Tuesday, January 22

Tech News
- Why don't people use formal methods?
Because 95% of the time there isn't even a proper requirements doc.
- The Orange Pi 3 is a competitor to you-know-what. (Tom's Hardware)
Made by Shenzhen Xunlong Software (who?) so of course you'd want to integrate it into your next security-critical IOT prototype.
- Sun's new EPYC-based Ultra 24 workstation. (Serve the Home)
Okay, there may have been a few aftermarket upgrades. Like, everything except the case.
- Some Amazon shareholders have called for the company to stop providing face Rekognition services to the US government. (Computer Weekly)
Partly because it might be used for border security and immigration enforcement, which shows that these people are dingbats. There are many valid concerns, with this technology, but those ain't it.
Social Media News
- CNIL (who?) has fined Google 50 million Euros for GDPR violations.
If you visit CNIL's website, you are greeted with this.
I would bet, oh, 50 million Euros, that they are not GDPR compliant.
- Facebook's WhatsApp has limited users to forwarding a message five times. (Reuters)
A limitation that will be bypassed in approximately 0.23 seconds. Frankly, the people calling for this restriction worry me far more than WhatsApp or its users.
Video of the Day
Bonus Video of the Day
All good, you get to ride the ant.Picture of the Day

On second thought, hold the corned beef. Art by Richard Parry.
Bonus Picture of the Day

Hoag's Object, an atypical galaxy about 600 million light years away in the constellation Serpens. Why is it structured like that? Nobody's entirely sure.
Disclaimer: This post may contain traces of cereals containing gluten, soy, egg, fish, crustacea, peanuts, tree nuts, milk, more egg, ants, those little green things, what are they called, capers, butter, cheese, bread, fish again, a different kind of fish, shrimp, no, wait, those are included under crustacea, so molluscs, aglets, look it up, maple and/or maple-flavoured syrup, other sugars including but not limited to sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose, galactose, and maltose, very small rocks, and a duck, unless he's got out again.
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Monday, January 21

Tech News
- Ethereum is really annoying.
Okay, yes, I am trying to analyse the entire blockchain, but nevertheless...
Update: Well, whatever it was I just did it sure as hell worked. That's six times faster than before.
- The PHP extension repository PECL was compromised and has been taken offline.
Exactly how much damage this has caused is not yet clear; I haven't used PECL directly in years. But the internet hasn't exploded yet. Or at least not so that we can tell the difference.
Social Media News
- Facebook is planning a new offensive on misinformation because the company is run by morons. (Tech Crunch)
Facebook added 24,000 content moderators in 2018, and is blocking a million accounts per day. Including mine, until I dug an old photo out of the company website and uploaded it to satisfy their screechy little bots.
Just give people the tools they need to manage their own feeds, and be transparent in how the feeds work. Stop being sociopathic money-grabbing control freaks.
- Twitter has lost its collective marbles.
Video of the Day
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Sunday, January 20

Tech News
- Kingston is aiming to bring NVMe SSD prices below SATA. (AnandTech)
I don't know of any specific reason why this would be impossible. The flash chips are the same and there's little difference in controllers.
They're aiming for 1500MB/s writes and 2000MB/s read, which is middle-of-the-pack for NVMe but three to four times faster than SATA.
Launch date and pricing are yet to be set.
- Netflix is full of shit. (Gamasutra)
Netflix VP: We are losing subscribers. Quick, what do we blame to placate investors?
Exec 1: The trade war?
Exec 2: Fortnite?
Exec 3: All our original content sucks, competition is stronger than ever, and we just increased our pricing?
[Exec 3 exits via window.]
- Two is one and one is none.
Also, if it's Synology, two may be none, because those things seem to simply drop dead without warning.
- Apple users are very, very slowly coming to the realisation that a hermetically sealed ecosystem might not be great for consumers. (Apple Insider)
Very, very, very slowly.
- According to Amazon 50,000 retailers on their platform had more than $500,000 in sales in 2018. (TechSpot)
200,000 had sales over $100,000.
That's a lot of small businesses making good money. I don't entirely like Amazon, but they don't suck the life out of everything they touch the way Facebook and Google do.
- We had a recent mention of a bug in scp where a hostile server could attack your client. Usually this sort of problem runs in the other direction.
Well, there's a similar bug in MySQL, though you're even less likely to actually run into it. scp is used to connect to remote hosts all the time; it is far less common to connect to a MySQL server outside your control, for dozens of excellent reasons.
So the answer is YES. Mysql docs even explicitly state it 😬Thanks to Adminer's author @jakubvrana for pointing that out: https://t.co/qEFTYvw6uApic.twitter.com/cDO57JEYve
— Willem de Groot (@gwillem) January 18, 2019
Social Media News
- Facebook may be facing record fines by the FTC for violating a 2011 consent decree. (Ars Technica)
Give Facebook credit: They've worked very hard to earn this.
Video of the Day
Bonus Video of the Day
Anime Op/Ed of the Day
Picture of the Day

