What is that?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
Monday, July 12
Daily News Stuff 12 July 2021
Working Five To Nine Edition
Working Five To Nine Edition
Top Story
- Kaseya has patched the vulnerabilities that led to over 1500 companies getting compromised with ransomware. (Bleeping Computer)
To be fair, it took a while because there were a lot of bugs needing fixing.
Tech News
- Giant pandas are no longer classified as being endangered. (BBC)
Wait, did China not ruin something for once?
- The free and open internet is under attack all around the world, says Google. (BBC)
"Mostly by us", added CEO Sundar Pichai.
- Cartoon streaming service Toomics filed a bunch of DMCA takedown notices... Against itself. (TorrentFreak)
Neat.
Disclaimer: This is the October that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friends. Some people started living it not knowing what it was....
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Sunday, July 11
Daily News Stuff 11 July 2021
Rolls Of Ricks Edition
Anime of the day is Ushio and Tora - the one from 1992, not the recent remake.
It's the story of Ushio, a kid growing up in a Shinto temple not entirely unlike Tenchi from Tenchi Muyou, whose distant ancestor captured a deadly demon and imprisoned it on the temple grounds, not entirely unlike Tenchi Muyou.
Except instead of a cute - if extremely dangerous - girl, Tora is an enormous tiger-like demon spirit thingy. And its mere presence on the temple grounds draws lesser demons like moths to a flame, so Ushio is forced to release Tora and form a pact before the demons kill him and everyone in the vicinity.
The manga for this ran for 33 volumes and has sold tens of millions of copies. The original 90s OVA series only ran for 11 episodes and finished airing before the manga was even half-way done.
More recently there's been a 39-episode TV remake and unusually for this sort of thing it's not half bad. The animation quality is better and of course it's in all wide-screen and high-definition. And it sticks to a very 90s aesthetic, which I love.
Unfortunately they lost the original soundtrack, which I also love, and replaced it with something that is serviceable but doesn't have any spark for me. On the other hand, you can get the complete Blu-Ray collection for twenty bucks online, and it covers much more of the story than the original version.
There are good clips of the original OVA on YouTube somewhere, but I can't find them anymore because the search results have been overrun by the remake. So this is a clip of the full=length version of the opening theme, rather than what actually appeared in the OVAs.
Yes.
Rolls Of Ricks Edition
Top Story
- How to enable the Windows 10 Start Menu on Windows 11. (Bleeping Computer)
Well, nice that they -
- Too slow. (Bleeping Computer)
This falls under the Stardock Full Employment Act of whenever Windows 8 was released. (The original Windows 8 was unusable without Stardock's Start8. I lasted two days.)
- On the other hand, you can at least control positions for snapping windows. (Thurott.com)
I run two monitors side by side each with two windows snapped into place. I really want a super ultra wide monitor with five or maybe seven windows and no gap in the middle, but Windows 10 doesn't support that.
- Sydney lockdown status report:
It's the story of Ushio, a kid growing up in a Shinto temple not entirely unlike Tenchi from Tenchi Muyou, whose distant ancestor captured a deadly demon and imprisoned it on the temple grounds, not entirely unlike Tenchi Muyou.
Except instead of a cute - if extremely dangerous - girl, Tora is an enormous tiger-like demon spirit thingy. And its mere presence on the temple grounds draws lesser demons like moths to a flame, so Ushio is forced to release Tora and form a pact before the demons kill him and everyone in the vicinity.
The manga for this ran for 33 volumes and has sold tens of millions of copies. The original 90s OVA series only ran for 11 episodes and finished airing before the manga was even half-way done.
More recently there's been a 39-episode TV remake and unusually for this sort of thing it's not half bad. The animation quality is better and of course it's in all wide-screen and high-definition. And it sticks to a very 90s aesthetic, which I love.
Unfortunately they lost the original soundtrack, which I also love, and replaced it with something that is serviceable but doesn't have any spark for me. On the other hand, you can get the complete Blu-Ray collection for twenty bucks online, and it covers much more of the story than the original version.
There are good clips of the original OVA on YouTube somewhere, but I can't find them anymore because the search results have been overrun by the remake. So this is a clip of the full=length version of the opening theme, rather than what actually appeared in the OVAs.
Tech News
- You're a slave to multiple masters, with no rights whatsoever. Here's why that's a good thing. (Gizmodo)
The author explains that it's a good thing because she has the mental capacity of a retarded mosquito.
