• Terrorist supporters have claimed responsibility for the DDOS and hack of the Internet Archive.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Maybe it's true.  Maybe they're lying.  There are many powerful groups that would love to scrub the internet's memory forever.
  
  But they're publicly boasting of this on Twitter from a verified account, so they've made themselves easy targets for law enforcement.
  
  
  
• The core archive is unaffected.  (Twitter)
  
  The site is down temporarily while the staff scrub the front-end servers and upgrade security, but it will be back.

• Tesla has announced its new Robotaxi, the gloriously art deco Robovan, and the new Tesla Robot.  (Tesla)
  
  A good old-fashioned future.
  
  
  
• AMD very graciously allowed Intel to be relevant for an entire week before stomping on them with a 192 core server CPU that is 20% cheaper than Intel's 128 core model.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD's new lineup includes Zen 5 models with up to 128 cores, and Zen 5c models (functionally identical cores but lower clock speeds) up to 192 cores.
  
  That article has lots of benchmarks; WCCFTech has the price list.
  
  If you need high clock speeds rather than just the maximum possible number of cores, the 9575F offers 64 cores running at 5GHz.  The 192 core 9965 "only" runs at 3.7GHz.
  
  In theory you could put one of each in the same server.  (I think?)  Not sure how much the Linux kernel would appreciate that though.
  
  
  
• Intel meanwhile has announced its new Arrow Lake desktop CPUs - the 245K, 265K, and 285K.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 285K will be slightly slower than the existing 14900K for gaming, but use less power.  Unfortunately it is expected to be up to 20% slower than AMD's best gaming chips like the 7800X3D, which uses much less power.
  
  Expected to be at retain on the 24th, so not much in the way of benchmarks until then, except for the one leaked result on CPUBenchmark.
  
  
  
• Intel claims the new chips provide parity performance at half the power.  (PC World)
  
  Which is very interesting because the claimed power consumption hasn't changed with respect to 13th or 14th generation parts, neither the base TDP nor the maximum turbo power.
  
  Which means that either Intel was lying before, or is lying now, or both.
  
  
  
• Just to make sure they rain on all of Intel's parades AMD's 9800X3D is expected to have an all-core clock 400MHz faster than the existing 7800X3D.  (VideoCardz)
  
  That would salvage the lackluster launch of the 9000 series.  It's not at all a bad CPU, but it shines at heavy server-oriented workloads rather than typical productivity apps or gaming.
  
  With that clock speed boost the 9800X3D should easily be the fastest CPU available for games.
  
  
  
• Maybe when the DOJ's antitrust team has finished beating up Google it could take a look at Adobe.  Adobe no longer offers perpetual licenses for its low-end Elements products.  (Notebook Check)
  
  You can "buy" the 2025 editions right now, but the software will drop dead three years after it is installed.
  
  
  
• What's better than Ethernet?  Ultra Ethernet.  AMD has shown off its first Ultra Ethernet cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These run at 400Gbps and offload a lot of the networking stack to a dedicated CPU on the card.
  
  
  
• Serve the Home got hold of the new AMD Epyc CPUs and a 400Gb Ethernet card and put them to the test.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I'm not sure how many homes need to be served with a 384 core server with 800Gbps of total network bandwidth, but here you go.
  
  
  
• There's a vulnerability in 64 different Qualcomm chipsets.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This only affects about two billion people, so you don't need to worry.
  
  And no, there are no details.
  
  
  
• Three executives in charge of Amazon's Just Walk Out project - cashierless brick-and-mortar stores - just walked out.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It is a thing.
  
  
  
• Amazon dreams of AI agents that do the shopping for you.  (Wired)
  
  Burn in Hell, Amazon.
  
  
  
• The latest Windows 11 update leaves 9GB of trash behind.  (PC World)
  
  Trash that it is impossible to delete short of reinstalling Windows entirely.
  
  That's nearly 50 cents worth of storage at today's SSD prices.
  
  
  
• The world must Act Now (TM) or We Are Doomed (TM).  (Dawn)
  
  More doomed than the last eleven times we were doomed?
  
