out of power before Parliament votes on any new legislation.
  
  Still moving forward is the government's Won't Somebody Think of the Children Act, which bans minors under the age of 16 from using social networks, though again it never specifies how this is supposed to be achieved.  This has the support of the nominally conservative Liberal Party and is likely to pass in some form, even though it is obviously completely unworkable.
  
  That's the same party that previously wanted to ban encryption, claiming that Australia's laws superseded mathematics, so this betrayal of conservative principles comes as no surprise.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 uses the new CAMM2 memory module in place of SO-DIMMs, but with a twist.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not only does it use the new, more compact modules, it uses LPDDR5X memory rather than regular DDR5.
  
  This reduces power (LP = low power) and also runs faster at 7500MHz.
  
  This is particularly welcome as AMD's Zen 5 laptop chips don't support regular DDR5, so without these modules, laptops based on those chips would not have any path for memory upgrades.
  
  
  
• I don't remember if I wrote about this - the story is from six months ago - but yes, LPDDR6 is on its way.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  LPDDR6 promises initial transfer rates of 10.6GHz and eventually 14.4GHz, which is not dramatically faster than the best LPDDR5X chips available now.
  
  Except that the bus is also 50% wider, and instead of fetching 8 words at a time it fetches 12.
  
  Which makes 288 bits, which is not very useful for 64-bit computers, so the extra 32 bits at the end is used for very strong ECC (DECDED guaranteed).
  
  Which makes 10.6GHz LPDDR6 90% faster than 7500MHz LPDDR5.
  
  This matters because current integrated graphics solutions from AMD and Intel are bottlenecked not by the chips but by memory speeds.  Apple's higher-end M-series chips have (as far as I can tell) 256-bit or even 384-bit buses, and AMD's upcoming Strix Halo chips will also have a 256-bit bus, but regular laptops only offer 128-bit memory.
  
  So when LPDDR6 arrives we can expect a big jump in integrated graphics performance.
  
  (My new laptop has DDR4 memory running at 3200MHz.   So...  Yeah.)
  
  
  
• Can ChatGPT-o1 complete a junior front-end developer's task?  (Charbel Ghossain)
  
  Well, yes, if you aren't worried about it working properly.
  
  The code produced for this example sort of works, in that it doesn't break the page.  But on a scale of 0 to 100, it only does anything at all for the range from 20 to 80.
  
  
  
• It is shockingly easy to jailbreak LLM-driven robots.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This is not shocking.  LLMs are notoriously insecure and unreliable.
  
  Simple solution: Don't fucking build LLM-driven robots.
  
  
  
• Who the heck is the M4 iMac aimed at?  (The Verge)
  
  It's a lovely piece of engineering, but the screen is too small for serious work, the memory cannot ever be upgraded, and the network speed is limited to 1Gbit when even the Mac Mini has a 10Gbit option.  And Apple has long since abandoned monitor mode, where an aging iMac with a perfectly good screen could serve as a monitor for another computer.
  
  Which would all be forgivable if it were cheap.  
  
  The 10 core model with 16GB RAM and 512GB of SSD costs $1699.
  
  
  
• Does GitHub Copilot improve code quality?  (GitHub)
  
  Yes, says GitHub.
  
  No, says literally everyone else.
  
  
  

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, November 25 2024 04:53 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Lowell at Monday, November 25 2024 09:51 AM (NnIKN)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 25 2024 06:12 PM (PiXy!)

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• Elon Musk's new ideas for improving government efficiency are not in fact new.  (The Verge)
  
  Do tell, O Verge.

  Though DOGE isn’t a real department - and may in fact just be President-elect Donald Trump’s way of placating Musk by giving him the appearance of a real job - it represents a long-running right-wing attempt to gut the civil service, a plan the incoming administration fully supports.

  So it only appears to be a real job, but the administration fully supports it?

  In any case, Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed cutting "thousands" of federal regulations and determining the "minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions."

  Awesome.

  This time around, it's not clear whether the courts would stop Trump, who, in his first term, nominated more judges to the federal judiciary than any of his predecessors and will inherit an extremely friendly Supreme Court. And as Musk and Ramaswamy noted in their explanation of how DOGE will function, the incoming Trump administration has something new at its disposal: the recent Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the landmark case that overturned Chevron deference.

  Better and better!

  The goal is mass deregulation - a weakening of checks and balances and a major cut to basic government services, all in the name of concentrating power among a small group of plutocrats.

  As opposed to the way things are now, where government regulations are the primary tool for concentrating power among a small group of plutocrats?
  
  
  

• Is AI hitting a wall?  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Yes.  Also, if you read to the end of the article, it is literally Hitler.
  
