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)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

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)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Nothing is currently on fire, off-site backups are complete and up to date, main server is back in production, and we have a powerful new server to take over if anything goes wrong anywhere.
  
  So I'm probably going to get hit by a meteorite.
  
  Just in passing, my three largest servers are named Akane, Akai, and Akko.  This wasn't planned, it just happened.
  
  
  

• Cerebras unveiled its new AI processor: 850,000 cores in 2.6 trillion transistors on a 46,225mm² die using TSMC's 7nm process.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are by far the largest and most powerful chips ever produced by anyone, and as you might imagine, they are rather on the expensive side.  The previous model - not quite half as fast - sold for around $2 million.  Yes, each.
  
  
  
• USB 4 is on its way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Wait, isn't it already here?  No, that's Thunderbolt 4?  Okay.
  
  USB 4 is a faster version of USB 3.2 gen 2x2 that can transfer up to 40Gbps bidirectionally or 80Gbps in one direction - i.e. for video output.  It is also optionally compatible with Thunderbolt 3 - not 4 - and it's only optional because the USB Type C connector didn't have enough signal variants already.
  
  One standard plug for all purposes, but you have no idea what it can actually do.  Could be anything from 480Mbps to 40Gbps.  But at least it doesn't have 540° rotational symmetry like USB Type A.
  
  
  
• Apple's new Magic Mouse may arrive in different shades of gray.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Charging port is still on the bottom, because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• Details of Intel's Alder Lake-S Xeon W-1400 series have leaked.  (WCCCFTech)
  
  This is two generations beyond the server that I just set up this morning.  However, the first of those two generations is already out and it is - to quote reviewers - "shit" and "a waste of sand" so the next generation has its work cut out.
  
  The W-1400 range will have up to 16 cores - the W-1290P I just got has ten - but only eight of those cores are any good.  The other eight are low-power cores for light laptop use, and are basically worthless on a server.  In particularly, spreading load across all cores would give horribly inconsistent application performance, and a task stuck on a slow core could block one on a fast core.
  
  I'm sure kernel developers are working hard to mitigate that nonsense - Apple already ships this kind of architecture in their M1 MacBook and Mac Mini - but far better to just not put it in servers in the first place.
  
  
  
• Mongita is to MongoDB as Mongita is to MongoDB.  (GitHub)
  
  The project uses the example of SQLite and MySQL but that's not really accurate.  SQLite is a robust library that is used everywhere.  You probably have a hundred copies of it already; I think their latest stats were that there were about a trillion SQLite databases in existence.
  
  Mongita is MongoDB compatible but designed for development and testing - you can code against MongoDB without having to set up a server.
  
  And remember, MongoDB is web scale.
  
  
  
• The M1 iMac is here, apparently.  (Six Colors)
  
  I totally missed this because I totally don't give a shit.  It has an eight core CPU - actually four fast cores and four slow cores, as I mentioned above, a 24" 4.5K screen, okay, comes in seven colours, and has eight fucking gigs of fucking RAM.
  
  My 2015 iMac has 32GB and can be upgraded to 64GB.  Every standard PC sold today can be upgraded to 128GB, if it either has four memory slots or enough headroom for taller, double capacity modules.  8GB is for mid-range phones, not desktop computers.
  
  
  
• The new iPad Pro has the same CPU as the new iMac and up to 16GB of RAM.  (The Verge)
  
  The iMac is probably available in a 16GB model too, but (a) it should start there and (b) nothing I could see on Apple's store indicated that such was the case.
  
  Yeah, it does come in a 16GB model.  (Mr Macintosh)
  
  The 2019 27" iMac is user-upgradeable to 128GB.  The new iMac is not.
  
  
  
• Discord says no, launches IPO.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Microsoft reportedly offered them $12 billion, but in a market where a shuttered New York deli can be valued at $100 million, Discord thought they could probably get more.
  
