• 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.

• Elizabeth Warren has a brilliant new solution for the growing threat of ransomware: Make it illegal to be a victim.  (Bloomberg)
  
  That's it.  That's the story.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Do the new security features in Windows 11 slow game performance?  Yes.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But only by around 5%.  And that seems to apply equally to average frame rates and to frame consistency (99% frame rates), so it's not a serious impact.
  
  
  
• The Surface Pro 8 is better than the Surface Pro 7.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Also it has upgradable storage, so if you already have a laptop that comes with a 1TB M.2 2230 SSD like say the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus you can swap that into a low-end model instead of paying Microsoft $1000 for a $200 SSD.
  
  
  
• Intel is back, says Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel added that its products that aren't shipping yet will close the gap with AMD's chips from last year, not that there ever was a gap, because there wasn't, but if there had been there wouldn't be.
  
  
  
• The simplest sorting algorithm ever.  (Arxiv.org - PDF)
  
  On the one hand, it's O(n2).  On the other hand, it's just four lines of code in any reasonable programming language.  On the third hand, it looks obviously incorrect.  On the fourth hand it has been mathematically proven to work.
  
  So it's the perfect answer for annoying tech job interviews.
  
  
  
• How IBM lost the cloud.  (Protocol)
  
  We use IBM Cloud at my day job.  (And other cloud services too.)
  
  The article is...  Not wrong.
  
  
  
• If you are doing 50,000 Docker pulls per day and you're not Facebook or Netflix you are doing something wrong.  Stop that.  (Earthly)
  
  WHAT ARE YOU IDIOTS DOING?
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, October 07 2021 03:43 AM (r9O5h)

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• Mark Zuckerberg and the terrible, horrible, no good very bad day.  (Bloomberg)
  
  All Facebook properties went down for six hours due to a BGP misconfiguration.  When everything goes down at once across a giant cloud provider like that, it's usually BGP.  Once you screw it up, you can lose remote access to the networking gear so you can't fix it, so a five minute solution can be stuck waiting for the right engineer to arrive on site with a serial cable.
  
  The outage caused Facebook apps to go bananas with DNS requests which caused problems for Twitter, Google, Amazon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon...
  
  
  
  
  The mee.nu server managed to crash all by itself.  Actually, it's possible that it was related since I don't know why it keeps crashing.  Just not probable.
  
  
  
• Don't trust SMS-based 2FA.  (Motherboard)
  
  Syniverse, which handles three quarters of a trillion text messages a year for 300 different mobile networks, was hacked.
  
  Five years ago.
  
  They discovered the breach in May and just disclosed this a week ago.
  
  Everything sent from May 2016 to May 2021 was an open buffet for hackers.
  
  
  
• New South Wales has a new premier after Gladys B, the least worst of a bad lot, resigned due to an ongoing corruption investigation of her boyfriend or something.  I don't know the details, it's petty stuff compared to what's happening elsewhere.
  
  I was waiting to see how much worse the new guy would be, and...  Well.
  
  
  It's not the most elegant formulation of the concept of negative rights I've ever read, but to have a politician - particularly an Australian one right now - saying this is refreshing.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL.  (Cloudflare)
  
  An explanation of just how Facebook shot itself in both feet and locked its keys in the car at the same time.
  
  
  
• What to expect with Windows 11.  (AnandTech)
  
  The big day is here, and it's kind of meh.
  
  
  
• I mean, it's not actively terrible.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just, y'know, kind of meh.
  
  
  
• Android 12 is out too.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  6 was the last version that mattered since it brought us adoptable storage - that is, you can take a 32GB device, add a 128GB microSD card, and it works as a single pool of 160GB of storage.
  
  Of course, the major device manufacturers and carriers hated this and immediately broke support.
  
  
  
• What happens when Google decides to break the web.  (The Register)
  
  What happens is the web gets broken.
  
  
  
• RaidForums - a site where people buy and sell the personal data that is increasingly less aptly named -  or not, as we'll get to in a moment - went abruptly if briefly offline after its domain name was yanked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's back up for now on another domain.
  
  
  
• When I said or not, this is what to which I referred.
  
  
  Hey!  This illegal data you sold me is fake!  I want a refund!

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 06 2021 01:51 AM (Z0GF0)

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• New research suggest that the Wuhan Bat Flu may have come from the Wuhan Bat Market and not from the Wuhan Bat Virus Factory across the road according to a paper published by the Wuhan Bat Virus Factory.  (LA Times / Yahoo News)
  
  A second paper from France that - the article kind of slides past this - has not actually been published anywhere concurs.
  
  The article is 90% just the LA Times sniping at CNN, but that has a certain charm in itself.
  
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• M1X Arm-based MacBook Pros may be arriving later this month.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The rumoured specs are inviting.  Shame about the operating system, the price, the fact that it's all glued together into an unmaintainable brick, and that the company behind it basically just plain sucks.
  
  
  
• The chip shortage will continue until morale improves.  (ZDNet)
  
  If you're waiting for prices to come down then congratulations, you can keep right on doing that.
  
  
  
• Why carmakers can't just update to newer chips.  (Jalopnik)
  
  In short: Because cars are expected to work.
  
  
  
• Ransomware gangs are getting ripped off by rival gangs that are undercutting their prices.  (ZDNet)
  
  The free market at work.
  