- AMD's 4700S might be a faulty PlayStation 5 chip with disabled graphics and not an Xbox chip. (Tom's Hardware)
Looking at the side by side photos, that assessment seems correct to me. The CPU cores are identical and the graphics switched off, so it was only by looking at the physical chips that someone could confirm this.
Asked to confirm this, AMD said:AMD 4700S Desktop Kit is its own unique solution, designed to address the desire for robust, high-core count performance in the mainstream market – ideal for multi-tasking, productivity, and light 3D workflows.
Which is a lot of words for yes but I'm not allowed to say so.
- How to merge two Apple IDs into one, part one of sixty. (Brian Stucki)
1. Don't.
2. No, seriously, don't.
3. Beer.
4. Wait, what was I doing again?
- Science Based Medicine shoots self in foot, reloads, and repeats. (Jesse Singal)
Science Based Medicine is an effort to defend medicine from obvious quackery - homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic bullshit, healing crystals and a hundred other kinds of fashionable nonsense - and also from irreproducible research, noting that half of all new research papers published in medical journals are wrong to the point of worthlessness.
Unfortunately - and this is something I've noticed before, because I've been following them for more than a decade - they all lean left politically and are utterly blind to bullshit dressed in the trappings of progressivism.
In this case it's the blatantly obvious moral panic of transgender teenagers, and the accompanying idea that irreversible medical interventions on minors are suddenly a good idea because shut up you bigot.
This ideological blindness is why I dropped almost all the podcasts I listened to a year ago and switched to Hololive and other vtubers. It means I need to read the news rather than listening to it while I work, but it also means that I don't get enraged by fresh outbreaks of woke insanity every fifty minutes.
If it comes to a choice between science and tech mixed with socialism and a Japanese-speaking Australian girl swearing at a thousand words per minute and singing the Aeroplane Jelly song, I'll take the latter.
Oh, the article tearing Science Based Medicine a new arsehole is written by Jesse Singal, who is kind of annoying in his own right. He correctly identified the dangers of CRT and the rest of the woke bullshit but voted for Biden because he thought that would calm things down which is, if not quite the stupidest decision imaginable, at least commendable effort.
Vtuber of the Day
So IRyS - Hololive EN's new diva - debuted today, with 90,000 live viewers and 338,000 subscribers. She even at the last minute managed to get her Twitter account unlocked.
Her audio wasn't working on her first three attempts but she just kept going until it did, and minor scuffage aside it was a big success.
I was hoping she'd have the opportunity to do some game and/or chat streams and not spend all her time recording music as Hololive originally did with AZKi but it looks like she's going full blast into a regular streaming schedule interspersed with music instead.
Oh, and Olivia from HoloID had her interdimensional debut due to Ame stepping on a bug.
I was hoping she'd have the opportunity to do some game and/or chat streams and not spend all her time recording music as Hololive originally did with AZKi but it looks like she's going full blast into a regular streaming schedule interspersed with music instead.
Oh, and Olivia from HoloID had her interdimensional debut due to Ame stepping on a bug.
But neither IRyS nor Ollie's Outer Limits sister nor new crazy Aussie sheila Luto from PRISM are today's vtuber of the day. Instead we have - spoiler warning - successful indie streamer kson ONAIR.
kson streams most often on Japanese site Mildom - great naming, guys - but also has 662,000 subscribers on YouTube. She's an avid cosplayer, making her own top-notch costumes and also filling them out rather well.
kson streams most often on Japanese site Mildom - great naming, guys - but also has 662,000 subscribers on YouTube. She's an avid cosplayer, making her own top-notch costumes and also filling them out rather well.
She also has - spoiler warning - a rather distinctive voice.
Yes, if you ignored the warnings, that is exactly who you think it is.
Update: Can I embed a tweet within a spoiler tag? Let's find out!
Yes, if you ignored the warnings, that is exactly who you think it is.
Update: Can I embed a tweet within a spoiler tag? Let's find out!
Yes.
Anime Music Intermission Video of the Day
The original Ushio and Tora also included a bonus comedy episode called the CD Theatre, with little skits interspersed with songs like this one.
Oh, wait, the whole damn bonus episode is on YouTube and it's not even region locked.
Enjoy!
Oh, it's dubbed. Never mind, at least they didn't mess with the songs.
They didn't mess with the songs, right? Tell me they didn't mess with the songs!
Oh, wait, the whole damn bonus episode is on YouTube and it's not even region locked.
