• No, airdropped NFTs cannot empty your crypto wallet.  (CoinDesk, September 22)
  
  OpenSea bug lets hackers empty crypto wallets with airdropped NFTs.  (Bleeping Computer, October 13)
  
  I mean, sort of...  I read through the article, and it looks like there's a long series of factors involved:
  
  
1. A hacker mints an NFT with a malicious SVG file attached as the ERC721 metadata image.
2. They then airdrop this NFT into the wallets of their victims.
3. OpenSea automatically imports every single NFT across three different blockchains, so the new NFT shows up automatically.
4. User clicks on the new NFT.
5. This is surmise on my part, though I don't see how else the rest could happen: Metamask was using the SVG tag rather than the IMG tag when the detected image type was SVG.
6. The SVG file has embedded JavaScript, and the SVG tag permits the JavaScript to run.  (The IMG tag would block it.)
7. A Metamask (or other wallet) prompt pops up to connect your wallet. User clicks on that was well.
   
8. Another Metamask prompt pops up to siphon your funds out of your account. User clicks on that one as well.
9. All your money is gone.
   
   
The moral of the story seems to be well, don't do that then.  Don't allow SVG files, don't use the SVG tag, don't take any wooden airdrops, don't blindly click on Metamask popups, keep your funds separate from your NFTs, and just generally treat the blockchain with the same level of trust and respect as you'd grant a Chicago politician you just caught rifling through your cash register.

• AMD's Radeon RX 6600 is here. (PC Perspective)
  
  It looks like a reasonable card.  It's a little slower but a lot cheaper than the Nvidia RTX 3060. In fact, it's by far the cheapest current generation card when looking at actual retail prices rather than suggested prices.
  
  It should fly through any game at 1080p - it's about 40% faster than the Xbox Series S - and it is small, quiet, and power-efficient.  It's not really remarkable in terms of performance or value; it's a mid-range card in a market where 100% markups are the norm.  But if you just want something to get by for a year or two, it at least won't break the bank.
  
  Update: And it's pretty much sold out already.
  
  
  
• I previously mentioned a problem with Windows 11 that caused AMD CPUs to slow down by as much as 15%. Well, the first update has arrived for Microsoft's new operating system and it's made everything much worse. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you're not being paid to use Windows 11, even if you are generally inclined to upgrade because, I don't know, you want to run Linux GUI apps under Windows, give it a couple of months.
  
  
  
• Nvidia may also be new releasing low-end cards soon. (WCCFTech)
  
  In fact, there's an entire new rumoured product lineup:
  
  
  • RTX 3050
  • RTX 3050 Ti
  • RTX 3060 Super
  • RTX 3070 Ti 16GB
  • RTX 3080 Super
  • RTX 3090 Ti
  
  
  The RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti already exist as laptop parts and have been expected to show up as desktop cards for a while.  The 16GB 3070 Ti (or something like it) has been rumoured for quite a while; I mentioned that Nvidia's mid-range is short on memory compared to AMD; the current 3070 Ti has 8GB where the competing RX 6800 has 16GB.
  
  The 3060 Super is a little weird if it is real.  The rumoured specs suggest a card with more compute power and RAM than the current 3060 Ti, but less bandwidth.  Nvidia doesn't have the large on-chip caches that AMD has, so that will skew benchmark results significantly depending on the game.
  
  
  
• Is your Apple II or Commodore PET getting a bit slow and creaky?  The 65F02 is a pin- and binary-compatible replacement CPU that runs at 100MHz.  (e-basteln)
  
  It's an entire circuit board - it needs extra chips to convert the old 5V signals to modern logic levels that are closer to 1V - but it is the same size as the original 40-pin DIP chip and drops straight into the socket.
  
  
  
• Southwest: It was lag!  (The Points Guy)
  
  Totally not industrial action.  It was the weather.  Moonlight reflecting off a weather balloon.  Look over there, a monkey!
  
  
  
• Apple: Forcing us to allow sideloading of apps would turn iPhones into pocket PCs.  (ZDNet)
  
  "Customers would actually own the devices they pay for!  Can you just imagine how terrible that would be?  I mean, for us.  Fuck the customers.  Wait, this is off the record, right?"