  
  
• Hackers are exploiting a Pulse Secure 0-day to breach orgs around the world.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Who is doing what?  Oh, Pulse Secure is a VPN service, apparently one in trouble right now because there are a dozen different families of malware exploiting it.
  
  I wonder if that is in any way connected with the bizarre wave of malformed HTTP requests that bombarded this site last night.  The notable factor was that similar requests were coming from datacenters all over the world, with no obvious common factor.  The hidden common factor could be an insecure VPN.
  
  
  
• Geico sprung a leak.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Their web site was coughing up other customers' license numbers from January 21 through to March 1.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 22 2021 04:23 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 22 2021 04:25 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 22 2021 04:27 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Thursday, April 22 2021 02:52 PM (v29Tn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 22 2021 04:28 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 22 2021 04:33 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Posted by: Jakee308 at Wednesday, April 21 2021 05:12 PM (LS3oW)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 21 2021 06:57 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, April 22 2021 12:16 AM (6oxGk)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 22 2021 12:38 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• After being gone for nearly two weeks, our main server was back on line for only two days before another storm caused another power outage and took it down again.
  
  They've evidently got backup power working again for part of the datacenter, because the servers we have there for my day job didn't even hiccup, but our server was down for about five hours.
  
  And the switch it was attached to was down for about eight, so I couldn't reach it even after it came back on line.  When I was finally able to connect it had already been up for hours.
  
  Long story short, we're getting a second main server, in Dallas, close to this one. Specs are:
  
  
• Intel W-1290P - 10 cores, 5.3GHz
• 64GB RAM
• 1TB + 2TB NVMe drives (it was a special deal, and adding a 2TB drive cost the same as upgrading the main drive to 2TB)
  
  
Similar CPU performance, memory, and storage to our existing main server.  About 20% faster single-threaded but only nominally faster multi-threaded, despite having ten cores to the current server's eight.  At full load it throttles pretty hard.

On the other hand, it's a lot faster than this server.  Thanks to the recycling of part numbers, we're upgrading from a Xeon 1240 to a Xeon 1290 and getting 4x the performance.

I could have got two six core, 32GB servers for the same price as one ten core, 64GB server.  But what I've learned this week is that it doesn't help having lots of small servers if all the work is landing on just one of them.

Update: New datacenter is 2.5ms away from this one and transfer rates are about 40MBps on a test file.  And this server is kind of slow; it would probably be faster with a decent server at this end.

Not as close as SSDNodes which is clearly located in the same building, but not bad.

Update to the above update: Apparently they are in the same building.  It's just a very, very large building.  Well, and we must be exiting to the internet and coming back in, where the route to SSDNodes is staying local.

Yet another update:

processor: 19
vendor_id: GenuineIntel
cpu family: 6
model: 165
model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) W-1290P CPU @ 3.70GHz
stepping: 5
microcode: 0xe0
cpu MHz: 800.211
cache size: 20480 KB

• Fortunately before the main server went away again I spent all of Sunday wrestling with LXD backup schemes for large database-driven containers.  In the end I got something that looked like it would work, and copied the resulting files off to two other locations, but I didn't actually get to check it out.
  
  In theory, an LXD backup is a GZipped Tar archive of a snapshot of the server - the Linux / Unix world's equivalent of a Zip file.  But what is it really?  What do you see when you look inside that file?
  
  Turns out you see exactly what it should be in theory.  Maybe I'm getting cynical in my early middle age, but that came as a pleasant surprise.
  
  
  
• A billion dollars in funding for two AI startups.  (AnandTech)
  
  So what are these companies doing that is actually useful?  Cameras that fix your terrible photos, okay, that's one thing.  Anything else?  Teslas that crash into things because the driver is sitting in the back seat eating pizza?  Netflix recommendations that are so utterly useless that I cancelled my account?
  