  
  
• The future of Windows is cloud and AI.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Literally Hitler.
  
  
  
• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is opening an investigation into an advertising group that organised a boycott of Twitter.  (Tech Crunch)

  Trade organizations and companies cannot collude to block advertising revenue from entities they wish to undermine," said Paxton in the press release. "Today’s document request is part of an ongoing investigation to hold WFA and its members accountable for any attempt to rig the system to harm organizations they might disagree with."

  Good.
  
  
  
• The DOJ is looking to disempartnerise Google and Anthropic.  (Pymnts)
  
  Because it can, apparently.
  
  
  
• Amazon meanwhile is throwing another $4 billion down the Anthropic drain.  (CNBC)
  
  None of the big AI companies are in the same universe as profitable.
  
  
  
• TSMC, which is profitable, expects 1.6nm chips to be coming off its production lines in 2026.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  My new laptop has a Ryzen 7730U CPU, which is built on a 7nm process.
  
  So...  Yeah.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, November 24 2024 12:57 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: stargazera5 at Sunday, November 24 2024 11:55 AM (vLfRn)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, November 25 2024 02:58 AM (rcPLc)

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• The problem is clear: Our customers are dumb.  (Intel)
  
  Intel commissioned a study to find out how much more efficient users were when equipped with a fancy new "AI PC".
  
  It turned out:

  At the same time, AI PCs offered a potentially transformative impact on people’s lives, saving individuals roughly 240 minutes a week on routine digital tasks. But the study also highlighted that current AI PC owners spend longer on tasks than their counterparts using traditional PCs. Study results show that greater consumer education is needed to bridge the gap between the promise and reality of AI PCs.

  AI PCs make things worse, but the real problem is the users.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile at Microsoft.  (Business Insider)  (archive site)
  
  Microsoft Copilot is a little too efficient, it seems...  At sharing confidential information with people who shouldn't have it.
  
  
  

• Microsoft really really really really wants you to upgrade to Windows 11.  (The Register)
  
  Really.
  
  
  
• Well, that's less than ideal: Finastra, which provides technology services to 45 of the 50 largest banks in the world, got hacked and saw 400GB of data stolen.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  There's no need to worry, though, unless you or someone you know uses a bank.
  
  
  
• OpenAI "accidentally" erased evidence pertaining to the lawsuit by the New York Times.  (The Verge)
  
  Just call me Mister Butterfingers!
  
  
  
• Kairos Power - which recently signed a contract to provide power to Google's datacenters - has received approval to build two test reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  These are small modular reactors, or SMRs, using molten salt cooling systems.  They're supposed to be simpler and safer - as well as smaller - than conventional designs.
  
  The test reactors will produce 35MW of heat each, while the production models will produce 150MW.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 23 2024 12:55 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Monday, November 25 2024 12:47 PM (YGUlK)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 25 2024 10:22 PM (NEIix)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 26 2024 11:10 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 26 2024 11:07 PM (NEIix)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 27 2024 12:44 PM (bg2DR)

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• The DOJ is seeking to break up Google, or rather to chip off a very small part of it.  (AP News)
  
  They want to break off the Chrome browser, which has multiple competitors, including some like Brave which use the same open-source core and behave virtually identically.
  
  What this is expected to achieve is unclear.  It would break Google's direct influence over the browser, but so would people switching to Brave or Vivaldi.
  
  They also want to prevent Google from making Google Search the default search engine in Android, which is something we've been through before with browsers and achieves basically nothing.
  
  Experts are freaking out, because that is what experts do:

  "It is probably going a little beyond," Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh said of the Chrome breakup. "The remedies should match the harm, it should match the transgression. This does seem a little beyond that pale."

  He should see my proposal, which involves Tasmanian devils.
  
  
  
• A Google employee union says, isn't there someone you forgot to ask?  (The Verge)
  
  I don't know what you mean.  The Tasmanian devils are fully on board.

• Ubuntu Linux has a decade-old bug in the needrestart tool that lets local users gain root access.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is bad, but it doesn't allow remote hackers to do anything directly.  It does give them a way to completely take over your system if they are already logged in, though.
  
  To fix it, edit the file /etc/needrestart/needrestart.conf
  
  It will have a line containing
  
  #$nrconf{interpscan} = 0;
  
  Find that line, and delete the # to activate it.  This has been the recommended configuration since 2022 but doesn't seem to have been adopted.
  
  Or just apt upgrade needrestart
  
  
  
• Microsoft didn't think people would actually want to play Flight Simulator 2024.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The servers that deliver the data stream have been overloaded and crashed entirely at least once.  Since you can't simply download the game once and play it, that makes it more or less unplayable:

  Our editors at Tom's Hardware attempted to install the game yesterday - two of our editors managed to hit around 70% before the installation failed, and one editor managed to install the game but could only access the main menu. So, unfortunately, we'll have to postpone our review of MSFS 2024 until Microsoft's game services are actually working.

