• The US government is attempting to fund its infrastructure bill with crypto regulations.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Now, I'm not entirely against crypto regulations - some days I'd be delighted to see the entire industry suffer a sudden spontaneous existence failure - but just one part of the infrastructure bill will run to $1 trillion and the regulations are expected to generate $28 billion over ten years.
  
  They did the math.  And ignored the answer.
  
  
  
• In related news a study - apparently of, by, and for idiots - says more people would use crypto if they understood it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I understand crypto.  This claim seems...  Inaccurate.
  
  
  
• I was logged into the server right as it crashed tonight.  Load average 60 and climbing.  I've blocked some IPs - well, about a quarter of a million IPs - and I'll see if constraining the CPU on this container makes things more stable.
  
  Update: Oops.  That's not the CPU limit.  That setting breaks things.  Anyway, the application and database containers are now each limited to 3 virtual cores, out of 8 (quad core + hyperthreading).  Not sure if that will be enough, but right now it's perfectly fine.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apple has new video cards - for use only in the Mac Pro - but faster than any individual card you can get anywhere else.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Radeon PRO W6800X Duo is a 400W card with two Radeon 6800 chips connected over AMD's Infinity Fabric, and 64GB of GDDR6 RAM.
  
  Perfect for playing Minecraft.  At 16K resolution on a video wall.
  
  
  
• Apple also has a new keyboard, and this one only works on M1 Arm-based Macs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yes, a keyboard that doesn't even work on other Mac models.
  
  
  
• Build your own CDN in 5 hours.  (Fly.io)
  
  Give or take five weeks, really.  Not a bad article overall:

  We have choices.  We could use Varnish (scripting! edge side includes! PHK blog posts!).  We could use Apache Traffic Server (being the only new team this year to use ATS!). Or we could use NGINX (we're already running it!).  The only certainty is that you'll come to hate whichever one you pick.  Try them all and pick the one you hate the least.

  It do be like that.
  
  
  
• I used to link to stories from Tech Crunch.  I stopped because of shit like this.
  
  
  
  
  Oh no, free speech!  Whatever shall we do?
  
  
  
• Note to self: Do not use DRAMless SSDs for Linux servers.  (Phoronix)
  
  I was actually planning to do just that - I'm building out a new development lab, and I'm going to deploy a small stack of Intel NUCs for cluster testing.  Plan was to use some existing WD Black SSDs and add WD Blues when those ran out.
  
  The WD Blue looks great on Windows-oriented benchmarks, but it's DRAMless.  The Samsung 980 is similar, and on the benchmarks on that page it's as much as eight times slower than the WD Black.  It's definitely not eight times cheaper.
  
  
  
• I'm getting a Dell.  I mentioned to my boss that I was going to be setting up a new home lab - the Linux cluster of NUCs and so on - and he said the company would pay for some of it.  I want to be free to do whatever the hell I want with the desktop stuff, so I suggested a laptop.
  
  Dell Inspiron 14 7000.  Core i7-1165G7, 2560x1600 screen, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 2GB Nvidia MX350 which isn't fast by any means but is there, 1.25kg.  Two of the Four Essential Keys at least; the others double up with F11 and F12 which I can live with.   
  
  HP have the perfect laptop with a 4K OLED display and the FEK in their proper place, but it costs a lot more than the Dell.  More than two Dells.
  
  My old Dell laptop still works - I'm typing on it right now - but it's developed some weirdness.  Sometimes the trackpad will click but not track, and sometimes it won't do anything at all.  And the battery stopped working entirely for a couple of months - and you can no longer get replacements.
  
  The new one is 80% faster single-threaded, 300% faster multi-threaded, and 40% lighter.  And presumably doesn't die the instant you unplug the charger.  Oh, and the screen on the new one covers 100% of sRGB.  Not sure what the gamut of this one is, but it's fairly muted.  Incredibly sharp - I chose it for the 4K screen - but the colours don't pop.
  
  
  
• Microsoft ran out of servers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They offered a free trial of Windows 365 - basically a Windows desktop running in the cloud.  Uptake was great.  Supply not so great.
  
  
  
• Microsoft accidentally leaked the latest redesign of MS Paint.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It actually looks less crappy.
  
