• Those bumblefucks at YouTube banned Sakura Miko this time.  She has her account back, but not her members.
  
  
  
  873,000 subscribers doesn't warrant human review even when you have just done the same thing to other members of the same group.
  
  The company is run by morons.  Three times is enemy action and all that, but they are doing this to themselves.
  
  
  
• My router caught fire.
  
  Apparently it was a short right in the plug, which was unfortunate because my first instinct was to pull the plug, and I grabbed hold of molten plastic.
  
  Ouch.
  
  I have backup networking stuff but it's not configured the way I need so things are even more chaotic than usual.
  
  
  
• A look at the Xbox Series X SOC, or XOX.  (AnandTech)
  
  Compared the the Xbox One X it has twice the GPU performance and three times the CPU; the One X's CPU was the same as the base Xbox One, which was...  Not great.
  
  
  
• Western Digital has launched the new Green SN350 M.2 SSD range.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are QLC NVMe devices, which are fine for the average user, but the only advantage of QLC is price, and the MSRP is exactly the same as the current price of the TLC Blue SN550 on Amazon, and only 20% cheaper than the Black SN750.
  
  Unless that price comes down, they make no sense.
  
  
  
• AMD is releasing 28 and 56 core Epyc CPUs with their third generation Milan range unless they aren't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Along with other models ranging from 8 to 64 cores.
  
  The listed specs indicate the 56 core model would have eight CPU chiplets each with seven cores active.  On Zen 1 and Zen 2 that would have meant unbalanced CCXes and potential scheduler problems, but Zen 3 has a unified eight core design and that particular problem wouldn't arise.
  
  The L2 cache numbers are wrong though, which raises a red flag.
  
  Intel's new Ice Lake Xeon parts are also listed here, and likewise may or may not bear any relation to reality.
  
  
  
• Clubhouse is sending your data to China.  (The Verge)
  
  Maybe.  Apparently Clubhouse is built on Agora, which is a Chinese company, and though they say they don't transmit US-based data back to China, (a) they are probably lying and (b) Chinese users who make it past the Great Firewall are screwed.
  
  
  
• Those idiots at Bloomberg are at it again.
  
  
  This is not a new story.  This is not an update to the original story from 2018.  This is the exact same story as before, with exactly the same evidence, which is to say, none whatsoever.
  
  Here's a thread by someone who is not an idiot breaking down exactly why the idiots at Bloomberg are in fact idiots.
  
  
  
  
  
• Tried baking some breadrolls just with the pancake mix, using a higher temperature and a shorter time to avoid that thick crust.
  
  The best batch yet - the crust is fine and they taste great, though more like scones than dinner rolls - but they also fall apart.  Not sure how to solve that one.
  
  
  
• I'm a big fan of crossing the streams, especially streams you would never expect to cross.
  

Definitely Not Tech News

• Meanwhile in Melbourne, Australia's own little San Francisco, or possibly New York.
  
  
  Victoria had 90% of Australia's total WBSDP deaths despite having 25% of the country's population.  This is because it is run by idiots.

• The RTX 3060 is great value at $329 with 12GB of RAM.  Unfortunately it looks like it will sell for anything from $600 to $850.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is not great value at all.
  
  
  
• Why SELECT * is bad for SQL performance.  (Tanel Poder)
  
  Actually, all the reasons are obvious and most of them don't matter most of the time.  If you do need just one or two fields, and those fields are indexed, and that query is used a lot, it's worth your time to narrow your field selection.  But far more important to get your database design correct.
  
  
  
• The Raspberry Pi Pico can output VGA with just a handful of resistors.
  
  
  With two cores, 2MB of flash, and 264K of RAM, it's pretty close to a real-world implementation of my imaginary home computer.  Well, it does run at 133MHz rather than 3MHz, and it's 32-bit rather than 10/20 bit, but otherwise.
  
  Having 8 bit bytes instead of 10 bits means it effectively has less memory, but on the plus side it is much, much, much faster.
  
  The 264k RAM is broken up into four banks of 64k and two of 4k.  There's a fabric that connects the two cores and the DMA controller to the memory, and the multiple banks let them all read and write to RAM without conflict, if you're careful.
  
