• The Radeon 6600 XT is on its way.  (WCCFTech(
  
  It's not super-fast; it amounts to a low-mid-range card by today's standards.  It has 32 compute units compared to 40 on the 6700 XT - pretty close - but only 32MB of cache compared to 96MB on the 6700 XT.
  
  But the advantage of that part is that it makes for a smaller chip that will still fly through games at 1080p and might actually be available at a reasonable price.
  
  

Tech News

• A couple of kids in South Africa made off with $3.6 billion in Bitcoin.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's the biggest in a series of massive scams that have looted billions of dollars in cryptocurrencies.  It's notable that the two directors of this particular scam are aged 20 and 17.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which - on a much smaller scale and less direct, and also unproven and maybe pure bullshit - John McAfee has been found dead in his cell in a Spanish prison.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Kind of a weird guy.  May have actually killed himself.  Not saying he did.  Not saying he didn't.  
  
  I'll miss him being a thorn in the side of the feds.
  
  
  
• NewsBlur got hacked and their data held to ransom.  (NewsBlur)
  
  If you go to that site you won't notice anything amiss.  That's because they had backups.  It took them a few hours to re-sync their database but after that everything came right back up.
  
  
  
• The Microsoft Store is crashing on Windows, affecting literally dozens of people.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Actually I don't know how many people use the Microsoft Store to download apps.  With the number of Windows PCs out there it's probably not insignificant.
  
  
  
• VMWare has fixed another bug that let anyone on the management network simply take over servers.  (Bleeping Compute)
  
  There are no workarounds, so if you're running the affected software it's upgrade time right now.
  
  
  
• LinkedIn is blocking people in China.  (WSJ)
  
  You know what you did.
  
  Most such sites don't have the problem of having to block particular accounts because they - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube - are banned outright in China.  LinkedIn isn't, yet.
  
  What they should do is tell the Chinese government to shove a pumpkin up its ass and sing Lili Marlene.  What they are doing is blocking individual accounts from being accessed from China.
  
  
  
• Three people have been arrested in Japan for summarising movies.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  They squish movies down to 10 minutes or so, add narration, and upload them to YouTube.  The movie studios are claiming that each view of these squishies constitutes a lost sale, totalling about a billion dollars in the past year.
  
  Which is unmitigated bullshit, but even in the US this likely wouldn't pass the fair use test.
  
  
  
• West Taiwan is ramping up production of 14nm chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is new for the backwards province, which sees most of its production at much older processes - 28nm and larger.  
  
  Mainland Taiwan meanwhile is ramping up production at 4nm.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, June 24 2021 11:55 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 25 2021 01:56 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, June 25 2021 06:07 AM (ZlYZd)

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• AMD's FidelityFX upscaling solution is here and it kind of works.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The way this works is you select your target resolution - say, 3840x2160, if that's the native resolution of your display - and your desired quality level ranging from Performance to Ultra Quality - and it renders at a lower resolution and does intelligent upscaling.
  
  Downside is that it's not an automatic feature of the drivers; it needs to be implemented in games.  Upside is that games can use the upscaling for 3D content and render menu overlays at native resolution.
  
  Performance gains can be better than 50% even at the highest quality settings, and it works on older cards like the Radeon 5500XT - and even older Nvidia cards like the GTX 1650, both of which are benchmarked here.
  
  It also works with integrated graphics, providing a health performance boost with minimal impact to image quality.
  
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• It you want a TV that doesn't spy on you - because it physically can't - you might want to get a gaming monitor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can get computer monitors in sizes up to 55", with no WiFi, no Ethernet, no smart features at all.
  
  
  
• SiFive has a new high performance core - where high performance is equivalent to an Arm A75.  (SiFive)
  
  Which is not bad at all, but is four generations behind Arm's latest designs.
  
  On the other hand, four of these SiFive cores are the same size as one A75 core, which is already pretty small.
  
  
  
• Brave now has its own search engine.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Sort of.  They say they run their own engine for common queries, and have links to Google, Bing, and Mojeek (who?) if they don't find many (or any) hits.  That works, probably.
  
