• Big Tech Detective is a Chrome extension that block requests to Google.  (The Verge)
  
  Unsurprisingly, you have to install it manually.
  
  It's configurable to block requests to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and/or Amazon, and to block the page that made the request.
  
  
  
• Console architecture from the NES to the Wii.  (Copetti)
  
  Each console gets its own page with a lot of detail; even so, some of the features need entire pages of their own.  Mode 7 on the SNES springs immediately to mind.
  
  
  
• Betteridge's Law of Quantum Headlines: If your headline uses the word "quantum" the answer is no.  (ZDNet)
  
  In this case:

  Could quantum computers fix political polls?

  And they give the answer right there in the subhed, so they are at least nominally aware.
  
  
  
• The trouble with Cassandra.  (Min.io)
  
  Specifically the trouble with using Apache Cassandra as a metadata store for object storage platforms like Amazon S3.  If that seems awfully specific, that's because MinIO is a storage platform like Amazon S3.
  
  It's open-source.  I didn't realise it was AGPL, but that shouldn't matter for 99% of applications where you just want to use it, rather than sell it as a product.
  
  If you want to sell it as a product, and can't work with AGPL, though, forget it.  Their Enterprise license is capacity based and costs four times as much as simply using Backblaze B2.  That is, the license alone costs more than outsourcing the whole thing.
  
  I suspect their audience is companies that want to use S3 APIs (why?) but need to control their own data.  A thousand bucks a month for long-term support on a 50TB storage pool is a lot less than even a potential privacy lawsuit.
  
  Oh yeah, the problem: Cassandra is not ACID.  It's not even eventually consistent, not by itself.  It's highly available, continuing to work even if parts of your network or multiple servers are down.  MongoDB by comparison will only work if a majority of nodes are available and you are connecting to that majority.
  
  It can also, by default, lose confirmed writes.
  
  So an object can be written to the datastore, be confirmed as available, and then if a problem occurs with the database - not the storage - be lost from the index and unfindable.
  
  Also, last time I checked - and admittedly it's been a while - MinIO didn't support user authentication or any other form of multi-tenant support; everything was owned by one user.  Now it does.  That makes it a lot more useful.
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 25 2021 12:59 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 25 2021 03:11 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 25 2021 09:18 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Kristophr at Thursday, February 25 2021 06:08 PM (DvtjP)

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• Building ByteDance's censorship machine.  (Protocol)
  
  If you're using a Chinese online platform, the Chinese government reads everything you say.  If you speak a language the spies don't know, you will encounter technical difficulties until you stop doing that.
  
  
  
• They both blinked.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  Facebook is unbanning Australia after some minor amendments to the shitty new link tax legislation.  They still have to pay the link tax, they just have more time to negotiate deals before any arbitration is triggered.
  
  
  
• Samsung's S21 Ultra is a brilliant flagship phone but.  (AnandTech)
  
  Lacks a headphone socket, has no options for expandable storage, and starts at $1200.
  
  
  
• JPEG XL is JPEG 2000 only good.  (Cloudinary)
  
  It supports transparency, overlays, animation (albeit very basic animation), and can be transcoded losslessly from existing JPEG images.  That is, both JPEG and JPEG XL are lossy, but there's no additional loss in the conversion.
  
  The sample images show that some of the competing formats - not JPEG XL - have interesting artifacts at high compression levels.  That is, they don't look like artifacts; they're not blocky, blurry, or smeared.  They just get the details wrong.  Flick between the original and compressed version and some of the fine details move.
  
  
  
• JWCC is JSON with commas and comments.  (GitHub)
  
  Seems reasonable.
  
  
  
• Concise Encoding is JSON with the lot.  (Concise Encoding)
  
  And a fried egg on top and spam.
  
  If you want JSON with the lot, the spec looks good.  If you want it in a language other than Go, time to roll up your sleeves.
  
  
  
• Yes you can.  (Late Checkout)
  
  Article about Reddit - and how it is undervalued relative to the other social networks - mentions as a glaring flaw that you can't search within a subreddit.
  
  You can.  The UI isn't great; you either need to know the syntax, or enter your search and then choose to narrow it to a particular subreddit, but it absolutely works.
  
