• [Not pure tech news, but I do branch out into the infectious cancer that is social media from time to time, so please bear with me -- Pixy.]
  
  Rolling Stone, the best time to delete your account was right before you posted this.  The second best time is now, except you're apparently all passed out in the bathroom.
  
  
  
  
  Shall we make a list?
  
  
1. "Doctor says."
   
   
2. Calling ivermectin a "horse dewormer" when it is one of the premier drugs for treating parasitic illness in humans.
   
   
3. Photo that shows people rugged up for winter in an area where recent daytime temperatures have been in the high 90s.
   
   
4. An apparent - and yet somehow entirely unreported - epidemic of gun violence in rural Oklahoma.
   
   
   
• The story was of course circulated by the usual "intellectuals" and "epidemiologists" and "news organisations".
  
  
  
  
  
  
• So what is the basis in truth for these claims?
  
  Turns out, there isn't any.  Every single word is a lie.
  
  
  
  
  There are ZERO cases of ivermectin overdose being treated in the eastern Oklahoma hospital system, and NOBODY has been turned away from emergency care.
  
  
  
• So, Rolling Stone, seeking to avoid another humiliation, immediately retracted their fairy tale, right?
  
  Nope.
  
  
  
  
  I did see one person back down when presented with these facts.  They were not of the American left, though.
  
  
  

• The Ryzen 5300G may be the best APU you can't buy.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not the fastest, but the best value for money, except that we don't know how much it costs because you can't buy it so the whole article is kind of guesswork.
  
  If you don't need sixteen cores and a 24GB graphics card, if you just want to check email, write your new novel, watch YouTube, play Minecraft - a modern quad core CPU with solid integrated graphics for $150 is likely all you need.  If this does cost $150, which we don't know, because, well.
  
  Intel has quad core desktop parts with integrated graphics, but their desktop parts have the graphics engine scaled way down from the laptop parts, and lag well behind AMD.  On GTA V for example, at 1080p low quality, the 5300G manages 80 fps, while the more expensive Core i5-11600K gets 52.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AMD's next-generation Rembrandt APUs have already entered mass production.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If that seems early, you need to understand that it takes months for a complex chip to make its way through the factory.  There are dozens of processing steps and they're not fast.
  
  These chips support DDR5 (though not PCIe 5.0) and should deliver twice the graphics performance of AMD's current fastest APUs - well, other than their actual fastest APUs which power the Xbox and PlayStation.  Something like 60% of the performance of the Xbox Series S.
  
  
  
• Spying on children is bad.  Don't do that.  (The Atlantic)
  
  When you've crossed the line so far that even The Atlantic - I refer to it as Fascist Quarterly - even The Atlantic notices, you might want to pause, take a deep breath, and quit your job and go take up potato farming because you're a miserable excuse for a human being where you are now.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare: Threat, menace, or just turning HEAD requests into GETs?  (KMitov)
  
  A normal web request  is an HTTP GET - it says "give me this page" and the server sends the page.
  
  There's another request type called HEAD - yes, I know - which says "just let me know if you have this page, but don't send it to me".
  
  So if you accidentally turn HEADs into GETs, the load on the server and network utilisation will jump dramatically as every check for the existence of a web page suddenly has to deliver the entire page.
  
  Cloudflare - which is designed to protect websites from being overloaded by their users - misconfigured several hundred servers to do exactly that, in effect DDOSing their own customers.
  
  
  
• I bought a 1TB microSD card for the new laptop.  And, since I was on Amazon, some cutlery as well.  Been that kind of day, whatever that kind of day is.
  
  
  

Mission Failed Successfully Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 05 2021 11:37 PM (r9O5h)

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Posted by: Mauser at Monday, September 06 2021 08:51 AM (Ix1l6)

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• Susprised by backlash from every sentient being in the entire galaxy and even some journalists, Apple has postponed its plans to (checks notes) spy on children.  (MacRumors)
  
  Not cancelled, mind you.  They are still 100% committed to spying on children.  They just need time to recalibrate their spin.
  
  
  
• I used to listen to tech podcasts all the time, and stopped last year because (a) they were getting dull because all the tech companies suck, (b) they were becoming overtly political and most of the commentators are closet commies, and (c) Hololive.
  
  One example of what I mean is Jeff Jarvis, who was (maybe still is) a regular on This Week in Google - and who teaches at a journalism school funded by Facebook.
  
  Let's see what kind of person Jeff is.
  
