• Carpe Diem is a lovely Apache privilege escalation bug that fortunately was fairly easy to patch.
  
  
• Intel has released its first Wi-Fi 6 cards.  (AnandTech)
  
  They're standard M.2 2230 devices so you should be able to drop them into any system that uses such - which is probably any computer you can open anyway.
  
  
• Of all the possible antitrust cases currently floating around like so many turtles in a giant bowl of tomato soup the DOJ picked up on Steven Spielberg's anti-Netflix rant.  (TechDirt)
  
  Are they all asleep over there?
  
  
• Anyone working with the Facebook API has recently been faced with a 30-page questionnaire that asks for details right down to the vendor of the hardware on which you are running your virtual machines that run the databases that store your data.
  
  This is why.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Microsoft's news app had a configuration bug that made users think their computer is infected with malware.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Which to be fair is probably true.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Be sure to make a good impression on your next 8:30 AM international developer conference call with Voidol, which can make you sound like a cute anime girl and/or the lead singer from Queen.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Only two settings, I'm afraid.  Mikuru and Mercury.
  
  
• Nuitka's idea of a standalone binary is not quite the same as mine.  Plus if you use the Requests library, which I do, rather a lot, it burns down, falls over, and sinks into the swamp.
  
  I did get to spend half an hour with Crystal, and it does seem to work, though I'm not certain that the standalone executable I generated is truly standalone.
  
  

Social Media News

• There's a lot of social media news to get to, but it all sucks, so I'm leaving it for tomorrow.  Or maybe the weekend, when I'll have time to work up a really good rant.

• Intel announced a bunch of stuff at their innovation day.  (AnandTech)
  
  Mostly enterprise-focused, unless you're looking for a 224-core, 448-thread gaming laptop.
  
  
• 56 core Cascade Lake CPUs, previously hinted at 48.  These are two 28 core dies on a package, with 12 memory channels, and use a rather hefty 400W.
  
  No pricing announced for these, but the new Xeon Platinum 8280L with 28 cores will set you back $17,906.  Further down the line, a 16 core Xeon Silver 4216 is a rather more reasonable $1002.
  
  
• New Optane memory modules can be used as main memory (though you need at least some regular DRAM in the system) and come in capacities up to 512GB.  Oddly the top-of-the-line 56 core CPUs don't support them.
  
  
• Agilex (Intel seems to be plagued by dumb name syndrome) is a new range of Altera FPGAs with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support, ready for the next generation of really expensive networking equipment.
  
  
• For the consumer market, Intel is offering a small box of coffee beans.  (AnandTech)
  
  A quad-core CPU with Iris Plus graphics puts this well ahead of other NUCs except for the expensive Devil's Skull Canyon double-wide models.
  
  
• If the 4.60" x 4.40" x 2.01" size of a NUC is just too big for your apartment, the ECS Liva Q2 might be what you need.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  It weighs in at a svelte 2.75" x 2.75" x 1.3" though admittedly the Celeron N4000 and the eMMC storage will be noticeably slower than the Bean Canyon NUC's Core i7 and NVMe SSD.
  
  
• Lego's new Spike Prime robotics kit is aimed at improving STEAM* education.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  * Science, Technology, Engineering, Worthless Piece of Paper That Will Doom You To A Life in the Service Industry, and Mathematics.
  
  
• Sites need to start installing the filters that are not required for compliance with Europe's catastrophic Article 17 (nee 13) right away.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• FOSTA is doing by malicious incompetence what the CDA tried to do by malicious intent.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Singapore's submission to the global Ministry of Truth contest that seems to have sprung up looks promising.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Internet content deemed to be false will be forcibly corrected, with fines of up to SG$1M (US$740K) applying to social networks that fail to comply.  As with all other plots by the current crop of pig-ignorant power-crazed censorious lunatics, the plan applies to the entire world.
  
  
• Don't like the web browsers currently available?  Why not build your own?  There's plenty of open source projects available, from KHTML to WebKit to Chromium to Firefox.
  
  The answer, according to Google, is because fuck you that's why.
  
  Where's the DOJ?  You can nail Google to the wall over this.
  
  
• Which Xeon is right for you?  (Serve the Home)
  
  A handy colour-coded chart will help you decide.  The previously mentioned 4216 is the same price as last year's 4116 but adds four more cores, which seems like a good deal.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 04 2019 02:18 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 04 2019 02:20 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, April 04 2019 12:31 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 04 2019 02:12 PM (PiXy!)

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• Google Hangouts is terrible.
  
  
• Cloudflare has always been at war with New Zealand.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I don't want to hand even more power to Cloudflare, but if you want a free VPN, most of the other products on offer are worse.  Except that Cloudflare Warp is not actually available just yet.  Minor detail.
  
