• Another application in the Mac App store has been caught stealing and uploading your browser history.  (9to5Mac)
  
  The culprit this time is Dr. Unarchiver, allegedly by Trend Micro.  I'm not sure if it's a Trend Micro app, a third-party app sold by Trend Micro on the app store, or if it was sold by a fake account on the App Store.  In any case, it's gone now.
  
  Other Mac App Store miscreants include Adware Doctor, Adware Medic, Open Any Files, Dr. Antivirus, and Dr. Cleaner.  (The Eclectic Light Company)
  
  World's first trillion dollar company.*
  
  
• Huawei have been caught cheating repeatedly on benchmarks.  (PCPer)
  
  The benchmark scores are real, but not reflective.  The phone is diddled to detect that a benchmark is being run and go into a high-power high-performance mode to inflate scores.
  
  
• PyPy, the Python compiler written in Python, just turned 15.
  
  Yikes.
  
  

• Buzzfeed is run by idiots.  The headline might as well read "How the Arm Cortex A53 Destroyed a Village".

Video of the Day

Picture of the Day

• I was writing up an introduction to LXC / LXD and ZFS but the formatting got messed up so I've hidden it for the moment.  It will show up later in the week.
  
  
• There is no news.
  
  
• Seriously.  Nothing.
  
  
• Hmm.
  
  
• Stack Exchange does 55TB of traffic a month, has 6.7TB of total data using 23 servers.  That's not all that impressive.  I've managed a 1.5PB search engine.  (Don't ask.)
  
  But they also note that they maintain 600,000 concurrent websocket connections.  That is significant, and not something I'd want to do on my usual nice clean threaded architecture.
  
  
• This article about web bloat is three years old but things haven't improved.  It points to a news article about web bloat that was 18MB for a single page.  I clocked it at 1.2MB with Adblock enabled, and 22MB without - and page elements were still loading after two minutes.
  
  Don't go there without Adblock.  Seriously.
  
  
• When Eric S. Raymond says non-discrimination he means non-discrimination, not today's trendy interpretation of discrimination, but only against people I don't like.
  
  He discusses an open-source project that had changed its license to block use by fifteen major companies.  The project is hosted for free on GitHub because it is open source.  The license change would mean it no longer qualified as such.
  
  And one of the companies they banned was Microsoft....  Which owns GitHub.
  
  It looks like the change was reverted after it blew up in their faces.
  
  It is, incidentally, a project for managing JavaScript projects.  JavaScript is a head injury disguised as a programming language; everyone who works with it for any length of time either starts out or ends up with brain damage.
  
  
• Have a relaxing Sunday and see you all tomorrow.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 10 2018 03:24 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, September 10 2018 03:37 AM (BcQU4)

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• Acer's Predator Triton 900 is a convertible 17" gaming laptop.  (AnandTech)
  
  Convertible into what, exactly, they do not say.
  
  
• Phillips' 499p9h monitor is almost there. (AnandTech)
  
  It's a 49" curved IPS display with a resolution of 5120x1440.  That's pretty good, and a big step up from the more typical 3840x1080 for ultrawide monitors, but I'm holding out for 7680x2160.  Which is, after all, what I already have.
  
  
• MSI's MEG X399 Creation is their latest Threadripper motherboard, with all the usual bits, including support for up to seven M.2 SSDs.  That's quite a lot.  (Guru3D)
  
  
• Popular Mac App Adware Doctor was spyware, shipping your browser history off to China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Fourth highest grossing app in the Mac App Store.  Way to go, world's first trillion-dollar company* and your nice safe walled garden.
  
  
• Hollywood is flooding Google with DMCA takedown requests targeting IMDB.  (Techdirt)
  
  This is because Hollywood is run by idiots.
  
  
• WPA3 is on its way.  This will replace the ubiquitous WPA2 security on WiFi which has been getting increasingly wobbly of late as researchers came up with new ways to attack it.
  
  If you have an old and/or cheap router, or are just unlucky, you'll probably need to buy a new one.  Same goes if your phone or tablet has stopped receiving software updates.  Computers should update automatically to the new standard when it arrives, unless they're really, really old, in which case they've probably already been hacked.
  
  
• Two words: Sand dams.  The idea is that if you're in an arid region and a regular dam would simply evaporate in the dry season, you fill it with sand, the sand holds the water and protects it from evaporation, and you can pump it out through pipes at the bottom of the dam.
  
  
• Broadcom is shipping 802.11ax WiFi chips
  
  Which one is that? No idea, sorry.  Press release say, and I quote, "buzz buzz faster buzz".
  
  
• The Haiku operating system is expected to go into beta very soon.
  
  Development started in 2002.  This makes me feel much better about things.
  
  
• The clients for NordVPN and ProtonVPN allow possible privilege escalation attacks so patch now if you use those services.
  
  
• Techspot asks with the recent price cut, is the Threadripper 1920X an appealing platform?
  
  Yes.  The answer is yes.
  