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Saturday, January 19

Tech News
- Western Digital has announced the WD Black SN750, their third-generation high-end consumer NVMe SSD. (AnandTech)
Turns out it's their second-generation high-end consumer NVMe SSD. Same controller, same flash memory, updated firmware. Since the second generation was already very good (and a big upgrade over the first generation) this is not a bad thing. It can already saturate PCIe 3.0, and PCIe 4.0 motherboards and SSD controllers aren't out yet, so there wasn't much more for them to do.
- Everything we know about Ryzen 3000 (Interesting Edition®) and the 500-series chipsets. (Tom's Hardware)
- AMD will support PCIe 4.0 on existing motherboards, but it's up to the manufacturers to qualify specific boards and update the BIOS to enable it.
- The 500 series chipset will likely be brand new and designed by AMD rather than ASMedia, based on the current EPYC server chipset. (Gamers Nexus)
It will support PCIe 4.0 as well, and have a higher power consumption as a result (15W vs. 8W). It may not appear until a few months after the CPUs, which is why it's so important that existing motherboards get updated to support the new CPUs.
- The AM4 socket remains the same, so chips and motherboards are backwards and forwards compatible. (Assuming BIOS updates.)
- Meanwhile, AMD's next-gen Navi graphics, which were a no-show at CES, replaced at the last minute by Radeon VII due to delays, are now expected to appear at E3 in July.
- Chooseco is suing Netflix over Bandersnatch. (TechDirt)
I just love that they're called Chooseco. The lawsuit however seems to be pure garbage.
- MIDI 2.0 is coming!
The original MIDI standard was laid out in 1983. It's older at this point that most of its users.
- What happens when identical twins send their DNA samples to consumer DNA testing companies will surprise you unless you have been paying attention and realise that doing a full DNA sequence is still very expensive and these companies are to the Human Genome Project what a class of pre-schoolers enjoying a finger-painting session are to the Italian Quattrocento. (CBC)
- Google manipulates search results to suppress offensive content. (One Angry Gamer)
The main story is via Breitbart, which has become a swamp of nonsense since Andrew Breitbart's death, but other reports appear to back this up. Knowing Google, the truth is probably far worse than is currently being reported.
- In a happy surprise, Star Control: Origins is back on Steam (One Angry Gamer)
Social Media News
- Nice one, Facebook. Way to go. (TechDirt)
Refusing to refund charges run up by underage users is a surefire PR coup.
- There is joy in Mudville - the EU's godawful copyright legislation has unexpectedly struck out!
BREAKING: Council has failed to find an agreement on its #copyright position today. This doesn’t mean that #Article11 and #Article13 are dead, but their adoption has just become a lot less likely. Let’s keep up the pressure now! https://t.co/DEYBhuRyGz#SaveYourInternet
— Julia Reda (@Senficon) January 18, 2019
- The GDPR is still in full and hideous effect, though, with Amazon, Apple, and other companies facing potential fines totalling up to €18.8 billion. (Bleeping Computer)
This week. For complaints from one advocacy group.
- Mike Godwin (yes, that Mike Godwin) reports on the problem of epistemic closure. (TechDirt)
The book Network Propaganda demonstrated that the problem with epistemic closure in American news sources lies not with explicitly biased sources like blogs, but with the mainstream media. But Mike apparently suffered an aneurysm mid-way through the article when he offered this hypothetical for the reader's consideration:Consider: if progressives had cocooned themselves in a media ecosystem that had cut itself from the facts—that valued tribal loyalty and shared identity over mere factual accuracy—conservatives and centrists would be justified in pointing out not merely that the left's media were unmoored but also that its insistence on doctrinal purity in the face of factual disproof was positively destructive.
Mike, you idiot, that's precisely what has happened.
67% of Democratic voters believe that the Russians changed the vote counts in the 2016 election. (The Economist/YouGov poll, November 4-6, 2018)
This is of course completely false, and everyone in the administration is on record as saying it is completely false, but it is the mainstream belief among Democrats.
- Oh, snap. (Tech Crunch)
Sorry. Had to.
Video of the Day
The first 11 minutes are explaining that leaks are unofficial pre-release information subject to change because people apparently no longer understand "grain of salt".
Picture of the Day

