• Following the shocking* revelation* that the FBI strong-armed social networks including Twitter and Facebook into hiding damaging new information* about the corruption of former vice-president and now president Joe Biden, the FBI has explained that it engages in similar constitutional violations to protect its own illicit pursuit of power all the time so what are you complaining about?
  
  
  
  
  Just a few minor points:
  
  
• They warn social media companies - but not the public.
• They keep this secret.
• When they say "potential threats" they mean stories they want suppressed.
• These stories are viewed as threats because they are true.
  
  

Tech News

• Walmart has joined Amazon in offering blatantly obvious scams on its online store with a disclaimer that they haven't bothered to check anything about what they sell so tough shit if you get ripped off you idiot.  (Ars Technica)
  
  In this case a 30TB SSD for $39.  You typically get 1GB and some clever software that makes it look like it works right until you write 1.01GB.
  
  
  Oh, and while they don't warn you that everything in the product description is a lie, they do warn that it could give you cancer. If, I assume, you smoke it.
  
  
  
  
• The Asus ProArt B660 Creator D4 is a perfectly adequate Intel motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Should work fine for current 12th generation and upcoming 13th generation CPUs.  The ProArt range is normally marked by the inclusion of Thunderbolt ports - relatively rare on desktop motherboards - but this doesn't have those.
  
  It is more reasonably priced than the higher-end ProArt models though, and there's nothing specifically wrong with it.  And it has DisplayPort output over USB-C if you need that.
  
  
  
• More price cuts are coming for video cards next month.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The best deal I've seen so far was A$999 for an RX 6900XT, but that's disappeared.  So if you don't want to wait for the new cards to arrive - they'll be announced soon, but availability is another question - and see the card you want at a price you're happy with, it might be a good idea to go for it.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's Orin CPU is a new high-end embedded Arm processor.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It has lots of interesting stuff on board: 12 A78 cores (the high-end Arm core in your phone if it's more than one but less than two years old), 5 TFLOPs worth of Ampere graphics cores (that can be split into two logical GPUs for server workloads), video encode and decode at up to 8k60 resolution, up to four 10Gb Ethernet ports, and four pairs of A52 cores running in lockstep for safety-critical tasks.
  
  Plus it has interconnect links so you can run up to four chips as a single system.
  
  There are a lot of uses for such a chip, including robotics and smart vehicles.  I'd like to see it in a home storage / media server, since the current models are either woefully underpowered or use expensive and power-hungry Intel CPUs.  Orin starts at 10W.
  
  
  
• Neither party got all it wants but the judge in the Twitter / Musk trial has ordered Twitter to hand over the data it's been hiding on the real bot numbers.  (CBS)
  
  Remember that Twitter is suing Musk to force him to go ahead with the takeover, when just weeks ago they were vocally insisting that the bid severely undervalued the company.  One way or another, the Twitter we have all come to know and loathe isn't long for this world, and the directors and shareholders know it.

• I'm watching The Saga of Tanya the Evil, an anime series set in an alternate Earth where WWI doesn't kick off until 1923.  It's not entirely historically accurate - there's a plane in an episode set in 1926 that looks very much like the Me 323, which first flew in 1942 - but this version of Germany is larger and more powerful than in our timeline, so I'll grant them a little leeway there.
  
  The show isn't flawless, but it does offer an unsparing look at the realities of war - and in the movie that follows season one, the realities of communism.  We see, without commentary, a Federation (Russian) officer executing soldiers who have failed to defend their base against an overwhelming Imperial (German) assault.
  
  Not for the squeamish; if you don't want to see what would realistically happen in trench warfare to anyone dumb enough to stick their head up for a better look, best avoid.  And the story seems to be going somewhere but hasn't got there yet; a second season is in production but not yet scheduled to air, so if you don't like to be left hanging, also best avoid.  And if you're allergic to deus ex machina the same rule applies in spades, because the series takes the phrase very literally.
  