  
• Ryzen 3000 chips and X570 motherboards have started showing up in benchmark databases.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nothing particularly exciting yet, unfortunately; still engineering samples and low-end parts.
  
  
• Facebook says please don't throw me into that anticompetitive regulatory briar patch.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Researchers say they have found a new way to hack into Intel-based computers.  (ZDNet)
  
  Intel says "nuh-uh".

• Reddit's /r/games has shut down for April Fool's Day to chastise its readers insufficient wokeness.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  The brilliant thing about Reddit is that if the moderators of one subreddit are idiots, everyone just goes elsewhere.  There's constant churn as the infection moves about, but it's so quick and easy to set up a new, competing subreddit that there's little incentive to move off-platform.
  
  
• Twitter is playing stupid games for stupid prizes with bigger accounts than mine.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  @UnplannedMovie at least got unsuspended - but with 200,000 followers missing.
  
  This might not be as nefarious as it seems, because I can tell you from the inside that Twitter's suspension mechanism is complete nonsense on a technical as well as an administrative level.  I believe what happens is:
  
  
1. The account gets suspended.
2. All followers are moved off to some sort of holding bucket, a process that is fairly slow.
3. The Twitter distributed cache picks up these changes, a process that is stochastic.
4. Follower count now shows as zero.
5. The account gets unsuspended.
6. Everything starts getting reversed.
7. Because of the distributed cache, not only is the follower count increasing slowly back up to its previous value, but the number displayed is inconsistent depending on where are - or even on whether you are using mobile or desktop Twitter.
   
8. Adding to that, some cache nodes are broken and have stale results for some accounts that never seem to get refreshed.
   
   
• The EU is breaking the internet in three.  (TechDirt)
  
  The free internet, China's prison garden, and Europe's padded cell.  Russia is of course envious of China's garden and wants to build its own.
  
  
• Australia wants to fine internet companies up to 10% of global revenue and impose up to 3 years jail time for corporate officers if violent crimes are streamed on their platforms.  (ZDNet)
  
  There's an election coming up.  Time for these imbeciles to lose. The opposition are no better, but sometimes you have to send a message.
  
  
• Craigslist has 50 staff and makes around $500 million in gross profit per year.  (The Spring)
  
  And for the most part, it does it without any public fuss.
  
  
• Maybe I won't try ProxmoxVE.  Maybe I'll give up and move to DigitalOcean like I originally planned.  DigitalOcean doesn't give me weird IPMI errors.  DigitalOcean gives me new and entirely different errors.

• Asus' WS C246M is a workstation motherboard supporting both Core series and Xeon E processors.  (AnandTech)
  
  Includes ECC support, HDMI, DisplayPort, VGA, 8 SATA ports, two gigabit Ethernet ports, 8 SATA ports, audio, and various USB ports of random speeds.
  
  No remote management so it's not so great as a server board, but otherwise pretty good.
  
  
• For some reason, buying a 256GB SanDisk microSD card from Amazon Australia costs as much as buying a 400GB SanDisk microSD card from Amazon US through Amazon Australia.
  
  And Intel's 660p 1TB QLC SSD is US$109 on Amazon but A$275 on Amazon - US$195.
  
  If only there were a global online store with enormous revenues and first-rate inventory management and logistics that could sort this kind of thing out...
  
  
• Uber says what, we're supposed to pay our employees?  Do you have any idea what that would do to our share price?!  (Slate)
  
  Yeah, Slate is garbage, but so is Uber.  It evens out.
  
  
• You too can be the proud owner of a 32-core Arm workstation, perfect for...
  
  Perfect for being a 32-core Arm workstation.
  
  
• Google asks what it means for AI to fail.  (ZDNet)
  
  They could always ask Microsoft, hopefully before Tay decides to invade the Sudetenland.
  
  
• I'm going to try ProxmoxVE.

Social Media News

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 31 2019 10:32 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, April 01 2019 09:17 AM (LMsTt)

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Posted by: DougO at Monday, April 01 2019 07:36 AM (NoaSY)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, April 01 2019 02:02 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 01 2019 09:39 PM (PiXy!)

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• Samsung's Galaxy S10+ goes under the microscope.  (AnandTech)
  
  Executive summary: The US version is great.  The international version, which has Samsung's own Exynos chip rather than the Snapdragon 855, is...  Pretty okay.  The international version suffers not only from inconsistent performance but also worse photography due to the differences between the image processing hardware on the two chips.
  
  
• Sony also has a 10+.  (ZDNet)
  
  The Xperia 10+ has a 6.5" 21:9 2520x1080 display (LCD rather than OLED), 4GB RAM, 64GB flash, microSD slot, USB C, and a headphone jack.  The CPU is a mid-range Snapdragon 636 with four A73 and four A53 cores, putting it two generations behind the A76 found in 2019 flagship phones.
  