  
  
• Supply chain attacks are getting worse and you are not ready for them.  (ZDNet)
  
  The problem with the world today is that there are not enough grumpy old bastards saying You're not putting that shit on my servers.  Back when I was a very young Pixy they were already a dying breed, and we need to find a new supply somehow.
  
  
  
• AMD's 5600G and 5700G APUs have finally launched as retail parts.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Can you get them anywhere?
  
  No.
  
  That might change, though.  All of AMD's other CPUs are now in stock and selling at MSRP.
  
  
  
• If you've manage to nurse your 2011-era unpatched Android device all this time, congratulations and farewell.  (Ars Technica)
  
  You'll lose access to Google services by the end of September.
  
  Later but still very old Android devices will continue to work because sometime around Android 4 they added a modular update architecture, but the very early versions can't be fixed any more.
  
  
  
• South Korea is looking to blow a hole in Apple and Google's walled payment gardens.  (Mac Rumors)
  
  Proposed legislation would force their respective app stores to accept and allow third-party payment processors.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 05 2021 12:14 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 05 2021 09:27 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, August 05 2021 11:55 PM (0jVI9)

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• Huawei has set up an entirely Arm-based datacenter in Moscow.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Free pen-testing with every server!

• Need a motherboard with up to 128 cores and 4TB of RAM?  Gigabyte has you covered.  (AnandTech)
  
  At just over $1000 the board itself isn't that expensive as things go.  A pair of 64 core CPUs could set you back fifteen grand, though, and 4TB of RAM gets expensive fast.
  
  
  
• Google has teased pictures of the upcoming Pixel 6.  (AnandTech)
  
  With its mismatched colours it looks like a $79 Vietnamese knock-off.
  
  
  
• Windows 10 will soon start automatically blocking PUPs.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Potentially unwanted programs - that is, programs that aren't explicitly viruses but that you don't want running.
  
  Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on how well it is implemented.  MacOS has the same feature, and when a server at Apple went down no Mac users anywhere in the world could run anything for a couple of hours.
  
  
  
• China is now hacking phone companies throughout Southeast Asia.  (ZDNet)
  
  And by "is now" we probably mean "always has been but just got caught at it".
  
  
  
• The Pentagon believes its new AI system can predict events days in advance.  (Engadget)
  
  The examples given are spectacularly unimpressive.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, August 03 2021 08:44 PM (DHVaH)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 03 2021 11:35 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 04 2021 12:02 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 04 2021 12:05 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 04 2021 12:58 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, August 05 2021 02:07 PM (Ix1l6)

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• Its propaganda efforts failing, despite having all the newspapers, all the television networks, all of social media, and all of academia on its side the US federal government is now enlisting children.  (New York Times)
  
  That'll work.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Thunderbolt 5 is trinary.  (AnandTech)
  
  Rather than using just two voltage levels - 0 and 1 - it uses -1, 0, and 1, and then composes two trinary digits into three bits, with the sequence 00 being unused and treated as an error.
  
  This isn't the first time it's been done, but the more common approach these days is what is called PAM-4, using four levels which maps easily to two bits.  PCIe 6.0 - coming soon at least to the server market - uses PAM-4.
  
  Thunderbolt 5, when it ships, will deliver speeds up to 80Gbps bidirectionally.  The length and price of the cable that will support that speed is not mentioned, but you can expect it to be short and expensive.
  
  
  
• Google scrapped Google Reader, and that was bad.  (The Ringer)
  
  Now you don't need to read the article, which is insufferable.
  
  
  
• How to get admin access on any Windows machine where you have a login.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Yes, it's yet another print server problem.
  
  
  
• There are two big red things in the asteroid belt.  (New York Times)
  
  They're named 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, and they're not supposed to be there.  Or they're supposed to be there, but they're not supposed to be that colour.  One of those.
  
  
  
• There will be a new Mac Mini by November....  2022.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Well, that's exciting.
  
  I'm probably going to end up with some kind of Mac to do support for work.  It won't be my main system, but when there's a Mac-related issue I need a Mac so I can fix it, or at least see it.  We run into a lot of problems with Safari, but we have an entire team of UI developers so I mostly don't have to get involved.
  
