• So as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted...  No, never mind, can't remember.  
  
  I have a sneaking suspicion my wired internet might be down for a few days.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• When I got my current phone - an Oppo A91 - I just went for something inexpensive, with decent specs and a great screen, and critically a headphone jack and microSD slot.  It's not 5G because I don't need 5G; I have high-speed internet and I'm not utterly dependent on my phone to get my job done...
  
  Well, crap.
  
  Ordered a Samsung A52s (5G model) today.  I can probably expense it because my 4G speeds won't even support a Zoom meeting.  Also a new SIM on a 120GB data plan for a surprisingly reasonable price.
  
  Phone arrives tomorrow, SIM card probably Monday.  Don't even have a response about internet repairs much less an ETA.

• Second new backup server is being deployed now.  This will be named after (checks list) Mikan from Gakuen Alice.

• Despite all that I am online and none of my computers or appliances seem to have died.
  
  I was in the middle of a Zoom meeting with a dozen other people - and just about to deploy a critical patch that would allow a project to roll out to customers - when the lightning hit.  I had to SMS instructions for deployment and testing to the team because I couldn't even make a phone call right then.
  
  
  
• How it started:
  
  
  
  
  How it's going:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Speaking of watching you do not trust otters.  (Politico)
  
  Otter.ai is a service for journalists that assists in transcribing interviews, stealing all your data, and selling it to the highest bidder.
  
  
  
• All of Canada's major banks experienced unspecified technical issues just hours after the Nazi takeover.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Curiouser and curiouser.
  
  
  
• S3 (and compatible services) are a great solution for storage if you don't care about your data and/or want to create a mess so bad that you'll happily spend $100,000 to click a button that makes it all go away.  (Cyclic)
  
  To use S3 effectively you have to maintain your own database of all the objects, and manage keeping the two in sync.  S3 does nothing to help you there.  Less than nothing, in fact, because it will simply lie about your metadata.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zephyrus G14 gets several things right.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has AMD's brand new Ryzen 6900HS CPU and Radeon 6800S graphics, with 32GB DDR5 RAM and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM, a 2560x1600 14" 120Hz display, 1TB of PCIe 4 SSD, two USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI, microSD, and a headphone jack.
  
  It has a massive 240W power brick, but on the other hand lasts over 10 hours of constant use on battery power, so you might not need to lug that everywhere (maybe take a smaller USB-C charger to extend battery life).
  
  Unfortunately the Four Essential Keys are a no-show on this one.  Asus is hit-and-miss on the FEK.
  
  
  
• Slow down to speed up: Intel is planning server CPUs with only slow cores.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel's 12th generation Alder Lake desktop and laptop chips have a mix of fast and slow cores.  The slow ones are about half the speed of the fast cores - but one quarter the size.
  
  Desktop apps can't generally make use of a ton of slow cores (though you're going to get that anyway) but servers can, and if you have four times as many cores at half the speed, that means you double your throughput.
  
  Expected in 2024.
  
  AMD is doing something similar with their Zen 4c Bergamo chips, but that will be out a year before Intel.
  
  
  
• Intel's Sapphire Rapids chips are twice as fast as AMD's Milan-X, says Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not only is that true only of a very specific subset of benchmarks, you can't and won't be able to buy Sapphire Rapids.  It's for supercomputers, and you don't count.
  
  Also by the time it arrives it will be competing with AMD's next-generation Genoa, which will truly be twice as fast as Milan.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

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• Lightning doesn't strike twice because once is plenty.
  
  My internet is fried.
  
  
  
• Audible steals roughly half of the royalties it promises to audiobook producers.  (AudibleGate)
  
  The rates kind of suck to begin with, and then Audible steals half anyway.
  
  

• Apple's solid-state drives are non-standard, encrypted, and soldered in place, but at least they're fast.
  
  They're fast, right?
  
  
  
  
  Not a huge problem for laptop users, and probably not for the average desktop user, but don't run an important database on a Mac.  Just don't.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 17 2022 11:57 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 18 2022 12:53 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Friday, February 18 2022 10:50 AM (obo9H)

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• Not naming any names, but if your blockchain can go down - not just congested with high gas prices but entirely offline - then you're blockchaining wrong.
  
