• AMD is expecting sales of $21.5 billion this year after a Q4 total of $4.8 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you remember the situation AMD was in back in 2015 and 2016, this is very encouraging.  AMD provides a viable alternative to both Intel and Nvidia, not only serving to keep the bastards honest, but often beating the bastards at their own game.
  
  Intel has recently caught up with AMD on the desktop after five years lagging behind, and Nvidia is probably a better choice for graphics for the average user.  (Though the GPU market is so distorted right now that it's impossible to say who is really providing the better price/performance tradeoff.)
  
  We've already seen what Intel does when it's not facing competition, and it was not healthy for anyone.

• Google, which is a terrible company run by idiots, made $20.6 billion in profits in a single quarter.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Ugh.
  
  
  
• The US Senate has introduced a bill to allow farmers to fix their own equipment.  (NBC)
  
  Farm machinery, that is.
  
  The bill focuses on right-to-repair for farm machinery rather than trying to immediately tackle the problem in all its forms.  That's probably not a bad thing; it could be easier to pass narrow and obviously necessary legislation, and it can be followed with further bills for cars and electronics.
  
  Also trucks.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon Pro W6400 is - to be honest - kind of anemic.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The good thing about these low-end workstation cards is they have four, sometimes even six, mini-DisplayPort outputs so even if they're not great for gaming, they're great for running lots of monitors for getting work done.
  
  This has two DisplayPort outputs, and the same graphics hardware as AMD builds into its new laptop CPU, making it just generally meh.
  
  
  
• Well, that's new.

  Can’t send messages because you subscribed to this channel while watching a video made for kids

  I subscribed to that channel over a year ago, you dumb bastards.
  
  
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1981 Video of the Day

• The soft bigotry of lowered expectations:
  
  2019: Dammit, they're out of triple-cream Brie.  Do we really have to settle for double-cream?
  
  2022: Check it out baby!  Name-brand toilet paper!
  
  
  
• Hot new NFT marketplace LooksRare has already done $8 billion in sales.  (Decrypt)
  
  If you're thinking "I bet most of that is fake", then you're right - 87% of those sales are users buying their own NFTs to drive up the price.
  
  In an effort to stabilise their marketplace and restore buyer confidence, LooksRare has implemented strict measures to...  Who am I fooling?  They haven't done squat.
  
  I'd be surprised if it lasts the year.

• Test driving PhoenixNAP's Bare Metal Cloud.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I'm running a bare-metal cloud server here in Sydney for development until I finish rebuilding my lab (still have boxes everywhere) and it's great.  Unlike a typical cloud server, you get an entire physical server, sitting in a rack, reserved entirely for you.  And unlike a typical dedicated server, you have a dashboard where your could spin up a new server for an hour, a day, a week, a year, whatever you need, have it online in a minute or so, and shut it down when you're done.
  
  PhoenixNAP's pricing is very close to what I'm paying here in Sydney - a six core server with 64GB RAM and 1TB NVMe storage is $105 per month, though the one I have here has 800GB mirrored instead, and the PhoenixNAP server has dual 10Gb Ethernet rather than 1Gb.
  
  It's about a quarter the price of Amazon while retaining the pay-by-the-hour flexibility.  You don't get all of Amazon's add-on services, but you should run a mile from Amazon's add-on services if you possibly can; they serve purely to lock you into that platform and Amazon has proven it cannot be trusted.
  
  The biggest difference though is bandwidth pricing.  Bandwidth on all the big clouds is highway robbery - $90 per terabyte at Amazon and IBM, and something similar at Google and Microsoft.
  
  With PhoenixNAP, $90 will buy you fifty terabytes of bandwidth with a few bucks left over for coffee.
  
  RAM is plentiful too.  Except for a couple of budget models, you get 64GB, 128GB, or more.  The only problem is storage.  The reasonably priced options have only 1TB or 2TB of storage, which is not really a lot.  My laptops have 5TB.
  
  They do offer their own S3-compatible cloud storage at $23 per TB per month - including 30TB of free bandwidth, which would cost $2700 at Amazon.  So if you're storing a lot of image or video files, it could take that load off your servers.
  
  I really like having a dashboard where I can just go clicky-clicky and provision new servers.  I really hate cloud pricing - and the general behaviour of Big Tech.  So for me this platform is something that bears looking into.
  
