• AMD launched 12 4000-series desktop APUs and 6 new 3000-series APUs and you can't buy any of them.  (AnandTech)
  
  All of them - 3000 and 4000, Pro and non-pro, are OEM-only.
  
  That sucks.
  
  Up to 8 cores / 16 threads, top clock speeds of 4.4GHz, and over 2 TFLOPs single-precision on the GPU side.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the 4000U range has started showing up in all-in-one desktops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The only real flaw with my Inspiron 27 is that it needs to cool a 65W CPU and a 150W CPU.  It's never silent and can get annoying when playing games.  My iMac is silent most of the time, but when it really gets cranking it's even louder than the Dell.
  
  A 15W APU in a 24" or 27" monitor housing can probably just rely on passive cooling.  We've already seen that they don't go into thermal shutdown no matter how you abuse them.
  
  
  
• Benchmarking every CPU.  (AnandTech)
  
  Well, every CPU from Intel and AMD since 2010, anyway.
  
  Though a project to benchmark every CPU would be far more interesting.  Find a working IAPX 432 and a Linn Rekursiv and...
  
  
  
• Samsung's bad XML day.  (.clue)
  
  I saw this story before but didn't realise how widespread or intractably it was.  Samsung accidentally remotely bricked a huge number of their Blu-Ray players, every single one that picked up the latest update.  And you can't factory-reset them to get out of it.

• Says everything that needs to be said, really.
  
  

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, July 22 2020 03:35 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 22 2020 05:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, July 22 2020 05:28 AM (ZlYZd)

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• At last an inexpensive >1Gb Ethernet switch.  (AnandTech)
  
  This only took seven forevers.  Good fucking work, entire tech industry.
  
  
  
• How to install Windows 10 on your Raspberry Pi.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Step 1: Don't.
  
  Though to be fair, at least the Raspberry Pi can used for something else after you get tired of watching a hamster ride a bicycle.
  
  
  
• How to run Steam games on a Raspberry Pi.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Fun game: How many computers have you owned that collectively were less powerful than a Raspberry Pi?  I have four Macs, a Silicon Graphics O2 and a Sun Ultra 5 that combined wouldn't put a dent in it.
  
  
  
• Loren Chariot Addy the Titbit of Cholame questioned Cele Garth Alda and 16 windy frogs.  (GitHub)
  
  This makes some slight sense.  I once had difficulty tracing a bug in a large customer-service app because users weren't reporting it consistently, so I changed it to show up as Fruitcake Error.  I got 100% of instances reported and was able to fix the problem.
  
  What?  Oh.  It turnes UUIDs into vaguely Shakespearean and grammatically correct nonsense.
  
  
  
• Well, if your entire lab disappears, that would be a sign.  (Quanta)
  
  Kind of like the old question, How do you tell when there's an elephant in your refrigerator?
  
  
  
• The UAE has launched a Mars probe, from Japan.
  
  
  
  
  I think this is a good development.  Probably.

Not At All Tech News

• H.R. 6666 - the Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act - has 66 sponsors.  (Congress.gov)
  
  The writers for 2020 are getting lazy.
  
  
  

Posted by: Jay at Tuesday, July 21 2020 09:52 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 21 2020 01:48 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 21 2020 11:05 PM (PiXy!)

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• Citrine is a localised programming language.  (Citrine-lang.org)
  
  That is, the code is automatically translated into your preferred natural language - English, Danish, Swahili, whatever.  All of it.  Keywords, variables, comments, everything.
  
  This is a gloriously terrible idea.
  
  
  
• Things unexpectedly named after people.
  
  Also bloom filters and currying, a term used in functional programming purely to annoy people new to functional programming.
  
  Some more in the comments at Hacker News.  Including the Children's python, named after John George Children.
  
  
  
• How remote work could destroy Silicon Valley.  (Medium)
  
  That or a well-aimed comet.  I'm up for whatever it takes.

