Ahhhhhh!
Sunday, January 27
Tech News
- Google's Pixel Slate is a premium Chromebook convertible for the three people who want that. (Tom's Hardware)
It has the same 12.3" 3000x2000 screen as my HP Spectres, and that screen is amazing. Not quite as bright, and not quite the colour gamut of something like the iPad Pro, but still very good.
But the Slate model reviewed here has half the memory of my Spectres, one eighth the storage, a slower CPU, and a less capable operating system (unless you unlock the Slate and dive into Linux) - and costs more.
On the third hand, HP ran out of Spectres at that price in last November, so you're too late anyway.
The Pixel Slate isn't a bad device by any means; I just don't think there's a market for it.
- Tencent's share price rose 4% after the Chinese government approved a new batch of mobile games. (WCCFtech)
Thirty years ago China took a look at the 1984 hellscape they had built, and did a hard turn towards an eclectic mashup of Brave New World and Neuromancer. Which is an improvement - really it is - but ugh.
- Intel may have a 35W 8 core CPU up their sleeves. (Tom's Hardware)
An engineering sample of a Core i9 9900T has been spotted, and that's a 35W designation, or has been so far. What makes it believable is that the base clock was listed as 1.7GHz, which is pretty damn slow.
- 15 US senators are demanding an FCC and FTC investigation into mobile carriers selling user location data. (CNet)
The list seems to be mostly Democrats for whom I have very little regard, but on this one, they are correct.
- What Fyre Fest docs reveal about the Bay Area Mafia being perpetually hopped up on goofballs. (Rolling Stone)
Slightly paraphrased the headline there. Their subhed is good though. Other than that, assume everything in the story is wrong.
- An Atari 2600 emulator in Minecraft.
The latest version of Minecraft has new features that let developers of these things cheat a little - not everything has to be built out of blocks. This allows the emulator to play Donkey Kong at 1 fps.
- 7zip's encryption isn't.
Basically.
Social Media News
- We need a word for that feeling you get when you're reading an article that is really getting stuck in to Facebook for their shady activities and and are just about to post a link to it when you realise the author is a hard left conspiracy nut.
- New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo was apparently sick the day they covered the Bill of Rights in Clown College. (TechDirt)
Let’s make assaulting the press a felony in New York State. Last year saw heinous and deadly attacks against members of the press, journalists must be protected from the threat of physical harm for just for doing their jobs.
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) January 16, 2019
Anime Op/Ed of the Day
Picture of the Day
I can fix that in the template with a hard-coded limit of 1000 or something.]

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Saturday, January 26
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Tech News
- Intel's single functional (mostly) 10nm CPU gets reviewed. (AnandTech)
And when I say reviewed I mean it - 14 pages, and some of the individual pages would make Tolstoy blush.
Quick summary though: Eh.
- Samsung has a 15.6" 4k OLED laptop display on the way. (AnandTech)
100% DCI-P3, 600 nits, HDR10, and a 120,000:1 contrast range are the key points, all areas where OLED has a huge advantage over LCD. I have three high resolution laptops (one Dell 4k and the two 3000x2000 HP models I picked up at fire sale prices last year) and they're great, but the Dell is neither particularly bright nor possessed of an especially impressive colour gamut.
How well Samsung has dealt with the problems specific to OLED we have yet to see. These should start appearing in laptops around the middle of the year, but it might be wise to hold off for a bit if you're spending your own money.
- Intel's volumes are down but average selling price is up, suggesting that this is not part of an economic downturn, but rather AMD nibbling away at their low end products. (Tom's Hardware)
This holds true across the board - notebooks, desktops, and servers.
- Samsung is forging ahead with its full-custom Arm chips. (WCCFTech)
The new Exynos 9820 will feature two of Samsung's M3 cores, as well as two A75 cores (which were the high-end standard core until recently) and four A55 low-power cores.
The previous 9810 had some design issues that prevented it from living up to its potential, so it will be interesting to see how Samsung fares this time around. Neither Arm themselves nor companies like Qualcomm seem to be interested in chasing Apple in the high-performance wide-issue full-custom space, leaving Samsung alone, apart from companies like Fujitsu who are putting Arm into supercomputers and would set your pocket on fire if they got anywhere near the smartphone market.
- Asus' VivoMini VC65-C1 is a small - bigger than a NUC, but still small - PC that can play 4K Blu Ray disks. (AnandTech)
Up to 6 cores and 32GB RAM (maybe 64GB or even 128GB depending on stuff), one M.2 slot and two 2.5" drive bays. 8" square and 2" tall. Oh, and no external power brick - it has direct AC in.

