• Basecamp, long a thought leader in woke bullshit in the tech industry, has woken up and smelled the brokeness.  (Hey)
  
  They've announced just a few small changes:
  
  
• Political discussions on work accounts are banned.
• No more woke benefits. You get paid. It's your money, spend it however you want.
• No more committees.
• No worrying about the past.
• No more peer reviews. Your manager is expected to manage.
• The world is big enough to look after itself. Or not. We're a business, we're here to make money.

The usual suspects are up in arms. Sane people are cautiously pessimistic.

• Is AMD selling defective Xbox CPUs as desktop systems?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Looks like it.  With the ongoing chip shortage it makes no sense to throw out an Xbox CPU just because the graphics core isn't up to scratch; just disable the graphics and you have a solid (if previous generation) eight core processor.
  
  The system in question appears to use GDDR6 memory, which means that it's not a mainstream Ryzen part, but a custom chip from either the recent Xbox or PlayStation lineups.
  
  
  
• TSMC is on track to deliver 4nm and 3nm chips next year.  (AnandTech)
  
  Compared to current 7nm parts (Apple is shipping 5nm parts from TSMC, but no-one else is yet) these will use half the power and be as little as one-third the size.  They'll also be faster - up to 30% - but that's a bit more complicated; it's measured at optimum power usage, rather than maximum performance.
  
  So it's meaningful for mobile phones at the low end, and servers with hundreds of cores at the high end, but not so much for desktop systems, which focus on a different part of the performance-per-watt curve.
  
  While shortages are expected to continue into next year, TSMC is planning to pump $30 billion a year over the next three years for updates and expansion.
  
  
  
• All your Mac are belong to us.  (Objective-See)
  
  A bug introduced in MacOS 10.15 lets hackers slide malware right past all of Apple's multi-layered protection schemes and simply take over your Mac.
  
  Your Mac.  My Mac is still running 10.14, because every release - both major releases and point releases - since then has been a bug-ridden pile of crap.
  
  It's a long article.  If you have the time and you want to see how security guys earn their keep, it's worth reading through it, and just imagine that any words you don't understand are witchcraft.  You won't be far wrong.
  
  
  
• A laser-toting robot can zap 100,000 weeds per hour.  (Freethink)
  
  Downside: It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.  To get that speed it uses high-powered carbon-dioxide lasers, not cheap solid-state ones.
  
  I for one welcome our new weed-zapping overlords.
  
  
  
• Canada is offline after a beaver gnawed through the phone cord/  (Gizmodo)
  
  Or maybe only part of Canada.  I'm hazy on the details.  It's Canada.
  
  
  

Megumi Hayashibara Theme Song Video of the Day

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, April 27 2021 10:29 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 28 2021 12:33 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 29 2021 02:37 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, May 01 2021 09:46 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, May 01 2021 10:59 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: SONIA PATEL at Saturday, April 09 2022 05:09 PM (p3Vui)

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• No reasonable person, says Apple, would assume that they owned the products they had bought.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Apple is about to discover that the world is full of unreasonable people.

• Hackers breached Apple contract manufacturer Quanta and pilfered schematics of existing and new devices.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They are demanding $50 million in ransom or they will release the documents, which would potentially allow people to repair Apple devices rather than replace them.
  
  
  
• Apple is also being sued over misleading claims of water-resistance ratings on iPhones.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Apple, it seems, rates water resistance with regards to distilled water.  Unless you have some very specific living or working conditions, it is unlikely that this is what your phone will encounter.
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Strix G15 has the four essential keys.
  
  I know this because a colleague's work laptop died this morning, and our boss being sensible about this stuff told her to go to the local electronics store, buy whatever she preferred, within reason, and expense it.
  
  She needed 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD to handle our development environment, and the ROG Strix is what they had in stock.  It also happens to have a 144Hz screen, a six-core i7-10750H CPU, and an RTX 2060, so it's probably better for gaming than anything I own.
  
  
  
• Twitter is blocking tweets that criticise the Indian government.  (The Wire)
  
  In India, yes, but that is where they are most relevant.
  
  India still has a tendentious relationship with free speech.  They're not blatantly totalitarian like China, but they certainly tend towards the authoritarian.
  
  
  
• This is why we can't have nice things.  (LayerCI)
  
  Many providers of CI - continuous integration testing tools - offered free tiers useful for individual programmers and baby startups.  That's fast disappearing because people are abusing these facilities to mine cryptocurrencies.
  
  This is spectacularly inefficient - one commenter noted it cost them $50 for a user to mine $1 worth of Monero - but that doesn't matter because they are not personally bearing the cost.
  
  If that reminds you of anything - or indeed everything - in politics, that just means you're paying attention.
  
