Monday, September 27
The Age is outraged at @therealrukshan for reporting without a license.
I blocked you you IT genius. But I can still see your stupid shit in apps that don’t get access to the full API you fucking dipshit motion fuckface Fuckwit.
— Peter Wells (@peterwells) September 26, 2021
Or they've just gone completely insane. Hard to tell.Or maybe I’m just using SorosBot you fucking moron racist fuck stain embarrassment to your parents.
— Peter Wells (@peterwells) September 26, 2021
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Sunday, September 26
Pessimalism Anonymous Edition
Top Story
- The BBC is bringing back Russell T Davies to revive Doctor Who. (BBC)
Which the BBC themselves killed.
I'm cautiously pessimistic. I don't think it will be good, but I think it might at least return to being watchable.
Tech News
- Germany's attempts to balance free speech with their national pastime of stamping out all independent thought seems to be floundering. (MSN)
They are shocked that politicians are being criticised:The aim of our legislative package is to protect all those who are exposed to threats and insults on the internet
They see being rude to those who richly deserve it as a crime to be punished.
Well, I don't live in Germany, so go fuck yourselves you fascist Furbies.
- Which VPN is best for you? (ZDNet)
They give top marks to NordVPN which got hacked two years ago. (Tech Crunch)
Second on the list is ExpressVPN which their own reporting says no-one should touch with a ten-foot pole.
Number three is Surfshark which... I haven't heard anything bad about. I haven't heard much about them at all, which might be a good sign, because when things go bad in the security world that invariably makes the news. Well, the news I follow.
- Hands on with HP's new Pavilion Aero. (Thurrott.com)
I mentioned this one before; it's a 13" laptop with an AMD CPU, a 16:10 2560x1600 display, and the Four Essential Keys. Potentially the best small laptop available right now with Dell's Inspiron 14 7000 no longer available.
Even South Canada Still Has Some Freedom of Speech Video of the Day
A Wisconsin teen sued after being threatened with jail over an Instagram post - and won.
Though Joseph Conrad is a great name for a sheriff.
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Saturday, September 25
Update And/Or Smash All The Things Edition
Top Story
- Update your Chrome browser. (Bleeping Computer)
Update your Exchange server.
Update your VMWare vCenter.
Update your iOS.
Update your IOS. That's Cisco rather than Apple.
Update your SonicWall security devices. Again.
Update your, uh, European Union. Or not, that one's definitely non-critical.
Tech News
- China has banned cryptocurrencies. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, except for one, controlled by China.
Be interesting to see what happens with video card prices. Hard drive prices are on their way back down after the Chia mining crazes fizzled out, but video cards are in short supply even without the miners.
Anyway, I have an RTX 3060 now - albeit a laptop 3060 - which should do for a while.
- A teenager on TikTok invalidated the garbage research of thousands of garbage scientists. (The Verge)
How it happened is you're lazy and stupid and your research is worthless.
- Your face is not a bar code. (UCLA)
- Your butthole on the other hand... (The Guardian)
- A look at the Asus Zenbook 13. (Hot Hardware)
This one has a Ryzen 5800U, an OLED display covering 100% of DCI-P3, albeit only at 1080p, the four essential keys, two USB-C, one USB-A, HDMI, microSD... No headphone jack and soldered RAM, but oh well.
- Using Nim instead of Python for data processing. (Benjamin D Lee)
Nim is essentially a statically typed and statically compiled Python. I say essentially because the languages are just very similar, not actually compatible.
There is a Python JIT compiler - it's called PyPy and it works very well - and in this case it's already nine times faster than Python, but Nim is three times faster again.
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I mean, not relevant to this particular post, it is relevant o the world at large and the frauds in charge.
This is one of my favorite troll responses. These fake Russia stories were The Biggest Thing On Earth, for years, when the crooks behind them still hoped they'd work. Now they just want to get away clean, and people like you say, "Can't you just let it go?" https://t.co/KFvYTksorG
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) September 23, 2021
Read your own tweet: the Beacon originally funded the "research firm†that created the dossier, not the dossier itself. Timeline: Beacon drops Fusion, Perkins Coie hires Fusion, Fusion hires Steele. No one disputes this. It’s been testified to countless times. https://t.co/xDnRVXTvDgpic.twitter.com/8Z2WvQvPwp
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) September 24, 2021
Every single person who works at the media corporations that spread the CIA lie that the Biden archive was "Russian disinformation" knows they lied to protect Biden.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 24, 2021
But they also know their audience doesn't care if they get caught lying as long as it's for the right Party.
Also, this is literally the objectification of women.
Our new issue is here! On the cover—'Periods on display' and the cultural movement against menstrual shame and #PeriodPoverty.
— The Lancet (@TheLancet) September 24, 2021
Plus, @WHO air quality guidelines, low #BackPain management, community-acquired bacterial #meningitis, and more. Read: https://t.co/eP1Lx7D116pic.twitter.com/DchfiHnYEs
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Yeah, we're back.
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Friday, September 24
Circling The Drain Edition
Top Story
- I got to load 1595 web pages last night and manually click a button on each because a certain company's API no longer works.
- Meanwhile not only is Melbourne sending the stormtroopers after anyone in a high-vis jacket, they are sending the brownshirts after Twitch livestreams of said stormtroopers to prevent the government propaganda efforts being punctured.
Time for an intervention, if not a visitation.
