• Weekends are Question and Answer time, unless I have to work, or I just worked two 18 hour days back-to-back, or I need to pack up and move house to a house I don't have, or my internet is down again, or my entire state is under flood and storm warnings, or every gluten-free foodstuff I normally eat is out of stock at the same time (possibly related to eastern Australia being underwater right now), or it's freaking World War III, but if it's all of those they cancel out somehow so Q&A is on.
  
  
  
• In the first sensible move of any of the participants in this whole debacle Russia has banned Twitter and Facebook.  (CBS / MSN)
  
  And over 140 other domains including the BBC.  Sadly we are not on the list, but this is just new additions and we may have been blocked previously.
  
  The BBC has responded by restarting its shortwave news broadcasts.  (The Verge)
  
  Everything old is new again.
  
  
  
• Russia doesn't have anything like China's Great Firewall but US companies are stepping up to help with leading provider of bad internet backbone connections Cogent cutting off access to Russia.  (ZDNet)
  
  They're justifying this by a broad reading of new EU regulations, but the regulations never actually say Russia has to go back to acoustic couplers and hope.
  
  
  

Tech News

• One moment, need to reboot my keyboard...
  
  
  
• With many of Ukraine's existing communication systems offline the new shipment of Starlink satellite dishes could become a target.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They're small and low-power and not easily spotted in the normal soup of radio waves, but if everything else has been knocked out one way or another they're much easier to detect.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the normal soup of radio waves the FCC is looking to crack down on crappy wireless avionics.  (Ars Technica)
  
  There's long been a fight between mobile carriers who say their operations don't infringe upon frequencies used in aircraft and aircraft makers and operators who say your phone will make their plane crash.
  
  It seems they're both correct - and the fault is with the aircraft, or rather wireless receivers used in some instruments.  They're so poorly designed that they pick up signals hundreds of megahertz outside their designated band.
  
  
  
• Yandex, Russia's version of Google only even more obnoxious about its web crawling efforts may be technically bankrupt.  (CNN)
  
  While the parent company is based in the Netherlands, most of its operations are in Russia, and recent sanctions act as a network partition event in an improperly balanced cluster.
  
  
  
• Microsoft meanwhile has blocked all new sales to Russia.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Microsoft has also been providing assistance to Ukraine to defend against hacking attempts, so whether you agree with their decision or not, they are actually doing more than just virtue signalling.
  
  
  
• Major cryptocurency exchanges are very pointedly not blocking Russia.  (CNN)
  
  Whatever you thing of cryptocurrencies generally, the underlying point is that there's no central control, and no-one can block your access to the blockchain.  So again, they're operating based on principles rather than profit, or rather, a little of one and a lot of the other.
  
  
  
• Similarly, ICANN is not intending to revoke Russian domain names.  (Ars Technica)
  
  That one was never on the cards.  The old .su TLD is still active.
  
  
  
• The US Space Force is planning to start patrolling the far side of the Moon.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because that is civilisation's chief area of concern right now.
  
  
  
• Firefly's ITX-3588J is a high-end alternative to the Raspberry Pi.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Can you get it?
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Oh, and one more thing?  Half the world's supply of ultra-pure neon used in chipmaking comes from Ukraine.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This was highlighted in 2014 when spot prices for neon shot up 600% during the invasion of Crimea, but then everyone went right back to sleep.
  
  
  
• Belarus is now on the tech industry shitlist too.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  
  
  
• The great thing about paying twice as much to get a Mac is that it just works.  (Derek Seaman)
  
  After trying three different docks and three different Thunderbolt to DisplayPort adaptors, it just works.
  
  
  
• More on the suckage of Western Digital's new high-capacity NAS drives.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Base on their ratings, having a ZFS pool of 20TB drives with a weekly data scrub would exceed the annual workload rating after four months, even if nobody was accessing the data.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, have a drive failure already on my new ZFS server.  Good thing I configured RAID-Z3.
  
