• Leaked benchmarks suggest that Samsung's new Exynos SOC could have the fastest graphics in the mobile world.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Samsung used License Radeon from AMD.  It was super effective!
  
  
  
• Personium is an open-source personal data store, or PDS.  (Personium)
  
  That is, it collects data about you from all over the place and puts it all in one neat container that you control so that when the next 0-day attack comes along everyone can lose all their privacy at the same time.
  
  
  
• Facebook shut down the Robinhood Stock Traders group.  (Reuters)

  The notification, seen by Reuters, said without detail that the group violated policies on "adult sexual exploitation.”

  They're not even pretending to care about being caught lying.
  
  
  
• If you got your kicks on Port 69, choose again.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I don't know why anyone would be running a web server on port 69 - 80 and 443 are the standard ones, and 8080 for proxies and test servers - but if you were and suddenly all your traffic disappeared, it's because none of the popular browsers can connect to you anymore.
  
  
  
• Apple is escalating its feud with Facebook.  (Six Colors)
  
  Facebook isn't the one employing child slaves though.
  
  
  
• Google purged 100,000 one-star reviews of Robinhood from the Play Store.  (The Verge)
  
  Because you can't be allowed to know what people think.
  
  Apple did the same in their own walled garden of earthly delights.
  
  
  
• The reason for all those bad reviews?  No!  No buy!  Only sell!  (Vice)
  
  Robinhood made it so that users could no longer buy the stocks at the center of the short squeeze, only sell them.
  
  They're getting hit by a class action lawsuit and will very likely be bankrupt before the year is out.
  
  
  

Not Really Tech News

Coco Plays Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Minecraft Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 30 2021 06:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 30 2021 08:25 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 30 2021 10:15 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 30 2021 10:16 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 30 2021 12:37 PM (eqaFC)

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• The guys from r/WallStreetBets set up a Discord server a while back in case Reddit nuked them.
  
  Discord nuked them.  (The Verge)
  
  Discord's official statement says:

  Today, we decided to remove the server and its owner from Discord for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.

  The WSB community refer to themselves in often colourful language.  Self-deprecating humour is now just another excuse for deplatforming.  Unfortunately for Discord, the company is run by idiots and following paragraph immediately gives the game away:

  To be clear, we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.

  Financial fraud, Discord?  Who the fuck mentioned financial fraud?
  
  Meanwhile, the original subreddit was set to private by the mod team due to an influx of hoarders and wreckers who might have triggered the same action from Reddit itself.  Certainly a group that wipes $20 billion and counting off Wall Street's balance sheet in a matter of days is going to come under the crosshairs.
  
  Meanwhile, Jen Psaki, asked what action the government might take, noted that they had the first female Treasury Secretary.
  
  
  That, uh, doesn't actually answer the question, Jen.
  
  Glenn Greenwald sums up the debacle quite well.
  
  
  Sure, I've had my disagreements with Greenwald in the past, but he's done much to rehabilitate his reputation, such as getting booted from the news outlet he co-founded for insisting on reporting actual news.
  
  
  
• Intel's DG1 graphics cards don't actually work with anything.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Specifically, they don't work with 8th generation or older Intel chips, they don't work with current 11th gen Intel chips, and they don't work with any AMD chips at all.  They can only be used by OEMs still shipping 9th and 10th gen systems, which are going to be phased out by March, and even then they need a specific chipset and a custom BIOS.
  
  Good work, Intel.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, the only graphics cards available in Australia are the GTX 1650 and the RTX 3070.  Literally every other card is out of stock.
  
  It's worse than it was immediately after the recent launches; it's worse than in 2017 when I was forced to buy a Dell all-in-one instead of building my own system as I had planned.
  
  
  
• In spite of absolutely everything being out of stock absolutely everywhere, AMD turned in record quarterly sales figures and record profits.  (AnandTech)
  
  Up 53% over their record quarter in Q4 2019, and up 16% over their most recent record quarter in Q3 2020.
  
  So they really were selling lots of chips, just not enough to meet demand.
  
  
  
• When I turn on the lights in my downstairs bathroom, every light in the house goes out.  This is not good.  I think the extractor fan (which is ducted and not easy to replace) has died, and the circuit breaker is doing its job.  That part is good.  Better than a house fire, anyway.
  
  My upstairs bathroom is being torn apart because the concrete slab has cracked.  So, yay.
  
