• Dissent is the highest form of terrorism.  (DHS)

  The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.  These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.

  I have a question.
  
  Get fucked, you dime-store Stalin wannabes.
  
  Well, I guess technically that's not a question.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile with that story about protestors trying to burn down an Ottawa apartment building...
  
  
  
  
  Uh huh.  Do go on.
  
  
  

• Gigabyte's new Aero laptops are on their way with Alder Lake chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The current models are interesting because they combine solid CPUs and graphics options with 4K AMOLED displays.  A lot of the time laptops with solid graphics go for low-resolution high-refresh display panels.  Since I spend far more time working than gaming I'd much rather have a high-res low-refresh screen.
  
  The 16" model has a 3840x2400 60Hz AMOLED panel or an optional 2560x1600 165 Hz LCD - still pretty good, up to a 12900HK CPU and 3080 Ti graphics, up to 64GB of RAM, and two M.2 slots so in theory a maximum of 16TB of SSD though that gets pretty expensive.
  
  Where the old models had a broad range of ports, the new ones are simplified: Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB-C port with DisplayPort support - so three outputs that can drive monitors without needing a dock, and a headphone jack.  Wired Ethernet seems to have disappeared.  On the other hand, it looks like they have the Four Essential Keys.
  
  
  
• Intel lost half a billion dollars on its Optane business last year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Optane is a technology similar to flash, but about ten times faster and ten times more expensive.  Since flash storage can already be very fast, and is much, much cheaper, that leaves only a small and stagnant market for Optane.  Which is a shame because on a purely technical basis it's kind of neat.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's plan to purchase Arm has fallen in a heap.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Current owner, Japanese investment group Softbank, will proceed with an IPO instead.
  
  
  
• The IRS has decided that maybe you don't need to sign up as a Twitch streamer just to file your taxes.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  Every organisation needs a grumpy old bastard whose job it is to tell people why what they're doing is a bad idea.  I try to fill that role but to my chagrin I am not grumpy enough.
  
  
  
• The EU announced plans to throw $48 billion at expanding chip production in Europe.  (Apple Insider)
  
  Unfortunately it seems that they don't actually have $48 billion, which is actually something of a surprise given how much they've fleeced US Big Tech companies for.
  
  
  
• Congress set aside $1.9 billion to pay for ripping Chinese spyware out of US communications networks.  Turns out the amount needed is $5.6 billion.  (The Register)
  
  Maybe they can fine European Big Tech companies....  Oh, wait.
  
  
  

Posted by: Tim at Wednesday, February 09 2022 11:30 AM (n+R81)

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• Not directly tech-related but it played out on Twitter so I'm going to snipe it.  (Also there's not that much tech news today.)
  
  Overnight all sorts of awful crimes broke out at the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa...  Unless they didn't.
  
  
  
  
  And suddenly the person tweeting out his tale of attempted mass murder went very, very silent.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Also the head of government-funded Antihate.ca got caught, well, making shit up.
  
  
  
  
  His "friend" said he saw the flyer in Ottawa...  And then downloaded an existing photo from Twitter and sent it to him because, um, he didn't have access to Twitter to post it himself.  Or a phone to take a picture, apparently.
  
  But although that one was fake, he definitely has others that are real.  Except he doesn't because he's not there, but trust him.
  
  Story checks out.
  
  
  
• The Freedom Convoy fundraiser on GiveSendGo has passed $4 million, despite an ongoing DDOS attack.  Their servers are still kind of broken but clearly some people are getting through.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Spotify is still trying to split the baby.  (Today)
  
  He apologises to the haters of Joe Rogan and to his own staff, says that Spotify is keeping Rogan anyway, and offers to pour $100 million down the drain of "marginalised" artists.
  
  This is gonna end well.
  
  Spotify was never a good company, and I'm assuming Rogan got his money and can walk if the house of cards collapses.  I hear CNN is going have a whole lot of vacancies soon.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the big advantage of Web3 is that it's decentralised and no-one has control and you can't cancel people oh wait.
  
  
  
  
  Apparently for the crime of suggesting that it would be nice if people didn't murder quite so many babies.
  