  
  
• Redbox went bankrupt.  But the Redboxen remain.  (MSN)
  
  They weigh 900 pounds and there are 24,000 of them scattered across the country, typically wired directly into power so you can't even unplug them.  Walgreens says that just sitting there the boxen are costing the company $184,000 a month.
  
  And they're typically anchored in concrete to prevent theft, so you can't just yank them out.
  
  
  
• London is gone.  (The Register)
  
  Blown into the North Sea.  The BBC is predicting 13,508 mph winds, and overnight lows of 400C in Nottingham.
  
  Conditions are expected to return to reality this weekend.
  
  
  
• Automattic is doing open source dirty.  (Hey)
  
  This is the personal site of DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails.  I might have some philosophical differences with the design of Rails, but to my knowledge DHH never blackmailed or libeled anyone.
  
  
  
• The Fifth Circuit has upheld a lower court's finding of contributory copyright infringement against ISP Grande, but tossed the calculation of damages.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The ISP was found liable because it did not act on infringement notices, but the calculation of the damages at $47 million was found to be incorrect and excessive.  Where a CD was copied, the jury calculated the full damages on each song individually, which was deemed incorrect.
  
  The damage calculation heads back to the lower court while the fundamental matter of law likely goes to the Supreme Court, as the entire industry has an interest in how this turns out.
  
  
  
• The Amelia Watson Limited Edition Hyte Y40 PC case is discounted to $199 through October 28.  (Twitter)
  
  I already got mine, but that's okay.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 11 2024 10:18 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 11 2024 10:30 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, October 12 2024 10:58 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 12 2024 01:15 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 12 2024 02:57 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 12 2024 08:00 PM (bg2DR)

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• The Internet Archive has been hacked and credentials for 31 million users stolen.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The passwords are encrypted with Bcrypt, which is pretty robust, but if you shared a password between the archive and some other site, it's time to change it and also to stop doing that.

• Turkey has banned Discord because, well, Turkey.  (Reuters)
  
  If you let a turkey into your house, it's going to do turkey things.
  
  
  
• 80% of developers will need to "upskill" by 2027 to keep pace with the growing demands of goat vomit.  (IT Professional)
  
  Wait, my mistake.  It says here "generative AI".
  
  
  
• The walls are closing in on (throws dart) ELON MUSK.  (The Verge)
  
  Sure, he's worth a quarter of a trillion dollars, but we've got him for sure this time.
  
  
  
• Why GOV.UK's Exit this Page doesn't use escape.  (Beeps)
  
  Sounds like nonsense at first, but it's actually a useful function and the reasoning is sound.
  
  
  
• Are Intel's new CPUs just bad for multi-threaded performance?  (CPU Benchmark)
  
  The eight core laptop 288V runs like a four year old AMD 5800U - also with eight cores, and the 24 core desktop 285K runs like a two year old 12 core AMD 7900.  In both cases the AMD chips use half the power.
  
  The Intel chips have great single-threaded performance but multi-threaded test results so far are meh at best.

• Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Real AI, not this modern crap.
  
  Hinton invented the technique of back propagation in 1978, and Hopfield invented the Hopfield network in 1982, which is (says Wikipedia) a form of recurrent neural network, or a spin glass system, that can serve as a content-addressable memory.
  
  The key trick for winning the Nobel Prize continues to be not dying before the committee recognises your work.  Hinton is 76; Hopfield is 91.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Wikipedia the site really seems to have fucked the goat this time.  (The Publica)
  
  Downplaying over a thousand documented cases of child sexual abuse that have led to the arrest and conviction of 36 people so far.  
  
  No, Wikipedia, I don't think I will be donating to your fund drive.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AI image processing effortlessly transforms your precious memories into flavourless pap.  (The Verge)
  
  If even The Verge noticed this, it must be bad.
  
  
  
• Roblox is inflating its player numbers, says an investor newsletter aimed at short-sellers.  (The Verge)
  
  Gold is shiny, says an investor newsletter aimed and gold collectors.
  