  It also has XIP - execute in place - on the flash memory, so you don't need to load code into RAM before running it.  Not sure how dynamic that is; the tradeoff for XIP is that you can't write to it at the same time.  You have to be running code out of RAM, switch XIP mode off, write your data, and then switch it back on.
  
  Working my way through the 637 page datasheet right now.
  
  
  
• Fuck Ethereum.
  
  Matic on the other hand - now part of Polygon - is Ethereum compatible and seems to actually work, while offering transactions two million times cheaper than Ethereum.
  
  The one good thing about the sky-high Ethereum prices (both ETH and gas) is that I was able to scrape together small amounts of ETH from secondary wallets at my day job and convert it to what would cost $430,514,016.07 if we wanted to run the same volume of transactions on Ethereum itself.

• Bubble dwellers rise up against....  Everyone else!  (CJR)
  
  This has to be the most comically unaware piece ever written by a multicellular organism.
  
  
  
• Though this comes close.  (New York Times)
  
  The money quote comes right at the end:

  "That’s not what I would have expected from The Times,” she said. "You have the 1619 Project. You guys do all this amazing reporting on this, and you can say something like that?”

  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 17 2021 01:07 PM (pxvtu)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 17 2021 02:09 PM (PiXy!)

3 It looks like a lot of them have a certain amount of L1, yeah, at least once you get past the $1 or so mark.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 18 2021 04:43 AM (2Mei2)

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• Raspberry Pi Pico too damn large - or just can't get one?  Try the Pimoroni Tiny 2040.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Admittedly it's three times the price and has 16 I/O pins vs. 40 on the Pico, but it is half the size and comes with 8MB of flash storage instead of 2MB.
  
  
  
• Always remember that the person on the other end of the support line is probably a human being.  (ZDNet)
  
  Though possibly a very stupid one.
  
  
  
• 6.7 billion Arm chips shipped in Q4 alone.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's nearly one per person alive.  Come the zombie apocalypse, we're going to be able to rebuild the internet in about three days.
  
  
  
• 1921 Duesenberg, one careful owner.  (The Drive)
  
  Well, technically, one careful family.  But still, complete with the original toolkit.
  
  
  
• Uh-oh.
  

Holoquake Video of the Day

• Well, the chicken I ordered for my next round of cooking experiments was out of stock - chicken breast pre-cut into nugget-sized pieces because I'm lazy and it's only another 50¢ per kilogram - so I'll just be doing a roast instead.
  
  Today I tried baking a couple of batches of gluten-free soda bread, first just with self-raising flour, then with half-and-half self-raising flour and pancake mix.
  
  The first attempt was, I think the word is, bad.  The second attempt tasted much better but had a thick crunchy crust and didn't rise enough.
  
  Going to order some yeast and experiment some more.  I've tried gluten-free bread mixes a few times in the bread machine without success, so here I'm doing it by hand.
  
  
  
• The RTX 3060 is on its way in a couple of weeks.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is 14/19ths of a 3060 Ti core with 3/4 the bandwidth and 3/2 the RAM for 329/399ths of the price.
  
  Will you be able to buy one?  Shake shake.  Signs point to no.
  
  
  
• Raspberry Pi has already sold one million Picos.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unfortunately they only made 200,000 in the initial production run, so even if you got your order in you could be waiting a while.
  
  A few suppliers still have stock but have strict limits on purchase quantities.
  
  
  
• Rocket Lake desktop parts are on their way.  If you were looking forward to the new Xe graphics core, here's some bad news for you.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The core in the desktop version is drastically reduced from the laptop parts - one third the number of cores.
  
  
  
• Amazon has filed suit in New York to block a suit by the New York Attorney General over unsafe working conditions, claiming that federal occupational safety laws pre-empt state laws.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's an interesting theory.
  
  
  
• I missed the start of Coco's latest Twitch-plays-Pokemon Minecraft stream, so now I'm waiting for the livestream to end so I can go back and watch the beginning.  She's stopped playing Minecraft, but then she read superchats for an hour and launched straight into karaoke, so it might be a while.
  