  
  
• Speaking of hating the general behaviour of Big Tech 84% of app developers support an antitrust bill targeting Apple and Google's app stores.  (The Hill)
  
  Justin Trudeau will be along in a minute to explain why this is a fringe minority of racists.
  
  
  
• The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed.  (Ask a Manager)
  
  A new type of parasite is taking advantage of remote work and remote hiring, having a qualified candidate show for the interview and then an alien bug in a skin suit  turn up for the job.
  
  In this case there's a happy ending involving a jumbo-sized can of Raid, but in some corporations this is likely going undetected.

Posted by: MadRocketSci at Wednesday, February 02 2022 01:07 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 02 2022 01:39 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: DougO at Wednesday, February 02 2022 06:29 AM (G1vK4)

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• Still no gluten-free chicken nuggets, but gluten-free chicken tenders are inbound.  Guess I'll live another week.
  
  
  
• The Royal Society says stop trying to censor scientific disagreements online.  (Royal Society)
  
  Even if one side is wrong, even if one side is obviously, blatantly wrong, censorship doesn't serve the truth.
  
  The comment thread at Hacker News is interesting.
  
  There's certainly a range of opinions but most of the comments agree that  (a) censorship has no place in scientific debate or outreach and (b) science has enough problems with the Replication Crisis that it can't afford to be pointing fingers at anyone else.

• Memory leaks: The forgotten side of web performance.  (Read the Tea Leaves)
  
  Somebody needs to wrap this around a brick and toss it through the window of the YouTube web client team.  Try watching a busy Hololive livestream on a computer with less than 32GB of RAM to find out why.
  
  
  
• Americans lost $770 million to social media scams in 2021.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's about a tenth of blockchain fraud or civil asset forfeiture, never mind the real wealth killers like inflation and government waste.
  
  The FTC shared useful tips on how to avoid getting scammed on social media:

  Stay off social media.

  
  
  
• PCs are back again.  But for how long?  (ZDNet)
  
  For as long as people actually need to get work done, you latte-swilling weenie.
  
  
  
• Went ahead and got a PinePhone to break free of the Apple/Google diarchy?  Wondering what operating system to run on it? Here's an easy way to test the 15 current options.  (Liliputing)
  
  That's quite a difference from Apple, or even from Android, where if you are really determined you often can install some alternative OS that is only fully functional on hardware that you can no longer buy.
  
  
  
• Ohio promised Intel $2 billion in incentives to attract the $20 billion chip factories recently announced.  (AP)
  
  A combination of new infrastructure (roads and water supply upgrades), tax breaks, and some sort of rebate to defray the relative expense of local construction against, um, places Intel had no intention of building a fab anyway.
  
  Still, of all the ways governments find to waste our money, this is one of the least destructive.

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, February 01 2022 02:59 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, February 01 2022 03:39 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, February 01 2022 04:40 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, February 01 2022 08:00 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, February 01 2022 08:09 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, February 01 2022 02:04 PM (Ix1l6)

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• Investors in the DeFi protocol Wonderland are wondering if their money is safe after the co-founder of Wonderland was revealed to have been the co-founder of collapsed crypto exchange QuadrigaCX.  (Motherboard)
  
  DeFi is decentralized finance - financial transactions that don't go through a bank or other centrally controlled choke point.
  
  QuadrigaCX made the news two years ago when its other co-founder, Gerald Cotten, suddenly died in rural India - of Crohn's disease, not something that commonly causes sudden death - leaving hundreds of millions in investor funds locked securely in a hardware wallet that no-one else had the keys to unlock.
  
  And if you buy that, I have a DeFi protocol to sell you.
  
  Most of the fuss that time focused on Cotten's sudden disappearance, assuming that he was responsible.  The remaining founder, Michael Patryn, had his funds conveniently separate from that hardware wallet and didn't lose a dime.
  
  But who is Michael Patryn, and should his association in what can be charitably described as an unmitigated disaster be disqualifying for a brand new DeFi protocol?
  
  Continued on page A2.

• Who is Michael Patryn?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  But one mistake, even a huge one like-
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• Classy guy.  With the infamy of QuadrigaCX, how did he slip under the radar of the other founders of Wonderland?
  
  
  
  
  There's something of a difference between blocking ex-cons from opening bank accounts and putting them in charge of the fucking bank.  You idiots control a billion dollars of other people's money.
  
  
  
  
  Okay, to be fair some of those other people deserve to lose all their money.
  
