• That's going to leave a mark: Call and text records for the past six months for almost all AT&T customers have been stolen in the slow-motion train wreck that is the Snowflake breach.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Snowflake was an online data analytics platform with some major customers including Ticketmaster and Santander Bank.  Technically I think Snowflake is still operating but I wouldn't expect them to be around for much longer.
  
  While Ticketmaster is international and the number of customers affected far outweighs AT&T, in that breach the hackers got your name, address, last four digits of your credit card, that kind of stuff.
  
  In this hack they got the phone numbers of everyone 110 million people called or texted over a period of six months.  And it's all out there, forever.
  
  It does not (according to AT&T) include the contents of the text messages, and calls even if recorded for whatever reason would not be stored in this kind of database.  I hope.  That would raise it from a mere disaster to a catastrophe.
  
  And if you're not an AT&T customer you might still be affected if your phone company uses the AT&T network behind the scenes.

• Meta has dropped the special restrictions it had placed on Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts.  (The Verge)
  
  You can enjoy the screaming in the comments there, if you like.
  
  
  
• Emmanuel Goldstein's X faces big EU fines as paid checkmarks are ruled deceptive.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Sorry, I mean Elon Musk.  It's pure coincidence that every Ars Technica article mentioning SpaceX, Twitter, Tesla, or Starlink has the name ELON MUSK in it as a signal for the zombies to swarm.
  
  Anyway, the headline is a lie.  There is no such ruling.
  
  But EU Bookburner General Terry Britain claims that blue checkmarks used to denote trustworthy sources of information which is either a direct lie or a sign of galloping early-onset Alzheimer's.
  
  Musk fired back asserting that the EU offered Twitter an illegal secret deal under which they would hold off on fines if the company would enact secret censorship under their direction.
  
  Terry Britain claimed that the EU doesn't do that, but...  It does.
  
  Also interesting to see on that article, Ars Technica's creative director Aurich Lawson getting savaged by his own mob.
  
  
  
• Don't run your Ryzen 9 9950X at 60W.  (WCCFTech)
  
  More leaked benchmarks, but there's something interesting here because the same tests were run at power levels of 60W, 90W, 120W, 160W, and 230W, with the last of those being the maximum boost power setting without manual overclocking.
  
  At 60W the CPU ran cool at 41C and managed 4GHz on all cores.  Bumping it up to 90W pushed the temperature to 49C but the clock to just over 5GHz.  At 160W it reaches 5.55GHz and at 230W 5.6GHz, so there's no real point in going over 160W.
  
  
  
• Emmanuel Gold - sorry.  SpaceX's Falcon 9 has been grounded after issues with a second stage caused the latest cluster of Starlink satellites to miss their orbital target.  (Reuters)
  
  They are trying to boost the satellites into the correct orbit with the on-board ion drives - really - but even if that works it will reduce their service life.
  
  This comes after, if you weren't keeping track, 365 consecutive Falcon 9 launches without issue.
  
  
  
• Looking to buy a Z80 computer before supply of the chip runs out forever?  Tindie (who) and Zeal have you covered.  (Tindie)
  
  For $180 you get a 10MHz Z80, 256k of flash storage, 512k of RAM, VGA graphics, and four voice sound synthesis.
  
  It's kind of neat if you're into retrocomputing.
  
  
  
• Speaking of retrocomputing the German navy is working on phasing out eight inch floppy disks.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I have no idea why they are used because the ships involved were commissioned in the mid-nineties, by which time even 3.5" floppies had been around for a decade, and eight inch models had been dead for years.
  
  
  
• A "red team" from CISA broke into another federal agency and had free rein in its network, undetected, for five months.  (The Register)
  
  Wait, the federal government noticed a massive problem in only five months?
  
  
  
• Peer review is essential for science.  Unfortunately it's fucked.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, they use the term broken, but I felt it needed a little more oomph.

  The practice of peer review was developed in a different era, when the arguments and analysis that led to a paper’s conclusion could be succinctly summarized within the paper itself. Want to know how the author arrived at that conclusion? The derivation would be right there. It was relatively easy to judge the "wrongness" of an article because you could follow the document from beginning to end, from start to finish, and have all the information you needed to evaluate it right there at your fingerprints.
  
  That's now largely impossible with the modern scientific enterprise so reliant on computers.

  Specifically because scientific papers very rarely include the code used to analyse the data.  All the assumptions - and the errors - in that code are hidden from reviewers.
  
