• Intel looks set for another meh year in 2020.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Comet Lake will still be 14nm, and will max out at 10 cores.  And it will require a new socket.  And it will use more power than a 16 core Ryzen.  And it will have less than half the PCIe bandwidth.
  
  
• AMD's RX 5500 looks set to replace the existing RX 570, 580, and 590 cards unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It replaces the existing cards' 256-bit GDDR5 memory with 128-bit GDDR6, so almost the same speed but cheaper to manufacture.  It's aimed squarely at Nvidia's GTX 1650 - but Nvidia are about to launch their 1650 Super as a counterattack.
  
  
• Secrets of the Hitachi 6309  (WikiChip)
  
  The 6309 was a clone of the 6809 (as found in the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer and the Hitachi Peach) but had a few hidden features.  The 6809 was notable compared to other 8 bit CPUs for having a multiply instruction; the 6309 added division.
  
  It also provided block transfer instructions like the Z80 and a 32-bit accumulator.  No other 8 bit CPU - as far as I am aware - had that.
  
  
• All six major browser vendors are rolling out DNS-over-HTTPS in a big middle finger to ISPs and governments.  (ZDNet)
  
  Also, six?  Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple...  Their list includes Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi, so they don't count one of the seven as "major".
  
  
• Microsoft clarifies its strategy for Windows application developers.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  
  
  Actual quote:

  Moving forward, we’re looking forward to being able to continue to evolve the app model space to make it less of a hard left-right decision for you but something that is a choice you can make as a developer later on, and not as an initial change.

• Disney is planning to airbrush its own content on its own streaming service.  (One Angry Gamer - do not read the comments)
  
  Anyone familiar with the story of Song of the South - it has never been released on home video in the US - will be completely unsurprised at this move.
  
  
• The Chrome spell checker does not believe unsurprised is a word.
  
  
• Diablo IV won't be out for years but Blizzard is already planning microtransactions, seasonal content, and expansion packs on top of the full-priced game.  (One Angry Gamer - do not read the comments)
  
  
• No, an AI hasn't solved the Three-Body Problem you idiots because we already have a proof that there is no general solution for the Three-Body Problem.  (LiveScience)
  
  The comments at Slashdot (unlike certain other sites) are actually informative on the subject.  (Slashdot)
  
  
• Instagram is hiding likes, which are kind of the entire and only purpose of Instagram.
  
  
  
  
• Julia has threads.  (Julia)
  
  It's had sort-of threads for a while, but with 1.3 - which isn't out yet - they are officially in beta.
  
  That's because it does some complicated and clever stuff with them.  You can fire up as many threads as you like - including having nested loops that each spawn threads all over the place - and it will make sure that the end result all makes sense and doesn't kill your computer.
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 11 2019 03:16 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 11 2019 03:30 AM (Iwkd4)

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• I finally remembered to turn spell check back on in Chrome, so post quality might improve a little.  Though because of all the special terms these posts tend to be a sea of red squiggles regardless.
  
  
• Google's Pixel 4 XL gets a meh out of ten.  (AnandTech)
  
  Universal opinion is that it's a 2017 phone shipping in late 2019.  No headphone jack, no microSD card, no fingerprint sensor.  It does have radar because that's what everyone was demanding.  Apparently.
  
  
• Speaking of old school, the Dynabook T8 and T9 feature a 16" screen and a Blu-Ray drive.  (AnandTech)
  
  They remind me of my Vaio from...  Uh, quite a long time ago.  But with a much better battery life; that thing lasted no time at all.
  
  
• Blizzard explains no, it's the children who are wrong.  (TechDirt)

  In explaining that decision,Brack reiterated the message that Blizzard supports free speech and encourages employees and players to say what they want in "all kinds of ways and all kinds of places." The one exception to that, he said, is "if it affects our bottom line".

  (Paraphrased slightly.)
  
  
• Volta XL is basically a USB-C Magsafe power cable.  (ZDNet)
  
  So it falls out all the time rather than occasionally getting snagged on something and bringing your laptop crashing onto the floor.  With modern fast charging the former is probably a worthwhile tradeoff for many.
  
  
• Gfycat is not only mass deleting old images, but threatening to sue Archive Team over attempts to back them up.  (Boing Boing)
  
  The first part is understandable - the images are old, anonymously posted, and mostly copyright violations.
  
  The second part is straight out of the Blizzard Public Relations Handbook.
  