  
  

Social Media News

• "I'm not biased, and I have no agenda" says Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to a congressional enquiry and then immediately bans the accounts of Alex Jones and InfoWars for confronting CNN operative Oliver Darcy who has been working tirelessly to get their accounts banned.  (Mashable)
  
  Franz Kafka eat your heart out.
  
  
• Feeling left out Apple banned the InfoWars app from their App Store after their earlier ban of the InfoWars podcast sent the app rocketing up the charts.  (Axios)
  
  I smell a lawsuit in the wind, because the App Store is the only way to get apps on to iPhones and iPads, which account for half of all mobile devices in the US.  (Far less overseas, where we're not all rich idiots.)

Posted by: Armed and Larry at Sunday, September 09 2018 12:54 AM (rTqn/)

Posted by: Armed and Larry at Sunday, September 09 2018 12:55 AM (rTqn/)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 09 2018 04:11 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 09 2018 04:11 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 09 2018 04:12 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, September 09 2018 06:52 AM (v29Tn)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, September 10 2018 04:03 AM (06P2d)

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• Samsung is aiming to have its 3nm process in risk production by 2020.  Risk production is the first runs of commercially useful chips to come off a new fabrication process; they have more variability and defects than later chips.  (Anandtech)
  
  Samsung also announced that their ultra-low-power 8nm process will come on line later this year.
  
  
• AMD's beloved Athlon CPUs are back in the form of the Ryzen-based Athlon 200GE.  (PCPer)
  
  The $55 chip is a 2 core / 4 thread part running at 3.2GHz, with 3 Vega CUs (192 shaders) and a 35W TDP.  That's great for a media center system, but for desktop use (and certainly for gaming) you're better off spending $99 for a 4 core / 8 CU Ryzen 2200G.
  
  
• QNAP's TS-332X NAS is a weird beast.  It has three 3.5" drive bays, three M.2 slots - but SATA only - and three ethernet ports, two 1GBase-T and one 10Gbit SFP+.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I don't know who it's for, exactly.  The home market isn't running SFP+ cables and the device is far too small for businesses that would.  And it can't use NVMe drives at all - though three SATA SSDs are enough to saturate a 10Gbit link anyway.
  
  
• Chrome 69 is screwing with URLs.  (ZDNet - warning, autoplays video with fucking audio.  Quit that shit, ZDNet.)
  
  This was a stupid idea when Safari did it, and it's a stupid idea now.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 08 2018 01:38 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 08 2018 12:53 PM (PiXy!)

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• NBN: Nonexistent.
• Domain sale: Unpaid.  PAID.
  
• Laptop: Out of stock.
• Shiny wonderful all-singing server: Obtained!  Currently testing RAID-6 RAID-10 RAID-5.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, September 06 2018 08:55 AM (Ix1l6)

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• Naruto loses copyright battle.  (TechDirt)
  
  Short of a Supreme Court hearing, that's it for PETA and their bullshit monkey selfie copyright suit.
  
  
• Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR director.  They should have kept online backups.  (TechCrunch)
  
  
• Need a terabyte of RAM in your next desktop PC?  Gigabyte has you covered!  (Serve the Home)
  
  It is a server board, but it's E-ATX so it will fit into larger desktop cases, and it has 7 PCIe slots (including four x16 slots) for graphics cards and stuff.  Being a server board the dual 10GbE ports are SFP+, but you can't have anything.
  
  
• "The check's in the mail" isn't a great excuse when you're paying by PayPal and you've already confirmed that you've received the funds from the third party.
  
  Grrr.

• NBN: Nonexistent.
• Domain sale: Unpaid.
  
• Laptop: Out of stock.
• Shiny wonderful all-singing server: $248.

• Microsoft just took an axe and gave Skype's feature set 40 whacks.  (The Register)
  
  It's a start.
  
  
• Google is loading the Ethereum blockchain into BigQuery every day so that Google cloud users can search it for stuff.  (ZDNet)
  
  You can do that directly with the Ethereum API, but to do anything advanced you end up doing exactly what Google has done - load the whole damn thing into a real database.
  
  
• Amazon is eyeing Facebook and Google's river of gold - that is, online advertising.  (New York Times)
  
  Which of course they (and Craigslist) swiped from the newspapers before them, effectively bankrupting the industry.
  
  I'm happy to see poorly-behaved companies like Facebook and Google facing competition, but at the same time Amazon are ruining their own site with ads, and I don't want to see more of that.
  
  On the third hand, Amazon US no-longer ships physical goods to Australia, and their Australian store is a dumpster fire, so fuck the lot of 'em.
  
  
• If you are taking screenshots with Chrome headless, you must have a full certificate chain for any HTTPS sites you load components from, or the screenshot will be messed up.  This, even if it works perfectly in your browser.
  
  At least the error messages tell you something is wrong with your SSL certs, so you're not left blindly scrabbling for a solution.
  
  
• Ethereum is doomed!  Says a contributor to competitors BitCoin and Stellar who is clearly completely unbiased on the subject.  (TechCrunch)