  
  
• A bug found last year in 800,000 firewalls only got partly fixed.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• The beatings will continue until the smiles improve.  (PetaPixel)
  
  Canon deployed AI cameras in the offices of a Chinese subsidiary that will only unlock the doors if you smile.
  
  What could possibly go wrong?
  
  
  
• Microsoft has reached a market cap of $2 trillion.  (GeekWire)
  
  Money printer continues to go brrr.
  
  
  
• Iran is claiming that the US State Department seized the websites of some of their state-run propaganda media outlets.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Presumably because the content was insufficiently inflammatory.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 24 2021 07:21 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 24 2021 10:08 AM (obo9H)

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• Leaks ahoy!
  
  
  
  
  Okay, so this is AMD's next-generation embedded processor.  Looks nice for people working on mid-range embedded systems, but doesn't do a whole lot for the rest of us.
  
  Except that advanced chip design is expensive.  A large chip like a CPU or GPU at modern nodes - 7nm, 6nm in this case, 5nm, costs in excess of $100 million to develop.  AMD simply doesn't have the scale to drop that much money just on an embedded design.
  
  This is Rembrandt, the fill-in between current Zen 3 chips and the Zen 4 chips set to arrive late next year.
  
  CPU performance will be basically the same as current generation - it's still Zen 3 - but with a bit of a boost from the 6nm process and the DDR5 memory.
  
  PCIe 4.0 is new for AMD mobile parts.  So is USB 4.0.
  
  The dual 10G Ethernet ports are interesting, but those might not survive in the consumer models.  Every first-generation Ryzen chip has 10G Ethernet support built in, but it's not wired up to anything.  There's a crossbar switch inside the chip that connects various on-chip I/O devices - USB, SATA, PCIe, and Ethernet - to the pins on the package.  All generations of desktop Ryzen parts have 32 PCIe lanes internally, but only 24 are available because the other pins are used for SATA and USB.
  
  Same deal is likely here - the consumer version will likely have more PCIe lanes but no 10G Ethernet.
  
  And finally, 12 RDNA2 compute units.  It's a bit hard to say how that will perform since it's a combination of the number of compute units, clock speeds, memory bandwidth, and on-chip cache.  For comparison the Xbox Series S - the cheaper one - has 20 RDNA2 compute units, but according to WCCFTech the graphics cores on this chip are clocked about 30% faster than the Xbox Series S.
  
  Still not a replacement for an RTX 3090, but probably capable of playing Minecraft even at 4K.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• China is ruining the cryptocurrency mining ecosystem with shutdown orders - and that's a good thing.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China ruins everything.  Crypto mining ruins everything.  So what if China ruins crypto mining?
  
  
  
• Well, graphics card prices come back down, for a start.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Slowly but steadily.  I haven't seen a 6700 XT for under $1000 just yet.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Rocky Linux 8.4 is here.  (Rocky Linux)
  
  Rocky Linux is a replacement for the late lamented CentOS project, recently killed-ish by IBM.  It's led by one of the founders of CentOS and named after another (actually late and lamented) founder.
  
  8.4 is the first version because the version numbers are synchronised to RedHat Enterprise Linux, for which it is a drop-in replacement.  Except free.
  
  
  
• Of course, being a drop-in replacement means copying all the design flaws too.  (DoltHub)
  
  Dolt - why the hell did they choose that name? - is a MySQL-compatible database that supports Git operations like cloning, branching, and merging data.
  
  Those aren't things you'd want to do in your conventional OLTP environment, but for development and research they are amazing tools.  Want to try out some new code?  Just branch the database and run it on the branch.  Want an up-to-date local copy?  Just clone the remote database to your computer.
  
  Merge is likely to be a problem though.  It always is.
  
  Anyway, the article is about how if you want to be truly compatible you have to be compatible with all the weird shit a platform does as well as all the sane, documented shit, because no matter how screwy a feature might be, someone, somewhere, has written code that will break if you fix it.
  
  Microsoft understands this.
  
  Apple also understands this but doesn't care.
  