  The reason I missed it - one of the reasons, because I was also asleep at the time - is that YouTube shadowbanned the stream.  She noticed the shadowban beforehand, and re-created the stream....  And they shadowbanned that too.
  
  The way YouTube shadowbans work is that videos don't show up in your feed, recommendations, or notifications even if you subscribe to that channel.
  
  They also shadowbanned Kiara's last two streams, and Gura's collab with Amelia today.  Kiara posted to her YouTube community page to let people know about the shadowbanned streams, and they shadowbanned her post.
  
  Those three between them have over four million subscribers - and corporate backing - so just imagine what happens to smaller channels.
  
  Regular shadowbans are basically committing fraud on your users, making them think they are posting publicly when only their followers can see them.  YouTube shadowbans are fraud against the followers as well.
  
  I'm keeping a log of things social networks shouldn't do, and this ranks right up there.
  
  Update: I just realised.  She was doing Chat plays Minecraft on the HoloJP server, not single player this time.  I mean, I saw that in the part I caught earlier, it just didn't register.
  
  But the very first question she asked chat was which button to click on the Minecraft loading screen.
  
  Update: Reine pre-emptively titled her latest stream "I love YouTube".
  
  
  
• Yandex caught an employee selling access to private emails.  (ZDNet)
  
  Only three employees in the company had the sysadmin rights to be able do this, so once they found that it was happening, the investigation as to who was responsible was probably quite short.
  
  Good advertising for ProtonMail though.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, I will support end-to-end encrypted messages in Mana (the new platform) but not in V1.  You'll need to download an app, which will basically be a local instance of Mana, bundled up to run on Windows, Mac, or Linux.
  
  Mobile apps are not on the radar at all, but there is already a full API, so anyone who wants to will be able to write one.

• Magnitude 7.1 earthquake off the coast of Fukushima.  (Japan Times)
  
  No tsunami is expected this time but people on the coast nearby were advised to seek high ground.
  
  
  
• Some tweets age better than others.
  
  
  
  
  Yes, talking about exactly who you think we were talking about.

The Show Must Go On, Even If No-One Knows the Words Video of the Day

The rest of Hololive is just as confused about Haachama as her viewers.

Just Make the Anime Already

• Cover Corp has announced auditions for Hololive EN Generation 2.  (Reddit)
  
  This announcement has been met with Hololive fans' usual levels of polite detachment, by which I mean the announcement itself has received over 100 awards and 2500 comments.
  
  It will likely be about five months before the new generation debuts.
  
  
  
• The Biden Administration has announced plans to address chip shortages and electronics supply chain issues.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They haven't announced what those plans are, just that they have them.
  
  
  
• AMD is set to announce Zen 3 XT models clocking at 5GHz and higher unless they're not.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Given how close they are getting to 5GHz already this one seems pretty plausible.
  
  
  
• Australia's Death to Google legislation will be introduced in Parliament next week.  (Reuters)
  
  That means it sill has to pass a vote in both houses, but that's likely to go smoothly since Google has ensured it has no friends in either major party.
  
  This is not, on the whole, well-considered legislation, but fuck Google.
  
  
  
• Booting an Arm-based Mac from an external disk is stochastic. (Eclectic Light)

  The problem occurs at the end of the normal installation phase, when presumably the installer is writing hashes up the Merkle tree, with the installer window claiming that there’s only About a minute remaining.  At that stage, Activity Monitor reports that com.apple.MobileSoftwareUpdate.UpdateBrainService is taking lots of CPU, and there’s sustained and intense disk activity for many minutes. When that finally completes, instead of the Mac restarting from the external disk to complete installation, the installer just quits.  Trying to restart from the external disk then results in an error.

  Sounds wonderful.
  
  How fucking hard is it to format a disk, you idiots?  That was a solved problem in 1964.
  
  
  
• More on that NPM / PyPI / RubyGems private package vulnerability.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The security model for private vs. public packages on all these platforms is fundamentally and obviously broken: A public package takes precedence over a private package of the same name.
  
  All anyone needs to do was find the name of one of your private packages, and you're dead.
  
  And it's not fixed.  There's no fix forthcoming.  This is just how it is.
  
  You can avoid it with due caution, but it's broken by design.
  
