• Pay no attention to the censor behind the curtain: Bing searches - and thus also DuckDuckGo searches - for "tank man" were returning no results.  (Motherboard)
  
  Tank Man of course being the hero who stood down a column of armoured vehicles armed only with a couple of grocery bags, and yesterday being the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
  
  The search results are back and Microsoft blames human error.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Bing is permitted to operate in China, unlike Google, but does so under strict censorship rules.  Nothing that reflects badly on the genocidal fascist rulers of that country is allowed.
  
  I suspect that what we saw yesterday was human error - a glimpse into the the daily reality of the Chinese people under their government's massive propaganda machine.
  
  Meanwhile the state-run Global Times is openly boasting on Twitter of the country's mutilation of history.  
  
  And those who remember Tiananmen are being arrested in Hong Kong.  (PJ Media)
  
  
  

• It's getting cold here in Sydney, which this being a subtropical coastal region means that in the middle of winter if you sit in an unheated house for hours doing nothing more energetic than occasionally moving the mouse you will eventually notice that you're cold and turn on the reverse cycle on the AC.
  
  It's snowed here exactly once in my lifetime, in one location, and it melted within the hour.
  
  
  
• Do not adjust your vBIOS.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Alienware laptops with RTX 3070s have been shipping with 10% of the GPU cores missing.  Dell is rolling out a patch, because while that's a hardware problem it's not a hardware problem.
  
  
  
• Nvidia says that smart phones aren't ready for ray-tracing.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What they mean by that is that Apple and AMD are either shipping or preparing mobile chips with ray-tracing - it's currently in high-end iPads and coming soon to a range of Samsung mobile products using AMD graphics - and Nvidia and Arm don't have anything to compete.
  
  On the other hand, AMD said something similar about Nvidia's first attempts at ray-tracing on the desktop.
  
  On the third hand...  They were right, at the time.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, if you're finding video cards just too darn cheap and readily available, AMD is bringing out their Radeon Pro W6800.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The GPU is equivalent to a fully-configured 6900 XT, but with 32GB of GDDR6 RAM rather than 16.  It also has six DisplayPort outputs so you can run six 4K monitors at once - though apparently only one 8K monitor.  Not sure how many people are using multiple 8K monitors just yet, anyway; the only readily available model I know of will set you back four grand.
  
  That said, 6800 and 6800 XT cards seem to be showing up again.  At roughly double the launch price, true, but they are in stock at online stores.
  
  
  
• The usual suspects are fleeing Medium after a memo from CEO and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams asked them to at least try not to be complete shitbiscuits on company time.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Frankly this seems like a brilliant way to simultaneously reduce expenses and boost productivity: Just leak a milquetoast memo suggesting the employees should be a tad bit less woke and the worst offenders will self-identify and storm out and you won't even need to pay severance.
  
  The employees quoted in the article are just comically un-self-aware.
  
  
  
• DON'T CONNECT CRITICAL FUCKING INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET.  (Ars Technica)
  
  There's a level 9.8 vulnerability in VMware, allowing anyone to stroll in and take over servers - if they already have access to the management network.
  
  There's actually a site that tracks exposed software like this.  Great for hackers, but network admins should also go there and check that they are not on the list.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Nothing more expensive than a free tier.  (Cloud Irregular)
  
  I vastly prefer fixed-price services over cloud, particularly anything that promises to automatically scale with load.  It sounds great but you're one mistake away from a maxed-out credit card.  Lately I've got some servers that are prepaid a year at a time; the cost saving against billed-by-the-hour AWS is huge.
  
  Anyway, the specific problem in this case is Amazon's promise of an "always free" tier of services in AWS that will immediately start charging the card you use for Amazon purchases the moment you step outside their Byzantine grimoire of limits and quotas.
  
  The AWS management interface is, on the whole, insane.  Some serious problems have persisted for fifteen years.  Even IBM does it better.  Google does it far better.
  
  
  
• Russia again.  The last big Xcode trojan attack was from China though.
  