  But I've always thought that if the European powderkeg hadn't been set off at Sarajevo things would have been much worse when it did inevitably explode five or ten years later, and this series examines that and comes to much the same conclusion.
  
  It's also worth noting that the series isn't titled The Saga of Tanya the Quite Nice Really Once You Get to Know Her.

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 29 2022 12:08 AM (obo9H)

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• The hackers who attacked Twilio recently gained access to 93 Authy accounts.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Authy is a two-factor authentication app - like those hardware keys that give you a random number that changes every 30 seconds, but it runs on your phone.
  
  So if this was a targeted attack and those users were already victims of other security breaches, they were rendered defenseless.  Still, it they hadn't had Authy, the original security breach would have done that, with much less warning.
  
  
  
• The Twilio hack was part of a broader campaign that affected over 130 companies.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oddly enough, the group investigating this attack originated in Russia, and the attack itself is suspected to be by a US-based group.

• After four years in development the adventure game Malasombra has been announced - for the NES.  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  Or your preferred emulator, I guess.  There must be a good number of working NESes still out there, though the oldest working console I own is a Nintendo 64.
  
  
  
• You can finally edit your tweets.  (WCCFTech)
  
  All you have to do is pay Twitter five bucks a month.
  
  I can't blame them for doing this seeing as how I suggested it as the only feature anyone would be willing to pay for.  But nor am I going to pay them one thin dime unless and until Elon Musk takes them over and purges their ranks with fire and sword.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti is expected to match the RTX 3080 in performance.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Leaked numbers for the raw hardware performance (in TFLOPs) put it slightly ahead, and synthetic benchmarks slightly behind.
  
  That's not bad at all if pricing and availability are solid.  We shall see.
  
  
  

Hololive Music Video of the Day

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Saturday, August 27 2022 10:30 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 28 2022 01:28 AM (obo9H)

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• Half the plots of the X-Files just got cancelled.
  
  
  
  
  Indeed, an awful lot of movies, TV episodes, and novels would be resolved instantly if someone could send one quick text message.
  
  Also real-world emergencies.  There's those too.
  
  
  

Tech News

• More details on Starlink V2.  (The Verge)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The FBI got social media to quash a story inconvenient to Joe Biden - and the FBI - in the runup to the 2020 election.  (Legal Insurrection)
  
  We knew that, of course.  The only thing that's changed is Mark Zuckerberg has openly admitted it.
  
  
  
• If you're waiting for Nvidia's RTX 4000 series rollout, you might just need to keep waiting.  (PC Magazine)
  
  There are a lot of RTX 3000 cards still in stock, despite some pretty significant price reductions, and those cards will turn instantly into paperweights if RTX 4000 is as good as Nvidia has been hinting.
  
  Since the new chips are moving from an 8nm process to a 4nm one, they have a lot more transistors to play with and they should be a lot more power-efficient, so even if it's not quite as good as they want us to think this should be a significant upgrade.
  
  If you need a new computer - or just to replace your graphics card - now is probably the best time in the past couple of years because components are actually available to buy.  (Ars Technica)
  
  But also the worst time because whatever you buy today will be obsoleterated almost immediately.
  
  
  
• Sony is hiking prices of the PlayStation 5 everywhere in the world except the US.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In Australia the price has increased by $50 - about 7% - which makes no difference at all because you can't get one anyway.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has said it will not be increasing the price on the Xbox.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which makes no difference at all in Australia because you can't get aargh.
  
  It's in stock at my local electronics store right now.  Local to the old house, that is.  Rather a long way from New House City.
  
  Seems to also be in stock at Slightly Larger Country Town which is at least a much shorter trip than Sydney.  They're not offering delivery, and all the sites that do offer delivery don't have any.
  
  Well, not in any tearing hurry anyway.
  