  Go, Rust, and Crystal I know handle this properly.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Surface Pro Duo, a very nice $399 productivity device that was unfortunately priced at $1399, is now $999.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Getting there, Microsoft.
  
  
  
• That time Audible censored a book about censorship.  (The Fire)
  
  Audible is owned by Amazon, the company that famously deleted copies of 1984 from user's devices.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 13 2021 12:38 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 13 2021 03:05 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 13 2021 05:40 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 13 2021 07:31 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 13 2021 07:56 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 13 2021 12:35 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 13 2021 01:50 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 13 2021 09:26 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Another day, another blonde chaos gremlin hits the million mark.
  
  

  🎉 Watson Amelia🔎 celebrates 1,000,000 subscribers 🎉 from r/Hololive

  
  She was playing Oblivion at the time, but she had an Instant Party button wired up ready to go.
  
  
  
  
  
• Comparing the Threadripper Pro 3995WX to mere mortal systems.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is the Lenovo Thinkstation P620 again, and not the Asus motherboard.  Which is a shame, because it would be really nice to see this tested with consumer rather than OEM parts.
  
  It only came out slightly ahead of the 3990X, but what you're paying for here is the far greater memory and I/O capacity rather than raw performance.
  
  
  
• Samsung is planning a new $17 billion fab in Texas.  (AnandTech)
  
  Production is expected to start coming online as soon as 2023.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Samsung, Qualcomm's new 5G modem chips use their 4nm process.  (AnandTech)
  
  Or more precisely, will do so, since the parts aren't shipping yet.  They're expected to arrive in flagship phones this year though.
  
  
  
• Cooking up some baby potatoes in my air fryer now as an experiment.  Only cooked chips, chicken nuggets, and simple things like that previously.
  
  Verdict: Not bad.  As Terry Pratchett said, if you add butter and salt they taste like salty butter.
  
  
  
• AMD's StoreMI caching software now works with Threadripper Pro systems.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Okay, it makes sense to test and qualify it across your full range of desktop CPUs, but on the other hand, no-one is going to spend $5000 on a CPU and then want driver-based hybrid storage.
  
  On the third hand, the 16 core Threadripper Pro is only $1150, so maybe there's a niche there.
  
  
  
• Let's Encrypt is prepping.  (Let's Encrypt)
  
  They issue an average of two million certificates per day, but want to be prepared in case disaster strikes and every single certificate needs to be reissued at once.
  
  They've upgraded to new Dell Epyc servers with 2TB of RAM for the databases, 25Gb Ethernet using hardware donated by Cisco, and dedicated encryption hardware capable of 800 million signing operations per day.
  
  
  
• Apple: North Dakota bill threatens to destroy the iPhone as you know it.  (MacRumors)
  
  Everyone else: Good.
  
  
  
• Before Cat Lawyer there was Cat Chemist.  (Archive.org)
  
  Same software struck in the same way back in 2013.  That was before Zoom even existed.  It was shipped as a default webcam filter on some Dell laptops.
  
  
  
• Shame, PyPI.  Shame.
  
  
  
  
  
• Did the Democrats just get caught using fake evidence in the impeachment farce?
  
  
  Yes.  The answer is yes.
  
  
  
• Publishing a new ERC721 contract (with some custom features) on the Matic EVM-compatible network costs $0.000489.
  
  Over the past 24 hours, publishing the same contract to the Ethereum mainnet would have cost between $600 and $2600 depending on when you were unfortunate enough to be trying to do it.
  
  
  Last time I was publishing new contracts - about nine months ago - it was around $20, and that was already a problem because the contract required several last-minute revisions.
  
  The current situation is insane.
  
  

World's Fastest Doog Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, February 12 2021 12:37 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, February 12 2021 10:30 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, February 12 2021 01:54 PM (6y7dz)

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• Wait, you can embed Reddit posts?  Let's try that.  Don't have a tag yet, so these are manual.
  
  

  🎉 Akai Haato❤️ celebrates 1,000,000 subscribers 🎉 from r/Hololive

  
  Card
  
  Amelia is at 995k, and Coco at 980k right now.  Haachama was in third place but then she strapped on a JATO unit and blew right past them.
  