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Friday, January 18

Tech News
- PCIe 5.0 is on its way. (Tom's Hardware)
The 5.0 spec is expected out in the next two months. 3.0 has been the standard for a long time, so this rapid update is really just getting things back on track.
PCIe 5.0 is likely to take some time to deploy to the consumer space, though. Where PCIe 4.0 can work on some existing motherboards, 5.0 - which is twice as fast again as 4.0 - will require new materials and layouts.
- A fascinating examination of the death of the tech industry by a writer who places the tech industry's "first era" as beginning in two thousand and fucking seven. (The Atlantic)
Author Derek mentions Apple (founded in 1976) and Samsung (founded in 1938) but displays no idea that they existed prior to the iPhone and the Galaxy range.
If someone told him that Nintendo has been around since the 19th century, he'd probably expire on the spot.
- Singapore is half the distance from Sydney as San Francisco, but ping times are only 6% better. Interestingly, I have better ping times to San Francisco from my home than from the virtual server I run here in Sydney, even though the virtual server is plugged straight into a ten gigabit uplink and is a couple of milliseconds away from the AU-US cable head.
Someone needs to fix that speed of light thing. It's annoying.
- An AMD APU with eight Zen cores and Navi graphics? (Computerbase.de)
This is an engineering sample and looks like another semi-custom part like the on in the Subor game console. Might be next-gen Xbox or Playstation, but it seems early for that.
Speaking of that Subor game console, other Linus got his hands on a pre-release version.
Social Media News
- The EU is still trying to legislate unicorns into existence.
The new text by the Romanians requires platforms to prevent uploads of copyrighted works, but requires next to no cooperation from rightholders! How is that supposed to work? #Article13#SaveYourInternetpic.twitter.com/8LaEoDTiui
— Julia Reda (@Senficon) January 17, 2019
- Facebook's "10 year challenge" is just a harmless meme says Facebook. (Wired)
There is nothing to be alarmed about, the company added. We are not working to improve our facial recognition algorithms. We did not lie about "suspicious activity" and demand you upload a picture of yourself to reactivate your account. Nuh-uh. That totally didn't happen.
- A debate in the Swedish parliament took an unusual turn. (CBC)
(Older story, but slow news day.)
Video of the Day
Picture of the Day
Dumb Fact of the Day

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Thursday, January 17

Tech News
- Ugh. It's, like, 197 degrees here at Pixy Central and the air con keeps cutting out. I work from home most of the time so there's no escape and I'm melllllllting.
- Farewell, Cortana. Or fare poorly. Whatever. Just go away. No-one likes you. (PC Perspective)
- Nvidia is allegedly working on a GTX 1660 Ti. (Tom's Hardware)
The GTX designation is the key; this wouldn't have the currently useless ray tracing and AI features. The rumour also says that it would be an entirely new chip, not just an RTX 2060 with some strategic snippery. That would make sense because the RTX 2060 die is large and expensive - about 40% bigger than the chip for AMD's Radeon VII.
- WordPress plugins are the spawn of the Devil. (Tech Crunch)
- Amazon has launched AWS Backup, a backup service. (Tech Crunch)
What the hell? It's not called, I don't know, Amazon Frog Farm? Or Amazon Deep Ocean Outfall? Or Amazon Psychotropic Baba Ganoush Dehumidifier 27X? How is anyone expected to know what it does?
- Mastercard has somehow done something not evil. If you sign up for a free trial online with Mastercard merchants are now required to get your permission again before they charge you at the end of the trial period.
They have still failed, however, to address reports of collusion with the global couscous cartel.
- Need more storage for your phone? Like, a lot more? Sandisk's 400GB microSD cards are currently $83.98 on Amazon.
Social Media News
- Don't be a journalist in Turkey. (TechDirt)
Or a school teacher or an army officer or...
Also, if you follow that link, remember Rule One: Don't read the comments.
- With the EU's godawful new copyright legislation looming, Google has rolled out a beta version of a compliant Google News service. (Search Engine Land)
- Free Press, an organisation that is dedicated to - and I quote - fighting for your rights to connect and communicate - turns out to have neglected to mention which side they have been fighting on all this time.
Hateful conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is back on Facebook just a few months after the site kicked him off. Urge Facebook to ban him permanently. https://t.co/pNG2GGULt8pic.twitter.com/GvKw6jncDS
— Free Press (@freepress) January 16, 2019
Video of the Day
Picture of the Day