  
  
• HP has a couple of new computers that look interesting.  (Engadget)
  
  The first is the Dragonfly Folio G3, a 13.5" convertible laptop with a hinge that lets the screen flip over and lie flat on top of the keyboard to turn it into a rather bulky tablet.  I very much liked the HP Elite X2 convertible I had - that one had a detachable keyboard - except for the part where it died of battery bloat.
  
  Hopefully the Dragonfly won't do that because where the Elite X2 was very cheap, this is definitely not.
  
  The other model of interest is the 34-inch All-in-One, which is a 34-inch all-in-one.  The screen is 5120x2160 which means that you get extra real estate over a 27" 4k monitor without sacrificing clarity.
  
  It has a 12th generation Intel CPU, Nvidia 3050 or 3060 graphics, dual Thunderbolt ports, and up to 128GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD.  A pretty solid competitor to the 27" iMac, at least on paper.  Not that that is hard, since Apple no longer sells the 27" iMac.

• Choo choo indeed: Chattanooga has launched America's first community-wide 25Gbps internet service.  (Hacker News)
  
  It's not exactly cheap - $1500 per month for residential customers and $12,500 per month for business - and you will need either Cat8 cabling or fiber internally, but it is available now.
  
  Great for schools and businesses if a little beyond the reach of the average household.  And a good way to bootstrap a small city into a regional tech hub.
  
  Also, I linked to Hacker News because the ISP's own web site is down.  I don't know what that says, but it says something.

• A 14kB web page can load dramatically faster than a 15kB page.  (End Times)
  
  Though given the dramatic bloat in web sites over the years, if you can achieve either one you're doing well.
  
  
  
• There's a critical remote execution vulnerability in GitLab 15.1, 15.2, and 15.3.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Probably a good idea to patch it.  (We run our own GitLab servers at work - safely inside the private network.  GitLab is great but I wouldn't recommend exposing it to the public internet.)
  
  
  
• The DeskPi lets you build a cluster of six Raspberry Pi CM4 modules in a mini-ITX form factor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you really want to.  
  
  The I/O is wired to the first module which acts as a management interface to the other five.  The board also adds a standard M.2 slot for each module so you can do a lot better than microSD cards for storage.

Posted by: Frank at Friday, August 26 2022 08:34 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, August 26 2022 01:16 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, August 28 2022 01:31 AM (rglbH)

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• So I finally got internet set up at the new place now that I'm living there full time.  I had it connected before the purchase was complete, but all through the move I've been relying on a 4G mobile hotspot.  In theory it's a 5G hotspot but I never got a 5G signal at my old house and there is no 5G in New House City just yet.
  
  And around lunchtime today I hit the bandwidth cap, so I had to stop being lazy and set it up.  The first router I tried kept complaining that there was no ADSL connection which is absolutely true because I don't have ADSL but not something I can fix because I don't have ADSL.
  
  The second router - a Netgear WiFi 6 model I bought early this year and which I was lucky enough to have already found and unpacked the box for - connected just fine once I realised that only one Ethernet port on the NBN box actually works, but wouldn't route anything.  I knew it had an internet connection because it updated its own firmware, but it wouldn't share that connection with anything else.
  
  After trying every setting I could find to no avail, I gave up and rebooted it one last time and it worked.
  
  Nominally it's the same speed as at the old place but download speeds are 35% faster - I'm somehow getting 108Mbps down on a 100/40 connection.
  
  The one router seems to cover the new house pretty well too, though the signal is not quite full strength at 5GHz at the opposite end of the house.
  
  
  
• Twitter's former head of security says Twitter's security is crap an absolute disaster.  (Ace of Spades)
  
  I originally linked this CNN article but Ace has some juicier details from a long Twitter thread examining the whistleblower report - including the fact that Twitter was allowing China to doxx Chinese users and directly hiring spies for the Indian government.
  
  Oh, and every engineer working at Twitter has access to production servers and private user data, there's that too.

