• Waiting for house news. 
  
  Update: There's a buyer for this one as well so I've upped their offer by $25k.  I'll be cross if this one gets away because I've already set up a shopping list at Ikea.
  
  Update: And now I'm probably going to be cross.  The other buyers lost their house in the floods, and they've already paid the deposit, so unless they can't exchange contracts tomorrow the owners are going to take their offer.
  
  Also, apologies are due to unknown real-estate agent #1 who I thought was playing games.  That property - which had been on the market for quite a while - has sold.
  
  
  
• Had a report that one of my (virtual) servers was port scanning someone.  I'm not sure if it was legit, and a scan of the server showed nothing untoward, but I have to take it seriously.
  
  First step was to block unwanted outbound traffic at the firewall.  The first thing I do with any server is to block unwanted inbound traffic, but everyone* does that these days so all the major exploits sneak unwanted data in on trusted connection. - like the huge Log4j mess a few weeks ago.
  
  Easy peasy because if you screw up the firewall settings on a virtual server you can get in via the virtual console.  I've done this on physical servers on the other side of the planet, with complex networking arrangements and no console, and that is nerve-wracking.
  
  Next step was to rebuild that server entirely since all it runs is a proxy server (Caddy) and it's needed an update for a while.  Before doing that I checked on the backups to make sure if anything went wrong I could easily restore and, well, f*ck.
  
  The backup drive on the backup server is not responding at all.  The syslog is full of ZFS deadman events.  And the load average is a personal record, and I've worked on some pretty big servers.
  
  
  
  That is not a happy 10-core bunny.
  
  The backups run A->B->C where A is the active server and C is a an archive server that can collect lots of daily backups and B is broken.  Which means that for, uh, ten weeks, no backups were going off site from that origin server to anywhere.
  
  So, I arranged three off-site backups and then rebuilt the proxy server with the latest software and the new firewall rules and basically tweaked the config file at random and kept restarting it until it all worked.  I don't know why that was necessary, but it was.  At least I could flick the routes back and forth internally and didn't need to wait for DNS to update.
  
  Then back to the backup server.  Look at the I/O stats.  It's written how much data?  18 petabytes?  No wonder it's not working, the SSD must be fried.
  
  Wait...  Insert commas manually.  18 terabytes.  That's not much at all.
  
  Kill the stuck processes (all 24,000 of them).  Load average goes up.  Kill the parent process...  Load goes up even more.
  
  Guess it's reboot time.
  
  And...  It sits there with ping working but no other sign of life for ten minutes.  (This one doesn't have a remote console either.  I grabbed it during the datacenter fire last year and took what I could get.)
  
  It does have a button to remotely power cycle the server but the page asks you not to do that if the server can ping because they'd rather have a technician look at it before the evidence of whatever the problem was disappears.
  
  So I start writing a tech support ticket and just as I'm about to submit it the server comes back up and is working perfectly as if there was never anything wrong.
  
  Okay.
  
  How was your evening?
  
  * Not everyone.
  
  
  
• Twitter is adding an edit button, maybe.  (The Verge)
  
  
  
  
  "Protecting the integrity of that public conversation" is of course Newspeak for eradicating dissent.

• Over $50 billion worth of video cards were sold in 2021.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's up 30% by value and 20% from 2020, and with 50 million cards sold last year that means the average retail price was $1000.
  
  Which is far too much.
  
  
  
• The US government - which plans to replace its vehicle fleet with electric models - has nearly 1% of the charging stations it needs to do that.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Sounds about right.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is joining the board of directors of Twitter.  (CNBC)
  
  That's going to put the honey badger among the stool pigeons.
  
  
  
• Fire Toolbox turns your Kindle Fire into an Android tablet.  (Liliputing)
  
  Ish.  Some things remain locked down - like the app launcher, which can't be entirely replaced - but it provides a lot of customisation options.
  
