• 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...

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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.
  
  

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Tech News

• Clarke's Corollary to Hanlon's Razor states that Any sufficiently profound incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
  
  And the new owners of Freenode are acting as a test case.  (Ned Batchelder)
  
  They claim that all the missteps since the takeover are mistakes and not deliberate attacks on their own users, but in the end it doesn't matter.  If you're constantly under attack by your supposed allies, the reason why is of secondary importance.  You have to ditch them.
  
  The Free Software Foundation, Linux, GN, and Python have joined BSD and other major projects in ditching Freenode.  (FSF)
  
  Only real question is what took them so long.

• Turf invaders: Amelia Watson and Gawr Gura of Hololive did a watchalong of the Microsoft / Bethesda announcements at E3.  Well, not the whole thing, it appears that the E3 stream ran for nine hours altogether, but the major announcements from the first 90 minutes or so.
  
  
  
  E3 livestream is here.  It's age-restricted so I can't embed it - though the gremlin commentary above is not.
  
  
  Because of the risk of copyright strikes - Hololive has a lot of trouble with YouTube, from shadowbanned streams to accounts with a million subscribers being summarily deleted - they don't show any of the content.  You watch the live stream in one tab and their commentary in another.  Bit of a pain to watch later because you have to sync the streams by trial and error, but better than having your entire channel scrubbed.
  
  Or you can just watch the Hololive side and they seem to be baked.
  
  The funny thing is, a huge chunk of the audience of the E3 stream was also watching the Hololive commentary - something like 80% of the YouTube audience - and they were posting references to the commentary in the main chat.  And the girls were roasting the game announcements.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 5800X vs Intel 11700K: Battle of the 8 core mainstream CPUs.  Again.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Both are readily available now, and are pretty close on performance, but at least in Australia the 11700K is 20% cheaper.  On the other hand, it uses twice as much power, and if you need to upgrade Intel provides you with nothing where AMD has a 16 core part available today.
  
  
  
• Be careful what you wish for: You might just get it.  It's the 21st century.  Where's my flying car?  (MSN)
  
  Though with a single-seat model costing $300,000 to build and government red tape being thicker these days than molasses in Boston in January of 1919, it could well be the 22nd century before we actually see these things.
  
  
  
• There is apparently a movie called 2:22.  I've never heard of it and the IMDB ratings give me little reason to look closer.
  
  But exactly as you'd expect, automated takedown notices of pirated copies targeted every web page with the digits 222 in the URL.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Medium articles?  Linux distros?  IRC chat logs?  Dr Phil episodes?  Japanese porn?
  
  They will put you on the list, kiddo.
  

Hamster Duality Anime Music Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 15 2021 12:50 AM (eqaFC)

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• Even the greatest of players can fumble the ball on occasion.  It's how they recover that sets them apart.
  
  Software development platform Codecov got hacked at the end of January, an event not discovered for two months, leaving their users exposed that entire time.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The vulnerability was via a Docker configuration flaw, and the attackers modified the shell script Codecov used for uploading files to be tested.  That meant that everything in the customers' code or the test scripts used with it could be stolen by the hackers.
  
  So that one hack potentially meant that every single one of Codecov's customers also got hacked.
  
  The thing is, complete retards also fumble the ball on occasion, and it's clear now which category Codecov falls into: They replaced their shell script with a 43MB binary-compiled Node.js application using 579 third-party libraries.
  
  This is the equivalent of Ford apologising for a critical safety failure in brakes manufactured cheaply in China and replacing them with brakes made for one quarter that price in Burkina Faso using radioactive recycled hamster bedding from North Korea as lining material.
  
  Do not use Codecov.  They are morons.
  
  
  
• Audi / Volkswagen got hacked, if the term hacked is relevant when you connect a database directly to the internet.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The hack includes loan and lease applications, which would contain all sorts of sensitive financial and identity information.
  
  They don't know how exactly many people are affected, but at least 90,000 had financial data leaked and millions more had personal data leaked.
  
  
  
• Intuit did not get hacked - they say - but they've been notifying customers of individual accounts that appeared to have been hacked after a security breach at another company.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Assume that everything you put online passes immediately into the hands of your worst enemies.
  
