• Is Obama's blatantly unconstitutional Operation Choke Point responsible for the recent rash of payment deplatforming?  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Originally aimed at illegally stamping out the Second Amendment, claims are that it is still alive and being used to target the First.
  
  I'm skeptical, but Operation Choke Point was real, has not so far as I know been verified as having been dismantled, and worked in precisely this way, so I'm not dismissing this either.
  
  (Remember Rule One.)
  
  

Tech News

• California could soon have its own version of the internet.  (Wired)
  
  That is to say, the internet, only fucked it gives you cancer.
  
  
• DBS Bank in Singapore is using AI and big data in a way that is NOT AT ALL CREEPY.  (ZDNet)
  
  The way AI personal assistants work at the moment is completely messed up and counterproductive.
  
  
• Ten predictions about the media for 2019.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Summary: Everyone will be trying to buy everyone else and/or stab everyone else in the back, while violating customer privacy and making a whole lot of crap.  Also blockchain.
  
  
• Ultima Thule is shaped like a peanut.  The first high-resolution images should be received tomorrow, but it will take until September 2020 for all the flyby data to be received.
  
  I know how that feels, New Horizons.  I've been waiting for my fibre internet connection nearly as long as you've been alive.
  
  Update: I looked up Ultima Thule on Twitter to see if the first high-res images have come in yet and instead I find idiots bitching about Space Nazis. (Newsweek)
  
  Update: Had better luck on Ars Technica.
  
  
  
  
  

Social Media News

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Posted by: Ed Hering at Thursday, January 03 2019 04:54 AM (/cXdK)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, January 04 2019 09:37 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 04 2019 07:23 PM (PiXy!)

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• Star Control: Origins has been removed from Steam because - as far as I can tell - the designers of Star Control II are jerks.  (OC3D)
  
  Those same jerks are why you can't get Star Control I and II on GOG at the moment, even though they were earning royalties on the sales.
  
  Right now Star Control: Origins is still available on GOG though that may change at any moment.  Oh, and also on Stardock's own site, which is less likely to change, since Stardock has already countersued over the DMCA notices.
  
  
• Netflix has told Apple to go bite itself.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apple made around $250 million as its cut of Netflix purchases through Netflix's iOS app in 2018 alone.  
  
  
• Swarm has been fined nearly a million dollars by the FCC for launching unlicensed space bees.  (MIT Technology Review)
  
  What it says.
  
  
• First leak of 2019 looks like Nvidia's RTX 2060.  (PC Perspective)
  
  I'm not sure what the point of a low-end RTX card is, exactly.  The big new feature is ray tracing, and even the 2080 Ti is too slow to do that usefully.  But now might be a good time to grab a GTX 1070 or 1070 Ti.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Five tech stories you're already sick of hearing about.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• China's Chang'e 4 probe is set to land on the far side of the moon in the next couple of days.  (South China Morning Post)
  
  Despite the fact that the Soviet probe Luna 2 first landed - rather hard - on the Moon all the way back in 1959, this will be the first probe to make a landing on the far side.  
  
  The Chang'e rover - China's second Moon rover after 2013's Jade Rabbit - will communicate with Earth via a dedicated satellite called Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge.
  
  This being a Chinese mission, many details remain undisclosed, but it has been confirmed that yes, there are silkworms aboard.
  
  
  

Video of the Day

Pictures of the Day

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• Apple is doomed.  (ZDNet)
  
  The current Mac lineup is a snoozefest, the iPad is in decline, and the hilariously overpriced iPhone XS Max is barely making half its projected sales.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And the iWatch is a joke.  Which leaves, what?  Smart speakers?  Apple missed that market.  Overpriced uncomfortable earphones that you immediately lose?
  
  Apple makes enormous amounts of money, enough to fund a dozen entirely new products every year.  The question is whether they have the vision to actually do that.
  
  I don't think so.
  
  Amazon does.  Microsoft does, though not to quite the same degree.  Google has the vision, but the company is run by idiot children so they always fail.
  
  Apple has the money and competent leadership, but vision died with Steve Jobs.
  
  Analysts are trying to talk up the stock, framing Apple as the new Coca Cola.  (Fudzilla)
  
  But Coca Cola don't charge A$2869 per bottle and deliver it bent.
  
  
• Nvidia is facing a lawsuit over mishandling its inventory in the face of the cryptocurrency bubble.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  About 18 months ago I was looking to build a new PC, and I wanted to go all AMD.  I could not get an AMD graphics card anywhere.  By the time I decided to get Nvidia instead, they were gone too.  Then Dell announced the Inspiron 27 - and launched it with a 15% day one discount - and I just went with that instead.
  
  AMD cards were impossible to find for a long time.  And the reason AMD didn't just increase production is that they knew that the moment the crypto bubble burst, as all bubbles eventually do, they would be left with a ton of unsold inventory and the used market would be flooded with cheap cards.
  
  Not a good combination.  So they held tight and waited it out.  
  
  Nvidia doesn't seem to have been as successful in managing those events.
  