  
  

• Elon Musk bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the largest individual shareholder.  (CNN Business)
  
  The share price rose 27% on the news that someone who isn't a braindead doctrinaire liberal might be involved at some level in the company's decision-making process.

• AMD's Ryzen 5500 and 5600 are finally here and they are great value for money.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While slower than the 5600X they are not a lot slower, and the 5600X until recently sold at $299, while the 5600 is priced at $199 and the 5500 at $159.
  
  The 5600 is pretty close in gaming performance to Intel's i5-12400 as well, and in 3d rendering benchmarks there's less than 0.3% difference between the two.  Intel does currently have a single-threaded lead, but AMD chips scale better in multi-threaded work and catch up.
  
  
  
• There's also the 5700X.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This is a cheaper, lower-power, 8 core CPU, and depending on the benchmark is either nearly as fast as the more expensive 5800X or nearly as slow as the 6 core 5600X.
  
  Not a bad chip, but not ground-breaking.
  
  
  
• GitHub can now prevent you from accidentally committing code that contains API keys and passwords.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The way GitHub works, once a key or password is in there, it's very hard to remove entirely.  It's out in the wild and you just have to go change the password.
  
  So having it smack you with a ruler when you slip up like that is a very good thing.
  
  
  
• Hackers used MailChimps internal customer management tools to directly target crypto users receiving email notifications through the service.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is not a very good thing.
  
  
  
• The Realme Pad Mini is a new 8.7 inch Android tablet with ugh.  (Liliputing)
  
  Decently fast A75 CPU but a disappointing 1340x800 screen, barely better than the 2012 model Nexus 7.

• Looks like house #3 might be the one.  I've mentioned place a couple of times - it's a modern 4 bedroom place, with a garage the size of a small house and a house the size of two small houses.
  
  That garage is 23 x 42 feet, not counting a storeroom / workshop area off to one side and a small bathroom on the other.  That should suffice.  And it has windows on two sides so it's not a complete cave.
  
  
  
• The internet is not what you think it is  (Princeton)
  
  Oh?

  Many think of the internet as an unprecedented and overwhelmingly positive achievement of modern human technology.

  Who?

• Dell's new Inspiron 16 2-in-1 model has a 3840x2400 OLED touchscreen.  (Dell)
  
  (That price is Aussie dollars; it's not yet listed on the US site.)
  
  And a 12 core i7-1260P CPU and Nvidia MX550 graphics, which puts its gaming ability at roughly zero.
  
  
  
• Google says that Microsoft is a threat to national security.  (NBC)
  
  I mean, yes, but have you guys looked in a mirror lately?
  
  
  
• Facebook has been locking accounts for no reason.  (BBC)

  Your Facebook account was disabled because fuck you, that's why.  This decision could easily be revered but we won't because see above.

  Not sure why this is a news item though.

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 04 2022 09:45 PM (obo9H)

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Posted by: J Greely at Monday, April 04 2022 01:39 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, April 19 2022 07:25 AM (LZ7Bg)

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Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Sunday, April 03 2022 11:11 PM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, April 04 2022 04:20 PM (gVjvf)

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 04 2022 09:41 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 05 2022 10:11 AM (obo9H)

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• It's the weekend again - somehow - and that means it's Question and Answer time.  Take one of the bottles from the basket, put your question inside, and cast it into the waters.  It will probably just wash straight back up on the beach, but if it does make it here to PixyLab I will attempt to answer.
  
  
  
• No news on house #3 yet.  The one that was previously #4 on my shortlist has actually sold, but I wasn't actively pursuing that one because while the renovated interiors were first rate, the location (between an iron foundry and an artillery range) was less than ideal.
  
  
  
• 123qweQWE!@#0.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  GitLab had a default test password configured for accounts registered via external authentication providers.  They say no accounts have been compromised, but the bug affects not only the cloud service, but the paid on-premises version and the free open source edition, so if you run your own it's time to update.
  