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 15 2021 12:47 AM (Z0GF0)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Alternative blockchain Polygon just raised its transaction fees by a factor of 30.  (AMBCrypto)
  
  Well, sort of.  They increased the guideline for the minimum gas price charged by validator nodes from 1 to 30.  That's voluntary, but nobody's going to turn down earning 30x as much for processing transactions.  On the other hand, the real gas price on Polygon hasn't been consistently 1 since around April; 8 was about the best you could get reliable transactions with, 15 was more reasonable, and sometimes it spiked over 100.
  
  The reason they did this, though, is the network was too cheap for its own good.  It was getting flooded with millions of garbage transactions per day, because each one cost a small fraction of a cent.  Now that each one costs a large fraction of a cent, transaction volume has halved and the network is much more stable.
  
  Sucks if your business model doesn't support spending half a cent per transaction, but blockchains do cost money to run.
  
  
  
• The new NSW premier took time out from his busy schedule of restoring civil rights (not being sarcastic here, he's really doing that) to announce a $3 billion green hydrogen boondoggle.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  I'll watch for Dave from EEVBlog's thoughts on this.  He loves tearing apart the claims of green energy projects, and he lives right here in Sydney.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Improving Sydney's Bat Flu check-in QR codes.  (GitHub)
  
  The simple expedient of just burn the fucking things doesn't appear to have occurred to the author.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 4 will support PCIe 5.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There was some confusion here because the first CPUs on the new Socket AM5 platform from AMD will support DDR5 memory but only PCIe 4.  That will be the Rembrandt refresh of Zen 3 using the new RDNA2 graphics - the same graphics in the current Xbox and PlayStation graphics.
  
  So both Intel's 12th gen and AMD's 4th gen products will switch to 5th gen PCIe, and by the end of next year we might actually see cards that use it.
  
  The article also explains why Intel isn't using PCI 5 for the 12th gen chipset interface: Power consumption.  PCIe 4 is more than twice as power hungry as PCIe 3, and PCIe 5 is likely to continue that trend.  It's more efficient to simply double the link from 4 lanes to 8 than to upgrade to the new standard.  And that's what Intel has done.
  
  On the CPU an extra 10W of power consumption isn't critical if it also doubles I/O bandwidth.  On the chipset, that makes the difference between a passively cooled motherboard and one with a (potentially noisy and unreliable) chipset fan.
  
  
  
• Hosting provider OVH is down.  (Hacker News)
  
  Famous last words: No impact expected.
  
  
  I could link to OVH's status page, but it's down.  Probably a failed BGP update, like the one that took out Facebook the other day.

• More sanity in unexpected places.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  The SMH is a left-wing rag, and yet:

  It turns out that when you reflexively imprison people they get sick of it. Some take to the streets in protest and, clearly, a great many others just silently disobey the absurd demands of their overlords. When the dust settles on this pandemic and the world assesses how to deal with a future crisis, Victoria will be used as a template of what not to do.

  I mean, yes, it's just unusual to find a journalist willing to say so.

  
  
  

• They're trying to kill me again.  Minecraft streams today from Kiara, Ina, Kronii, Fauna, Amelia - twice, first with Roboco and now solo, Baelz, and a Calli / Rushia / Ollie collab at midnight.  Plus Pina Pengin from Prism, Enna from the new Nijisanji EN Wave 3, and Nymroot on the Gwemshire server.
  
  
  
• I previously complained that you couldn't find any 1080p laptops in Australia for under A$1000, at least not name brand models.  That's now changed, a lot.  A quick look at one online retailer showed 23 models available.  None with more than 8GB of RAM, but one with 8GB RAM, 4GB VRAM, and a 1TB SSD.
  
  
  
• Which PCIe 4 SSD is best for your laptop?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a different question to which is best for a desktop, because a desktop doesn't care about a few extra watts of power draw.  The Seagate Firecuda 530 is very fast, and is available in capacities up to 4TB, but it cuts three hours off the battery life compared to running the same workload on a Samsung 980 Pro.
  
  Not sure if I care because the laptop I'm planning to upgrade is not the one I'm planning to carry with me on a daily basis.  But for people who don't purchase laptops in three-packs, it's worth noting.
  
  
  
• DRAM makers expect a "price correction" by the end of the year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Usually when you see this it's a warning that prices are going up.  In thise case, though, it's a warning to investors that prices may go down.
  
  Which is good for everyone else.
  