  
• Tariffs are bad for high-end embedded CPUs.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Specifically because these CPUs are soldered-in, rather than socketed, so the tariff ends up hitting the entire product.  The CPU might represent 80% or more of the total cost, but since it has to be soldered to the board, the tariff hits the whole thing.
  
  
• If you can't beat them, hire them?  Intel hired Ryan Shrout, Editor in Chief of PC Perspective back in October to become their Chief Performance Strategist, and they've now also poached Allyn Malventano and Ken Addison.  
  
  This is a good move for Intel, but a loss for tech journalism.  PC Perspective is still a going concern, though, with Sebastian Peak moving up to Editor in Chief.
  
  Until Intel hires him too...
  
  
  

Social Media News

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 31 2018 02:58 PM (Iwkd4)

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• The year in review for CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not that much has happened (30,000 words later) really.  Maybe things will shift gears in 2019.
  
  
• 19 tech predictions for 2019.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And it is not one of those unspeakable slideshows!  A between-Christmas-and-New-Year Miracle!
  
  
• China has approved 80 new video games!  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What an oppressive regime.  I'm so glad we don't suffer that sort of nonsense here in Australia.  (Wikipedia)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, December 31 2018 06:21 PM (gxCG3)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 01 2019 01:31 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 01 2019 02:24 AM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia's RTX 2060 is on its way.  Also the RTX 2060, the RTX 2060, the RTX 2060, the RTX 2060, the RTX 2060, and the RTX 2060.
  
  Gigabyte alone lists 39 models.  (VideoCardz.com)
  
  
• HDMI 2.1 is coming, eventually.  (CNet)
  
  It will support resolutions up to 10k/120, 16 bit colour,and HDR - though admittedly not all at once, as that combination would require 300 Gbps and HDMI 2.1 only delivers 48 Gbps.  It is exactly fast enough to support uncompressed 8k/60 video in 8 bit colour.
  
  Most importantly, it's not here yet.  You can't buy HDMI 2.1 televisions, HDMI 2.1 Blu-Ray players, or HDMI 2.1 cables.  You don't need any of those for 4k, but you need all of them at once for 8k.
  
  
• Speaking of which, Is 8K worth it? No.  (High-Def Digest)
  
  More specifically, not yet, unless you are editing major motion pictures (you're probably not) or doing technical computing or publishing work and someone else is footing the bill.
  
  For a TV, no.  It will be the Next Big Thing, and prices will come down fast, and I would love a curved ultrawide monitor of 10240x4320 or something similar that will come as panels move to mass production, but right now, no.
  
  
• Microsoft is currently the most valuable tech company, but Apple makes as much profit - and nearly as much revenue - as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook combined.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• How does Facebook guarantee that trillions of pointless drunken New Years' greetings are delivered promptly and accurately without overloading their servers?
  
  Like generations of smart engineers before them, they lose your message and lie about it.  (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  Harsh as it seems, this is actually a sound strategy.  If too many messages are coming into the network for you to deliver, your options are to crash and not deliver any of them, provide back pressure to slow down the influx of messages - the network equivalent of surge pricing - or just drop some of the messages on the floor.
  
  If you don't plan to do at least one of those, you will end up doing all three.
  
  
• libpostal parses street addresses so you don't have to.
  
  It has a Python binding too.
  
  
• Every time I do this roundup I have to shut down Chrome and restart it because it just stops working.  Will look at other browsers and see how they do, because that's nonsense.

• An Ohio woman has been jailed for three days and banned from social media for a year for reposting a false story she found on Facebook.  (TechDirt)
  
  Everything about this story screams First Amendment Violation.
  
  People in the comments of the article are citing Schenck in support of this decision.  Remember Rule One.
  
  
• How much of the internet is fake?  (New York Magazine)
  
  It's a question that has been asked for years, and consumed the lives of those who have studied it.
  
  The answer is 900%.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 30 2018 10:52 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 31 2018 02:42 AM (PiXy!)

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• The top five "copyright owners" (only one of whom you may have heard of) have between them sent Google 1,297,436,659 DMCA takedown requests.
  
  These requests were, by Google's numbers, somewhere between 99% and 100% bullshit.  (TechDirt)
  
  The handy chart at TechDirt shows a sample of 59,950 takedown requests sent to Google by APDIF Mexico, of which Google judged zero were valid.
  
  
• Do developers understand IEEE floating point?  No.  (PDF)
  
  Have you looked at it?  I mean, seriously.
  
  
• Swift 5 makes it easier to post ASCII art right into your code.
  
  Another option is to not do that.

• In an award-winning act of introspective failure, the New York Times has run a 3500 word article taking Facebook to task for the incomprehensible censorship rules that the New York Times has spent years demanding Facebook implement.
  
  It's also a load of shit.

  In India, Chinmayi Arun, a legal scholar, identified troubling mistakes in Facebook’s guidelines.

  One slide tells moderators that any post degrading an entire religion violates Indian law and should be flagged for removal. It is a significant curb on speech — and apparently incorrect. Indian law prohibits blasphemy only in certain conditions, Ms. Arun said, such as when the speaker intends to inflame violence.