  Much of the advice given in the article seems similarly wrong.  The numbers are interesting, though.  Unless they are also wrong.  I didn't check.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Thoughts from an Ethereum developer.  (GitHub)
  
  
• Ethereum is painful and mostly useless.
• Web3 is a stupid idea.
• POA networks aren't a solution.
  
  
  
• Not 1984 but Brave New World.  (ZDNet)
  
  Is that better? Maybe, if the only available alternative was indeed 1984.
  
  The usual suspects have signed on to an Australian industry code aimed at stamping out that most dangerous of all scourges, misinformation.
  
  Of course, Facebook has taken it a step further and stamped out Facebook.  File that one under met or exceeded.
  
  
  
• Liberals get the bullet too.  (BuzzFeed)
  
  Communists at Facebook are upset that the CEO has influence over corporate policy, and that they are prevented from simply deleting everything they disagree with.
  
  
  
• Turning all of science fiction's dire warnings into Totalitarianism for Dummies guides.  (The Next Web)
  
  Today: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Precrime.
  
  
  
• Vyolfers streamed Minecraft this morning and Reine is resuming her previously aborted stream right now.  I found that literally seconds before it went live.
  
  Their shopping mall is starting to look really impressive.
  
  
  
  
  
• Half-price sale on organic gluten-free flours.  Don't care at all about the organic part, but do appreciate the gluten-free and half-price.  Have brown rice flour, coconut flour, almond flour, lentil flour, and oat flour incoming.
  
  Just cross-checking, at half price they're cheaper than the inorganic equivalents but not radically so, except for the almond flour which is expensive no matter what.
  
  
  

Hardware Unavailable Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 23 2021 01:08 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 23 2021 02:44 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 23 2021 02:46 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, February 23 2021 02:54 AM (WIXd2)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 23 2021 03:11 AM (eqaFC)

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• Planedrops keep falling on my head.  (Aviation24)
  
  But that doesn't mean - look out!  (Aviation Herald)
  
  Turbine blades fell out of a 747 engine taking off from Maastricht, and the engine inlet from a 777 taking off from Denver.
  
  Both planes had safe emergency landings, with only two minor injuries to people on the ground.  (Safety tip: Don't try to pick up fallen aircraft engine parts.)
  
  
  
• That's basically what I wanted to build.  (Pimoroni)
  
  It's a board for the Pi Pico that supplies VGA, PCM and PWM sound (though you have to choose), and a microSD slot.  The only real hardware on the board is an I2C audio DAC for PCM sound; the rest seems to be passive components to let the Pi Pico show its strengths.
  
  The VGA output supports a maximum resolution of 640x360 in 15-bit colour, which is more than enough for my needs, and in fact a lot more than you can fit in the memory of the Pico, so they'd have to be doing similar tricks to those I described a while back - using a software CLUT to fill a line buffer that is then fed by DMA to the PIO.
  
  The advantage they have here is the Pico's intelligent PIO, which keeps things cycle-accurate without needing any external logic, which was the sticking point I ran into even before building a prototype.
  
  
  
• Pimoroni has some other neat kits for playing with the Pico.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Someone at Tom's Hardware is something of a Pi Pico fan.
  
  I don't blame him, it looks like a fun and well-designed piece of kit.
  
  
  
• At the other end of the Arm CPU scale, Apple's M1X will support 8 cores and 32GB of RAM unless it won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Technically 12 cores in total - 8 large and 4 small.
  
  Expect the usual articles explaining why no-one needs more than 32GB of RAM.  From people who run Mac Pro systems with eight times that much.
  
  
  
• Binding to localhost:0 will automatically generate an available port number... Unless the system is already running 64512 services, in which case you're probably screwed anyway.
  
  
  

Cola Gremlin Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, February 22 2021 01:27 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, February 22 2021 02:44 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 22 2021 03:36 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 22 2021 07:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 22 2021 10:03 AM (PiXy!)

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• Google has fired another one of its top AI ethicists.  (Reuters)
  
  In this case for violating their code of conduct and security policies involving moving research data outside Google's corporate network.
  
  Ethicists are consistently some of the most unethical people on the planet, so it doesn't surprise me in the least that even as unethical a company as Google is having trouble with them.
  
  
  
• The state of the NAND Flash ecosystem.  (AnandTech)
  
  TL;DR: 10Gbit/mm².  That's, um, quite a lot.  Consider that the Raspberry Pi Pico has 2MB of flash memory, which would measure 0.0016mm² if manufactured on a leading-edge process, and the entire chip would barely be visible to the naked eye, even if you knew exactly where it was.
  
