• Gladys Berjerkelian...  Bejekele...  Brelekj...  Gladys, premier of NSW and probably the least horrible state government leader in Australia right now though that's not saying much, has abruptly resigned due to an ongoing corruption investigation.
  
  Expecting things to somehow get worse.
  
  Meanwhile Dictator Dan down south remains firmly entrenched.
  
  
  
• USPS!  Can we ship it?  No we can't.  (USPS)
  
  Not to Australia or New Zealand, anyway.
  
  
  
• Do not use SMS-based two-factor authentication to protect anything of real value.  (The Record)
  
  It's not secure and people will steal your stuff.  In this case, Coinbase wallets.  It sounds like the people affected here might have reused a password leaked by a different site, and the attackers then bypassed  2FA to break into the accounts.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Acer FA100 looks like a pretty decent lowish-end NVMe SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a DRAMless TLC model; the alternative at this price point is QLC flash with DRAM.  The tradeoffs are complex but for the average user TLC is still a better bet.
  
  The drive is rated up to 3.3GBps for reads and 2.7GBps for writes, which used to be a very high-end product and is now available at under $100 in a 1TB drive.
  
  It's also very power-efficient, so a good choice for upgrading a laptop.
  
  
  
• The Kingston Datatraveler Max UFD is a USB thumb drive that can hit 1GBps.  (AnandTech)
  
  And can sustain that rate for writes for 95 seconds before it runs out of cache and slows down a bit.  Though it gets pretty toasty if you do that, with the chip temperature - not the case - spiking as high as 92C.
  
  
  
• Backblaze data shows SSDs failing nearly as often as hard drives.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Showing an annual failure rate for newer devices of 1.05% for SSDs and 1.38% for hard drives.  That's quite high and I'd like to dig into the details, but I can certainly report having seen expensive enterprise SSDs simply dropping dead without warning.
  
  
  
• ARM server CPUs are cheaper than AMD (and a lot cheaper than Intel).  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ampere's 80 core Arm server chips can rival AMD's 64 core parts on many benchmarks (though not as I recall for PostgreSQL) at around half the price, and they now offer 128 core models.  They're not as easy to get as AMD or Intel parts, but I've been trying without success to acquire some AMD Epyc Milan servers for work, so "easy to get" is all relative.
  
  
  
• Crypto trading platform Compound gave $90 million to its users by mistake.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not hacked, just dumb.
  
  
  
• Dude, where's my privacy?  (ZDNet)
  
  Amazon's new devices siphon up your persona data and make you pay for the privilege.
  
  
  
• Jeffy B has praised Amazon Games for its first successful release.  (WCCFTech)
  
  See below.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 03 2021 01:33 AM (obo9H)

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• Appeal #7 sent off to Twitter.  I wonder if anyone ever reads these.
  
  
  
• A list of the top new features coming in Windows 11...  But not yet.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  (It's a premium article, but you can read it with a free registration if you want.)
  
  Android apps?  Not yet.
  Adobe apps?  Not yet.
  Streaming services?  You guessed it.
  Full-screen widgets?  Actually, those are ready to - wait.  Nope.

  Windows 11 is quite good overall, but it can’t be compared in any way to the consistent and modern interface that Apple offers, say, with macOS.

  The words of someone who hasn't tried to use MacOS for any serious work recently.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Let's Encrypt's root certificate has expired and stuff is breaking all over the place.  (ZDNet)
  
  Let's Encrypt replaced their root certificate a long time ago, but if software isn't configured properly - or is simply out of date - it won't be able to access sites using Let's Encrypt anymore.  This affects very old Android devices - unless you install Firefox - and also, it turns out, Palo Alto, Bluecoat, Cisco Umbrella, Catchpoint, Guardian Firewall, Monday.com, PFsense, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure Application Gateway, OVH, Auth0, Shopify, Xero, QuickBooks, Fortinet, Heroku, Rocket League, InstaPage, Ledger, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages.  Among others.  Oh, and API testing tool Postman, which just stopped working for me.
  
  
  
• Intel's new Loihi 2 neural network chip has the capacity of 10 millihamsters, sys the company.  (AnandTech)
  
  The chip one million neural circuits, and Wikipedia pegs the Golden hamster at 90 million, so that seems about right.  I mean, such comparisons are 90% fluff, but so are hamsters.
  
  
  
• Corsair's Xeneon 32QHD165 covers 84% of Rec.2020.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A recent and confusing theme is the outbreak of new colour gamuts.  I know that 100% of sRGB means you get pretty decent colour - not amazing but decent - and 48% of NTSC is crap, but keeping track of all the different gamuts (gami?) and what percentage of each is acceptable is a chore.
  
  It seems at least in this case that 84% of Rec.2020 is equivalent to 116% of DCI-P3.
  
  Or maybe not.  While looking for a price ($800) I found a second review that notes that apart from the wide colour gamut it also has better colour accuracy than Apple's $5000 Pro Display XDR.  (PC Magazine)  But they measure it at 94% of DCI-P3, which is pretty normal for a wide-gamut monitor.
  
  Oh, right.  2560x1440, 165Hz.  DisplayPort, USB-C, and 2x HDMI.
  
  
  
• How to upgrade to Windows 11 and bypass the TPM requirement.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not quite as insane as it looks; they cover both upgrades and clean installs; if you're upgrading you only need the first five steps.
  
  
  
• QNAP has fixed another remote execution vulnerability.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Do not connect anything to the internet.  Ever.

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 01 2021 11:07 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 02 2021 02:29 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 02 2021 08:12 AM (PiXy!)

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