  Noting that peer review is f - broken, the author, not a journalist but real life astrophysicist Paul Sutter, moves on to science's second line of defense, replication, where things are no better:

  There's a complex swirling septic tank of problems that all contribute to the replication crisis, but the first issue is that replication isn't sexy. You don't get to learn new things about the world around us; you just get to confirm whether someone else learned new things about the world around us. As an added ugly bonus, non-results often don't even get published. Novelty is seen as a virtue, and if you run an experiment and it doesn’t provide a positive result, journals are less likely to be interested in your manuscript. Additionally, because replication isn't seen as sexy, when it is done, it isn't read. Replication studies do not get published in high-impact-factor journals, and authors of replication studies do not get as many citations for their work. This means that their h-index is lower, which lowers their chances of getting grants and promotions.

  What's the solution?  I'm glad you asked:

  Altogether, the scientific and technical publishing industry rakes in about ten billion dollars a year, often with double-digit profit margins. Of course they don't want this ship to change course. I can't really blame them; they’re just playing by the accepted rules of their own game.

  Yes, there isn't one.
  
  
  
• Despite selling literally dozens of units, several of which were not returned, developers are ignoring Apple's wildly expensive and basically useless Vision Pro AR headset.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not even porting existing iOS apps.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is reportedly working on an AI that can reason, instead of just regurgitating pre-digested Reddit posts and telling you that backpacks are as safe as parachutes when jumping out of a plane.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, first up, Terry Winograd, SHRDLU, 1968.

  Person: Had you touched any pyramid before you put the green one on the little cube?
  Computer: YES, THE GREEN ONE.
  Person: When did you pick it up?
  Computer: WHILE I WAS STACKING UP THE RED CUBE, A LARGE RED BLOCK AND A LARGE GREEN CUBE.
  Person: Why?
  Computer: TO GET RID OF IT.
  Person: Why did you do that?
  Computer: TO CLEAN OFF THE RED CUBE.
  Person: Why did you clear off that cube?
  Computer: TO PUT IT ON A LARGE GREEN CUBE.
  Person: Why did you do that?
  Computer: TO STACK UP THE RED CUBE , A LARGE RED BLOCK AND A LARGE GREEN CUBE.
  Person: Why did you do that?
  Computer: BECAUSE YOU ASKED ME TO.

  Second, that parachutes and backpacks thing is really an answer given by Google's AI Overview.  (Fast Company)
  
  And it's based on a real result from a real scientific study.  (NPR)
  
  But it's a study of whether people actually read scientific papers.
  
  The plane was parked on the ground.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 13 2024 08:11 PM (bg2DR)

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• Could AIs become conscious? Right now, we have no way to tell.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because we haven't properly defined the terms.
  
  What kind of AI?  SHRDLU from 1968 (yes, I keep mentioning that) displayed more evidence of consciousness than ChatGPT, and examining its abilities we see clear indications of a primitive level of conscious.
  
  There's a term in AI, sphexishness, referring to the golden digger wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus.  Like many wasps, the sphex wasp will paralyse its prey to serve as food for its larvae.  In this case it will paralyse an insect, drag it back to its burrow (it's a digger wasp), check that the burrow is safe, and then put the prey in the burrow to serve as a larder for the baby sphexes.
  
  The thing is, if you move the paralysed insect while the sphex is checking the burrow, it will move it back next to the burrow, inspect the burrow again, and then drag it into the burrow.
  
  And if you move the insect again while the sphex is re-checking the burrow, the cycle will repeat.  No matter how many times you do this, the sphex will not change its behaviour.
  
  SHRDLU was able to explain why it did what it did, step by step.  It didn't get angry at being given repeated nonsensical orders, but it could account for every action that it took.
  
  Anyway, can computers become conscious?  Well, they are already more conscious than insects, and have been for decades.
  
  Can computers become conscious with all the complexity as human consciousness?  Certainly not currently; they are not remotely powerful enough.
  
  Can LLMs become conscious?  A single LLM, no.  LLMs are designed specifically to avoid that.
  
  A pair of LLMs in a feedback loop?  Maybe, yes.  But likely also psychotic.

• Why The Atlantic signed that deal with OpenAI.  (The Verge)
  
  Money.
  
  
  
• Ben Faw, the harbinger of AI slop.  (The Verge)
  
  He made his mark pushing ads for his buddies' businesses unnoticed into online newspapers and magazines, and it was all downhill from there.
  