  
  
• Apple is reportedly preparing to release the new Mac Studio.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is either a smaller version of the Mac Mini, or a larger one, or something else entirely.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, March 06 2022 06:54 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: furball321 at Sunday, March 06 2022 08:14 AM (n+R81)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 06 2022 08:27 AM (ZlYZd)

4 Pixy, after 6,000 years without it, what's the big deal about gluten-free. Does gluten really make you sick or is it just a preference?

As J notes, yeah, I have celiac disease.  You could say I prefer not to spend half my life in the bathroom, and you'd be correct.

I haven't gone into my symptoms because this is a family blog [Now you tell me -- Ed.] and the symptoms were kind of disgusting.  I've been gluten-free for ten or twelve years now and it made made an immediate and massive difference, but I'm still not healthy.

Which is reflected in my search for a new home.  I have strong preferences on certain features and I'm looking at plans and saying things like Where did you learn to design bathrooms?  Were you raised in a barn? when it's stuff that doesn't even occur to most people.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 06 2022 11:40 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 06 2022 12:15 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 06 2022 04:40 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Russia has asked Google to stop the spread of misinformation about its invasion of Ukraine.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that is.  Not Google's.  Google is so far as I know still deeply entrenched in the Sudetenland and not looking for further adventures.
  
  To be specific, Russia is objecting to calling the invasion an invasion, showing pictures of the invasion, streaming videos of the invasion, or generally claiming that Ukraine is a place that exists.

  Russia wants to introduce a new law that would punish spreading fake news about the Russian armed forces' military operations in Ukraine with up to 15 years in prison.

  Wonder where they learned that habit.
  
  
  
• And in particular, don't mention the fact that Russia is currently bombing an active nuclear power station.  (AP)
  
  Because that would be bad.
  
  
  

Tech News

• If you need a 12-core (sort of) NUC with dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports ASRock has one.  (Anandech)
  
  Two, in fact.  Should be pretty zippy; these use the new Alder Lake laptop chips.  4 fast cores plus 8 efficiency cores, which combined should be about twice the speed of the previous generation 4-core parts.
  
  
  
• The Intel Core i3-12300 is good value for money.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is a 4-core part priced at $143.  While four cores is not a lot these days, the new design makes it about as fast as my 2017 Ryzen 1700 system that I am typing this on right now - with half the cores.
  
  On single-threaded tasks it's about 80% faster.  
  
  And cheap.  Did I mention cheap?
  
  
  
• Russia declares war on Apple in 3... 2...  (9to5Mac)
  
  Apple Maps has been updated to show that Crimea is part of Ukraine and no longer Russian territory.  Unless you're actually in Russia.

• Found a six-acre plot of land neatly in my price range, on the edge of town, with power, water, and internet available.  Bit of a walk to the shops but since I have my weekly groceries delivered that's not a huge issue.
  
  
  
• Aaaand my internet just went down again.
  
  
  
• UCIe is PCIe for chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  AMD has used its own Infinity Fabric for its chiplet-based designs since 2017, while Intel has used, um, whatever it has used.
  
  UCIe is a shared specification developed by Intel, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC (among others) so that chips designed to the spec can easily be plugged together and might even work.
  
  Speeds go up to 256GBps, which is a lot.
  
  
  

Tech News

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 04 2022 12:05 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Saturday, March 05 2022 01:43 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 05 2022 05:33 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 05 2022 05:57 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Sunday, March 06 2022 02:44 AM (IC7R4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• I was promised eight inches of rain today.  So far only two.  I feel robbed.
  
  
  
• The Conti malware gang - who have thrown in their lot with Russia - have been hacked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If your team is going to side with one side it helps not to have the other side on your team - the deed seems to have been done dirt cheap by a Ukrainian gang member.
  
  Oops.
  
  Internal communications and source code have been published, as usual.

Tech News

• Benhmarking AMD's Ryzen 6000 laptop CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  Short story: It's the same chip (on the CPU side) as the old one, but a series of clever tweaks has made it 9% to 14% faster.
  
  On graphics it's in a class of its own.
  
