• Just when you thought it was safe to go back into consumer SSDs Intel and Toshiba are working on PLC technology.  (Ars Technica)
  
  As in 5 bits per cell - 32 levels.  Intel uses a floating gate design rather than the more common charge trap cell, which is supposedly better at high numbers of levels, but this is really pushing things.  The cost/benefit doesn't seem to be worthwhile at all.
  
  
• A recent Windows update means that it no longer trusts SSDs to properly handle encryption themselves.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can optionally enable self-encryption, and existing drives don't change, but the new default is to use software encryption.  Given that some popular drives have been found to have default master passwords, store the password in plantext, or just not encrypt the data at all  (ZDNet) this is a wise move.
  
  
• The EcoFlow Delta, a Kickstarter portable "battery generator", is...  Not fake.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not where I expected the article to go whe I started reading it.  Complaints are that the fans are noisy - but it needs active cooling to charge and discharge quickly, so you can't make such a device without them.
  
  
• Speaking of Kickstarter, the idiots in management are still at war with their idiot employees.  (Current Affairs)
  
  To give an idea of the slant of that article:

  So we got together with our colleagues at Protean Magazine, Pinko Magazine, the Nib, and the Baffler (all of whom had done Kickstarter campaigns in the past) and released a statement condemning the firings and expressing solidarity with the union.

  Kickstarter's response was surprisingly commendable, being, roughly paraphrased, Fuck you and the fucking horse you fucking rode in on, you fucking Marxist fucks.
  
  
• The iPhone 11 is Apple's best product in years.  (Six Colors)
  
  Partly because it's thicker and heavier than last year's model - not enough to notice, but enough to deliver better performance and battery life.
  
  
• Cuphead has sold five million copies.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  That's quite a lot for an indie game.  That's quite a lot for any game.
  
  
• Linux 5.4 has a new security lockdown feature that restricts some kernel features even from the root account.  (ZDNet)
  
  That's something that was traditional in mainframe and minicomputer operating systems, but Unix has always granted free rein to the root account.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, September 30 2019 08:08 PM (YUAc9)

Posted by: Jay at Monday, September 30 2019 10:59 PM (mrlXS)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 01 2019 02:00 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, October 01 2019 07:07 AM (7cxC9)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, October 01 2019 09:06 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 01 2019 09:17 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Eros at Tuesday, October 17 2023 05:50 PM (ffR6l)

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• An ROG RGB LED USB SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• The Atari 2600 game Entombed reliably generates solvable mazes - and no-one knows exactly how.  (BBC)
  
  They have the code, of course, and it works, but no-one knows mathematically why it works.
  
  
• Thirdripper will not be backward-compatible unless it is.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In terms of sockets and motherboards, not software.  Of course, since it looks like there will be at least two variants with different numbers of memory channels and PCIe lanes, it could be both compatible and incompatible.
  
  With PCIe 4.0 it would need a new motherboard to take full advantage of the capabilities in any case.
  
  
• A Robert Heinlein cover illustration takes flight.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or maybe John Varley.
  
  
• Firefox won't use DNS-over-HTTPS by default in the UK.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Because it makes extra work for Big Brother and we can't have that.
  
  It will be available, just not on by default.
  
  
• Speaking of Big Brother, he also wants end-to-end encrypted apps to hand over user messages.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Which is mathematically impossible, but it's not like that argument ever got anywhere with politicians.
  
  
• If you ever wondered why "banana flavour" tastes nothing like bananas, the answer is apparently it does, it just tastes like the Gros Michel, which was destroyed by Panama disease in the 1950s.
  
  The familiar Cavendish variety might be facing a similar fate.  (Nature)
  
  This is because domestic bananas are clones with almost no genetic variation within a given cultivar - the ultimate monoculture.  Fortunately we now have far better tools for twiddling genes to add resistance than we did sixty years ago.
  
  I don't know the truth of the banana flavour story, but Gros Michel can still be found as a special import, so I hope to check some day.
  
  
  

Video of the Day

• Me: Why not put an RGB water cooler on it while you're there?
  
  Phone designers: Brilliant!  (AnandTech)
  
  The Nubia Red Magic 3 is the usual Snapdragon 855 with 8 or 12GB RAM, 128 ior 256GB UFS 2.1 flash, a 6.65" 2340x1080 AMOLED display, 5000mAh battery, 48MP camera, USB-C, a headphone jack...  And a fan.
  
  $479 for 8/128 and $599 for 12/256.
  
  
• Arm and TSMC demonstrated an 8 core 4GHz dual-chiplet processor.  (Tom's Hardware)

  LIPNCON is to CoWoS what AIB or MDIO is to EMIB.

  Right.  Got it.
  