  Yeah, right.  Anyone remember when the whole of mu.nu got banned in India?

• Meanwhile, Google and Facebook are being criticised for not filtering out encrypted content.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The solution is clearly to ban journalists.
  

• Indonesia has unblocked Tumblr now that no-one goes there anymore.  (Tech Crunch)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 29 2018 02:00 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 29 2018 02:05 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 29 2018 10:24 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 29 2018 10:27 PM (PiXy!)

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• Passbase helps you create a universally trusted digital identity.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  No possible way that could go wrong.
  
  
• Banana Pi (I'd prefer pecan, but never mind) is launching a tiny 24 core Arm server.  (Phoronix)
  
  Though it's 24 1GHz A53 cores, so in reality it's no faster than a high-end phone.
  
  
• More details emerge on that false flag Russian bot fake news social media "researcher" story.  (The Verge)
  
  It's pretty clear here that Facebook are right and the "researchers" are just providing dirty deeds done dirt cheap.  Except not that cheap.
  
  
• Christmas Eggs?  It should have been obvious that was a bad idea.  (Yet another programming blog)
  
  This is fine to do in an app.  It's not quite so fine in a component library, where what you want is consistent behaviour above all else.
  
  Christmas Eggs.  What is the world coming to?
  
  
• Did cryptocurrency dreams go bust in 2018?  (Axios)
  
  Axios as usual has the wrong end of the stick.  Cryptocurrency speculators' dreams went bust.  I'm working on cryptocurrency apps at my day job and the speculation bubble was a huge problem for anyone trying to run any practical apps - it clogged up the networks and increased transaction fees by an order of magnitude, sometimes two orders of magnitude, and made both costs and schedules impossible to reliably predict.
  
  If it's over, we might be able to get some actual work done.
  
  
• Chrome's new UI design looks like poop.  (ZDNet)
  
  Google says, "If you don't like it, don't buy it....  Wait, come back!"
  
  
• How does the 9700K (8 cores, 8 threads) compare with the older 8700K (6 cores, 12 threads)?  (Gamer's Nexus)
  
  For games, it's usually a win.  For productivity and rendering, it's mixed.  In fact, for Blender the 9700K is only a hair ahead of the Ryzen 1700, an older, lower power, and much cheaper part.  (On Amazon, $399 vs. $199.)

Social Media News

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 28 2018 01:47 AM (Q/JG2)

2 I think the writer of that piece might have an opinion.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 28 2018 02:06 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 28 2018 06:07 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Huawei sold 200 million phones in 2018.  (AnandTech)
  
  
  
  
• The Humble Stem Bundle offers books to freeze your brain through the hottest Christmas nights.
  
  Or if you live in the northern hemisphere, you could burn them, I suppose, except they're digital so you'd have to print them out first and then what is the point?!
  
  Uh, anyway, for a dollar you get nine books covering AutoCad, Alzheimer's, electrical and industrial engineering, mathematical and experimental physics, software testing and operating systems.  Ten more nooks at the $8 mark and 13 more more at $15.
  
  
• The Nokia 9 is inbound with 5 rear cameras and reportedly one single solitary lonely front camera.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
• How to scale to 11 million users on AWS.  (High Scalability)
  
  Step 1: Have many millions of dollars that you don't want.
  
  
• Everyone is suing everyone again.  (BusinessKorea)
  
  
• You probably didn't win a BMW M240i in that lottery you didn't buy a ticket for.  (Bleeping Computer)

• Why privacy regulations are no longer a pipe dream.  (Axios)
  
  Because the incumbents want the cost of implementation to smother any potential competitors, that's why.

• A team at MIT has built transistors just 2.5nm wide using modifications of existing fabrication techniques.
  
  That latter part is significant, because it means this approach could potentially see industry adoption.  Many of the smallest / fastest / whateverest transistor records in the past have been built using techniques that don't scale at all.
  
  
• Silicon valley?  Ethos?  Hahahahahaha... <wheeze>  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• AMD CEO Lisa Su will be using her CES keynote on January 9 to launch the Ryzen 3000 CPUs and APUs and new Radeon graphics cards unless she doesnt.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Patches to support Zen 2 have been landing in the Linux kernel so AMD is clearly gearing up to launch something.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As previously noted, there are two completely separate families of Ryzen 3000 parts on completely different processes and launch schedules, so AMD could well launch Ryzen 3000 at CES, just not 7nm.
  
  
• MIPS is going open source and royalty free.  (Phoronix)
  
  Not quite yet, but details to follow in Q1 2019.  This is likely a smart move given Arm's dominance of the sector and the interest in RISC-V.

• I linked to an Engadget story yesterday about Facebook banning a social media research company for what the company claims was research into how false media narratives propagate on social networks and what Facebook describes as, and I quote, "some seriously shady-ass fucking shit".
  
  This report from Tim Pool suggests that Facebook may have been right on this one and caught them with their red hands in the cookie jar.
  
  
  
  They were allegedly not only posting fake news during the Alabama elections, but presenting fake reports of Russian fake news efforts.
  
  It's mock turtles all the way down.

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