- Websocketd lets you turn absolutely anything into a websocket server.
Awk? Snobol? Fortran IV? No problem!
Mind you so does Caddy so it's probably best just to use that. The author of Caddy mentioned that he got the idea for that feature from Websocketd.
Websocketd GitHub.
- Badger is an LSM database library with built-in versioning. Versioning is used in transaction management, with stale versions normally getting eliminated once a new transaction is committed, but Badger allows you to keep them around and query them.
Want to see the last five versions of that post you just accidentally overwrote? [This never happens - Ed.] Badger can dig those out for you.
Badger GitHub.
- The Microsoft 365 online service has been renamed to Microsoft 363. (Bleeping Computer)
Oops.
- The full specs for Motorola's upcoming G7 range have been leaked. By Motorola. (CNet) [Warning - autoplay video with sound]
Oops.
Social Media News
- Court documents show that it wasn't just a couple of individuals in customer support denying refunds to under-age purchasers of in-game items, it was Facebook corporate policy. (Reveal)
They even had a term for it: Friendly fraud.
This is not going to go well for Facebook.
- Need to get your blep and blop fix in one convenient place? Pro tip: You can combined subreddits with a + to create instant custom multireddits.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blep+blop/
Video of the Day
Anime Op/Ed of the Day
Pictures of the Day


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Friday, January 25
Tech News
- JMAP is a modern email protocol that doesn't suck.
It works over HTTPS (okay) and uses JSON (yay!) It's stateless where IMAP and POP are stateful, but that's probably a win on balance.
There are a couple of Python libraries already, though not yet in the robust state of libraries for protocols that were laid down in 1986.
JSON lacks support for some data types (dates and times) but it is simple, fast, and robust, where formats like XML or YAML are none of those things.
- A DNA voltmeter for organelles.
Just the thing I need.
- Apple has laid off 200 employees from their automotive division. (Mashable)
The whole project never made any sense anyway.
- There's a steganographic JavaScript advertising attack in the wild and targeting Mac users.
It downloads an image that looks like a plain white rectangle and a snippet of JavaScript that decodes the hidden content. Once decoded, it tries to convince you to download a fake update to Adobe Flash which contains the real payload - the Shlayer trojan.
All the rigmarole is to hide from real-time virus scanners, and it worked, for a while.
- Chrome has added new protection against downloads not specifically requested by the user. (Bleeping Computer)
The existing protections are already a significant nuisance when trying to get your purchases from Humble Bundle, but given the story immediately above I guess we'll just have to deal with it.
- A look at modern big iron: The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX. (Serve the Home)
It's basically a whole lot of PCs on a very fast backplane. A single-width compute sled can contain 56 cores and 3TB of RAM, and a double-width sled twice as much. Eight (or four) such sleds fit in a 7U rack module, which can weigh up to 400 pounds fully populated.
- NumPy has a remote execution bug. (Bleeping Computer)
NumPy is a very widely used Python library for scientific computation. Turns out it uses Python's Pickle library by default when saving data, which has been known to be unsafe for about a trillion years. The problem is even documented by NumPy... Just not actually fixed.
- Fucking magnets, how do they work? (Quanta)
Turns out that is actually a good question.
- NekoMiko gets a pervert patch to bypass the shutoff valve that was blocking steamy content. (One Angry Gamer) [Potentially NSFW]
Steam has gotten censorious again - nobody seems to know why they keep changing their minds, and Valve aren't talking - and blocked a whole bunch of games (the above site calls this waifu holocaust 2.0). So the developers are publishing a tame version and then making a patch file publicly available.
Also, that site was loading while I was typing this in another Chrome window, and it popped up an alert, stole the input focus while I was typing, and disappeared the alert before I had a chance to see what it said.
What the actual fuck was that, Google? Never, ever, ever do that.
- Google has appealed to the Supreme Court to smack down the idiots in the appeals court who overturned the original (and correct) ruling in the original trial of Fuckheads Who Want to Copyright API Definitions v. The Rest of the Universe. (Thurrott.com)
- Some researchers working to make the BGP protocol more robust managed instead to crash a number of routers at major internet providers. (ZDNet)
Then two weeks later they did it again.
I mean, point made, but could you maybe not experiment on a live patient?
Social Media News
- The Huffington Post just laid off their entire opinion section. (CNN)
All together now: Isn't that everything they do?
- BuzzFeed meanwhile is laying off 15% of its employees. (CNN)
The truly shocking thing here is that BuzzFeed has 1450 staff. Doing what? Posting "10 reasons why your cat may be an alien" and "Donald Trump takes orders from Mars and we have the documents to prove it (in Martian)"?
- Why is all this happening? Newspapers have been in decline for forty years and their responses to this decline have been to make themselves more and more isolated, irresponsible, and unreliable, and to blame everyone else for their own failings. The thread is a fascinating mix of historical fact and wilful ignorance. But it can be summed up in one picture.