  
  
• The Corsair One a200 is small, quiet, fast, and expensive.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It includes a Ryzen 5900X processor and an Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card, both high-end parts and very hard - and expensive - to find by themselves, with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD.  So while this $3799 system bears a substantial markup over list price for the components, it's not such a bad deal compared to the market price - if you can find the individual components at all.
  
  It's a mini-ITX system so expansion is pretty limited.  You can't actually add anything; you'd have to swap out the existing SSD or RAM for larger versions.  And if you think you might ever want to do that, you're much better off moving up to the $4199 model, which provides a Ryzen 5950X, the same RTX 3080, 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
  
  
  
• Barking dogs, screaming babies, band practice, and now IoT devices.  (devRant)
  
  This guy's neighbours have so many IoT devices that they render WiFi unusable for everyone around them.
  
  
  
• Sony will not be shutting down the online stores for PS3 and PS Vita games just yet.  (CNet)
  
  I think this comes as a response to the rising noise about "CBomb", the flaw that means if - rather, when - your CMOS battery expires and needs to be replaced, all your games including the ones you own on physical media become unplayable until you connect back to the PlayStation Network.  If Sony shuts down online support for your console, sooner or later it will simply become an expensive brick.
  
  They are still stopping new sales of games for the PlayStation Portable, but are retaining online support and will allow existing purchases to be re-downloaded.
  
  

The Joys of Apple Design Video of the Day

Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, April 21 2021 02:28 AM (t/97R)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 21 2021 08:58 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Top Story

• AMD's new Epyc Milan is the fastest CPU in the world - for Cinebench, anyway.  Can Intel's new Ice Lake processors catch up?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If by that you mean, can two Ice Lake CPUs narrowly beat one AMD CPU while using twice the power and costing four times as much, then yes.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Was looking for a second main server to pair with the current main server.  Found one last night that fit the requirements but cost a bit more than I wanted to spend.  Went back this morning after deciding that it was probably worth the price and it's gone.
  
  Eh.
  
  Meanwhile, trying out Amazon's cold storage for backups.  At 1.5¢ per GB it's as cheap as you'll find anywhere and seems to work okay at my day job.  The question is, can a cheap little t2.micro server copy with the stress of rsync and ZFS, or is it going to throttle me to death?
  
  
  
• AMD's Van Gogh processors are aimed squarely at the low end of the laptop market.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These have Zen 2 cores - last year's version - and latest generation RDNA 2 graphics.  The Cezanne parts for mid-to-high-end laptops have current model Zen 3 CPU cores but older Vega graphics.  I'm guessing this is because there hasn't been time yet for the separate CPU and graphics teams at AMD to bring their latest designs together.
  
  
  
• Renaming the nanometers.  (EEJournal)
  
  Not the SI unit of length itself, but how we talk about new semiconductor process nodes.  Apple's M1 Arm chip is built on TSMC's latest 5nm node, but that's all marketing.  Nothing about the 5nm node is actually 5nm.  The names for new process nodes haven't matched the physical measurements for twenty years.
  
  Which is good in a way, because if the chips were really built at a scale of 5nm they wouldn't work due to quantum effects.  Because it's just marketing nonsense, they expect to get down to around 1.2nm before the chips start to fail.
  
  
  
• An Nginx cheat sheet.  (Hashnode)
  
  For when you have to set up a proxy server in fifteen minutes at 2AM.
  
  What?  That's never happened to you?  How odd.  Happens to me at least once a month.
  
  Needs to add caching though.
  
  
  
• Even Wordpress is automatically disabling Google FLoC.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This turkey is getting deader by the day.  It's wonderful to see an industry come together for a moment over something that stinks so bad that no-one can bear to go near it.
  
  
  
• Death by stupidity.  (Click2Houston)

  No-one was driving the car, officials say.

  How could that possibly have turned out badly?
  
  
  
• Even a dead squirrel can get hit on the head by an acorn: China and Huawei are proposing a redesign of the internet to go with 6G mobile networks.  (Just Security)
  
  And when they say redesign they mean taking Orwell's nightmares and seasoning them with Kafka's fever dreams.  And they're working with the UN - specifically the International Telecommunications Union - to bring this dystopian digital concentration camp to reality.
  