  I have a rechargeable combination nightlight/motion-sensitive lamp/flashlight thingy in the kitchen in case of blackouts, so that has migrated to the bathroom until someone can come out and crawl into the ceiling to replace the fan.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 29 2021 01:29 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 29 2021 01:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 29 2021 10:05 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 29 2021 11:44 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 29 2021 02:01 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 29 2021 03:12 PM (eqaFC)

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• How Reddit broke the hedge funds. (MSN)
  
  This is a classic institutional version of the story, though it has usefully specific details, such as the fact that institutional investors have lost $5 billion on this stock so far and the situation continues to get worse for them because they refuse to accept their losses.
  
  If you short a stock at $3 and buy in at $1, you make $2 per share. But if everyone shorts at $3 and there aren't enough shares to buy in, and some smart-arses decide to bid the price up just to fuck with you, and it spikes to $300... Congratulations, you've just lost nearly 150 times your expected profit.
  
  This can very easily bankrupt you.
  
  Louis Rossman has explained the whole thing quite well, and the new YouTube tag supports playlists, so here you go:
  
  
  
  
• Retail investors are attempting to do the same with other heavily shorted stocks. (Business Insider)
  
  
  Naturally the hedge funds who are losing their shorts are calling for this to be immediately criminalised.
  
  
  
• Taking the Ryzen 9 5980HS for a spin. (AnandTech)
  
  Quick precis: It fast.
  
  
  
• That focuses on the CPU itself, but the laptop they are testing is also interesting: It's the Asus ROG Flow X13. (PC World)
  
  It's a 13" model weighing 2.8 pounds, with a 1920x1200 or 3840x2400 screen (yes, 16:10), up to 32GB RAM and 1TB of NVMe SSD, the aforementioned 5980HS, and an Nvidia GTX 1650 and an Nvidia RTX 3080.
  
  The 3080 is in a custom dock thingy with a x8 PCIe cable rather than Thunderbolt.
  
  This is not at all a bad combination. Fast CPU, reasonable on-the-road graphics, top-of-the-line graphics when sitting at your desk.
  
  Of course it lacks the Four Essential Keys because We Can't Have Nice Things.
  
  
  
• The Threadripper Pro 3995WX retails for $5500. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, that's the suggested price; actual retail is closer to $6000.
  
  That's not hugely inflated over the Threadripper 3990X at around $4000; the Pro version offers the same amount of cores and cache, but twice the memory channels and twice the PCIe lanes, plus registered memory support so it can have up to four times the total RAM.
  
  The 16 core 3955WX lists for $1149, which isn't too much of an increase over the 5950X at $799 - though for tasks that can't take advantage of the much greater memory capacity and bandwidth it will actually be slower, since Threadripper is currently still on Zen 2.
  
  
  
• ASRock has a new barebones mini-PC for Ryzen desktop APUs which you can't get. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's bigger than a NUC - about the size of a Mac Mini - but takes up to a 65W socket AM4 APU, 64GB RAM, and an M.2 and a 2.5" drive.
  
  Eight USB ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, VGA for some reason, WiFi, and a 1Gb Ethernet port. I would have preferred to see at least 2.5GbE there.
  
  
  
• The Scunthorpe Problem:A video player app was suspended from the Google Play Store for "Sexual Content and Profanity". (GitHub)
  
  The crime? It supports the old SubStation Alpha .ASS subtitle format.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 28 2021 03:23 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 28 2021 03:31 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 28 2021 07:27 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 28 2021 07:44 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Kristophr at Thursday, January 28 2021 08:52 AM (ZoT8Y)

Posted by: Kristophr at Thursday, January 28 2021 08:54 AM (ZoT8Y)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, January 28 2021 09:49 AM (4i7w0)

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• Stasi's mom has got it goin' on.
  
  
  Edit button?  Fuck you.
  
  Auto-snitch network?  Got you covered.
  
  
  
  
  
• Does your laptop have a spare M.2 slot?  Here's how to install an RTX 3090.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, more of an outstall than an install, but it does technically work.  In fact it technically works quite well.
  
  
  
• CollapseOS is the operating system of choice for the zombie apocalypse.  (CollapseOS)
  
  It runs on anything from a TRS-80 or TI programmable calculator to a Threadripper Pro, and the core is only 3000 lines of code.
  
  We could of course just not have a zombie apocalypse, but that level of planning seems to be somewhat beyond world leaders at the moment.
  
  
  
• Replacing Dropbox with Digital Ocean Spaces (or any other S3-compatible storage).  (Mitja Felicijan)
  
  For the other kind of zombie apocalypse:

  But recent developments around deplatforming and having us people hostages of technology and big companies speed up my goals to become less dependent on Google, Dropbox etc and take back some control.
  