  
  
• McDonalds got hacked too.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not sure how much that matters.  Who gives personal information to fast food franchises?
  
  I know, probably a hundred million people.

• Blockchain ruins everything, Part 378: The free plan at Docker Hub no longer includes Autobuild.  (Docker)
  
  Because people have found a way to write build scripts that mine cryptocurrencies.  It's astounding inefficient, but that doesn't matter because they're not paying for it.
  
  Docker has been suspending thousands of free accounts each week, and has now decided to stop playing whack-a-mole.
  
  
  
• China's ban on cryptocurrency mining is also expanding.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China was mining about half the Bitcoin in the world, and is the home to the Chia plague.  The growing restrictions have caused the price to sink, at least temporarily.  I have no idea what will happen longer term.
  
  
  
• PLC flash is years away. thank goodness.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Flash memory comes in four densities at the moment - SLC (1 bit per cell), MLC (2 bits), TLC, the most common (3 bits), and QLC (4 bits), used in SD cards and low-end SSDs.
  
  For each additional bit they try to pack in, the circuitry needs to be twice as sensitive.  Single-bit cells have two electrical levels, two-bit cells have four, three-bit cells eight, and so on.
  
  QLC seems to be okay so far, but a major feature of newer drives is being able to switch storage blocks between SLC mode and TLC or QLC.  A drive that is mostly empty could actually be running entirely in SLC mode, and will gradually switch over - and slow down - as it fills up.
  
  PLC - 5 bits per cell, with 32 electrical levels - sounds like a bridge too far to me. The cost savings are minimal - they're already pretty small for QLC vs TLC - and the lifespan would be at best a quarter of current mainstream TLC drives.
  
  
  
• Click on this link.  (BBC)
  
  Yeah, login required.  Never mind that.
  
  See that stock photo of a programmer sitting a laptop?  Try selecting the text on the laptop screen.
  
  
  

When In Doubt Bribe the Reviewer Video of the Day

I May Have Already Used This Anime Music Video of the Day

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• The last two long weekends here marked the start and the end of the problems related to the datacenter fire, so I not only didn't get long weekends then, I didn't get weekends at all.   This time it looks like I'll at least get the normal two days off.
  
  I need to configure some new servers tomorrow, but they'll make my life a lot easier.  And make our newly hired sysadmin's life a lot easier, which will make my life even more easier.
  
  
  
• Regular updates for Windows 10 will end in 2025.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This doesn't mean that support and bugfixes will stop then, but it does indicate that there's an entirely new version of Windows on its way.
  
  We'll see what that brings.  As long as they don't drop 32-bit application support like MacOS.  I doubt that will happen, because there's still a 32-bit version of Windows and that can still run ancient 16-bit apps.

• Intel's new 11900KB seems to be nearly as fast as the 11900K at half the power consumption.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That would be great if you could use it in your own desktop builds.  But because this is Intel and we can't have nice things, that's not possible.  It's a surface-mount BGA package and only useful to OEMs.
  
  
  
• HBM3 pushes data clocks to 5.2GT/s.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Think of it as 5.2GHz.  Technically it's half that because all memory these days is DDR - double data rate, transferring two bits of data per clock - but it doesn't matter unless you're actually designing hardware yourself.
  
  Since the idea behind HBM - high bandwidth memory - is that it would run at relatively low clocks but use very wide buses - 1024 bits for a single chip - pushing the clock up to 5.2GHz makes it very fast indeed.
  
  GDDR6X can currently reach 19GHz, but those chips are only 32 bits wide.
  
  
  
• TSMC is looking to add a chip packaging plant to its planned expansions in Arizona.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The company has already expanded earlier expansion plans and is looking to build as many as six leading-edge fabs - chip factories - in the US, but those would produce raw silicon dies that would need to be shipped to another factory to be packaged.  On this scale adding local packaging facilities makes sense.
  
  Also, the first of the new buildings looks like a WiFi router.  I mean, you can see the ventilation slots and the RJ-45 ports and everything.
  