Enjoy!
Oh, it's dubbed. Never mind, at least they didn't mess with the songs.
They didn't mess with the songs, right? Tell me they didn't mess with the songs!
Disclaimer: They didn't mess with the songs.
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Saturday, July 10
Daily News Stuff 10 July 2021
Slow News Is Good News
Anime of the day is Noragami from 2014, the story of - essentially - a gig-work god. Yato has no shrines dedicated to him, but is dedicated to accumulating one million subscribers, like Ayame of Hololive.
To that end he posts fliers offering to solve people's problems for five yen, which is working out about as well for him as you would expect. His luck starts to change - in multiple directions - when he runs into a human girl named Hiyori who saves him from an oncoming car - at the expense of a herniated soul. At which point she's kind of stuck with Yato because he's the only one likely to be able to fix it.
There's a second season in 2015 that follows directly on from the first, and twenty-odd volumes of manga that carry the story on a lot further.
She got so deep into the plot in this morning's stream that she's doing Episode Three Part Two later this evening because she can't put it down.
This is scheduled for the same time tonight as Mooyü's Hatoful Boyfriend Episode Three Part Two, but Risu is my favourite of HoloID and this game is perfect for her.
I guess I'll watch Mooyü live and then catch what I can of Risu.
There are just too many English-language vtubers streaming good content. Something needs to be done.
Also, Calli / Gura Minecraft collab tomorrow, I think. If Gura's still alive and sane after a nearly seven hour Minecraft collab today with Kiara. I watched a bit, went back to sleep for three hours (it started at 5AM my time), and woke up expecting it to be over, but it wasn't even close.
Slow News Is Good News
Top Story
- Nothing has gone horribly wrong in the tech world in the last 24 hours.
- The NSW state government has gone full fascist, though. And this is what passes for our conservative party; the other lot are even worse.
So far the police have just said they may arrest people for buying things "we don't think they need" - like shoes. In Victoria they were kicking down doors over Facebook posts.
They actually did something similar - arresting people suspected of existing without a license - during the first outbreak early last year - but then the had the slim excuse of not knowing how severe it was or how fast it might spread, and there was no vaccine.
But thin as that excuse was back then, it doesn't exist at all now. I'll see these fuckers in Hell before they get my vote again.
- Samsung's 3nm GAA process will go into early production next year, with full commercial production in 2023. (AnandTech)
TSMC's 3nm process is expected to go into full production next year, but it's still what is known as FINFET - the transistor design introduced by Intel with their 22nm node. Gate All Around, or GAA, is the next generation design, but TSMC have pushed it back to their 2nm node, which will probably appear in 2023 at the same time as Samsung's commercial ramp up.
The early production next year probably means just Samsung's own chips, which could give their devices a competitive edge for a while.
Samsung will also have a 4nm process in full production next year. As a reference point, Nvidia's latest graphics chips are produced on Samsung's 8nm process, so there are some big upgrades in the pipeline if they ever get the pipeline under control.
To that end he posts fliers offering to solve people's problems for five yen, which is working out about as well for him as you would expect. His luck starts to change - in multiple directions - when he runs into a human girl named Hiyori who saves him from an oncoming car - at the expense of a herniated soul. At which point she's kind of stuck with Yato because he's the only one likely to be able to fix it.
There's a second season in 2015 that follows directly on from the first, and twenty-odd volumes of manga that carry the story on a lot further.
Tech News
- Backblaze says that farming Chia - the cryptocurrency, that is - isn't profitable. (Tom's Hardware)
Not even for them, and they have better economies of scale than anyone else in the world.
They'll still let you pay to do it on their servers, they just point out that you're going to lose money.
- Intel's SSD D7-P5510 SSD is nearly as fast as that Optane drive from the other day, has ten times the capacity, and is 20% cheaper. (Hot Hardware)
There are reasons Intel and Micron's Xpoint storage technology - used in Optane - hasn't set the world on fire: It's too expensive to produce in bulk, and smart controllers and caches mean flash-based storage can keep up with Xpoint in almost all cases.
Xpoint is also being targeted at non-volatile memory, but even there it's not much cheaper than RAM, so it's another niche market.
Anyway, $1600 for a 7.68TB PCIe 4.0 enterprise SSD is pretty good value. Still a lot of money, sure, but that's roughly the same price per GB as high-end desktop drives like the Samsung 980 Pro. And the kind of server you'd put this drive in would probably have two CPUs in the $4000 to $8000 range.
