• Apple's new M4 based MacBook Air is not here, but Apple did offer a gift of sorts to MacBook Air buyers: 16GB of RAM.  (Ars Technica)
  
  While that is the same base memory as my Dell laptop from 2013, it is at least an upgrade over the previous base configuration of 8GB without the previous $200 price bump.
  
  There is an M4 MacBook Pro.  It is slightly faster than the M3 MacBook Pro.
  
  
  

Tech News

• How are sales of Intel's Arrow Lake chips going?  Based on public data from German computer retailer Mindfactory, they aren't.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In a list of the 33 top selling CPU models for the past week, Arrow Lake doesn't show up at all, and AMD holds the first 20 places.
  
  It's not all roses for AMD either, as none of their new Zen 5 chips make it into the top ten.
  
  
  
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard is here, the fourth in the series founded with Dragon Age: Origins, one of the best fantasy role-playing games ever made.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  It's hot garbage.
  
  Tom's Guide tries to tiptoe around that, because technically it works quite well.  It's not a buggy mess; the graphics look pretty and perform well without requiring a $3000 graphics card.
  
  But the review summary tells the tale:
  
  - Uninspired story
  - Bland characters
  - Hard to role-play
  
  It's a role-playing game.  That's a death sentence.  It's like reviewing a book and saying the quality of the paper is quite good.
  
  If you venture onto YouTube you will find far harsher reviews, while the mainstream gaming press - the same ones who praised Concord to the heavens before it died ten days after launch - are giving it triumphs and pageantry.
  
  Electronic Arts think it has "break out" potential, which is exactly what Sony was saying about Concord right up until they pulled the plug and wrote off $400 million.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Concord, the game's developer Firewalk Studios is gone.  (MSN)
  
  Not just the expected - and richly deserved - layoffs after they laid their $400 million egg; the entire studio has been shut down less than two years after Sony bought them.
  
  
  
• ZFS deduplication is good now and you shouldn't use it.  (Despair Labs)
  
  Whatever you say.
  
  Continues using ZFS deduplication.
  
  
  
• Mark Zuckerberg promises your feeds will soon be filled with even more AI-generated slop.  (Fortune)
  
  Lucky you.

Posted by: pookysgirl at Thursday, October 31 2024 06:57 PM (dtlDP)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, November 01 2024 01:50 AM (rcPLc)

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• A Russian court has reportedly fined Google $20,541,679,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for blocking 17 Russian TV channels. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which used to be a lot.

• Apple's new Mac Mini - which is actually mini - is here, including an M4 Pro model. (9to5Mac)
  
  As with everything Apple makes, it is locked down forever at the time of purchase, and selecting larger memory and storage options is ruinously expensive.
  
  But at least this one supports up to 64GB of RAM.
  
  The 2024 models measure 5" square, similar to other mini-PCs, and much smaller than the previous 8" square models.
  
  
  
• AMD's 9800X3D, due out next week, is 25% faster than its predecessor on productivity benchmarks. (WCCFTech)
  
  The X3D models are optimised for games and are generally slower than the regular models for serious work, but AMD seems to have managed to reverse that in this case: It's also 10% faster than the comparable current-generation 9700X.
  
  
  
• The Verge is having a normal day to end all normal days: A vote for Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles. (The Verge)
  
  It's particularly impressive how the article includes a chart showing school shootings soaring under the Biden-Harris administration, not Trump's.
  
  
  
• Oops. Oopsie. There's been a local privilege escalation bug in the X.Org window server (that manages desktops on Linux) for 18 years. (Phoronix)
  
  Another very good reason not to run it on servers.
  
  If you needed one.
  
  
  
• 25% of Google's new code is written by AI. (The Verge)
  
  Another very good reason to move away from Google as fast as you can.
  
  If you needed one.
  
  
  

Gotta Catch 'Em All

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 30 2024 10:44 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 31 2024 12:20 AM (O7lu9)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 31 2024 10:29 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 31 2024 10:59 AM (bg2DR)

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• AI is 90% marketing and 10% reality says Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And Git, in much the same way Donald Knuth created TeX and Metafont to typeset his own books.
  