  
  
• BuzzFeed has won a Pulitzer Prize.  (BuzzFeed)
  
  Before you scoff - I mean, go ahead and scoff anyway, just before that - they won the prize for documenting China's genocide of the Uyghurs.  The New York Times won the same prize for covering up the Soviet genocide in Ukraine.
  
  It's progress.  It's not much progress, but its something.
  
  
  
• Hackers broke into Electronic Arts by social engineering internal tech support via their Slack channel.  (Vice)
  
  Rule One: Don't use Slack.
  Rule Two: When someone asks for a password, tell them to fill out Form 404.
  
  
  
• The Avaddon ransomware gang has called it quits and released decryption keys for their remaining victims.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  No, I don't know why.  Water getting too hot with the recent spate of high-profile hacks?  More profitable avenues to pursue?  Government funding dried up?  Don't know.
  
  
  
• The US Senate has just agreed on a $52 billion bailout for an industry currently making record profits.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's not the dumbest thing they've ever done, not even close, but the three big companies lobbying for this handout have a combined market cap over $5 trillion.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the New York Senate has passed a right to repair bill.  (IFixit)
  
  Louis Rossman is currently in Florida, and could not be reached for - who am I kidding, here are his thoughts:
  
  
  
  Basically it looks like one step forward and then take the rest of the year off.  What a certain blogger calls failure theater.
  
  
  
• Proposed federal and state legislation would force online marketplaces like Amazon to publish direct contact information for their sellers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Amazon hates this.  Real companies that actually get sued for selling fake products are strongly in favour.
  
  
  
• Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT cards seem to be back in stock after going missing for several weeks.  Supply is still limited, but they are there, and prices for the 6700 XT are heading back down into the troposphere with the higher-end cards trailing behind.  The 6900 XT is still about 20% higher than it was a few weeks ago, but hopefully that will correct itself soon.
  
  I might get a new PC this year after all.  I'm currently running on a Ryzen 1700 and a Radeon 580; I'm looking at a 5900X and a 6700 XT for the new build.  That would be about 2.5 times as fast.
  
  Nvidia, as yet, need not apply.  The RTX 3060 is currently priced as high as the 6700 XT despite being a much slower card.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 13 2021 01:13 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 13 2021 03:33 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 13 2021 04:04 AM (eqaFC)

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• Got delayed by network problems at work, so I'll keep this short and then maybe add some stuff later.
  
  Update: Network is back up.
  
  Update 2: Network is suffering 97% packet loss and 340ms ping times.
  
  Update 3: Network is down.
  
  Update 4: Network still down. Wait, up, no, down, updown, downup... Up!
  
  
  
• Intel has made a $2 billion offer to buy embedded processor startup SiFive.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The whole attraction of SiFive is that their instruction set is an open specification, so anyone can implement it themselves if they want.  Most companies wouldn't want all that work and would rather license a design or buy an existing chip, but you can.
  
  Intel is pretty much guaranteed to fuck things up.  It's not in their DNA to be open.

• Back 12 M.2 NVMe drives into your DVD bay.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Don't have a DVD bay?  Tough.
  
  
  
• Dirt as a service: Backblaze is offering online Chia farming.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Backblaze has an enormous number of disk drives, perhaps enough to actually make a dent in Chia.  You'd still need to prepare your farm locally before uploading it - it's the preparation that burns out drives; after that they're mostly idle.
  
  Or, you know, not do any of that at all.
  
  
  
• Food services supply company Edward Don has been hit by a ransomware attack and is offline.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Exactly how do these companies have their networks configured?
  
  
  
• Slilp, a market for stolen logins, got stolen itself by law enforcement agencies from four countries.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They'll be up again somewhere else tomorrow.
  
  
  
• Hackers broke into Electronic Arts' network, and are now desperately trying to forget what they saw.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The horror.
  
  
  
• Samsung security kind of sucks.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Though the bug that gave random apps admin rights over your phone was hard to miss because it also deleted all your other apps.
  