  Reddit embeds seem to work pretty well - and load a lot faster than Twitter - with one exception.  If a post has been edited by default it won't display the text in an embed (which is reasonable - you don't want to accidentally embed something that then turns weird), but if you disable that feature it still doesn't display the text.
  
  
  
• The advantage of having a split personality is that you can be in two places at once.  Akai Haato has a livestream starting in an hour:
  
  
  
  While Haachama is doing a Minecraft collab with Mio, Fubuki, Botaan, and Watame.
  
  
  
  Update: She ducked out of the collab to do a live version of her own stream rather than the pre-recorded one.  It's extra weird this way.  Psychological horror / one million subscriber party crossover.
  
  
  
• My huge grocery order arrived.  Or more precisely, I got some chicken, some grapes, and some eggs and margarine.
  
  Everything else - 90% of the order - was listed as out of stock.  Everything from flour, sugar, potatoes, and Pepsi to my favourite gluten-free carrot cake slices that actually do go out of stock regularly.
  
  Apparently there was a widespread failure of their barcode scanning system late last night when my order was being picked, and so I got only the few items that they already had in the cart when the scanners failed.
  
  They didn't bother to say that, though.  Just an automated sorry, some of your items were out of stock followed by two pages of stuff I didn't get.
  
  Even bigger order inbound tomorrow, I hope.  A few items are now on sale so I'm saving about $20.
  
  
  
• I found a donut maker.  Actually a four-in-one device with swappable cooking plates - donuts, waffles, and open and closed toasted sandwiches.
  
  The same store I found that has one donut maker - the only one I can find in Australia - has ten different takoyaki makers.
  
  
  
• Zombie girl is singing anime songs.  Including K-On.  Took me a moment to go from hey I know that one, to oh, yeah.
  
  
  
• Chrome sucks at handling busy YouTube livestreams.
  
  How badly does it suck?  A stream that caused Chrome to freeze up on my desktop PC (Ryzen 1700, 16GB RAM), played just fine, including live chat, on a 2013 Nexus 7 (1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro, 2GB RAM) using the YouTube app.
  
  
  
• Why Intel's new Rocket Lake processors won't work on most current motherboards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• We've removed your clothing items from our store because they contain drugs, somehow.  (Medium)
  
  Also no, even though you pay us over $100,000 a year and this is obvious bullshit you get no support whatsoever.
  
  Also yes, we do sell hundreds of thousands of products that are obviously fake and do nothing about them despite constant complaints.
  
  Yes, it's Amazon again.
  
  
  
• Intel's Horse Ridge II has a maximum operating temperature of 4.  (Serve the Home)
  
  4 Kelvin.
  
  It's a support chip for quantum computing - a qubit interface chip, rather than the qubit processing element itself.
  
  
  
• Apple has patched their sudo problem.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  In the last three releases, so you're not forced to upgrade just for the security fix.  I rag on Apple a lot, and all of it is deserved, but this they've handled appropriately.
  
  
  
• Qaulcomm's new X65 5G modem can hit 10Gbps.  (ZDNet)
  
  No, you don't need 10Gbps on your phone.  The point of this is to get your download done and your phone back to idle and the network free again as quickly as possible.
  
  
  
• LineageOS now supports the Nintendo Switch.  (XDA Developers)
  
  You need to find an older Switch though, because Nintendo have patched the firmware to prevent you having nice things.
  
  
  
• One of the key features of the new Arm-based Macs is that they can run iOS apps.  Unless Apple decides that they can't.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Apple could have added an alert saying that certain apps are not officially supported on MacOS, but instead they tell you that you are not permitted to run your software on your hardware. 
  
  It doesn't matter if you've bought the app.  It doesn't matter if you've bought the computer.  You don't own anything here.  Fuck you.
  
  

The Tokyo Philharmonic Celebrates Haachama's Milestone Video of the Day

Let Me Explain

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 11 2021 03:56 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, February 11 2021 10:34 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: jabrwok at Friday, February 12 2021 02:51 AM (BlRin)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 12 2021 09:46 AM (PiXy!)

