• Apple has outlined its new fee structure under the new rules the company has been forced into by EU regulations.  (The Verge)
  
  Taking as an example an app that has 10 million installs and makes $10 million in revenue per year - pretty normal stuff - the new fee structure would entail:
  
  - A 3% transaction fee on purchases.
  - A 10% commission on sales.
  - A 49% "Core Technology Fee" on because fuck you, that's why.
  
  So the new relaxed rules would double Apple's cut of your revenue.
  
  And if your app makes less than 57 cents per user on average - again, pretty normal with a free app - you would end up paying Apple for the privilege of them doing nothing for you.
  
  
  
• The EU's Bookburner General, Thierry Breton - yes, that guy again - is warning Apple of "strong action" if the company's new terms are utter bullshit which they are.  (Reuters)
  
  Unlike Twitter which can operate from the US and safely ignore EU posturing, Apple could face an outright ban of its devices from one of its largest markets if the EU got serious.
  
  Apple claims that 99% of apps would save money under the new terms listed above...  Which means that 99% of apps have no users.
  
  It's also entirely self-serving, because what it hides is that the 1% of apps that are actually successful would be worse off.
  
  
  
• That poison pill also applies to third-party app stores.  (The Verge)
  
  Developers are not impressed.

• So why would anyone use Apple in the first place?
  
  Microsoft accidentally granted global admin privileges to a random legacy test account.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Which then got hacked by Russia.
  
  Granting the hackers read access to every Office 365 account in the world.
  
  From the comments at Ars Technica:

  To summarize the fuckups:
  
  

  • Created test tenant with access to prod data
  • Created test account with weak password
  • Made test account accessible from internet
  • Never enabled 2FA on test account
  • Gave test account admin role
  • Did not monitor for slow password sprays (a known technique)
  • Failed to disable test account at end of testing
  • Failed to monitor for unused/test accounts in production environment
  • Did not monitor executives' accounts for surreptitious access
  • Did not monitor internal test account (that apparently hadn't been accessed in years) for "unusual login activity"

  Did I miss anything? By my count, that's ten fuckups.  It's kind of impressive!

  Genuinely useful comments at Ars Technica?  What is the world coming to?
  
  

• California lawmakers are pushing for a blatantly unconstitutional watermark requirement for AI-generated images.  (Bloomberg)
  
  The obvious illegality of such a requirement is of course no hindrance to the California state legislature.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 5 desktop CPUs could be arriving as early as Q2 this year, rather than the more usual Q4.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  We've seen leaks that the chips are already on the production line at TSMC, so given lead times of five to six months for current-generation chips, this makes sense.
  
  The real action though is with the new laptop chips, and those aren't expected until the end of the year, with the Strix Point Halo - 16 CPU cores and PlayStation 5 level graphics - pushed back to next year.
  
  
  
• Tech layoffs are back, baby!  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Much as I enjoy shitting on the idiocy of the tech press, this is at least the second time that Tech Crunch has mocked itself for its September article proclaiming that tech layoffs were "almost a thing of the past".
  
  Good for them.

1 Pills - And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, January 28 2024 12:43 AM (cARBX)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 28 2024 09:10 AM (bg2DR)

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• Apple is bringing third-party app stores and side-loading to the iPhone.  (The Verge)
  
  But only in the EU.
  
  
  
• Apple will allow full versions of Firefox and Chrome browsers to run on the iPhone, instead of just hastily-drawn skins on top of Safari.  (The Verge)
  
  But only in the EU.
  
  
  
• Epic Games will make its app store and the game Fortnite available on iPhones.  (The Verge)
  
  But only in the EU.
  
  
  
• Twitter has been flooded with risque AI-generated images of Taylor Swift.  (The Verge)
  
  But only in the EU.  Wait.
  

• The Pokemon (with a little thing on the e) Company has announced it intends to investigate Palworld (over eleventy billion sold).  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Except that The Pokemon (with a little thing on the e) Company announced no such thing.  Tech Crunch includes the full text of the announcement, and it's lawyer boilerplate that TPwaltoteC will take legal action against infringing content.
  
  Palworld has been in development for three years now.  No action from TPC.
  
  A mod that made Palworld look just like Pokemon came this week out and it was taken down the same day.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has announced layoffs - A Thing of the Past (TM) - of 1900 Xbox and Activision staff.  (The Verge)
  
  Including the president of Blizzard, which is part of Activision, which Microsoft owns.
  