  Also, put it behind a firewall.  At my day job your VPN account has to be configured to grant access the the GitLab server before you can do anything at all.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Sabrent's 8TB PCIe 4 M.2 SSD is now available at a mere $1499.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is about what I paid for three 4TB drives, but if you absolutely have to fit a ton of storage inside a laptop - maybe if your job involves video editing on the go with a film crew - then it's either that or $2200 for the 8TB option on a MacBook.
  
  
  
• Proposed EU regulations would require all blockchain transactions - all of them - to be registered with a verified account - on both ends - and the details made available to member governments at any time for any reason.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And transactions valued at more than 1000 Euros would be automatically reported to the government.
  
  Note the both ends requirement.  If you want to transfer your crypto to someone - anyone - they also must register with the EU.
  
  Oh, and these registers, if implemented, are going to get hacked.  Count on it.
  
  
  
• Posting the full name and medical history of a patient in a reply to a Yelp review is a HIPAA violation.  (The Verge)
  
  Who knew?
  
  
  
• A Scottish Twitter user has been sentenced to 150 hours of community service for being a Twitter user.  (The Verge)

  Sheriff Adrian Cottam told Kelly he passed the "custody threshold” but there is a presumption against prison if there is an alternative.

  Which means that this haggis-humping bumblefuck was actually considering jail time for the crime of being a pretty normal Twitter user, which is to say, a loathsome mindless hate-filled tankie who would likely be shot by his own zampolit if their unit ever faced action.
  
  Hang on...
  
  Right, this is not Twitter, nor am I Scottish.  Just needed to check.
  
  
  
• Russia has banned purchases of foreign software for critical infrastructure.  (The Register)
  
  But at the same time has legalised theft of foreign software, so that's okay.

• Some of you expressed interest in the cover home of The Concise Dictionary of Regrettable Architecture (4th ed, Stodder & Houghton, 3716pp) as mentioned in yesterday's Pixy Goes House Hunting item.
  
  Well, here's one of the bathrooms:
  
  
  
  After looking at several late 19th to early 20th century homes that have been lovingly restored (and one that is a complete dump but is heritage listed and so frozen in time as a complete dump) this place comes across like a big bowl of curried corn flakes.
  
  Every single pixel asks the question why?  
  
  And that's the bathroom they they selected to show off the property.  If this was a modest three-bedroom place passed down in the family for 65 years and now on the market for the first time, sure.  Buy it, replace the kitchen, bathroom, and carpet, strip off the wallpaper and paint everything left white, and you'd have yourself a little gem.
  
  For this one, the owner would have to be someone prepared to drop an additional half a mil to gut it and rebuild from the inside out.
  
  In other words, not me.

Posted by: ahd at Saturday, April 02 2022 09:56 PM (6vszb)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 02 2022 10:12 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 02 2022 10:14 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 03 2022 12:39 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, April 03 2022 07:54 AM (ZlYZd)

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• I have my agent checking the contract on my first alternate now.  Assuming there's no major issues and no-one has already grabbed it (and there's no indication of that so far), I'm prepared to go over asking price if needed, because this one has the right combination of being ready to move right in and have the potential for improvement - because you could park a freight train in the garage.
  
  Speaking of which, the craziest damn house popped up in my tracker just now.  Seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, four living rooms, two kitchens, two laundries, nine car spaces, five minute easy walk through the park to the shops, and in my price range.
  
  Except (a) it's for auction at at the end of the month so who knows what the final price will be, and (b) it was built in 1957 and could grace the cover of a James Lileks book with the word "regrettable" in the title.
  
  
  
• CNN+, the new pre-failed streaming service from the former news network, is planning to sell NFTs of its first half hour of content.  (Ace of Spades)
  
  If this doesn't kill NFTs I think they might be immortal.
  
  What are NFTs, you ask?
  