  
  
• Paul Hansmeier, of the infamously infamous Prenda Law, will not be getting time off for good behaviour.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Because, as it turns out, he has been continuing the schemes that earned him a 14 year prison sentence from prison.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 02 2021 11:08 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 02 2021 11:23 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, August 03 2021 09:15 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 03 2021 11:09 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 03 2021 11:10 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, August 03 2021 08:14 PM (DHVaH)

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Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 03 2021 11:31 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, August 03 2021 08:16 PM (DHVaH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 04 2021 10:34 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, August 05 2021 09:36 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 05 2021 10:48 AM (eqaFC)

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• So I went out to the shops last night here in occupied Sydney and...  Yeah, nothing.  Number of soldiers sighted: Nil.  Number of police sighted: Nil.  Number of bored security guards: One.  Mask compliance: 50%.
  
  Which doesn't mean that I'll ever vote for these fascists again, just means they're lazy fascists.
  
  Yeah, I'm gonna need you to arrest yourself tomorrow.  So if you could arrange that for, mmm, 9AM, that'd be great.
  
  
  
• The SolarWinds hackers - which is to say, the Russian government - also hacked at least 27 US Attorneys' offices.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which is just more evidence that it was always a state actor and not a criminal gang.  And that it was Russia and not China in this case, because China simply buys the people it needs.
  
  More details at AP:

  The department said 80% of Microsoft email accounts used by employees in the four U.S. attorney offices in New York were breached. All told, the Justice Department said 27 U.S. Attorney offices had at least one employee’s email account compromised during the hacking campaign.

  
  
• The Darkside hacking group - the one behind the Colonial Pipeline attack - has rebranded itself BlackMatter.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They're easily identified because they use home-brewed encryption.
  
  And, again, it's Russian government.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Chinese hackers - by which of course we mean the Chinese government - are hacking insecure home routers to build a mesh network from which to attack everything else.  (The Record)
  
  Do us all a favour.  Skip the small stuff and just breach Amazon's mesh network so they'll be forced to shut it down.

• Physicists have built the first time crystal, a device that oscillates perpetually without consuming energy.  (Quanta)
  
  It's only a handful of atoms, it has to be kept at cryogenic temperatures inside a diamond inside a quantum computer, it doesn't do anything useful, and if you look at it too hard it breaks - literally - but it's still better than Wish.Com.
  
  
  
• Chromebook sales grew 75% in Q2.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  I understand the appeal, but you're handing complete control of your data to crazy people.
  
  
  
• Virtual contact is worse than no contact for people over sixty in locked down cities.  (The Guardian)
  
  I'm in the latter but not the former category, but I can confirm my life would be vastly improved if Skype stopped ringing at two in the morning.
  
  
  
• The GAO has told Jeff Bezos to fuck off.  (CNBC)
  
  He sued over the award of a lunar lander contract to SpaceX, and the ruling affirms that everything about the contract followed regulations.  Also that SpaceX actually gets shit done.
  
  
  
• GitHub now provides free legal assistance to projects hit by DMCA takedown notices.  (VentureBeat)
  
  That...  Sounds good.  Waiting for it to go horribly wrong somehow.
  
  
  
• The Asus ProArt Studiopro Pro 16 Pro leaked on Amazon China.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Wait, Amazon China?
  
  Anyway, it has a top-of-the-line Ryzen 5900HX (actually I think there's a 5950HX that is the tiniest smidgen faster), Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics, a 16" 3840x2400 OLED display, 32GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and probably the Four Essential Keys.  The current 15" and 17" models have them.
  
  Around $3000, so not cheap, but there's literally nothing wrong with it.
  
  
  
• Samsung will be producing 24Gb DDR5 chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  One thing I noted immediately in the DDR5 spec was support for 24Gb memory sizes.  Generally only powers of 2 are supported, and current chips are all either 8Gb or 16Gb.
  
  Problem is memory technology hasn't been shrinking as fast as processors, and 32Gb chips aren't quite economical yet.  So the committee planned ahead and fitted in a half-node increase.
  
  So in a year or so you'll start seeing 12GB, 24GB, and 48GB modules.  The spec allows for modules up to 128GB - and up to 512GB total on a typical DDR5-enabled desktop CPU - but those sizes will take a lot longer to arrive.
  
  
  
• Exactly 20 years later, Intel's Itanium is dead.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This was Intel's attempt to lock up the server market, by designing a brand new 64-bit architecture and not licensing it to anyone.
  