  Ever the optimist, is Linus.

• The (useless paperweight) 8GB iMac is no more.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 2024 edition based on the latest M4 chip starts with 16GB.
  
  And a minuscule 256GB of SSD worth less than $10 because Apple is determined to make cheapskates suffer.
  
  Everything is soldered in place - everything is always soldered in place - so you can't upgrade it later.  And the top configuration, with all of 32GB, costs as much as a high-end gaming or workstation PC with twice as much of everything and ten times the graphics performance.
  
  
  
• Samsung's 990 EVO Plus SSD fixes most of the issues with the 990 EVO.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new model scores pretty close the 990 Pro across a range of benchmarks.
  
  It's also priced pretty close to the 990 Pro.
  
  
  
• JPMorgan Chase has started suing customers who took advantage of an "infinite money glitch".  (CNBC)
  
  Also known as cheque fraud.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 30 2024 12:28 AM (zx18t)

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• Nature abhors a vacuum, and OpenAI's Whisper abhors a momentary silence.  (The Verge)
  
  If it encounters such a thing, it will happily fill the void with something it just made up, often creating strange or offensive sentences out of nothing at all.
  
  Which wouldn't be a huge problem since we've come to expect that of chatbots.
  
  Except that Whisper is used for medical transcriptions.
  
  Lawyers everywhere are salivating like dogs hearing the dinner bell.

• Speaking of salivating dogs countries are struggling with what to do about software liability.  (The Record)
  
  Software licenses tend to disclaim everything disclaimable and many things that aren't, and companies only get into real trouble when they screw up in very specific and public ways and yes I am looking at you, CrowdStrike.
  
  And while the US grapples with how to draft new legislation that would protect users and hold companies liable without crippling the entire industry the EU has decided to drop a guilty-until-proven-innocent liability bomb on individual developers.  (Lawfare)
  
  Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that communists.
  
  
  
• Hugging Face - a hub for AI models - has announced HUGS, conveniently downloadable AI models that can run on the cloud or on your own hardware.  (The Register)
  
  This competes directly with Nvidia's NIMS (seriously, who names these things) but also supports AMD and Google hardware.
  
  
  
• A new Windows exploit makes fully-patched Windows systems vulnerable by rolling them back to a version before a key vulnerability was patched, and then exploiting that vulnerability.  (HackRead)
  
  Seems logical, though the pre-exploit code still needs to infect your system somehow.

• Are Boeing's problems beyond fixable?  (Financial Times / Ars Technica)
  
  Probably not.
  
  They do need to ditch their space division, though.  Find a buyer or just shut it down.  Unless the government starts handing out cost plus contracts like candy again, it's a money pit for them.

• Intel's new Arrow Lake CPUs on motherboards with Intel's new Z890 chipset running Microsoft's new 24H2 update to Windows 11 with their integrated graphics don't.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you want to do that, you need to update your BIOS.  Or disable the integrated graphics and plug in a video card.  Or stick with a previous edition of Windows that works.
  
  The last option is likely safest, because this is not the first major problem to have arisen with 24H2 on specific hardware.  There are known SSD models that work perfectly well on previous Windows versions that cause Blue Screens of Death on the latest update.
  
  
  
• UnitedHealth has confirmed that medical and billing records for several customers were exposed during a ransomware attack on Change Healthcare back in May.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Where several turns out the be one hundred million.  Roughly.
  
  What's more, when Change paid the ransom - believed to be $22 million - the intermediary stole the money and stiffed the hackers, leading to the data being leaked anyway until Change paid the ransom again.
  
  The attack caused an estimated $2.45 billion in losses for Change.
  
  
  
• Bounty hunters.  Just saying.
  
