• Nvidia has outbid Intel to buy Mellanox for $6.9 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a good and logical fit because...  Um, because...  NO!  THIS MAKES NO SENSE!  WTF NV?
  
  
• Jealous that all the bad attention is going to Europe - and America - and China - and Japan and Australia - Thailand is proposing new legislation to make service providers criminally liable for their end users' acts of lèse-majesté.  (TechDirt)
  
  Also, if you google lèse-majesté, all the top hits relate to Thailand.  That country has a serious bee up its butt.
  
  
• Reinstall your Linux server over SSH.
  
  Yes, that involves reinstalling the SSH daemon, so this is just a tiny bit tricky.
  
  
• CSS is studying trigonometry.  (ZDNet)
  
  It looks like this is mostly to generate waveforms to control animation functions.  Currently you need to use JavaScript for that.
  
  
• MikroTik has more switches where that $270 10GbE model came from.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The CRS312-4C+8XG is 12-port 10Gbase-T managed switch with SFP+ support as well on four ports.  That makes it an easy drop in to an existing network, unlike pure SFP+ switches.
  
  No pricing just yet.
  
  
• Linux 5.1 may support Optane modules as system RAM.  (Phoronix)
  
  I'd be interested to see OS-level generalised NVM support, but this is a useful step.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, March 12 2019 03:23 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 12 2019 05:16 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 12 2019 10:26 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, March 12 2019 12:47 PM (Ix1l6)

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• A die photo of Samsung's Exynos 9820 SOC.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is interesting because the chip has Samsung's own M4 cores, Arm's previous generation A75 performance cores, and Arm's low-power A55 cores.  The size difference is striking.
  
  
• The Dutch Data Protection Agency says that sites that require you to allow tracking cookies to access content violate the GDPR.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sites aren't going to stop doing this, of course; they're going to hide it under ever increasing layers of bullshit.
  
  
• Why does Google return invalid JSON data?  (Stack Overflow)
  
  Because everything is garbage.
  
  
• Citrix got hacked.  (The Register)
  
  This isn't good.  Citrix believes that this only involved corporate data and not customer records, but this isn't certain yet.
  
  
• Want to write your own programming language?  You're probably crazy but here's a list of helpful tools and information for you anyway.  (GitHub)
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 11 2019 04:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, March 11 2019 11:24 AM (Ix1l6)

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• In the market for a compact server that looks like an old-school CB rig?  Cincoze has you covered.  (AnandTech)
  
  Up to a 6 core Xeon and 32GB (maybe 64GB) RAM, two 2.5" bays, up to 8 USB ports, 6 gigabit Ethernet ports, and 6 serial ports, plus DVI, DisplayPort, and HDMI.
  
  
  
  
• If you have Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise, and don't want the 1903 update dumped on you without further warning act now to avoid disappointment.  (ZDNet)
  
  If you have Windows 10 Home, the best option I know of is to have a cheap laptop with 32GB of eMMC storage and the rest of your data on an SD card.  This will make the Windows updater crap out with 100% reliability.
  
  
• A 1TB NVMe drive for $105?  What's the catch?  (Tech Report)
  
  Catch is it's a QLC drive.  But it's fast for reads, and usually fast for writes.  If you don't run it 100% full, so it has room for a pseudo-SLC cache, it should do fine.
  
  Link also points to a 10TB external drive at Best Buy for $160.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 10 2019 07:14 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 10 2019 10:58 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, March 10 2019 02:26 PM (Ix1l6)

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Tech News

Social Media News

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 09 2019 02:30 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Surprising exactly no-one, AMD will be releasing a third-generation Threadripper CPU this year. (AnandTech)
  
  No specs yet, but it will be using the new chiplet and I/O die design shown off at CES, which means it could go as high as 64 cores.
  
  Intel are stuck at 28 cores for now, so it will be an interesting year for the high-end desktop.
  
  
• A leak by Fujitsu confirmed earlier leaks of Intel's 9th generation family. (Fanless Tech)
  
  This includes a 35W 8 core i9-9900T and 8 core Xeon E2200 parts, which will arrive just in time to get stomped by AMD.
  