  
  
• The one thing worse than being in Bat Plague Lockdown in a communist dystopia is being stuck in Bat Plague Lockdown in a communist dystopia with bad weather and no internet.  (ZDNet)
  
  Must check in on my brother living in Hell Melbourne.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 12 2021 12:46 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 12 2021 01:03 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 12 2021 02:44 AM (eqaFC)

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• Bitcoin vs. the volcano.  (ZDNet)
  
  El Salvador has not only made Bitcoin legal tender, but announced plans to power Bitcoin mining with volcanoes.  Well, geothermal power.  Which is something they actually have, unlike money.
  
  One of the effects of this is that there's no capital gains tax on Bitcoin in El Salvador.  The other effects - well, too early to tell.
  
  I'm pretty negative on blockchains generally, but I'm not a huge fan of the traditional financial system either.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, JBS reportedly paid hackers $11 million in Bitcoin to get their cows back.  (Blockchain News)
  
  That's how it works, right?  I think that's how it works.
  
  
  

• Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Reviewers are unimpressed.  It splits the nominal price difference between the regular 3070 and the 3080, but is barely faster than the 3070.  If you can get it for recommended retail price it's great value in today's market, but that's rather unlikely.
  
  
  
• Video card of the day is the GeForce GT 730 from 2014.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Things are so bad that they've pulled them back off the dusty shelves of Warehouse 13 and are shipping them out to retailers.
  
  They're not great.  They're not good, even.  But they work.
  
  
  
• Things are much better if you were holding out for a new CPU.  All models of the Ryzen 5000 range are in stock at most retailers and selling at or below recommended retail prices.  In Australia the 12 core 5900X is selling for what the 8 core 5800X cost just a month ago.
  
  AMD's Radeon 6700X graphics cards are also readily available.  Expensive, yes, but available.
  
  
  
• Western Digital and Seagate are ramping up production of hard drives - specifically in response to Chia.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're not expanding production facilities as yet but will be adding shifts to run existing factories at full capacity.  They're fully aware that the Chia bubble could burst at any moment and flood the market with second-hand disk drives.
  
  
  
• Raptor Lake - Intel's next next generation of desktop CPUs - could have up to 24 cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Of course, that's 8 good cores and 16 crappy ones, because Intel is absolutely determined to hand the high-end desktop market to AMD on a platter.
  
  
  
• Patch your Chrome stuff.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Google has fixed an actively exploited bug, so if you're still on 91.0.4472.77 you should update to 91.0.4472.101 right away.
  
  
  
• Asked how many customers had had video data from their Ring video doorbells handed over to police without a warrant or even notification, the company, now owned by Amazon, said.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's an unedited quote, by the way.
  
  The Electronic Frontier Foundation was more forthcoming:

  Ring is ostensibly a security camera company that makes devices you can put on your own homes, but it is increasingly also a tool of the state to conduct criminal investigations and surveillance.

  They also catch fire.
  
  
  
• Everything new is old again: The Vivaldi browser now has built-in email, calendar, and RSS feed support.  (The Verge)
  
  What about news, though?  No love for NNTP?
  
  
  

Not Exactly Tech News

I Told You They Were Unimpressed Videos of the Day

Episode Zero Video of the Day

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• Like the first episode of James Burke's Connections, one customer changed one parameter on one account at one CDN and within seconds the entire eastern seaboard lost power internet was toast.  (Fastly)
  
  
  
• Reddit, Twitter, the BBC, the UK government, and amusingly, Amazon were among those who experienced sudden plagues of unhelpful error messages.  (Online or Not)
  
  It's harder for Fastly to tailor their errors in a completely friendly way for end users, but the default error messages that come out of tools like Nginx and Varnish are so abstruse that even people who work with them daily complain.
  
  
  
• Just a comment on that story about the FBI reclaiming millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin from the Darkside hacking group:
  
  What almost certainly happened is the hackers used an online wallet so they could easily share access to the funds.  Problem is, that's not remotely as secure as a local wallet.  The feds knew what wallet address the money was in, so they just had to ask all the major exchanges whether they managed that address, and serve a warrant on the one that did.
  
  If the online wallet was properly secured it would still have needed the hackers to log in before the key could be retrieved, and that's quite likely what happened.  They logged in, the key was decrypted, and before they could do anything else there was this huge sucking sound and all the money disappeared into the coffers of the federal government never to be seen again.
  