  
  
• Intel's i5-1240P is faster than an i7-1195G7.  (WCCFTech)
  
  By quite a good margin.  Which is to be expected, because the 1240P is a 12-core (4 fast cores + 8 slow cores) 12th generation chip and the 1195G7 is a 4-core 11th gen chip.
  
  The 14-core 1280P meanwhile (6+8 ) comes in just behind AMD's new 6900HX in multi-threaded tests.  But the 6900HX is an eight-core part, so that's not exactly a win for Intel.
  
  On single-threaded tests Intel's 12th gen leads by 10% over AMD and 20% over their own 11th generation.
  
  Also, the 1280P is a 28W part, and Intel's prior 28W lineup only went to 4 cores.  So there should be some much more capable thin-and-light laptop models this year.
  
  
  
• Largely pointless benefits aren't going to keep tech workers happy.  (ZDNet)
  
  75% of managers want to work from the office.  34% of staff do.  That's a problem in an industry struggling to find skilled workers.
  
  We're 100% remote at work, and it makes it a lot easier to find and retain staff.
  
  
  
• Will remote tech workers tolerate being monitored?  No.  (ZDNet)
  
  Betteridge's law never fails.
  
  
  
• What will keep tech workers happy then?  (ZDNet)
  
  1. Money.
  2. A company that isn't run by idiots.
  
  American Big Tech is in for a world of hurt.
  
  
  

Posted by: Frank at Monday, February 07 2022 06:25 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: MadRocketsci at Monday, February 07 2022 09:43 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 08 2022 12:24 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 08 2022 12:49 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 08 2022 12:51 AM (Z0GF0)

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Posted by: normal at Monday, February 07 2022 12:46 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 08 2022 12:53 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Question and Answer time is back!  Drop your questions in the comments today and I'll attempt to answer them tomorrow.  I did just get woken up in the middle of the night by work emergencies two days in a row so the answers might not be entirely coherent, but I will answer nonetheless.
  
  
  
• The Freedom Convoy has upended Canadian politics, launched similar protests in other countries, and raised $10 million on GoFundMe so...
  
  
  
  
  That's not entirely accurate - they're not stealing the money and giving it to other charities of their own choosing, they're stealing the money and giving it to charities selected by the Freedom Convoy organisers from a shortlist created by GoFundMe.
  
  You may wonder how this is legal, and the answer is it may not be.
  
  
  
  
  There's a new fundraiser up and running at GiveSendGo that has received $336,000 $390,000* in the last few hours.  And that's despite the fact that their site was down for half that time.
  
  * They got the site back up and have pulled in $54,000 while I was writing this post.  CSS is busted as I write this though.**
  ** $432,000 and the CSS is fixed.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apple, facing legal moves that would abolish its forced 30% cut of every payment it processes, has announced a new plan: It will take  a forced 27% cut of every payment it doesn't process.  (Apple)
  
  Also it will have the right to audit you any time and in any manner it sees fit and ban you if it is not appeased.
  
  
  
• Apple's privacy changes will cost Facebook $10 billion this year.  (The Economist)
  
  It's not that Apple is protecting your privacy, it's that they won't let anyone else violate it.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Facebook is focusing on critical issues like enforcing social distancing in virtual reality.  (The Guardian)
  
  We swear we are not making this up.
  
  
  
• Which might help explain why their stock price plunged by 25% in a single day.  (The Guardian)
  
  Also because no-one needs Facebook.
  
  
  
• Four of Cisco's small business router lineup have code red critical vulnerabilities.  (The Register)
  
  The combination of remote code execution bugs and privilege escalation bugs mean anyone, anywhere, can completely take over your router.
  
  Not good.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, February 06 2022 03:19 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, February 06 2022 10:19 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, February 06 2022 11:27 AM (5iiQK)

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Posted by: kimqi2 at Friday, August 30 2024 07:50 PM (1Pm7C)

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• So between Zoom calls this evening I briefly tuned into Nick Rekieta's stream with Robert Barnes, and thought I'd misheard him because it sounded like he was giving as shout out to Phase Connect vtuber Pipkin Pippa.
  
  Turns out he was giving a shout out to Phase Connect vtuber Pipkin Pippa and I'd missed something special - and the stream has been privated now.
  
  Two observations: First, that vtubers are counter-culture in a world where mainstream culture is increasingly insulting Marxist drivel (not a new observation I admit), and second, that if the three rabbit vtubers Pippa, Pekora, and Non ever get together we may experience an Earth-shattering kaboom of record proportions.
  
  
  
• There's nothing worse than legislation with a cutesy name and popular bipartisan support: The abominable EARN IT Act is back again.  (EFF)
  
  The point of the bill is to eradicate online privacy.  Not only would it open up every online to government snooping, it would make the use of encryption evidence against defendants in civil and criminal prosecution.
  
  Here's a handy list of the culprits.
  
  On the plus side - though I doubt this has entered the thinking of any of those listed - is that this would annihilate American Big Tech.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Supermicro's Alder Lake server motherboards have started showing up.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I know of at least one hosting provider offering Alder Lake servers right now, but they are using desktop motherboards and don't have end-to-end ECC or remote management features.  DDR5 RAM has on-die ECC which is a partial solution but DDR5currently costs three times as much as DDR4.
  
  
  
• Why not ZFS? (Ivysaur)
  
  Impressive.  Everything in the article is wrong.
  
  
  
• Requests bodies in GET.  (Evert Pot)
  
  Do not.
  
  
  
• Mathematicians have proved the André-Oort Conjecture.  (Quanta)
  
  This means that...  Nope, no idea.
  
  
  
• If you want a large Android phone with a high resolution screen, a pretty decent CPU, a 50MP camera, and a stylus, but only want to spend three hundred bucks to buy it outright, the Moto G Stylus is one.  (Liliputing)
  
  They're pretty good about not crapping all over stock Android too.

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 05 2022 12:07 AM (rIzT3)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, February 06 2022 11:16 AM (5iiQK)

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• So I thought I'd take a look a Phoenix NAP, the company reviewed the other day by Serve the Home.  They offer dedicated servers with the convenience of the cloud, and sane terms of service which amount to "Pay your bills on time, no spam, nothing illegal, no, seriously, no spam."
  
  There's a particular model they offer that would suit us well, based on Intel's new Xeon E3-2356G (equivalent to a desktop i5-11600K).  64GB RAM, 1TB NVMe storage, and 20Gbps networking for $113 per month.  That's a very fast network connection for that price.  With the default operating system you can have one deployed in under a minute, or ten minutes for a custom installation.  Perfect for deploying a cluster because you have lightning fast networking and complete control via the dashboard for when you screw up the firewall and/or routing settings and lose SSH access.
  
  Except...  They don't have any.
  
  
  
• The Wormhole cross-blockchain platform, supporting Avalanche, Oasis, Binance, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Terra...  Got hacked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  120,000 ETH, worth about $326 million, walked out the door.  In case you thought you were having a bad day.

• The WD Black SN770 is okay.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a new model of entry-level PCIe 4 DRAMless SSD; the MSRP is the same as the SN750 SE we saw on Sunday but it's up to 40% faster.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is here, where by here we mean it hasn't been announced and you can't buy it anywhere, that latter part isn't much different to the existing 3090.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Also it costs up to $6000.
  
  
  
• Scientists have invented a new metamaterial that is not just boingy, it's super boingy.  (Phys.org)

  By controlling the elastic and magnetic interactions, we engineer two distinct phases—the closed and open phases—in the deforming metamaterials and show that capabilities for energy storage and management are introduced by crossing through the phase boundary.  A Landau free energy–based model predicts the design space for metamaterial geometry and magnetic interactions to support phase transitions.  We demonstrate that magnetic interactions, instead of only elasticity [e.g., buckling or suppression of internal rotations], can control the coefficients in the Landau free energy and modulate the phase transitions.  The coexistence of the closed and open phases in metamaterials and their transition induce a stress plateau during mechanical deformation with enhanced energy storage and mitigation capacity.

  Oh, right.  That's what I thought.
  
  
  
• European regulators have ruled that the cookie consent popups that have proliferated in response to European regulations ruling that tracking users without consent is illegal, are illegal.  (Engadget)
  
  Either make popcorn or block the entire continent at the router.
  