  Meanwhile the Ryzen 5000 desktop range, no longer the fastest gaming processors around, 
  have received price cuts of 20 to 25%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ryzen 7000 is due out later this year, though, and will use a different motherboard.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's new 20TB Red NAS drives are rated for 300TB of writes or reads per year.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That's not a lot.  Particularly for reads.  You can do that in two weeks, leaving the remaining fifty somewhat empty.
  
  
  
• Small, cheap, fast: With Intel's new NUC, pick one.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It's basically a mini-ITX Alder Lake system, just with Intel branding.  If that's what you want, it is that.

• Shot:  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
  
  Chaser:
  
  
  
  
  In a warzone, has faster download speeds than 90% of Australia.
  
  
  
• Particularly Tasmania.  (ZDNet)
  
  The entire state lost internet access around 1:30 PM today.
  
  Major internet problems in Queensland and New South Wales today as well, due to large parts of those states being underwater.  We're currently in the latter half of "Of droughts and flooding rains".
  
  Come to think of it, I should check what towns are in trouble right now and scratch them off my list.  Armidale is a reported emergency area but so is the part of Sydney where I live right now, and while everything outside is thoroughly soggy, it's not coming inside.  Lismore and Ballina are less fortunate.  A couple of my co-workers in Queensland are cut off but otherwise safe.
  
  Update:

  The State Emergency Service put out a flood watch for the whole Sydney region, with the worst predicted for areas around the Upper Nepean River.

  That's unusual.  The Nepean, yes, but the entire Sydney region?  I'll be fine; I'm up on a hill in Sydney's north, but much of the western parts of Sydney are low-lying and flat.
  
  Update Two: Five to eight inches of rain predicted where I live tomorrow, with similar falls across Sydney.  Time to batten down.
  
  Update Three: I've been so busy with work that I missed the fact that Sydney flooded last week.  (ABC - the Aussie one)
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• 40Gb DisplayPort 2.0 connections connectors will be labelled DP40.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And the new higher speed 80Gb connectors will be labelled DP80.
  
  This will work over existing Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 cables which are rated for 40Gbps, because DisplayPort only needs to send data in one direction.  It actually switches all the receive wires into transmit mode.  (Except for the single USB 2.0 pair in the middle.)
  
  
  
• Western Digital's new 20TB NAS drive has 64GB of flash on board.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not, I understand, used for data caching, but to record metadata that is normally written to the disk itself.  This will still improve performance, and NAS units have their own dedicated SSD caching slots now so it's not so important it be built into the drives themselves.
  
  
  
• Internet domain registry and other services company Namecheap has stopped supporting Russia.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Russian customers and .ru, .by, and .su (which still exists) need to find a new home.
  
  The CEO is responding to questions at Hacker News.  The company apparently has staff in Ukraine.
  
  
  
• Toyota has suspended operations on 28 production lines after a key supplier got hit by a cyberattack.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There's a reason armies work on "hurry up and wait" rather than "just in time".  A perfectly efficient "just in time" strategy is 100% fragile; any problem at all propagates downstream.
  
  
  
• And the entire internet, like it or not, is a warzone.  (The Register)
  
  24/7.  It's a wonder anything works at all.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, March 02 2022 08:09 AM (bHHXR)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, March 02 2022 10:45 AM (MuaLM)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Quest for Pixy Manor continues apace.  I've found a 5 bedroom place on two acres - in the same country town I was looking at before - for around $300k less than they're asking for my current shoebox on a postage stamp.
  
  And it has gigabit internet, which is not something I can get here in suburban Sydney.
  
  It's not as nice inside as some of the other places I've looked at, but it has all the storage space I could ask for - an attached 3-car garage, plus a second detached 3-car garage.  And the land is already divided into two lots and for that $300k I could probably build something on the second lot and sell the original.
  
  

• Or I could just start my own crypto trading platform, defraud customers of $2.4 billion, and buy the whole damn town.  (MSN)
  
  And get indicted by a grand jury but that seems like a detail we can iron out later.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Lenovo's new ThinkPad X13s is a laptop power by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which is - according to this article - not just another respin of a mobile phone chip, but one designed for laptop use.  
  