  
• GPU prices are down and likely to stay down and cards are actually in stock for a change. (PC Perspective)
  
  Yay, I guess. I'm good for at least a couple of years though.
  
  
• But someone forgot to tell Colorful. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Windows 7 goes into extended support on April 1. Support plans will start at $25 per system per year which sounds fine. (WCCFTech)
  
  But the price doubles every year, meaning that after just 100 years we'll all probably be dead and won't care anyway.
  
  
• Supermicro's M11SDV-4CT-LN4F is another embedded mini-ITX server board. (Serve the Home)
  
  Only four SATA ports on this one though so meh.
  
  
• Consciousness is one of the few scientific fields of studies where people can earn PhDs and spend decades working on theories and gathering data and end up knowing less about the subject than a dead turtle does about magnetic containment fusion reactors. (Quanta)
  
  Panpsychism? Yeah, sure, and phlogiston and luminiferous aether and the inheritance of acquired characteristics you goddamn frauds.
  
  Update: Why can a random layperson on Twitter not only grasp but eloquently convey what these boneheads cannot?
  
  

  It's the brain contemplating itself, the ultimate Escher sketch.

  — dicentra ن (@dicentra33) March 7, 2019

  
  

• The American mainstream news media has an aggregate IQ of 3. (TechDirt)
  
  In this case taking "America" fairly broadly.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 08 2019 08:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 08 2019 08:42 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 08 2019 12:25 PM (Iwkd4)

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• A team of Chinese and American scientsts has invented infravision pills.  (Cell)
  
  Well, not pills.  It needs to be injected.  Directly into the eyeball.  But!
  
  
• The EU's terrible horrible no good very bad copyright legislation might violate the GDPR.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• VPNs are no privacy panacaea.  (TechDirt)
  
  Free VPNs are selling your data.  Paid VPNs are quite possibly also selling your data.
  
  
• Drupal had a nasty vulnerability patched recently; the patch of course meant the vulnerability was publicly announced, so attackers swarmed on it to try to hack sites before they could be updated.
  
  Cloudflare deployed a custom firewall rule to block attacks the same day.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Having half the websites in the world behind one CDN is worrisome, but it has advantages sometimes.
  
  
• Intel's Stratix FPGAs now support 58Gbps signals and 400Gb Ethernet.  (Intel)
  
  Intel also recently showed off a working 112 Gbps transceiver for their next generation FPGAs.
  
  Which doesn't seem immediately useful for the average computer owner - except that this is the technology that will become PCIe 6.0 and PCIe 7.0 in a few years time.
  
  
• PEP 584 is one of those do-this-ten-years-ago PEPs.  (python.org)
  
  If there are obvious semantics for + and - for a datatype, implement them.

• The USB Promoter Group announced the announcement of the release of the USB4 spec.  (AnandTech)
  
  The spec itself is expected to be announced by the middle of the year.  It's "based on" Thunderbolt 3, but the announcement of what that means hasn't been announced yet.  Expensive cables is a good bet, though.
  
  With this, USB 3.2 Gen 1 will be renamed USB4 Gen 1, USB 3.2 Gen 2 will become USB4 Gen 2, and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 will become USB4 Gen 2x2.  The new speed will be named USB4 Gen 4x4.
  
  Or maybe not.  Who knows?  These guys have all the branding sense of Supermicro.
  
  
• The University of California told Elsevier to take a hike.  (TechDirt)
  
  Elsevier is the Engulf and Devour of the academic publishing world, so this is significant.
  
  
• SPOILER is yet another speculative execution flaw in Intel CPUs.  (The Register)
  
  Though it's not clear how significant it is.  Reportedly it doesn't affect Arm or AMD CPUs.
  
  

Elsewhere

Picture of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 06 2019 01:40 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 06 2019 02:30 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Linux 5.0 is out!  (Phoronix)
  
  The bug that led to a week's delay turned out not the be a significant problem, but the extra week allowed things to settle down a bit so all is well.
  