  Which I'm sure is a metaphor for something.  Just can't think what.

Tech News

• The chip shortage continues to bite: Now there aren't enough power management chips to keep up with demand for Thunderbolt ports on notebooks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thunderbolt ports can draw and supply up to 100W - you can charge your laptop that way, or plug in another device to charge from your laptop.  So they need fairly capable power management, and the chips certified for the task are out of stock.
  
  Intel has temporarily certified compatible but not technically compliant chips, which will work fine, probably.
  
  Reportedly Intel is also short of power management chips for their enterprise SSDs, which isn't great at a time when a certain blockchain is chewing up all the non-enterprise storage the industry can produce.
  
  
  
• Why is everything in short supply?  A lot of it is the blockchain bubble in GPUs and (more recently) storage.  GPU sales spiked by 40% between Q1 last year and Q1 this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yes, there were somewhat more people playing games during the two week lockdown.  Yes, there are new cards out.  But are there really that many more new computers being sold?
  
  
  
• As it happens...  Yes.  In fact, overall US PC shipments are up 73% in the same timeframe.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  HP in particular grew by 122%.  Which is kind of a lot.
  
  
  
• The state of Ohio has filed a suit seeking to regulate Google as a public utility.  (Columbus Dispatch)
  
  Good luck, guys.  Don't think it will fly, but worth a try.
  
  
  
• Patch your Adobe stuff.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I'm not sure if I still run any Adobe stuff.  I used to have the entire Creative Suite but that expired long ago.  I've replaced Photoshop with Affinity Photo, which might not be quite as good but is a hell of a lot cheaper.
  
  Anyway, they've patched 41 vulnerabilities as well as the usual raft of bugs.
  
  
  
• Patch your Windows stuff.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I do still run Windows.  The latest update patches seven actively exploited vulnerabilities and 43 that aren't actively exploited yet.
  
  
  
• Graphene could boost hard drive capacities by a factor of ten.  (ZDNet)
  
  They're not making the drives out of graphene, just coating the platters with it.  It's thinner than current protective coatings, which means the drive heads can be closer the the surface of the disk, which means higher densities.
  
  Or possibly not.  It's not quite as bad as predictions about new battery technology but it's not far off.
  
  
  
• Why is Verizon blocking Nyaa and Mangadex?  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Someone asked me recently if I'd had any trouble accessing Nyaa, and I hadn't, mostly because I'd been too busy to try.  Also because I don't use Verizon.
  
  Also, it's kind of pointless blocking Mangadex, because it got hacked and it's been down for weeks while they rewrite the software.
  
  
  

• Kiryu Coco of Hololive announced her graduation - that is, retirement - today.  (Reddit)
  
  The Hololive fanbase kind of exploded over this because she's the first established member of any of the main Hololive branches to leave.  There were a couple who flamed out in their first month, and the regrettable West Taiwan episode, but she's the first mainstream talent to quit.
  
  We'll miss our foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing Yakuza dragon, and wish her the very best in whatever strange incarnation she finds herself in coming months.
  
  Her final stream is on July 1.  Unusually for the industry, and commendably, her channel and all her existing content will remain active, though members-only streams will expire automatically three months after she leaves YouTube.
  
  Update:
  
  
  
  She's gained 30,000 subscribers in nine hours, and at least a couple of thousand paid members.  Had to reload the tab because it was using 11GB of RAM thanks to the insane number of chat messages.
  
  Fans are trying to solve the problem by throwing love at it.  Probably won't work but worth a shot.
  
  Update Two: 40,000 subscribers in 11 hours.  She's streaming right now, but it's a collab on Fubuki's channel.
  
  
  
• The Minecraft Caves and Cliffs Part One update is out.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This part doesn't actually have any caves or cliffs.  It does have goats, axolotls, and glow squids though.