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• Need a 28GBps SSD?  Highpoint has you covered, sort of.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a PCIe 4.0 x16 card with an NVMe RAID controller - just 0/1/10, no 5/6 here - that takes eight M.2 devices and merges them into one big, very fast, blob.
  
  Price is around $1300.  You can get much cheaper four-slot adaptors, because those can be done with a passive board and the CPU's own PCIe bifurcation support (simply splitting a x16 link into four x4 links), but if you want this many devices on a single card you need the expensive custom chip.
  
  
  
• Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And announced it would be accepting payments in BTC.
  
  Given the timing, they've probably already made over $500 million on this.
  
  
  
• CD Projekt Red got hacked and is being held to ransom.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Their official response to their Perforce server getting hacked and all the files deleted was Pfft, we use Perforce, there's nothing worse you can do to us.
  
  Also, they have backups.
  
  
  
• Zen 4 could deliver a 25% IPC increase and 40% overall performance boost over Zen 3 or not.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's an awful lot for a fourth-gen part, but their track record so far makes this entirely plausible.  Zen 4 won't be out this year, but there may be a Zen 3+ update in between.
  
  Rumours for Zen 4 are only just starting to appear, but the rumours for Zen 3 were pretty darn accurate.  AMD has spoken publicly about Zen 4 but has given few details so far.  (The Street)
  
  
  
• 20% of all requests to Wikimedia - the image library for Wikipedia - are for one particular photo of a New York aster.  (Wikimedia)
  
  As in the flower.  (Wikipedia)
  
  Nobody knows why.
  
  
  
• PyPI is awash with spam right now.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is bad, first because it's full of spam, and second because if the moderators are busy fighting spam they might miss malware.
  
  
  
• Google's fuckup with Terraria is getting more attention now, though not from Google.
  
  Ars Technica
  
  Rock Paper Shotgun
  
  IGN
  
  PC Magazine
  
  Polygon
  
  The Escapist
  
  The Verge
  
  Curiously enough, DuckDuckGo provides much better search results here than Google itself.
  
  I just wonder how much bad news is required to get Google to respond.  Any competent or honest company would have done something about this already.
  
  
  
• You can't buy a home donut maker in Australia.  They just don't exist.  Commercial unit that can crank out 1750 donuts an hour, sure.   Amazon AU sells those.  Home unit that makes four or six at a time, no.
  
  I could order one from Amazon US, but then I'd need a suitable adaptor, which would cost as much as the donut maker itself.
  
  
  
  
• Monkeys R Us.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 10 2021 03:00 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 10 2021 03:01 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 10 2021 03:06 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 10 2021 03:08 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, February 10 2021 03:37 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, February 10 2021 02:13 PM (Bkp4m)

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• YouTube locked the official channel for Terraria, a game that last time I checked had sold 10 million copies, over a million on Android alone.  (TechRaptor)
  
  
  And their Gmail account.
  
  
  And still hasn't responded three weeks later.
  
  
  Which means the lead developer lost access to everything he had on Google.
  
  
  So they've cancelled their planned launch on Stadia.
  
  
  Because fuck Google.
  
  
  Commenters on Hacker News are unimpressed.  Try Ctrl-F and search in that page for "mafia".  Enjoy.
  
  
  
• They do this to everyone.  Make them ten million dollars a year?  They'll ban you.
  
  Actually work for Google and can escalate through internal channels?  They'll still ban you.
  
  
  
  
  
• How does the Arm Cortex-X1 on a 5nm process compare with the Arm Cortex-X1 on a 5nm process?  (AnandTech)
  
  Okay, it's TSMC's 5nm vs. Samsung's.
  
  
  
• Apparently you can make donuts with pancake mix too, though the recipes vary a lot in complexity.  Some require additional plain flour, eggs, milk, butter, sugar, and so on, others are basically throw the pancake mix in a donut maker.
  
  I really miss donuts.  A single gluten-free donut costs as much as a dozen normal ones.
  
  My grocery order now includes eggs, sugar, cinnamon, blackberry and strawberry jam, and a stick mixer.  I'll have to go to Kmart if I want to get some proper donut trays though.  (I have both a stick mixer and a hand mixer somewhere, I think.  But they're not in the kitchen cupboard, which means they're in a box in the garage with all the spiders and I'd rather just buy a new one.)
  