  
  
• JMS is working on a reboot of Babylon 5.  (Variety)
  
  Look, it's his baby, and the original production was, shall we say, not untroubled.  If he wants to try making it again, and he has funding, let's see how it comes out.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 12:06 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 12:10 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 05 2021 04:01 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, October 05 2021 11:36 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 05 2021 01:28 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 02:10 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 02:16 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 02:17 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 05 2021 04:51 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wednesday, October 06 2021 02:56 AM (uii8N)

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• Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Cisco, SAP, and Atlassian have joined forces to establish Trusted Cloud Principles.  (ZDNet)
  
  The principles are:

  1. A government may not harm a cloud provider's profits, or through inaction, allow a cloud provider's profits to come to harm.
  2. A cloud provider must obey the laws enacted by its government except where such laws would conflict with the First Law.
  3. Users get screwed.

  The silver lining is that this is self-serving corporate bullshit, which is infinitely less harmful than the self-destructive woke bullshit that is so prevalent these days.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of woke bullshit Ruby has embroiled itself in a code of conduct war.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  "To promote inclusion" they have removed the First Law of their existing code of conduct, which previously read:

  Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.

  The rule of the day is now intolerance in the name of inclusion.
  
  Also, Square's "Global Neurodiversity Chair" is - unexpectedly - a fuckhead.
  
  
  
• HP's Chromebook x2 looks nice.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It's not, of course.  It runs Chrome, leaving all your data hostage to the lunatics at Google.  But the industrial design is close to that of my deceased Spectre x2, which is very nice indeed.
  
  At $680 including the detachable keyboard and pen it's reasonably priced compared to an iPad or Surface Go, both of which charge a bundle if you want to type or draw anything.  
  
  It uses a Snapdragon 7c, which is not a fast chip, but would be fine for ChromeOS or Linux, if you can get it to run your preferred distribution.
  
  
  
• Do not buy an Xbox Series S.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  Given that you can't buy an Xbox Series X or a PlayStation 5, that means just don't play games.
  
  Except Minecraft, which will run on a potato with a little overvolting.
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 4 was doomed to die because of a bug that would trigger when the CMOS battery failed.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If the battery fails, the console connects to the PlayStation Network to set the clock.  If it can't do so, it refuses to play any games.  Doesn't matter that the game disk is in the drive, it won't work.
  
  So they fixed it.
  
  
  
• Apple did not fix the phone number field in their AirTag interface, despite being alerted to a security issue.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Scanning the tag with your iPhone reads the phone number, but that could contain anything at all, including JavaScript, which your phone will then run.
  
  
  
• Everything you never knew you didn't know about JIT compilers and didn't ask because you didn't know you didn't know it.  (Carol Chen)
  
  A pretty good look at PyPy and Graal (a Java JIT compiler), with some information on LuaJIT as well.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, October 03 2021 10:48 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 03 2021 11:43 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 04 2021 02:13 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 04 2021 04:39 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 04 2021 09:50 AM (r9O5h)

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• Gladys Berjerkelian...  Bejekele...  Brelekj...  Gladys, premier of NSW and probably the least horrible state government leader in Australia right now though that's not saying much, has abruptly resigned due to an ongoing corruption investigation.
  
  Expecting things to somehow get worse.
  
  Meanwhile Dictator Dan down south remains firmly entrenched.
  
  
  
• USPS!  Can we ship it?  No we can't.  (USPS)
  
  Not to Australia or New Zealand, anyway.
  
  
  
• Do not use SMS-based two-factor authentication to protect anything of real value.  (The Record)
  
  It's not secure and people will steal your stuff.  In this case, Coinbase wallets.  It sounds like the people affected here might have reused a password leaked by a different site, and the attackers then bypassed  2FA to break into the accounts.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Acer FA100 looks like a pretty decent lowish-end NVMe SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a DRAMless TLC model; the alternative at this price point is QLC flash with DRAM.  The tradeoffs are complex but for the average user TLC is still a better bet.
  
  The drive is rated up to 3.3GBps for reads and 2.7GBps for writes, which used to be a very high-end product and is now available at under $100 in a 1TB drive.
  
  It's also very power-efficient, so a good choice for upgrading a laptop.
  
  
  
• The Kingston Datatraveler Max UFD is a USB thumb drive that can hit 1GBps.  (AnandTech)
  
  And can sustain that rate for writes for 95 seconds before it runs out of cache and slows down a bit.  Though it gets pretty toasty if you do that, with the chip temperature - not the case - spiking as high as 92C.
  
  
  
• Backblaze data shows SSDs failing nearly as often as hard drives.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Showing an annual failure rate for newer devices of 1.05% for SSDs and 1.38% for hard drives.  That's quite high and I'd like to dig into the details, but I can certainly report having seen expensive enterprise SSDs simply dropping dead without warning.
  
  
  
• ARM server CPUs are cheaper than AMD (and a lot cheaper than Intel).  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ampere's 80 core Arm server chips can rival AMD's 64 core parts on many benchmarks (though not as I recall for PostgreSQL) at around half the price, and they now offer 128 core models.  They're not as easy to get as AMD or Intel parts, but I've been trying without success to acquire some AMD Epyc Milan servers for work, so "easy to get" is all relative.
  
  
  
• Crypto trading platform Compound gave $90 million to its users by mistake.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not hacked, just dumb.
  
  
  
• Dude, where's my privacy?  (ZDNet)
  
  Amazon's new devices siphon up your persona data and make you pay for the privilege.
  
  
  
• Jeffy B has praised Amazon Games for its first successful release.  (WCCFTech)
  
  See below.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 03 2021 01:33 AM (obo9H)

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