  
  
  
  This thing doesn't attack users directly; it infects the machines of iOS developers, and then secretly inserts vulnerabilities into their code.
  
  
  
• Steak is back on the menu.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  JBS says it is fully operational again and delivering delicious beef and bacon (and in Australia, lamb) to a hungry world.
  
  I had some pork steaks for lunch yesterday.  No idea if they were processed by JBS; I just added them to my grocery order and they showed up on my doorstep at the appointed time, the way nature intended.
  
  
  
• iPadOS 15 will finally allow the iPad to reach its full potential.  (MacWorld)
  
  And 2021 is the year of Linux on the desktop.
  
  ...
  
  I mean, it's taken over everything from embedded devices to supercomputers, so it's surprising that's taken as long as it has.
  
  
  
• Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are joining forces on browser extensions.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  On my new tablet I'm using Brave exclusively.  I've even given it the Chrome icon, just to rub it in.  Works very well.  Chrome on Android doesn't even support extensions.
  
  Anyway, this isn't as bad as it sounds.  It's a standardisation effort, and those are even more effective than the Medium approach for sidelining your least productive staff.  A standards committee appointment can keep a officious busybody distracted for decades.
  
  
  
• Satire is dead: Startup company Stealth Data seeks to rip aside any pretense of anonymity on the internet in the name of because fuck you, that's why.  (Slashdot)
  
  The main article is on a site called Bizjournals which requires a paid subscription or skill with the Chrome dev tools to read.  But the idiots involved in this look like - literally, because they're pictured in the article - look like caricatures created by the idiots in the Medium story above.
  
  
  
• Microsoft: Developers, developers, developers!
  
  Apple: Fuck you, you whiny little shits.  You didn't build this.  (Marco Arment)
  
  This comes out of Apple's posturing in the Epic Games case.  Because the allegations of unfair practices are self-evidently true, and an adverse decision could slaughter its cash cow, Apple has been throwing everyone under the bus, including themselves, notably implying that CEO Tim Cook is uninvolved with operations of the company.
  
  Developers are the last thing on Apple's list of concerns.

Subaru Sits Down Video Video of the Day

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, June 06 2021 01:13 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 06 2021 03:08 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 06 2021 09:31 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 06 2021 09:35 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 06 2021 12:54 PM (obo9H)

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Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 07 2021 01:18 AM (eqaFC)

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• The Supreme Court has reined in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The government has been using it to slap additional charges on any crime where computers were involved, and the decision says that if it's going to be used that broadly, it would make felons of the entire country.
  
  Interesting split to the decision: Thomas, Alito, and Roberts were in the dissent, against the Trump appointees and the liberals.
  
  In this particular case a cop was caught taking bribes and charged with accessing a computer system pursuant to said bribes.  (ZDNet)
  
  The problem is, he was authorised to access that system, and he wasn't charged with the obvious crime of the bribe itself.  So now the charges have been thrown out.
  
  
  
• Something I didn't think of with regards to AMD's recent announcement of die stacking to increase cache sizes. This technique requires a custom CPU chip as well as custom memory chip to stack on top. Only AMD didn't announce a custom CPU chip, just an update to Ryzen 5000 with triple the cache.
  
  Which means...
  
  
  
  
  
  

• How to buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.  (WCCFTech)
  
  1. Check the online stores.
  2. They don't have any.
  3. Go to a brick-and-mortar store.
  4. They don't have any either.
  5. Go home.
  6. Order pizza.
  
  
  
• Not always Russia: Chinese hackers hacked the network of New York's MTA in April.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The point of entry?  A Pulse Secure VPN appliance.
  
  Firewall your firewalls and VPN your VPNs.  It's the new double-bagging.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is the world's first folding notebook except for every other notebook computer every except that Tandy 1000 and other relics of the 80s from before they invented hinges.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It works well but it's horribly expensive - price for a basic model is around $2500 - so it's not clear quite what the point is.  You have to start somewhere, and with another five years of iteration this could be a gem.  Or on the other hand, not.
  