Tech News

• A further look at the Twitter hack. (Krebs on Security)
  
  
  
• And what Twitter themselves are saying. (Twitter)
  
  
• Attackers were not able to view previous account passwords, as those are not stored in plain text or available through the tools used in the attack.
  

I should bloody hope not.


• Attackers were able to view personal information including email addresses and phone numbers, which are displayed to some users of our internal support tools.
  
  
And let's pause a moment to reflect that Twitter will lock your account for the most trivial of reasons - or none at all - and force you to provide a phone number to unlock it again.


• In cases where an account was taken over by the attacker, they may have been able to view additional information. Our forensic investigation of these activities is still ongoing.
  
  
Safest to assume that everything on Twitter is now in the hands of the hackers.

Speculation is swirling that the Bitcoin scam was a smokescreen to divert attention from the actual target. Twitter have confirmed that full data for certain accounts was downloaded during the hack - but that those were not verified accounts.




Curiouser - as Alice would say - and curiouser.




• Cloudflare fell over. (Cloudflare)
  
  Well, sort of.

  The affected locations were San Jose, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Richmond, Newark, Atlanta, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, Moscow, St. Petersburg, São Paulo, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre. Other locations continued to operate normally.

  That sounds like a lot of locations but Cloudflare has a lot of locations.

The event sounds like a replay of the Northeast blackout of 1965. An issue with one network link caused traffic to be re-routed, which overloaded that link causing the combined traffic to be re-routed, and so on until large parts of the core network collapsed.

The major difference being that it took less than two hours to fix everything.

The other side of this is that a lot of sites use resources - JavaScript, CSS, fonts - from CDNs that are actually provided via Cloudflare.  So it doesn't really matter if you host your own site unless you host everything yourself.

And by everything I mean everything.  Hetzner (a major German hosting company) uses Cloudflare's DNS, so the failure cascaded to them as well.



• Among the sites affected were GitLab, Patreon, Authy, Downdetector, and BleepingComputer.  (BleepingComputer)
  
  I use some of those.
  
  
  
  
  


• Apple Watch is apparently your mother.  (9to5Mac)
  
  
  
• The Asus PN50 contains the Ryzen 7 4800U, making it by far the most powerful NUC available unless...  No, pretty sure this one is real.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the full 8-core/16-thread version.  It's about 30% faster single-threaded and 20% faster multi-threaded than my current Ryzen 7 1700.
  
  The PN50 has HDMI, Ethernet, three USB-A ports (5Gbit), two USB-C ports (10Gbit) with DisplayPort support, dual built-in microphones, an IR receiver, WiFi 6, a headphone jack and a microSD slot.  Room inside for two SO-DIMMs, an M.2 SSD and a 2.5" disk drive, and a tiny option slot that supports a choice of VGA, serial, a full-size DisplayPort, or a second Ethernet port.
  
  4.5x4.5x2".
  
  
  
• You're not shadowbanned.  It's just a coincidence that every single search and activity listing on our site accidentally excludes your content.
  
  
  
  Also please ignore the leaked screenshots showing the huge SHADOWBAN button on our internal management software.  That's simply a spelling error.
  
  
  
• Smalltalk has been ported to the Raspberry Pi.  (GitHub)
  
  By which I don't mean that the Smalltalk language is running on Linux which in turn runs on the Raspberry Pi, because that was already available.
  
  Smalltalk 80 was effectively a complete operating system, and that is now running directly on the Raspberry Pi, with nothing between you and the bare metal.
  
  
  
• Oh, and one other thing: Fuck this shit.
  
  
  
  
  A significant percentage of my day job involves integrations with Ethereum. Ethereum is hopelessly broken right now, and has been for weeks, with no end in sight.  Basically any time that chart goes above, say, 4, Ethereum-based apps run into problems.  At 40 they're deader than a doornail.
  
  Centralised solutions suffer from single points of failure, but distributed solutions suffer from infinitely many points of failure.
  