  It has four fast X1 cores plus four low power A78 cores.  The fast cores in my new phone are A78, and this chip uses them as its low-power cores.  It will still lag behind Apple's M1, but this might finally make Windows on Arm viable.
  
  Wouldn't recommend it over an Intel or AMD model unless you need some serious battery life - it manages 28 hours on a single charge.
  
  13" 1920x1200 screen, and up to 32GB RAM and 1TB of SSD.
  
  
  
• Apple has filed a patent for a computer build into a keyboard, like the TRS-80 Model 1 and the VIC-20.  (The Register)
  
  Because of course they did.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:43 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:45 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: furball321 at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:01 PM (n+R81)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:13 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 01 2022 07:01 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, March 02 2022 03:46 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 02 2022 09:48 AM (Z0GF0)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• This is the way.
  
  
  
  
  Amazon takes longer than that just to change a status page from green to yellow.
  
  
  

Questions and Answers

• From sock_rat_eez:

  Pixy, can you recommend a cheap tablet that would be (relatively) easily rooted & switched to Linux ?
  10-inch-ish size preferred, performance expectations low, SD card slot

  I'm not really up on models can easily be rooted and what versions of Linux run well, but the people at the XDA Developers forum are.  Here's the guide for the Lenovo M10 FHD Plus I have for example.
  
  It can be a fiddly process even for a tablet that is known to be rootable though.
  
  
  
• From Faffnir:

  Using Brave,videos will not display for some COB's, mostly Weasel's Gun thread.
  
  Using Chrome works.
  
  Any suggestions?

  By default Brave doesn't install the Widevine DRM extension, so if the video is DRM-protected, it won't play.  Only thing I can think of immediately.
  
  
  
• From DaveX64:

  What is your favourite data recovery utility? I stupidly left the cover off my computer and had a wireless phone sitting within 8 inches of the bottom of a Western Digital 4TB Black mechanical hard drive. It still shows in Windows but access is sporadic. I have about 2TB of data on it but a lot of it is crap anyway, would still like to get a few things off it.
  
  Thoughts?

  One I used successfully about ten years ago was Stellar Phoenix.  They have a free download that tells you if there's something that can be recovered before you actually pay for it.
  
  The other one that has a solid reputation but that I haven't needed to use is SpinRite.  It's one of the oldest data recovery apps for Windows so it looks kind of clunky, but it's well-regarded.
  
  
  
• From badgerwx:

  I've heard that an SSD drive has a certain number of writes & that determines its lifespan. My laptop has an SSD main drive & a secondary HDD. Would it be worth it to move my /home & swap directories from the SSD to the HDD? I'd like to keep using this laptop as long as possible, and I'm not handy enough to open the case to replace anything.

  SSDs do have a limited lifespan, and it's more limited if you have a cheap QLC drive instead of a TLC one.  
  
  But modern SSDs are very clever about managing this and you have to rewrite the contents of the entire drive hundreds or even thousands of times before you run into that limit.  This does happen on busy database servers - there are more expensive SSDs rated for heavy database loads - but is unlikely on the average laptop.
  
  
  
• From Rodent:

  How are things in Australia Covid/Economy wise? Hopefully they're dropping quarantines and those concentration type camp things they had.

  Here in Sydney (and the state of New South Wales generally) it's been relatively sane throughout.  Could have been better, but not crazy.
  
  Very limited vaccine mandates.  Mask mandates have been on again / off again.  Currently you need to wear masks on public transport and in hospitals, and you need proof of vaccination for large indoor music events.  And there's a couple of types of venues - night clubs, strip clubs, and, um, houses of ill-repute - where you have to check in.
  
  I have never once checked in.  I don't have the check-in app installed.  I have worn masks half a dozen times.
  
  Economy is going mostly okay.  Our government did spend a lot of money keeping people in jobs during the various restrictions, but it seems to have been better managed than US efforts.  Smaller scale makes that easier, I guess.
  
  Definitely seeing inflation starting to bite here.  Each week some other item on my grocery list has gone up by 10%.  My Amazon Prime subscription is paying off there - fresh food prices don't seem to be affected nearly as much, and other groceries I can often order cheap in bulk from Amazon if I don't care what day they arrive.
  