  
  
• Amazon to its drivers: Go play in traffic.  (Motherboard)
  
  Sure, you'll likely get killed, but it will shave another thirty-seven seconds f your route.
  
  
  
• Copyright holders are suing Cloudflare for failing to shut down infringing sites.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Cloudflare doesn't host the sites; they provide secondary network services - content delivery and DDOS protection.  And they forward DMCA notices as required by law.
  
  But the individual sites are many and mostly broke, while Cloudflare is a big fat bag of money.
  
  They're not the worst of Big Tech but I have no particular love for them either.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 05 2021 01:02 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, June 05 2021 06:24 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, June 05 2021 06:28 AM (5iiQK)

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Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 05 2021 08:46 AM (obo9H)

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• Amazon warehouse injury rates are 80% higher than those of their competitors.  (BBC)
  
  Amazon was at a loss to explain these numbers.
  
  
  
• Amazon has stopped testing job applicants for marijuana use and is pushing for legalisation.  (NPR)
  
  This is, like, totally unrelated.

Tech News

• The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In short, it's fast, though not much faster than the existing 3080, overpriced, though you probably won't be able to find one anyway, and HOLY CRAP THE 3070 IS EXPENSIVE.
  
  It's currently going for around $2000 here in Australia, where the competing Radeon 6700 XT is around $1150.  That's still about a 60% markup over what it's supposed to cost, but the 3070 is marked up about 160%.
  
  
  
• Windows 10+ or whatever it's called is being announced on June 24.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Can they just fix the various settings panels so that they all work the same way?  Some were released with Windows 10, while others haven't changed since NT 3.51.
  
  
  
• Micron is shipping 1α memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is 40% smaller and uses 15% less power than their existing 1Z chips.  
  
  Those numbers - 1α and 1Z - are because they gave up entirely on claiming they were working at a size in nanometres.  It's really all somewhere around 20nm with various clever tricks applied on top of that.
  
  
  
• Prosus (who?) is buying Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion.  (Wall Street Jorunal)
  
  Stack Overflow used to be just massively popular with programmers; it was the first place you went when you needed help with a coding issue.  In recent years it has suffered something of a problem of entrenched opinion; if you ask a question it will instantly be closed and you will be chastised for not looking up an answer provided a decade ago that no longer even compiles.
  
  
  
• There will never be a Python 4.  (Tech Republic)
  
  Good, because they seriously fucked up the release of Python 3.
  
  Also, there kind of is a Python 4.  It's called Nim.
  
  It's not perfect, but Nim is written entirely in Nim, which shows a certain degree of commitment by its maintainers.  And it's a lot faster than Python.
  
  
  
• Will AMD come to the yellow, carp-shaped courtesy phone?  (Phoronix)
  
  AMD's recent GPUs have all been codenamed as $colour / $fish - the first one being Sienna Cichlid.  I haven't seen any mention of Yellow Carp before - it just showed up in a Linux Kernel update - so it looks like they have yet another part on the way.
  
  
  
• The FBI says that the Russia-based REvil group is behind the hack on steak-and-bacon supplier JBS.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I don't trust anything the FBI says; if they told me not to eat plutonium-based paint chips I wouldn't even bother to put down the bowl while I googled "plutonium paint chip danger debunked".
  
  But yeah, probably Russian hackers.  This one looks like their kind of short-term thinking; China plans things much better.
  
  
  
• Huawei has launched their new operating system for mobile devices, Harmony OS.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This is totally a new and independent system and not just Android hurriedly papered over to look like iOS despite the fact that the preview release still identified itself as Android in dozens of places.
  
  
  
• If you use Alibaba's UC Browser, you might want to not do that.  (Forbes)
  
  They're tracking everything you do.  They promised explicitly not to do that, and then they did it.
  
  Who do they think they are, Google?
  
  Actually, the tracking outlined in the article is at a level American Big Tech only dreams it could get away with.  It's already been yanked from Apple's App Store, and apparently after that article was written, from the Google Play Store as well.
  
  This would be totally unconnected with the recent crackdown on Alibaba by the Chinese government and the almost total disappearance of Jack Ma after he was totally not forced to resign as chairman.
  