  
• Older iOS devices may be unfixably jailbreakable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The secure boot ROM on older devices had a flaw, and it's a true ROM - it can't be reprogrammed.  It still needs a device-specific exploit on top of that, but the secure boot ROM is what is supposed to prevent device-specific exploits in the first place, so this is likely just a matter of time.
  
  
• The Adland website, covering the history of advertising, is shutting down due to a bullshit DMCA notice.  (TechDirt)
  
  Their hosting provider gave them 24 hours to move the entire site.
  
  I get these on average every three months.  When the whole of mee.nu went offline recently, it was over something similar - though in that case it was a polite request and not even a DMCA notice and had already been resolved and the ticket closed when the server got shut down.
  
  It's insanity.
  
  Yes, I have off-site backups.
  
  
• AMD's Navi-based Radeon 5600 and 5800 cards are on their way unless they aren't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 5700 and 5700 XT have 36 and 40 CUs respectively.  The 5600 looks set to have 24 CUs, which should make it competitive with the RX 580.  No definite numbers for the 5800 yet, except for "probably more than 40".
  
  
• A psychology study that got huge media attention when it was published but turned out to be completely and obviously wrong has been retracted.  (Psychology Today)
  
  The retracted study claimed to show that children raised in religious families were less generous, and was being cited in the media as recently as last month, and will likely continue to be cited forever or until the heat death of the Universe, whichever comes first.
  
  
  

• The Humble Painter bundle has Painter.  (Humble Bundle)
  
  Formerly Fractal Design, now Corel.  The $25 bundle also includes PaintShop Pro 2020 and Pinnacle Studio 23, plus a bunch of plugins.
  
  
• AMD's server market shar is epxected to grow tenfold from 2017 to 2020 - to 10%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sio, yeah, their marketshare was not in great shape before the Ryzen launch. 
  
  
• Kazakhstan took down 93,000 websites to block just one.  (TechDirt)
  
  Who do they think they are, Australia?
  
  
• bootRogue is a Roguelike game that fits in a boot sector.
  
  It has 26 different monsters, armour and weapons, food, sort of gold, at least 26 dungeon levels (there can be more), and the Amulet of Yendor - in 510 bytes.
  
  
• TSMC is telling clients to book 7nm production a year in advance due to high demand.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This may be a big advantage for their 5nm process.  It's not a lot faster, and it doesn't use much less power, but it is a lot smaller.  They get nearly twice as many dies per wafer, all else being equal.
  
  
• DARPA is working on 10 terabit networking.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Achieving that will require rethinking every layer of the network stack.  Also, I don't know how they'd connect it to rest of the system.  128 lanes of 112G SERDES?  That at least is a thing that exists.
  
  
• HTTP 1, 2, and 3.
  
  HTTP 3 abandons TCP for UDP because building an entire new error-checking protocol is easier than fixing TCP.
  

Tech News

• The rumoured Ryzen 3900 looks to be on its way.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is a 65W 12 core Zen 2, with expected base and boost clocks of 3.1 and 4.2 GHz.  Which would make it the perfect processor of a new Inspiron 27 if Dell hadn't sabotaged that product range beyond redemption.
  
  No ETA, but a launch at the same time as the 3950X would make sense.
  
  
• Good news for chip makers is bad news for you.  (PC Perspective)
  
  DRAM and flash prices are low, video cards are readily available, so of course now there's a CPU shortage.
  
  
• Global Foundries announced an updated version of its 12nm process node.  (AnandTech)
  
  With up to 40% lower power than their existing 12nm process.
  
  AMD produces its I/O dies and chipsets at Global Foundries, so this is good news for future Ryzen and Epyc systems.
  
  
• Intel announced the 665p, an update to the 660p family of QLC SSDs.  (AnandTec)
  
  It promises to be up to 40% faster, though the figures Intel used for the 660p are lower than those from independent reviewers, so pinch of salt time.
  
  Still a PCIe 3.0 x2 device, so it has a hard cap at 2GB per second.  Not that that is slow.
  
  
• Can't deal with TechDirt today.  It's a mish-mash of important news and complete nonsense.
  
  
• Amazon had a Telescreen event today.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It was behind the painting.
  
  
• Zen 3 will come with four threads per core unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  IBM's Power architecture has four or eight threads per core, as do some Sparc processors, so this isn't entirely novel.  It could be attractive to cloud hosting providers, particularly given all the bugs in Intel's hardware threading.  I believe that Amazon don't use hardware threads at all, but Digital Ocean do.
  
  
• At least 70 countries have had disinformation campaigns, study finds.  (New York Times)
  
  Does the name Walter Fucking Duranty mean anything to you, you assholes?
  