  
  Yeah. Not wasting my time on that.
  
  And if you ever wondered how journalism in the US came to be what it is today, its through being taught by professors like Jeff.
  
  

• The new best small laptop may be the HP Pavilion Aero.  (PC Magazine)
  
  A 1kg / 2.2lb 13" laptop isn't that new - I have an LG model from 6 years ago that fits those specs - but this one ticks all the other boxes as well.
  
  Up to an 8 core Ryzen 5800U, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and a 2560x1600 display covering 100% of sRGB.  The charging jack is on the right, but if it can charge from the USB-C on the left that's not a problem.
  
  This being HP, the Four Essential Keys are present and in their proper place.  And it's available in four colours if you care about such things - silver, white, gold, and rose gold.
  
  It starts at around $680 right now - with 6 cores, 8GB/256GB, and a 1920x1200 screen - with a maxed-out configuration going for $1050.
  
  But because there's a universal law that we can't have nice things, it has no SD card slot.  Sure, you can get a little USB adaptor for a few dollars, but what the fuck, HP?  You almost had it, and you threw it away.
  
  For a change this is actually available in Australia - though only a single configuration at present - and is not yet in stock in HP's US online store.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Four Essential Keys, I thought the MSI Modern 14 had 'em.  There they are on the right of the main layout, just where you'd want them.
  
  Then I took a look.  Insert?  Delete?  What the hell?  Bad MSI!  No biscuit!
  
  
  
• Intel's 12th generation desktop CPUs are launching on November 19.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Just in time to be out of stock for Christmas.
  
  On the one hand, these will bring welcome updates including DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, on the other hand, leaked tests indicate that they are every bit as power hungry as existing 9th, 10th, and 11th gen parts and not all that much faster.
  
  
  
• If you're running Gzip on a recent IBM mainframe, it just got orders of magnitude faster.  (Phoronix)
  
  One of the things that IBM does with its mainframe CPUs is shovel in dedicated hardware for common functions.  Every CPU these days implements hardware for encryption, but compression is uncommon.
  
  I wonder if this extends to ZFS.  Gzip compression works great with ZFS, but if you copy terabytes of data over a very fast link it also puts a substantial load on the CPU.
  
  
  
• An open letter to Microsoft: Stop putting ads in Windows, you fucking retards.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you're annoyed with ads on websites breaking page layouts, you ain't seen nothing.  A promotion for Microsoft Teams broke the explorer, taskbar and start menu on preview builds of Windows 11.
  
  It wasn't an update, it just broke.  And it stayed broken even if you completely reinstalled your computer.
  
  Paul Thurrott has more.  He's more polite than I am but equally unimpressed.
  
  
  
• Mass exploits of a bug in Atlassian Confluence are underway.  (ZDNet)
  
  Happy Labor Day long weekend, sysadmins!  Glad you got three hours of sleep, because you're going to need it!
  
  Atlassian used to have a program where small teams could get any of their products for $10 per year.  Obviously it's a "first dose is free" thing, but if your company has had a small developer team for years and isn't growing, it might still be attractive.
  
  This sort of thing makes it less so - any authenticated user, or possibly just anyone on the network, could run any code they wanted on the company's Confluence server.
  
  Which if that server is connected to the internet and not behind a VPN DON'T EVER DO THAT means you're completely screwed.
  
  
  
• Apple is discovering the cost of hiring progressive lunatics: They're facing an investigation from the US Labor Board for (checks notes) putting crazy people on paid leave.  (Engadget)
  
  Where can I get a gig like that?  Full pay for zero hours per week sounds like a rather cushy deal.
  
  
  
• The chief software officer - the first such - of the US Air Force has quit because the senior staff of the US military are idiots.  (The Register)
  
  And if he expected anything else, he is also an idiot.
  
  
  
• A hacker scammed a victim out of over $300,000 for a fake Banksy NFT by the clever trick of listing the NFT on Banksy's own website.  (BBC)
  
  They did return the funds (less postage and packing).  But anyone who is dropping $300k on an NFT is going to get fleeced again tomorrow anyway.
  
  
  
• I was going to say this article was obvious horseshit, but I took a look and it might actually just be normal competent engineering with a bad headline.  (Fast Company)
  
  The claim is a new wind turbine design can capture five times the energy of existing turbines.  I thought at first that this was claiming five times the efficiency, which is impossible.  Instead, it's a new design made up of multiple smaller - but still huge - rotors, that collects more energy than a current single large turbine because it's the size of 20 football fields.
  