  
  
• Eight cheap M.2 SSDs compared.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Not everyone needs a RAID array of 15TB enterprise drives.  Sometimes you just need something better than your seven year old hard drive.  These are that, though if your motherboard is also seven years old it won't have an M.2 slot.
  
  
  
• ADATA - a memory and SSD maker included in the review above - got hit by ransomware.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They told the hackers to go fuck themselves and restored from backup.
  
  
  
• Apple is designing a whole new MacBook Air.  (MacRumors)
  
  It will increase the count of graphics cores from 8 to 10 and have a new style of rubber feet.  On the underside, the article takes care to note.  I'm not sure where else Apple puts rubber feet, and not sure I want to know.
  
  
  
• Sony has won an order from a court in Germany forcing DNS provider Quad9 to block lookups to an unnamed "popular pirate site".  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Quad9 is based in Switzerland, which is not (hang on) yes, not part of Germany.  Or the EU for that matter.
  
  The court order carries fines of €250,000 per infringing lookup - which could easily run to a trillion dollars a day - and two years in prison.

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, June 25 2021 01:23 PM (Ix1l6)

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• You won't believe what kids are into these days.
  
  
  
  
  Oh, they deleted it.
  
  This being The New Yorker, they do their best to blame anime on Donald Trump.

• The ultimate monitor?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Maybe.  The Asus ROG Swift PG32UQX is a 32" 4K 144Hz monitor with G-Sync, 10 bit DCI-P3 color, HDR10, and an eye-searing maximum brightness of 1400 nits.
  
  Price is a wallet-searing $3000.
  
  Which is a lot for a 4K screen; you can get a decent IPS screen for $250.  Or for $4000 you can upgrade to 8K.  But a single 8K screen requires all the outputs of a high-end graphics card working together, and a low-end...  Wait.  This one does 144Hz and has 90% DCI-P3 coverage.
  
  That's not bad for $250.
  
  
  
• Intel's high-end multi-chip Xe graphics cards will potentially match Nvidia and AMD's middle-end cards.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If it eases the ongoing shortage at all, I'll take it.
  
  
  
• I'm going to sing the doom song now.  (New Atlas)
  
  2014 UN271 is an Oort Cloud object that is currently approaching perihelion.  It's closest approach will be around 11 AU - about a billion miles from the Sun - but its orbit takes it out as far as 60,000 AU - almost a light year.
  
  It's not small either; observations indicate it's around 100 miles in diameter.
  
  
  
• The three most important programming languages are Julia, Crystal, and Nim.  (Matecdev)
  
  Julia for scientific computing - it's the new Fortran, only even faster and much easier to use.  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, June 21 2021 10:56 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 21 2021 10:58 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, June 22 2021 12:12 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 22 2021 03:24 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, June 22 2021 11:10 AM (6y7dz)

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• DDR5 RAM is here.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These are the first modules that actually have a price - $400 for 32GB - and a shipping date - end of this month.
  
  They're 4800MHz modules, and that price matches existing overclocked DDR4-4800 modules.  (That listing is for 16GB; I couldn't find any 32GB kits.)  It's about double the price of mainstream DDR4-3200 though.
  
  Also, these modules have a 40 cycle latency which is definitely not fast.  I'm not sure exactly how that relates to DDR4 latencies though.
  
  Also also, if you follow that link, don't read the comments.  WCCFTech is great for leaks and the very latest hardware news, but the comments are full of bored 14-year-olds.
  
  
  

• Qnap has a dual-port 100GbE network adaptor for their high-end NAS offerings.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Their high end NAS offerings are very high end, with AMD Epyc server CPUs, up to 256GB of RAM, and 24 NVMe SSDs.  That's enough I/O to flood even dual-port 100GbE.  But dual-port 100GbE uses most of the bandwidth of a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, so right now it's the fastest practical server interface.
  
  There are faster versions of Ethernet - 200 and 400 gigabit, with 800 gigabit announced but not shipping yet - but those are reserved to high end switches with six digit price tags.  A 100GbE card can be found for a few hundred dollars.
  
  
  
• Some bright sparks have got the idea of pretending to be Russian hackers in order to shake down companies.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I think mob hits should not only be legal under these circumstances, but required by law.
  