  
  
• A data breach at mSpy exposed the personal information of millions of customers.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  mSpy sells spyware.
  
  
  
• TSMC is another big beneficiary of the AI bubble, with its market share topping $1 trillion for the first time.  (Reuters)
  
  While still well behind the leading US bubblers like Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, it is nonetheless the most valuable company in Asia.
  
  
  
• The most important video game you've never heard of.  (A Critical Hit)
  
  The Sumerian Game.  It ran on the IBM 7090 mainframe ($2.9 million for 100 kiloFLOPs) and it was, well:

  Sir, I am sorry to report that 150 bushels of grain have rotted or been eaten by rats this past season.

  Hammurabi.  It's Hammurabi.
  
  
  
• The man who destroyed Wikipedia.  (Tracing Woodgrains)
  
  David Gerard, the man behind longtime lolcow dumpster fire RationalWiki, has also been systematically rotting away the credibility of Wikipedia for twenty years.
  
  Everything bad you've seen from terminally online leftists, he represents, and he's been at it for longer than most.  He has his good points - he hates blockchain, for example, but he hates it from a doctrinaire liberal perspective, not because of the specific and often astoundingly ill-considered technical decisions that make working with it an unending misery.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 12 2024 07:06 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: CanajunXYZ at Saturday, July 13 2024 02:57 AM (4MQvG)

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• Construction of a Bitcoin "mine" in a Texas town has caused a massive outbreak of hypochondria and innumeracy.  (Time)

  On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. "It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed," she says. "That pain was worse than childbirth."

  Sounds nasty, but what does that have to do with Bitcoin?

  Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks.

  Over several months, dozens of people had a variety of symptoms ranging from the purely physical to the neurological to the psychological.  In a town of 11,000, and since they say "the Granbury area", let's note that the county is home to 60,000 people.

  "I’m sure it increases their cortisol and sugar levels, so you’re getting headaches, vertigo, and it snowballs from there," Bhaloo says. "This thing is definitely causing a tremendous amount of stress. Everyone is just miserable about it."

  You're sure.  Great.

  Not all data centers make noise.

  Yeah, this is not a serious article.

  Jenna Hornbuckle, 38, lost hearing in her right ear and was diagnosed with heart failure; ear exams document her hearing loss along with that of her 8-year-old daughter Victoria, who contracted ear infections that forced doctors to place a tube in her ear.

  Bitcoin is bad in many ways.  It does not cause heart failure or ear infections.

  As rock music blares from the speakers and other patrons chatter away, Rosenkranz pulls out her phone and clocks 72 decibels on a sound meter app—the same level that she records in Indigo’s bedroom in the dead of night. In early 2023, her daughter began waking up, yelling and holding her ears. Indigo’s room directly faces the mine, which sits about a mile and a half away.

  Okay, there's a tiny problem there.

  Shirley sticks his recorder out the window and the numbers on it flicker up and down as the roar washes over it. Eventually, the recorder caps out at 91 decibels, which the CDC estimates as roughly in between the output of a lawnmower and a chainsaw.

  91 decibels is pretty loud.  Even on a still night, at a distance of a mile and a half, it would be barely louder than leaves rustling in the trees.
  
  To register 72 decibels at that distance, the Bitcoin "mine" would have to be as loud as a Shuttle launch, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

• Microsoft is pushing its AI bullshit, named Copilot, into Windows 10 as a mandatory update.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is the existing bullshit; the next-level bullshit is named "Copilot+" is still isolated to Windows 11.
  
  
  
• Nintendo is targeting Switch emulators Suyu, Nuzu, Uzuy, Torzu, Sudachi, and Bob.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Some of these emulators contain copyrighted Nintendo code, making them easy targets for a DMCA takedown.  Others don't, but Nintendo is going after them anyway.
  
  
  
• Twitter does not owe its thousands of fired paperweights any additional severance.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  All the laid-off employees received at least three months of severance pay, more than satisfying the legal requirements.
  