  Problem for them is that the ITU has no say whatsoever about how the internet is run.  That's up to the IETF, which views the ITU with the same friendly camaraderie as a seagull with half a chicken nugget views another seagull.
  
  I can't recommend that site generally - in fact some of their content is mind-meltingly stupid - but they got this one right.
  
  
  

Anime Music Videos of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, April 19 2021 10:59 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 20 2021 12:16 AM (LADmw)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The main server is up and running again, but not live yet because I'm taking the opportunity to do software maintenance while no-one is using it.
  
  One of the things that worried me was that I didn't have a recent, complete off-site backup of the system; the most recent one was over a month old.  That's because the server is configured with LXD virtualisation, which has two backup methods
  
  
• Snapshots which are fast and efficient and generally wonderful, but are stored on the main system disk (in our case, a large SSD).
• Exports which are none of that, but turn your virtual server into a single portable backup file that you can restore onto any other LXD system.
  
  
So we had plenty of on-site snapshots, and manual off-site backups, but not automated exports because it's something of a pain.

With the server back but not in use I have configured exports, and discovered they are much more of a pain than I had ever suspected.  If you have a container with mixed applications and databases and a bunch of snapshots and you try to export it, expect it to flatten the system for hours and use massive amounts of storage.

And there's no progress bar, not even a Microsoft one that sometimes goes into reverse.

And you can't cancel it.

So back to the drawing board on that one; I'll need to write a custom backup script.

Update: If you value your sanity, use --instance-only and do something else to hang on to snapshots if you must.  19 minutes with that option, three hours and counting without it, before I found a sneaky way to cancel it.  (Pro tip: Kill the compression process, and the backup process will abort and clean up properly.)

Update to the above update: Or use --optimized-storage.  Nowhere is it documented what this option actually does.  What it does is prevent the snapshot explosion.  I'm not sure yet if it does it at the file level or the block level; with database containers the file level would be rather less useful.  Using this does mean that you can only restore from a ZFS backed LXD node to a another ZFS backed node, but you'd be crazy not to use ZFS with LXD anyway.


What idiot decided that hyphens were a useful character to include in YouTube video IDs?

• Thanks for the bonus, I quit.  (Substack)
  
  Ill-considered incentive schemes can be more destructive than not having any incentives at all.  In this case causing delays and bugs and increasing stress to the point that engineers resigned despite being paid a bonus.
  
  Engineers care about making good products.  They'll work unpaid overtime to make good products.  But they'll quit en mass if you ask them to come in on weekends to help meet the quarterly target.
  
  
  
• Twitter was suffering from a worldwide outage.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I missed this, apparently.  I was busy teaching anteaters to play Bach.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has fixed that bug that would irreparably trash your entire filesystem if you simply opened a certain magic folder.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And 107 other bugs.  Update time!
  
  
  
• There's a tiny problem lurking in Sony's PlayStation 5.  And PlayStation 4.  And PlayStation 3.
  
  If the CMOS battery goes flat, all your games stop working.  Including the ones you own on physical media.
  
  
  
  
  If you have a PlayStation 5, you can replace the battery, connect it to the internet, resync to the PlayStation Network, and your games start working again.
  
  But Sony is going to stop supporting the PlayStation 3 on PSN, and then the PlayStation 4, and eventually the PlayStation 5.  And then it's only a matter of time before all your games including the ones you own on physical media can no longer be played.
  
  
  
• Compressed backup has just passed 600GB - for a 70GB container.  Ugh.
  
  
  
• Comparing Intel's 11600K with AMD's 5600X.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel's high-end 11th generation parts are, in the words of Hardware Unboxed, shit, and in the words of Gamer's Nexus, a waste of sand.  And AMD's high-end 5th generation parts are simply out of stock.
  