  
  
• From questioning pookysgirl:

  What's the internet bandwidth for most of Australia? Do they use satellite for the Outback?

  Anyone in a metropolitan area and almost all country towns have 100Mbps available, 250Mbps or so if you're on cable, and 1Gbps on fibre.  Outside of town it's either fixed 5G (you get a big antenna for better reception) or a satellite solution.  There's a home-grown satellite solution called Sky Muster for the Outback, and Starlink just started deploying here too.
  
  

  How many undersea cables go into Australia? Do you ever have it that you're on an international call and it sounds like the whales are attacking the undersea cables with AK-47s? (Pooky and I used to get that sound circa 2012-2014. We'd laugh and make up stories about whale cartels.)

  There's at least a dozen major undersea cable links, the two biggest being Southern Cross which connects Sydney and LA via two different routes, and SEAMEWE3 from Perth to Singapore.
  
  It used to be that connecting from Sydney to Singapore would travel all the way to the US and back again, but they seem to have fixed that in the past couple of years.
  
  Sadly, no, I have not heard the whales.
  
  
  
• From mildly citrusy:

  What is your take on blockchain data storage such as filecoin?

  Unfortunately that's rather like asking what flavour of unicorn I prefer.  Crypto developers are really bad at keeping their tenses straight, and often speak of future events in the present tense.  Unless you have very small amounts of data or very large amounts of money, you can't store data on the blockchain.
  
  
  
• From markreardon:

  After 20+ years living on my corporate e-mail address, I'm coming up on retirement at the end of fiscal 2022.
  Can you discuss free vs pay e-mail and give suggestions for preferred options.

  Of all the big tech companies that will give you free email, I distrust Microsoft the least.  They'll just spam you with advertising, probably, and not report you to the Stasi so long as you are profitable.
  
  For paid solutions, ProtonMail is the benchmark, but they give you very little online storage.
  
  
  
• From Lexistexas:

  So, proof of work, to get on the blockchain requires solution of an algorithm, right? Who comes up with the algorithm? And how do the other nodes on the network know the answer in order to verify it?

  The algorithm is baked into the blockchain when it is designed (which means that a poorly-chosen algorithm can wreck a blockchain further down the road).
  
  The algorithms are designed so that it is hard to compute the right answer, but easy to verify that a supplied answer is correct.  This generally involves very large prime numbers and probably elves.
  
  
  
• From Bildo:

  I have an Asus ROG laptop that won't connect over wifi to any printer. I've checked my router, my firewall, and all the laptop settings I can I think of. No matter what I try I get the same "Wireless Printer Not Found" message. Any ideas as to what's going on?

  Elves again?  Possibly dark elves.  The combination of Windows networking and printers has always involved black magic.
  
  
  
• From The Mantastic Tor:

  You often make references to the Four Essential Keys. I've worked in IT for 25 years and had never heard this phrase before you, and I haven't been able to find any other mention of this phrase in my web searches. So, if you please, which keys are these?

  PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End.  If you are using a modern IDE without those keyboards you often to hold down three, sometimes four keys at once to perform common functions.
  
  I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that on small laptops there is no good solution to this.  Either the keys are missing, or they are present but the keyboard is too crowded or too small, or shifted one key to the left so the keys are never where you expect if you touch type.
  
  

Tech News

• Swapped the 512GB SSD in my Dell Inspiron 14 for the spare 4TB QLC one I had.  (I was originally going to use two 4TB QLC drives in my two Inspiron 16s but then (a) the QLC model went out of stock and (b) Amazon had the TLC model at the same price.  So I got two of those and the QLC drive I already had ended up surplus.)
  
  Opened it up (kind of fiddly), found the SSD slot (hidden but not very), installed the new drive, closed it up, and...
  
  Wouldn't power on.
  
  Opened it back up, swapped the original drive back in, powered it on with the case open - works.
  
  Installed the 4TB drive again, crossed fingers - powered on this time.
  