  It ran headlong into the torpedo of AMD's own 64-bit chips, which were faster, much, much cheaper, and could run all existing software.  Intel had to license AMD's architecture but had long-term contracts and were stuck supporting Itanium as well.
  
  
  

Hololive Teaser Trailer of the Day #1

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 02 2021 12:03 AM (obo9H)

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• Not tech news but close to home: The conservative Coalition in Australia just committed political suicide.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  The bullshit lockdowns are supported by Labor voters - lefties - but opposed by a strong majority of conservatives.  The Liberal Party is about to find out that their voters don't appreciate this rapid swing to fascism.
  
  Labor voters are just fine with fascism, but aren't going to vote for the Liberal Party anyway.
  
  I wouldn't mind these useless fucks getting the boot except that the other party is significantly worse on every measure.
  
  But there is no way I will vote for either of our major parties again.  Not that I have ever voted Labor in the first place.
  
  Update: Plural of anecdote, yes, but I went out to the shops this evening.  Soldiers sighted: Nil.  Regular police sighted: Nil.  Mask compliance: Around 50%.  That's no excuse for our shithead politicians, though.  Into the volcano they go.
  
  
  
• Blockchains.  Can't live with them, can't nuke 'em from orbit.
  
  Major crisis at work today because a platform with a ten-figure market cap returns the same bland response for "transient network error, please retry" and "your wallet is empty you idiot".
  
  

• The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks are fighting again.  (New York Times)
  
  It will be fun to watch the New York communists try to take on the Beijing communists.
  
  
  
• Samsung is jacking up chip prices.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  RAM prices are already up 50% since last year, and flash memory prices are up too.
  
  It's not clear how this will affect non-commodity parts - CPUs and GPUs - because the great bulk of the cost there goes to designing, testing, and preparing for production.  Just prepping a minor update to a CPU to go into production on a leading-edge fabrication process can run over $100 million.
  
  That's why they patch problems in firmware; it's both too time-consuming and too costly to update the hardware every time.
  
  
  
• Static.Wiki is Wikipedia shoveled into and served directly from a SQLite database.  (Static.Wiki)
  
  A 48GB SQLite database.
  
  This isn't an app running on a SQLite database; every single page is rendered and stored in SQLite.
  
  
  
• Idiots and maniacs.  (Earthly.dev)
  
  Idiots are people who don't do what I do; maniacs are people who do what I don't do.  Most people are both.
  
  
  
• eBPF - the Extender Berkeley Packet Filter - lets user code run inside the Linux kernel in a sandbox.  Turns out that provides a local privilege escalation vulnerability for free.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  To the surprise of absolutely nobody.
  
  
  
• Amazon has been fined $888 million for GDPR violations, specifically targeted advertising.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I find it difficult to be offended on Amazon's behalf.
  
  
  
• I used to blithely install packages from PyPI whenever I needed to. 
  
  But baby that was years ago, I left it all behind.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  For my cheap wine and not having my credit cards stolen.
  
  
  
• Russian hackers continue their attacks despite Biden's warning.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Unexpectedly.
  
  
  
• Amazon's delivery partners routinely tell drivers to ignore safety checks.  (CNBC)
  
  What's a dead hobo here and there compared with free delivery?

Posted by: Richard Cranium at Sunday, August 01 2021 11:52 AM (769ST)

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• Intel 11500
• 64GB RAM
• 2 x 2TB WD Blue SN550 SSDs
• 1x 8TB WD Red Pro
• RTX 3060 on the Windows box

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 01 2021 06:25 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 01 2021 07:31 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 01 2021 07:31 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 01 2021 07:48 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 01 2021 02:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, August 02 2021 09:09 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 02 2021 10:36 AM (PiXy!)

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• My day job continues to drive me insane, but I have a very capable assistant and today got a raise, back-dated to the beginning of the month.  So I'll soon be insane but with a shiny new computer.
  
  Or two.  Figuring out whether to get one big system - probably a 5900X - or two smaller systems - 5600X or Intel 11500, one running Windows and the other Linux.  I think the latter might be good.
  
  
  
• The server hosting this blog did not crash overnight, so that was nice bad.
  