  
• Did a Singapore retailer just leak all the Ryzen 3000 configurations and pricing?  (Reddit)
  
  Probably not.  Looks like they copied and pasted the previous unconfirmed leaks right into their price list.
  
  
• XKCDify your Matplotlib charts.
  
  This is actually kind of cool.  You can see how it makes information more accessible by being less perfect.
  
  
• An 8-port 10GbE router/switch for $270?  (Serve the Home)
  
  Well, maybe.  It's MicroTik, which has a less than stellar security record.  And it's underpowered for L3 / routing functions.  But switching works fine, and it's passively cooled.  (And it's A$350 locally, which is pretty good.)
  
  But it's SFP+ rather than 10Gbase-T.  They don't seem to have any 10Gbase-T models at all.
  
  
• In a timely reminder that everyone's a goddamn idiot, it looks like Chinese surveillance teams left their collected data in a publicly-exposed MongoDB database with no password.  (Bleeping Computer)

  "There is no security. It looks like they have NO CLUE what they are doing,” the researcher told us.

• The QuadrigaCX mystery deepens.  (NewsBTC)
  
  The CEO of Quadriga died in a hospital in India last December.  (There were suggestions he faked his own death, but there seems to be a death certificate and a body, which would be tricky to arrange.)
  
  Most of the funds held on behalf of clients were stored offline on cold wallets, which is standard practice - if it's not plugged in, you can't hack it.  But only the CEO had the necessary password, so C$190 million disappeared overnight, leaving staff scrambling to recover access.
  
  Only...  No deposits were made to the known cold wallets since April of last year.  All the information is public, but no-one has been able to trace through the maze just yet.
  
  
• A roundup of Ryzen V1000 and Epyc 3000 boards.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Ryzen V1000 is an embedded version of the Ryzen 2000-series APUs - up to 4 cores and Vega 11.  Epyc 3000 is something that so far doesn't exist on the desktop, a one or two die CPU package, with between 4 and 16 cores.
  
  There are ITX and STX and all sorts of other formats to choose from.
  
  
• This waifu does not exist.  (thiswaifudoesnotexist.net)
  
  This waifu does not exist.
  
  
  
  This waifu does not exist?
  

• Lenovo's Tab V7 is a reasonably-priced 7" phoneblet.  (Android Central)
  
  6.95" 2160x1080 screen, Snapdragon 450 (eight core A53, 1.8GHz), 3/32GB or 4/64GB, USB-C, headphone jack, LTE, and just one camera each on the front and back.  5180mAh battery, total weight 195g.
  
  €249 for the base model, price not yet given for the 4/64GB model.
  
  It's not anything special design-wise, but with the lack of compelling small tablets lately it might be worth taking a look.  I'd prefer 1920x1200 (as on the 2013 Nexus 7, which I still have and still works), but a wider screen makes it hard to thumb-type.
  
  
• The semiconductor industry will need new resist chemistries if it is to reach the 1nm process node.  (EETimes)
  
  Well, that's a bit of a down - wait, 1nm?
  
  "But", you say, "1nm is only five silicon atoms wide.  How can they do that?"
  
  The answer is surprisingly simple, and uses a technique known to the semiconductor industry since the beginning.  It's a lie.  Nothing about the 1nm node is actually 1nm.  But since nothing about the current 7nm process is actually 7nm, this doesn't matter as much as you might expect.
  
  
• Update your ColdFusion deployments now!  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  People still use ColdFusion?  Well, Supermicro does.  I was pasting in the links yesterday and I was all "Dot c-f-m?  Seriously?"
  
  
• Japan's SDF tells SJWs to get bent, says Strike Witches is awesome.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  "Also, they are wearing pants."
  
  
• Space X launches a dragon into orbit.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Nothing about launching dragons into space could possibly turn out badly.
  
  
• Facebook is finally shutting down its Onavo bullshit spyware free VPN.  (TechDirt)
  
  This comes after Apple yanked a similar Facebook bullshit spyware free VPN from the App Store and revoked Facebook's enterprise certificate.