  
  
• Never had a chance to get a Voodoo 5 6000 back in the day?  Why not build your own?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Well, because the drivers are notoriously buggy and it's terribly slow by modern standards, but still, someone did exactly that, and the homebrew model looks better than the real thing.
  
  He also made it a PCI card (not PCIe) instead of AGP, so it's just about possible to find a motherboard that will support it.
  
  
  
• Brave was leaking DNS requests for pages fetched over Tor due to a regression in the built-in ad blocker. 
  
  That's kind of bad.
  
  They had a fix available within 24 hours of being notified.
  
  That's pretty damn good.
  
  
  
  
  
• Oh, Calli is streaming.
  
  Oh, she's doing a Japanese-only challenge.  Being Calli, this means that any time she accidentally speaks English she has to take a drink.
  
  Speaking of which, I was watching the Kiara/Calli farewell karaoke earlier.  (Kiara is heading back to Australia wink now that travel restrictions have been relaxed.)
  
  I stopped the chat in Chrome and opened it in Edge instead so it wouldn't make the music freeze and skip as it often does.
  
  Edge used 5.5GB of RAM for that one tab.
  
  
  
  

Oh No Haachama Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Sunday, February 21 2021 03:26 AM (obo9H)

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• In an effort to preserve at least some RTX 3060 cards for gamers, Nvidia has deliberately skorked their drivers to cut Ethereum hash rates in half  (AnandTech)
  
  And launched a new range of mining-oriented cards.
  
  Which rely on the exact same supply-constrained chips as the gaming cards.  But are worse at mining.  A lot worse.
  
  No, I don't know what they think they're playing at either.
  
  
  
• Need more screen real estate on your laptop?  Got $20,692 of somebody else's money to spend?  Expanscape got you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Aurora A5 and A7 have up to seven screens - four 4K 17" displays, two 9" 2K displays, and a 7" touchscreen.
  
  They run on a Ryzen 7 4800U.  The A5 comes with 64GB RAM, 2TB of NVMe SSD, and 2TB of SATA SSD.  The A7 boosts that to 128GB RAM and 8TB total SSD.
  
  These are currently prototypes, but if you want one badly enough they will custom build it to your specs and deliver it to you.  The traditional markets for these would be film editing in the field and energy and mineral exploration, but both those industries are kind of in the dumps at the moment.
  
  
  
• Intel just Osborne Effected Rocket Lake.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, not deliberately perhaps, this is a leak.  But according to the leak, Alder Lake will be 20% faster than Rocket Lake and ship in December, giving Rocket Lake a mere nine month lifespan, since it won't even launch until next month.
  
  Alder Lake will use a new socket - LGA 1700 - and support DDR5.  If it launches on schedule and delivers as expected, it will give Intel a lead over AMD for the first time in four years, since Zen 4 isn't expected until early 2022.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Office 2021 will be available for purchase later this year.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which seems like a good time for it.
  
  Also, yes, purchase, as in you plunk down your money and then you get to use it.  Office 365 will still be there if you prefer that.
  
  
  
• WhatsApp has explained what data it shares with Facebook and why.  (ZDNet)
  
  The answers are, respectively, everything, and fuck you.
  
  
  
• Photoshop can no longer draw lines.  (Photoshop)
  
  It's been broken for months.
  
  Which just tells me it's time to cancel my subscription entirely because it's that long since I've used it.
  
  

Laptop Repair Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 20 2021 02:21 AM (ZlYZd)

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• Facebook has blocked all news into, out of, from, for, by, or about Australia.  (ABC)
  
  Including articles posted by the news organisations themselves, government weather reports, and emergency services.
  
  I'm not exaggerating.  Here's their own blog post.  
  
  If you're pretending to take a principled stand, try not to cut off emergency services during an emergency.
  
  
  
• Google meanwhile has struck a deal with News Corp.  (Protocol)
  
  That's only one of the big Australian news organisations, and though it has global reach its market share within Australia is not particularly large.
  
  
  
• The HP Spectre x360 14 is a flippy convertible laptop with a 3:2 touchscreen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can choose between a 1920x1280 LCD or 3000x2000 OLED display, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and either a quad-core 11th generation Intel CPU or...  No, that's the only choice.
  