- Tencent is spying on children. (Bloomberg)
Kids are staying up late playing games. I know, lets monitor their activity using video cameras and secret AI. That'll fix everything.
- Samsung's app to control their internet-connected washing machine requires access to your location, phone calls, media, contacts, bank account, voting record, last three payslips, and the contents of your fridge. (Vice)
I've noticed something similar with Japanese web apps - they just ask for a whole slate of permissions they can't possibly need because their audience just clicks okay.
And there's an added problem that if you change the permissions requested you need to re-submit your app for authorisation. Even if you require fewer permissions than before.
I have an internet-enabled washing machine from LG. I wanted a combination washer/dryer, and they all had that.
The fact that it's internet-enabled doesn't mean it has internet access, of course. It's a bit of a pain, though, because simple, obvious functions like remembering the wash cycle from last time are relegated to the LG Android app, and there is no way in Hell I'm going to use the app.
- Chrome for Android is always connected to Google Search. (Ctrl Blog)
This makes sense from a performance standpoint, because resolving DNS - particularly over a secure connection - and then establishing the secure connection for the website itself - takes long enough for a user to notice.
And in theory Brave could arrange to do the same with Duck Duck Go. Not without asking, though, because millions of unused connections that are permanently open would be rather a nuisance.
Vtuber of the Day
Vtuber of they day is Mooyü, one of Vyolfers' circle of friends. She plays Minecraft on their server - known as Gwemshire - which is notable for its cottagecore aesthetics where Hololive Japan's server is a cross between WWIII and Disneyland.
She also does drawing streams - she designed and rigged her own Live2D avatar - and a weekly session playing through dating sims, starting with Hatoful Boyfriend - the one where all the romantic targets are birds. Mostly pigeons.
I knew of Hatoful Boyfriend, but I didn't know exactly what it was about. I thought it was just a weird quirky game where you date birds for a reason they never bothered to explain. Well, it is a weird quirky game where you date birds, that much is true.
She got so deep into the plot in this morning's stream that she's doing Episode Three Part Two later this evening because she can't put it down.
Update: Episode Three Part Three tomorrow.
Ayunda Stickmin Video of the Day
This is scheduled for the same time tonight as Mooyü's Hatoful Boyfriend Episode Three Part Two, but Risu is my favourite of HoloID and this game is perfect for her.
I guess I'll watch Mooyü live and then catch what I can of Risu.
There are just too many English-language vtubers streaming good content. Something needs to be done.
Also, Calli / Gura Minecraft collab tomorrow, I think. If Gura's still alive and sane after a nearly seven hour Minecraft collab today with Kiara. I watched a bit, went back to sleep for three hours (it started at 5AM my time), and woke up expecting it to be over, but it wasn't even close.
And the Irys debut tomorrow as well. She's still banned from Twitter, so that will be interesting.
Disclaimer: Quis fuckodiet ipsos custodes?
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Friday, July 09
Daily News Stuff 9 July 2021
Revenge Of The UPRP Edition
Anime of the day is Little Witch Academia. Actually, I thought I had already done this one, but I checked and I had only posted an AMV.
This originated in 2013 as a short film produced on a small budget, followed in 2015 by a second, longer film with funds raised on Kickstarter. It hit its funding target in five hours - that first film was very popular among the anime community.
And that was followed by a 25-episode TV series in 2017, which is what I'm discussing here. The TV series doesn't quite follow the continuity of the two movies - it starts earlier and events play out differently - but the characters and motivations are all the same, so the movies work just fine either as an introduction or as side stories.
If you think of this as Harriet Potter you won't be too far wrong, except that our heroine Akko is kind of an inverse of Harry Potter. Her parents are supportive of her pursuit of magic, but rather than being her generation's designated hero from the outset, she's just plain not very good at it.
She's surrounded by a wonderful supporting cast, ranging from mushroom queen Sucy to token sane person Lotte to not-very-well-hidden-secret-identity Professor Ursula. The story wanders a bit, but it's enjoyable throughout, and when it all comes together in the last few episodes it's really great stuff.
In my opinion this is the best anime series of the last five years. Highly, highly recommended.
One of my favourite AMVs from this series; it highlights a lot of great character moments, though you won't realise their impact until you've seen the show.
The other instant classic LWA AMV, this one focuses on Sucy and particularly on the Sucy episode, which is a better introduction to philosophy than any university is likely to offer these days.