  
  
• North Korea hacked South Korea's nuclear research agency.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not Russia for once.
  
  The same North Korean hacking organisation - which would be under government control because internet access in North Korea is under government control - also hacked several other South Korean government agencies and senior officials.
  
  
  
• Google is reportedly force-installing a Bat Plague tracking app on the devices of Massachusetts residents.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Without notification, let alone consent.
  
  The lawyers are going to make out like bandits on the class action suit for this one.
  
  
  
• %p%s%s%s%s%n  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you join a WiFi hotspot with that SSID from an iPhone, your WiFi will stop working entirely.  Turning your WiFi off and on again won't help, and nor will rebooting your device.
  
  Only option is to go into Settings and reset all the network settings, and then have the fun of entering all your details again.
  
  
  
• Journalists - even tech journalists sometimes - are turning mental illness into performance art.  (ZDNet)
  
  Don't bother with the article; it blames Windows 11 on Donald Trump.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Windows 11, if you wanted to get the leaked preview it's being taken down.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Unsurprising, and you probably didn't wat it anyway.
  
  Microsoft has left reviews alone as long as they didn't link directly to download sites.  In the US they wouldn't have a legal basis for a takedown anyway.  Not that this tends to stop the DMCA notices.

Not Exactly Tech News

• There's a weird ripple effect going on in Hololive.  Not a bad thing, but interesting.
  
  Coco recently announced her retirement to pursue her indie career.  If you know where to find her, she has another YouTube channel with half a million subscribers.
  
  Anyway, the usual suspects from China hate Coco because she referred to Taiwan as a country live on stream and then refused to back down in the face of their delusional outrage.  That debacle led to the shuttering of Hololive China, which was a troubled venture from the start because YouTube is banned in China.
  
  Anyway, in the weeks before her departure Coco is taking the opportunity to collab with as many members as possible. 
  
  The nutcases follow her to each collab stream and flood that channel with spam.
  
  The girl running that channel sets chat to members only to stop the spam.
  
  Then they get a flood of new paid members because people want to join in the chat.
  
  Right now Reine is teaching her how to swear in Indonesian.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, June 20 2021 09:28 PM (6y7dz)

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• How many inconsistent user interface designs are there in Windows 10?  (NTDev)
  
  Eight.  
  
  The oldest thing that has survived completely unchanged is the Management Console which appeared in Windows 2000, but there are elements from Windows 95 / NT 4 that are the same except for a quick coat of paint.
  
  On the other hand, MacOS has UI features that have stubbornly remained intact since 1984 when there was only one model and it had a 9" monochrome screen.

• The US Senate has proposed a 25% tax credit for US companies building silicon foundries in the US.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They point out that most of the cost difference between US and overseas production is due to subsidies provided by other countries, and not direct costs.
  
  This is in addition to the recent $52 billion incentive program.  As I said before, while the plan isn't ideal, of all the things the Senate has done recently this is one of the least idiotic.
  
  The article notes that South Korea's government is pushing a $450 billion plan to support its own chip industry - which accounts for 15% of the country's exports.
  
  
  
• You can now get anime RAM.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's DDR4-3600 with decent timings - CL18 - but the modules only go up to 16GB.
  
  It's also not particularly cheap, even allowing for the price increases on RAM from the lows last year.  It would be more cost effective to buy brand-name RAM with the same specs, and a sheet of printable stickers, and a printer, and stick your favourite anime characters on the heatsink yourself.
  
  
  
• Handy HTML tricks.  (Marko Denic)
  
  Many of them genuinely handy and some of them I didn't know about.
  
  
  
• How does Intel's new 32 core Ice Lake server CPU compare to AMD's Rome chip of the same size?  (Serve the Home)
  
  The parts are roughly the same price, so it's a level playing field.  Only problem is that the AMD chip beats Intel on every benchmark, by between 20 and 45%.  AMD also has a much cheaper 28 core model with less cache that would likely still beat the Intel part.
  
  
  
• Wegmans suffered a security breach due to a misconfigured server.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The leaked data included names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates, and hashed passwords, but not - it is important to note - your mother-in-law's maiden name.
  