  
  
• AMD's market cap now exceeds Intel's.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a far cry indeed from the dark days of 2015 when their share price was in the toilet and it was looking like someone was about to flush.  
  
  To be fair, Intel is likely undervalued here, based not on sales figures but on a decade of underwhelming R&D effort.  AMD's revenues have been soaring but are still only 20% of Intels.
  
  And for whatever reason, Nvidia is currently valued at more than Intel and AMD combined.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Akamai has bought cloud server provider Linode for $900 million.
  
  For once, genuinely not a bubble.  There's a story I could link, but 95% of it is statutory investor warnings.
  
  
  
• Google is dying.  (DKB)
  
  Google earned its early success by doing something hard, well: Indexing the entire damn internet in a way that was actually useful.
  
  In doing that they unleashed the plague that is comment spam that persists unto this day, but their search was still useful.  Now it's becoming useless, not because search has changed, but because the internet is absolutely flooded with shit.
  
  The article notes that Reddit is much better at handling this, not because Reddit isn't flooded with shit, but because Reddit is divided into tens of thousands of small communities and if you search for a Hololive-related question in /r/hololive you know you are going to get a Hololive-related answer.
  
  
  
• Writing a Minecraft server from scratch in Bash.  (sdomi)
  
  If you know what that means, you know what it means.
  
  If you don't, well, it's like constructing your own fully functional fire engine entirely by hand - out of cheese.
  
  
  
• Google is bringing Chrome OS to computers.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Actually not a bad way for the average user to revive an old PC or Mac with low-end specs.  4GB of RAM is not a fun experience on Windows or MacOS but works relatively well on ChromeOS.
  
  
  
• The Australian Electoral Commission is fighting conspiracy theories online by seeking out spreaders of misinformation and turning them into toads.  (ZDNet)
  
  Reports are that the toads are either used in vaccine research or forced to assist in the branch-stacking efforts of the Victorian ALP.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 17 2022 12:46 AM (Z0GF0)

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 17 2022 11:03 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 17 2022 11:07 AM (obo9H)

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• Long day at work - and it isn't over yet - so short one today.
  
  
  
• The UK tax department has seized NFTs worth a total of $1.8 million as part of a broader tax fraud investigation. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  Which makes me wonder if I can pay my taxes in NFTs.
  
  
  
  

• Intel's Core i3-12100 is a pretty good CPU for $120. (Tom's Hardware)

  
  

  No low-power cores to to complicate things, reasonable clock speeds (4.3GHz), modest power requirements (60W base, 89W turbo), good single-threaded performance, and decent multi-threaded performance. With "only" four cores it's not a 3D rendering powerhouse, but for the average user it should cope quite well. It's slower on multi-threaded tasks than my spare new laptop, which has a 15W 6-core AMD Ryzen 5600U, but only by about 10%, and it's 15% faster single-threaded.

  
  
  
• Android 13 supports virtual machines. (CNX)

  
  

  As in, you can run complete standalone Linux and Windows instances on your phone. Right now just the Pixel 6, but in the future all up-to-date mobile devices. Why you would want to do this is another question, but my A$300 phone came with 8GB of RAM, so if there's a use for it there's no reason not to do it.
  

• Not up on the news sites yet but GiveSendGo was briefly taken offline by a redirection attack that sent visitors to GiveSendGone.
  
  Also GiveSendGo information apparently sourced from a misconfigured S3 bucket - or not, I'll get to that in a moment - with details of campaigns and contributions is circulating on the internet.  Supposedly 200GB of data was leaked.  99% of that is going to be videos and images from campaigns.  If they had 200GB of payment data they'd have enough money from their processing fees to buy Nova Scotia.
  
  
  
• Anyway, that misconfigured S3 bucket.  First, almost all S3 buckets are misconfigured because the S3 bucket configuration panel in AWS is a screaming toxic dumpster fire.  Absolutely unbelievable how bad it is.  IBM has an S3 compatible storage service and even they do it better.
  
  And the data I've seen circulating...  Was public on the website in the first place.  So it might not have been misconfigured at all, just open to public view because it was public data.
  
  Not seeing any email addresses, phone numbers, or home addresses, but I haven't gone and downloaded the file myself, and don't plan to.
  
  Update: Apparently the leaked data includes ID of campaign organisers, but not of contributors.
  