Posted by: Skip at Wednesday, June 09 2021 07:27 PM (Cxk7w)

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Posted by: Ed Hering at Thursday, June 10 2021 12:24 AM (yKa6S)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 10 2021 12:28 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 10 2021 01:02 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 10 2021 01:03 AM (eqaFC)

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• Rule One of Encryption: Never roll your own encryption
  
  Rule Two of Encryption: Never trust anyone else's encryption either.  (Reuters)
  
  Australian police arrested 224 suspects and seized $45 million in cash after hacking into a custom messaging app used by a criminal ring - and also stopped a murder plot.
  
  All in all not a bad day's work.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in the US, the DOJ stole back $2.3 million from the Darkside gang that hacked Colonial Pipeline.  (Justice)
  
  The moral of this story is that everyone is dumb, but criminals exceptionally so.  If they were smarter they'd go into politics, or if they were smarter and less ethical, marketing.
  
  
  

• It's Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, the one week each year where they try to persuade developers they didn't really mean what they said the other 51 weeks.  (AnandTech)
  
  Apple themselves announced a bunch of stuff no-one cares much about except for the update to Siri.  Siri will now process voice commands locally on your device and send only data requests to the cloud.
  
  That's how it should have worked all along, but it couldn't be done at the time; devices just weren't fast enough.
  
  Of course Siri doesn't work very well anyway, but at least now it doesn't spy on you quite so egregiously.
  
  
  
• AMD's new FidelityFX game upscaling feature is coming to the new Xboxen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Since these are basically PCs running a cut-down version of Windows on AMD processors and graphics and FidelityFX will run anywhere, even on Nvidia hardware, this comes as very little surprise.
  
  
  
• CPUs are back in stock, so should you even consider the 11700K?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Performance is, well, it's fine.  It's pretty close to the Ryzen 5800X.
  
  Power consumption - and thus heat - is a different story.  Under load it not only uses significantly more power than the competing 5800X, or even the 12-core 5900X, it uses twice as much power as last year's 10700K.
  
  Intel have cranked things up to the max to remain competitive with AMD across a big gap in process nodes, and that means a lot more heat and noise for the same performance.
  
  Alder Lake, due later this year, should improve things.
  
  
  
• Your antivirus will now mine Ethereum for you.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I remain unconvinced that this is a good idea.
  
  
  
• Step One: Release a useful online tool.
  Step Two: Quietly subvert it to hack other people's websites.
  Step Three: Get caught, because you're dumb.  (@wrede)
  
  You're doing this in public, you idiots.  How do you expect to not get caught?
  
  
  

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• We interrupt this program to annoy you and make things generally irritating for you.  (ZDNet)
  
  Microsoft recommends different browser settings. Want to change them?
  
  ...
  
  I don't know how to get "fucked".  Updating your browser settings now.
  
  Microsoft Edge and Outlook.  Better together.  Let's go ouch.  (ZDNet)
  
  
  

• So, those PNY drives that received an abrupt durability downgrade?  People have been speculating that this is because of Chia, but the company has now gone on the record to announce that yes, it's because of Chia.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Cryptocurrencies come in two basic forms: Proof-of-stake, which basically codifies rent-seeking, and everything else, which is even worse.
  
  Chia is in the even worse category.
  
  
  
• If it ain't broke, fix it until it is: Chip flaws that affect one core in a million show up on about 63% of computers with a million cores.  (The Register)
  
  Well, computers still mostly don't have a million cores, but a datacenter can pack 50,000 cores into a single rack, so a million cores is not really that much.
  
  The article mentions a system where one core had a bug that affected encryption, so that only that core could decrypt files it had encrypted.  And this is because we are pushing close to the fundamental quantum limits of silicon.
  
  
  
• The US Air Force wants to contract SpaceX to deliver cargo by rocket.  (Ars Technica)
  
  SpaceX's Starship has a cargo capacity of 100 tons to orbit, maybe slightly more for a suborbital trajectory.  Anywhere in the world in an hour.
  
  If you can keep it ready to launch 24/7, which you can't, making it useful for cargoes that need to be delivered in an hour but that you know about a week in advance.
  
  
  
• The EFF is unimpressed with the recent court decision against Cox Communications.  (EFF)
  
  They argue that the District Court award of a billion dollars in damages gets the law wrong, violates due process, and will destroy the internet.
  
  And they're largely correct.