  They sued anyway, apparently on the basis that they were useless and couldn't find employment anywhere else.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 11 2024 08:02 PM (bg2DR)

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• Goldman Sachs released a report on generative AI - the hot new thing pushing stock valuations of key tech companies into the trillions. In short: It's trash. (Where's Your Ed)
  
  The article linked above is not short but it is a good read. The full report is available for download and it doesn't pull any punches either:

  The promise of generative AI technology to transform companies, industries, and societies continues to be touted, leading tech giants, other companies, and utilities to spend an estimated ~$1tn on capex in coming years, including significant investments in data centers, chips, other AI infrastructure, and the power grid. But this spending has little to show for it so far beyond reports of efficiency gains among developers. And even the stock of the company reaping the most benefits to date - Nvidia - has sharply corrected.

  From the article:

  In essence, on top of generative AI not having any killer apps, not meaningfully increasing productivity or GDP, not generating any revenue, not creating new jobs or massively changing existing industries, it also requires America to totally rebuild its power grid, which Janous regrettably adds the US has kind of forgotten how to do.

  There is that, yes.

  Generative AI is not going to become AGI, nor will it become the kind of artificial intelligence you've seen in science fiction. Ultra-smart assistants like Jarvis from Iron Man would require a form of consciousness that no technology currently - or may ever - have - which is the ability to both process and understand information flawlessly and make decisions based on experience, which, if I haven't been clear enough, are all entirely distinct things.

  Right. Although the understanding doesn't have to be flawless, merely good enough for the task at hand, and cheap enough that it's not simpler to just train a human and pay them to do it.
  
  Generative AI doesn't understand anything - it is a language model, not a fact model; doesn't gain experience, at least not in its current form, which is trained once at enormous expense and then left to rot; and doesn't make decisions.
  
  It's not AGI and has no path to become AGI. Terry Winograd's SHRDLU from 1968 is in important respects more sophisticated than ChatGPT, even though it was written by a single grad student on an 18-bit computer more than fifty years ago.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Leaked benchmarks of AMD's Ryzen 9900X pin it as the fastest CPU available for single threaded tasks. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel had taken that crown, mostly by cranking up the power consumption of some of its chips to 400W, but the 9900X beats that.
  
  That's roughly in line with AMD's own promises. But this twelve core chip also beats AMD's sixteen core 7950X3D on the multi-threaded version of the same benchmark, which is about double what AMD promised.
  
  The eight core 9700X also beats Intel's 14900KS on single-threaded tasks though with only eight cores vs. 24 on the Intel chip, it's 33% slower on the multi-threaded version.
  
  We'll see real numbers soon enough; the chips are expected at retail next week.
  
  
  
• HP has cancelled its cheapest inkjet and laser printer models. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Cheap because they locked you into a perpetual ink/toner subscription plan, without which they wouldn't function at all. Just need the scanner on your multi-function device? Sorry, you haven't paid for the ink you don't need.
  
  So abandoning this is actually good.
  
  
  
• You can now link 10,000 Moore Threads GPUs together to build a super computer. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I wonder how viable this is. The Chinese-made Moore Threads GPUs have been tested in Windows PCs for gaming and they are just abominable, performing far below their theoretical capabilities. But supercomputers are tightly controlled environments, where you modify the code to fit the hardware, and they might actually deliver in such an environment.
  
  
  
• There are too many Python package managers. (DuBlog)
  
  Well, sure, but with Node and NPM you can install a single package and get 25 known critical vulnerabilities bundled in. Python can't compare with that.

1 The Disclaimer is a nice story reference

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, July 09 2024 09:00 PM (5zZ9A)

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• Boeing is planning to plead guilty to criminal fraud.  (CNBC)
  
  No, not for that.  Not for that, either.  Yes, for the two fatal 737 Max crashes, and more specifically, for the flawed flight control system that caused those crashes.
  
  Boeing will be fined $240 million and be required at least $450 million in new compliance and safety programs, as well as having government compliance officials operating directly within its facilities.
  
  Much as I loathe the administrative state, the alternative looks like murder trials, sooner or later.
  
  
  

Tech News

• China has seen the creation of one hundred competing LLMs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Resulting in a massive outflow of money from China to Nvidia for AI hardware, before 98 of those projects (plus or minus five) inevitably crater.
  
  
  
• Current leading AI models cost around $100 million to train.  The next generation currently in development could cost closer to $1 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So a hundred of those would cost...  Carry the twelve...  A lot.

  "Right now, 100 million. There are models in training today that are more like a billion." Amodei also added, "I think if we go to ten or a hundred billion, and I think that will happen in 2025, 2026, maybe 2027, and the algorithmic improvements continue a pace, and the chip improvements continue a pace, then I think there is in my mind a good chance that by that time we'll be able to get models that are better than most humans at most things."