Not that newspapers were ever trustworthy, on the whole. The ghost of William Randolph Hearst is laughing heartily.
Video of the Day
Bonus Video of the Day
Anime Op/Ed of the Day
Fair enough.
Picture of the Day

- If she weighs the same as a duck...
- she's made of wood.
- And therefore?
- A witch!
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Thursday, January 24
Tech News
- Looks like AMD will offer a 12-core Ryzen 3000. (Tom's Hardware)
Which doesn't exactly come as a surprise since their CEO all but announced it at CES, but anyway, someone was testing an engineering sample and it landed in a benchmark database.
- Why are eyeglasses so expensive? (LA Times)
Lack of transparency, my dear Watson.
- Intel's Pentium Silver J5005... Wait, I recognise that numbering scheme. That's an Atom. (Serve the Home)
It's one of the good Atoms, though, and is actually a little faster than the Excavator-based Opteron X3421. But both get squashed like bugs by any real CPU.
- Do those double-height, double-capacity DDR4 DRAMs do their duty? (AnandTech)
Yeah, basically. If you have a system with only two memory slots (like many Dell Inspiron desktops) these might be the perfect solution to upgrade it to 128GB of RAM. If and when the BIOS supports that.
Social Media News
- The Supreme Court has denied cert to an appeal of a failed lawsuit against Yelp. (TechDirt)
This means California Supreme Court decision stands - which is good because they got it right, upholding the protection of social network operators against lawsuits for user-generated content.
- Facebook will ban you if, among a whole list of other activities, you post in support of someone else they banned. (Bleeping Computer)
But they have a nice new user interface to tell you so, so there's that.
- Millennials say they plan to contact companies for customer service using social media. (ZDNet)
Hi, Delta Airlines? This is @SluttyKitty94, and I wanted to complain about... DON'T LOOK AT MY TUMBLR!
Yeah, no.
Video of the Day
Everything you ever wanted to know about the sea cucumber.