  Roblox called bullshit on this, citing its public earnings figures.  However user numbers are calculated, revenue has increased 22% over the past year.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 10 2024 02:00 PM (pnaK4)

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• Artist* Jason Allen has requested judicial review of the US Copyright Office's decision to deny him copyright on his* piece Théâtre D'opéra Spatial.  (Ars Technica)
  
  At issue is that Allen did not paint the image, neither in a traditional physical medium, nor in a digital one.  It was generated using Midjourney.

  "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" is a wholly original image expressing his idea, Allen said, and to produce that human expression, he dedicated more than 100 hours to refining Midjourney text prompts through an iterative process that he estimates took more than 600 prompts. Allen told Ars that through this process, he crafted his own prompt language after determining "which parts of his instructions were effective and which were not," as well as which parts were "not even considered."

  If it took you ten minutes to try each prompt, I would have to wonder what you were doing in between.

  The Copyright Office has said that Allen's prompts are copyrightable, but only Midjourney was responsible for the output derived from the prompts. Walsh told Ars that if Allen had used any non-AI tool to transform the final image a little, even just applying a filter, he would be "good to go" to register his work and sue anyone who "verbatim copies" it.

  Surprisingly, and the EFF concurs, the Copyright Office has this pretty much right.
  
  * For some value of this term.
  
  
  

• Bad news for Google, good news for Android users everywhere: The judge in the Epic vs. Google case has issued his final ruling, requiring Google to make third-party app stores (like Epic's) available via the Google Play Store.  (The Verge)
  
  No more monkey business like Google attempted with Samsung to make it all but impossible to sideload apps.  The app stores must be installable from the Play Store itself.
  
  In addition, Google can no longer require app developers to use its own payment services, or restrict how developers communicate with their customers how to install and pay for their software.
  
  No such decision has been reached against Apple as yet - at least, not in the US.  Things are not looking great for Apple in the EU.
  
  
  
• If you want a Lego model of an AMD Epyc server CPU - the current 4th generation model with 12 CPU dies - this is now a thing that exists.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not a working model, but it is a model.
  
  
  
• Asus' new "Nitropath" memory slots help your RAM run faster on partly-populated motherboards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Up to 400MHz faster, which could increase overall performance of your computer by...  2%.  If you're lucky.
  
  Not without value, but not a big deal.
  
  
  
• How a Clinton-era law opened up US secrets to China.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yeah, who could have ever predicted that mandating back doors would lead to adversaries focusing their attention on those back doors?
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Okta.  (HackRead)
  
  Okta is a "security" company that lets other companies outsource logins to their applications.
  
  Okta is a constant target for hackers as a result.  And they were successful.  Again.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, October 09 2024 12:51 PM (nk1Z+)

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• Insecure "Deebot" vacuum cleaners made by Chinese company Ecovacs are recording you and taking pictures and measuring every corner of your house and sending the data back to the manufacturer.  (ABC)  (no, the other one)
  
  But you agreed to this when you were silly enough to buy one of their products.

  The Chinese home robotics company, which sells a range of popular Deebot models in Australia, said its users are "willingly participating" in a product improvement program.

  When users opt into this program through the Ecovacs smartphone app, they are not told what data will be collected, only that it will "help us strengthen the improvement of product functions and attached quality".

  But I can use the app to delete my data, right?

  It also states that voice recordings, videos and photos that are deleted via the app may continue to be held and used by Ecovacs.

  But at least the data doesn't go any further, right?

  Cybersecurity researcher Dennis Giese reported the problems to the company last year after he found a series of basic errors putting Ecovacs customers' privacy at risk.

  "If their robots are broken like that," he asked, "how does their back-end [server] look?

  "Even if the company's not malicious, they might be the victim themselves of corporate espionage or nation state actors."

  But... Lerian Jihad time.

   

• Intel's new Core Ultra 9 285K desktop CPU - expected to arrive this week - sets a new single-threaded performance record.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It scores 5268 on Passmark (my preferred benchmark for mainstream CPUs), about 10% ahead of competing chips from AMD and Apple.
  
  On the multi-threaded version of the test, though, things are not so rosy.
  
  There the 24 core (8P, 16E) 285K comes in behind AMD's Ryzen 7 7900, which has 12 cores, is two years old, and uses between half and one third the power of the Intel chip.
  