  It does have the Four Essential Keys though.
  
  
  
• Citibank just blew half a billion dollars due to a bad UI.  (Ars Technica)
  
  In fairness, it's a really bad UI.
  
  In further fairness, the judge is an idiot, arguing in his decision that major banks wouldn't make huge and obvious blunders.
  
  
  
• This interview with Bill Ottman, CEO of Minds, is worth a listen.  (Quillette)
  
  He seems to have his head on straight.  While I don't agree with everything they do, they are neither incompetent, nor crazy, nor openly antagonistic towards freedom of thought, where most of their competitors fall into at least two of those categories.
  
  Also, Quillette being an Australian commentary magazine, they got shut down by Facebook.  Not being incompetent or crazy themselves they have their own site, their own forums, their own podcast, but one third of their traffic was coming from Facebook.
  
  
  
• As Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Twitter have shown very clearly, if you deal with American Big Tech you have to have a backup plan that doesn't involve American Big Tech, because they not only cannot be trusted to do the right thing, or to abide by their own contracts, they can't even be relied upon to obey the law.
  

Posted by: Dreamlord at Thursday, February 18 2021 11:53 PM (Knf75)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 19 2021 12:34 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Friday, February 19 2021 01:52 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 19 2021 02:38 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: benzeen at Friday, February 19 2021 06:14 AM (sA62t)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 19 2021 11:13 AM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, February 18 2021 10:14 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Friday, February 19 2021 03:39 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 21 2021 12:08 PM (PiXy!)

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• With Google Play Music shutting down I requested a backup of all my Google content.
  
  Two weeks ago.
  
  It was scheduled to run on the 5th.
  
  It just started.
  
  
  
• Coco planned a stream to take her over the 1 million subscriber mark.  Due to scheduling differences, she started out at 999,948.  Which was good because the stream immediately got banned.
  
  When she got things working again, the next few minutes were spent measuring YouTube's cache timeout, which is somewhere between five and ten minutes, whereupon the count jumped straight to 1,001,032.
  
  
  
  It's been a busy week for YouTube, what with shadowbanning Hololive streams, banning Hololive streams, demonetising Hololive streams, and terminating Hololive accounts.  But hey, here's a gold-coloured play button to thank you for making us millions of dollars.
  
  Speaking of Google screwups, watching her second, half-hour long celebration stream in Chrome used over 2GB of RAM for that one tab.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo Thinkstation P620 is the perfect computer for the demanding livestreaming drug-dealing shitposting million-subscriber yakuza dragon.  (AnandTech)
  
  Yes, it supports up to 64 cores and 512GB of RAM - they tested it with 1TB of LRDIMMs but it wouldn't boot - but it also measures just 36 dBA at 30cm with the default fan profile, so it actually is suitable for livestreaming.
  
  The base config is not even insanely expensive - currently $2099 with 12 cores, 16GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, and an entry-level Nvidia Quadro video card.  The price includes a 1000W power supply and 10GbE built in.
  
  
  
• Pine64 has a next generation version of their Quartz64 board out.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's more-or-less a Raspberry Pi 4 competitor, but has some extra features like SATA and a PCIe x4 slot.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new HBM2 chips run at 1.2TFLOPs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, they're memory chips.  Yes, they have 1.2TFLOPs of compute built in.
  
  
  
• I hope they're not being made in Texas.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Austin area fabs belonging to Samsung, NXP, and Infineon have been told by their electricity supplier to temporarily shut down because the entire state is frozen solid.
  
  
  
• Adata has changed the flash used on their XPG SX8200 Pro again.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Without mentioning the change or updating the model number.  This is the third time they've done that - to just this one model of SSD.
  
  
  
• Amazon's attempt to avoid getting sued by the New York AG over working conditions does not seem to be going according to plan.  (WHEC News)
  
  I say this only because they have in fact been sued by the New York AG over working conditions.
  
  
  
• Parler came back online for a while, with existing accounts but not all the posts.
  
  Ars Technica wrote the usual bit of techno-fascism, going upstream from them looking for someone they could potentially bully.
  
  The site is still up, but now their DNS isn't resolving so you can't get to it.
  