  But what about their mid-range six-core parts?
  
  They're readily available and relatively affordable.  Intel is actually cheaper than AMD, and although not quite as fast, it's a matter of percentage points.  In single-threaded tasks the Intel chip can actually pull ahead.
  
  The big difference is in power consumption.  The AMD part is rated at 65W and sticks to that pretty closely; the Intel part is rated at 125W but can go well above that.  That means more noise and heat; you might want to spend the money you save on an after-market cooler.
  
  On the third hand, the Intel chip has an integrated GPU - not a very fast one, but it's there - so if you can't get your hands on a graphics card you can at least use your system to watch YouTube videos of other people playing games.  None of the AMD 5000-series parts currently available at retail have built-in graphics.
  
  Intel also offers the 11400 and 11500 if you want to shave off a few more dollars; in fact, the 11500 looks like the best price-performance point out of the three.  The 11400 CPU is only slightly slower, but the on-chip GPU is cut down by 25%.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti is headed to a retailer near you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  We don't mean the product range here.  We mean one card.  Which will mysteriously disappear in shipping.
  
  
  
• Hard drives and SSDs are next.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's a new cryptocurrency called Chia whose sole aim is apparently to prevent you from buying storage.  GPUs are gone, CPUs are in short supply, so they needed to figure out what to target next to ruin everyone else's lives.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, Bitcoin mining rates have crashed due to rolling blackouts in China for a "comprehensive power outage safety inspection" in Xinjiang province.  (Nasdaq)
  
  Xinjiang is where the Uyghurs live, so "comprehensive power outage safety inspection" is quite possibly code for something unspeakable.
  
  
  
• Lenovo also offers a tiny 10 core 35W system.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Or rather, a Tiny 10 core 35W system - the ThinkCenter M90q Tiny.
  
  This one is not passively cooled though.
  
  
  
• Maybe Instagram for kids is not such a great idea.  (CCFC)
  
  And maybe hippos make poor housepets.
  
  Buzzfeed had an earlier, idiocy-filled announcement of the project.
  
  
  
• Facebook, bucking five thousand years of human history, is letting governments lie to and manipulate their citizens.  (The Guardian)
  
  This has never happened before and something must be done.
  
  
  
• A 21-year-old Australian physics student accidentally solved a key problem in quantum computing.  (ABC - the Australian one)
  
  This happens from time to time.  A student in mathematics or physics is assigned a tough homework question and answers it, not knowing that people have been trying and failing to solve the problem for twenty years.
  
  I suspect this is being oversold, though; I'll have to read the paper and see if it's really all that groundbreaking.
  
  
  
• Nobody ever got fined for filing bullshit DMCA takedowns.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  It is technically a felony* but I don't think it has ever been pursued as such, and rarely even followed up in civil action.  In this case, RightsHero (who?) filed the bullshit notices on behalf of VuClip (who?) and targeted pages owned by actual real organisations including NASA and the BBC.
  
  Thousands of pages and even entire websites were listed in the notice.  Google rejected many of the takedowns but even so list of affected sites from this one takedown notice runs to twelve pages.
  
  * After feedback in the comments I looked this up, and it's only potentially a felony if you send a takedown notice for somebody else's work, not if your notice is just plain bullshit.
  
  
  
• Compressed backup has passed 720GB of temporary storage.  If it goes much further it won't have room to copy to the backup directory.  I can't cancel it, but I'm going to anyway.

O Canada Video of the Day

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, April 18 2021 08:58 PM (v29Tn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 18 2021 09:11 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 18 2021 09:12 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 18 2021 11:52 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 19 2021 02:54 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, April 19 2021 03:29 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 19 2021 05:50 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 19 2021 02:01 PM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

1. lxc snapshot which is simple and instantaneous and uses minimal disk space but is stored on the local drive
2. lxc export which gives you a complete portable backup in a single file but by default backs up your everything straight into your root filesystem

• Get FLoCed: Nobody wants to work with Google on their new IOPAAS platform (invasion of privacy as a service).  (The Verge)
  
  Brave blocks it; Vivaldi blocks it; Firefox blocks it, and Mozilla is run by Stalinists; Opera doesn't specifically block it but doesn't support it; the DuckDuckGo extension and mobile browser both block it; Microsoft and Apple appear to be planning to block it but don't want to come out and say so.
  