  Which breaks no laws of physics and will probably actually work.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, September 04 2021 02:21 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 05 2021 12:10 AM (obo9H)

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• So I've been working crazy hours recently - and less recently, this has been going on since February - but it's paying off.  Not only did they give me a raise, and even backdate it, they've offered me a second raise starting next month.
  
  And now that things are slightly less insane and I have some money to spend, it turns out that everything I want to buy, from gluten-free chicken nuggets to a second one of those Dell laptops, is now out of stock.  
  
  Fortunately, given the looming nugget famine, I can actually cook.  I just tend not to.
  
  
  
• Turns out I can order a Lenovo Tab M8 FHD from Amazon US.  I can't order it from Amazon US via Amazon AU, though, because...  Yeah, I got nothing.
  
  
  
• GM can't get its nuggies either it seems, and is temporarily shutting down all but four of its US factories.  (Engadget)
  
  Nuggies make the world go 'round.
  
  
  
• Yes, we need to nuke South Australia.  Again.  As with the burning of Washington, the British had the right idea but no follow-through.

• IBM and the L3 Cacheless society.  (AnandTech)
  
  I mentioned this previously - IBM's new mainframe CPUs have no L3 cache.  Or L4 cache, which is also something the previous model had.
  
  Instead, they have very large L2 caches - 32MB per core - and share them between cores as a virtual L3 cache, and between sockets as a virtual L4 cache.  A large system can have 8GB of virtual cache this way.
  
  The article notes that this L2 cache has a 19-cycle latency, where AMD's current Ryzen chips are 12-cycle, but Ryzen only has 512kb per core and the L3 cache is much slower.

  How Is This Possible?
  
  Magic. Honestly, the first time I saw this I was a bit astounded as to what was actually going on.

  
  
  
• Windows 11 is launching October 5.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Hurrah.
  
  
  
• The Silicon Power XD80 gives you a terabyte of TLC flash with proper DRAM caching for $110.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a PCIe 3.0 drive so it peaks at "only" 3.4GB per second - which is astoundingly fast, really - and not quite up with the top models in that class like the WD SN750 or the Samsung 970 Evo Plus.  But it's priced to compete with low-end DRAMless and/or QLC drives and it blows them out of the water.
  
  Worth a look.
  
  
  
• The 1170 words you can't say on GitHub.  (The Register)
  
  Or more specifically, can't say to GitHub Copilot.
  
  The list includes such horrific slurs as "Israel", "man", and "woman".
  
  
  
• UK ISP Sky Broadband feeds your bandwidth data straight to a bunch of sleazy lawyers so they can sue you over copyright infringement.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  If we have any nukes left over after South Australia...
  
  
  
• The Chinese mafia - which is to say, the Chinese government - is looking to steal $15 billion from Alibaba.  (Reuters)
  
  Watch for their economy to unexpectedly tank in a couple of years.
  
  
  
• Asus is going all-in on OLED in its new notebooks.  (Engadget)
  
  Including the - I've mentioned this before and I swear I am not making this up - ProArt Studiobook Pro.  It will come with a 16" 4K panel with 550 nit brightness and 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut.
  
  Asus is also pretty good (if inconsistent) about including the Four Essential Keys, so I'll keep an eye out for these new models.  I only have one OLED device so far - my new phone - and that screen is pretty great.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, September 03 2021 10:30 PM (knj0d)

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 03 2021 11:25 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, September 04 2021 01:08 PM (x0epN)

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• Amazon is trying to block Starlink at the FCC because Amazon sucks, says Starlink. (Ars Technica)
  
  While these statements are self-serving on the part of Starlink, they are nonetheless accurate.  Starlink is active now with 100,000 Beta customers and 1700 satellites, where Amazon's competing Kuiper service has yet to launch anything whatsoever.
  
  Amazon has not had a single meeting with the FCC this year about issues raised with its own planned service, but has found time to have fifteen meetings to complain about Starlink.

• Cloudflare has ditched Intel for AMD. (The Register)
  
  Cloudflare runs a lot of servers - not Facebook or Amazon scale, but they act as a gateway for a scary percentage of the web.  They evaluated the latest server chips from Intel and AMD and say that while Intel can now compete in performance, they use much more power to do so - several hundred watts more per server.
  
  When you have to budget power for 200 datacenters, it starts to add up.
  