  
  
• Russia has banned Opera VPN and VyprVPN.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is a good indication that those networks are secure.  If Russia could hack them they'd have no interest in banning them.
  
  The company that is now behind Opera has engaged in some remarkably scummy practices - like offering high-interest loans in impoverished regions of Africa - so I still wouldn't trust them, but I haven't heard of any out-of-the-ordinary security issues.
  
  Russia insisted in 2019 that VPNs provide access to the government to allow the automated blocking of websites.  Kaspersky complied.  Everyone else told the Russians to pound sand.
  
  The previously banned ProtonVPN and ProtonMail.  I don't know that much about ProtonVPN, but ProtonMail has a solid track record.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, Russia invaded Poland...  's email servers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's as far as it went because right now they have no convenient Nazis to stage a joint operation.
  
  
  
• XPG is planning to launch DDR5-7400 RAM and is targeting overclocks to DDR5-12600.  (VideoCardz)
  
  DDR5 is likely to launch at around 4800MHz and go up to 8400MHz.  You can get DDR4 RAM at speeds over 4800MHz right now, but that's a big overclock and what you actually get depends on your CPU and motherboard and, in a large part, your luck.
  
  
  
• Ageing process is unstoppable, finds scientifically illiterate journalist.  (The Guardian)
  
  To be fair, there was a scientist only too eager to provide a money quote to support the headline.  Only problem is the study is online and that's not what it says at all.  (Nature)
  
  What the study does show is that there is no significant variation in ageing in healthy individuals within any particular primate species, once other variables are controlled.  Increases in human life expectancy are due to drastically reduced early death rates and to better overall health, and not to reduced aging rates.
  
  Which doesn't imply that we can't change ageing rates.  It just means that we don't have a convenient natural model.  There's no rare tribe of monkeys that lives for 300 years.
  
  But we - meaning not the idiots who write for The Guardian - knew that already.
  
  
  
• Oregon has legalised human composting.  (Motherboard)
  
  A good friend will help you move, but a true friend will help you move a body.  Across state lines.

Not At All Tech News

• Auditions are open for a second wave of Nijisanji EN.  (Reddit)
  
  I mostly watch Hololive, but I also mostly watch Minecraft, and while Hololive streamed 25 hours of Minecraft in the last day, it was all in Japanese.
  
  The Nijisanji EN girls - who debuted this time last month - have been playing a lot of Minecraft since it's an easy and popular game and doesn't require special permission to stream, so I checked them out and have come back to report that we are all Pomu.
  
  
  
  Anyway, they're looking for four new female streamers - they have four characters designed, though they also have the option to audition as an entirely new character - and for an unspecified number guys as well.  That will mean a big and rapid expansion for Nijisanji EN, which currently has just 3 members.
  
  Nijisanji Indonesia has 17 members, and Korea 16, so they're not shy about adding lots of new channels quickly.
  
  Work and life and the world generally has been pretty blah the past year or so, and vtubers have helped keep me sane.  While I like Hololive they do have an enormous following and it's basically a crapshoot whether they see your messages or not.  When things get crazy $100 superchats zoom by and disappear.  So it's nice sometimes to check out a stream with 30 viewers online rather than 30,000.
  
  
  
  
  
• In indie Vtuber news, Mooyü from what I call VMN* had her own debut today.
  
  
  
  I almost missed this one but was able to catch it in time and suggest that her fanbase should be called mootuals.
  
  * VMN is the Vyomoonym Media Network - they don't call it that, but I do - of Vyolfers, Mooyü, and Nymroot, three English-language streamers from Indonesia.  Vyolfers caught attention early on because she did artwork for every single member of Hololive - one a day for nearly two months.  Mooyü and Nymroot are artist friends of hers who have done Minecraft collabs with her and are now launching their own channels.

Posted by: Jay at Saturday, June 19 2021 10:26 PM (0jVI9)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 20 2021 12:12 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 20 2021 12:03 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 21 2021 11:24 PM (eqaFC)

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• If you're one of the 3.3 million people whose data was potentially exposed in the Audi / Volkswagen breach you can stop worrying and start panicking.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Your data is now for sale at disreputable online stores everywhere.