  Google is planning to stop supporting third-party cookies next year, meaning that evil ad-tracking scum vermin will need to find a new way.  FLoC was Google's plan for this, but everyone hates it.  Third-party cookies had uses beyond privacy violation; FLoC does not.
  
  I had to give up on third-party cookies a long time ago because, technically, mu.nu is not a valid domain name - or at least wasn't at the time.  The second-level domain must be at least three characters long.  So I couldn't set cookies for mu.nu, either for the domain itself or as third-party cookies for subdomains to implement single sign-on.
  
  Speaking of managing sites, you can also opt your site out of Google FLoC regardless of what browser your readers prefer.  If you're using one of the common web servers or proxy servers it should only take a minute or two; that page provides instructions for Apache, Nginx, Caddy - we use Nginx and Caddy -  Varnish, Traefik, Lighttpd, and more.
  
  I've done just that for all sites hosted on this server.
  
  I haven't done it yet for sites hosted on the main server because it's still down.
  
  
  
  Kopi Luwak is coffee where the raw beans pass through the digestive tract of a civet before being roasted and ground.  I am not making this up.
  Art by Bangzheng Du.
  
  

• There's more to not rolling your own crypto than just not rolling your own crypto.  (Galois)
  
  Nothing worth doing is ever easy, and things are now so complicated that nothing worth not doing is easy either.  This is complicated mathematical stuff, but you can get the gist by looking at the penguin on that page.  The one on the left is the original; the one in the middle is encrypted using AES in ECB mode.  It's encrypted using a high-quality thoroughly-tested encryption algorithm, but the result is just a penguin with a noise filter applied.
  
  To decrypt the file you need either the password or a quantum supercomputer, but you don't need to decrypt the file; you can just look at it and see the image.
  
  
  
• Why is Python so popular despite being slow?  (Sethserver)
  
  Because it works, and your page is broken.
  
  I'd prefer to use something else - Crystal or Nim, probably - if I were to start a major new project now, but the only dynamic language (or rather environment) with a larger collection of available libraries than Python is Node.js, and Node is digital leprosy.
  
  
  
• Step 1: Buy old, unprofitable power plant.
  Step 2: Convert to mine Bitcoin.
  Step 3: Profit.  (Tom's Hardware)
  Step 4: Get shut down for using your own power for the wrong thing.
  
  
  
• It can't game, but can the Surface Laptop 4 work?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Mostly, yes.  It has an 8 core Ryzen 4980U, which they call custom silicon but is really just a binned Ryzen 4800U.  That said, the 4800U is a solid part and a binned version of it is icing on the cake.
  
  That's paired with 16GB of LPDDR4-4266 RAM - large enough to get stuff done and fast enough for the integrated graphics to run at full speed, a 512GB NVMe SSD, and a 15" 2496x1664 3:2 touchscreen, powered by a battery that delivers 12 hours of us in real tests.
  
  It doesn't have the Four Essential Keys, though, so it's dead to me.
  
  
  
• Atlast packs the 10 core i9-10900 into a small form factor, passively cooled desktop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The i9-10900K is famously power-hungry, topping 300W under load with default motherboard settings.  But this is the i9-10900T - still 10 cores, but with a 35W TDP rather than 125W.
  
  It would be cheaper and quite possibly faster to simply get a Ryzen laptop like the one above, unless you absolutely need a silent, passively-cooled system, for a recording studio, for example.
  