Bonus Picture of the Day
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Wednesday, January 16

Tech News
- The game Red Dead Redemption 2, set in the Old West in the late 19th century, features a couple of characters who work for the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
Which is fine and all, because Pinkerton really existed and played a role in several real-life stories of the Old West.
Only problem is that Pinkerton still exists today and filed a C&D letter with Take 2 Interactive over trademark abuse. (TechDirt)
It's not clear, given the murky nature of trademark law, who is in the right here.
- The telescreen was behind the painting. (TechDirt)
Sorry, spoiler warning.
- Netflix is hiking prices for US subscribers, secure in the knowledge that they will return for such hit series as [insert name of hit series]. (Tech Crunch)
Don't look at me, I already cancelled. Netflix Australia is garbage.
- RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 comes bundled with several databases, including MySQL, MariaDB (a MySQL fork), PostgreSQL, not you MongoDB, and Redis.
Because MongoDB's new open source license isn't.
- Intel still doesn't have a CEO and it's starting to become obvious. (Network World)
Looking at you, Core i9 9990XE.
- The Ada 202x Draft Reference Manual.
It's no Algol 60, but it's not all bad either.
- A planned upgrade to the Ethereum network has been put on hold after security researchers found a bug in the behaviour of smart contracts that could have allowed malicuous contact owners to steal all your monies. (ZDNet)
Ethereum is fully programmable - you can actually write programs and run them on the blockchain. This makes it extremely powerful and also a giant fucking pain.
Video of the Day
WE GOT ONE!!!
Pictures of the Day


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Tuesday, January 15

Tech News
- Micron has bought Intel's share of their flash memory joint venture. (AnandTech)
That's still big news, though something that has been in the works for over a year. The IMFT joint venture is the manufacturer for Intel's Optane chips, and now Micron will own it.
- How is Intel going to respond to AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 series? With the Core i9-9990XE, a 14 core 255W part with a base clock of 4.0GHz and a boost clock of 5.0GHz. (AnandTech)
About that power draw:Motherboard vendors will have to support 420 amps on the power delivery for the chip (which at 1.3 volts would be 546 watts), and up to 30 amps per core. It will be for the socket 2066 X299 motherboards already on the market, and perhaps importantly, there is no warranty from Intel.
Oh, and the price? There is no price. It will be sold only to approved system vendors by private auction.
- The Opteron whichwhat? The Opteron X3421 is... Oh, that's Excavator, isn't it? (Serve the Home)
Yes, Excavator. Meh.
- Apple says Qualcomm refused to sell them modems for the latest iPhones. (Thurrott.com)
Qualcomm says Apple already owes them thirty-seven trillion dollars, so of course they didn't sell them any more chips.
- Why is my keyboard connected to the cloud? (ZDNet)
Good question, I'll ask Google.
Hmm, the answer appears to be It is safe and secure. Please remain calm and stay in your current location.
- Xapiand is a search engine designed to compete with Elasticsearch but written in nice clean C++ and not icky Java.
(Or is that the other way around?)
Anyway, it's clearly written around the Xapian search library, which I have used extensively and works well. I haven't looked at it for about four years so I'm not sure if it's entirely kept up, but even at the state it was in then it's a solid foundation.
Xapiand specifically is in a pre-release state and needs some love, most obviously in the documentation. But it's all on GitHub and it's MIT licensed, so it's open to anyone who wants to help out.
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Monday, January 14