  He's fine.  He's just been playing golf.  Since November.
  
  
  
• Can you play Metro Exodus EE at 8K?  (Tweaktown)
  
  Short answer: No.
  
  Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooo.
  
  Unless 10 FPS with dips down to 7 is your jam.  It does better with DLSS enabled, but DLSS simply means that you're no longer running at 8K; it's rendering at some lower resolution and upscaling.
  
  
  

How Did He Even Get That Clip Video of the Day

Did I Already Do Little Witch Academia Anime Music Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 04 2021 02:44 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, June 04 2021 03:38 AM (bHHXR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, June 04 2021 05:56 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 04 2021 11:50 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, June 05 2021 07:32 AM (bHHXR)

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• TSMC is firing on all cylinders.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's still not enough, but they're also building a bunch of new cylinders.
  
  6nm production - what they term N6 since the nanometres are imaginary - will match 7nm (N7) this year.  N5 is producing better yields than N7 already, though it is a more complicated process and more expensive to produce.  And N4 will be entering initial production later this year.  N4 is only slightly smaller than N5 but is cheaper to produce, which is a good combination.
  
  Meanwhile the company outlined its plans for the 3nm and 2nm nodes.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Fabs (silicon factories) for these advanced nodes are planned for both Taiwan and Arizon, and the company expects to expand overall production at a compound rate of 30% annually.  Though they didn't specify for how long and no-one asked if paperclips were involved.
  
  Logic circuits are expected to be 70% denser on N3 than on N5.  (WCCFTech)
  
  But memory circuits will only improve by around 20%.  This is similar to the situation moving from N7 to N5, and it's a major reason why AMD and Intel are both looking at die stacking solutions.  Their CPU cores are getting smaller but their caches aren't, so if they don't seek out novel solutions their chips are going to be cores lost in a sea of RAM.
  
  
  
  

• Gas is one thing, but when you hack a country's supply of steak that's a declaration of war.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Russian hackers targeted meat processor JBS SA, closing facilities in America, Canada, and Australia, though some facilities are expected back online soon.  The company handles about 25% of the US beef supply and around 20% of its pork.  The edible kind, not the other one.
  
  They're also the largest processor in Australia for beef, pork, and lamb, including a huge volume of exports.
  
  I'm dubious that this is ordinary criminal activity.  And I'm not alone.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  But I'm equally dubious of the ability of our leaders - who are in general some combination of feckless, fascist, and inconsequential - to do anything about it.
  
  
  
• Europe is at least ostracising aspiring failed state Belarus after its airliner hijacking stunt.  (BBC)
  
  Though to be fair, Belarus is also banning travel from Belarus.
  
  
  
  
• Faced with having to pay fees for 75,000 individual arbitration cases, Amazon is scrambling to drop their forced arbitration clause.  (Wall Street Journal)
  
  The article is cut off after five paragraphs but you can get the gist.  They forced customers into arbitration rather than potentially costly judicial proceedings, only to discover that not all their customers are idiots, and tens of thousands of separate arbitration cases aren't cheap either.
  
  
  
• Turkey reportedly deployed hunter-killer robots in Libya.  (CNet)
  
  The drones are designed to track and kill their targets without human guidance or intervention.
  
  This is probably not a good development.
  
  
  
• The space station got hit by space junk.  (Science Alert)
  
  It only dinged the Canadarm, which is mounted outside the hull, so there wasn't a pressure breach, but that's kind of close.
  
  
  
• Don't throw away your optical microscopes just yet.  (Nature)
  
  A new technique that I don't quite understand...  Don't understand in any way whatsoever improves the resolution of regular optical microscopes by a factor of five, to about one tenth the wavelength of blue light.
  
  This is done using metamaterials, or in other words, magic.
  