  
  
• The problem is that the customer has two children with their own daughter, and, as a result, he can't use my software because of errors.  (Stack Overflow)
  
  Family trees aren't trees in the computer science sense of the term.  The best you can hope for is a directed acyclic graph, and not even that in some states.
  
  
  
• Testing the Samsung 980 Nothing.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Samsung's SSDs generally have a three-letter suffix - QVO for the low-end models, EVO for the standard lineup, and PRO for the, well, pro parts.  This one doesn't, and it slots in between the QVO and the EVO.
  
  It's a PCIe 3.0 DRAMless TLC SSD.  The alternative at that price point is QLC with a DRAM cache; it's a tradeoff, and either is likely to be fine for the average desktop or laptop.  I wouldn't put either one in a server on a bet, though, not even in RAID-Z3.
  
  
  
• Amex let their SSL certificate for the Google Pay interface expire.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I can certainly see why this would be a manual process and not delegated to Let's Encrypt.  And also, since it wouldn't be public, it's harder to add to automated monitoring systems that alert you to impending certificate expiry.
  
  But still.
  
  
  
• Dell is spinning VMWare back off as an independent company.  (ZDNet)
  
  Dell acquired an 80% stake in VMWare when it bought enterprise storage and server vendor EMC in 2016.  I don't think VMWare ever fit in with Dell's corporate strategy, though, so it's no surprise to see it being spun off.  And they'll likely make a tidy profit off the deal.
  
  
  
• The Asus ZenBook Duo 14 lacks the Four Essential Keys, but with good reason.  (ZDNet)
  
  The reason is that the trackpad is on the right of the keyboard rather than in front of it, so there isn't room for a column of extended cursor keys on the right.
  
  And the reason the trackpad is on the right of the keyboard?  Because of that Duo part: This laptop has two screens.
  
  The lower screen is a touchscreen, and programmable to display apps or function keys or to work as a drawing surface with the included pen.
  
  As for the boring parts, it's an Intel 11th generation CPU with optional Nvidia MX450 graphics, up to 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD.  It has two Thunderbolt 4  / USB-C ports, one regular USB, HDMI, a microSD card slot, and a 1/8" audio combo jack.  No wired Ethernet, but a Thunderbolt dock or USB-C monitor can provide 2.5Gb or even 10Gb Ethernet.
  
  It's interesting, and I can see that second screen being very useful for certain tasks.  Kind of like having an Elgato control pad only built right in to your laptop.  Asus shows examples on the product page of the second screen acting as a control surface for Adobe apps.
  
  The main screen is 1920x1080 and the second screen 1920x515.  I'd prefer 2560x1440 and, what, about 2560x700 respectively, but that's because I like to be able to split my screen when testing code.  With the second screen, 1920x1080 might actually be fine - I could have the browser on the main screen and a terminal session below.
  
  There's also a 15" model with a 4K OLED screen, 8 core CPU, and an RTX 2060 mobile GPU, but that's last year's model and it ain't cheap.
  
  
  
• The House Judiciary Committe has approved a report recommending harsher restrictions on mergers and acquisitions in Big Tech.  (Reuters)
  
  Republicans on the committee - all of them, as far as I can tell - voted against it because they prefer stripping the companies of their CDA Section 230 protections, which simply isn't going to happen under the current Congress and Administration, so unless there's something specifically partisan and toxic in this report they're just being stupid.
  
  
  
• Somewhere, D. D. Harriman is smiling: Space X has been awarded a contract for a new manned US Moon program.  (Washington Post)
  
  This means there's a good chance we'll actually live to see it happen.
  
  
  

What the Hell Are You Idiots Doing Video of the Day

Rascal Does Not Dream of War Criminal Senpai Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 17 2021 10:41 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 18 2021 12:19 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 18 2021 12:32 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 18 2021 12:34 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 18 2021 01:17 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 18 2021 01:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, April 18 2021 02:47 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 18 2021 03:51 AM (eqaFC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• A power outage halted production at TSMC's Fab14A on Wednesday.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is an older plant working on nodes from 40nm to 90m, mostly for the automotive industry - parts that are already in desperately short supply.  Since a power outage is likely to ruin many of the wafers in production at the time - and wafers take weeks to complete - this is not going to help things.
  