  That might be a hiccup, but the 285K has only 8 full-size cores, without hyper-threading.  (Intel has removed hyper-threading in this generation.)  The Ryzen chip has 12 full-size cores with hyper-threading.
  
  
  
• React on the server is not PHP all over again.  (Christoffer Artmann)
  
  No, it's not.
  
  
  
• It's worse.  (Infrequently Noted)
  
  And here's why.
  
  
  
• After shutting down its cashierless stores - where you can walk in, pick out what you want, and just leave - Amazon is looking to sell the technology to other companies.  (CNBC)
  
  I hear this is already big in California.
  
  
  

• Back at the dawn of time - which is to say, a few years ago - when an AI didn't know how to answer a question it would say it didn't know how to answer the question.  Either that or tie itself into knots, spit out an entire ream of gibberish, and crash.
  
  AIs today are much more sophisticated.  Like many humans when they don't know how to answer a question, they lie.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This is what you get when you reward answers rather than accuracy.  It's the comment spam problem all over again.
  
  What's worse, the more advance the AI - the larger its training set - the stronger the tendency to lie.
  
  And the more effort that is put into supervising the AI after the bulk training - a process called alignment - the stronger the tendency to lie and get away with it.
  
  It's not really lying, of course, since the current crop of commercial AIs have no intentionality.  It's just that they also have no concept of truth, and the way they are trained rewards giving answers, not just giving the right answer.

• SSD capacity could quadruple by 2029 as the number of layers in flash memory chips continues to increase.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Before the development of multi-layer flash cells, SSDs had a real problem.  We couldn't make the cells any smaller or they would leak - in fact, they were already leaking, and the newest SSDs were slower and less reliable than the previous generation.
  
  The first multi-layer cells were significantly larger than in the chips they replaced, which made them faster and more robust, but the multiple layers provided much more storage in the same size chip.
  
  If you don't want to wait five years, though, you could just buy four SSDs.
  
  
  
• Chinese state hackers reportedly gained access to the US wiretap system.  (MSN)
  
  So if the DOJ was listening in on your conversations, so was the CCP.
  
  
  
• Plastic-eating bacteria could combat pollution and possibly also utterly destroy civilisation.  (MSN)
  
  Scientists say that the latter scenario is "unlikely".
  
  
  
• California has passed a law protecting "brain information".  (GovTech)
  
  So if you are trapped in an advanced VR game where if you die in the game you die in real life, you can rest assured that the company that created the game cannot legally sell your neural scans.
  
  
  
• The latest HP OmniBook 14 Ultra isn't bad.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It lacks the Four Essential Keys and the screen is a 2240x1400 IPS model with a 60Hz refresh rate and 100% sRGB colour, which is good but nothing amazing.
  
  But it has a twelve core Ryzen AI 9 HX 375, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
  
  According to the article it costs around $1050, which is reasonable for those specs, but I was unable to find that exact configuration in HP's online store.

Totally Not Tech News

• Mark Muppetly, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, continues his spiraling descent into psychosis: WordPress.org just belongs to me.  (The Verge)
  
  WordPress.org is not non-profit organisation managing the open-source WordPress code.

  "I happily provide WordPress.org services to literally every other host," Mullenweg says. There is "no requirement to give back. WordPress will be open-source forever and ever, and so there will never be any legal requirement to give back." But WordPress does still "request" that companies contribute something. "It's better for WordPress if they give back."

  WP Engine's lawyers are reportedly looking at replacing their Porsches with Ferraris.
  
  
  
• 159 Automattic employees (the commercial side of WordPress) have taken the hint and the available severance offer and walked out.  (The Register)
  
  They are not going down with the ship.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Melk Murgatroyd decided to join in a Hacker News thread on the WP Engine suit and...  Potentially libel the party suing him.  (Hacker News)
  
  This seems unwise.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Having crashed the stock price by 90% through years of abject mismanagement, the Guillemot family and Tencent are looking to buy Ubisoft.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yves Guillemot is CEO of Ubisoft and behind the decisions that have ruined the company.
  
  Sounds like an amazing plan:
  
  1. Destroy your own company.
  2. Stock price crashes.
  3. Buy it for pennies on the dollar.
  4. Spend years fighting shareholder lawsuits.
  5. Price continues to decline.
  6. Lose everything.
  