  
  
  
  Which doesn't sound at all like a Ponzi scheme, from a convicted criminal with a long history of Ponzi schemes.
  
  Do you people want draconian regulations?  Because this is how you get draconian regulations.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Minecraft-based NFT game Blockverse just disappeared with a million dollars of users' money. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Over three thousand blockchain projects disappeared with all their users' money in 2021 alone.
  
  
  
• Ugh.  Where was I?
  
  
  
• The WD Black SN750 SE is okay.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a DRAMless PCIe 4 SSD.  It performs similarly, is priced similarly, and uses similar power consumption to PCIe 3 SSDs with DRAM such as Samsung's 970 Evo Plus, though models with DRAM are less likely to have weird slowdowns in edge cases.
  
  
  
• Micron has some new PCIe 4 SSDs too.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Micron SSDs are all enterprise models - they use the Crucial brand for consumer products.  So these deliver slightly slower performance than desktop drives but endurance of up to 35PBW - 3 drive writes per day for five years.
  
  
  
• The IRS is reconsidering their requirement for all taxpayers to go through a vtuber audition before being permitted to, uh,  pay their taxes.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  This particularly idiotic program outsourced all your personal information including live video chat to a startup called ID.me.  Government agencies are controlled by federal privacy laws; private companies even when operating under government contract are not.
  
  The scheme is so outrageous that even Ted Lieu was able to criticise it without putting his foot in his mouth:

  Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) called it "a very, very bad idea by the IRS" that would "further weaken Americans’ privacy."

  
  
  
• Ongoing chip shortages are due in part to misplaced investment.  (The Register)
  
  Most of the hundreds of billions pouring into new semiconductor fabs are pouring into new semiconductor fabs - 7nm and smaller - but the most critical crunch is with older nodes - 40nm and larger.
  
  Samsung's new 17nm node is a step in the right direction - it's an update of the old, reliable 28nm node, keeping element sizes the same but with the vertical transistors (FinFETs) used on all modern process nodes.  I'm not sure I've seen any other stories on companies deploying new resources for older nodes.

Posted by: Tim Turner at Monday, January 31 2022 08:09 AM (n+R81)

Posted by: at Sunday, May 28 2023 03:50 PM (Z473N)

Posted by: ase at Wednesday, June 21 2023 08:20 PM (Vnceq)

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• More than 80% of NFTs created for free on OpenSea are fraud or spam, according to a scathing review conducted by, uh, OpenSea.  (Motherboard)
  
  Seems low.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, this being a day ending in Y DeFi platform Qubit Finance is begging for thieves to return $80 million.  (ZDNet)
  
  Please, they added.

• Samsung didn't accidentally dump 763,000 gallons of sulfuric acid into an Austin creek killing all wildlife along a mile-long stretch.  (KXAN)
  
  Samsung did however accidentally dump 763,000 gallons of something into an Austin creek killing all wildlife along a mile-long stretch.  Just...  Not sulfuric acid.
  
  
  
• The FCC has banned China Unicom from operating in the United States.  (BBC)
  
  I thought this was a repeat article, but it was China Telecom that was banned back in October.  China Mobile was banned in 2019.
  
  
  
• 34 US states have weighed in on Epic's side in their appeal against Apple in their suit over Apple's bullshit.  (Reuters)
  
  The ruling found that Apple's anti-competitive 30% cut of everything did not violate anti-trust law, though it separately required Apple to allow developers to worm their way around it.
  
  Both parties are appealing the decision, but no-one is on Apple's side.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is expected to make a Moon landing in the next few weeks.  (CBS)
  
  Ish.
  
  The second stage of Falcon 9 rocket launched in 2015 is on a trajectory that will intersect with the far side of the Moon.  It would normally do a burn to return to Earth but in this case ran out of fuel and went up instead of down, putting it on track to reach the Moon on March 4.
  
  Orbital mechanics is odd.  Are odd?  Whatever.  Play Kerbal Space Program.
  
  
  
• Did Nvidia just hand the future of computing to Apple?  (ZDNet)
  
  No.  
  
  Idiot.
  