• Andrew Cuomo killed so many people that he's lost Vox.
  
  
  
  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 19 2020 06:29 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 21 2020 12:43 AM (PiXy!)

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• The 2020 Dell XPS 13 is not entirely awful.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 3840x2400 screen is particularly nice.  But it has neither the four essential keys nor an AMD CPU, so I'm not interested.
  
  
  
• So that's a yes?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  An interesting statement from Twitter:
  
  
  
  
  So first of all, user accounts weren't hacked.  Twitter itself was hacked - with inside help.  (Vice)
  
  Secondly....  Why does this need to be said?  It should be impossible for passwords to be accessed.
  
  Thirdly, this event makes those MariaDB temporal tables even more intriguing.  Even if the application goes horribly wrong, the database will continue right on logging every change for you.
  
  
  
• I have a perpetual professional license for FontAwesome 5.0.
  
  They just announced 6.0.
  
  Doh!
  
  Well, $49 per year is not terrible.
  
  
  
• Edge 84 is out.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  And so is Thunderbird 78.  (Thunderbird.net)
  
  Is there any point to version numbers any more?
  
  
  
• Patreon probably shouldn't oughta have done that.
  
  
  
  After being sued by a bunch of patrons of an account they suspended (and by suspended I mean killed deader than a doornail), Patreon changed their terms of services, and then countersued under the new terms of service claiming that they applied at the time of the original suit.
  
  Which they weren't.
  
  
  
• Apparently the difference between Window Blinds and Curtains is that Window Blinds works across multiple versions of Windows but is hacky and sometimes does weird stuff, where Curtains is Windows 10 only but is a much cleaner implementation because of that.  They both do the same thing, essentially - make Windows look like something else.
  
  Probably best not to run both at the same time.
  
  
  
• I figured out what Microsoft are doing with the RAM in the Xbox Series X.  
  
  It has a 320-bit memory bus - so 10 32-bit chips or 5 64-bit chips - but 16GB of total RAM.  10GB is for video and is 320 bits wide and 6 GB is for the OS and applications and is 192 bits wide.
  
  I originally thought they had two banks of RAM, which I didn't know was possible with GDDR6.  But no, they have one bank, it's just that 6 of the chips are 2GB and are used for both graphics and applications, and the other 4 are 1GB and are used for graphics only.
  
  It would have been simpler to just have 20GB of RAM; this is purely a cost-saving move.

Anime Opening Theme of the Day

Posted by: Karl Drexler at Saturday, July 18 2020 10:49 AM (4+8eU)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, July 18 2020 11:36 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, July 18 2020 07:26 PM (5iiQK)

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• 1TBVPS.com actually also sells 2TB VPSes.  (1TBVPS.com)
  
  They don't both to draw attention to the fact though.
  
  
  
• So, yeah, Twitter had a bad day.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It appears that the hackers either had inside help or Twitter are even more incompetent than you'd expect, because they had access to Twitter's internal account admin systems.
  
  Screenshots of those admin systems have been floating about on Twitter and elsewhere.  Which screenshots, people are noting, show the shadowban status of accounts.
  
  Wich @Jack swore before Congress that Twitter doesn't do.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has announced more AMD systems, both laptops and desktops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They look reasonable except for some of the configuration restrictions.  Why on Earth would you only offer up to 2TB disk drives?  They do that in the P620 workstation too - most powerful CPU in existence, maximum drive size only 4TB.
  
  
  
• What's coming with Zen 3:
  
  10-15% better IPC, 5% better clock speeds, 8 cores per cluster, and...  DDR5?  Maybe.
  
  
  
  It will be launching this year, that much has been announced publicly.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 17 2020 04:23 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 17 2020 04:25 AM (Iwkd4)

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• AMD's Threadripper Pro is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  You can't have one.  You can't even know what the price is.
  
  Just like Ryzen Pro, it's an OEM-only part.  That's disappointing because this is by far the best workstation CPU ever made.
  