• Apple has expanded its DIY repair program.  (The Verge)
  
  They now provide a handy 162-page guide to replacing the battery on a 14" MacBook Pro.
  
  Yes, just for that.  162 pages just for that.
  
  
  
• Perfluorocubane is weird.  (Science)
  
  This is a molecule with eight carbon atoms forming the vertices of a cube, each with a fluorine atom attached to the outside bond.
  
  
  
• Intel is going chiplets next year with its 14th generation desktop parts.  (Serve the Home)
  
  They've done this once before with the Kaby Lake-R laptop chips which had integrated AMD Vega graphics, but the plan is to apply this technique to all large consumer chips going forward.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, August 25 2022 02:41 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 25 2022 05:48 PM (PiXy!)

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• Buying a house may be time consuming, overly complicated, and of course terribly expensive, but renting isn't that great either.  Particularly when having moved out of a place after fifteen years you get complaints that not everything is like new anymore.
  
  
  
• The Metaverse sucks.  (The Register)
  
  Sucks up huge quantities of cash, for one thing, but sucks in every other way as well.  It's the signature of a programmed effort to create the Next Big Thing rather than simply creating a Good Thing: Absolutely nobody wants it.

• Katz's gluten free donuts are back in stock here in New House City after being absent for a few weeks.  Got two boxes today to celebrate completing the move. (modulo some annoying details that will get sorted out).
  
  
  
• Apparently Cricut is pronounced "cricket".
  
  
  
• Intel detailed its Ponte Vecchio server GPU which the company says offers up to 2.5 times the speed of Nvidia's A100.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These GPUs are not for playing Crysis or whatever the kids are into these days (I haven't even been playing Minecraft lately and am now hanging out for the next Holocure update).  They costs as much as a new car, and the only question is whether that's a cheap Korean subcompact or a fully-specced F150.
  
  
  
• The Biren BR1000 is another of these expensive datacenter GPUs.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It can hit a little over 1 PFLOPs - albeit with 16-bit values; on conventional single-precision floating point it only does 256 TFLOPs.
  
  Which is still kind of a lot.  As I've mentioned before, I played Mass Effect and Dragon Age on a 1 TFLOPs graphics card at 1280x720, so this chip should be able to cope with 20480x11520.
  
  Of course, nobody will be using this one to play games either.
  
  
  
• Lightmatter Passage brings Co-Packaged Optics and Silicon Photonics to the Chiplet Era.  (Serve the Home)
  
  To unpack that a little: Modern "chips" are increasingly a collection of smaller chips with high-speed interconnects.  AMD jumped on this in 2017 with their Epyc server CPUs and Threadripper workstation parts, both of which were simply multiple Ryzen desktop chips wired together.  
  
  Building large monolithic chips is getting fantastically expensive and everyone - even Intel - is moving towards this "chiplet" approach.
  
  The problem then becomes the interconnect between the chiplets, which uses far more power than the same bandwidth would on a single piece of silicon.  On large Epyc CPUs the interconnect can consume half the total power.
  
  One possible solution - which is what is being discussed here - is to use teeny tiny lasers and microscopic fiber optic cables instead of electronic circuits between the chips.
  
  
  
• Don't eat yellow snow, and don't copy-and-paste encryption examples.  (The Register)
  
  Hyundai did the latter, copying not just the code but the encryption key from the AES specification.
  
  So unusually they got the implementation of the code exactly right; they just used a password that is written down in the same place everyone looks to find the code.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 24 2022 12:29 PM (obo9H)

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• The problem with waiting for human review to untangle the mess when Big Tech's AI scripts have flagged your account for illegal behaviour is that Big Tech no longer employs functioning humans.  (Yahoo News)
  
  Take a photo of your toddler so that the doctor can make a quick diagnosis and get your email and phone accounts cancelled.  Permanently.  And all your photos deleted.  After they get sent to the police.
  
