• On October 1, I filed my seventh appeal with Twitter over my latest ban, not expecting or receiving a better response than the previous six attempts, Let's Encrypt's root certificate expired and caused outages all over the internet, Intel's new AI chip rated 10 milliHamsters, Corsair's Xeneon 32QHD165 covered 84% of Rec.2020 or about two feet seventeen inches in Imperial measures, how to bypass that TPM report, and QNAP had another RCE*.
  
  * Remote code execution vulnerability, meaning someone else can run their code on your computer.
  
  
  
• On October 2, the least worst state government leader in Australia - mine - got caught up in a corruption investigation and resigned, do not use SMS 2FA, the Acer FA100 was a pretty decent basic SSD, Backblaze data showed SSDs failing nearly as often as hard drives, Arm server CPUs offered pretty good performance for the price, Crypto trading platform Compound wasn't hacked, they were just dumb, the genius of Amazon is they make you pay for the telescreen, and where there's smoke there's a dead graphics card.
  
  
  
• On October 3, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Cisco, SAP, and Atlassian joined forces to establish Trusted Cloud Principles, which are apparently "fuck you, give me my money", Ruby was the latest bunch of idiots to dive headfirst into a code of conduct war, HP's Chromebook x2 looked nice without going to the bother of being nice, don't buy an Xbox Series S even though it's the only non-portable game console you can buy - hang on - sorry, that's not available either anymore, Sony undoomed the PlayStation 4, Apple put an RCE in the AirTag interface despite being told specifically that they had done that, and all about JIT compilers.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 4, M1X Macbooks might have been on their way - spoiler: they were, the chip shortage would continue until morale improved, why carmakers couldn't just switch to newer chips - spoiler: because people get upset when cars crash, ransomware gangs were getting ripped off by rival gangs offering discount decryption services, a reboot of Babylon 5, and against all odds the new premier of NSW was better than the previous one.
  
  
  
• On October 5, all Facebook services went down for six hours which caused secondary problems for everyone from Pokemon to Verizon, really, really don't trust SMS-based 2FA, Windows 11 was here, Android 12 too, and a file containing the personal data of 1.5 billion users turned out to be fake.
  
  
  
• On October 6, there was a file leak bug in the most common web server in the world because 2021, there would be no victims of crime if we simply made being a victim a crime in itself, Windows 11 was perfectly fine mostly, the Surface Pro 8 was also fine, the perfect answer for programming job interviews, how IBM lost the cloud, and WHAT ARE YOU IDIOTS DOING?
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 7, the Democrats launched a pre-fab whistleblower in their ongoing fight with Facebook which they are too dumb to realise is their best friend in the world, Windows 11 was all about forcing you to upgrade your hardware, Linux almost kinda sorta ran on Arm-based Macs, I ordered that monitor I wanted (two of them in fact) and they shipped the same day, and a 4chan user called Twitch a disgusting toxic cesspool - and then leaked all their source code.
  
  
  
• On October 8, my monitors arrived, the Ampere Altra Max server CPU hovered somewhere in the no mans land between amazing and meh, Samsung announced a 17nm process node - actually old reliable 28nm updated with FINFETs, TSMC to the Biden Administration: bite me, Google and Apple were facing antitrust investigations in Japan, a judge ruled that CDNs don't in themselves constitute contributory infringement, Intel passed over Britain for new fabs because continental Europe offered bigger bribes, stablecoins weren't very, and I discovered bamboo and pandas - in Minecraft.
  
  
  
• On October 9, throwing politicians into volcanoes, where exactly was Tether's $69 billion, unexpected sanity from two left-wing Sydney institutions, hydrogen was still a terrible fuel, the .NET Foundation kerfuffle was updated to a brouhaha, Apache has released an emergency update for the incomplete fix in the emergency update for the bug they introduced introduced in the recent update - something that would become a theme as the year wrapped up, and I established Camp Pandaton - in Minecraft.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 10, we were sick of these mother-beeping outages on this mother-beeping server, Firefox sent every character you typed into the URL bar to its ad network, Vivaldi blocked Googles snoopy new API, Nvidia graphics cards could have done with more RAM except the 3060 and 3090 - and the A4000, and Step One of Fixing Windows 11 Club was Don't install Windows 11.
  