  
  
• An energy company founded by the CEO of Atlassian plans to build a 6GW solar power plant in northern Australia - good place for it - and supply 2GW of that to Singapore.  (Reuters)
  
  The article doesn't mention the exact location, but assuming this is the north end of Western Australia (which is a desert) and not the north end of Queensland (rainforest) or the north end of the Northern Territory (swamp) it seems like a good plan.
  
  Plans are to also supply power to Indonesia in the future.  That's a lot closer than Singapore, but either is closer to that part of Western Australia than is Sydney.
  
  
  
• The US government bought a tool that can track phones at abortion clinics.  (404 Media)  (archive site)
  
  If that seems oddly specific, your suspicions are correct.  It can track mobile phones anywhere.  The writers of this piece don't care about wholesale unconstitutional violations of privacy, though.  They only care about abortion.
  
  
  
• Orion could be OpenAI's game changing model.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  No it couldn't.

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, October 28 2024 09:23 AM (ZLF73)

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• The Librarian of Congress has granted a DMCA exemption to allow franchise owners to repair their own ice cream machines.  (ExtremeTech)
  
  The requested exemption was much broader, but the Librarian only granted the part covering "retail-level food preparation equipment".  Still a step forward for soft-serve lovers everywhere.

• Siri now has an integration with ChatGPT.  (The Verge)
  
  Asked a simple question, it can return answers for things you didn't ask, just vague enough to be completely useless when they are not entirely wrong in the first place.
  
  
  
• Delta Air Lines has filed its long-awaited suit against Crowdstrike.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  Delta wants damages of $500 million to cover its direct costs over CrowdStrike's colossal screwup, plus additional unspecified amounts for lost profits, reputational damage, and lawyers' fees.
  
  CrowdStrike says this is Delta's own fault for being stupid enough to use CrowdStrike.
  
  
  
• This page does not exist.  (Wikipedia)  (archive site)
  
  The judge in a defamation case in India has ordered Wikipedia to take down the page about the case - globally.
  
  Be a shame if this got Streisanded into the stratosphere.
  
  
  
• Cheaper Zen 5 laptops are on their way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The current Zen 5 laptop chips are Strix Point, with twelve cores (four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5c).  The new Krackan Point chips trim that down to eight cores (four of each) and likely also trims down the GPU side to eight cores.
  
  Still waiting in the wings is Strix Point Halo, with sixteen Zen 5 cores and forty graphics cores.
  
  
  

Voices from the Distant Past Video of the Today

Voices from the Distant Past Video of the Tomorrow

• Intel's Arrow Lake desktop CPUs - effectively the 15th generation Core chips though they don't call them that - are finally here.  Are they good?  Should you buy one?  No.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They do post very good results in a couple of AI benchmarks, and generally solid results in multi-threaded productivity tasks, but on games they average 5% slower than the previous (and cheaper) generation, and are even further behind AMD's previous generation gaming-oriented chips like the 7800X3D.
  
  In fact, for games they are often behind the two-generation-old 5800X3D, sometimes behind the budget-oriented 5700X3D, running roughly even with Intel's three-generation-old 12600K.  But costing four times as much.
  
  And while these new chips do use significantly less power than the 14900K blast furnace, they still use significantly more power than AMD's offerings.
  
  Intel managed to one-up AMD's Zen 5, which has been nicknamed Zen 5% for its mediocre performance gains on consumer applications, but actually going backwards.
  
  To complicate matters further, new BIOS features to improve performance that should be on by default, aren't, and when they are turned on manually they sometimes make things worse.
  
  The same goes for Windows, with the latest 24H2 update causing some games to run noticeably slower on Arrow Lake, when the same release improves performance on AMD's Zen 4 and Zen 5 chips.
  
  It's a mess.
  
  
  
• And AMD's 9800X3D is due out in two weeks.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That looks like the way to go for people who play a lot of recent computer games...  Whoever they are, given how poorly received recent titles have been.
  
  If you just need something that works for everyday tasks, something like the 8700G or even the previous generation's 5600GT should do the job nicely.