  
  
• Civilization VII recommends 32GB of RAM, a 16 core CPU, and an RTX 4070 to play at 4K resolution.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Civ VI recommended 8GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• After getting smacked down by the courts last year, the SEC is going after the Ripple blockchain yet again.  (CNBC)
  
  It's the usual thing: The SEC says that everything and anything is a security without ever issuing any written regulations.
  
  They just show up out of the blue with a lawsuit, and if you win, they just do it again the next year.
  
  
  
• The Pilet 5 is a big clunky PDA that you can't buy.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's kind of cool in an industrial retro way.  It's a case, screen, keyboard, and battery that fits a Raspberry Pi 5.  
  
  According to the developer the hardware includes a laser pointer that "has the power to destroy planets, just like the death star" though this feature is not confirmed by the official specs.
  
  
  
• TSMC's 2nm node - called, reasonably enough, N2, is 25% more efficient than the current N3E process.  (Notebook Check)
  
  But also twice as expensive per wafer as the mainstream N5 and N4 processes.
  
  Expect leading-edge devices to cost more when N2 chips start shipping next year.
  
  
  
• As expected, the Ars Technica commentariat is shrieking with rage that a judge has chosen to uphold the Constitution with an injunction against California's ban on inconvenient satire and the site itself has pinned the blame on Emmanuel Goldmusk.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Plus ca change, plus la orange.
  
  
  
• Ars also offered its own take on the WordPress debacle that is so hilariously one-sided that its own commenters are roasting the site.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Good.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 06 2024 01:08 AM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 06 2024 01:09 AM (pnaK4)

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• A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction blocking California's new law against "AI deepfakes" noting that the law is overbroad and subjective.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The judge is, as the kids would say, based.

  While a well-founded fear of a digitally manipulated media landscape may be justified, this fear does not give legislators unbridled license to bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment. YouTube videos, Facebook posts, and X tweets are the newspaper advertisements and political cartoons of today, and the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to speak regardless of the new medium these critiques may take.
  
  ...
  
  California’s interest and the hardship the State faces are minimal when measured against the gravity of First Amendment values at stake and the ongoing constitutional violations that Plaintiff and other similarly situated content creators experience while having their speech chilled.

  Indeed.
  
  
  
• Amelia Watson Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC Case Status: Acquired
  
  Sitting in the front hall right now.
  
  
  
• Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC Case Status: Order confirmed
  
  Hyte confirmed that the order was processed before things fell apart, and they've fixed it.  I've now received the confirmation email and the order is showing in my account on their site.
  
  I'm not sure that I want to go through all that again for the Dokibird case.  It ended up costing me an extra $200 to air freight a PC case to the other side of the world, and a regular Hyte Y40 only costs $130.

• Cloudflare has blocked a 3.8Tbps DDOS attack, the largest on record.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Everything is awesome.
  
  The attack was using a wide range of compromised devices, notable Asus and Microtik routers.
  
  
  
• Conservatives on social networks are censored more than liberals.  (Nature)
  
  But it's their own fault, say the researchers, for sharing unapproved information.
  
  
  
• What happens to all of 23andMe's DNA when it goes bankrupt as seems likely?  (NPR)
  
  It all goes in the jar.
  
  Don't ask.
  
  
  
• The Magic the Gathering community is undergoing yet another incredibly stupid and very public meltdown.  (The Verge)
  
  At least in the old days, if someone thought you were cheating at cards they would just shoot you.
  
  
  
• What goes around: After Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, went nuclear on WordPress hosting provider WP Engine, blocking the company's access to the open source WordPress components and updating the WordPress dashboard to include posts targeting WP Engine, WP Engine has fired back with a lawsuit accusing Mullenweg and WordPress owner Automattic of extortion and libel.  (MSN)
  
  I hate WordPress.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 04 2024 09:53 PM (pnaK4)

2 They want $90 for a doubleshot PBT set of keycaps?  Well.
I mean, the price isn't outrageous considering the materials and that it's probably going to be a relatively-small batch order, says the guy who's already bought even more expensive keycaps.   But you can buy generic DS PBTs for under $20 on Amazon.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 04 2024 09:58 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 04 2024 10:02 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, October 05 2024 03:34 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Saturday, October 05 2024 05:20 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Saturday, October 05 2024 05:21 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 05 2024 05:39 AM (LADmw)

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• Eric Adams' phone pleads the Fifth.  (The Verge)
  
  The FBI obtained two of the New York mayor's phones under a warrant served almost a year ago, but they still haven't managed to access any data.
  