  
• GitLab's director of risk and global compliance has resigned because GitLab was thinking seriously about issues of risk and global compliance.  (Business Insider)
  
  Specifically, considering whether to hire staff living in Russia and China for positions where they would have access to private user data.
  
  
• MSI leaked the existence of the 64 core Thirdripper that everyone knows is coming.  (OC3D)
  
  
• The ASRock X570 Creator combines Ryzen 3000 with Thunderbolt 3.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It also has an Aquantia 10Gb Ethernet port, WiFi 6, and two M.2 slots.
  
  At $500 it's not exactly cheap, though.
  
  
• Facebook is censoring mentions of posts mentioning the censorship of posts mentioning quote-whistleblower-unquote Eric Ciaramella:
  
  
  
  
  
• And so is YouTube:
  
  
  
  
  
• YouTube also says that 141 minutes isn't enough context to determine if a video violates their "community guidelines":
  
  
  
  
  Fortunately, we still have BitChute - for now.
  
  
  
  
• Twitter, oddly enough, is not censoring the name.  Possibly because they retain enough functioning neurons to realise that doing so would provoke an unimaginable trollpocalypse.
  
  
• Lilith is an operating system written in Crystal.  (GitHub)
  
  If you ignore all the fancy stuff, at its lowest level Crystal is basically C with a saner syntax, but a single person writing a complete working operating system in it is still an impressive achievement.
  
  
• Fresh benchmark leaks continue to indicate that AMD's mainstream 16 core 3950X will outperform Intel's high end 18-core 10980XE.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 10980XE is no faster than the 9980XE, and the 3950X beats the 9980XE on both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 10 2019 01:52 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 10 2019 02:06 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, November 10 2019 02:13 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 10 2019 05:18 PM (PiXy!)

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• Thirdripper 3960X and 3970X prices and specs have been leaked by...  Wait, that's an official AMD announcement.  (AnandTech)
  
  3960X: 24 cores, 3.8 / 4.5GHz, 280W, $1399.
  3970X: 32 cores, 3.7 / 4.5GHz, 280W, $1999.
  
  The only really new news is on the platform side.  The TRX40 chipset has an 8 lane PCIe 4.0 uplink to the CPU, providing four times the bandwidth of the previous generation X499.
  
  The CPU itself provides 48 lanes of PCIe 4.0, plus 4 USB 3.2 ports, and either eight more PCIe 4.0 lanes or 8 SATA ports, plus 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes dedicated to the chipset connection.
  
  The chipset provides another 8 USB 3.2 ports, 4 SATA ports, 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes, and either eight more PCIe 4.0 lanes or 8 more SATA ports.
  
  So between 56 and 72 available PCIe 4.0 lanes, with 12 USB 3.2 ports and between 4 and 20 SATA ports.  If you don't want all that SATA you could have three x16 slots and six M.2 slots.  You couldn't run all six M.2 slots at full PCIe 4.0 speed simultaneously, but you could run them all at full PCIe 3.0 speed.
  
  Memory support is up to 256GB of DDR4-3200 unbuffered DIMMs, with or without ECC.
  
  Of interest here is the scrunching up of part numbers.  The previous generation 32 core part was the 2990WX, now that cour count has been moved down to the 3970X.  Expect 48 and 64 cores to show up sooner rather than later.
  
  
• At the other end of the scale AMD also announced the Athlon 3000G, a $49 dual core APU.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's a 3.5GHz 35W part, and comes with a 65W cooler, so you can take full advantage of its unlocked overclocking.  It has 3 Vega CUs, which should be adequate for desktop use and very light gaming.  It certainly stomps on anything else in its price range; last year's Athlon 240GE was roughly equivalent but cost $75.
  
  
• If you were interested in the Ryzen 3900 - 12 cores at 65W TDP - and disappointed when it turned out to be an OEM-only part, well, disappoint no more.  The latest AMD BIOS lets you run any 95W or 105W Ryzen 3000 CPU in a 65W power profile.  (Reddit)
  
  And 65W parts in a 45W profile.
  
  
• Xiaomi's Mi Note 10 has five cameras.  (AnandTech)
  
  
  
  And a 2340x1080 6.4" AMOLED display, 6/128GB or 8/256GB, a 32MP front camera, dual SIM cards, a headphone jack, and no microSD slot because fuck you that's why.
  
  Close.
  
  
• Why xHamster is better at moderation than Facebook.  (Medium)
  
  Orders of magnitude less content.
  