• Chrome has fixed its seventh actively-exploited vulnerability for the year.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's not actually that bad given the complexity of modern browsers.  The attack surface is huge.  And I'm not sure where to start on paring back that complexity, so I can't complain too much.
  
  
  
• Carnival was hit with multiple ransomware attacks.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  One last August that we knew about, and another in December that they are still cleaning up.
  
  
  
• The pandemic panic didn't help.  (ZDNet)
  
  Moving millions of workers out of the office and into their own homes essentially overnight left vulnerable access gateways and cloud servers strewn all over the landscape.  As in, hundreds of thousands of insecure corporate servers connected to the internet.
  
  
  
• A Ukrainian ransomware gang has actually been arrested.  (NBC)
  
  Unlike the Russian ones, who just seem to quietly cease activities with no decline in the overall rate of attacks.
  
  
  
• AMD has a new high-end liquid cooled version of their Radeon 6900 XT.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's only a minor bump over the specs of the existing cards, but water cooling is nice to have if you need a computer that is both fast and quiet.
  
  
  
• You can't buy it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because of course you can't.

• Declining cryptocurrency prices mean that GPU and storage prices are also dropping.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's still a component shortage so don't expect magic, but things are improving.  I just took a quick look around and the Nvidia 3070 Ti is in stock and cheaper than the base 3070 was two weeks ago.  The Nvidia markup is down to around 100% over retail, with AMD between 40 and 50%.
  
  

• Don't plug your shiny new Western Digital SN850 into your shiny new X570 chipset.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It won't explode.  It will run 40% slower than it should.
  
  It's not a problem with AMD X570 motherboards per se; plug it into the first M.2 slot, the one connected directly to the CPU, and it will work great.  There's something odd going on here because the X570 chip is the exact same chip used to provide I/O on the CPU itself.  And I haven't heard of this affecting any other SSD.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Z690 motherboards for Intel's 12th generation chips are expected in Q4.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There may even be CPUs to go in them.
  
  AMD's socket AM5 motherboards are expected in Q2 next year.  Zen 4 won't arrive until late next year, so the first chip destined for AM5 is likely the new generation Raphael - I think it's Raphael - APU with updated integrated graphics.
  
  
  
• Tim Cook has claimed that giving users freedom to install apps themselves would weaken the company's monopoly position.  (ZDNet)
  
  Well, yes, Tim.  That's the point.
  
  
  
• Karl Schroeder, call your agent.  It's time for a sequel to Permanence.
  
  Facebook will be embedding ads into Oculus Quest VR apps.  (The Verge)
  
  In the world of Permanence, these ads are omnipresent, and ad blockers are illegal.  It's good to see Big Tech experimenting with new dystopias, though, beyond the big three of 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.
  
  
  
• President* Biden has said that maybe some Russian attacks on America should be off-limits.  (Reuters)
  
  Maybe, Joe.  Maybe.
  
  
  
• Amazon has blamed everyone and everything except its own shitty site for the plague of fake reviews found therein.  (The Guardian)
  
  They didn't even address the plague of fake products.
  
  
  
• The Alienware M17 R4 has the Four Essential Keys.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  And an option for a 4K display covering 100% of Adobe RGB, plus an 8 core Intel CPU, Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics, NVME RAID, wired 2.5Gbps Ethernet, Thunderbolt 3, and 32GB of RAM.
  
  Price is...  Well, it ain't cheap.  Comes to A$6000 when configured with all those options, 4TB of RAID-0 SSD and a 3 year on-site repair contract.  But that's not actually insane compared with other high-end laptops, or even desktops right now.
  
  
  
• Server monitoring platform Datadog has an agent you can download and install that will forward system stats to their collector so it can plot neat graphs for you.
  
  It's 731MB.  It seems to include a complete Python install, and possibly a complete Linux install.
  
  I happen to know how big something like this should be because I've written one myself, and it's 324kB.  The problem is not that the Datadog agent is slow, or that it uses 20 cents worth of space on my enterprise SSDs.  It's that it is literally impossible to audit something like that, and you're expected to install it on every single server.
  