  
  
• QNAP is force-updating devices after DeadBolt ransomware hit 3600 users.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is why we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• Joni Mitchell has threatened to pull her song off Spotify in solidarity with Neil Diamond.  (ABC)
  
  Sorry, what?  No, look at her.  Young is hardly the adj...  Neil who?  Never heard of him.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 30 2022 03:18 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 30 2022 03:28 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 30 2022 05:48 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Facebook's venture into the blockchain space is apparently an ex-parrot.  (The Register)
  
  Called Libra, it's a multi-purpose payment processing, cryptocurrency, and NFT platform.  The plan was to have a core stablecoin and and easy way of implementing third-party cryptocurrencies and NFTs.  
  
  Creating a cryptocurrency on Libra is very easy - no blockchain code required - and an NFT apparently not too much harder.  Certainly better in that respect than Ethereum.
  
  But Facebook's plans ran head-first into disapproving regulators because they made the mistake of announcing their plans rather than just launching the platform and leaving regulators scrambling to catch up.
  
  
  
• Russia meanwhile is not intending to ban cryptocurrency mining as previously rumoured.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just going to track it and tax the hell out of it.
  
  Fine.  Whatever.
  
  

• Oh QNAP, you've done it again.  (ZDNet)
  
  
  
  
  Is this a new vulnerability or a new exploit of an existing vulnerability?  It's hard to keep track.
  
  
  
• Microsoft got hit with a 2.45Tbps DDOS attack.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's equivalent to 46,266,666,666 1200/75 modems.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3050 is here aaand it's sold out.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Seems to be available here in Australia - and graphics cards have increased from one per customer to three per customer - but it's at least 50% over MSRP.
  
  
  
• Team Group has announced its first PCIe 5 SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Won't ship until Q3 and there's no pricing yet, but speeds will reach 13GBps on reads and 12GBps on writes.  Which is a lot.
  
  
  
• When open source isn't free.  (Gnu)
  
  Free as in freedom, that is.  As I often say, Richard Stallman is just crazy, not wrong.
  
  
  
• If you use cloud storage on your Mac and you didn't disable automated updates three years ago your in for a bad day sometime soon.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The 12.3 update will break Dropbox and OneDrive integration, and quite likely others as well.  Because keeping things working is simply not on Apple's radar.
  
  iCloud support won't be broken by this update...  Because that would be redundant.
  
  
  

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

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 29 2022 01:02 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 29 2022 10:25 AM (obo9H)

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• Gluten-free breakfast cereal is available again.  I also stockpiled a couple of months worth of gluten-free snacks.
  
  Gluten-free bread and chicken nuggets have gone AWOL though, as have most brands of toilet paper.  Two years in and they still haven't figured this out.  And we don't have Joe Biden to blame, at least not directly.  This is a home-grown debacle.
  
  
  
• Another country has been DDoSed off the internet.  This time it's North Korea in the hotseat.  (Reuters)
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway...

• What's worse than NFTs?  Bankrupt cities using NFTs to raise funds.  (New York Times)
  
  On the upside this suggest that the entire blockchain ecosystem is due to collapse at any moment.
  
  
  
• Fanhouse is a payment platform for SFW photos and videos.  It takes a 10% commission and passes 90% to content creators.  Apple of course famously takes 30% of everything.  So Fanhouse simply increased all prices in their iOS app by 50%.  (9to5Mac)

  On the platform’s website, users are urged not to buy tokens in-app, where they cost more than on the web. According to the site, 2,000 coins costs $30 on the app and $20 on the web. On Twitter, Nguyen wrote, "If the app wants you to enter payment information, don't. It means 'give Apple 30% of your money.'" Purchase coins on web, and you can freely use them in app after."

  Yes.  Everyone should do this.
  
  
  
• Intel's Alder Lake Core i9 is faster than Apple's M1 Max*.  (Macworld)
  
  * The author wears a mask in his profile photo so you can probably just skip the article.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3050 sucks less than AMD's Radeon 6500 XT.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's a decent low-end gaming card.  We'll have to see what price it actually sells for because the $249 MSRP is a joke and everyone knows it.  But if it retails for 25% over the 6500 XT and you don't need to save every last penny it's an easy win for Nvidia.
  
  
  

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

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 28 2022 10:16 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: at Wednesday, July 05 2023 08:10 PM (AWDS1)

Posted by: aaaa at Saturday, July 15 2023 01:14 AM (yBuni)

Posted by: gb whatsapp pro at Saturday, November 25 2023 10:17 PM (+Wgs9)

Posted by: WhatsApp Plus Original at Tuesday, January 07 2025 06:22 PM (1x6O+)

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• The new mobile chips from AMD have started showing up in benchmarks.
  