  
• The European Galileo positioning system went offline for a week earlier this year.  We now know what happened.  (BertHub)
  
  Short answer: They lost it.
  
  
• Fitbit is doomed.  (ZDNet)
  
  The article examines the series of train wrecks that have been recent Google acquisitions, but doesn't spend a lot of time on why.  But we know why.
  
  
• Twitter is planning to experiment on methods to control user behaviour.  (Reclaim the Net)
  
  For example, if you disagree with a tweet, which happens sometimes because Twitter is a spectacular aggregation of utter idiocy, Twitter will ask you why.
  
  I somehow doubt that "Because the above user is a fuckwit" will be on the menu.

Video of the Day

• The Jetson Xavier NX is a smaller, cheaper, slower version of the AGX Xavier.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's a controller for visual robots from Nvidia.  $399, up to 21 TOPS at 15W.
  
  
• Begun, the price wars have.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD's desktop market share has doubled in the past three years, and their server market share has climbed by over 400% - albeit from a very low starting point.
  
  Intel have started cutting prices in response, but they're going to have to keep doing that to keep up, because they will be behind technically until at least 2022.
  
  
• Blizzard is run by idiots.  (TechDirt)
  
  Creator of some of the most successful computer games ever, but still run by idiots.
  
  
• Twitter is run by idiots.  (TechDirt)
  
  Well, we knew that one already.  This is an examination of their recent decision to ban political ads.
  
  
• Thirdripper 3960X and 3970X prices and specs have been leaked by a retailer unless they haven't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  3960X has 24 cores for around $1400, 3970X has 32 cores for around $2000.  Both have a top speed of 4.5GHz, 128MB of L3 cache, and a TDP of 280W.
  
  
• Former Twitter employees have been charged with spying for Saudi Arabia.  (Washington Post)
  
  Unwritten headline is that Twitter employees appear to have unfettered access to your "private" data.
  
  
• Apple TV all the way down.  (Six Colors)
  
  Apple TV is a hardware device, an app, a streaming service, a desert topping, and a floor wax.
  
  There is also a Videos app, a smart-TV app simply called Apple, a reseller program called Channels, and a streaming service called Cinema.  Somewhere in there it is possible to watch Apple TV programming in the browser - but do you know where it is?  I certainly don't.
  
  
• The Australian federal government is still busily working out what they want to ban after passing legislation banning it back in April.  (ZDNet)
  
  Australia is run by idiots.
  
  
• SoftBank made a Â¥15.6 billion loss in the last quarter due to a bear market on complete and utter fuckery.  (ZDNet)
  
  Specificially their investments in Uber and WeWork are underperforming, and by underperforming I mean dead and starting to smell.
  
  
• Why do we need 32 core CPUs and thousand-dollar GPUs and all the other stuff?
  
  Because.
  
  
  
  That's why.
  
  
• Jimmy Dean is coming back to the Five and Dime.  (The Hollywood Reporter)
  
  Entirely digitally, since he's been dead for 64 years, and technology hasn't advanced that much.
  
  
• Tesla has a truck.  (CNBC)
  
  The Cybertruck (really) will be launched on the 21st.
  
  

• Intel goes chiplets.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not with CPUs, at least not yet, but with their new high-end FPGA, which has two logic dies and four I/O dies.
  
  
• Dell has a professional 4K monitor too.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a little dull compared with the Asus ProArt - literally so, with a narrower colour gamut and lower brightness.  But it does include two ThunderBolt ports and six USB 3.2 ports, and an integrated colorimeter.  Plus at $1999 it's half the price.
  
  
• Intel's Cascade Lake AP CPU - the one you can't buy - is 84% faster than AMD's Epyc unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And in this case, it definitely isn't.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The key benchmark highlighted here is an old version that treated Epyc 2 the same as Epyc 1.  But Epyc 2 - and Zen 2 generally - in fact has double the floating point performance of Epyc 1.  An updated version of the benchmark that is aware of Zen 2 is already available, but Intel didn't use it.
  
  
•  Xerox is looking at buying HP.  (WSJ)
  
  Since the former HP has now fissioned into three at least four separate companies - the consumer and printer company HP, the enterprise company HPE, the biomedical lab equipment company Agilent, and the test and measurement company Keysight - we need to be specific, and Xerox is just looking to buy the first of these.
  
  
• Libra is poo, argues one engineer.
  