  
  
• The Hugo Awards are in the spotlight again, for the usual reasons: They are complete garbage and have been for the past decade.  (The Guardian)
  
  In this case, the 2023 awards were held in China, and multiple award nominations that received enough votes to be on their respective shortlists...  Weren't.
  
  The head of the awards jury, Dave McCarty issued a particularly blatant non-denial:

  There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner.

  But unofficially...

  "After reviewing the constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible." He declined to elaborate on what the rules were.

  The rules that let us get out of the country with our kneecaps.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 27 2024 01:11 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, January 27 2024 02:40 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 27 2024 03:32 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, January 27 2024 06:14 PM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, January 28 2024 02:59 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 29 2024 07:34 AM (r9O5h)

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• You're censoring it wrong: Yoel Roth, former deputy chief propagandist at Twitter, and Mike Masnick, former free speech advocate turned totalitarian nutcase, joined the CEO of Bluesky Social, some guy I've never heard of, to discuss how to prevented the unwashed masses from having unapproved thoughts.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Tech Crunch is avid for this.
  
  Actual Masnick quote:

  "Unfortunately, you can’t turn a Nazi into not a Nazi. But we can limit the impact of the Nazis," Masnick said. "Let’s limit their ability to wreak havoc. I think that leads to a better place in the long run."

  Yeah, Mike, about that...
   

• Top Harvard cancer researchers have been accused of scientific fraud across 57 research papers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is retracting six papers and issuing corrections to another 31.
  
  Authors of the papers include the institute's president and CEO, two vice presidents, and the research integrity officer.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon 7600 XT is here, and it's definitely a graphics card.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you play games at 1080p and don't care about ray tracing, it should do fine.  But then so would a 7600 from the previous generation.
  
  If you do care about ray tracing, it's a bad choice, but so is every other card in its price range.
  
  If you want to play games at 4k, forget this one.  The 7800 XT costs 50% more but will run twice as fast at that resolution.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 26 2024 02:44 AM (r9O5h)

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• Google Chrome is to gain AI features including a writing helper, a theme creator, a tab organiser, a baby shower planner, and that one annoying relative who simply can't take a hint.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Brave and Vivaldi have announced they are not doing this.  Or will.  Probably.

• Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti Super is here and it's...  Well, it's...  Yeah.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not a lot faster than the 4070 Ti except in a few edge cases, but since it's the same price as the original 4070 Ti, has more memory, and is faster, even if not much, the only downside is that it uses more power.
  
  In fact, it uses more power than the original 4080, but since that cost 50% more and is also on the chopping block, it's probably not all that relevant.
  
  Compared with paying $1199 for the 4080 it's a clear win, but $1199 was a ridiculous price for the 4080.
  
  
  
• AFMF is now available in WHQL providing up to a 103% improvement in frame rates in thousands of DX11 and DX12 titles, similar to FSR and DLSS.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It does this by making shit up.
  
  
  
• The OnePlus 12 is a good phone that isn't overrun with AI crap.  (The Verge)
  
  Though it costs $799, so I would hope so.
  
  My old phone (not the Samsung, but the one before that; I keep a second phone just in case) just died of battery bloat, and I replaced it with a Motorola G14, which worked out to about $118 including tax.  Runs fine.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 25 2024 09:43 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 25 2024 09:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 25 2024 05:52 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 26 2024 12:58 AM (BMUHC)

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• Don't buy HP printers: They're hopelessly insecure piles of garbage, says...  HP's CEO?  (Ars Technica)
  
  He was trying to argue that if you buy third-party ink cartridges they could contain a virus that could take over your entire network, but you'd have to have delegated your design efforts to middle-schoolers in Myanmar to fuck up that badly.
  
  Or use Node.js.  That would do it too.
  
  He's lying.  Or at least, I really hope he's lying, because I'm using an HP laptop right now and I don't want it turn burn my house down.

• Palworld is a hit, and it's easy to see why.  (The Verge)
  
  In which the article is relatively sane and the comments are a mud-wrestling match of crazy people, none of them weighing less than three hundred pounds.
  
  The argument going on in the article is that one of the 3D models used in the game has very similar proportions to one of the 3D models used in one Pokemon game...  Because they're both fucking wolves.
  
  The argument going on in the comments is that Palworld is nothing but a direct ripoff of another game...  Though nobody can agree which other game.
  