  Apparently the outage was caused by construction workers (when you invest $100 billion in new factories you're going to have some construction) cutting through an underground power cable.  Given how much electricity these factories use, this must have been exciting for those on the ground.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Our datacenter, which suffered a fire and a flood during a recent power outage, had another power outage this week.  Since they're still restoring their UPS and backup power systems from the previous disaster, that meant that 75% of the servers we have with them at my day job went off line.
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• Speaking of TSMC they expect chip shortages to continue well into next year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're investing $30 billion in new plant and equipment this year alone, so it's hard to blame them for the situation.
  
  
  
• Having accidentally released a test driver that breaks the crypto mining limits on their RTX 3060 Nvidia is preparing a new version of the 3060 with the limits enforced in hardware.  (WCCFTech)
  
  How will you know which version you are getting?  You won't.  Because - everyone sing along - fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has called Ampere - that is, the RTX 3000 family - their best product launch ever.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Can you buy one?  No.
  
  
  
• Google's business model is privacy violation.  Here's how to fight back.  (Plausible)
  
  Simplest answer is, don't use Chrome.  Use Brave or something similar.
  
  
  
• Why Rust strings seem hard.  (Brandons.me)
  
  Rust strings are hard, because the Rust developers hate you and hate strings, and because Unicode is a semantic superfund site.
  
  
  
• A microATX Epyc server motherboard from ASRock.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It only supports six channel memory, because they just plain don't have room for more, but it has four x16 PCIe slots, supports up to 20 SATA drives right off the motherboard,  dual 10GbE, dual 1GbE, yet another 1GbE just for management, two USB, and a VGA port. 
  
  
  
• Celsius Network had a minor data breach.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  But that minor breach leaked contact information for customers, which the hackers then used in a phishing attack that gave users a fake crypto wallet.
  
  And then anything you put in that wallet got stolen.
  
  
  
• Can you game on the brand new Microsoft Surface Laptop 4?  (Thurrott.com)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Twitter is taking a closer look at their algorithms to reduce bias.  (ZDNet)
  
  This ignores the key problem, that their employees span the political range from Marxist-Leninist to Stalinist, but I expect they'll address that issue any day now.
  
  
  
• Bank error in your favour.  Collect a lawsuit.  (Reuters)
  
  Charles Schwab sent a payment of $1.2 million when they meant to send $82.56.  I know, happens to us all.
  
  The lucky recipient bought a house.
  
  And then - surprise - got sued.
  
  
  
• Sony made a lot of fuss about how fast the storage is on the new PlayStation 5.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Unfortunately, there's enough space for three, maybe four games.  And even though there is an expansion slot right there waiting for you to add more storage, you can't.  It doesn't work.
  
  What you can now do is transfer your data to a USB drive, and then load it back onto the internal storage when you want to actually play a game, because you can't play games from external storage.  That's probably faster than downloading it again, at least.
  
  
  
• The Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague vaccines are 99.992% effective - sort of - if you get both doses.  (Ars Technica)
  
  That is, only 0.008% of fully vaccinated people have contracted WBSDP after the fact.
  
  The usual suspects will now insist that you wear three masks.  Because it was never about the disease.
  
  
  
• A better article showing the new Dell Inspiron laptop lineup.  (Ars Technica)
  
  None of them, not one, has the Four Essential Keys.  The 15" and 16" models have numeric keypads, which normally double as cursor keys - even my full-size desktop keyboard does that = but in this case they don't because - all together now - fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  

Posted by: at Saturday, April 17 2021 12:52 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 17 2021 12:53 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 17 2021 01:06 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 17 2021 12:20 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 17 2021 12:40 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 17 2021 12:49 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment