• We posted part one of a video series about the solution to a 65 year old mathematical puzzle a few months ago.
  
  
  
  At the time, only two numbers remained to be found.  The video was made in 2015, but by coincidence I posted it just before the next number was found.
  
  
  
  And now the final missing number has been found, and it is...
  
  Forty-two.
  
  
  
  
• Samung has an affordable 8K QLED TV.  (AnandTech)
  
  Yeah, I thought it said OLED for a moment too.
  
  It's still 8K so "affordable" means $2500, but for a 55" 8K display that's not so bad.  Would be an interesting choice for a computer monitor since it's the same pixel density as a regular 4K 27" display, though I'd personally rather have something 8K wide but only half the height.
  
  
• COPPA and CDA 230 are colliding and we're getting bombarded with the legislative equivalent of gravity waves.  (TechDirt)
  
  Mike stops inventing rights out of whole cloth for a moment and provides the analysis that makes TechDirt worth reading.
  
  The FTC basically decided that although YouTube as a whole is protected by CDA Section 230, individual channels are in violation of COPPA and thus YouTube as a whole is liable.
  
  Google settled rather than trying for an appeal, probably because this would have been spectacularly bad PR.  But when the "think of the children" line is off the table in some future case I expect this to go to the Supreme Court.
  
  
• Apple is blaming Google for tanking the value of iOS (reads fine print) vulnerabilities.  (WCCFTech)
  
  While Google's Play Store is a complete mess compared to Apple's App Store - mostly because the App Store is nightmarishly restrictive - iOS itself has had quite a few security issues of late.
  
  
• Let's Encrypt is encrypting 30% of web domains.
  
  This is good - Let's Encrypt is free and support is built right into modern proxies and web servers like Caddy.
  
  And it's bad, because a successful stealth attack targeting Let's Encrypt could endanger 30% of web domains in one go.  (You'd also need to fake their DNS, but that's just a question of offering free public WiFi.)
  
  
• PingFS stores your files in (reads fine print) the payloads of in-flight ping packets.
  
  It's mercury delay lines for a new age.
  
  
• Cube World aten't dead.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  I bought it and spent some time playing it years ago, but it went into hibernation in 2014 and updates have been sparse.  But now:
  
  
  I liked it at the time but it was an early beta release and I ran out of things to do after a while.  I'll be interested to see what's changed since then.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 08 2019 02:08 AM (Reqnf)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, September 08 2019 01:14 PM (+qGjD)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, September 09 2019 06:00 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, September 10 2019 01:04 PM (rglbH)

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• Huawei announced their Kirin 990 and 990 5G CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  These have the A76 core, the same as in the Kirin 980, but have a 60% larger GPU running at a slightly lower frequency.
  
  Huawei said the reason for A76 is that the A77 isn't delivering the desired performance per watt on TSMC 7nm, and they will likely hold off until 5nm is available.
  
  
• USB4 apparently supports 40Gbps transfers in USB mode as well as in PCIe mode when the optional Thunderbolt 3 compatibility is enabled.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Can we please use this to replace SATA?
  
  
• Facebook leaked 419 million phone numbers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You know, in the old days, we had these things called "phone books", and they basically just gave them to you.  Every year.
  
  
• That just means the court is also wrong, Mike.  (TechDirt)
  
  There is no First Amendment right to a White House press pass, and your Fifth Amendment rights are not being violated if yours is suspended because you are an asshole in public.
  
  
• Samsung showed off a prototype key-value SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  SSDs are normally block-addressed.  This one is arranged like a simple database - think Berkeley DB rather than MySQL.  You have a pool of objects, each identified by a key (up to 255 bytes) mapped to a value up to 2MB in size.
  
  So rather than the CPU mapping keys to locations in a file to block addresses and doing the appropriate reads on the SSD, you just shoot the key at the SSD and get the data back.
  
  This does require an update to the NVMe spec, and I'm not sure how redundancy is handled - these days they might just say use two servers.
  
  Potentially interesting but I'm not sure how much this will improve on what we already have.
  
  
• COBOL turns 60 this month and still works better than Node.js.  (ZDNet)

• Intel's next-generation high-end desktop CPUs will launch next month.  (AnandTech)
  
  Cascade Lake-X will offer up to 109% better performance per dollar than Skylake-X, says Intel.
  
  So, basically, a price cut.
  
  
• The US Copyright Office's handling of the designated DMCA agent database works about as well as you might expect which is to say not at all.  (TechDirt)
  
  To be officially protected by the DMCA you must register a designated agent to receive complaints.  In 2016 the Copyright Office simply deleted all the registrations, just because, so even if you did register, you'd better go take a look again.
  
  
• So not time-travelling big game hunters firing a .700 Nitro Express then.  (Science Daily)
  
  
• YouTube has done what they do best: Banned another 17,000 channels and disabled comments on all kids videos.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  This is further fallout of the FTC investigation over targeted advertising on children's videos.  Google could have just not shown targeted advertising, but no, they had to screw everything up.
  
  
• Samsung's Galaxy Fold is back.  (ZDNet)
  
  It will go on sale in South Korea tomorrow, to be followed by Europe, Samsung having correctly judged that American tech journalists are dangerous idiots who can't be trusted with a kitchen sponge.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 11:20 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 11:23 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 11:37 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 11:48 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 06 2019 12:03 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 06 2019 02:12 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 06 2019 02:45 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, September 06 2019 03:30 PM (+qGjD)

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• Samsung's Exynos 980 is a mid-range smartphone CPU with the brand new A77 core.  (AnandTech)
  
  First one I've seen.  Also, 5G.
  
  
• Acer's Predator Triton 500 has PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys.  (AnandTech)
  
  Oh, and someone mentioned something about a 300Hz display but I wasn't really listening.
  
  
• Thought YouTube's content policies were bad before?  Well, now the government has got involved.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you create "child directed content" on YouTube and don't specifically mark it as such, you could have personal liability under COPPA for what YouTube does with your content.
  
  Simple solution: Mark everything as "child directed".
  
  
• Maesh is a service mesh built on Traefik for Kubernetes clusters.  (Medium)

  Installing Maesh to your cluster is easy: install the Helm chart, as there are no helper applications, no CRDs to install, and no new vocabulary for users to learn. If users understand how pods and services work, then Maesh will be easy to understand and use.

  No, you're not having a stroke.  I have no idea what that means either.  Glad to hear there's no new vocabulary at least.
  
  
• AMD is working on a BIOS fix for Ryzen 3000's low boost clocks.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There is apparently a specific issue that can be patched, and it's not just underperforming chips.
  
  
• Serverless to cgi-bin is an extension for Chrome and Firefox that does precisely what its name would suggest.  (GitHub)
  
  
• The Internet of Things is all about giving end users control over their own sorry I can't even type that with a straight face.  (ZDNet)
  
  What?  Just because you bought something you thought you owned it?
  
  
• USB4 is ready and coming to devices next year.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is basically USB 3.2, which already exists, plus optional Thunderbolt 3, which has been shipping since 2015.
  
  It supports 40Gbps, but it's not clear if that's only in the optional Thunderbolt mode or if it's also available in USB mode.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 07:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 07:43 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 07:46 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Cue is a new scripting language from Google that has more on this later.
  
  Seriously?  You're the richest corporation in the world.  That wouldn't hold up for a fourth-grade science fair.
  
  
• Intel has announced new Cooper Lake and Ice Lake server CPUs based on Socket 4189.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is starting to get out of hand.
  
  
• Avast ye 850,000 scallywags ye have been remotely disinfected.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A bug in a remote exploit package called Retadup allowed it to be remotely exploited - and wiped out.
  
  
• China is embedding propaganda in Twitter porn accounts.  (Quartz)
  
  If you can't trust Twitter porn accounts, who can you trust?
  
  
• Should you be using web workers?  Yes, but only if your client side code actually does something.  (Medium)
  
  Also, the entire JavaScript ecosystem is garbage.
  
  
• Do not connect the BMC port directly to the internet you idiots.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Distinguishing satire and parody from sincere nonsense is one of the hardest tasks for AI.  And also for humans.  And for whatever is running YouTube these days and just exterminated Goeppels-chan.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 04 2019 01:25 AM (Iwkd4)

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Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, September 04 2019 03:03 PM (ZlYZd)

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• Dark Patterns are tricks websites play on you to get you to do what they want.  (Dark Patterns)
  
  Their Hall of Shame ranges from amusing to irritating to horrifying.
  
  I don't know whether that Chrome setting from yesterday was a deliberate dark pattern or if Chrome is designed by morons and it just came out that way.  Hard to tell sometimes.
  
  
• Mmm.  Gluten-free dark chocolate Tim Tam clones.
  
  
• Don't count on your Ryzen 3900X hitting 4.6GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though that is the advertised boost clock, a large majority of chips only seem to reach 4.5GHz.
  
  This is based on survey results and is not authoritative, but there are enough chips failing to hit the rated boost clock to indicate a problem.
  
  
• Is Cobol holding you hostage?  (Medium)
  
  Only if you're an idiot, because the examples used in the article show that Python solves the problem better than Cobol does.
  
  
• The Radeon Pro WX 4100 is a half-height half-length single-slot card that can drive four 4K monitors.  (Serve the Home)
  
  We pit it against dual Nvidia Titan RTX cards with NVLink.  Turns out it's not as fast.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2019 02:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2019 02:26 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2019 02:35 AM (Iwkd4)

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• How to get Chrome to stop nagging you about enabling notifications for random websites.  (The Next Web)
  
  Problem is, this is stupid.  The opposite to "Ask before sending" is "Don't ask before sending", not "Don't ask, don't send".  There is no way a user would guess what turning this option off would actually do.
  
  And that's if it works as this article suggests.  If it doesn't work it's even worse.
  
  
• The problem with sneering at a senator pushing a silly bill to erase CDA 230 protections for saying that Silicon Valley is no longer innovative is that it's true.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• C4 is a self-compiling C compiler and bytecode interpreter in 528 lines.  Of C.  (GitHub)
  
  
• Wrong kind of innovation!  (Fast Company)
  
  Is Silicon Valley building a totalitarian "social credit" system - or have they already?
  
  
• Google's new privacy sandbox has nothing to do with protecting your privacy.  (EFF)
  
  Advertisers are still entirely able to track you and match up ads to purchases.  It's all about Google protecting their bottom line.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 02 2019 02:39 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, September 02 2019 02:21 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 03 2019 12:44 AM (PiXy!)

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• Linux kernel patches indicate that AMD's next-gen mobile APU will support LPDDR4X-4266.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  LPDDR4 is essentially mobile only; it requires memory to be soldered directly onto the motherboard.  Desktop APUs will have to wait for DDR5 to get an equivalent bandwidth boost.
  
  This is important because AMD's current-gen APUs are already bandwidth-limited.  They could easily add faster integrated GPUs but they wouldn't help because the integrated GPU is not the issue.  I think they currently specify DDR4-2400 for the mobile parts, so 4266 is a big jump.
  
  
• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's Twitter account got hacked.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Probably via a SIM-swap attack.
  
  Don't use SMS for 2FA if you're a likely target for something like this; carrier security for end users is a joke.  Use any of the one-time authenticator apps.
  
  
• LittleFS is a filesystem for microcontrollers that is safe against power-loss, provides consistent performance, automatically wear-levels flash storage, and only needs a few kilobytes of RAM.  That's not an easy combination of features to deliver.
  
  
• Intel has started sampling 10nm Agilex FPGAs to select customers.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These are high-end parts that start at the price of a second-hand car and go up from there, for use in products that cost as much as a house, that you might only sell ten or twenty of, total.  The alternative is designing a custom chip, which can easily cost millions.
  
  An interesting thing is they implement 112G transceivers, which will likely form the basis of PCIe 7.0 in, oh, 2028 or thereabouts.
  
  
• It's Reddit's turn to fall over today apparently due to AWS issues.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's working for me (I use it to follow stories for these updates) unless I go to my profile or inbox, and then it goes into a perpetual login redirect loop.
  
  
• Don't buy a Macbook.  (ZDNet)
  
  Well, what they say is that pen support is a must-have feature for new notebooks.  I have two notebooks with pen support but I've been so busy the last few months - and spending all my time working from home - that I've hardly used them.
  
  
• Untitled Goose Game is an Epic Game Store time exclusive I am not making this up.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  
• Final Fantasy VIII Remastered is getting censored.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  I don't know which is funnier, the tech company rearranging a bird's feathers for modesty, or fans carrying out geometric analysis of a character's decolletage to prove that the visual difference is not purely due to the HD textures.
  

• Sharp is working to deliver 8K over 5G.  (AnandTech)
  
  This may seem something of a niche market right now, but when 8K displays come down in price the way 4K already has and become ubiquitous, and 5G does the same, which will take a little longer, these things will be deployed everywhere.
  
  And then they'll all get hacked but that's another news item.
  
  
• Asus is preparing at least two motherboards for what PCPer has taken to calling Thirdripper.  (VideoCardz)
  
  AMD appears to be planning three chipsets for their new flagship desktop parts: The low-end TRX40, the high end WRX80, and the middle-end TRX80.
  
  Yes.
  
  
• Someone is suing the people behind that baby shark song though not over crimes against humanity as you might expect, but copyright infringement.  (TechDirt)
  
  The interesting thing here is while the litigant points out that miscreant Korean company PinkFong did not write the song...  Neither did he.  
  
  The really interesting thing is that, in this hyperdocumented age, no-one seems to know who did write it.  It just kind of appeared.
  
  
• NPM has banned ads.  (ZDNet)
  
  The only possible move other than to burn down the entire ecosystem, which was my preferred approach.
  
  
• Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has released Dqlite, an open source distributed embedded database.
  
  At first I was Who the hell needs a distributed embedded database? and then I realised that the target market is me.
  
  Thanks Canonical, I'll take a look at this.
  
  
• Compass needles are going to point north for the first time in 360 years but only for a few days in September and only if you are in Greenwich, England.  (The Guardian)
  
  
• Google uncovered a long-term effort to target iPhone users via known security flaws.  (Six Colors)
  
  The bugs in question were patch months ago.  What Google found was a major ongoing effort to use the bugs to compromise the phones of selected victims - most likely by a state actor.
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, August 31 2019 02:36 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 01 2019 03:46 AM (PiXy!)

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• Threadripper 3 will not be ignored dammit.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is the third benchmark leak of an engineering sample of a Ryzen 2 Threadripper.  Base clock of 3.6GHz up from 3.0GHz on the 2990WX, plus the 15% IPC uplift we've seen, plus more consistent memory latency with the new I/O die means this will be a high-end workhorse rather than a niche part.  And that Intel is gonna get stomped.
  
  
• Comet Lake S is Intel's response to Ryzen 2.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not much of a response, admittedly.  10 cores at 125W where Ryzen is already shipping 12 cores at 105W and will soon have 16 cores.  I don't know if AMD have been more specific than "September" but then Intel haven't been more specific than "next year".
  
  
• The DOJ is considering blocking a cable from Los Angeles to Hong Kong for national security reasons because there totally aren't any other internet routes between America and China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Possibly because Facebook and Google (who are funding the cable's construction) won't let them tap it.  Of course the Chinese government will be listening to everything on the other end.
  
  
• Google just deleted an open source Android app and terminated the developer's account because

  After reviewing your appeal, we have confirmed our initial decision and will not be able to reinstate your developer account.

  they have apparently morphed into Twitter.
  
  
• Analog Devices and MIT have teamed up to build a real live working microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's a RISC-V core (open source and very popular) with around 14,000 transistors.
  
  It runs at a clock speed of...  Oh.  It runs at a clock speed of 10kHz.
  
  This one might need some more work, guys.
  
  
• Microsoft has approved exFAT support in Linux and it's coming whether you like it or not.  (Phoronix)

  I know the code is horrible, but I will gladly take horrible code into staging. If it bothers you, just please ignore it. That's what staging is there for

  Let he who has not pushed horrible code into staging cast the first revert.
  
  
• Gravitational wave observatories have discovered a black hole that shouldn't exist.  (Quanta)
  
  It's in the gap between regular supernova remnants and supermassive black holes where black holes should be exceptionally rare - far too rare for our gravity wave telescopes to have found one yet.  Depending on their mass, dying stars form white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes.  But extremely large stars - above 65 solar masses - don't leave anything behind at all: The supernova obliterates the star entirely.
  
  This black hole looks to be around 100 solar masses, and it shouldn't be there.
  
  
• PATCH YOUR CISCO ROUTERS NOW.  (ZDNet)
  
  10/10 would not buy again.
  
  
• Google may be moving Pixel production from communist China to...  Vietnam?  (ZDNet)
  
  I guess that's an improvement.  Maybe?
  
  
• The Xioami Redmi Note 8 Pro has five cameras including a 64 megapixel main sensor.  (The Next Web)
  
  Chinese pricing tops out at $252 with 8GB RAM and 128GB flash.  Expect it to cost a little more than that if it comes to Western shores, even grey market.
  
  CPU is a 2.05GHz dual-core A76 plus six A55 cores, which is the latest technology if not the highest clock speed, and should do pretty well.  Screen is 2340x1080, and it has a 4500mAh battery.
  
  And yes, it has a headphone jack.  (GSMArena)  And a microSD slot.
  
  
• High-end TVs from several manufacturers' 2020 lineups are expected to ship with an experimental leave the video the fuck alone mode.  (Ars Technica)
  
  In this mode, the advanced adaptive artificial intelligence in your TV set will be whacked across the nose with a newspaper (included) and told to leave the video the fuck alone.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 30 2019 12:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, August 30 2019 09:47 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, August 30 2019 01:32 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 30 2019 01:56 PM (PiXy!)

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