  For a hundred billion dollars, you get something that is incapable of learning (LLMs are trained once) and is better than humans mostly at things that aren't particularly useful.
  
  Hooray.  We're saved.
  
  
  
• The looming spectre of Mt Gox paying back its users wiped $170 billion off the global crypto market.  (CNBC)
  
  Pay back users?  What insanity is this?
  
  
  
• Fedora Linux 41 will retire Python 2.7.  (Fedora Project)
  
  Python 2.7 still works, but it was released in 2.7, and support ended in 2020.  The current version is 3.12, with 3.13 in beta.
  
  You can actually still get a supported release of Python 2.7 in the form of PyPy, a Python compiler written in Python.  Since it's written in Python 2.7 and can compile Python 2.7 (as well as more recent versions like 3.10), they are planning to support Python 2.7 indefinitely.
  
  
  
• What has it got in its pockets?  (Liliputing)
  
  An eight core Ryzen 8840U, 32GB of RAM, an M.2 2230 SSD, USB4, and wifi, all packed into a folding keyboard.
  
  It even has the Four Essential Keys, sort of.  Dedicated Home and End, and four keys marked L1 through L4.  It's a little cramped, but if you want a powerful computer that can fit in your coat pocket, it is one.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 08 2024 07:48 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, July 08 2024 09:19 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 10 2024 10:58 AM (2Mei2)

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• Merle Meyers did not kill himself: A former Boeing inspector says parts marked for scrap ended up being built into planes. (CNN)

  Meyers, a 30-year veteran of Boeing, described to CNN what he says was an elaborate off-the-books practice that Boeing managers at the Everett factory used to meet production deadlines, including taking damaged and improper parts from the company’s scrapyard, storehouses and loading docks.

  This, if true, should result in felony convictions.

  Beginning in the early 2000s, Meyers says that for more than a decade, he estimates that about 50,000 parts "escaped" quality control and were used to build aircraft. Those parts include everything from small items like screws to more complex assemblies like wing flaps. A single Boeing 787 Dreamliner, for example, has approximately 2.3 million parts.
  
  Most of the parts that were meant to be scrapped were often painted red to signify they were unsuitable for assembly lines, Meyers said. Yet, in some cases, that didn’t stop them from being put into planes being assembled, he said.

  Lots of felony convictions.

   

• AMD's new 12 core 120W 9900X is about 6% slower than Intel's 20 core 253W 14700K. (WCCFTech)
  
  Also the faster Intel chips have a habit of cooking themselves and failing though Intel is working very hard to pin the blame on someone else.
  
  
  
• It's always DNS, except when it's the DNS server, in which case it's BGP. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Cloudflare's global DNS service at 1.1.1.1 got bushwhacked by Greek ISP Electronet. BGP doesn't have great protection against mistakes like this - or against deliberate attacks either.
  
  Since 1.1.1.1 is designed to respond from a local server no matter where you are in the world, the bad BGP announcement from one Greek ISP didn't affect that many people, but it's still a fiddly system that I'm glad I don't have to worry about.
  
  
  
• How good is ChatGPT at coding? (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  If your problem had an answer published to the public internet prior to 2021, it's good. Otherwise not.
  
  Of course, if that's the case you could just look up the answer yourself.
  
  
  
• Here's a $629 ice machine. And it's not even internet-enabled. (The Verge)
  
  My fridge cost less than that.
  
  
  
• You could learn a lot from a CIO (chief information officer) with a $17 billion IT budget. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Like the ability to fail upwards:

  "You can't really start talking about AI if you’re not in the cloud, if you’re not modernizing your data, if you’re not doing all the foundational stuff," she said. That has put the bank on an aggressive modernization journey based on a hybrid strategy. Some of the more critical services are running on prem in very sophisticated data centers the company built to handle its unique demands, and some are running in the cloud with the main cloud vendors: Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

  JPMorgan Chase, the article notes, handles $10 trillion in transactions per day.
  
  And they want to throw AI into that mix.
  
  I don't even want to think about that.
  
  
  
• Tokens are a big reason today's generative AI falls short. (Tech Crunch)
  
  One of many big reasons.
  
  The biggest being they are using language models without a corresponding fact model, and if you get the fact model right the language model becomes largely irrelevant.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 07 2024 10:50 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, July 08 2024 12:00 PM (nk1Z+)

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• OpenAI got hacked, but definitely not by Chinese spies.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  In April.  2023.
  