  On the other hand, it runs £349 compared to £899 for the cheapest Galaxy S10+.
  
  My Huawei tablet has an A72 CPU, which is equivalent in performance to the A73 but uses more power.  It's not slow, and I wouldn't hesitate to get this or another A73 powered device on that respect, unless you are running seriously heavy apps on your phone.
  
  Another possible upgrade for my ageing Xperia Z Ultra...
  
  
• Apple cancelled its AirPower wireless charging pad because it couldn't make it work.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Wireless charging is easy.  Fast, efficient wireless charging of multiple devices at once is hard, and what Apple found was that the AirPower could double as an electric wok.
  
  
• The SR-71 had its own R2 astromech droid - and it may be relevant again should we fuck things up sufficiently.  (The Drive)
  
  
• How not to create an open-source license, example 462.
  
  Another example.  Well-meaning idiots will get us all killed.
  
  
• How to become a 10x programmer.
  
  Two ways: One, spend a huge amount of time and effort in memory training programs of dubious merit and on memorising API calls that might disappear entirely in six months; or two, create a little personal wiki where you record things you might need to look up again.  A notepad file.  Anything.
  
  
• Oracle has sent out an advisory telling customers not to use Java for anything, ever.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's not what they intended, but that's what they did, saying that critical security patches to Java 8, which is still very widely used, would require a paid license after the upcoming patch release in April.

• What if we built a surveillance state and nobody came?  (TechDirt)
  
  Google and Facebook have built massive - and massively intrusive - surveillance systems to monitor everything their users do, for the single purpose of increasing the amount they can charge for ads.
  
  There's an increasing amount of data suggesting that all this, basically, doesn't work, that it's pointless and harmful and enormously expensive.
  

Try Incorporating These Into Your Next D&D Campaign of the Day

Your players will likely kill you, but totally worth it.

Was That "Insert Tab A Into Slot B" or "Insert Tab B Into Slot A" of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 31 2019 03:08 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 31 2019 03:27 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 31 2019 03:28 AM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft's Surface Laptop 2 gets a full review.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is a mid-range system, below the Surface Pro and Surface Book, but above the Surface Go.
  
  It seems expensive for what you get, but then I waited for a 70% off sale before buying my latest laptop so my sense of value for money may be a bit skewed.  But the i7/16GB/512GB model costs twice as much as the Dell Ryzen R7 laptop we got for a co-worker this week.
  
  
• This Dell wireless keyboard just eats batteries.
  
  
• Asus engineers apparently posted their email passwords on GitHub on more than one occasion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.  If you do anything even slightly important with your email, enable 2FA.
  
  
• Huawei's networking equipment could be backdoored without warning accordng to a British security review.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Although Huawei have provided source code for review, they have not provided any way to validate that the source code matches the binary files they distribute.
  
  
• LAPD reports that their high-tech policing initiative is garbage that does little but infringe upon civil rights.  (TechDirt)
  
  So they're going to keep right on doing it.
  
  
• AMD's next-gen Navi graphics may support dedicated ray tracing - possibly even better than Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Unless it doesn't or it's not.
  
  
• Office Depot faked malware scans to rip people off on expensive tech support.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They've been fined $35 million, but someone should be in jail over this.
  
  
• The FCC has fined robocallers $200 million in the past four years.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The robocallers have coughed up 0.0003% of the total fines levied, because the FCC lacks statutory authority to enforce such fines.
  
  The FTC meanwhile has collected 8% of the fines it has levied over the same period.
  
  
• How to use Google Sheets as a database.  (codecentric)
  
  Step One: Don't.
  
  
• A four-socket Supermicro server gets put through its paces.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs used here are 12-core parts that cost $7000 each.  Ouch.
  
  Both Intel and AMD will have 48 core CPUs available this year.  Maybe wait for those.

• Google is busy censoring the app store for...  Religion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Instagram is busy censoring commenters for...  Who the hell knows anymore?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Alex Jones is still on Instagram by the way.
  
  
• Australia wants Facebook to censor paid content relating to elections.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• The New York Times ran an op-ed piece accusing teenage gamers of Nazi sympathies.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Written by an "assistant professor of game studies", a job title that makes minimum wage laws look like a bad idea.
  
  
• Microsoft calls for more online censorship.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Specifically, they want to use advanced AI to instantly scrub any content depicting real-world violence from the internet.  And once that's done, they plan to turn their attention to "toxic" speech.
  
  Maybe you should ask Tay how well that is likely to work, you fucking retards.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 30 2019 12:54 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 30 2019 10:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 31 2019 02:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 31 2019 03:24 AM (PiXy!)

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