  
  
• In slightly brighter news, that 4TB SSD that suddenly got an massive unexplained discount right when I was looking for a 4TB SSD - and went up by 50% right after I bought it - suddenly got a massive unexplained discount when I was back on Amazon checking my order statuses.  (Everything has been delivered except some gravy.  Long story.)
  
  It's A$1500 if I buy it through Amazon US; that seems to be the MSRP.  I don't know what Amazon's pricing algorithm is playing at; yesterday on Amazon AU it was A$1307, this morning it was A$873, and after I bought one, it went straight up to A$1147.
  
  Anyway, where I said I shoulda bought two, now I didda bought two.  Also I'm $200 over budget for my lab buildout, but I think I'll cope.

• Intel's Sapphire Rapids vs. AMD's Milan-X server CPU.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The benchmarks aren't of huge interest to me personally because they are all floating-point workloads, but there's an interesting chart on cache and memory latencies.  AMD does surprisingly well here, getting 17.3ns latency to 1.5GB of total L3 cache.  Intel has 28.4ns latency to - I think - 180MB of total L3 cache.
  
  Which is not what the chart says but the chart is wrong.
  
  
  
• Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY.  (Saagar Jha)
  
  If you spend much time reading tech company blogs, you've seen this post hundreds of times.  About 10% of them have some true insight, the rest are just overpaid hamsters spinning in their wheels.
  
  
  
• I'm in the wrong business.  Or in the wrong branch of the right business.  A white hat hacker was awarded $2 million for pointing out a critical bug in the Optimism layer-2 blockchain.  (Crypto Adventure)
  
  "Hey, did you know you can create infinite ETH tokens on your site?"
  "Thanks, fixed, here's two million bucks."
  
  Not a bubble.
  
  
  
• France is planning to build up to 14 new nuclear reactors.  (The Guardian)
  
  At least 6, and as many as 14.
  
  Germany meanwhile apparently plans to starve in the dark.
  
  
  
• This is actually not stupid: Tech startup Giga runs a mobile bitcoin mining operation.  (CNBC)
  
  When oil exploration hits natural gas instead, the gas is often burned off (which is safer and better for the environment than letting it escape).
  
  So what Giga decided to do is build a gas-powered mobile Bitcoin mining facility that can be towed out the oil field and tapped into the gas on the spot.  Mining Bitcoin is immensely wasteful, but that gas was considered waste in the first place, so any purposeful use is a win.
  
  
  
• No shit, Sherlock: YouTube's Olympics highlights are riddled with propaganda.  (Wired)
  
  That's the entire reason China wanted to host the games in the first place.
  
  
  
• NFT marketplace Cent has suspended most transactions because NFTs are mostly garbage.  (Reuters)
  
  I mean, yes, this is true, but you might be in the wrong business if you're planning to just come right out and admit it.
  
  
  
• Copyright holders want the United States to invade Iraq again.  Or something.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Sure guys.  Whatever.  We'll get right on that.

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• One final* purchase, a 2TB NVMe drive from Amazon for the new spare laptop.  Specifically the Samsung 970 EVO Plus, which is what I recommend to people who need a good M.2 drive and are wondering what to get.
  
  It's "only" PCIe 3 and "only" does about 3.5GB per second and 620,000 IOPS, with a read latency around 50 microseconds, an only costs about 20% than garbage like the Kingston NV1.  The reason I didn't get it for my larger laptops is it "only" goes up to 2TB.
  
  And the reason for the purchase is that HP Australia doesn't do build-to-order; there's exactly two models available of the Aero 13, and since the 512GB model is on sale and the 1TB model is not, buying my own SSD and installing it saves me about A$550 - and gives me twice the storage capacity.
  
  My old spare laptop has a 5500U processor; this new one has a 5600U. It's six times faster.
  
  * Update: Oops I bought it again...
  
  
  
• So the IRS cancelled their plans to force people to audition for a movie role before they could file their taxes online only after seven million people had handed over all their details to a private contractor.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  So, what happens to all your private data now?  According the IRS, the answer is that individual users can log in and delete their data...  Maybe.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Binance has invested $200 million in trash-tier blogging platform Forbes.  (CNBC)
  
  It's not a bubble.
  