  
  
• Stp asking difficult questions, you're scientists, not...  Wait.  (Nature)
  
  Methinks someone doth protest too much.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 02 2021 11:23 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Thursday, June 03 2021 08:27 AM (v29Tn)

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Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wednesday, June 02 2021 12:12 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 02 2021 11:18 PM (LADmw)

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• AMD had their Computex keynote, and announced a few things, some expected, and one not.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 5000 desktop APUs will be coming to the retail market August 5th.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 5700G is an 8 core / 16 thread part with a 65W TDP and will cost $359.  The existing 8 core CPU, the 5800X, costs $449, so that's not a bad price.
  
  It does run 100MHz slower, and it has half the L3 cache and only PCIe 3.0.  On the other hand, it uses less power than the 105W 5800X and has built-in graphics.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 6000M family is also here.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 6800M is basically a reduced power 6700XT.  The 6700M is a cut down and reduced power 6700XT - 10GB of RAM instead of 12GB, and about 90% of the performance.  And the 6600M looks like the leaked specs for the upcoming Radeon 6600.
  
  It looks like the 6800M isn't quite as fast as the mobile RTX 3080, but it's not too far behind.
  
  
  
• And finally, AMD CEO Lisa Su put to rest rumours that they were working on 3D chip stacking technology by announcing that 3D chip stacking technology would be going into production this year.  (AnandTech)
  
  Su showed off a version of the Ryzen 5000 with 192MB of L3 cache.  The existing high-end parts have 64MB across two CPU chiplets, and the new version stacks another 64MB cache chiplet on top of each of those.
  
  They reported performance gains of up to 25%.  Admittedly that's in one specific game, Monster Hunter World, but 25% is huge and MonHun is huge.
  
  It also helps with a limitation of newer process nodes.  TSMC's 5nm node is about 35% smaller than 7nm, but only for logic circuits.  For memory it's basically the same size as 7nm.  With die stacking AMD could produce just the CPU chiplets on 5nm and the cache dies on the older and cheaper 7nm process.
  
  
  

• AMD also unveiled their FidelityFX AI upscaling solution.  (AnandTech)
  
  This competes directly with Nvidia's DLSS, except that it's open source and also works on Nvidia hardware.  This is exactly what AMD did with Freesync - now an industry standard - to Nvidia's proprietary  and expensive G-sync.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's 3080 Ti is a 3090 with half the RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, it also has 256 shaders missing, but that's about 2% of the total.  That's so they can salvage dies with one or two defects.
  
  It will cost $1199 - in theory.  The regular 3080 costs $699 - in theory.  So you're paying 70% more for a 15% performance boost.  In theory.  I have no idea what the real prices will be.
  
  There's also a 3070 Ti which looks to be 7% faster than the 3070.
  
  
  
• Porn film distributor The Score Group file a DMCA takedown request demanding Google remove links to Wikipedia's own Wikipedia page.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Google said no.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has released WinGet, a package manager like RedHat's Yum or Debian's Apt.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It's available right now on GitHub.
  
  
  

Not Technically Tech News

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 01 2021 11:21 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 02 2021 12:19 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wednesday, June 02 2021 01:23 AM (LZ7Bg)

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 02 2021 05:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, June 02 2021 07:03 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 02 2021 07:20 AM (PiXy!)

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• Blockchain mining has made it impossible to buy video cards for video, so what if they instead used hard drives?
  
  Yep, storage market is fucked.  (New Scientist)
  
  Drives haven't disappeared, but bargains on large hard drives that were commonplace six months ago are gone, and supply is patchy generally.
  
  I got myself a new 6TB drive (Toshiba Gold) last month to replace a failing unit in my NAS, because I knew this was coming.  That drive is still available - but I'd now have to order it in from Amazon UK, because there's zero stock in Australia, even at double the price I paid.
  
  The people behind Chia say that this will be a good thing in the long run as drive makers ramp up production, to which I counter, fuck you you fucking fucks.
  
  
  

• Apparently it's Computex or something, and Intel has announced a refresh of their Tiger Lake laptop parts.  (AnandTech)
  
  You can tell how far they've come by the fact that these are 15W parts but they quote performance numbers for them running at 28W and they actually use up to 50W: Not very.
  