The terrifying alien being silhouetted by the Aurora Australis above the Antarctic Peninsula.
Anime Op/Ed of the Day
The animation got a lot more fluid as the series progressed.
Picture of the Day
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Wednesday, January 23
Tech News
- Samsung has announced the 970 EVO Plus as their new top-of-the-line NVMe SSD for consumers. (AnandTech)
Sizes up to 1TB available now, 2TB in April.
It's up to 30% faster than the original 970 in some benchmarks, particularly sequential writes, and is priced the same as the 970. So much like the Western Digital Black SN750, not a huge upgrade, but a welcome one.
- There's a security bug in the wifi chips used in some little known products like Microsoft's Surface and Xbox One, and the PlayStation 4. (Tom's Hardware)
If you have one of those, expect it to reboot soon as it downloads a security update from the mothership.
- Sapphire has launched a crypto mining version of the Radeon 570 with 16GB RAM. (Tom's Hardware)
And an HDMI port, so you can actually use it as a video card.
It's a bit of an odd duck since the mining boom has largely busted, but there are some cryptocurrencies which are designed to need a large amount of memory to mine so they can't be swamped by the first person to get a bunch of ASICs back from the foundry.
- GitLab 11.7 is out with multi-level child epics, Kubernetes API integration, and cross-project pipeline browsing.
No, I don't know either, and I use it every day.
- A planned update to the Chromium extension API may break ad-blockers including the widely-used uBlock Origin and uMatrix. (Bleeping Computer)
This is pure coincidence, I'm sure. (Bleeping Computer)
- The PHP extension repository is still offline while that security breach is investigated. (ZDNet)
A clean and verified copy of the installer source code has been pushed to GitHub, but GitHub itself never got the hacked version. So if you downloaded the installer from source, or if you relied on the version that came with your operating system, which would have been packaged from the GitHub source, you should be safe. It's only if you grabbed the compromised version directly from the repository that you might have a problem.
- Intel has consigned their Quark microcontrollers to the well, that didn't work shelf next to the IAPX 432, the i860, and their entire discrete GPU product lineup so far. (AnandTech)
What discrete GPUs, you ask? Well, precisely.
- Toshiba is sampling UFS 3.0 flash drives. (AnandTech)
These are teeny-tiny devices - the size and thickness of a fingernail - and can store up to 512GB and transfer up to 2.9GB per second. Obviously the first market is high-end phones, but any small mobile device that needs a lot of fast built-in storage can take advantage of this technology, such as, for example, um, phones.
Social Media News
- Russia is suing Facebook and Twitter for not storing Russian users' data in Russian datacenters where Russia can conveniently steal it all. (ZDNet)
Facebook and Twitter responded to the lawsuit with, and I quote, "Say 'Moose and squirrel' again!" and then fell out of their chairs laughing hysterically.
- Reddit and Twitter have both redesigned their websites.
Just click the opt out / return to legacy site option. I can see what they're going for, but I don't have to like it.
Picture of the Day

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Tuesday, January 22
Tech News
- Why don't people use formal methods?
Because 95% of the time there isn't even a proper requirements doc.
- The Orange Pi 3 is a competitor to you-know-what. (Tom's Hardware)
Made by Shenzhen Xunlong Software (who?) so of course you'd want to integrate it into your next security-critical IOT prototype.
- Sun's new EPYC-based Ultra 24 workstation. (Serve the Home)
Okay, there may have been a few aftermarket upgrades. Like, everything except the case.
- Some Amazon shareholders have called for the company to stop providing face Rekognition services to the US government. (Computer Weekly)
Partly because it might be used for border security and immigration enforcement, which shows that these people are dingbats. There are many valid concerns, with this technology, but those ain't it.
Social Media News
- CNIL (who?) has fined Google 50 million Euros for GDPR violations.
If you visit CNIL's website, you are greeted with this.
I would bet, oh, 50 million Euros, that they are not GDPR compliant.
- Facebook's WhatsApp has limited users to forwarding a message five times. (Reuters)
A limitation that will be bypassed in approximately 0.23 seconds. Frankly, the people calling for this restriction worry me far more than WhatsApp or its users.
Video of the Day
Bonus Video of the Day
All good, you get to ride the ant.Picture of the Day

On second thought, hold the corned beef. Art by Richard Parry.
Bonus Picture of the Day