  
  
• Oh, and it's now sold 6 million copies with a peak of 1.5 million simultaneous players.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Apple may have sold 180,000 units of its Vision Pro high-gloss e-waste device.  (Engadget)
  
  Which is and isn't a lot.  At a minimum price of $3499 that's a lot of idiots who just set their money on fire.  On the other hand, with an estimated 1.2 billion users worldwide, just 0.015% of Apple's customers have shown an interest in the Vision Pro.
  
  I don't think VR goggles are pointless, but consumer-grade VR goggles at $3499 a pop definitely are.
  
  
  
• A hacker has cloned a Game Boy Advance game by crashing the console at just the right time.  (Engadget)
  
  So that instead of playing a single sound from the game's ROM cartridge, it played the entire contents of the 16MB ROM cartridge over the speaker.  So all he had to do was record it, spend a couple of days cleaning up the recording, and then more time debugging the issues with the resulting code, and then it booted, albeit with bugs.
  
  Of course, you can also just read the ROM cartridge over a parallel interface in about four seconds, but where's the fun in that.
  
  
  
• Terraform Labs has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  At first I thought this was Terraform the Docker management thing, but that's owned by HashiCorp.  There is no corporation named "Terraform" associated with the product "Terraform".
  
  No, this is the Terraform associated with the Terra "stablecoin", which imploded in 2022 and took the company's market cap from $40 billion to zero inside of a week.
  
  I'm surprised they still exist.  Their former CEO is in jail in Montenegro after fleeing the country, awaiting extradition back to the US.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, January 24 2024 12:06 AM (ijGbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, January 24 2024 03:36 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 24 2024 06:26 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 24 2024 05:34 PM (PiXy!)

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• What the heck is Broadcom doing with VMWare?  (MSN)
  
  After Broadcom - which makes small boring chips in huge volumes - acquired VMWare for $69 billion, it laid off hundreds of staff, cancelled perpetual license in favour of subscriptions, and removed almost all product offerings.
  
  Why?
  
  As the article explains, it's because Broadcom only wants 600 customers for any of their business units.  If you're not in the top 600 for that market, you simply don't exist, and your needs are irrelevant.
  
  The company made $14 billion in profit last year so this approach seems to be working for them.
  
  But if you're the 601st company on their list and reliant on VMWare, you're paying a lot of attention to competitors' products right now.

• The boycott, it does nothing!  (Twitter)
  
  Palworld has sold four million copies in three days.
  
  
  
• NASA has found Ingenuity.  (NPR)
  
  Not the abstract concept, but the helicopter.
  
  It's on Mars.
  
  Which is where they left it.
  
  
  
• An AI chatbot swore at a customer and derided its company as useless...  After the customer asked it to do so.  (Time)
  
  Yep.  That'll happen.
  
  
  
• What is the solution to gridlocked EV charging sites?  (Sacramento Bee)  (archive site)
  
  Nope.  Sorry.  Can't think of anything.  No way at all to solve that problem.  Nope.  Nothing.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 23 2024 09:12 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 23 2024 09:16 AM (BMUHC)

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• The same pathetic losers who tried to organise a boycott against the Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy are at it again with Palworld.  (GGRecon)
  
  With similar results.
  
  Hogwarts Legacy sold 22 million copies last year.
  
  Palworld has sold 3 million copies in two days.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Overclocking your SSD can bring big performance gains.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have a cheap no-name SSD that is underclocked to start with, and if you don't mind losing all your data.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop chips could be 5% faster than the current Raptor Lake models.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel is in the middle of launching four generations of CPUs in the same month, which is impossible for anyone to keep track of, but it doesn't matter since they all perform the same.
  
  
  
• For truckers driving EVs there is no turning back.  (Yahoo News)
  
  That's because the only truckers driving EVs are the ones on fixed short-to-mid-range routes where charging is readily available and the economics make sense.
  
  
  
• Can an AI become its own CEO after creating a startup?  No.  (INC)
  
  The co-founder of Google's DeepMind division thinks so, but he's an idiot.
  
  
  
• Node.js users download 2.1 billion deprecated packages every week.  (SC Magazine)
  
  If you're using Node.js, you've already made a really bad decision, so why not double down on that?