  
  
• The next version of Windows 10 is on its way, and will bring sweeping UI changes that will probably suck.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Or you could not do that, Microsoft.  Just a thought.
  
  
  
• Despite booking $11 billion in orders, Aerion could not raise funds to complete its supersonic business jet.  (Flying)
  
  They will now return to making expensive chairs.
  
  
  
• Apple's next-gen M1X Mac mini will return the features removed from the M1 Mac mini.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Not upgradeable RAM, though.  Not upgradeable anything, in fact.

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 31 2021 11:54 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 31 2021 11:54 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 01 2021 12:05 AM (obo9H)

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• Intel has quietly slipped Tiger Lake B into the sales channel - so quietly that I missed the importance of this yesterday.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Existing 11th generation Intel desktop CPUs are made on their old 14nm process; until now only laptop chips were produced at 10nm.  Tiger Lake B represents Intel's first 10nm desktop parts.
  
  We'll have to wait for reviews to see exactly how this turns out, but the new 11900KB uses 65W at base load, compared to 125W for the 14nm 11900K.  It also looks like they've increased the cache from 16MB to 24MB.
  
  On the other hand, base clocks for the 11900B are a little slower than before.
  
  The 11500B on the third hand looks like it could be a gem: The power remains the same at 65W, but base clocks are up from 2.7GHz to 3.3GHz, and maximum boost clock from 4.6GHz to 5.3GHz.
  
  
  
• Intel also has graphics cards on the way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is great given the ongoing shortage and sky-high prices from both Nivida and AMD.  The cards are expected to have up to 512 Xe execution units, which gives us a good idea how fast they will be, because Tiger Lake laptop chips have up to 96 Xe units.  The dedicated cards will likely run at a faster clock.
  
  On the downside, we won't see these until next year, so in the meantime it's either wait or pay the scalper.
  
  
  

• Zen 3 Threadrippers could arrive in August.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's ten months after the launch of Zen 3 for the consumer desktop, though it's only recently that the high-end Zen 3 parts (12 and 16 cores) became readily available.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Edge 91 is here and it's, um, basically crap.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It pushes a bunch of unwanted features and an even bigger bunch of bugs. 
  
  Avoid.  Oh, wait, you can't.  It updates itself auotomatically.
  
  
  
• Iran has banned Bitcoin mining due to ongoing blackouts.  (NBC)
  
  This is not entirely because the country is run by genocidal kleptocrats; they've also been subject to a prolonged drought that has reduced hydroelectric output. 
  
  The government blamed the blackouts on a natural gas shortage, which is rather like Australia blaming problems on a mouse shortage.  (CNN)
  
  
  

Bonus Not Actually Junk Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 31 2021 05:06 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 31 2021 05:36 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 31 2021 10:39 AM (6y7dz)

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• When our main datacenter burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp - which is several weeks ago now - I had to bring up other sites on the mee.nu server and I made some hacks to limit performance-crunching features.
  
  I haven't had time to undo those hacks yet because we also had servers at that datacenter for my day job and the following weeks were somewhat....  Fraught.
  
  Anyway, I'll be working to undo those de-featurings this weekend.
  
  
  
• It's time to firewall your firewalls to defend your defenses from attacking attackers.
  
  Just before a report was released about Chinese hackers compromising Pulse Secure VPN appliances, the hacks were quietly removed.  (The Record)
  
  FireEye, the company monitoring this, has revised its report from "a group likely connected with Chinese espionage did this" to "China did this".
  
  
  
• The Russia-based hackers who compromised the SolarWinds management software are targeting the governments of 24 countries.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again, this is not a rogue criminal organisation operating in Russia.  This is the Russian government.
  
  
  
• If you have SonicWall security appliances, patch that shit now.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It never ends.
  
  If you don't want to sleep for a week, go over to Bleeping Computer and start scrolling.

• Back in the Paleolithic Era I had a YouTube channel.  It will come as a surprise to many of you that it was a curated collection of anime openings and endings.  No full episodes, no full songs, just the opening and ending credits.
  