  The first point, about the uselessness of BFT on a permissioned network, is granted, but Facebook have argued that they want to be able to transition Libra to a permissionless model, which would necessitate BFT.  Now that transition may never happen, but without supporting BFT from the beginning, that's guaranteed.
  
  The second point on transaction privacy is also granted, because how the hell else can it work?  Well, I suppose you could have regional shards so that at least any single transaction is only subject to one set of banking privacy laws and not all the laws in the world.  In fact, that would make sense.  It would also help with scaling.  It would also be really complicated.
  
  Third is that it can't scale to the size of existing payment processing backbones.  Indeed Facebook haven't claimed that it can, promising peak transaction rates about half the average rate handled by Visa alone.  But that is still two orders of magnitude more than Ethereum can handle, so Libra still has value even if it falls far short of the ideal.
  
  Fourth is that the Move language - at least as it is currently implemented - is unsound.  Here he seems to be on much firmer ground, and unless he is factually wrong the language is currently not even a true proof of concept.  Given what he says about Solidity, the Ethereum programming language, which I have worked with:

  These are typically done in a shockingly badly designed language called Solidity, which from an academic PL perspective, makes PHP look like a work of genius.

  I am inclined to believe that he has the facts straight here and Move, at present, is inadequate for the task.
  
  Fifth is that the cryptography stack used by Libra has not bee audited, and very much needs to be, given that it uses several novel techniques.  It may be fine, but a detailed audit is essential.
  
  And sixth and last, it has no capacity for reversing payments.  This one is a little odd for a permissioned system, since by its very nature Libra embodies arbiters, unlike Ethereum where nobody trusts anyone else because nobody knows anyone else.
  
  
• The problem with Apple TV+ is Apple TV.  (9To5Mac)
  
  Apple TV+ is only available via Apple's TV app, and Apple's TV app is...  Bad.
  
  It also doesn't work at all on Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, or Android, locking Apple out of about three billion devices.
  
  Also, it has a total of 8 shows available.  Seriously.  8.
  
  
• Alexa, Siri, and Google smart speakers are open to attack from lasers.  (ZDNet)
  
  Is that burning plastic I smell?
  
  Basically, an attacker can zap the microphone with a modulated laser, and the microphone will interpret it as voice commands, without anything being audible.  You need line of sight to the device, and a steady hand, but otherwise it's open season.
  
  
• Samsung is shutting down its Arm CPU design operation.  (Android Authority)
  
  They just recently announced their M5 core, but it seems it will be the last of its line.  Samsung will still make Arm chips, but it will license the cores from Arm rather than designing them itself.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 06 2019 11:25 PM (eHWT1)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, November 07 2019 07:46 PM (EXhwA)

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• Who makes the most secure CPUs, Intel or AMD?  It's AMD.  Duh.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Examining five different aspects of CPU security, AMD wins four and ties on one.
  
  
• The Asus ProArt PA32UCX is a great monitor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It provides a 4K resolution, Rec.2020 colour, HDR 1000 with 1152 dimming zones, and costs just $3999.
  
  It's a calibrated professional display and not something the average user would want to buy; for that price you can get two complete 27" iMacs with 5K DCI-P3 displays.
  
  
• Ryzen 4000 APUs are coming early next year.  (PCGamesN)
  
  This is the Zen 2 / Navi version, which will potentially deliver 8 core mainstream laptops and / or much faster integrated graphics.
  
  This one has been surprisingly leakproof so far.  We know that it's Zen 2, Navi, and 7nm, but the rest is just speculation.
  
  
• Linux 5.5 will add support for the SGI Octane.  (Phoronix)
  
  Which came out in 1997.  Some people take LTS seriously.
  
  

• 
  
  
• Is the Universe flat?  Or closed?  (Quanta)
  
  Yes, probably one of those.
  
  
• Facebook and Instagram have banned fruits and vegetables.  (NicheGamer)
  
  Well, that's their entire user base gone.
  
  
• Google is run by idiots.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Seriously, who is hiring these cretins?  And is anyone keeping a list of the industries they refuse to work with?  Because at this point it seems to include anyone who actually does anything.
  
  
• Facebook has rebranded itself as FAECBOOK.  (NBC News)
  
  Did I miss a memo?  Is it the 90s again?  In which case, note to self: Sell at $3.20.
  
  
• Netflix can't keep pumping out mediocre drivel forever.  (Washington Post)
  
  So be apathetic towards it while you can.
  