  
  
• You can buy a Lenovo ThinkStation P620 though.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, you can't, in fact.  It is listed on Lenovo's site but it's not available even for pre-order and there are no prices attached.
  
  
  
• Why modern software makes me sad.  (RogueLazer)
  
  Or, Google ruins everything.
  
  
  
• Uh-oh.  Patch Tuesday is here, and it's even patchier than usual.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It fixes no fewer than 123 vulnerabilities.  Yay.
  
  
  
• Ethereum is fucked.  (Etherscan)
  
  Ethereum charges a transaction fee, based on the congestion of the network and the complexity of the operation.  The base gas fee is - reasonably enough - 1, though you can use a fractional fee if you are feeling adventurous.
  
  Right now the recommended gas fee is 79, and it's been over 30 for most of the past month.  Generally speaking, any time it's over 10 it causes major headaches.  Right now it's basically useless; even the MLM scammers can't process their transactions.
  
  
  
• The Rust project has revoked all API keys for the Crates package manager over a potential vulnerability.  (ZDNet)
  
  Nothing was compromised, but they discovered that the random number generator wasn't cryptographically secure, and the keys were neither encrypted nor hashed.
  
  
  
• No, I don't know what the difference between Curtains and Window Blinds is.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  I think Curtains lets you customise Windows to look like other versions of Windows, while Window Blinds lets you customise Windows to look like anything you can imagine and many things you shouldn't.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

• I'm Australian and don't follow professional sports anyway - or unprofessional sports for that matter - so I only had a very general notion of who Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is.
  
  So I was a little surprised to find him taking on the racism behind "anti-racism" in The Hollywood Reporter.
  
  Well worth reading.
  
  
  
• I hate it when that happens.
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, July 16 2020 01:03 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 16 2020 12:43 PM (obo9H)

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• The Intel Core i3 10100 is cheap and fast matching the Xeon E3-1275 v6 and stomping older E3 Xeons.
  
  If you look around for small cheap servers, E3 Xeons are everywhere.  This i3 beats them all.  And there are some great prices for them because it's such a cheap part to begin with.  For $5 more than this virtual server I could get something easily twice as fast.
  
  But:
  
  
• Socket 1200 server boards are in short supply, so those are most likely on desktop boards.  Single network port and no IPMI.
• No ECC.  It's just not supported.
• The Ryzen 3 3300X scores remarkably better on the PassMark multi-threaded workload.  More than 50% better.  That's a surprise, but I've found PassMark to be a pretty good predictor of real-world performance so far.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, you cannot get the Ryzen 3 3300X.  It doesn't even show up in searches on Amazon or Newegg.
  
  The one price I saw quoted was $250, which is nearly double the list price and more than a 3600X.
  
  
  
• Techdirt is very, very drunk today.
  
  
  
• Google's new Confidential VMs use AMD's memory encryption.  (AnandTech)
  
  There are various ways to break out of a VM on an unpatched server and spy on other VMs on the same node.  Most of those ways only work on Intel, and Google (and the other big cloud companies) are good at keeping up with the patches.
  
  But this is a very strong extra level of protection.  Also, if you tick that option you know you'll be running on AMD because Intel doesn't support this.
  
  
  
• Hands on with that Indiegogo AMD NUC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's well-designed and it works.  This model is based on a Ryzen 3000-series APU, but the company has confirmed they are working on a Ryzen 4000 update.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

• This is so bad it makes my head hurt.
  
  
  
  
  Yes, it's real, or as real as anything is these days.
  
  
  
• Take this.  It will make you feel better.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 15 2020 03:37 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 15 2020 09:28 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 15 2020 10:08 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 15 2020 12:20 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, July 16 2020 06:28 PM (UdIkr)

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• My back is mostly functional again but I'm now suffering from the effects of not moving for nearly five days.  Joy.
  