  Well, think of a baseball card.  It doesn't have any special intrinsic value - it's just a piece of cardboard.  It doesn't give you any influence over the player, of course, or let you attend a game.  It's just a piece of cardboard.
  
  Now, imagine a digital baseball card - it's just a file on a computer somewhere.
  
  An NFT is like a digital version of a photocopy of a 3x5" index card that lists the address of the locker at the bus station containing the baseball card, so that if you remember the locker combination you can take it out and, um, put it into another locker, with the added bonus that eight billion people with hacksaws and power drills have easy 24x7 access to the bus station, and even so, there are people willing to spend six figures on these damn things.
  
  I can only sleep at night by telling myself that it's probably mostly money laundering and what these people really do for a living is something relatively wholesome like smuggling heroin or land mines or endangered monkeys or maybe all three each nested inside the other like so many addictive explosive hyperactive Russian dolls.
  
  Because, yes, my job is mostly NFTs these days.
  
  Which is why I can afford a seven bedroom house - albeit in a country town; this thing would be eight figures easy if it was in an upmarket suburb in Sydney - but I'd almost sooner live in a cardboard van by a cardboard river.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Quis scamodiet ipsos custodes?  (Lupinia)
  
  In which a scam prevention expert gets scammed - partly because she expects customer service from her bank to be incompetent, and it takes a while for the scammer to raise sufficient red flags.
  
  She is an expert and she manages to keep the scammer on the line while she calls the real customer service line of her bank so that they can watch in as the scammer tries to steal her money, but it's a valid if rare example of how you can be too cynical for your own good.
  
  
  
• Not with NFTs though.
  
  
  
• In case you've missed this one it's fortunate that it's harder to block Chesapeake Bay than the Suez Canal.  (gCaptain)
  
  Same shipping line, different ship.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 22.04 is in beta.  (Phoronix)
  
  I'm looking forward to this; 20.04 had a surprisingly smooth launch; I think I first deployed it at the beginning of May that year and have had very little trouble with it.  (That's on servers.  I run lots of servers on Ubuntu, but I've had less experience with it on the desktop.)
  
  
  
• Google is bringing a new advertising API to Chrome.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you don't like it, you can simply opt out.
  
  Of Chrome.
  
  Because you sure can't turn the new Topics API off.
  
  
  
• Samsung will sell parts and tools needed to repair the Galaxy S20 and S21 and Tab S7+.  (Fast Company)
  
  And provide detailed repair guides in partnership with iFixit.
  
  But Pixy, you say, aren't those all prior year models?
  
  Why yes.  Yes they are.
  
  
  
• Russia's Great Firewall isn't working and could be headed for collapse.  (Torrent Freak)
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway...
  
  
  
• The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted Earendel.  (CNN)
  
  I wondered where he'd gotten to.
  
  The star (because that's what Hubble spots, after all) is 28 billion light years away, which means since the Universe is only 14 billion years old that light effectively travelled at twice the speed of light in order to reach us.
  
  Because space is not only really big, but very weird.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Horn wearing Anon at Friday, April 01 2022 07:53 PM (9GEPh)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 01 2022 10:25 PM (r9O5h)

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• Repeat after me: We have a hot prospect expecting to close today but if you act right away...
  
  Actually, this time I believe them, because (a) they provided details that were not to their advantage and cooled me down on this property, and (b) they didn't claim a hot prospect so much as a room temperature one.
  
  Either way, bleah.  I'll have my agent check out my top two alternates but I'm getting ready to activate Plan B.
  
  
  
• I'm not sure there is a top story today.  Well, the Washington Post says that some of the cryptographic signatures on the Laptop from Hell check out proving that the emails are from who they say they are and did in fact say what they say when they were sent, but we knew that 18 months ago.
  
  
  

Tech News

• YouTube has added 100 free TV shows and over 1000 free movies.  (Mashable)
  
  Where are they?  What are they?  No-one knows.  You can't browse the list; you can't search for them; and if I click the link to see even a sample of the TV shows I get a purple monkey error.
  