  
• Prehistoric porcelain baby bottles.  (NPR)
  
  Is that a kangaroo?  It looks like a kangaroo, but can't be, because in 7000 BC there weren't any domesticated animals in Australia to provide milk, except for the dingo, which seems rather unlikely.
  
  
• The recent plague of unbootable Macs has been traced to Chrome.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which apparently was deleting /var.  Which is a symbolic link on MacOS, so this is like renaming C:\Windows just for the hell of it.
  
  Nice work, Google.
  
  This didn't happen to everyone because with the default security settings MacOS would refuse to do something so obviously stupid.
  
  
• Alex Jones is suing Brianna Wu for libel.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  There is not enough popcorn in the world.
  
  
• Twitter got something right for once?  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  They had to get it wrong first, of course, since this is still Twitter.
  
  
• In a shocking finding that is bound to cause panic among the terminally innumerate, table salt contains 0.005 micrograms per gram of plastic.  (New Scienist)
  
  That's five parts per billion.  The concentration of uranium in seawater is three parts per billion.
  
  
• /e/ is a Google-free Android fork with a dumb name.  (ZDnet)
  
  In fact, it's a fork of LineageOS, which is a fork of CyanogenMod, which is a fork of Android. 
  
  Which is Linux.
  
  It's forks all the way down.
  
  
• Dapper Labs, the CryptoKitties people, have announced their own blockchain, called Flow.
  
  I say announced advisedly, because while the technical papers they've published look sound, there is no code or documentation for the actual implementation yet.
  
  The launch of CryptoKitties basically trashed the Ethereum network for weeks, so these guys are as familiar with the limitations of that platform as anyone, and probably well-placed to produce something better.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2019 12:36 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2019 12:42 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, September 27 2019 02:59 AM (ZlYZd)

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• Smartphones are just slabs of black glass.  It takes real talent to make them this ugly.  (AnandTech)
  
  Why not put an RGB water cooler on it while you're there?
  
  
• AMD's upcoming B550 chipset is a step up from the X470, but a big step down from X570.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compared to the X470 it adds 2 SATA ports and 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes.  No PCIe 4.0 at all, not even for the uplink.
  
  
• A Pennsylvania DA has been busy deploying a China-grade (in more ways than one) surveillance network.  (TechDirt)
  
  WTAF as the kids are saying these days.
  
  
• eBay's CEO is stepping down.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  As far as I can tell, the worst that is happening at eBay is some investor grumbling, and this is fairly routine.
  
  
• Facebook has said it will not censor or fact-check political speech.  Journalists are outraged.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• WeWork continues to implode.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  I found a couple of more detailed articles at Tech Crunch and The Information but they require registration and/or payment to access.
  
  And I'll note again that WCCFTech called it before any of the big business news sites.
  
  
• Double it, add one, and use the next larger unit.
  
  There are three kinds of estimates: Educated guesses, the fever dreams of software development project leads, and tech startups.
  
  
• CentOS 8 is out.  (ZDNet)
  
  Great, except that I moved to Ubuntu for all my new stuff about three years ago.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2019 12:52 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 26 2019 12:56 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, September 26 2019 12:58 AM (mrlXS)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2019 12:59 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, September 26 2019 01:03 AM (mrlXS)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, September 26 2019 07:56 AM (+qGjD)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2019 12:31 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Gigabyte's Aorus X570 Xtreme has 10Gb Ethernet, WiFi 6, three PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, and no fan.  (AnandTech)
  
  But cheap it ain't.
  
  If you want a high-end AM4 motherboard without a chipset fan - and you have $700 burning a hole in your pocket - this looks like it may be the way to go.
  
  
•  Alleged rumours speculate that Microsoft might potentially be considering the possibility of using 6 and 8 core Ryzen CPUs for the Surface Laptop 3.  (PC Perspective)
  
  AMD has already released a 45W 8 core part, the 2700E, and that was on 12nm, so 7nm could do even better.
  
  
• An increase in US tariffs on technology imported from China has been postponed until August of 2020.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• By pure coincidence, Apple announced it will continue to produce the new Mac Pro in the US and not move production to China as previously planned.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Xiaomi's Mi Mix Alpha has a 180% screen to body ratio.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The screen wraps around both sides onto the back, but there's an opaque strip for the cameras and buttons.  The cameras include a 12MP zoom, a 20MP wide angle, and a 108MP main sensor.
  
  It has a Snapdrago 855+, 12GB RAM, and 512GB of UFS 3.0 flash.  The 7.92" AMOLED screen is made of sapphire glass and the frame is titanium alloy.  
  
  No headphone jack though.  Also it will cost $2800.
  
  
• In a surprise move, the EU recognised that the EU's jurisdiction is restricted to the EU.  (Hacker News)
  
  Specifically with the fictitious "right to be forgotten" in this case.
  