  
  
• No free plan.  (No Free Plan)
  
  This is sound advice if you have an audience and don't depend on the network effect for growth and sustainability.
  
  They do suggest free trials with long enough periods - and no up-front payment details, free plans for open source projects, and reasonably priced lifetime subscriptions.
  
  
  
• An Android Barcode Scanner app called Barcode Scanner suddenly became malware.  (Malwarebytes)
  
  It had ten million users.
  
  Malwarebytes suggests installing Malwarebytes, which given the context of the article seems just a bit pushy.
  
  I suggest throwing all your Android and iOS devices out the window of a very tall building, preferably one overlooking an active caldera.
  
  
  
• Phishing emails in Morse code?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  So, it has come to this.
  
  
  
• 14 million programmers are using VSCode.  (ZDNet)
  
  VSCode sucks.
  
  
  
• A Paris court has found France guilty of failing to meet commitments under the Paris Agreement.  (CBS)
  
  The US, which withdrew from the agreement entirely, has nonetheless met or exceeded its own commitments.
  
  
  
• Reddit's five-second guerilla SuperbOwl spot.
  
  
  Which they uploaded to Twitter because you can't embed Reddit posts.
  
  
  
• Glenn Greenwald on how the American mainstream media has turned into the Stasi.  (Substack)
  
  CNN, NBC, and the New York Times all have full-time staff dedicated to finding online services that still permit free speech - and destroying them.
  
  
  

Mouse Computer Ad Roundup Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 09 2021 12:31 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 09 2021 12:55 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 09 2021 01:08 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, February 09 2021 03:02 AM (Pl2MP)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 09 2021 03:53 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 09 2021 06:39 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, February 09 2021 09:28 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 10 2021 02:54 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: mikeski at Wednesday, February 10 2021 04:43 AM (P1f+c)

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• I have only one source of gluten-free chicken nuggets, they're not particularly cheap, and they're out of stock half the time.
  
  But I now have a little oven that can cook basically anything and be wiped clean with a handful of paper towels no matter how messy the recipe.  So time to experiment.
  
  I've ordered a big batch of chicken fillets and gluten-free marinades, flour, breadcrumbs, and pancake mix to try out in various combinations.  Plus some vegetables so I can just do a mini roast dinner.  Won't go hungry this week.
  
  
  
• Speaking of PCIe 5.0 Silicon Motion expects to be shipping PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers in the second half of 2022.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No technical details yet, but the first PCIe 4.0 controllers could "only" reach 5GB per second so we might see something similar again.
  
  
  
• Reverse-engineering a one-bit processor.  (Righto)
  
  This is not even a bit-slice CPU, it is literally a one-bit architecture.
  
  
  
• You apparently can stop the Signal.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Iran banned Signal.
  
  Signal suggested users use SSL proxies and provided sample code.
  
  Security researchers posted information about security issues with this approach to GitHub.
  
  Signal said please don't use GitHub for this, post the details to our support forums.
  
  The researchers posted the information to Signal's support forums.
  
  Signal banned them.
  
  
  
• Apps in Apple's App Store lie.  (MSN)
  
  They may say they store no private information, but they do.
  
  When questioned, Apple said - and I quote - "Whatever."
  
  Oh, and that article sets 87 cookies even with AdBlock Plus enabled.  Literally.  I counted them.
  
  
  
• AlmaLinux is a fork of CentOS - specifically CentOS 8.  (AlmaLinux)
  
  Sponsored by CloudLinux, which is a commercial fork of RHEL.  It's out in beta right now.
  
  
  
• The internet is full of crazy people.  (New York Times)
  
  And not all of them work for the New York Times.
  
  
  
• Though many do.
  
  
  They explicitly fired someone for discussing racist language.  Outside of work.  On the other side of the planet.
  
  
  

Twitter Sets Itself On Fire Over Puppets Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 08 2021 02:08 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, February 08 2021 08:55 AM (Bkp4m)

Posted by: Jay at Monday, February 08 2021 01:55 PM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 08 2021 07:54 PM (PiXy!)

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