  
  
• On October 11, Australian big tech industry association DiGi went went recursively Big Brother, NEC was building a half-petabit transatlantic fiber link just for Facebook, HP leaked specs of Intel's 12th generation and AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs, and we built a rail line from Camp Pandaton all the way home to Riverbend through the Nether.
  
  
  
• On October 12, laptop Availability was improving here in Oz, which PCIe 4 SSD for your laptop, memory prices were predicted to fall, if your software stack is generally crap adding encryption in just one place wouldn't fix it, and under CDA Section 230 Wikipedia wasn't responsible for its idiot users.
  
  
  
  

• On October 13, the Polygon blockchain raised its gas prices by factor of thirty overnight, improving things that should never have existed, Zen 4 would include PCIe 5 after all, and global hosting provider OVH announced routine network maintenance and then five minutes later every single one of their servers went offline because it's just been that kind of year.
  
  
  
• On October 14, well don't do that then, Microsoft patched the problem that made Windows 11 run slow on AMD processors and made everything much worse because it's just been that kind of year, new Nvidia graphics cards were on their way unless they weren't, a 100MHz 6502, Southwest Airlines said it was lag, and Apple pushed back against the idea that people own the electronic devices they own.
  
  
  
• On October 15, Ubuntu 21.10 was here, Belarus sent everyone to jail, Google Distributed Cloud ran the cloud on your own servers - which wasn't as dumb as it sounded, Apple had a looming announcement, and Crystal 1.2 was out.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 16, 7-Eleven Australia decided to build a biometric database of all their customers without actually informing anyone of this intent, PinePhone announced a new model that was basically adequate, there was an update for that patch for that AMD performance bug in Windows 11 but no-one ever explained what the bug was, time to bust some trusts, Apple fired the leader of the AppleToo movement, Tether paid a $41 million settlement to the CFTC over not actually being tethered, Valve banned the blockchain and there was much rejoicing, and putting guns on robot dogs because what could possibly go wrong.
  
  
  
• On October 17, the last best Socket AM4 motherboard, the first worst Socket 1700 motherboards - maybe not actually worst but it rhymes, Alder Lake vs DRM, Canon got hit with a well-deserved class-action lawsuit, a look at the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9, and fighting ransomware by making sure there is nothing worth ransoming.
  
  
  
• On October 18, my new notebooks were pretty good, Microsoft was really pushy, and Windows doesn't tell you where your disk space has gone, JavaScript metastatised, does nobody write code anymore, and if you have a 9000 sq ft home you can probably afford an expensive WiFi router.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 19, Apple announced their new 14" and 16" MacBook Pro models complete with STUPID DISPLAY NOTCH, AMD's next-plus-one generation laptop chip would have sixteen cores, someone hijacked the REvil ransomware group's servers, and enabling Windows 11's "God mode".
  
  
  
• On October 20, Apple's new M1 Pro and M1 Max were good but not nearly as good as groundbreaking as Apple claimed - for example, the 16" MacBook Pro with M1 Max was about 8% faster than my Dell on CPU tests and 30% slower on average on GPU tests - and twice the price, the Alienware x15 had four non-essential keys right where the Four Essential Keys should be, the QNAP NASbook, running Windows 11 on a 2006 Pentium 4, 15 more security vulnerabilities in Windows 11, Nim reached 1.6, a fairly standard setup for a 100GbE switch, Microsoft killed off UWP - ish, and China opened its VPN market to foreign investment in perhaps the single most disingenuous government policy announcement in the history of the Universe.
  
  
  
• On October 21, next-gen Ryzen 6000 mobile chips were spotted - and possibly striped, TSMC scheduled 3nm for Q1 2023, Microsoft rolled out support for Android apps to Windows 11 beta testers, Windows 10 meanwhile designated Deluge as a PUP, I picked up the full version of Corel Painter (formerly Fractal Design) at 90% off, the US Senate gave NASA $100 million and told it to run a multi-billion dollar program, and thinking about 8TB laptop SSDs.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 22, remaking Love Canal in Chernobyl, kneel before Qod, Affinity Photo was also mentioned, and Microsoft finally rolled out the actual fix for that AMD performance bug and still refused to say what the bug was.
  