  
• Ubuntu 20.04 will probably be able to boot from ZFS.  (Phoronix)
  
  It will also include zsys, a new tool for managing ZFS with a completely different command set from the existing zpool and zfs utilities.  Hooray.
  
  
• Twitter has suspended the accounts of Hamas and Hezbollah, after discovering to their surprise and dismay that these are terrorist organisations.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Twitter is also run by idiots.
  
  
• The problem with housing affordibility in California...  Is California.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If even Ars Technica is starting to work this out, in another twenty or thirty years they might figure out they maybe shouldn't keep voting for the idiots that are perpetuating this situation.
  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 06 2019 01:06 PM (9i8R5)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 06 2019 01:09 PM (9i8R5)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 06 2019 05:01 PM (PiXy!)

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• Intel's entire 10th generation desktop range has leaked unless it hasn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The details are plausible because they aren't particularly impressive - the top of the line Core i9-10900K has 10 cores and 20MB of L3 cache, compared to AMD's 3950X with 16 cores and 64MB of cache, and Intel are staying with PCIe 3.0 but moving to a new socket, because fuck you.
  
  
• The launch of Cascade Lake X has been delayed unless it hasn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Press embargo was originally set to lift tomorrow before all the details leaked out anyway, but Intel hasn't confirmed if that was also launch day.  AMD are planning to rain on their parade this month with 3950X and Thirdripper, but that was known already.
  
  
• Stop using DNS with ridiculously low TTLs.
  
  Look, I'm guilty of not setting proper production TTLs after setting them to 5 minutes during deployment, but this is horrifying:

  Half the DNS responses have a 1 minute TTL or less

  That basically kills DNS caching.
  
  
• Speaking of killing caching...
  
  I mentioned CDNJS a couple of days ago.  One of the promises of CDNJS and other component CDNs is that if all sites point to the same copy of the horribly bloated JavaScript code, at least your browser only has to load it once.
  
  Only...  Not any more.  This exposes a potential security risk, so browsers aren't going to share cached files anymore.
  
  
• How big is a proton?  0.833 femtometres.  (Sparkonit)
  
  They measured them using muons, which is kind of neat.
  
  
• How big is an electron?  Nobody knows, but you can't upload them to the Apple Store.
  
  Electron is based on Chromium, which uses non-public frameworks on Mac.
  
  The Electron team are working on it and it should be resolved soon.  (GitHub)
  
  Which just leaves the problem that Electron apps are bloated and awful.
  
  
• Apple products to not buy, late 2019 edition.  (ZDNet)
  
  iPad Pro, Mac Pro, iMac Pro, MacBook Pro, and the Mac Mini all make the list.  I think most people worked out not to buy the 2013 Mac Pro when it didn't get updated for six years.
  
  
• If you want the new Mac Pro, but don't want to wait for it to actually be released and/or don't want to spend a billion trillion dollars on it, there's an alternative.
  
  
  
  Yes, it's an IndieGogo project, but it actually looks pretty good.  $199 with a regular front cover, $279 with both the regular front cover and the fancy 3d machined version.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 05 2019 11:19 AM (eHWT1)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 05 2019 11:21 AM (eHWT1)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 05 2019 08:47 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 06 2019 01:04 PM (9i8R5)

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• Ubiquiti phone home.
  
  This is fine in general, but there has to be a clear way to disable it without adversely affecting your networking equipment.  It's not at all unusual for security requirements to absolutely forbid this.
  
  
• An update on TSMC's 5nm process.  (WikiChip)
  
  7nm is the hot new thing, but TSMC entered risk production for 5nm back in March.  It has close to double the transistor density of 7nm, and uses up to 30% less power.  That power figure is better than earlier estimates, and is likely to be reliable now that they have six months of low-volume production to examine.
  
  Next year's Zen 3 based processors will still be 7nm, and Zen 4 might not arrive until early 2022, so it could be more than two years before the next dramatic upgrade.
  
  
• At Blizzcon, Blizzard announced that Diablo IV is really truly in development and promised to repeat all the mistakes they made in Diablo III  (NicheGamer)
  
  Diablo III sold well enough that they have no incentive not to pull the same nonsense again.
  
  
• WebAssembly in theory allows you to write code for your web pages in any language and not just shitty JavaScript.  In practice it's mostly used to mine cryptocurrency.  (InfoQ)
  
  
• Microsoft Edge has a new logo.  (Thurrott.com_
  
  No, it's not a slow news day.  Why do you ask?
  