  I am not a conspiracy theory nut, but to be honest, what these companies are doing lately is out of control. It is a matter of principle at this point. I have almost completely degoogled my life all the way from ditching Gmail, YouTube and most of the services surrounding Google. And I must tell you, I feel so good. I haven't felt this way for a long time.

  
  
  
• MeWe has a sound privacy policy.  Their free speech policy, on the other hand, could do with a little work.
  
  
  The etc is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.  (Big League Politics)
  
  MeWe has tweeted several times that they are not censoring anything, only banning those specific users who are "calling for violence, breaking the law, etc".  Every tweet they have posted protesting claims of censorship contains that etc.
  
  Worse, their CEO is a Libertarian.

  "I don't like sites that are anything goes," Weinstein said. "I think they're disgusting. Good people right and left and middle can't handle 'anything goes.' We don't want to be around hate speech. We don't want to be around violence inciters."

  (NPR)
  
  On the, let's see, eleventh hand, Big League Politics is about as trustworthy as the Washington Post, so we'll have to see how MeWe responds as the chaos continues to swirl.  At least with Twitter you have the comfort of knowing they will always do the worst thing possible.
  
  Update: That said, you have to moderate.  Or alternately, divide your network up into communities that can each set their own moderation rules.  We saw what happened with Usenet, before major feeds started filtering out the worst of the nonsense, and it wasn't pretty.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, January 27 2021 10:20 AM (Bkp4m)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, January 27 2021 10:28 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, January 27 2021 01:50 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, January 28 2021 03:29 AM (4i7w0)

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• Calli hit a million subscribers today in the middle of a twelve-hour marathon.  Next up are likely Amelia, Coco, and Haachama.  In fact, 28 of the Hololive girls are on track to hit a million subscribers this year, with 7 already past that mark and all the others set to reach at least half a million.
  
  Not huge news in the grand scheme of things, except that they provide exactly the type of irreverent politically incorrect content that makes Hollywood scream and flee in the opposite direction.  The more followers they have, the greater the blowback when the usual suspects inevitably try to cancel them.
  
  If YouTube tries to cancel them they could launch their own platform and have a million users on day one.  Payment processing is the bottleneck though.
  
  
  
• PGM indexes are magic.
  
  Mathematically they are as good as B-trees in the worst case while being faster and orders of magnitude smaller in the typical case.  They work by reducing the indexed data to an ordered set of patterns and deltas between patterns.  If the data cannot be effectively reduced then the end result is essentially just a B-tree, but when it can, the improvements can be daramatic.
  
  Or so it would seem.  Further discussion at Hacker News.
  
  
  
• SonicWall ate its own dogfood.  (ZDNet)
  
  In most cases this is a necessary step - if you don't use your own product you won't have any direct feedback on the problems it might have.
  
  In this case a maker of network security devices was hacked because the network security devices they were using weren't secure because the network security devices the were using were the ones they themselves made.
  
  At time of writing, there's no patch available.
  
  
  
• If you want to take a picture of the fascinating witches who put the scintillating stitches in the britches of the boys who put the powder on the noses of the faces of the ladies of The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software YOU'RE TOO LATE because they just closed down.  (Tucows)
  
  27 years is not a bad run for a download site.
  
  
  
• Facebook has spent the past decade systematically making sure it has no friends anywhere.  (BBC)
  
  Bye Felicia.
  
  
  
• Once I built a railroad, made it run...  (Jalopnik)
  
  Built it on Macromedia Flash.
  Once I built a railroad, now it's done.
  Adobe caused my business to crash.
  
  It's back up now using a hacked version of Flash.
  
  
  
• A class action lawsuit against YouTube for failing to take action against copyright infringement has run onto the rocks for failing to allege a single instance of copyright infringement.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  These are the same people who used a VPN to download their own content and then file a takedown notice from the same IP address.
  
  
  
• Amazon has asked the NLRB to block mail in ballots in a unionization attempt, noting that the suffer from "serious and systemic flaws".  (OutKick)
  
  If we could mine this irony we wouldn't need to bother with asteroids.
  
  
  
  

She Must Be Stopped Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 25 2021 11:59 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, January 26 2021 02:01 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 26 2021 02:53 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 26 2021 05:20 AM (6y7dz)

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• Everything you ever wanted to know about the Raspberry Pi Pico but were afraid to ask and how to raise wolves.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Looks like a nice little board for nice little projects.
  