- Facebook allegedly volunteered to pay a $5 billion FTC fine as a payoff to keep the agency quiet. (Ars Technica)
A shareholder lawsuit says that the maximum fine was a little over $100 million - which would put a dent in your pocketbook or mine but would be insignificant to Big Tech, and Facebook accepted a much larger fine just to hush it all up.
Seems plausible. They suck.
Tech News
- What is the point of a 200MP camera sensor when the red pixels are smaller than the wavelength of red light? Not much. (AnandTech)
The physics are a bit more complicated than that, and the layout means that you can easily get 50MP or 12.5MP images out of it, but 200MP isn't really going to work even for a sensor that is quite large for a phone camera.
- The EU is pushing the enforce USB-C as a standard phone connector. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, it's better than mini-USB, which was large and clunky, or micro-USB, which was fragile and clunky.
At the high end the list of features a USB-C port might support is incomprehensibly complicated, but if you just want 10W or 20W of power and USB 2.0 data rates you shouldn't have any problems.
- There's another three vulnerabilities in iOS. (Habr)
Data at risk includes:
-
medical information (heart rate, count of detected atrial fibrillation and irregular heart rhythm events)
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menstrual cycle length, biological sex and age, whether user is logging sexual activity, cervical mucus quality, etc.
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- Minecraft Dungeons is now on Steam. (Thurrott.com)
Unfortunately it doesn't involve mining or crafting, it's just a blocky version of Diablo.
- Twitter is adding Bitcoin tipping to its authoritarian digital hellscape. (Bloomberg)
There is nothing on Twitter that is worth a Bitcoin transaction fee, much less the tip. Unless they let you bid to have other people's accounts suspended. They could make billions that way.
- California just signed their Fuck you Amazon bill into law. (The Verge)
It targets Amazon's abusive working conditions and obsessive control. Very much a let's you and him fight situation.
- Now that I have a new computer - still in its box, but I have it - the monitor I wanted is out of stock again. The LG 27UP850-W, which is a 27" 4K model with USB-C input for my laptop, DisplayPort, HDMI, a 95% DCI-P3 colour gamut, HDR, speakers, a USB hub, Freesync, and a tilt/pivot/height adjustable stand without being horribly overpriced.
Just can't actually get it.
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Sydney
We're still under lockdown - likely for another three to four weeks - and pubs are closed. But you're allowed to get together in small groups outdoors since there's much less spread.
So the government did something sensible and lifted alcohol bans in a lot of inner-city parks.
Melbourne
Police are scouring a park - including air support - after a report that two people were spotted wearing high-visibility safety vests.
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Thursday, September 23
Dictator Dan Edition
Top Story
- Knock at the door and the sound of a package being left while I was busy on a video conference. I assumed it was either the new glasses I ordered or the Dell laptop that I've been waiting on for, hmm, four weeks to the day.
It was both.
Which is great because I've been having increasing trouble with both my old PC and my old glasses.
- If you have been following the protests in Melbourne at all, you should be aware that everything the Victoria state government says is a lie, everything the police say is a lie, and almost everything the mainstream media says is a lie.
Sometimes it's the same lie, but sometimes it's mutually contradictory lies.
...
Okay, this space unintentionally left blank. The account that was live-tweeting all the Melbourne protests has just erased their Twitter history.
You'd think if there had been an attack (the discussion of which is now gone) there would be video all over the place but Dictator Dan has banned live video from Melbourne.
What we do have evidence of is this:
World's most liveable city, ladies and gentlemen.
Fortunately the federal courts aren't having it.
Unfortunately the news networks are worthless.
Tech News
- Microsoft's new Surface lineup is here. (AnandTech)
Looks like the leak was legit.
The Surface Pro 8 has a 2880x1920 13" display (why not 3000x2000?) with a quad core CPU and up to 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The SSD appears to be a tiny M.2 2230 unit that is user-replaceable, which is a nice improvement over the usual state of everything being glued in place. If you buy the low-end 128GB model you can upgrade it yourself, except you can't because the biggest M.2 2230 cards you can find at retail are 128GB.
It also has two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a headphone jack, but no microSD slot because we can't have nice things.
There's also a new Surface Laptop model which has a flippy hinge so that the screen lies flat on top of the keyboard in tablet mode, and a Surface Pro X which is Arm-based and sucks.
- There's also a Surface Duo 2. (Thurrott.com)
Microsoft's dual-screen Android phone is still expensive but at least it now has near-flagship specs, with a Snapdragon 888, 8GB of RAM, and up to 512GB of storage.
- The article doesn't mention the password used this time but we can guess. (Bleeping Computer)
A second farming co-op has been hit with ransomware - despite being on the list of industries that Russia should not attack.
- If you're running a really old Android device - before 6.0 - it's time to install Firefox. (Tech Crunch)
Let's Encrypt's old root certificate is expiring at the end of the month. They already have a new one, but Android versions through 5.0 don't know about it and can't be updated.
Firefox has its own certificate registry, though, and will continue to work.
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Wednesday, September 22
The NSW state government came in for scathing criticism over being slow to enforce lockdowns in the latest Bat Flu outbreak, and lax when it did so.
Victoria's lockdowns were swift and harsh.
And resulted in a much steeper climb in cases - twice as many cases in the first seven weeks - and reportedly (I haven't checked on this) twice the hospitalisation rate.
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