  Nice work, Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Panzer of the lake, what is your wisdom?  (Stack Exchange)
  
  Tracking down an eighty year old photo of a tank.  In a lake.
  
  
  
• The OneXGPU 2 is an external GPU for laptops and mini-PCs with Thunderbolt, USB4, or OCuLink.    (Hot Hardware)
  
  It contains a Radeon 7800M laptop CPU, which is the 7800 XT desktop chip cut down to 12GB of RAM and a 192-bit memory bus (and also cut down from 265W to 180W).
  
  It also serves as a docking hub, with two USB ports, Ethernet, a micro-SD slot, and an M.2 slot in addition to the upstream USB4 and OCuLink ports and the three video outputs.
  
  And...  Basically, it works.
  
  
  
• Reddit is back online.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Some people actually noticed that it went down.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, November 22 2024 03:56 AM (rcPLc)

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• Two undersea communications cables in the Baltic Sea, one between Germany and Finland and the other connecting Lithuania and Sweden, were cut on the same day and absolutely nobody believes it was an accident.  (Tom's Hardware)

  "Nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed," said [German Defense Minister Boris] Pistorius. "We have to know that, without knowing specifically who it came from, that it is a hybrid action, and we also have to assume that, without knowing by whom yet, that this is sabotage."

  
  
  
• Yeah, it was China.  (MSN)
  
  The Chinese bulk carrier Yi Peng 3, en route from Ust-Luga in Russia to Port Said, was in the exact location of both cables at the moment they were cut, and was also tracked as slowing down both times.
  
  

• If Netflix can't make live streaming work, who can?  (The Verge)
  
  Um, broadcast TV?  Since the 1950s?
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Apple spent $20 billion on new films and television shows to attract 0.3% of viewing hours.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This seems like a poor return on investment.
  
  
  
• If Microsoft can't make Flight Simulator work, who can?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, Microsoft of 2020 could.  The previous version still works and is still being updated.
  
  Flight Simulator 2024 is here, except it kind of isn't.  It doesn't seem possible to actually download the game, ever.  It recommends at least a 100Mbps internet connection and it downloads map data as you fly over it.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Windows 365 Link device is Flight Simulator 2024 for the desktop.  (The Verge)
  
  Not your desktop, though.  At $349 this little box is slower than a $299 Beelink mini-PC and can't be used at all without a Windows 365 subscription.  It doesn't actually run Windows itself; it streams it from Microsoft's servers.
  
  Who would want such a thing?
  
  Libraries, for example.  If you have random patrons showing up to use your computers, and you don't know what they might use them for, this is perfect.  Every time someone logs out, the entire system is wiped clean as if they had never existed - because the system is in the cloud.  No data is stored locally at all.
  
  
  
• I came here to chew bubblegum and watch Earth-shattering kabooms, and we're all out of Earth-shattering kabooms.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The sixth test launch of Starship went pretty smoothly.  They called off the chopstick catch trick this time, but everything else went as planned.
  
  The next test is expected to show off Starship V2, slightly taller and with about 10% more thrust.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 20 2024 07:25 PM (bg2DR)

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• Nearly half of US thinks scientists are smug, and studies show humility helps.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The commentariat throws its toys out of the pram at this suggestion.
  
  
  
• How Scientific American's departing editor helped degrade science.  (Reason)
  
  I stopped reading Scientific American well before this particular lunatic's reign from Hell.  Looks like that was a good decision.

• Publisher Harper Collins is offering authors $2500 to sell their backlists to an unnamed AI company.  (404 Media)
  
  Judging from the response of the author cited here, he would be well advised to take the money and run.  AIs can already generate self-important drivel.
  
  
  
• Or sometimes not: Apple Intelligence is here and it's garbage.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Thanks Apple.
  
  
  
• Gwynne Shotwell, CEO of SpaceX, predicts 400 Starship launches over the next four years.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Since Starship is fully reusable, it will be cheaper to launch than Falcon 9 which has a disposable second stage, despite being far larger and more powerful.
  
  Since this is a rocket article, the comments are mostly sane.  The usual Musk-hating lunatics show up but promptly get downvoted to oblivion.
  
  
  
• BlueSky is a new kind of social network.  Decentralised and freed from the control of any single company, it is resistant to groupthink and censorship and if you say there are only two genders you will be banned instantly.   (The Dossier)
  
  When leftists talk about censorship, they mean censorship of them.
  
  They insist on censorship of you.