  The police basically said "Are you kidding?  There's no crime here." but couldn't contact the victim because his email and phone accounts had been cancelled.
  
  In a statement, Google - of course it was Google - said "Yeah, what?"

• Cory Doctorow has Kickstarted a new audiobook.  (Kickstarter)
  
  Doctorow won't put out a book with DRM, and Audible won't publish an audiobook without DRM.  This book, then - Chokepoint Capitalism - is about the ways Big Tech - Amazon (which owns Audible), Google, Facebook, Apple, and others - have conspired to take all the value from every transaction and leave the actual content creators with crumbs.
  
  It's so far raised nearly eight times its (admittedly modest) initial goal.
  
  Fair warning: Doctorow is a leftist, but an old-school one who can write coherently even when his premises are wrong.
  
  
  
• A whole bunch of stuff on Ryzen 7000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With the launch a week away the leaks are probably pretty accurate at this point.
  
  
  
• The first major update for the hit fan-made game Holocure - a Hololive-oriented spin on Vampire Survivors - is out September 9.
  
  
  
  
  It will add Hololive Japan Gen 0 and Gamers to the current roster of characters (just Hololive English).
  
  Hololive has a very open approach to fan-made products using their IP, with some great results.

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 22 2022 09:43 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 23 2022 12:07 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 23 2022 08:37 AM (obo9H)

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• Google search is quietly damaging democracy.  (Wired)
  
  The argument here is that Google moving from providing unbiased, unfiltered search results to attempting to provide you with what they believe is the right answer has a deleterious effect on individual ability in fact-finding and decision making in the modern world and thus in evaluating political news and making voting choices.
  
  Well, so far so good.  Needs to be examined but not implausible.
  
  Where the whole thing comes off the rails, ploughs through a nursing home, crashes into a school, bursts into flames, and finally explodes is that this is the thesis of the author's book The Propagandists' Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy.  (Amazon)
  
  Yes, you read that right: She claims that conservatives are twisting Google's search results with the aim of "humanizing the people whose worldviews and media practices conservatism embodies" - using trickery learned in Bible studies class.
  
  This is "Jews control the weather on Mars" levels of insanity.

Tech News

• The Merge: Ethereum is finally going to Eth2, dropping proof-of-work for proof-of-stake.  (Ethereum)
  
  What does this mean?

  Misconception: "The Merge will reduce gas fees."
  
  False. The Merge is a change of consensus mechanism, not an expansion of network capacity, and will not result in lower gas fees.

  Oh, but it will be faster without the proof-of-work requirement, right?

  Misconception: "Transactions will be noticeably faster after The Merge."
  
  False. Though some slight changes exist, transaction speed will mostly remain the same on layer 1.

  It does mean that no-one will be using graphics cards to mine ETH anymore, because you won't be able to mine ETH anymore.  
  
  And it will mean that the electricity used by the Ethereum blockchain will be reduced by around 99.9%.
  
  This is expected to happen sometime.  I think it's about two years behind schedule at this point, but it's understandable that they'd rather it be hopelessly late than lose billions of dollars of other people's money.  That's a sentiment that more blockchain developers should adopt.
  
  
  
• Intel's graphics cards may suck, but they can run Crysis.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Crysis was a serious test of hardware performance when it came out, but that was in 2007.  These days it will run on a potato.
  
  Similarly, a modern low-end card like the RX 6600 can comfortably beat the performance of the GTX 1080 - and that's from just six years ago, not fifteen.
  
  
  
  
  
• Hoes Mad in Your Area: Artists react to the use of AI art to illustrate an article that would not have otherwise been illustrated.  (The Atlantic)
  
  This article is half groveling apology, have pathetic attempt at navel gazing, as you would expect from Fascist Quarterly when they inadvertently offend their core readership of complete lunatics.

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 22 2022 02:25 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, August 22 2022 04:04 PM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, August 23 2022 11:25 AM (rglbH)

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