- I really need to get that autosave feature working.
- Wacom's Cintiq 16 is their least expensive Cintiq yet at $649. (PC Perspective)
The display is cut down significantly - from 4K on the Cintiq 16 Pro to 1080p - but the pen function is all there.
- Intel's new GPU-free CPUs save you exactly nothing. (Tom's Hardware)
Yes, the price is exactly the same as the version with the iGPU, because Intel.
- Tech Crunch frets that Trump is driving dream unicorns to extinction.
The Bay Area is another planet.
- Porting Cowgol to the Z80.
Cowgol is just a hobby project but is better designed than 98% of progamming languages in the industry.
- Correction: The Radeon VII doesn't support double precision. (TechGage)
Even without DP support it still has faster DP than Nvidia's RTX, but only by a factor of two, not sixteen, so there's little reason for anybody to buy Radeon VII at all.
Oh well. The card was interesting for nearly a day.
I suspect that AMD isn't planning to sell any of these but needed something to show at CES because Navi is delayed a few months. I don't have any direct evidence of this, but only a couple of months ago, AMD was saying it would not release a consumer version of 7nm Vega.
- Way back in 2010, someone stole a bunch of Bitcoin with an overflow attack. (Hackernoon)
The bug was promptly fixed and the blockchain was forked to orphan those coins, but if that hadn't happened those coins would be worth $650 trillion at today's prices. Well, in reality Bitcoin would have died and the coins would be worth exactly zero, but that's less interesting. Maybe better for the world, but less interesting.
- How Kubernetes solves the persistent storage problem.
- Make it so unnecessarily complicated and downright painful that you are forced to hire someone to manage just that one function.
- Now it's their problem.
- NTT DoCoMo and NEC used 5G to stream 8K video of steam trains. (ZDNet)
Priorities.
- Apple Death Watch: Prices of iPhone XR and iPhone 8 slashed by up to 20% - in China. (ZDNet)
Doooom.
- Google has discovered that it makes something called Chromecast Audio that is cheap and well-received by users and killed it. (Thurrott.com)
- There was a security bug in systemd. My servers all automatically patched themselves. And that set off all their watchdogs that check for modifications to critical files, and they felt that they absolutely had to tell me about this. It's like having thirty babies that all start screaming at the exact same moment.
- Why do Nvidia's cards only have 12GB of RAM? (Actually 11GB mostly, but anyway.)
Because wiring. Further on in the video he really dumps on Nvidia, but he doesn't say he'd buy this card either.
- The manufacturers' TDP figures for AMD's Athlon 200GE and Intel's Pentium Gold G5400 do not present an accurate picture. (AnandTech)
The AMD part is rated at 35W, but under full load it actually uses... A little over 18W. The Intel chip is rated at a higher 58W, but the truth of the matter is that it will uses as much as, um, 24W.
Well, that was anticlimactic.
Video of the Day
Chris Hadfield on the highs and lows of outer space.
Bonus Video of the Day
Picture of the Day

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Sunday, January 13

Tech News
- AMD released benchmarks of Radeon VII across 25 different games showing performance gains of up to 68% over Vega 64. (EuroGamer)
Only problem, the one game that got that level of increase was Fallout 76, which doesn't exist.
Also, it seems that the Radeon VII has the full compute capacity of the MI50, 6.9 TFLOPS of double precision. If you are in the market for an affordable double precision compute card with plenty of RAM, that puts it so far ahead of Nvidia that they might as well not exist: The Nvidia Titan RTX has a peak double precision throughput of just 0.5 TFLOPS. For single precision Nvidia is more competitive.
An evenly optimised chip would deliver around 1/4 the single precision performance when calculating double precision. The Radeon VII delivers 1/2 performance, which means it's designed for double precision at the expense of single precision. The RTX series delivers just 1/32, because it's designed for single precision - games - with no consideration for double precision compute at all.
- Asus' ProArt PA32UCK has 1000 lighting zones with brightness ranging from 0.003 to 1200 nits. (AnandTech)
That's a lot of nits.
Oh, and it's 4k, HDR, 10 bit, 98% DCI-P3, with DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, and HDMI inputs. Price is expected to be in "Pro" territory.
- Don't host your site with GoDaddy.
(Only applies to their shared hosting, not to other services.)
- Download your open source nuclear reactor today.
- The Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 has a 48 megapixel camera and starts at $150. (Thurrott.com)
Only one camera? What is the world coming to?
Video of the Day
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