  "It's personalised" says YouTube, which apparently translates to "fuck you".
  
  Also, the small number of free movies I could find that are actually viewable in Australia are crap.  But then so is Netflix.
  
  
  
• Canada will ban sales of combustion engine cars by 2035.  (Engadget)
  
  Has Canada ever seen Canada?  There is no country in the world that would benefit more from global warming or that is less suited to electric vehicles.
  
  
  
• Phenylephrine is useless.  (In the Pipeline)
  
  On the one hand, it's not a precursor to meth.  On the other hand, it does nothing.  And there are many cheaper substances that fit both those roles.
  
  
  
• QNAP again.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Seriously?

Posted by: normal at Thursday, March 31 2022 11:10 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 31 2022 11:28 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: furnall321 at Friday, April 01 2022 04:28 AM (n+R81)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 01 2022 06:47 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 01 2022 07:27 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, April 01 2022 08:51 AM (MuaLM)

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• Agent for the other house on my shortlist is not playing games.  Sent the contract right over, only one thing in there that raises an eyebrow, and certainly no deal breakers.  Getting my agent to do a walkthrough and then will take it from there.
  
  What I also found while clicking around is a rather nice five bedroom house on 16 acres on the edge of town - with a spare two bedroom house just in case, I don't know, the main house has a puncture.  At the extreme upper end of my price range but actually still cheaper than my current place, which is about the size of the spare house there.
  
  The problem is, it's on wireless internet, and wireless internet in Australia sucks.  A major reason I selected this particular town is the fibre internet, and this house don't got it.  I can do my job remotely, but I still need to be able to do my job.
  
  What price 1km of Cat 5?
  
  
  
• Axie Infinity's Ronin network bridge got hacked.  Just a little bit.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  For $620 million.
  
  And they didn't notice for a week.
  
  (Yes, this is crypto stuff.)
  
  (breathe in)
  
  WHAT ARE YOU IDIOTS DOING?
  
  (breathe out)
  
  
  

Tech News

• Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is officially officially here for officially $1999.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But actually a whole lot more than that.
  
  And there are no reviews, because Nvidia didn't send out review samples.
  
  It runs at 450W and should be about 35% faster than the RTX 3080 at three times the price.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Ryzen 5800X looks kind of dead.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you want speed you'll go for the 5800X3D or the 12-core 5900X; if you're price-sensitive you'll want the new 5700X which substantially cheaper, uses much less power, and is only 5% slower in single and multi-threaded benchmarks.
  
  
  
• HP's new FX900 Pro SSD is, um, pretty good actually.  (Tweaktown)
  
  It's not the fastest SSD in existence, but it's cheaper than anything faster and faster than anything cheaper.  7.4GB/s read and 6.7GB/s write, with 43 µs read latency and 14 Âµs writes.
  
  
  
• Paging Barbra Streisand.  Will Ms. Streisand please come to the Law of Unintended Consequences phone.
  
  
  
  
  Farewell, Ubiquiti, you assholes.
  
  
  
• Sydney is acquiring...  Sandworms.  They're sandworms.  (ZDNet)
  
  The sandworms will be used to extend the new Metro system in western Sydney, burrowing through 200 metres of sandstone and shale per week.  (Not a lot of granite around here.)
  
  
  
• What happened to that 40 mile long Russian invasion convoy.  (The Guradian*)
  
  Or one version of events, anyway.  But something sure happened to that convoy and it wasn't good.
  
  * Stet.
  
  
  
• This professor stopped grading her students' papers.  How did it go?  (The Conversation)
  
  She has no idea because she stopped grading her students' papers.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 30 2022 11:25 PM (oPg+d)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 31 2022 01:13 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Eros at Thursday, September 28 2023 08:26 PM (vmsJS)

Posted by: martin at Wednesday, September 17 2025 02:33 PM (TiFMY)

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