Hoag's Object, an atypical galaxy about 600 million light years away in the constellation Serpens. Why is it structured like that? Nobody's entirely sure.
Disclaimer: This post may contain traces of cereals containing gluten, soy, egg, fish, crustacea, peanuts, tree nuts, milk, more egg, ants, those little green things, what are they called, capers, butter, cheese, bread, fish again, a different kind of fish, shrimp, no, wait, those are included under crustacea, so molluscs, aglets, look it up, maple and/or maple-flavoured syrup, other sugars including but not limited to sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose, galactose, and maltose, very small rocks, and a duck, unless he's got out again.
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Monday, January 21
Tech News
- Ethereum is really annoying.
Okay, yes, I am trying to analyse the entire blockchain, but nevertheless...
Update: Well, whatever it was I just did it sure as hell worked. That's six times faster than before.
- The PHP extension repository PECL was compromised and has been taken offline.
Exactly how much damage this has caused is not yet clear; I haven't used PECL directly in years. But the internet hasn't exploded yet. Or at least not so that we can tell the difference.
Social Media News
- Facebook is planning a new offensive on misinformation because the company is run by morons. (Tech Crunch)
Facebook added 24,000 content moderators in 2018, and is blocking a million accounts per day. Including mine, until I dug an old photo out of the company website and uploaded it to satisfy their screechy little bots.
Just give people the tools they need to manage their own feeds, and be transparent in how the feeds work. Stop being sociopathic money-grabbing control freaks.
- Twitter has lost its collective marbles.
Video of the Day
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Sunday, January 20
Tech News
- Kingston is aiming to bring NVMe SSD prices below SATA. (AnandTech)
I don't know of any specific reason why this would be impossible. The flash chips are the same and there's little difference in controllers.
They're aiming for 1500MB/s writes and 2000MB/s read, which is middle-of-the-pack for NVMe but three to four times faster than SATA.
Launch date and pricing are yet to be set.
- Netflix is full of shit. (Gamasutra)
Netflix VP: We are losing subscribers. Quick, what do we blame to placate investors?
Exec 1: The trade war?
Exec 2: Fortnite?
Exec 3: All our original content sucks, competition is stronger than ever, and we just increased our pricing?
[Exec 3 exits via window.]
- Two is one and one is none.
Also, if it's Synology, two may be none, because those things seem to simply drop dead without warning.
- Apple users are very, very slowly coming to the realisation that a hermetically sealed ecosystem might not be great for consumers. (Apple Insider)
Very, very, very slowly.
- According to Amazon 50,000 retailers on their platform had more than $500,000 in sales in 2018. (TechSpot)
200,000 had sales over $100,000.
That's a lot of small businesses making good money. I don't entirely like Amazon, but they don't suck the life out of everything they touch the way Facebook and Google do.
- We had a recent mention of a bug in scp where a hostile server could attack your client. Usually this sort of problem runs in the other direction.
Well, there's a similar bug in MySQL, though you're even less likely to actually run into it. scp is used to connect to remote hosts all the time; it is far less common to connect to a MySQL server outside your control, for dozens of excellent reasons.
So the answer is YES. Mysql docs even explicitly state it 😬Thanks to Adminer's author @jakubvrana for pointing that out: https://t.co/qEFTYvw6uApic.twitter.com/cDO57JEYve
— Willem de Groot (@gwillem) January 18, 2019
Social Media News
- Facebook may be facing record fines by the FTC for violating a 2011 consent decree. (Ars Technica)
Give Facebook credit: They've worked very hard to earn this.
Video of the Day
Bonus Video of the Day
Anime Op/Ed of the Day
Picture of the Day