  Okay, done.  I promise to never open this one up again.  That just leaves, uh, four more laptops to do.  Including the Aero 13 which doesn't even have visible screws.
  
  Speaking of the Aero 13, it came with a big clunky barrel jack charger.  I have a little USB charger on the bedside table with one USB-C port (and four regular ones), and wanted to see if it would charge from that.
  
  Yep.  No problem.  It's only getting 35W so it won't charge very quickly, but since it only gets used in the evening for watching YouTube and checking websites, the chance of me running through its battery life is basically zero anyway.
  
  
  
• Intel, AMD, and TSMC have cut off supply of chips to Russia.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China has also been banned from shipping products using those chips to Russia, which doesn't mean they won't do it on the black market anyway, but restrictions on volume and higher prices will fairly quickly strangle Russian IT.
  
  China's own chip production is mostly at 20nm, several years behind Taiwan and South Korea which are both at 5nm, or Intel at 7nm.
  
  
  
• Nvidia was reportedly breached by South American extortion group LAPSU$.
  
  South American extortion group LAPSU$ was also reportedly breached by Nvidia.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The story is Nvidia followed the backchannel to the hackers' own servers, encrypted their data, and is now holding them to ransom.
  
  Many grains of salt with this one, though the initial hacking attempt appears to be confirmed.
  
  
  
• Russia is gradually being cut off from the SWIFT payment network.  (The Guardian)
  
  Russia has $500 billion in foreign reserves...  Digitally.  They can't spend it if no foreign bank will talk to them.
  
  Of course with the idiots currently in charge in Washington DC and Berlin this won't be a clean isolation, but they can turn the thumbscrews tighter day by day.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 28 2022 03:23 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, February 28 2022 07:23 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 28 2022 09:31 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Weekends are Question and Answer time, when I'm not working because the blockchain has blown up again, or stuck on a mobile link with a two second ping time, or tied up moving house, or whatever is scheduled for next week that I don't want to think about.
  
  Drop your questions in the comments today and if I don't get crushed by a meteorite I will endeavour to answer them tomorrow.
  
  
  
• Internet is back on.
  
  It was the cable between the modem and the wall socket.
  
  How exactly that got fried by the lightning strike when nothing else was affected I do not know.  Maybe they have optoisolators at both ends to protect against this sort of thing.
  
  First thing I watched was a Minecraft stream with Pina Pengin of Prism Project, possibly the single nicest vtuber in the world, which got gatecrashed by Pipkin Pippa of Phase Connect who has a standing invitation to join Nick Rekieta's livestream if that gives you any indication.
  
  
  
• Wait, HoloEN is having an unarchived off-collab?!  Amelia, Ina, Mumei, Fauna, and Kronii are all in the same room.  You can tell by the acoustics - they're terrible.  Right now they're singing the guitar solo from Bohemian Rhapsody, as you are required to by law in any karaoke session involving more than three people.
  
  
  
• The US and allies including Taiwan have announced broad export restrictions of technology to Russia.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Does that mean video card prices will finally come down?
  
  
  
• China's supreme court has ruled that fundraising via crypto tokens is a crime punishable by ten years in prison.  (The Star)
  
  Does that mean video card prices will finally come down?
  
  
  
• Nvidia is investigating an attack that took down parts of its internal network for two days.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  Nvidia says that its "business and commercial activities continue uninterrupted" - which means that the attack was aimed at its R&D.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Russian hacking group Conti basically announced that it's an arm of the FSB.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There might be some independent criminal hacking groups operating in Russia, but for the most part it's government controlled to a greater or lesser degree.
  
  Also in that article: The FSB got hacked.
  
  
  
• The poor you will have with you always because poverty is relative.  (Jeff Kaufman)
  
  Shoots down a Twitter meme about how modern minimum wage earners make less than Bob Cratchit, because minimum wage earners throughout history by definition earn minimum wage.  The meme ignores purchasing power, which has gone through the roof.
  
  
  
• The claimed effect size is about a zillion times higher than is plausible.  (Statistical Modeling and Stuff)
  
  Good article about how you can immediately disregard certain scientific papers as garbage if they claim unreasonably large effect sizes.
  