  Then the first version of ContentID got switched on, and I got three strikes instantly because the music in some of those clips matched their database, and it was gone forever.*
  
  That was more than a decade ago, but proving that a trillion dollars in market cap doesn't mean you have the faintest clue about anything Twitch is replicating YouTube's fuckup in every last detail.  (The Verge)
  
  Nice Twitch channel you have here.  Shame if anything were to happen to it.  Like, for example, Twitch happened.
  
  * I still have all the video files and if you search very carefully you might still find them, but the YouTube channel got yeeted to Yeetsville.
  
  
  
• USB power delivery is getting amped up to 240W.  (AnandTech)
  
  Well, that's technically the exact opposite of what's happening.  Standard USB-C cables can deliver up to 60W - 20V and 3A.  Specifically rated cables can deliver 100W - 20V and 5A.  The new standard keeps the same current rating but increases the voltage to 48V.
  
  That's only for 5A rated cables and you'll need a new cable anyway, with capacitors rated at 60V+ for safety.
  
  This can replace power bricks for even most high-end laptops - and smaller all-in-one desktops as well - with a single standard port.  The power bricks won't necessarily be smaller, but the same power brick will work for any device unless the manufacturers explicitly cripple them so that is almost certainly what will happen.
  
  The new standard also supports stepping the voltage up in 100mV increments, so you can expect chargers that support all of that to cost a bit more than the typical cheap phone charger from Kmart.
  
  
  
• I came looking for weed, and found Ethereum.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  British police took a break from confiscating butter knives to check out a suspected pot farm using an illegal electricity tap.  They confirmed the location using an infrared-sensing drone, which is a common way to spot these sites because their grow lamps put out a lot of heat.
  
  But so do 100 specialised mining rigs stuffed full of Nvidia graphics cards, which is what was actually found.
  
  
  
• Sabrent's 2TB Plotripper Pro has a 54PBW rating.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  To unpack that a little, this is a 2TB NVMe SSD, one of those little M.2 drives that plugs into a slot on newer motherboards.  It can write a total of 54PB - 54,000TB - over its lifespan.
  
  Assuming a 5 year warranty, that's 30TB per day - 15 times the drive's capacity, which is termed as 15 DWPD (drive writes per day).
  
  That is the highest rating I have ever seen on a general-purpose SSD.  Expensive enterprise drives go as high as 10 DWPD.
  
  This is - of course - for crypto mining with Chia.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti is a 3090 with half the RAM.  (WCCFTech)
  
  People complained when the 3090 was launched because the MSRP of $1500 was considered excessive.  Compared to what it costs to get one of those cards now, that seems laughably low.
  
  
  
• Twitter has confirmed their paid plan, Twitter Blue.
  
  
  
  
  For $2.99 per month you get absolutely nothing.
  
  There is one feature Twitter could offer that would be worth paying for - it rhymes with edit button - but they absolutely refuse because they know that their users are batshit insane and it would be an unimaginable clusterfuck.
  
  
  
• What's new in Swift 5.5?  (Hacking with Swift)
  
  Swift is Apple's programming language to replace Objective C, which absolutely nobody liked.  There was a lot of buzz around it early on as a new systems programming language with a clean and thoughtful design, but then people tried using it and the buzz died.
  
  There are third-party compilers and you can write apps in Swift and run them anywhere including Android, but nobody wants to.
  
  
  
• If you have a last-generation iPad Pro with 6GB of RAM, a single app can use at most 4.5GB of that, leaving 25% of the RAM for the operating system and other apps.
  
  If you have a new 16GB iPad Pro your apps can now get 5GB of RAM - a whole extra 512MB.  (MacRumors)
  
  iPads are a good device for artists, with their high resolution screens and stylus support.  Why plug an expensive drawing tablet into an expensive PC when you can just get an iPad?
  
  Well, this is why.  Because Apple hates you.
  
  

Karen Girls Music Video of the Day

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, May 30 2021 01:38 AM (v29Tn)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 30 2021 03:42 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 30 2021 07:44 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 30 2021 04:03 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 30 2021 11:18 PM (obo9H)

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