Wednesday, January 23
Daily News Stuff 23 January 2019
Tech News
- Samsung has announced the 970 EVO Plus as their new top-of-the-line NVMe SSD for consumers. (AnandTech)
Sizes up to 1TB available now, 2TB in April.
It's up to 30% faster than the original 970 in some benchmarks, particularly sequential writes, and is priced the same as the 970. So much like the Western Digital Black SN750, not a huge upgrade, but a welcome one.
- There's a security bug in the wifi chips used in some little known products like Microsoft's Surface and Xbox One, and the PlayStation 4. (Tom's Hardware)
If you have one of those, expect it to reboot soon as it downloads a security update from the mothership.
- Sapphire has launched a crypto mining version of the Radeon 570 with 16GB RAM. (Tom's Hardware)
And an HDMI port, so you can actually use it as a video card.
It's a bit of an odd duck since the mining boom has largely busted, but there are some cryptocurrencies which are designed to need a large amount of memory to mine so they can't be swamped by the first person to get a bunch of ASICs back from the foundry.
- GitLab 11.7 is out with multi-level child epics, Kubernetes API integration, and cross-project pipeline browsing.
No, I don't know either, and I use it every day.
- A planned update to the Chromium extension API may break ad-blockers including the widely-used uBlock Origin and uMatrix. (Bleeping Computer)
This is pure coincidence, I'm sure. (Bleeping Computer)
- The PHP extension repository is still offline while that security breach is investigated. (ZDNet)
A clean and verified copy of the installer source code has been pushed to GitHub, but GitHub itself never got the hacked version. So if you downloaded the installer from source, or if you relied on the version that came with your operating system, which would have been packaged from the GitHub source, you should be safe. It's only if you grabbed the compromised version directly from the repository that you might have a problem.
- Intel has consigned their Quark microcontrollers to the well, that didn't work shelf next to the IAPX 432, the i860, and their entire discrete GPU product lineup so far. (AnandTech)
What discrete GPUs, you ask? Well, precisely.
- Toshiba is sampling UFS 3.0 flash drives. (AnandTech)
These are teeny-tiny devices - the size and thickness of a fingernail - and can store up to 512GB and transfer up to 2.9GB per second. Obviously the first market is high-end phones, but any small mobile device that needs a lot of fast built-in storage can take advantage of this technology, such as, for example, um, phones.
Social Media News
- Russia is suing Facebook and Twitter for not storing Russian users' data in Russian datacenters where Russia can conveniently steal it all. (ZDNet)
Facebook and Twitter responded to the lawsuit with, and I quote, "Say 'Moose and squirrel' again!" and then fell out of their chairs laughing hysterically.
- Reddit and Twitter have both redesigned their websites.
Just click the opt out / return to legacy site option. I can see what they're going for, but I don't have to like it.
Anime Op/Ed of the Day
Picture of the Day
Nyawm.
Disclaimer: It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
Ugh, that security article is awful. According to the summary you can magically pwn a device without connecting to it, "every five minutes". There doesn't seem to be an explanation of what that last part means, but if you go far enough, you'll discover (if I am reading it correctly) you need a second exploit to steal control of the wifi soc and use it to attack the host system (the sample exploit uses the soc to plant harmless messages in the Linux kernel log.)
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 24 2019 01:26 AM (Q/JG2)
2
Yeah, it's nasty but not PANIC STATIONS nasty.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 24 2019 01:28 AM (PiXy!)
3
Oh--reading a bit more, it appears that the affected soc will scan for other wireless networks automatically every 5 minutes, without user interaction. I've always thought that was a bit silly--you probably shouldn't be searching for networks unless the user initiates it.
IIUC, a second wifi device is used to send carefully-crafted wifi frames at the target device, designed to cause a buffer overflow and remote code execution. Once you've pwned the wifi soc, you use injected code to attack the host system (over the SDIO bus, somehow).
IIUC, a second wifi device is used to send carefully-crafted wifi frames at the target device, designed to cause a buffer overflow and remote code execution. Once you've pwned the wifi soc, you use injected code to attack the host system (over the SDIO bus, somehow).
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 24 2019 01:31 AM (Q/JG2)
4
Re the Chromium adblockpocalypse: I see this as driving people back to things like Proxomitron.
Something like Proxo has a huge advantage over adblockers-as-extensions as it can prevent stuff from ever getting to the browser, whereas extensions can only examine data after it's been downloaded. That would, as one example, allow adblocking for Chrome on Android, which you can't do now as it doesn't have extensions. (I tried FF for Android for a while because it did, but it's just too painful to use, mainly because the default fonts are too small)
Something like Proxo has a huge advantage over adblockers-as-extensions as it can prevent stuff from ever getting to the browser, whereas extensions can only examine data after it's been downloaded. That would, as one example, allow adblocking for Chrome on Android, which you can't do now as it doesn't have extensions. (I tried FF for Android for a while because it did, but it's just too painful to use, mainly because the default fonts are too small)
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 24 2019 01:36 AM (Q/JG2)
5
Standalone cameras and drones are other obvious beneficiaries of speedy flash.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 24 2019 01:38 AM (Q/JG2)
6
Regarding the disclaimer: Make Orwell Fiction Again.
Posted by: muon at Wednesday, January 30 2019 03:58 PM (vMYTH)
7
That MOFA hat ought to come with a partial mask so you can't be recognized on camera.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 31 2019 10:49 AM (Iwkd4)
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