  And they didn't report it until now.  In fact, they didn't report it at all.  One of their employees alluded to the event on a podcast, and was fired for his trouble.

  Mr. Aschenbrenner said OpenAI had fired him this spring for leaking other information outside the company and argued that his dismissal had been politically motivated. He alluded to the breach on a recent podcast, but details of the incident have not been previously reported. He said OpenAI’s security wasn’t strong enough to protect against the theft of key secrets if foreign actors were to infiltrate the company.

  OpenAI denies this - well, not the hack, nor the firing, nor the fact that Aschenbrenner leaked the information, but the causal connection, in an announcement apparently written by a special release of ChatGPT trained exclusively on modified limited hangouts:

  "We appreciate the concerns Leopold raised while at OpenAI, and this did not lead to his separation," an OpenAI spokeswoman, Liz Bourgeois, said.

  Liz Bourgeois?  Obviously a made up name.

  Referring to the company's efforts to build artificial general intelligence, a machine that can do anything the human brain can do, she added, "While we share his commitment to building safe A.G.I., we disagree with many of the claims he has since made about our work. This includes his characterizations of our security, notably this incident, which we addressed and shared with our board before he joined the company."

  OpenAI is making no efforts to build AGI, safe or otherwise.  OpenAI's focus is building something and then redefining the term AGI to claim they have achieved it.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Microsoft has indefinitely delayed the release of its Recall spyware, but forgot to tell its marketing department.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ads for the new Copilot+ ARM laptops prominently feature the now nonexistent, uh, feature.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Copilot+ ARM laptops, any good?  Yes.  (The Verge)
  
  The 12 core Snapdragon X Elite chip is almost exactly tied with Apple's (also 12 core) M2 Max.  It's a little behind Apple's newer 8 core M3 chip in single-threaded tasks but well ahead in multi-threaded tasks.
  
  It's not the fastest chip on the planet but as far as laptop processors go it's up there with the best.
  
  
  
• After previously rejecting the Epic Games app store on iOS and facing nuclear levels of antitrust action in the EU, Apple has approved the exact same app store.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Epic Games made none of the changes Apple demanded, but the store somehow got approved anyway.
  
  
  
• Amazon is also facing EU action on a myriad annoying things it does to squeeze more money out of customers.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The EU calls companies like Apple and Amazon VLOPs - very large online platforms.  Of the list of VLOPs the EU is looking to regulate, exactly one is European.
  
  
  
• After more than entire decade in the court system the lawsuit by Sony against German cheat device maker Datel is turning against Sony.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The courts originally found in Sony's favour, then on appeal the decision was overturned and the suit dismissed.  Sony appealed that decision and it's been bounced up to the highest court in Europe for a ruling on specific legal and technical details, which came back saying that changing the value of a variable is not copyright infringement, you idiots.
  
  
  
• Japan has introduced a 40 foot tall humanoid robot designed for maintaining railway lines.  (The Guardian)
  
  It can be used for painting infrastructure - since it can maneuver to paint both sides and the inside fiddly bits of metal frameworks - and it can also be fitted with enormous death-dealing chainsaws for "trimming tree branches".

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, July 07 2024 01:15 AM (J67Ll)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 07 2024 02:35 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 07 2024 02:37 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Kristophr at Sunday, July 07 2024 06:43 AM (iYdVP)

Posted by: EdH at Sunday, July 07 2024 06:55 AM (eAtU4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 07 2024 04:09 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Monday, July 08 2024 04:12 AM (RCl76)

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• To the surprise of absolutely no-one, Glaze, a tool that claimed to protect digital artwork from being used to train image-generating AI systems, has been bypassed.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The idea was that it introduced subtle noise that would confuse an AI while remaining invisible to humans.
  
  This is like creating an antibiotic that is deadly to germs but harmless to humans, when the germs in question are at least as smart as you, know exactly what you are doing, and have billions of dollars in funding.
  
  So it lasted about a day.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Meanwhile Cloudflare has added a feature that blocks AI web spiders from crawling your site.  (Silicon Angle)
  
  This will work so long as the web spiders don't lie to Cloudflare.
  
  So about a day.
  