  The Ryzen 6900HX is reportedly 11% faster on single-threaded tests and 28% faster multi-threaded than the 5900HX.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is interesting because it's basically the same Zen 3 core, just built using TSMC's 6nm process, which is really just a tweaked version of 7nm.  The performance gains seem to be efficiency gains - the older chip was limited by the heat and power constraints of a laptop, and the newer chip less so.
  
  If this benchmark bears out, it puts Zen 3+ laptop chips on par with current Zen 3 desktop chips, at less than half the power consumption.
  
  
  
• Intel's Core i9 12900HK is even faster.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But it takes the opposite approach.  If you read past the shiny benchmark scores and get to the battery life test, when comparing the same Alienware laptop with 11th and 12th generation Intel CPUs, the battery life has dropped from 4h31m to 2h58m.
  
  A huge 17" laptop is going to spend most of its time parked on a desk anyway so that might not matter to you, though you should expect 12th gen laptops to run hotter and louder as well as faster.

• Google has dropped FLoC - its spyware proposal that would lock all targeted ads into a Google infrastructure that everyone in the world immediately opposed - and instead offered a Topics API which would simply have your browser spy on you.  (9to5Google)
  
  This actually is better because browser don't have to spy on you to comply with the API.  Brave and Vivaldi can just give you some checkboxes to choose your topics and leave it at that.  Then you just need to not use Chrome.
  
  
  
• There's a local privilege escalation vulnerability in Kubernetes.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Yay.  Get patching.
  
  
  
• There's a remote code execution vulnerability and a privilege escalation vulnerability in CWP.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Yay.  Get patching.
  
  
  
• There's a local privilege escalation vulnerability in pretty much every version of Linux from the last twelve years.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Fucking yay.  Get patching.  Or chmod 0755 /usr/bin/pkexec to squash it instantly.
  
  
  
• Chip shortages are expected to last into the second half of 2022 says the US Department of Commerce.  (ZDNet)
  
  No shit, Sherlock.  What tipped you off?
  
  
  
• If you're worried that your government is not just authoritarian but also retarded, you're not alone: China has changed the ending to Fight Club.  (Bangkok Post)
  
  In the Dictator's Cut, everyone gets arrested and Tyler Durden confined to an asylum, which makes total sense and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
  
  
  
• Logitech has some new mechanical keyboards.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They don't have per-key programmable RGB backlighting or built-in colour LCD displays, but on the other hand they start at $70.
  
  
  
• Google has recently been making moves to shut down content on Google Drive that violates their terms of service.
  
  This being Google, which leads the world in practical application of AI, the whole thing is going swimmingly.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Obscene Armenian Pigeon Video of the Day

Ladies and Gentlemen, Please Stand for the National Anthem Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, January 26 2022 11:03 PM (rIzT3)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 27 2022 02:19 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 27 2022 02:28 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 27 2022 05:53 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: bape hoodie at Thursday, September 21 2023 01:44 AM (5U5Lm)

Posted by: bape hoodie at Thursday, September 21 2023 01:46 AM (5U5Lm)

Posted by: timothyferriss at Thursday, February 06 2025 05:08 PM (+ASI3)

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• Just want to make it clear that the crew of The Incomparable network are definitely probably not communists and their D&D podcast Total Party Kill in particular is great fun.
  
  Unless they've switched to 5e in which case I will be duty bound to declare it anathema.  Honestly it's been all downhill since they removed level names.
  
  
  
• Also, Tucows is still not dead.
  
  
  
• This way to the egress: Save 99% on your Amazon Cloudfront bill with this one simple trick!  (Fleet)
  
  Don't use Cloudfront.
  
  In this case Fleet reduced their monthly bandwidth expenses from $2457 to $41 by delivering content from German hosting platform Hetzner rather than directly from AWS.  Amazon - and Google and Microsoft and IBM - charge absurd rates for bandwidth.
  
  I posted an item not long ago about Amazon reducing their bandwidth charges except that I couldn't find the price reductions listed anywhere.  Turns out the reason is that there was no reduction.
  
  The increased the limit of the free tier, but all the paid tiers remained exactly the same.  Instead of the first dose being free, now the first two doses are free.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's i7-12700H mobile chip performs well at a 115W TDP.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Wait, what?
  
  No, it's not running at a 115W TDP.  It's running at a 115W maximum turbo power; it's still a 45W TDP.
  