  
  
• AMD has announced the Radeon 6600 XT, set for release August 11.  (AnandTech)
  
  Suggested price is $379, but I wouldn't expect it to be going for less than $500.
  
  Wait for benchmarks on this one, because it's hard to predict how it will compare against the existing 6700 XT.  It has 80% of the compute capacity but only 33% of the on-chip cache, so it will likely depend on the individual games you want to play.
  
  It should be fine for any game at 1080p, though.  Only if you want to play at higher resolutions is there likely to be an issue.
  
  
  

Tech News

• There's now a standard for LPDDR5X -  faster memory for laptops and phones.  (AnandTech)
  
  It will run at up to 8.5GHz, which should be great when coupled with AMD's next-generation integrated graphics.  And Apple's Arm-based Macs too.
  
  
  
• Other gaming PC makers say they're not facing the same problems as Dell.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The California legislation is stupid, and the states that blindly adopt it are stupid, but Dell's standard configurations are also stupid.
  
  
  
• Intel has launched its new range of Ice Lake workstation CPUs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  With up to 38 cores and 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0, they will compete with AMD's Threadripper Pro, which has 64 cores and 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0.
  
  And is cheaper.
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• An enormous Tesla battery farm being built near Melbourne caught fire.  (The Age)
  
  Looks like just one of the pods - each the size of a half-length shipping container - was affected.  Oh, and everyone who lives within ten miles, because it belched toxic smoke everywhere and Melbourne is currently in lockdown.
  
  
  
• Safari is bad.  (HTTPToolkit)
  
  It's filled with bugs and lacks features available in every other browser, forcing developers to work around it.  I know our UI team flinches when they hear the name mentioned.
  
  It's the only browser available on iOS though, because fuck you that's why.  You can pretend to install another browser, and iOS will pretend to let you, but on the inside they're all Safari and all have the same bugs.
  
  
  
• It's a race to the bottom as China decides to suicide its own economy.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Tencent lost 23% of its market cap, and private education companies were forbidden from...  Basically forbidden from existing.
  
  China's strong economy in recent decades has been due to their switch from communism to fascism.  Looks like they may be switching back.
  
  
  
• One of the two HP notebooks I wanted to get - the new Envy 13 with the 4K display - is now listed on their Australian online store.  Not available, but listed.  About a 40% markup over the US price, but listed.

• In a speech at the National Counterterrorism Center, President Joe Biden named as America's greatest threats hackers from Russia and China and anyone who criticises the Democrats.  (Bleeping Computer)

  He named Russia and China as the USA's partners and "possibly mortal competitors down the road," saying that working together on existential threats such as climate change should prevent the US from keeping a "watchful eye on what the ultimate objective of the other team is."

  That makes no sense, but I'm not sure if it's Biden or the article who is confused there.

  "I think we also need to take on the rampant disinformation that is making it harder and harder for people to access — assess the facts, be able to make decisions," Biden added.  "The disinformation is coming from inside the House."

  
  
  
  
• A new US security memorandum bolsters critical infrastructure cybersecurity.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  A new Pixy memorandum bolsters critical Pixy is a 25 year old 6'4" blond billionaire security.
  
  
  

• Time to cut the cord?  (Six Colors)
  
  Already done.  I canceled all my streaming subscriptions and now throw my money at the girls from Hololive (and sometimes Nijisanji).  Many of the individual talents put out more and better content than the entirety of Hollywood.
  
  
  
• Google will require workers to be vaccinated.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This is the thirty-seven thousand nine hundred and sixteenth worst thing they have ever done.
  
  
  
• Facebook too.  (Reuters)
  
  Why does anyone need to go into the office at Facebook?  I mean, people managing the physical server farms, yes.  Everyone else?  No.
  
  
  
• AMD's revenues are - again - double those of the same quarter last year.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  And that's with supply constraints on pretty much everything they make.  Their CPUs at least seem to be consistently in stock now.
  
  
  
• Anyone pushing back against right-to-repair is a lying sack of shit.  (ZDNet)
  
  And should be launched from a catapult directly into the Sun.
  
  
  
• Apple is closing down internal Slack channels where employees have been discussing unauthorised topics.  (Cult of Mac)
  
  Unionise.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, July 30 2021 03:14 AM (DHVaH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 30 2021 10:02 AM (PiXy!)

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