  So if an article says that babies whose mothers regularly sang to them average 2 weeks earlier on learning goals than the control group, that's just normally dubious stuff.  But it they claim six months earlier, it's trash, throw it out right away.
  
  
  
• How to use an iPad Pro to power your home office.  (ZDNet)
  
  Step One: Don't have a real job.
  Step Two (optional): Get offended when people point this out.
  
  
  
• The USPS has told the EPA to go fuck itself and is proceeding with the purchase of 150,000 new trucks with internal combustion engines.  (Washington Post)
  
  "If you give us more money, we'll think about also buying some electric ones," they added.
  
  
  
• The world's largest bacterium has a sort of proto-nucleus.  (Science)
  
  Bacteria normally have their DNA just scattered about like toys in a kid's bedroom after a playdate, but this one has it all neatly stored away like that one kid who you just know is going to have a Wikipedia page before they turn 21.
  
  Also of note is the size: It's 9mm long, on average, with specimens up to twice that.  Bacteria are not supposed to do that either.
  
  
  
• How to achieve a completely secure link between two devices that are not themselves secure.  (Quanta)
  
  Quantum.
  
  The difference in this article is that they actually did it - it's not just theory anymore.
  
  
  
• Status pages at large internet companies are garbage.  (The Register)
  
  There was an outage at AWS last week, but you wouldn't know it from their status page or their official announcements - because those are the same thing.  Changing a single indicator from green to yellow on the AWS status page is a management decision, not an automated process.  Without approval, that light stays green even if the entire datacenter just got eaten by Nyarlathotep.
  
  That's where Status Page Status Page comes in.  (Status Page Status Page)
  
  It checks what the status pages for AWS, GitHub, and Slack are saying, compared with what is actually happening in the real world, and goes red if they don't match up.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: Mumberthrax at Sunday, February 27 2022 09:14 AM (YVq1I)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, February 27 2022 10:57 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 27 2022 12:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: John D at Monday, February 28 2022 01:08 PM (VAiJm)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Found a house I like.  Well, I say like, but that's not quite the right word.  Listed at around the market value of my current place, but (a) the lounge/dining area alone is roughly the size of my entire home, (b) the land area is larger than the land footprint of this entire townhouse complex, and (c) it has gigabit internet available (rare in Australia).
  
  Catch is it's a bit of a commute.  Like about ten hours.
  
  On the third hand we don't have an office in Sydney anymore, so I don't have a commute.
  
  
  
• Samsung shipped a hundred million phones with broken encryption.  (ThreatPost)
  
  They were quietly notified last year and slipped a couple of patches into the regular updates, so if you've updated your phone since last September you should be good.
  
  Samsung chose a robust encryption method but got the implementation details wrong, leaving it leaky and prone to attack by unprivileged apps on the phone.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Zion Pro is a 15.6" 4K AMOLED portable touchscreen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You probably don't need a 15.6" 4K AMOLED portable touchscreen, but if you do, this certainly is one.  Even I don't need a 15.6" 4K AMOLED portable touchscreen, but now I want one.
  
  
  
• Smaller, lower resolution, possibly more practical, and still OLED is the Asus Vivobook 13 Slate.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  A Windows tablet with a detachable keyboard starting at $599 - don't buy that one, it only has 4GB of RAM - with a 13" 1080p screen and a Pentium Silver N6000 CPU.
  
  That CPU is...  Oh.  I looked it up.  It sucks.  Forget I mentioned this.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's next-generation RTX 4000 range will be much faster than the 3000 series but not much more power-efficient.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which means power consumption will go through the roof - allegedly as high as 850W.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 26 2022 12:19 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 26 2022 12:46 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 26 2022 12:47 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 26 2022 02:06 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: DougO at Saturday, February 26 2022 06:04 AM (G1vK4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 26 2022 08:20 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 26 2022 03:47 PM (ZlYZd)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 25 2022 03:22 AM (Z0GF0)

Hide Comments | Add Comment