  
  
• If your house is made of cheese, the best locks in the world won't keep the mice out.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The headline suggests a weakness in wildcard SSL certificates, but that's not what this is about.  What they are saying is that if you generally use wildcard rather than specific certificates, and your applications don't check the domain used to talk to them, and one of your applications echoes back requests, and an attacker manages to poison your DNS results for their target users....  If all of that, then there's a problem.
  
  Using single-hostname SSL will prevent that, but so will fixing any of the other problems in that list.
  
  
  
• A Florida judge has ruled that under CDA Section 230 Wikipedia is not liable for errors in articles posted by its users.  (Wikimedia)
  
  Since that is literally what the law says, it shouldn't come as a surprise that te judge ruled that way.  But it does, a little.
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 12 2021 10:23 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 13 2021 09:34 AM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Top Story

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 11 2021 09:32 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mumberthrax at Friday, October 15 2021 04:48 AM (YVq1I)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Top Story

• I'm sick of these beep outages on this beep server.  As I'm sure everyone else is too.
  
  
  
• As one browser window closes, another one opens.  
  
  Firefox sends every character you type into the URL bar to the servers at Mozilla - to get suggestions, but now also to show you ads.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Just to completely set your privacy on fire, it also sends those keystrokes to your search engine - by default, Google.  At least if you use Chrome you only have to deal with one bunch of lunatics.
  
  
  
• Vivaldi meanwhile now automatically blocks Google's Idle Detection API.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This API is designed to detect whether you are actively using your computer.  Vivaldi not only blocks it automatically, it blocks sites from requesting that you turn it on.
  
  The new version also supports progressive web apps, has a screen capture function that can get a screenshot of the entire web page, and has improvements to the built-in mail, calendar, and feed reader components.
  
  Vivaldi and Brave are the browsers I recommend to the average user, with Edge for corporate use, if only because it's easier to get acceptance.
  
  
  
• A senior Victoria police officer has resigned after giving an interview - in uniform - saying that the force is sick of acting as Dan Andrews' personal stormtroopers.  (Sky News)
  
  Which is all very well but they could have said no.
  
  
  

Tech News

Workstation Alternatives Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 10 2021 11:43 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Monday, October 11 2021 01:32 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 11 2021 03:02 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 11 2021 06:13 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 11 2021 01:04 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 11 2021 03:13 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Where exactly is Tether's $69 billion?  (Bloomberg)
  
  Tether is a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged at 1:1 against the dollar.  Tether says they can do this because they have a 1:1 ration of liquid dollar assets to the Tether coins issued.
  
  Tether acts like a bank, but this report suggests it's somewhere between a hedge fund and a Ponzi scheme.
  
  
  
• Unexpected sanity:

  It’s a sign of Australia’s COVID parochialism that we seem to think allowing 10 people into the homes of the double-vaccinated, instead of five, is a measure of radical risk-taking.

  That's two academics from the left-wing Sydney University writing in the left-wing Sydney Morning Herald to berate the left over their COVID psychosis.
  
  Being what they are they feel obligated to take a dig at Donald Trump before they get on to criticising the Labor Party here in Australia.

  Perrottet’s political calculation is that we are now ready for take-off. This is one politician who isn’t afraid of freedom. His instincts tell him that the people of NSW increasingly aren’t either.

  For Labor and those on the political left, there is huge political danger in all of this.

  If it works, Labor is sunk.

• Hydrogen's moment is here at last.  (The Economist)
  
  Not.  None of the problems with storing and transporting hydrogen in bulk have been solved.  It's a lousy fuel.
  
  
  
• Hydrogen has its faults, but oil isn't necesarily any safer.  (The New Yorker)
  
  The F.S.O Safer, to be specific, which is a former oil tanker turned fuel store, sitting unpowered and unmaintained just off the coast of Yemen with a million barrels of oil on board.
  
  This being Yemen, it may also be surrounded by mines, preventing it from being moved to safety by tug boats.
  
  This being Yemen, the person in charge of laying mines in that area is dead, and there aren't any records.
  
  The only question is whether it leaks, causing an ecological disaster for the Red Sea, catches fire, causing an ecological disaster for Yemen, or simply explodes and kills everyone in the area. They can't close the port either, because there isn't another port available.
  