  
  
• GitHub went down again.  (Reddit)
  
  Favourite comment:

  While testing the availability report, we accidentally simulated a failure in production. This caused a real failure in production as the code was not designed to deal with this in production mode.

  
  
  
• On what planet?  (ZDNet)
  
  WeWork predicts profits on an uptick in demand for office space.
  
  No, really.
  
  
  
• Die AVX-512, die!  (ZDNet)
  
  Linus (original Linus) is not a fan, it seems.
  
  I just want to add that Linus now looks exactly what you would have expected an older Linus to look like when he was younger.
  
  
  
• Microsoft won't be doing anything to support PHP 8.0 on Windows.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  First, what kind of insane masochist would run PHP on Windows?
  
  Second...  No, that's it really.
  
  
  
• All the Raspberry Pepsi is gone.
  
  I still have half a dozen bottles, and ten cans, but they're the last of it.  I saw it on sale half price and ordered a dozen bottles and just got an out of stock notification.
  
  Hope they bring back lime, that was really nice.  Orange Coke too.
  
  
  
• That's just retarded.  (9to5Mac)
  
  No, Microsoft doesn't need to drop Intel for Arm, and they're not going to drop Intel for Arm.  Drop Intel for AMD, maybe.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 14 2020 12:40 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Really Bored at Tuesday, July 14 2020 05:44 AM (7vK48)

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• AMD shipped out some Ryzen 5 3600 CPUs in Ryzen 3 APU boxes.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The stickers on the boxes said they contained Ryzen 5 3600 CPUs, and they did in fact contain Ryzen 5 3600 CPUs, so no harm done except a bit of confusion.
  
  
  
• Threadripperbirds are Pro!  Unless they're not.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Looks like the new 8-channel parts are named Threadripper Pro and will range from 12 to 64 cores - and will indeed carry the full complement of 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes.
  
  These things will be beasts.
  
  If the specs are accurate, they will have slightly lower base and boost clocks than the existing models - for example, the 3995WX is 2.7/4.2 vs 2.9/4.3 for the current 3990X - because they have the same TDP but need to allocate power to those extra memory and PCIe channels.  But for those who need the memory or I/O capacity, a couple of hundred MHz is a small price to pay.
  
  
  
• I was not aware of that.  That is extremely useful.  (MariaDB)
  
  MariaDB temporal tables are versioned - records remember their own history.  You can query the state of records at a particular point in time, or query the history of a given record or set of records.
  
  I'll have to look into this.  The new system - which is mostly ready but which has been set aside since March due to pressures of my day job - tracks edit / version history in separate tables.  It's built to use MySQL so moving across to MariaDB should be a breeze.
  
  Update: There are, well, one or two complications, such as not being able to alter the table once it's created, and not being able to restore the version history from backup.  Database snapshots work fine, of course.
  
  It does have a nice feature that lets you exclude columns from versioning, so if you have comment and like counts on your posts table, it won't create thousands of versions when a post goes viral.
  
  
  
• The WD Blue SN550 is a DRAMless TLC NVMe M.2 SSD.  How does it perform?  (Serve the Home)
  
  It perform good.  
  
  I checked my usual supplier and it's one of the cheapest M.2 NVMe drives at the 1TB size - currently A$10 cheaper than the Intel 660p ,which has DRAM but uses QLC flash.  In terms of price/performance, the SN550 looks like a winner.
  
  
  
• Priorities.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Think outside the box.
  
  

• I can't express what I feel on Twitter since it would get me banned, so here goes.
  
  Journalists in the American news media are, with a few exceptions, completely fucking retarded and working for the enemy.  If the entire industry burns to the ground tomorrow I will dance for joy.  Learn to dig ditches, you miserable cretins.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 13 2020 06:33 AM (+Kfbd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 13 2020 10:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 13 2020 10:24 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 13 2020 11:05 AM (obo9H)

5 Yep.  Fine even for slightly crazy users. 

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 13 2020 12:07 PM (PiXy!)

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