  Waiting on some more detailed benchmarks, but it looks about 10% faster single-threaded than the fastest 11th generation mobile part.
  
  
  
• 40 people have been arrested in Turkey over a money laundering scheme operating on Twitch.  (Kotaku)
  
  Send money to Twitch streamers using stolen credit cards and have them kick back the majority of the funds.  Which unfortunately for them leaves a digital paper trail a mile wide.
  
  Get with the times guys and just mint NFTs like everyone else.
  
  
  
• Or steal them.  Hackers stole $1 million worth of off-brand monkey JPGs from OpenSea.  (ZDNet)
  
  Apparently there was a bug where you could relist an item for sale at a higher price without going through the process of delisting the first sale, so all the hackers needed to do was find the original sale and buy it.  Which is not much of a hack except that OpenSea doesn't have a public API for that kind of thing, so they needed to reverse-engineer the weirdness that goes on within OpenSea's website.
  
  And that's the problem with having a publicly-exposed private API: You don't lock it down to the same degree because you know you'll be the only ones using it, right up until you're not.
  
  
  
• Spoiler-bot, Spoiler-bot, kind of unfriendly Spoiler-bot: Twitter has banned a bot that told you the solution to tomorrow's Wordle puzzle.  (The Verge)
  
  And also insulted people.
  
  Which is very Twitter.
  
  
  
• Speaking of very Twitter Flocks will let you send tweets to up to 150 of your least hated enemies.  (9to5Mac)
  
  The one good thing about Twitter is that it's all out in the open.  It doesn't matter who you are; if you say something stupid you will immediately get dogpiled.
  
  If they start breaking that you would be better off using basically anything else, up to and including hieroglyphs carved into steles and delivered by trebuchet.
  
  
  
• Hackers claim to have infected the Belarus railroad system with ransomware to delay movement of Russian troops.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Unsubstantiated so far but given that they recently hacked and released the entire database and video archives of the Belarus secret police, it is entirely plausible.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Department of Homeland Security has warned that if the US interferes with Russia's invasion of Ukraine which is totally not going to happen Russia might respond with a cyberattack on US interests which has totally not been happening for several years already.  (ABC News)
  
  They should detonate a nuke in a remote part of Alaska and send Joe out to apologise profusely and say he genuinely thought that bit was Russia.  Then have Jen Psaki circle back until no-one knows what to believe and everyone's too frightened to even breathe loudly.
  
  Okay, it's a terrible plan but I'm not hearing any better suggestions.
  
  
  
• Google is being sued by Washington DC and multiple states for lying.  Again.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This time for claiming that with location history turned off, your location history was in fact turned off.
  
  Which - this is Google after all - it wasn't.
  
  

Hololive EN Gets Five New Members or Does It Video of the Day

Friendly Neighbourhood Spider Spider Video of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, January 26 2022 01:56 PM (Ix1l6)

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• An entire country got DDOSed off the internet in an apparent attempt to cheat in a Minecraft competition.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Admittedly that country is Andorra which has exactly one ISP - I counted - but still.

• You can't get there from here.  (Hacker news)
  
  Try to log in to Gmail from a device or browser they don't recognise, and it will tell you to try again from one that they do.  Got a security code?  Tough shit, you're not getting in.
  
  Now, if you have a device they recognise, the way it works isn't bad at all - it will pop up an alert on the other device and say "is that you?" and you just press the button and you're in.
  
  If you don't, though, you're kind of screwed.
  
  In the comments, people complaining about Apple, Facebook, and Amazon pulling the same crap.
  
  
  
• Medium was a promising, um, medium.  Then it turned to shit.  (etcetera)
  
  I mean legitimately worse than Twitter, which is a pretty impressive achievement.  Not because of the content, but because of the platform.
  
  
  
• What are NFTs, how do they work, and why do they suck?  (Absolucy)

  The ultimate goal of NFTs is kind of awful when you look at it - people want to reintroduce scarcity to the internet, a landscape where scarcity doesn't really exist.

  Yes.  Well, mostly yes.  NFTs have valid purposes, but for those purposes there is no artificial scarcity.
  
  
  
• Businesses are banking on cryptocurrency. But there are two big challenges ahead.  (ZDNet)
  
  1. Cryptocurrencies suck.
  2. Governments suck.
  
  Though #2 is hardly a new discovery.
  

Wakeup Call Video of the Day

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, January 24 2022 11:56 PM (8d+Am)

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