  
  
• How the .NET Foundation kerfuffle became a brouhaha.  (Rob Mensching)
  
  .NET is Microsoft's development platform, or one of them anyway.  .NET Core has been made open source.  The .NET Foundation manages that open source project.
  
  Poorly.
  
  
  
• Apache has released an emergency update for the incomplete fix in the emergency update for the bug they introduced introduced in the recent update.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Someone's having a bad week.
  
  
  
• Nijisanji EN Wave 3 - named Ethyria - just launched.  (YouTube)
  
  Pomu is the only one I follow regularly; with Hololive EN Gen 2 so active there's rarely a need to actually look for content.  But I like all the ones I have watched and will at least check in on the new ones.
  
  There's four in Wave 3, instead of three previously, and wave 4 is likely due before the end of the year.
  
  
  
• Also, since I finally have a day off - I've been working nights, weekends, and public holidays lately - I've been playing some Minecraft.  Found some glow berries today, and caught my first UPRP.  I've seen one before but I fumbled the capture and couldn't find it again.
  
  There's a huge mineshaft system under Camp Pandaton and now I have tons of iron, gold, copper, diamonds, and other goodies that I need to get back to base, 2500 blocks away. 
  
  I'm thinking of finally checking out the Nether at this point, since distance there is 1/8th of the overworld.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 10 2021 05:00 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Will at Monday, October 11 2021 12:51 PM (8548M)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 11 2021 01:08 PM (r9O5h)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Me: I need to clear my desk for these new monitors so I'll save money and choose three-day shipping, which will leave me time to-
  Courier: Zoom zoom beep beep package for, uh, Pixy Misa?
  
  Good work by Scorptec.  Haven't ordered from them in a couple of years but likely will as I build out my new development lab.
  
  
  
• The Ampere Altra Max is the fastest server processor in the world - or kind of meh - depending on your workload.  (AnandTech)
  
  They've managed to cram 128 cores onto a single piece of silicon, where AMD's 64 core server CPUs are spread across 9 chiplets.
  
  The downside of this design is that the entire chip is used for cores.  AMD has room for 32MB of L2 cache and 256MB of L3 cache, where the Ampere chip has only 16MB total.
  
  If your workload fits well in that cache, you get good performance.  If not, it's going to suck.
  
  With future chips built on a 5nm process, or with stacked memory similar to AMD's new designs, they might  be able to produce a more balanced design that unleashes all those cores.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Samsung expects to be in production on their 2nm process node in 2025.  (AnandTech)
  
  3nm will be in production by the end of next year.
  
  The company also announced a 17nm node.
  
  This is the old reliable 28nm node updated with FinFET.  That keeps a lot of the advantages (robust, cheap) while making chips smaller and reducing power.
  
  It's not for leading-edge chips like CPUs and GPUs, but for microcontrollers, which are also in short supply.
  
  
  
• TSMC to USG: Bite me.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The US government demanded details of the types of products TSMC produces for each of its customers, inventories, lead times, and more.  
  
  TSMC told them to fuck off.
  
  The list of questions the Commerce Department is asking is absurd, but typical of government overreach in all areas these days.
  
  
  
• Far Cry 6 requires 11GB of VRAM for its high resolution textures.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Nvidia's 3060 Ti, 3070, 3070 Ti, and 3080 all have less than 11GB of VRAM.
  
  AMD's 6700 XT and up all have at least 12GB.
  
  
  
• Google and Apple are both being investigated by Japan over anti-competitive bullshit.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You know, the usual.
  
  
  
• Everything new is old again: Intel's new low power laptop CPUs will go back to two cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They'll call then 10 core parts, but that's eight slow cores and just two fast cores.  AMD at the same power envelope has 8 fast cores
  
  It comes down to pricing and how fast the slow cores are.
  
  
  
• CDNs don't contribute to copyright infringement just by the act of distributing your content.  (Ars Technica)
  
  A judge ruled in favour of Cloudflare in a case accusing them of contributory infringement.
  
  
  
• WSL for Windows 11 runs Linux GUI apps out of the box.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Although not Gnome, which will install, but dies on startup.
  
  If I wanted to run Linux GUI apps this would present a reason to upgrade.
  
  
  
• Intel is no longer seeking a fab site in the UK after Brexit.  (BBC)
  
  Because continental Europe offers bigger bribes.  CEO Pat Gelsinger was quite explicit on that point.
  