  
  
• Sony has a new model of High Resolution Walkman out.  (Liliputing)
  
  $3600.  Not a bubble.
  
  
  
• Did I fall asleep and miss something, or was there somehow not a massive blockchain debacle in the past week?
  
  
  
• The big list of bad bots.  (Badbot)
  
  These either ignore the robots.txt files that control how web crawlers crawl the web, or, well, still ignore them but in a different way.
  
  Seekport and SEMRush are two I have had to block, along with Baidu, because they will point multiple indexing servers at a single host at once and just trash the place.
  
  

• I had it in my cart, again.
  
  This time it was an Orico 5-bay USB-C RAID storage box.  I just got one, noticed they were getting scarce, and added a second one to an order I was placing with a different online store.
  
  As soon as I placed my order the lead time went from 2 days to 2 months.
  
  Went back to the store where I got the first one, added it to my cart, didn't get time to check out, and when I looked the next morning it was gone.
  
  Not so much of a drama this time because (a) I was buying a second one just in case it went out of stock and I needed one, and (b) I got an 8-bay non-RAID model for the same price.  Hoping to set up software RAID on that.
  
  
  
• Also grabbed an HP Pavilion Aero 13 as a spare laptop, since the two big ones are going to be cabled in to monitors and storage and networks and not readily lappable.
  
  A$1199 with Windows 11.  Exact same specs with Windows 10, A$1049.  Not exactly a difficult decision.
  
  
  
• Twitter fell over.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The site was still up but gave not-very-reassuring errors any time you tried to do anything.
  
  I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of users wondered if they'd suddenly been banned.

• Learn what metaverse is and how you can profit from it with this $20 course.  (ZDNet Academy)
  
  The headline does rather give the game away.
  
  (ZDNet Academy is not news, but advertising for the worst tech products that ever existed.)
  
  
  
• Cisco has made a $20 billion cash bid to buy Splunk.  (Reuters)
  
  It's not a bubble.
  
  
  
• Early benchmarks of Intel's Raptor Lake have leaked, confirming a 24-core (8+16) design.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Bleh.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 12 2022 10:09 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, February 13 2022 04:44 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Russia has sentenced three teenagers - one to five years in a penal colony - over a plot to blow up an FSB building.  (Moscow Times)
  
  In Minecraft.
  
  No, literally.  There's a virtual copy of the building on a Minecraft server and they planned to Pekorise it.
  
  They also made fireworks.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile back in the USA same old, same old.  (Washington Post)
  
  Yes, the CIA is still illegally spying on American citizens.

  "CIA recognizes and takes very seriously our obligation to respect the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons in the conduct of our vital national security mission,” Kristi Scott, the agency’s privacy and civil liberties officer, said in a statement. "CIA is committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.  LOL.”

  
  
  
  

Tech News

• France has found that Google Analytics breaches the GDPR.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Also, the original link to that article was https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/10/cnil-google-analytics-gdpr-breach/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmVkZGl0LmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADOr6euOPAb-NTYK9eKpVKFO8xDY-n_4uo3vAZOYBY_qQjQFgxnVyBTUz6vju3_M7dI0e_8MR-Sjr4V2VFo6zjyBdHzr2eDY4V6nGipk63MuUGua3S1XMO7lQKv19P9HTFtY3dhz-tgrpxoxffP4fmJr_k4UgmBGnDmYchN4Je3w
  
  It's GDPR violations all the way down.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is planning to launch a million tons of cargo  into orbit per year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  To put that into perspective, there's currently about 15,000 tons of artificial stuff in orbit right now.
  
  The goal is to get a million tons of equipment to the surface of Mars to create a self-sustaining colony, and there's about a ten-to-one ration between mass launched to orbit and mass landed safely on Mars.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 7000 could be announced at Computex in May for a July launch.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Or not.
  
  
  
• Alder Lake N is on its way too.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is the flip side: No performance cores, only efficiency cores, for ultra-low-power products.  But with up to 8 cores that don't completely suck, these will blow older Atom chips out of he water.
  
  
  
• AMD's acquisition of Xilinx has regulatory approval, and is expected to close on Monday.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel bought Xilinx's main competitor, Altera, back in 2015.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 12 2022 01:35 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 12 2022 05:50 PM (r9O5h)

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