  
  
• AWS AP-NORTHEAST-1 fell over. (The Register)
  
  That's one of the Amazon datacenters serving minor cities of little global import, like...  Tokyo.
  
  I think they need to invest in some Tandem Nonstops.
  
  
  
• Professor Plum in the EVGA factory with the lead-free solder. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Amazon's game New World was not directly responsible for killing RTX 3090s, though it does push graphics cards pretty hard.  It was dodgy solder work on the initial run of cards from the factory, so if you were lucky enough to get one before the price shot up, karma circled back to pay you a visit.
  
  
  
• A California judge has ruled that UC Berkeley must conduct an environmental impact study on its own students. (Slate)
  
  Satire is alive and well but has been taken over by the government.
  
  

King Cover of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 02 2021 11:26 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Mike at Sunday, September 05 2021 11:32 PM (t/ABc)

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• The Australian Federal Police - our equivalent of the FBI - now have the authority to compel Australian social network providers (of which there are none) to hand over or even alter the details of your accounts.  (Tutanota)
  
  Of course this had strong bipartisan support as only the very worst legislation does.
  
  And of course the FBI does this already, even where they're forbidden to do so by law, but it doesn't help anything to grant such broad powers.  Basically all networks now need to be designed with the explicit expectation of faithless nodes.
  
  Now, that's not a news site - it's the blog of a company selling encrypted email - but it's an entirely legitimate concern.
  
  
  

Tech News

• A Node.js library that is downloaded 3 million times a week - and is used in Amazon's developer libraries - has a remote execution flaw.  (HTTPToolkit)
  
  An attacker that can convince you to read a malicious URL can run whatever code they like on your server.
  
  The problem is it uses the vm module to run untrusted code - when the vm module explicitly says not to use it to run untrusted code.
  
  
  
• If you're stuck at home in Australia waiting for one of (1) the 70% vaccination target to be met and things at least in NSW open up again, (2) the police kick your door down over a Facebook post that they posted for you, or (3) your package arrives in the mail don't bet too much on option 3.  (ZDNet)
  
  I understand they have staff out sick, can't easily hire more with this fucking lockdown going on, and are working to shift a much greater than usual volume, but I'm not sure how stopping accepting packages for three days is meant to help.
  
  
  
• Get your own Amiga!  (Apollo Core)
  
  In case you're too young to have joined in the fun back in the 80s and 90s, the Vampire V4+ has a Motorola-compatible "68080" chip implemented in an FPGA - not emulated - with 512MB of RAM and a new (but compatible) chipset.
  
  It's around eight times faster than the most powerful stock Amiga ever sold - the A4000 - and uses just 2W of power.  It has both Amiga-style mouse and joystick ports and USB, plus the usual things like Ethernet, don't-call-it-HDMI-and-we-don't-need-to-pay-royalties, and an internal CF slot and an external SD card slot for extra storage.  (Actually, that should also be a don't-call-it-SD slot.)
  
  About 600 Euros so it's not exactly a bargain unless you compare it with what those systems cost originally in which case it is absolutely dirt cheap.
  
  
  
• On the other end of the scale, if you're looking for an AMD motherboard with Thunderbolt 4 the Asus ProArt B550 Creator is one.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  One of exactly two such, in fact.
  
  It has dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, dual M.2 slots, HDMI out, DisplayPort in - it's routed to the Thunderbolt ports - and otherwise the usual bits and pieces.  Oh, and a PS/2 combo keyboard and mouse port in case you have a 30 year old keyboard that you just can't bear to part ways with yet.
  
  I wonder how well it works if you just plug two of these together with a Thunderbolt cable.

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, September 02 2021 02:40 AM (t/97R)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 02 2021 05:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, September 02 2021 10:16 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 02 2021 10:40 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, September 02 2021 11:16 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 02 2021 11:21 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 02 2021 11:28 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 02 2021 11:29 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 02 2021 07:45 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 02 2021 11:16 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 02 2021 11:23 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 02 2021 11:54 PM (LADmw)

13 "Model M"
Ah, you're one of those ones who hates his co-workers.   My first mech had Cherry MX Blues, but after that I switched to tactiles.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 03 2021 06:59 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, September 03 2021 12:33 PM (ZlYZd)

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• ARM China has hoisted the black flag and started slitting throats.  (ExtremeTech)
  
  SoftBank - owners of ARM - thought it was a good idea to form a joint venture with China where they only held 49% of the company.  The CEO of the joint venture was fired last year for running a business on the side, and went rogue, claiming he owns the company, and started firing any staff who wouldn't follow his instructions.
  