  The code I wrote is 141 lines.  Any competent programmer could read through it even without knowing the language I chose (Crystal).

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 17 2021 10:59 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, June 18 2021 10:25 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: QC at Friday, June 18 2021 02:14 PM (8nxoP)

Posted by: mikeski at Friday, June 18 2021 04:12 PM (P1f+c)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 19 2021 10:58 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 19 2021 11:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 19 2021 01:35 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 20 2021 12:09 AM (obo9H)

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• Windows 11 has leaked.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Microsoft has adopted a MacOS style application dock but kept the Start button, which makes no sense.  Fortunately you can change a setting - somewhere - to make it go back to normal.
  
  More screenshots.
  
  It does look pretty, for the most part.  You will be shocked to learn that the computer management interface still hasn't been updated from NT 4.
  
  Essentially the Windows 10 UI has been refreshed but all the older stuff - Windows 8 holdovers, Windows 7, 2000, NT, whatever - hasn't changed at all.
  
  That said, this is a leaked preview build and not the final product, so maybe something will be fixed before release.

Tech News

• Amazon has joined Microsoft in blocking Google's FLoC on its servers.  (DigiDay)
  
  Looks like Google is going it alone on this one.  Not only have the Big Tech companies assured they have no friends in the outside world, they also hate each other.
  
  
  
• The US has warned the EU over their increasingly sensible reluctance to trust the lunatics running American Big Tech.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The EU has assigned the warning to the circular file, and is looking at their next round of billion-dollar fines for whatever they can think of. Fortunately, Big Tech is very helpful when it comes to doing stupid shit on a massive scale.
  
  
  
• RAID expansion is coming to ZFS.  (Ars Technica)
  
  ZFS is little short of miraculous compared to other filesystems, but RAID expansion has been a notable missing feature for fifteen years.
  
  And likely will remain missing for another year, because they do a lot of testing before releasing new features like this.
  
  
  
• Google is extending its craptastic phishing protection to documents.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  We use this at my day job.  The way it works is when it detects a malicious email, it will delete it from all recipient mailboxes, and then send you a notification that it's been deleted.  With no details whatsoever about the content, so you have no way of checking anything.
  
  
  
• A vulnerability in Peleton devices let hackers take complete control of....   An exercise bike.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oh no.  Anyway...

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, June 17 2021 12:54 AM (hh530)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 17 2021 08:52 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 17 2021 09:27 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, June 17 2021 11:21 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, June 17 2021 12:18 PM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 17 2021 07:36 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 18 2021 05:07 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 18 2021 09:37 AM (PiXy!)

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• Apple: You can't run any sort of dynamic code on iOS.
  Also Apple: If you don't like it, use a web app.
  Also also Apple: You can't bring your own browser to iOS.  They're all just skins over Safari.
  Also also also Apple: Safari is broken.
  
  
  
  
  You're holding it wrong.

• Razer has a new 4-port USB charger that delivers 130W from a device not much larger than the typical 20W models you get for $20 or less.  (AnandTech)
  
  This one has two major differences: It uses GaN - gallium nitride - semiconductors rather than regular silicon, and the USB ports are green.
  
  Oh, and it costs $180.
  
  
  
• They also have a new 14" AMD-based laptop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All models have an 8 core 5900HX, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD; the choice is between a 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 screen, and Nvidia RTX 3060, 3070, or 3080 graphics.
  
  They don't have the four essential keys, though, so they're crap.
  
  
  
• US nuclear weapons contractor Sol Oriens got hit by ransomware.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
  
• So did Fujifilm.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
  
• So did the Teamsters, though they had the culprits whacked refused to pay.  (NBC News)
  
  
  
• The G7 quote-leaders-unquote asked that nice Mister Putin if he could please have a word with the criminal gangs that seem to operate out of his house without his permission.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Also, guys, your new National Security Advisor is a complete fucking wanker.
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, June 15 2021 10:16 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 16 2021 04:09 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, June 16 2021 09:12 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 16 2021 10:56 AM (obo9H)

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