  
  
• That outage that took the whole of North Korea off the internet?  Just some guy.  (Wired)
  
  They have a battalion of elite state hackers, we have some random dude sitting in his pyjamas in his parents' basement.  It's the Greco-Persian wars all over again, except the Greeks really need a shower and the Persians are communists.
  
  
  
• The Eppur si muove problem.  (The Federalist)
  
  Not directly tech related except in that so much of this is playing out online and, of course, so many of the Big Tech companies have pawned their souls for a sack of wet mice.  From Twitter to YouTube to Spotify to Facebook to GoFundMe, everyone is desperately playing whack-a-mole with the truth.
  
  The problem with liberals in the US is they got what they wanted - they swore to take power by any means necessary, and they did, and now everyone is realising that liberals don't have the remotest idea how to do anything.
  
  Which will all be very amusing come January 2025 if we haven't all died in a global thermonuclear apocalypse.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, February 03 2022 08:03 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Friday, February 04 2022 12:50 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, February 04 2022 01:20 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, February 04 2022 01:21 PM (Ix1l6)

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• AMD is expecting sales of $21.5 billion this year after a Q4 total of $4.8 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you remember the situation AMD was in back in 2015 and 2016, this is very encouraging.  AMD provides a viable alternative to both Intel and Nvidia, not only serving to keep the bastards honest, but often beating the bastards at their own game.
  
  Intel has recently caught up with AMD on the desktop after five years lagging behind, and Nvidia is probably a better choice for graphics for the average user.  (Though the GPU market is so distorted right now that it's impossible to say who is really providing the better price/performance tradeoff.)
  
  We've already seen what Intel does when it's not facing competition, and it was not healthy for anyone.

• Google, which is a terrible company run by idiots, made $20.6 billion in profits in a single quarter.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Ugh.
  
  
  
• The US Senate has introduced a bill to allow farmers to fix their own equipment.  (NBC)
  
  Farm machinery, that is.
  
  The bill focuses on right-to-repair for farm machinery rather than trying to immediately tackle the problem in all its forms.  That's probably not a bad thing; it could be easier to pass narrow and obviously necessary legislation, and it can be followed with further bills for cars and electronics.
  
  Also trucks.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon Pro W6400 is - to be honest - kind of anemic.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The good thing about these low-end workstation cards is they have four, sometimes even six, mini-DisplayPort outputs so even if they're not great for gaming, they're great for running lots of monitors for getting work done.
  
  This has two DisplayPort outputs, and the same graphics hardware as AMD builds into its new laptop CPU, making it just generally meh.
  
  
  
• Well, that's new.

  Can’t send messages because you subscribed to this channel while watching a video made for kids

  I subscribed to that channel over a year ago, you dumb bastards.
  
  
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1981 Video of the Day

• The soft bigotry of lowered expectations:
  
  2019: Dammit, they're out of triple-cream Brie.  Do we really have to settle for double-cream?
  
  2022: Check it out baby!  Name-brand toilet paper!
  
  
  
• Hot new NFT marketplace LooksRare has already done $8 billion in sales.  (Decrypt)
  
  If you're thinking "I bet most of that is fake", then you're right - 87% of those sales are users buying their own NFTs to drive up the price.
  
  In an effort to stabilise their marketplace and restore buyer confidence, LooksRare has implemented strict measures to...  Who am I fooling?  They haven't done squat.
  
  I'd be surprised if it lasts the year.

• Test driving PhoenixNAP's Bare Metal Cloud.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I'm running a bare-metal cloud server here in Sydney for development until I finish rebuilding my lab (still have boxes everywhere) and it's great.  Unlike a typical cloud server, you get an entire physical server, sitting in a rack, reserved entirely for you.  And unlike a typical dedicated server, you have a dashboard where your could spin up a new server for an hour, a day, a week, a year, whatever you need, have it online in a minute or so, and shut it down when you're done.
  
  PhoenixNAP's pricing is very close to what I'm paying here in Sydney - a six core server with 64GB RAM and 1TB NVMe storage is $105 per month, though the one I have here has 800GB mirrored instead, and the PhoenixNAP server has dual 10Gb Ethernet rather than 1Gb.
  