  
  
• Problem: Despite the distinctly cheaper MSRP actual RTX 3060s can cost as much or more than the RTX 3060 Ti.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The culprit is the 12GB of RAM and the general shortage of absolutely everything.
  
  
  
• Pip has dropped support for Python 2.  (Pypa)
  
  Hardly unexpected because it's been warning you about this for the last eighteen months.  Python 2 is still actively supported, though, thanks to PyPy, the Python compiler, so people will work around this.
  
  
  
• One of the chief idiots behind the Code of Cancer movement infecting open source is at it again.  (ZDNet)
  
  The author of this particular article frequently writes nonsense, but this one is fairly measured.  It gives space for the chief idiot in question to spout her idiocy, then quotes several actual experts in rebuttal.  
  
  Here's what she's trying to do this time:

  The Software shall not be used by any person or entity for any systems, activities, or other uses that violate any Human Rights Laws. "Human Rights Laws" means any applicable laws, regulations, or rules (collectively, "Laws") that protect human, civil, labor, privacy, political, environmental, security, economic, due process, or similar rights; provided, however, that such Laws are consistent and not in conflict with Human Rights Principles (a dispute over the consistency or a conflict between Laws and Human Rights Principles shall be determined by arbitration as stated above). Where the Human Rights Laws of more than one jurisdiction are applicable or in conflict with respect to the use of the Software, the Human Rights Laws that are most protective of the individuals or groups harmed shall apply.

  Or, to put use the vernacular, fuck you.
  
  It's a handy warning sign for projects headed for complete disaster, though, like the bright colours of poisonous frogs.
  
  
  
• Softbank is having a hard time getting regulatory approval to sell Arm to Nvidia.  (Nikkei)
  
  In large part due to West Taiwan, which is ruining everything as usual.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 25 2021 03:36 AM (6y7dz)

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Tech News

• More details of the ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI Threadripper Pro motherboard.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is the best desktop motherboard ever made, at least based on feature set.
  
  Eight DIMM slots supporting eight channels and up to 1TB of ECC registered DDR4-3200 RAM, seven PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, seven PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots (though four of these are via an included PCIe adaptor), eight SATA ports, two U.2 ports, dual 10GbE ports - one with remote management, integrated WiFi 6, ten UBS 3.2 ports including one at 20Gb, the usual block of six audio jacks, no RGB anything, and no chipset fan.
  
  Compared to the Supermicro and Gigabyte boards it lacks separate GbE ports and VGA and serial ports.  Those are only really needed if you want to put your Threadripper Pro in a server rack, but that's actually pretty common - we have a Threadripper cluster at my day job.  So it's good to have both options.
  
  
  
• Desktop and server rack, sure, but I don't think Threadripper laptops are quite ready for prime time.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• The Sony NWS-1250, on the other hand, is good to go.  (Rare & Old Computers)
  
  
  
• The useful idiots' Useful Card has expired.  (Socialist Workers Party)
  
  Facebook has shut down the page of the British Socialist Workers Party and removed the accounts of a number of activists.
  
  Meanwhile, Twitter is suspending Antifa accounts.  (New York Post)
  
  
  
• Apple is planning to scrap the Lightning report in favour of...  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  (ZDNet)
  
  Stupid.  You're so stupid.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is planning to lob 143 satellites into orbit with a single launch.  (UPI)
  
  This will include the first Starlink satellites in polar orbit.
  
  
  
• The EU wants to drag the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google before a hearing Monday week.  (Reuters)
  
  Burn them to the ground and scatter the ashes to the wind.
  
  
  
• I've used the MySQL / MariaDB INSERT INTO ... SET syntax for years, because it is objectively superior to the standard INSERT ... VALUES syntax from a code clarity point of view.
  
  Now I want to update Mana (my social platform) to also work with SQLite to make it as easy as possible to run your own small instance, but SQLite doesn't support that syntax.
  
  If I'd used an ORM like SQL Alchemy this would all be handled for me, but my testing showed that the performance was absolutely terrible - not because it produced bad queries, but because of the amount of messing around in the Python code.
  
  So I wrote my own very lightweight ORM, and now I have to deal with different SQL dialects myself.
  
  But it turns out that because everything is built around an API library, the entire platform has just 63 INSERT statements - rarely more than one for any given table.  I think I can cope.
  
  Update: That should automatically deal with most of the INSERTS, just a few specialised ones that need manual attention.
  