  
  
• Google is going all-in on censorship.  Latest target is anyone not following the party line on global warming.  (The Verge)
  
  Anything mandatory is forbidden.  Anything forbidden is mandatory.
  
  
  
• Stable coins should maybe, you know, actually be stable.  (Bloomberg)
  
  If you want to pin your cryptocurrency to real dollars, you goddam better have real dollars.
  
  
  
• Update: I found bamboo.  And pandas.  There's probably cocoa beans here somewhere.  I've established a base camp and will build a panda sanctuary at some point.
  
  
  
• Update Two: Cocoa bean get.  Operation Bean Farm commence.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 08 2021 09:51 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, October 09 2021 10:03 AM (bHHXR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 09 2021 10:17 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 09 2021 10:39 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 09 2021 10:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Andrew Horn at Sunday, October 10 2021 05:18 PM (uEGFG)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The difference between the Nazis and the Democrats is the Nazis only needed one Reichstag Fire.
  
  
  The Facebook "whistleblower" is nothing of the sort.  She's a paid lobbyist for government control of social media.
  
  
  
• Windows 11 is all about new hardware.  (ZDNet)
  
  Not about supporting new hardware.  About getting you to buy new hardware.
  
  Old system getting the job done just fine?  Not anymore.
  
  
  
• And if you were planning to upgrade to Windows 11 on your shiny 16 core Ryzen system, you might want to hold off on that.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's as much as 15% slower on Ryzen systems, particularly ones with lots of cores.  There's a patch coming.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Linux now runs on Arm-based Macs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, sort of.  There's no installer, no networking, and video is a dumb frame buffer like this was still 1993, but if you somehow manage to get it on there it will in fact boot.
  
  
  
• Amazon says don't blame us, it wasn't our game that caused the smoke to come out of your $3000 video card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Narrator: Yeah, it kind of was.
  
  A stock 3090 running Amazon's New World can draw 370W just sitting at the menu.
  
  
  
• The PCIe 6 has reached a final draft.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is four times as fast as PCIe 4  I'm not sure it's going to arrive in desktop systems any time soon, but I said that about PCI 5 and that will be shipping in about a month.
  
  
  
• The monitor I wanted - LG's 27UP850-W - came back in stock this morning and I ordered two. It all looks good on paper; 4K panel, 95% of DCI-P3 and 100% of sRGB. It's not calibrated for Adobe RGB but I don't do print work so that doesn't matter nearly as much.
  
  It has USB-C power delivery so it should be able to power the smaller of my two laptops directly. The laptops each have USB-C and HDMI, so they'll both be connected to both monitors and I can switch as needed.
  
  The plan is to retire my two current desktops entirely. The larger of my two laptops has a faster CPU and GPU, and more memory and SSD (but no internal hard disk) than either of the desktops. The smaller one is for rare occasions when I'm actually in the office; the rest of the time it's backup because I can't afford to be offline just because my main computer caught fire. And for single-threaded tasks it's also faster (by about 40%) than my current desktop systems.
  
  Update: It seems they had at least three of them, because I can see that my order has been allocated at the warehouse and is now in dispatch, and the monitor is still in stock.
  
  Update 2: And they've shipped. I didn't pay extra for 1-day shipping because I need to clear a space for them, but I should still get them Monday.
  
  
  
• Also just got a shipment of gluten-free snacks from Amazon, stuff that's not readily available from the local supermarkets. And a computer toolkit with about 100 different screwdriver heads. Also a pressure washer. I was looking at one for cleaning the back deck and they were on sale this week, so I threw it in the cart with the snacks.
  
  
  
• The community is a disgusting toxic cesspool said a 4chan user - referring to Twitch.  (The Record)
  
  And then leaked a 125GB file containing all of their source code.
  
  
  
• Now that the JP and EN servers have merged, HoloID is getting their own server as well.  Doing a build relay to launch it starting at, hmm, 9PM tomorrow.  I think they'll be doing the same as the EN branch, finishing the game by themselves and then linking it to the other two.
  
  Meanwhile Mumei and Kronii from EN Gen 2 spent three hours happily lost on the JP server.
  
  
  
  
  
• Blockchains and deadlines don't mix.
  
  
  
• Me: Time for bed.
  YouTube: Sora is exploring the HoloEN server.
  Me: Sleep is for the weak.