  
  
• Note to self: Look into Envoy.  (Better Programming)
  
  Envoy is an application router - similar to a reverse proxy like Caddy or Nginx, but smarter and more automated at directing requests for pages to the right endpoint.  I ran into some issues trying to load-balance servers last week when we came under some sort of weird garbage-HTTP-request attack, because Caddy's routing isn't flexible enough.
  
  It also offers caching, what they call "circuit breaking", where you'll automatically get the cached content if the back-end server is overloaded, and fault injection, which basically acts as the Handicapper General from Harrison Bergeron to make sure that when things actually do go wrong, your configuration will handle it.
  
  
  
• Linux Foundation to UMN: Bite me.  (Kernel.Org)
  
  Apology not accepted.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 27 2021 12:02 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 27 2021 12:06 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: ReallyBored at Tuesday, April 27 2021 02:00 AM (cp/J1)

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• Akane, Utah: Ryzen 3700X, 64GB RAM, 3.2TB NVMe
• Mikan (probably), Dallas: Xeon W-1290P, 64GB RAM, 3TB NVMe
• Aoi (original), Dallas, Xeon E-1240, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD
• Aoi2, Dallas, VM, 12 cores, 48GB RAM, 720GB SSD
• Kurumi, Dallas,  VM, 8 cores, 32GB RAM, 480GB SSD
• Midori, Los Angeles, VM 6 cores, 24GB RAM, 240GB SSD - just cancelled, will replace with a Sydney server
• Sakura, Singapore, VM, 8 cores, 32GB RAM, 480GB SSD - will probably cancel and replace with a Sydney server
• Chiriri, Sydney, 2 cores, 4GB RAM, 125GB SSD - seems tiny now
• Mew, Dallas, 48TB backup server
• Lurulu, Dallas, 16GB RAM, 768GB RAID-5 SSD, CPanel 

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• Do you want a regulatory crackdown?  Because this is how you get a regulatory crackdown.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The founder of a cryptocurrency exchange in Turkey has disappeared.  Along with the accounts of 400,000 users, totaling around $2 billion.
  
  This answers the question of where you flee to if you start out in Turkey: Albania.
  
  The 21st century is just going to be a replay of the 19th and 20th, only sped up so that it looks ridiculous.

Tech News

• SSDNodes has announced availability in Sydney starting Tuesday.  Which presumably means Wednesday Sydney time.  They like to send out these announcements at 4AM with  super special deals that only last an hour, so the only time I'm awake to catch them is when I'm dealing with a server fire.
  
  SSDNodes is a smaller cloud provider that specialises in long-term requirements.  Instead of paying Amazon or Digital Ocean ten cents an hour for a server, you pay SSDNodes $99 per year for three years up front.  Which means - if you do the maths - and if you end up using that server for three years - that you save about 90%.
  
  I've had a development server with them for about a year, but I really wanted one in Sydney rather than Los Angeles, because the ping times are about 30x faster.  On Wednesday I'll finally get that.
  
  
  
• A new dedicated Ethereum mining chip can run as fast as 32 Nvidia RTX 3080s.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good.  Maybe we can get video cards on the shelves again at some point.
  
  It should be better for the environment too, as it draws only...  Oh.  Only 2500W.
  
  
  
• Intel's 35W Rocket Lake CPUs are shipping.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are aimed at small form-factor and all-in-one desktops; you still get eight cores but they use a lot less power than the standard 125W chips, which use 250W, truth in advertising having died long ago.
  
  
  
• Don't click on this in Chrome, it will crash the browser tab.  (GitHub)
  
  I warned you, and you still clicked on it, didn't you?
  
  
  
• The update server for password manager Passwordstate got hacked.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The hackers installed malware that got installed automatically in the next update, and then stole your passwords.
  
  Which means that 29,000 additional companies got hacked, and everything they do is now suspect as well.
  
  Trust no-one.
  
  
  
• The University of Minnesota idiots have published an open letter apologising for getting caught.  (Phoronix)
  
  The letter insists that other patches from UMN are legitimate, but that is precisely what they said when they tried to submit additional buggy patches after getting caught the first time.
  
  Ban them for life, again, twice as hard.
  
  
  
• Is Hirsute Hippo an enterprise play?  (ZDNet)
  
  On the one hand, Ubuntu release names increment the letter of the alphabet each time; on the other hand, this is their second time through.  Hirsute Hippo is 21.04, though.  8.04 was called Hardy Heron.
  
  It integrates directly with Microsoft's Active Directory services, which are pretty much universal in the enterprise world and which I have the good fortune to have never come within a mile of personally.
  