  On the other hand, you can look at this logo and immediately know that it's for a web browser.  Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Pale Moon also get it right.  Vivaldi and Brave not so much.

• BrainNet is the first multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving.  (Nature)
  
  What could sibly go wronggggggg ENEURON BrainNet interface not found.  Connect brain and press any finger to restart.
  
  
• Did I mention that Google is run by idiots?  (ZDNet)
  
  A bug in Android 8 and later removed security protections for apps delivered to your phone over NFC WHY IS THIS EVEN A THING?
  
  If your device has a feature called Android Beam, turn it off.
  
  
• Politicians routinely oppose right-to-repair bills. Their stated reasons are usually vacuous nonsense.  (TechDirt) 
  
  Whether their stated reasons are their actual reasons we can't be certain; stupidity, corruption, a combination of the two?  For the record, in this instance, a New Hampshire Republican.
  
  
• New York Times attacks Facebook, gets flame-broiled in return.  (TechDirt)
  
  They posted an opinion piece by Aaron Sorkin on the dangers of free speech.  Mark Zuckerberg responded with Sorkin's own words.
  
  
• The Washington Post hasn't been having a great time either.
  
  
  
  
  
• Nobody likes the 9th Circuit.  (TechDirt)
  
  In this case, the 9th seems to have got the relevant law dead wrong.  To put it in words even they might be able to grasp: YOU CAN'T FUCKING COPYRIGHT A THREE-WORD PHRASE.
  
  
• Forget regulating social networks.  Regulate the payment processors, and the social networks will take care of themselves.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  It's One Angry Gamer, so don't read the comments.  
  
  
• Python BDFL Guido van Rossum is leaving Dropbox and retiring from his leadership position on the Python project.  (ZDNet)
  
  Benevolent Dictator for Life, Guido.  You knew the terms when you signed up.
  
  
  Art by gemi333 on Twitter
  
  
• How to tell if you're living in a dystopia: The government has the ability to shut down the internet.  (NPR)
  
  Yesterday Iraq and India.  (CNet) 
  
  Today, Russia.
  
  Also Australia.  Yay us.
  
  
• Chinese scientists have found a way to get rid of the protein that causes the damage in Huntington's Disease.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Of course, being China, it probably makes you explode.
  
  
• The NordVPN story gets worse, with multiple files of usernames and passwords dumped onto the Web.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The lists of passwords circulating don't necessarily indicate another security breach at NordVPN itself, though.  Since they're small lists of plaintext passwords, the most likely source is users reusing passwords from another site that got hacked.
  
  The best solution is to use a password manager, and when that gets hacked, give up, move to Idaho, and raise potatoes.
  
  
• The entire editorial staff of Deadspin has resigned when faced with the threat of being required to do their jobs.  (Axios)
  
  Saving the site's new owners a fortune in redundancy packages.
  
  
• Apple's AirPod Pros get a rating of 0 from iFixit.  (iFixit)
  
  $249 for disposable earphones.
  
  
• The 2019 Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet looks like a bargain at $165, but is it any good?  As it turns out, yes.
  
  
  
  If the HD 8 had the same specs at the same price, I'd have no hesitation in buying it.  Unfortunately it's a much less powerful device.  It is cheaper, but it's not that much cheaper - $125 vs. $165 for a 32GB model without "special offers".

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, November 03 2019 03:18 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 03 2019 05:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 03 2019 06:28 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 03 2019 06:31 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 03 2019 06:37 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Jay at Tuesday, November 05 2019 01:44 AM (mrlXS)

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• Fiorefox is dropping support for sideloaded extensions.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Probably Firefox too.
  
  This is a bad move.  Yes, it lets users download bad extensions and install them, but users can download bad things and install them regardless.
  
  Fortunately Fiorefox is open source so someone will probably put it back again.
  
  
• Google has a different problem with browser extensions.  (CNet)
  
  An internal Google extension for Chrome activates automatically whenever employees create calendar events involving more than 100 people.  Google needed to do this because their employees are insane.  Google's employees are insane because the company hires crazy people.  Google hires crazy people because the company is run by idiots.
  
  
• Deadspin is being burnt to the ground by its staff.  (TechDirt)
  
  And nothing of value was lost.
  
  
• A timely reminder that it's not just the US government that has spectacularly stupid ideas.  (TechDirt)
  
  Yay Australia or something.
  