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 22 2024 02:28 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 22 2024 02:34 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 22 2024 04:31 AM (BMUHC)

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• The same pathetic losers who tried to organise a boycott against the Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy are at it again with Palworld.  (GGRecon)
  
  With similar results.
  
  Hogwarts Legacy sold 22 million copies last year.
  
  Palworld has sold 3 million copies in two days.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Overclocking your SSD can bring big performance gains.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have a cheap no-name SSD that is underclocked to start with, and if you don't mind losing all your data.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop chips could be 5% faster than the current Raptor Lake models.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel is in the middle of launching four generations of CPUs in the same month, which is impossible for anyone to keep track of, but it doesn't matter since they all perform the same.
  
  
  
• For truckers driving EVs there is no turning back.  (Yahoo News)
  
  That's because the only truckers driving EVs are the ones on fixed short-to-mid-range routes where charging is readily available and the economics make sense.
  
  
  
• Can an AI become its own CEO after creating a startup?  No.  (INC)
  
  The co-founder of Google's DeepMind division thinks so, but he's an idiot.
  
  
  
• Node.js users download 2.1 billion deprecated packages every week.  (SC Magazine)
  
  If you're using Node.js, you've already made a really bad decision, so why not double down on that?

• Palworld, an independent game that can be best described as Pokemon with guns allowed a handful of vtubers a preview the past few days.
  
  Seems to have paid off because they sold a million copies in eight hours and reached half a million concurrent players in the first 24 hours - and it's still in pre-release.  (Kotaku)
  
  In case you're wondering, yes, those sheep have Browning M2s.

• Twitter has just launched support for audio and video calls via the Android app.  (Thurrott)
  
  I don't know that we want this, but having these features available from a platform not controlled by the usual Silicon Valley mafia is welcome.
  
  
  
• The group of crazed billionaires proposing that doomed planned community in Solano County in northern California has released, uh, a map.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Well, that solves everything.
  
  
  
• One of JPMorgan Chase's CEOs - apparently they have several - has claimed that the company repels 45 billion hacking attempts every day.  (The Register)
  
  This is entirely plausible, if you count individual probes by everyone from random script kiddies to Russian and Chinese state hacking teams.  It really is that bad out there.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Russia hacked Microsoft, looking to find out what Microsoft knew about Russian hackers.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And instead got the source code to Windows 8 and Clippy.  They are now pressing charges of war crimes in the Hague.
  
  
  
• Apple's Vision Pro, the company's absurdly overpriced VR headset, is up for pre-order.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Starting at $3499.
  
  This being Apple, you need an iPhone just to order it.
  
  
  
• Third-party platforms are flocking to the Vision Pro, with native applications available from...  Nobody.  (MacStories)
  
  YouTube, Netflix, Roku, Facebook, and TikTok have all announced a profound lack of interest, though Reddit has announced some kind of support.
  
  You can open your Numbers spreadsheet in glorious 4D though, so there's that.

• Mark Zuckerberg has made it is goal to develop AGI - artificial general intelligence - with Meta now joining OpenAI and Google in the race.  (The Verge)
  
  What a shame then that none of those companies are actually working on AGI.
  
  They're all putting a lot of effort into LLMs, but going from that to making actual working artificial intelligence is like trying to build houses by practicing caber tossing.  With an enormous amount of effort you might eventually produce something vaguely house shaped that somebody could live in, but it's so obviously stupid that nobody would ever try.

• Microsoft has set 16GB as the minimum memory for AI-enabled Windows PCs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I'd recommend 32GB as the minimum for any Windows PC, unless you're fortunate enough to still be running Windows 7, in which case you can comfortably get away with half that.
  
  The laptop I'm typing this on has 16GB.  It's using 40GB.  And it's not doing very much.
  
  
  
• Leaked benchmarks of Nvidia's upcoming 4070 Ti Super show it just 10% behind the 4080.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Considering the 4080 was $1199 and the 4070 Ti Super will be $799, that's a good deal.  Well, it would be a good deal at $499; at $799 it's as good a deal as you will find right now.
  
  
  
• YouTube hasn't made the site worse for adblock users just recently - that is, not in the past week.  Recent reports of worsening problems are due to people running multiple ad blockers at once.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Don't do that unless you know exactly what you are doing.  Like running multiple anti-virus programs, it's likely to cause weird problems and slow your computer down.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 20 2024 12:54 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, January 20 2024 04:58 PM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 21 2024 03:43 AM (r9O5h)

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