  Also, it's free.  Enterprise customers will pay for support contracts, but normal humans can just download it.
  
  On the other hand, it's not a long-term support (LTS) release; you'll need to upgrade first to 21.10 and then 22.04 to get that.
  
  
  
• An Oklahoma woman has had a felony embezzlement charge on her police record for 21 years and no-one bothered to tell her - though you bet they told her employers - because her boyfriend forgot to return a rental tape of Sabrina the Teenage Witch in 1999.  (Yahoo)
  
  These are the people who want you to trust them with, basically, everything.
  
  
  
• SpaceX's Crew 2 module has arrived safely at the ISS.
  
  
  
  
  Next stop, Andromeda.
  
  
  
• YouTube is refusing to let a DMCA troll dismiss its own lawsuit.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  This is a fun case where YouTube caught the complainant red-handed: They filed the complaint from the same IP address as one of the supposedly infringing users.
  
  Actually, I'm not sure what the end goal was here.  These people look like idiots.
  
  I'd like to see both parties lose somehow, but I'm happy for today to see the DMCA trolls ground into the dirt and forced to pay all of YouTube's legal fees.
  
  
  

Check the Fine Print Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 26 2021 04:05 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 26 2021 11:42 AM (PiXy!)

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• Bitcoin's price has tumbled by 25% because Democrats ruin everything.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And yes, the article blames the Biden Administration, over their capital gains tax plans, right in the headline.
  
  And let's not even started on the chaos the SEC has created for itself with its incompetent lawsuit against crypto-based payment transfer platform Ripple.  (Forbes)
  
  The judge in that case largely granted Ripple's motions for discovery, ordering the SEC to turn over all communications with third-parties regarding cryptocurrencies as well as all formal internal documents.  They're still trying to talk the SEC's legal department down off the roof after that ruling.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 25 2021 03:21 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 25 2021 03:23 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, April 25 2021 09:48 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 25 2021 12:00 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, April 25 2021 02:06 PM (4i7w0)

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• Three weeks ago it was the Easter long weekend, I was kicking back, playing some Minecraft, configuring the brand new 128-core Epyc server we got at work...  Then the Fire Nation attacked.
  
  This is the first night I've had off since then.  Tomorrow I'm even planning to go outside.  That will be exciting.

Tech News

• The University of Minnesota takes this situation extremely seriously.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Translation: We got caught.
  
  
  
• The best tablets of 2021.  (TechSpot)
  
  I want a new 7" or 8" tablet.  It's what I use to read books.  I have two Nexus 7 tablets from 2013, and it's nearly impossible to find anything better than that.
  
  There are plenty of 10" and larger tablets, but small tablets are almost extinct.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 21.04 is out.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has stuff.  I'm more interested in the LTS (long-term stable) releases that come out every second year, though.  I've been very happy with 20.04; normally I give new releases a few months to settle down, but I tried 20.04 when if first came out and still have yet to run into any significant issues.
  
  I mean, apart from systemd.  Fuck systemd.
  
  
  
• Out: RGB.  In: LCD.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The Asus ROG Ryujin II AIO - a CPU water cooler - has a built-in 3.5" LCD display.
  
  Why?
  
  
  
• The Post Office is spying on you.  (Yahoo)
  
  I'm so old I still remember when they delivered mail.
  
  
  
• The EFF is suing Proctorio - a company that spies on students during exams - for issuing false DMCA takedown notices.  (EFF)
  
  <mr burns> Excellent.</mr burns>
  
  
  
• 128 cores and four drive bays.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Why would you do that?  Who would buy such a thing?
  
  Your own 128 core Epyc server only has three disk drives.
  
  Well, yes, but we could add more if we wanted.
  
  Speaking of which, 15TB Enterprise NVMe drives are pretty neat.
  
  
  
• Oops, they explained.  (Phoronix)
  
  An IBM engineer was ordered to remove a patch submitted to the Linux kernel because he used his personal email address for work done in his own time.
  
  IBM has now confirmed that this was a mistake, and - though not in so many words - that the manager involved in the kerfuffle is a dumbass.
  
  
  
• Twitter phished its own users.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They sent out suspicious-looking emails asking you to click on a link to confirm your Twitter account, even though your Twitter account was already confirmed and working fine.  The emails were genuine, though; Twitter is just stupid.
  
  
  
• The new iMac is overpriced.  (ZDNet)
  
  For the same money you could get an overpriced Mac Mini and two 32" 4K monitors.
  
  And it can't be upgraded, repaired, or even recycled.
  
  You buy it, keep it until it dies, then buy a new one.
  
  
  
• Google is updating the UI of their Meet video call app.  (ZDNet)
  
  They say don't fix that which isn't broken, but Google is clear on that score.  The current Meet UI is garbage.
  