  However, individual EU member states can still choose to act like complete idiots and probably will.
  
  
• Nim turns 1.0.  (ZDNet)
  
  Nim is a Pythony language that compiles via C or JavaScript to native code.
  
  
• Crystal meanwhile has released version 0.31.0.
  
  Crystal is a Rubyish language built on LLVM that compiles directly to native code.  I like it a lot.
  
  This release has the new threading model and several other enhancements.
  
  
• Twitter banned Twitter.  (Twitter)

  You may not use Twitter’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience on Twitter.

• A day with the Huawei Mate Pro 30 and it's 7680 fps camera.  (AnandTech)
  
  Slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowfies.
  
  
• Nothing as a service.
  
  Turns out that going cheap is horribly expensive.  At even a modest scale Amazon Lambda costs two to eight times as much as EC2, and EC2 is already not cheap.
  
  
• Bedrock is a modular, WAN-replicated, blockchain nope.
  
  Nope nope nope.
  
  
• You can now pay for public transport in Sydney with your credit card, debit card, or phone.  (ZDNet)
  
  Just touch it to the green arrow at the gate and off you go.
  
  I noticed this today - had an office day after hiding at home for an extended period, and both the new Metro line and the new payment system have gone live.  Hope the payment system is more reliable than the Metro, which almost made me late even though I wasn't using it.
  
  
• Speaking of Sydney, we're number six!  (Slashdot)
  
  On the list of most-surveilled cities outside China.  (China takes eight of the top ten spots worldwide.)
  
  Though we have less than one fifth the number of cameras per person of London, it's not a number I'm particularly excited about.
  
  I wonder where they all are.  The Metro line I just mentioned is fully automated and uses a bunch of them, but not enough to account for the total.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 23 2019 11:29 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 24 2019 08:52 AM (PiXy!)

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• Water-cooling your Raspberry Pi.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Rather extreme water cooling at that.  Well, extreme water, cooling is another matter.
  
  
• Following problems relating to bootleg THC vaping solutions, Walmart is reportedly ceasing sales of vaping supplies pushing people back onto more harmful tobacco.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not directly tech-related except in the theme of everything is stupid and legislation mostly makes it worse.
  
  
• Time to weld your rusty pandas.  (Not a Monad Tutorial)
  
  For great justice.
  
  
• Australia has announced that it is tripling its space research budget and will be joining the US in both manned and robot missions to the Moon and Mars.  (NASA)
  
  Australia will specifically be developing automated mining equipment to operate on the Moon, which offers nearly as harsh an environment as suburban Melbourne.
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, September 24 2019 11:11 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 24 2019 11:47 PM (PiXy!)

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• It seems that AMD ran out of September.  Thirdripper and the 3950X will be arriving in November.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 3950X is the 16 core mainstream model; third generation Threadripper will be 24 cores and up.
  
  Given the ongoing shortages of the 3900X this shouldn't come as a surprise, though at least a paper launch of the 3950X was expected this month.
  
  This is the first official news of Thirdripper, apart from Lisa Su's statement that there would be such a thing when its absence on one slide sent rumours flying.
  
  
• A French court has said that yes, Cinderella, you can resell your Steam games.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That will be interesting.
  
  
• IBM has announced a working quantum computer with 53 qubits.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Their previous model had just 20 qubits.  That means the new one is potentially 8 billion times more powerful, because in theory the computational capacity of a quantum computer scales exponentially with the number of qubits.  We'll see how it turns out, because reality is rarely so generous.
  
  
• Network effects mean that small social networks die and large social networks suck.  (TechDirt)
  
  It doesn't help that all the major social networks are run by idiots.
  
  
• There are tens of thousands of Facebook apps?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I mean, that still have working API access.
  
  
• YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki says "Sorry everyone, YouTube is run entirely by idiots.".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  When a journalist pointed out that she ran YouTube she replied "What, no I don't.  You're so silly."
  
  
• Gigabyte has a slew of new motherboards on the way including at least five models for Thirdripper unless they don't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I'm eager to see what kind of chipset AMD cooks up for Thirdripper.  It looks like they have a mid-sized four-channel I/O core, so they could repeat the trick they did with the X570 and rotate that 180° and use it as the chipset.  At the other extreme they could rely on the built-in features of the I/O die and not have a chipset at all.
  
  
• Thousands of words on the socioeconomics of healing crystals without ever addressing the fact that they don't fucking work.  (The Guardian)
  
  
• WCCFTech noted weeks ago that WeWork was a losing proposition.
  
  Investors are just starting to realise that, being rather dumber than a random tech rumour site run on a shoestring budget.
  

Video of the Day

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