  The Chinese authorities are perfectly happy with this situation because it lets them walk away with a lot of ARM intellectual property.  Older designs - up to the A77 - but not garbage.
  
  Of course this means that no-one with any sense will enter a joint venture with China again, but it was a pretty dumb move to start with.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile China is working to scrub what's left of its internet of inconvenient truths.  (Bloomberg)
  
  It appears they've recently started heading back from fascism to communism, which means the oppression will remain the same but the economy will disintegrate.
  
  
  

• Movie companies want VPNs to lose the P.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  In essence - given the way a VPN works - they want to ban arithmetic.  That's what it all comes down to - all the laws on end-to-end encryption and backdoors for law enforcement and VPN logging are attempts to ban arithmetic.
  
  
  
• The best consumer hard drives.  (AnandTech)
  
  While I'd love to go SSD-only, it still costs at least three times as much per gigabyte, and doesn't really make sense if you just want a big storage array where you dump copies of everything in existence.  
  
  Since there are now only three makers of hard drives - Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba - the roundup is relatively straightforward, and they helpfully highlight the best bargains in green.
  
  
  
• Which reminds me: I recently said there are no good small Android tablets.
  
  I was incorrect.  There's the Lenovo Tab M8 FHD.  (Lenovo)
  
  It's the smaller cousin to the 10" model I got recently.  Same 8-core CPU, but with just 3GB RAM and 32GB of built-in storage.  But it does have a 1920x1200 screen, which is what I see as the minimum for good typography at that screen size (which matters if you read a lot), and it would be a hell of a lot faster than my ancient Nexus 7.
  
  And for $120 you can't go too far wrong.  Except that it's completely unavailable in Australia.  Even eBay turned up empty.  I could order it from AliExpress and keep my fingers crossed for six weeks.
  
  Lenovo also seems to have released four new 11" tablets - the P11, P11 Plus, P11 Pro, and Yoga Tab 11.  Those are rather more expensive (and a lot bigger and heavier) but the P11 Pro has a 2560x1600 OLED display, which would be great for watching TV and movies.
  
  
  
• A bug in the latest version of the Google Search App prevents some models of Android phones from making or receiving phone calls.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I understand that there are people who still do that.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 01 2021 12:00 AM (aQ0eC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 01 2021 12:10 AM (aQ0eC)

Posted by: Braenyard at Wednesday, September 01 2021 02:10 AM (oGc0G)

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Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, August 31 2021 11:53 AM (MuaLM)

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• Disk prices are coming back down now that the Chia mining craze has started to fizzle out, but graphics card prices are on their way back up.
  
  I've also notice that supplies of higher-end AMD cards have dried up again, though supplies of the 6600 XT and 6700 XT seem good.
  
  
  
• 40% of code suggestions made by GitHub's new AI tool Copilot contain security vulnerabilities.  (TechRadar)
  
  That's, uh, not good.

• AMD's new Threadripper Pro 5995WX is up to 40% faster than the current 3995WX.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a huge jump in performance because these two CPUs have the same number of cores (64) and the same power consumption (280W).
  
  I would have expected these high-end chips to be limited by the power budget and/or heat and not a lot faster than existing models, but it looks like AMD has been busy the last few months.
  
  
  
• The Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 XT Eagle is a graphics card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's one of the cheapest cards available from the current generation and it works, and it's avail...  Well, I can't find it in stock in Australia, but it exists.
  
  
  
• Google Play turned a profit of $8.5 billion in 2019 on $11.2 billion in revenue.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  I assume that's net revenue - their 30% cut - and not gross payments. But I do have to wonder how you spend $2.7 billion to run a website.
  
  
  
• I'm tempted to build my new PC in one of these.  (Thermaltake)
  
  It supports two XL-ATX motherboards, dual power supplies, and at least 21 disk drives (I had to look at the parts list to figure that out).
  
  You can increase that to 31 with a couple of hot-swap SSD cages, but those cost extra.  I could have Windows on one side and Linux on the other, and stuff it full of cheap disk drives in a RAID-Z3 config.  Bigger and cheaper than any NAS, if you were going to buy a Linux box as well.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, August 30 2021 10:14 PM (DHVaH)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 31 2021 11:44 AM (obo9H)

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