  It's about a quarter the price of Amazon while retaining the pay-by-the-hour flexibility.  You don't get all of Amazon's add-on services, but you should run a mile from Amazon's add-on services if you possibly can; they serve purely to lock you into that platform and Amazon has proven it cannot be trusted.
  
  The biggest difference though is bandwidth pricing.  Bandwidth on all the big clouds is highway robbery - $90 per terabyte at Amazon and IBM, and something similar at Google and Microsoft.
  
  With PhoenixNAP, $90 will buy you fifty terabytes of bandwidth with a few bucks left over for coffee.
  
  RAM is plentiful too.  Except for a couple of budget models, you get 64GB, 128GB, or more.  The only problem is storage.  The reasonably priced options have only 1TB or 2TB of storage, which is not really a lot.  My laptops have 5TB.
  
  They do offer their own S3-compatible cloud storage at $23 per TB per month - including 30TB of free bandwidth, which would cost $2700 at Amazon.  So if you're storing a lot of image or video files, it could take that load off your servers.
  
  I really like having a dashboard where I can just go clicky-clicky and provision new servers.  I really hate cloud pricing - and the general behaviour of Big Tech.  So for me this platform is something that bears looking into.
  
  
  
• Speaking of hating the general behaviour of Big Tech 84% of app developers support an antitrust bill targeting Apple and Google's app stores.  (The Hill)
  
  Justin Trudeau will be along in a minute to explain why this is a fringe minority of racists.
  
  
  
• The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed.  (Ask a Manager)
  
  A new type of parasite is taking advantage of remote work and remote hiring, having a qualified candidate show for the interview and then an alien bug in a skin suit  turn up for the job.
  
  In this case there's a happy ending involving a jumbo-sized can of Raid, but in some corporations this is likely going undetected.

Posted by: MadRocketSci at Wednesday, February 02 2022 01:07 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 02 2022 01:39 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: DougO at Wednesday, February 02 2022 06:29 AM (G1vK4)

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• Still no gluten-free chicken nuggets, but gluten-free chicken tenders are inbound.  Guess I'll live another week.
  
  
  
• The Royal Society says stop trying to censor scientific disagreements online.  (Royal Society)
  
  Even if one side is wrong, even if one side is obviously, blatantly wrong, censorship doesn't serve the truth.
  
  The comment thread at Hacker News is interesting.
  
  There's certainly a range of opinions but most of the comments agree that  (a) censorship has no place in scientific debate or outreach and (b) science has enough problems with the Replication Crisis that it can't afford to be pointing fingers at anyone else.

• Memory leaks: The forgotten side of web performance.  (Read the Tea Leaves)
  
  Somebody needs to wrap this around a brick and toss it through the window of the YouTube web client team.  Try watching a busy Hololive livestream on a computer with less than 32GB of RAM to find out why.
  
  
  
• Americans lost $770 million to social media scams in 2021.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's about a tenth of blockchain fraud or civil asset forfeiture, never mind the real wealth killers like inflation and government waste.
  
  The FTC shared useful tips on how to avoid getting scammed on social media:

  Stay off social media.

  
  
  
• PCs are back again.  But for how long?  (ZDNet)
  
  For as long as people actually need to get work done, you latte-swilling weenie.
  
  
  
• Went ahead and got a PinePhone to break free of the Apple/Google diarchy?  Wondering what operating system to run on it? Here's an easy way to test the 15 current options.  (Liliputing)
  
  That's quite a difference from Apple, or even from Android, where if you are really determined you often can install some alternative OS that is only fully functional on hardware that you can no longer buy.
  
  
  
• Ohio promised Intel $2 billion in incentives to attract the $20 billion chip factories recently announced.  (AP)
  
  A combination of new infrastructure (roads and water supply upgrades), tax breaks, and some sort of rebate to defray the relative expense of local construction against, um, places Intel had no intention of building a fab anyway.
  
  Still, of all the ways governments find to waste our money, this is one of the least destructive.

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, February 01 2022 02:59 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, February 01 2022 03:39 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, February 01 2022 04:40 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, February 01 2022 08:00 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, February 01 2022 08:09 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, February 01 2022 02:04 PM (Ix1l6)

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