  
  
• On October 23, all these programming language are yours except Node.js - attempt no coding there, the M1 Max was closer to a 3050 than a 3080, Intel's graphics cards were scheduled for Q1, the ASRock X570S Riptide had six PCIe slots, a security researcher did not steal $600 million from the Polygon blockchain and was rewarded $2 million for it, DDR5 RAM was expected to be 60% more expensive than DDR4 which turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, working in tech kind of sucked - partly because of the people complaining that working in tech kind of sucked, and Safari was the new Internet Explorer, ruining the web for everyone else.
  
  
  
• On October 24, Intel's upcoming 12900HK laptop part was faster than the M1 Max on both single and multi-threaded benchmarks, all of Dell's new laptop models removed the Four Essential Keys where their predecessors had them, fucking magnets how do they work asked YouTube, Microsoft removed .NET hot reload support for CLI developers and then immediately put it back again, we survived YANA - Yet Another Node.js Apocalypse - and all we got was these rather nice screen-printed 100% cotton t-shirts, an Egyptian art robot was arrested by border security, and the Democrats rolled out another prefab Facebook "whistleblower".
  
  
  
  Fan-made closing credits for Hololive EN Season 1.
  
  
• On October 25, Dell had service manuals, inside Google and Facebook's secret and possibly illegal back-room deals, Prince of Persia was ported to the Atari XL, and AMD's Zen 3D chips entered production.
  
  
  
• On October 26, a deep dive into Apple's M1 Pro and M1 Max, a deep dive into MacOS 12 (avoid), Node.js was being Node.js, and a close look at the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi which seems to no longer be available.
  
  
  
• On October 27, Hell Week of the Eternal October commenced, AMD reported another record quarter with revenue up 137% over Q3 2020, a new Penric and Desdemona story from Lois McMaster Bujold, we were shocked, shocked, to see Ethereum 2.0 delayed, again, and Microsoft force-installed the Windows 11 upgrade checker n Windows 10 that it could tell you that you couldn't upgrade.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 28, Hell Week escalated, like, a lot, Intel's Alder Lake was inbound, the best cheap tablets of 2021 all sucked, and Protonmail was not a telco.
  
  
  
• On October 29, the blockchain was a database server with a thousand-dollar-a-day crack habit, THAT STUPID DISPLAY NOTCH, AMD's Zen 5 server chips could go as high as 256 cores, MANGA was the new FAANG, and everybody made a shit ton of money. Including me, finally, because this is when my second raise of the year kicked in.
  
  
  
• On October 30, Sananana returned to us, unexpected sanity (though it was later revoked, at least I got to sleep at night for a while), get your RTX 3080 in the cloud where it's completely useless, AMD's next generation GPU taped out, OpenWorm was an open worm (possibly Yatagarasu), and Samsung was tripling its fab capacity.
  
  
  
• And on October 31, two down, two to go in Hell Week, key takeaways from the Facebook Papers - spoiler: you're a Nazi, new features in Python 3.10, the 11 worst features of Windows 11, and Fuck Razer.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 2012 Video of the Day

Party Like It's 1979 Vide of the Day

Disclaimer: Did we get it?

1 And of course The Security Professionals (TM) all demand we have highly complex passwords according to rules that are mutually contradictory on multiple sites and that you never reuse passwords, so actually committing passwords to memory are out as well. 

I guess the people who stored their passwords as yellow sticky notes on the side of their monitor had the right idea!

2 Pretty much every password-strength requirement I've seen can be satisfied by separating two four-letter english words with the string "X+1". Which says a lot about their strength-testing libraries, and not much about security.

I love the false sense of security provided by passwordmonster, where it estimates that a six-word diceware password with "X+1" appended couldn't be cracked in less than "30 million trillion trillion trillion years". :-)


-j

3 Knew a guy who worked as a sysadmin at the War College.  Security people would appear at odd intervals (at night) and try to hack into each person's workstation.  For some reason, they couldn't get into his.  His CO asked what he was doing that made his machine more secure and his answer - I don't follow the psw guidelines, I make my own.  He was then ordered to follow the guidelines, and the next time the security crew showed up, they were able to hack into his machine as well.