  Also need to automatically convert the %(name)s syntax for the MySQL library to the :name used by SQLite, and cast the SQLite named tuples to dicts.
  
  And then fire up the test suite and see what falls over.
  
  
  
• PayPal's automatic payment system fucking sucks.
  
  
  
• Gimme.
  
  

Garbage Anime Trailer of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 24 2021 03:34 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, January 24 2021 04:20 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, January 24 2021 04:54 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 24 2021 05:34 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 24 2021 07:35 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, January 24 2021 01:06 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, January 24 2021 01:51 PM (4i7w0)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Sunday, January 24 2021 02:09 PM (WY0BG)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, January 24 2021 03:07 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Monday, January 25 2021 02:47 AM (gRZQq)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 25 2021 03:31 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, January 25 2021 04:57 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 25 2021 06:00 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, January 25 2021 08:22 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, January 25 2021 01:15 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, January 25 2021 03:17 PM (4i7w0)

Posted by: ahd at Monday, January 25 2021 05:13 PM (p41ME)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 25 2021 10:28 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 26 2021 12:25 AM (6y7dz)

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• Intel says it is on track with its 7nm process.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It will enter mass production in 2023.
  
  Probably.
  
  
  
• Running Elite on the Raspberry Pi Pico.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Step One: Emulate a BBC Micro, including software-driven VGA.
  Step Two: ???
  Step Three: Get your high-value cargo yeeted by the people you are rescuing when their sun goes nova.
  
  
  
• A pox on both their houses, part one: Amazon is forking Elasticsearch as an Apache licensed project.  (Amazon)
  
  If only Elastic hadn't spent the past several years breaking it.
  
  
  
• A pox on both their houses, part two: Google is threatening to pull its search service from Australia if a new law is passed by Parliament.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's another one of those link tax laws, and is pointless and self-destructive, but so is Google.
  
  
  
• A pox on both their houses, part three: Google has agreed to pay an identical link tax in France.  (Ars Technica)
  
  See above.
  
  
  
• The reporting on Parler is uniformly awful.  No matter the source, they all repeat the Big Lie.  It's tiresome.
  
  
  
• Moderation is difficult at scale - but it only becomes impossible when you employ useless far-left fuckwits to do it.  (PJ Media)
  
  Twitter is being sued for a whole lot of things here.  If they try a CDA 230 defense on this one it could be the death of CDA 230.
  
  
  

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, January 23 2021 12:35 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 23 2021 06:42 AM (eqaFC)

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• Intel is rehiring retired CPU architects.  (AnandTech)
  
  Pat Gelsinger is already making his presence felt, with senior engineers willing to rejoin the company because of him.
  
  
  
• Haachama is a genius.  No wonder Cover hired her when she was still in high school.
  
  
  
• If you want two network ports and two video outputs in a NUC, Minisforum may have something for you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It does cost rather more than that little Liva Atom system from yesterday - the cheapest model I could find was $315 - but that has a Ryzen Athlon CPU, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD, both upgradeable, and room for a 2.5" SATA drive.
  
  
  
• You can specify the nonce in Metamask for unsticking stuck transactions that you didn't originally issue from Metamask.
  
  This is a problem with Ethereum: Transactions from a wallet must be processed in sequence, and if one gets stuck for any reason, everything after it fails.  There's no mechanism to cancel a transaction, but what you can do is replace it with a higher priority transaction with the same sequence number by allocating more gas.
  
  To do that you need to enter the nonce - the sequence number of the transaction.  But that's hidden unless you know to go into the hidden menu of hidden fields hidden in the Metamask settings and turn it on.
  
  Also, it's clear nobody who worked on this ever spoke to anyone from Britain.  It would be like producing a pedometer under the Pedo brand.
  
  
  
• The Raspberry Pi Pico costs four bucks.  (Raspberry Pi)
  
  It is very limited compared to the real Pi, with a custom chip containing dual Cortex M0 cores and 264K of RAM.  But for simple control projects where you want to code close to the metal, that's fine.
  
  Arduino are producing their own version of the board and porting their ID to it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Adafruit will also be using the Pico chip on their own hardware.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is the least sucky Big Tech company by far.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Not only have they not jumped head first into fascism like almost all their competitors, they - specifically GitHub, which they own - are fighting tooth and nail against the MPAA.
  
  Last time it was YouTube-dl; now it's NYAA, as in the codebase for nyaa.si and similar sites.  The MPAA filed a DMCA takedown; GitHub complied at first, then on closer examination, told the MPAA to get fucked and put it back up.
  