  
• Google bought Fitbit.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Fitbit's share price has been in the dumps lately so this is a relatively cheap purchase for Google.
  
  
• Windows 7 will no longer be supported after January.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Fair enough, it's ten years old.  It's older than CentOS 6, and that is antique.  (And also dropping support next year.)
  
  But Windows 7 still represents 26% of the market, which makes this a problem.
  
  
• Need a small server with high clock speeds?  You could do worse than the Xeon E-2288G.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's the server edition of the i9-9900K, with 8 cores and base / boost clocks of 3.7GHz and 5.0GHz respectively.  A Ryzen 3900X would deliver better total througput, but there are only a handful of Ryzen server motherboards, while Socket 1151 Xeon motherboards are everywhere.
  
  
• You need two pairs of AirPods says Apple.  (ZDNet)
  
  I'll settle for none.
  
  
• Motorola is launching a new Razr flip phone.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The difference with this one is that it has a folding screen, and is rather more compact than the Galaxy Fold.  Limited information right now; launch event is on the 13th of this month.
  
  
• TLS Delegated Credentials are a good thing.  (ZDNet)
  
  Basically, this new standard turns anyone with an SSL certificate into their own micro-issuer, able to create short-lived delegated certificates for their own domain.
  
  Currently, if you have multiple web servers and someone manages to steal the certificate from one of them, they have the certificate and you have to get it revoked (a messy process) and get a new one.  The new standard means you can have a central server that issues short-lived certificates to your web servers, and if someone manages to steal one, they only have a week at most before it self-destructs.
  
  
• The cloud is full.  Go away.  (ZDNet)
  
  Specifically in this case Azure in US East.  This happens all the time with smaller cloud providers like Vultr, who have 15 datacenters but none of them very big.  The larger players generally try to avoid it, or at least keep it quiet when it does happen.
  
  
• Now why did I ever pay for this junk?  Hooked up 80 channels streaming services and each one stunk.  (Bloomberg)
  
  ...
  
  ...
  
  Um, why isn't there even a half-decent AMV for I Can't Watch This?  The Weird Al canon has some odd gaps.
  
  Have this instead.  Different song but just as relevant.
  
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, AT&T and basically every other streaming service in the world is bleeding subscribers and money.  (TechDirt)
  
  Morons.
  
  
  
  
• If even Amazon is flooded with fake products you shouldn't be surprised that other, less well-run sites have similar problems.  (Vice)
  
  Hey, Airbnb: Fix this shit or the government will fix it for you, and you won't like it.
  
  
• How to tell if you are living in a dystopia: The government has the ability to shut down the internet.  (CNet)
  
  (Looks at Australia's NBN.)
  
  Uh-oh.
  
  
• CDNJS has gone poo poo.  (GitHub)
  
  The project founder restricted access to the project and promptly disappeared, leaving the maintainers no way to actually maintain anything.
  
  I thought this was a Cloudflare project, but Cloudflare just provide CDN services for it.  It's run by volunteers, and while the volunteers are still around they can't do anything.
  
  
• Damn those insecure Samsung Huawei televisions anyway.  (Reddit)
  
  How someone's Amazon account got hacked - twice - bypassing all 2FA and notification measures.

  It wasn't my TV. In fact, I've never owned an Android device, or anything made by Huawei.
  
  Of course I already suspected this, but the proof was plain to see. Now we're digging deeper. So it appears someone managed to access my account from another smart TV device (we assume) and make purchases through it. But why then, could I not see this device on my account dashboard or anywhere in my account settings for that matter? "Because," he explains, "non-Amazon devices, such as smart TVs, Roku devices, game consoles... do not show up there. In fact, even Amazon customer support cannot see those authorized devices. We have a special tool in this department to use to see all non-Amazon devices attached to your account."

  Well, that's...  WTF?
  
  
• Default parameter values are there to simplify things, not just to save time.
  
  Above all, the default settings shouldn't give wrong answers or produce surprising results.  If that's a possibility, force the programmer to provide an explicit value.
  
  

Posted by: Will at Saturday, November 02 2019 04:01 AM (x9VFU)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 02 2019 04:10 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 02 2019 02:48 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 02 2019 02:49 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 02 2019 02:49 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 03 2019 01:29 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, November 03 2019 08:53 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 03 2019 04:36 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, November 04 2019 10:47 AM (LMsTt)

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