  
  
• Kobo's Libra Colour and Clara Colour e-readers are fast (for an e-ink display), colourful (for an e-ink display), reasonably priced (starting at $150) and very annoying if your books aren't all on Kobo.  (The Verge)
  
  These are dedicated e-readers, so the one thing you can't do is install a competing app like Kindle.  You have to export your Kindle books, one at a time, using a computer, and load them onto the reader.
  
  
  
• Samsung has announced a new 60TB SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is intended to replace hard drives in large storage systems, being much faster (over a million read operations per second), smaller, and more reliable.
  
  It's not intended for super-heavy workloads that require a million write operations per second; for that you probably want to look elsewhere.
  
  Price not mentioned but you can expect it to cost somewhere around ten cents per gigabyte - over $6000 for a drive this size.
  
  
  

Posted by: David Eastman at Saturday, July 06 2024 02:14 AM (rmrII)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 06 2024 03:24 PM (PiXy!)

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• If you were using the Linux distribution NixOS it's time to abandon ship, right now, before communist weirdos take you with them to the bottom of the ocean. (Lunduke)
  
  Some people have criticised that article for being unbalanced so here's a longer, more detailed, and more balanced account that makes things look even worse for the malefactors. (Chris' Blog)
  
  Long story short:
  
  1. Trans activists demanded a board seat on the NixOS foundation reserved for a "sexual minority".
  2. The project founder suggested that your sexual proclivities were irrelevant to running a Linux distribution.
  3. The same activists declared a purge of "Nazis".
  4. The project founder said, have fun with that, I'm out of here.
  5. Other key contributors swiftly followed suit.
  6. The activists don't know how to do, quite literally, anything.
  
  A story as old as time, or Karl Marx, whichever comes first.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Hackers have stolen 33 million phone numbers of users of the authentication app Authy from parent company Twilio. (Tech Crunch)
  
  They're just phone numbers, right? What's one more scammer in the infinite swamp?
  
  Authy uses your phone number as your login. And millions of people use it as a more secure secondary authentication method than SMS.
  
  Now, not so much.
  
  
  
• Kioxia (nee Toshiba) has new 2Tb QLC flash chips that could make 16TB M.2 SSDs a reality. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Comparing the huge price gap between existing 4TB and 8TB models that seems unlikely though.
  
  
  
• MicroTik has announced a new POE switch. (Serve the Home)
  
  Okay, sure.
  
  
  
• OVHcloud is blaming a 2.5Tbps DDOS attack on a MikroTik botnet. (Bleeping Computer)

  OVHcloud says many of the high packet rate attacks it recorded, including the record-breaking attack from April, originate from compromised MirkoTik Cloud Core Router (CCR) devices designed for high-performance networking.The firm identified, specifically, compromised models CCR1036-8G-2S+ and CCR1072-1G-8S+, which are used as small—to medium-sized network cores.

  Those are higher-end devices than the one above - routers rather than switches - but MikroTik does not have a great track record on security.
  
  
  
• To be fair, does anybody?
  
  
  
• Well, looks like Roll20 rolled a 20 on its perception check. (Tech Crunch)

  Roll20 said that on June 29 it had detected that a "bad actor" gained access to an account on the company’s administrative website for one hour, after which the company "blocked all unauthorized access and ended the network breach."

  Catching the bad guys before they get into your system is even better, but one hour is better than a whole long list of much larger and better funded organisations.
  
  
  
• The FDA plans to ban an additive commonly used in food and soda. (Axios)
  
  What, again? Can't you leave people alone?
  
  The additive is brominated vegetable oils.
  
  In front of my Dr Oopsie?!
  
  
  
• Tech layoffs are a thing of the past. (GeekWire)
  
  This time Microsoft firing another thousand people. The pace has certainly slowed down though.
  
  
  
• The 2024 LG Gram Superslim is an $800 15.6" laptop that weighs 2.2 pounds. (Liliputing)
  
  It comes with a 512GB SSD and a second M.2 slot for easy upgrades.
  
  On the other hand, the OLED screen is only 1080p and the memory is 16GB, soldered.
  
  It's almost an amazing device but they just couldn't go the extra millimeter.
  
  I'm pretty happy with my Asus laptop so far. It weighs significantly more than 2.2 lbs, but it has a 2880x1620 screen and 40GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• If you bought an Amazon Astro robot, it looks like you bought an expensive brick. (The Verge)
  
  Amazon is giving full refunds plus a $300 credit.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 05 2024 01:54 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: David Eastman at Friday, July 05 2024 04:15 AM (rmrII)

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