  
  
• Don't allow kids or cats near your Linux desktop.  (GitHub)
  
  It's another of those "mash the keyboard to bypass the login screen" bugs.
  
  
  
• Well, that's not entirely awful.  While IBM are deprecating CentOS, they now allow free developer subscriptions to run up to 16 production servers on RHEL.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The problem remains that with CentOS, IBM had no say whatsoever in what you did with it.  One server, ten thousand, none of their damn business.  Understandable that they moved away from that model, but I don't have to like it.
  
  
  
• Biden's nominee for Treasury Secretary wants to crush cryptocurrencies under vast amounts of new regulations.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The Ars commentariat has predictably flipped and decided that fascism is good, and are brigading anyone who dares to contradict them.
  
  
  
• Trust in the news media is at an all-time low.  (Axios)
  
  Axios' proposal?  Co-opt trusted parties to gaslight people into trusting the media.

  61% of Trump voters say that they trust their employer's CEO. That compares to just 28% who trust government leaders, and a mere 21% who trust journalists.
  
  CEOs have long put themselves forward as the people able to upgrade America's physical infrastructure. Now it's time for them to use the trust they've built up to help rebuild our civic infrastructure.

  Retards.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 22 2021 12:31 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 22 2021 01:48 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 22 2021 02:01 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 22 2021 02:08 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 22 2021 02:20 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, January 22 2021 11:10 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 22 2021 02:22 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, January 22 2021 04:14 PM (Bkp4m)

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• A quick scan for currently available phones supported by LineageOS turned up the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 and the OnePlus Nord.  Mostly they're at least two or three years old before they get support, so you'd have to buy a phone, wait, and hope, or buy one second-hand.
  
  But they also just released a build for the 2013 Nexus 7.  Since I have two of those and they still work fine except for the OS being hugely out of date and the Google apps slowly eating all the storage, I think I'll give that a try.
  
  
  
• YouTube chat leaks memory like a firehose through a used Kleenex.  Just closed one tab with a busy chat (Amelia was streaming) and freed up 2GB of RAM and 4GB of swap.
  
  I mentioned a while back that I had a lot of trouble with Hololive livestreams?  It's nothing to do with the video.  It's that chat window.
  
  
  
• Samsung has announced the 870 EVO SATA range.  (AnandTech)
  
  There's nothing noteworthy about them because they are completely throttled by the SATA interface.  Past time to move to USB-C.
  
  
  
• Alibaba's share price shot up this morning after rumours circulated that CEO Jack Ma had not been offed by the government.  (Reuters)
  
  Actually, he appeared on a video call.  For less than a minute.  And it doesn't sound as if he answered any questions.  So...
  
  Lois McMaster Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice, anyone?
  
  
  
• MeWe has added 2.5 million users in one week.  (ZDNet)
  
  The article is actually coherent.  ZDNet has a couple of resident left-wing nutcases, but for the most part it actually reports the news:

  There has been a growing movement away from social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter recently.

  Users are getting fed up with relentless privacy violations, surveillance capitalism, political bias, targeting, and newsfeed manipulation by these companies.

  That's completely accurate, and not something you'd ever see in the mainstream media.
  
  
• Two minutes looking at This Anime Does Not Exist and I have a migraine.  Literally.
  
  Some of them work.  Most are worse than anything Escher Girls ever posted.
  
  
  
• Missed this among all the other chaos: Elastic has gone full fuckbiscuit and changed the license of their code.  (Elastic.co)
  
  Elasticsearch has over 1500 open-source contributors - or rather, had, past tense.  What it now has is 1500 forks of the last Apache-licensed version.
  
  The new license is hilariously, absurdly restrictive.  Also, their product sucks.
  
  
  
• A review of the ThinkStation P620 - Lenovo's ThreadRipper Pro workstation.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I haven't read it what with the migraine but it's probably interesting.
  
  
  
• Brave has integrated support for IPFS.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This could be interesting.  IPFS is a sort-of distributed sort-of peer-to-peer sort-of filesystem thing.  How it works is a bit strange and needs explanation when I don't have a migraine.
  
  
  
• This is going to be a shitshow and Big Tech richly deserves it.  (ZDNet)
  
  In the midst of all the drama Trump signed an executive order requiring all US IaaS services to keep details records of foreign customers, something likely to run head on into the GDPR.
  
  It seems stupid and unnecessary but then so is Google.
  
  
  
• Haachama's latest stream got removed before it even aired.  Twice.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:11 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:14 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:23 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:24 AM (eqaFC)

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