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Saturday, January 19
Tech News
- Western Digital has announced the WD Black SN750, their third-generation high-end consumer NVMe SSD. (AnandTech)
Turns out it's their second-generation high-end consumer NVMe SSD. Same controller, same flash memory, updated firmware. Since the second generation was already very good (and a big upgrade over the first generation) this is not a bad thing. It can already saturate PCIe 3.0, and PCIe 4.0 motherboards and SSD controllers aren't out yet, so there wasn't much more for them to do.
- Everything we know about Ryzen 3000 (Interesting Edition®) and the 500-series chipsets. (Tom's Hardware)
- AMD will support PCIe 4.0 on existing motherboards, but it's up to the manufacturers to qualify specific boards and update the BIOS to enable it.
- The 500 series chipset will likely be brand new and designed by AMD rather than ASMedia, based on the current EPYC server chipset. (Gamers Nexus)
It will support PCIe 4.0 as well, and have a higher power consumption as a result (15W vs. 8W). It may not appear until a few months after the CPUs, which is why it's so important that existing motherboards get updated to support the new CPUs.
- The AM4 socket remains the same, so chips and motherboards are backwards and forwards compatible. (Assuming BIOS updates.)
- Meanwhile, AMD's next-gen Navi graphics, which were a no-show at CES, replaced at the last minute by Radeon VII due to delays, are now expected to appear at E3 in July.
- Chooseco is suing Netflix over Bandersnatch. (TechDirt)
I just love that they're called Chooseco. The lawsuit however seems to be pure garbage.
- MIDI 2.0 is coming!
The original MIDI standard was laid out in 1983. It's older at this point that most of its users.
- What happens when identical twins send their DNA samples to consumer DNA testing companies will surprise you unless you have been paying attention and realise that doing a full DNA sequence is still very expensive and these companies are to the Human Genome Project what a class of pre-schoolers enjoying a finger-painting session are to the Italian Quattrocento. (CBC)
- Google manipulates search results to suppress offensive content. (One Angry Gamer)
The main story is via Breitbart, which has become a swamp of nonsense since Andrew Breitbart's death, but other reports appear to back this up. Knowing Google, the truth is probably far worse than is currently being reported.
- In a happy surprise, Star Control: Origins is back on Steam (One Angry Gamer)
Social Media News
- Nice one, Facebook. Way to go. (TechDirt)
Refusing to refund charges run up by underage users is a surefire PR coup.
- There is joy in Mudville - the EU's godawful copyright legislation has unexpectedly struck out!
Note that it's only mostly dead. Mostly dead is still partly alive.BREAKING: Council has failed to find an agreement on its #copyright position today. This doesn’t mean that #Article11 and #Article13 are dead, but their adoption has just become a lot less likely. Let’s keep up the pressure now! https://t.co/DEYBhuRyGz#SaveYourInternet
— Julia Reda (@Senficon) January 18, 2019
- The GDPR is still in full and hideous effect, though, with Amazon, Apple, and other companies facing potential fines totalling up to €18.8 billion. (Bleeping Computer)
This week. For complaints from one advocacy group.
- Mike Godwin (yes, that Mike Godwin) reports on the problem of epistemic closure. (TechDirt)
The book Network Propaganda demonstrated that the problem with epistemic closure in American news sources lies not with explicitly biased sources like blogs, but with the mainstream media. But Mike apparently suffered an aneurysm mid-way through the article when he offered this hypothetical for the reader's consideration:Consider: if progressives had cocooned themselves in a media ecosystem that had cut itself from the facts—that valued tribal loyalty and shared identity over mere factual accuracy—conservatives and centrists would be justified in pointing out not merely that the left's media were unmoored but also that its insistence on doctrinal purity in the face of factual disproof was positively destructive.
Mike, you idiot, that's precisely what has happened.
67% of Democratic voters believe that the Russians changed the vote counts in the 2016 election. (The Economist/YouGov poll, November 4-6, 2018)
This is of course completely false, and everyone in the administration is on record as saying it is completely false, but it is the mainstream belief among Democrats.
- Oh, snap. (Tech Crunch)
Sorry. Had to.
Video of the Day
The first 11 minutes are explaining that leaks are unofficial pre-release information subject to change because people apparently no longer understand "grain of salt".
Picture of the Day

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