• Would you like to play a game?  The Biden Administration - whoever the hell is actually running it these days - has ordered the Pentagon and intelligence agencies the increase their use of AI.  (MSN)
  
  The risk has never been in the AI itself.  The risk has always been the morons in charge of the AI.
  
  
  
• The Humane AI Pin has received a $200 price cut down to $499.  (MSN)
  
  Plus a $24 monthly subscription plan.
  
  It's still completely useless.
  
  
  
• After a 15 year legal battle, the EU has dropped its anti-trust case against Intel.  (Notebook Check)
  
  So there's one positive thing.
  
  
  
• OpenAI plans to release its next generation chatbot, Orion, before the end of the year.  (The Verge)
  
  A preview version of Orion was proud to announce that its name is an anagram of "they are so great".
  
  No, really.
  
  
  
• The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women - TFEVW, pronounced tfevw, has leaked a 228GB database of victims of violence against women.  (HackRead)
  
  You had one job.
  
  
  
  

You Had One Job Videos of the Day

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 25 2024 09:01 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 25 2024 09:02 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 25 2024 10:01 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 26 2024 04:07 AM (zx18t)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 26 2024 07:36 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, October 26 2024 11:07 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 26 2024 05:20 PM (PiXy!)

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• Arm has given notice to Qualcomm that it - Arm - plans to cancel it's - Qualcomm's - Arm architecture license.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  CPU startup Nuvia paid for an Arm architecture license, which allowed that company to design custom Arm processor cores.  Nuvia was then acquired by Qualcomm, which also had an Arm architecture license, and its - Nuvia's - designs became what is now the Qualcomm X series which has made its way into Windows laptops that for the first time ever provide adequate performance for Windows on Arm.
  
  Arm is upset about this because its - Arm's - own cores don't provide adequate performance in Windows laptops so nobody uses them, and cores produced on an architecture license provide Arm less revenue than its - Arm's - own designs.
  
  So Arm is suing Qualcomm for squillions of dollars and wants to prevent it - Qualcomm - from selling processors designed with its - Qualcomm's - own cores, despite it - Qualcomm and Nuvia both - having paid it - Arm - for a license to do so.
  
  It - the entire situation - is a mess and I don't know how things will turn out.

• The front fell off: Intelsat-33 experienced an anomaly.  (CBS)
  
  Which is to say that the US Space Force is now tracking around twenty individual fragments of what used to be the satellite.
  
  Intelsat-33 was made by Boeing.
  
  
  
• Huawei reportedly tried to manufacture its chips at TSMC using a cut-out company.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Alert employees at TSMC raised the alarm when they noticed that the new Ascend 910B they had been contracted to manufacture was very similar to Huawei's Ascend 910.
  
  Also it was marked Copyright Huawei all rights reserved.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which Huawei's HarmonyOS is finally here, divorcing the company's devices from Google's Android.  (The Register)
  
  HarmonyOS is Android.  (Ars Technica)
  
  
  
• Speaking of Ars Technica Tesla reported a quarterly profit of $2.2 billion and psychosis is running rampant among the commentariat.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I do not get a spell-check warning for commentariat.  Huh.
  
  

• Meanwhile the Tesla Cybertruck is the third best selling EV in America.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  After the Tesla Model 3 and Tesla Model Y.
  
  The Ars commentariat could not be reached for comment.
  
  
  
• Eero's new Eero Outdoor 7 takes wifi beyond your walls by putting wifi beyond your walls.  (The Verge)
  
  Remarkable.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 25 2024 12:24 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, October 25 2024 06:17 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, October 25 2024 06:33 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, October 25 2024 07:16 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, October 25 2024 07:18 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 26 2024 05:16 AM (rcPLc)

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• The San Francisco MTA is spending $212 million to move its train control system off floppy disks.  (GovTech)
  
  The system was installed in 1998, which is rather late to be using floppy disks that were (assuming it uses 3.5" disks) introduced in 1982.  But Compact Flash, the only real alternative at the time that is still supported today, was only introduced in 1994 and was likely not readily available when the project started.
  
  And given that it's been working for 26 years so far, we can't really blame the designers for being short-sighted.
  