  Adams changed the password after the warrant was served - to prevent staff from deleting information that was required for the investigation, he says - and then promptly forgot it.
  
  
  
• The Amelia Watson Hyte Y40 PC limited edition PC case is winging its way toward me as we speak.  Or as I write and you read.  Or trucking its way.
  
  The shipment of Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 limited edition PC cases to Australia disappeared into the Nether, so I broke down and finally ordered it directly from the US, exorbitant shipping and all.
  
  The site took my money and then promptly crashed, because of course it did.

• The TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus is an 8 slot M.2 NAS with 10Gb Ethernet.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It competes with Asus' Flashtor models, which come in 6 and 12 slot versions, but has more oomph.  The 8 core N305 CPU is more than twice as fast as the older 4 core model in the Asus unit.
  
  It's a bit fiddly to install and the operating system is meh, but it can deliver a steady 9Gbps over the network.
  
  
  
• If you run a Zimbra server which you probably don't it's time you patched it.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Nasty exploit in the wild.
  
  
  
• The modern economy rests on a single road in North Carolina.  (Twitter)
  
  The Spruce Pine quartz mine - the source of the purest natural quartz in the world - supplies critical materials used in every single leading-edge chip manufacturing plant.
  
  
  
• That road is gone.  (Axios)
  
  It's not known when the mine might reopen.

  "This is second order of priority," The Quartz Corp said in a statement. "Our top priority remains the health and safety of our employees and their families."

  
  
  
• Cerebras - maker of the world's largest AI chips - is filing for an IPO.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A single Cerebras chip is the size of a dinner plate and contains 900,000 cores.

Posted by: I still can't thing of anything at Thursday, October 03 2024 11:27 PM (VXvaX)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 04 2024 07:32 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: furball at Friday, October 04 2024 10:14 AM (As8gg)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 04 2024 10:21 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 04 2024 10:25 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: I still can't thing of anything at Saturday, October 05 2024 10:09 AM (kCw2o)

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• After Broadcom bought VMWare, there were numerous stories of smaller customers being pushed to the wayside.  Broadcom's general approach to marketing products is to have 600 customers and ignore everyone else.
  
  Broadcom now seems to be experimenting with pushing everyone to the wayside.  (The Register)
  
  Court filings in a suit from AT&T say that Broadcom sought to increase prices by 1050% while also blocking its reseller channel from doing business with AT&T at all.
  
  AT&T says that the proposed pricing makes the payoff time for moving from VMWare to literally anything else short enough that they see it as an investment rather than an expense.

• A Chicago lab scooped up $83 million in federal payments for fake COVID tests.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The DOJ gave the lab owner a deal where he pled guilty to a single count of wire fraud.
  
  I wonder who he knows.
  
  
  
• AMD's Epyc 8004 embedded server family is here.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I'm not sure what makes these specifically embedded, as they're socketed and work just fine in conventional rackmount servers.
  
  These are lower-end and cheaper than the 9004 series, with 6 memory channels and 96 lanes of PCIe 5.0.
  
  The processors are only available configured with Zen 4c cores, which are slower and use less power than Zen 4.  Not a lot slower in a server CPU; these are clocked at 3GHz where Zen 4 chips run at up to 3.6GHz.
  
  Prices start at $409 for an 8 core chip, and range through $855 for 24 cores, up to $4950 for 64 cores.
  
  The 24 core model looks good if your needs lean more towards memory capacity or I/O bandwidth than CPU performance, since it would be slower than a 16 core desktop chip.
  
  Even the 64 core version only draws 200W, which is another advantage.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Copilot can now read your screen and talk to you.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not if you uninstall it.