  
  
• Reading up on the Raspberry Pi Pico, the magic beans are the two I/O controllers, which are sophisticated state machines that automatically sequence cycle-accurate I/O operations without specific, dedicated hardware or heavy CPU load.  Each controller contains four state machines, so you have a lot of flexibility, and that's in addition to the dedicated serial ports (two each UART, SPI, and I2C), USB, and PWM.
  
  This Hackaday article has some more details.
  
  This is how the VGA output works.  It doesn't have a built-in video controller, but the I/O controller is fast enough and flexible enough to handle that for you.
  
  That will certainly endear it to retrocomputer hobbyists, because while classic chips like the Z80, 6502, and 6809 are readily available, suitable video chips are hard to come by.  I wonder if someone will make a version that fits into a standard 40-pin DIP socket.
  
  The Pi Pico is powered by the RP2040 microcontroller.  I don't know if the chip is available to hobbyists yet, but it could be popular; it's a QFN56 package and should be relatively easy to work with.
  
  There are a veritable swarm of third-party board on the way already though.  (Raspberry Pi)
  
  Two such chips, two SPI flash chips, a power supply, and a handful of transistors resistors and you'd have a really nice retrocomputer.  And you can start right away with a regular Pi Pico.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, February 18 2021 03:51 AM (mjO4F)

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 18 2021 05:21 AM (2Mei2)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, February 18 2021 05:57 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 18 2021 09:18 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, February 19 2021 11:47 AM (4i7w0)

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• Those bumblefucks at YouTube banned Sakura Miko this time.  She has her account back, but not her members.
  
  
  
  873,000 subscribers doesn't warrant human review even when you have just done the same thing to other members of the same group.
  
  The company is run by morons.  Three times is enemy action and all that, but they are doing this to themselves.
  
  
  
• My router caught fire.
  
  Apparently it was a short right in the plug, which was unfortunate because my first instinct was to pull the plug, and I grabbed hold of molten plastic.
  
  Ouch.
  
  I have backup networking stuff but it's not configured the way I need so things are even more chaotic than usual.
  
  
  
• A look at the Xbox Series X SOC, or XOX.  (AnandTech)
  
  Compared the the Xbox One X it has twice the GPU performance and three times the CPU; the One X's CPU was the same as the base Xbox One, which was...  Not great.
  
  
  
• Western Digital has launched the new Green SN350 M.2 SSD range.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are QLC NVMe devices, which are fine for the average user, but the only advantage of QLC is price, and the MSRP is exactly the same as the current price of the TLC Blue SN550 on Amazon, and only 20% cheaper than the Black SN750.
  
  Unless that price comes down, they make no sense.
  
  
  
• AMD is releasing 28 and 56 core Epyc CPUs with their third generation Milan range unless they aren't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Along with other models ranging from 8 to 64 cores.
  
  The listed specs indicate the 56 core model would have eight CPU chiplets each with seven cores active.  On Zen 1 and Zen 2 that would have meant unbalanced CCXes and potential scheduler problems, but Zen 3 has a unified eight core design and that particular problem wouldn't arise.
  
  The L2 cache numbers are wrong though, which raises a red flag.
  
  Intel's new Ice Lake Xeon parts are also listed here, and likewise may or may not bear any relation to reality.
  
  
  
• Clubhouse is sending your data to China.  (The Verge)
  
  Maybe.  Apparently Clubhouse is built on Agora, which is a Chinese company, and though they say they don't transmit US-based data back to China, (a) they are probably lying and (b) Chinese users who make it past the Great Firewall are screwed.
  
  
  
• Those idiots at Bloomberg are at it again.
  
  
  This is not a new story.  This is not an update to the original story from 2018.  This is the exact same story as before, with exactly the same evidence, which is to say, none whatsoever.
  
  Here's a thread by someone who is not an idiot breaking down exactly why the idiots at Bloomberg are in fact idiots.
  
  
  
  
  
• Tried baking some breadrolls just with the pancake mix, using a higher temperature and a shorter time to avoid that thick crust.
  
  The best batch yet - the crust is fine and they taste great, though more like scones than dinner rolls - but they also fall apart.  Not sure how to solve that one.
  
  
  
• I'm a big fan of crossing the streams, especially streams you would never expect to cross.
  

Definitely Not Tech News

• Meanwhile in Melbourne, Australia's own little San Francisco, or possibly New York.
  
  
  Victoria had 90% of Australia's total WBSDP deaths despite having 25% of the country's population.  This is because it is run by idiots.