  

Tech News

• De-extinction company Colossal has provided an update on its work to bring back the Tasmanian tiger.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The company now has a near-complete genome for the creature, which went extinct in 1936.  (Though some people suspect a few specimens might still exist in south-west Tasmania, which is extremely rugged and mostly uninhabited.
  
  The plan is to produce new embryos by engineering eggs from its nearest living relative, the fat-tailed dunnart, which is basically a carnivorous mouse.
  
  Since it is - was - a marsupial, we wouldn't need to bring it to term in a womb; it evolved to latch on to a nipple and feed at a point that would be an embryo in a placental species.
  
  
  
• Flock you: A lawsuit in Virginia argues that networks of license plate cameras constitute unlawful warrantless searches under the Fourth Amendment.  (404 Media) (archive site)
  
  It's an interesting question.  In Norfolk, the police know the travel habits of pretty much everyone thanks to cameras distributed through the city.
  
  You don't have an implicit right to privacy in public, but the government is explicitly restricted in how it can infringe on your privacy.
  
  
  
• VMWare has fixed critical vulnerabilities in its vCenter management application.  (The Register)
  
  Again.
  
  Fixes were pushed out last month, but they didn't fix it.
  
  
  
• The Beelink SER9 is the fastest mini-PC around.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And its quiet.
  
  On the other hand, it's expensive at $999 and memory is locked at 32GB.  It's soldered in place (the Ryzen 370 laptop chip it uses doesn't support regular DIMMs) and there's no 64GB model.
  
  
  
• The iPad Mini 2024 model is the best iPad Mini yet.  (The Verge)
  
  But it's not much better than the old model, and it still suffers from the "jelly scrolling" problem that everyone noted when the old model first appeared.
  
  Apple doesn't seem to care about this product at all.  If you want a good small tablet, there's this and the Lenovo Legion Tab which you basically can't buy anywhere.
  
  
  
• My Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC case is here.

Posted by: Rick T at Thursday, October 24 2024 11:43 AM (xeXUW)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Friday, October 25 2024 12:06 AM (oAfAk)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 25 2024 12:21 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, October 25 2024 10:07 AM (ZLF73)

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• The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post are suing AI startup Perplexity over copyright infringement.  (Variety)
  
  To be fair, that seems to be Perplexity's entire business model: Index copyrighted content, summarise it, file off the serial numbers, and then provide it to users to answer their questions.

  News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, in a statement about the lawsuit, said: "Perplexity perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp. The perplexing Perplexity has willfully copied copious amounts of copyrighted material without compensation, and shamelessly presents repurposed material as a direct substitute for the original source. Perplexity proudly states that users can 'skip the links'  - apparently, Perplexity wants to skip the check."

  From my understanding of Perplexity, this is actually pretty accurate.
  
  This bit less so:

  We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, which understands that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realize the potential of artificial intelligence

  OpenAI is as unprincipled as any company in the industry, but with billions of dollars of investors money to burn, they can pay off at least some of their victims.

• The Internet Archive got hacked again - not the main site, but their Zendesk tech support hub.  (HackRead)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Arkansas may have vast lithium reserves.  (New York Times)
  
  Or at least half vast.
  
  
  
• Daze is MySpace for teenagers.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or maybe GeoCities.
  
  Only worse.
  
  
  
• Disney will name Bob Iger's replacement in 2026.  (CNBC)
  
  I think Tim would be a good name.
  
  
  
• AMD's upcoming 9800X3D - due in stores November 7 - seems to be significantly faster on general-purpose workloads than either the 9700X or 7800X3D.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The X3D chips are optimised for games with extra large caches, which make them run at somewhat slower clock speeds, which in turn makes them perform worse fo applications that don't benefit from extra large caches.
  
  The 9800X3D though ups the TDP to 120W vs. 65W for the 9700X, and that makes it a very capable chip all round.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 23 2024 03:26 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Wednesday, October 23 2024 10:52 AM (hRoyQ)

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