  
  
• Honey is now radioactive.  (Motherboard)
  
  The modern era is defined as the period in which carbon dating no longer works.  Not because carbon dating isn't sensitive enough, but because everything since the 1950s is now slightly radioactive, and that's enough to make the measurements meaningless.
  
  
  
• John Deere doesn't let you repair your own equipment, but they do dox their own customers.  (Security Ledger)

  Sick Codes, the researcher, said he created a free developer account with Deere and found the first myjohndeere.com vulnerability before he had even logged into the company’s web site.

  Oops.
  
  
  
• A new Facebook bug exposes millions of email addresses.  (Wired)
  
  Per day.  They estimate they can find five million addresses per day.

  The researcher, whom Ars agreed not to identify, said that Facebook Email Search exploited a front-end vulnerability that he reported to Facebook recently but that "they [Facebook] do not consider to be important enough to be patched."

  I'm sure they don't.
  
  
  
• Even the Stalinists at Slashdot hate the Stalinists at Mozilla.  (Slashdot)
  
  The Stalinist Slashdot Alliance is fighting it out with the Slashdot Alliance of Stalinists in the comments.  The Alliance of Slashdot Stalinists is waiting in the wings to shoot the survivors.
  
  
  
• The Biden Administration is planning to loot the roughly $100 billion in cash held by Big Tech companies in overseas banks.  (Bloomberg)
  
  First helpful or intelligible thing any of them have done all year.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, April 23 2021 07:25 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 23 2021 09:22 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 23 2021 11:54 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 24 2021 01:54 AM (2Mei2)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 24 2021 04:32 AM (LADmw)

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Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 23 2021 12:03 PM (2Mei2)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 23 2021 12:54 PM (obo9H)

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Top Story

• The Linux Foundation has banned the University of Minnesota from committing patches, and is reverting or reviewing all patches they have ever committed.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because - as some kind of twisted and astoundingly unethical sociology experiment - they were systematically introducing bugs under the guise of fixing other bugs.
  
  They got caught, denied it, got caught again, and are now banned for life.
  
  Hacker News has comments.  1724 of them so far, and still going.

• The Asus ZenBook 13 is a Ryzen 5800U laptop with an OLED screen and the four essential keys.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That processor has 8 CPU cores and what they call 8 GPU cores - also known as CU for cluster units.  16GB of LPDDR4-3733 RAM, 1TB of NVMe SSD, two USB-C ports, one USB-A, HDMI, and a microSD slot.
  
  What it doesn't have is a headphone jack because there is apparently a requirement carved into the bedrock of the laptop industry that they have to fuck something up on every single model.  It comes with a USB-C audio adapter, which is a pain but less of a problem with a laptop - where you carry it around in a bag anyway - than with a phone.
  
  We might forgive them that defect though because prices end at $999.  Typically laptops in this class start around that price and by the time you get up to the full configuration you're paying 60% more.  $999 is a good price for an 8-core laptop with an OLED screen.
  
  
  
• I've called Docker the world's least efficient package manager, but that's not a fault of Docker's technology, but of it's philosophy.  As an example of how well it can work in the hands of competent people, here's a web server in a 6kB Docker container.  (DevOps Directive)
  
  That's quite small.  The baseline container they started with was 150,000 times larger.
  
  
  
• WSLug lets you run Linux GUI applications on Windows.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is currently a preview release but it's promising; as a developer I already find the ability to run Linux console apps on Windows extremely useful.
  
  
  
• Europe is proposing strict regulations on the use of AI.  (New York Times)
  
  In particular they are proposing a ban on the use of facial recognition cameras in public spaces.  By private companies, that is.  The governments will keep right on doing that.
  
  
  
• Russian communications regulator Rozkomnadzor has demanded that Instagram stop blocking the Russian national anthem.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The DMCA takedown notices were apparently filed by a German TV show.
  
  Meanwhile the same agency has insisted that Google remove the blog page of a Ukrainian political party, because...  You know why.
  
  
  
• Intel has defeated a $3 billion patent lawsuit filed by VLSI Technology.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This isn't the VLSI Technology, though.  That company - founded back in 1979 - was acquired by Philips in 1999 and later spun off again as part of NXP.
  
  This is a different company with the same name, founded by Japanese investment giant Softbank purely for the purpose of screwing over companies that actually do R&D.
  
  Fuck 'em.
  
  
  

Worst Chemical Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 23 2021 02:52 AM (6y7dz)

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Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, April 22 2021 02:20 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 22 2021 04:17 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 22 2021 08:07 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 22 2021 11:16 PM (LADmw)

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