And she can sing:
Oh, and she composed, wrote, and mixed that song herself.
And she plays Minecraft.
And she speaks fluent English and Japanese. That seems to be Prism's niche - English language streams from Japan - and I hope it works for them.
Also, she loves terrible jokes. The worse, the better.
Revenge Of The UPRP Edition
Top Story
- The lesser of two REvils: The recent Russian ransomware attack was the biggest in history - but not the smartest. (Bleeping Computer)
Although it affected at least 1500 businesses and possibly many more, the broad scope of the attack meant it wasn't tailored to anyone in particular - and it left backups intact.
So victims are, for the most part, restoring backups rather than coughing up.
This originated in 2013 as a short film produced on a small budget, followed in 2015 by a second, longer film with funds raised on Kickstarter. It hit its funding target in five hours - that first film was very popular among the anime community.
And that was followed by a 25-episode TV series in 2017, which is what I'm discussing here. The TV series doesn't quite follow the continuity of the two movies - it starts earlier and events play out differently - but the characters and motivations are all the same, so the movies work just fine either as an introduction or as side stories.
If you think of this as Harriet Potter you won't be too far wrong, except that our heroine Akko is kind of an inverse of Harry Potter. Her parents are supportive of her pursuit of magic, but rather than being her generation's designated hero from the outset, she's just plain not very good at it.
She's surrounded by a wonderful supporting cast, ranging from mushroom queen Sucy to token sane person Lotte to not-very-well-hidden-secret-identity Professor Ursula. The story wanders a bit, but it's enjoyable throughout, and when it all comes together in the last few episodes it's really great stuff.
In my opinion this is the best anime series of the last five years. Highly, highly recommended.
Tech News
- Ethereum miners are dumping used video cards onto the second-hand market. (Tom's Hardware)
Don't buy them, they're probably fried from being run 24/7 in an overheated server room, by which I mean a tin shed somewhere outside Shenzhen.
My benchmark 6700 XT still hasn't dropped below A$1000, but availability is vastly improved from a few weeks ago. All models from both AMD and Nvidia are in stock from multiple brands in multiple online stores.
- The new Atari console is kind of crap. (Tom's Hardware)
It's not a hardware issue; with an AMD Ryzen APU and 8GB of RAM, it has more than enough horsepower. The software, on the other hand, is kind of broken, even at the BIOS level. You can install Windows 10, since it's really jut a PC, but good luck getting it to run apps without constantly throwing up errors.
Unfortunately you're much better off with a Raspberry Pi and your choice of free emulators.
- The Radeon 6600 XT will reportedly launch next month with an MSRP of $399. (WCCFTech)
If the 6700 XT was selling for anything like its MSRP of $479 it would be a no-brainer to go for the faster card. In reality it's selling at a premium of about 60% here in Australia and 80% in the US, so any real comparison will have to wait for street prices of the 6600 XT.
The new card has 80% of the shaders, 66% of the memory and memory bandwidth, and just 33% of the on-chip cache. So how it performs will be very dependent on the game you're playing.
Wait for benchmarks.
- There are many options for API pagination. (GitHub)
All of them are annoying.
- Don't buy the Lexar NM620 NVMe SSD. (Serve the Home)
Once it fills its pseudo-SLC cache, sequential writes drop to the speed of a regular disk drive.
A laptop drive.
From around 1998.
Probably just a firmware issue, but that's their problem.
- Google is dropping Play Services support for Android Jelly Bean. (ZDNet)
I'm totally fine with this. That's versions 4.1 through 4.3, and the new baseline for ongoing support will be Kit Kat - Android 4.4.
Even my 2013 Nexus 7 has updated to Android 6. If you have something still running on 4.1 with no way to upgrade, well, congratulations on keeping it going for eight or ten years, but maybe time to look at something slightly newer?
- California exodus is just a myth, says.... California. (SFGate)
The University of California's Department of Denying Reality looked into the question and said, and I quote, Nuh-uh.
- Also there are no problems with the water supply in the state. (Axios)
You just can't have any.
Little Witch Anime Music Videos of the Day
One of my favourite AMVs from this series; it highlights a lot of great character moments, though you won't realise their impact until you've seen the show.
The other instant classic LWA AMV, this one focuses on Sucy and particularly on the Sucy episode, which is a better introduction to philosophy than any university is likely to offer these days.
Vtuber of the Day
Vtuber of the day is Pina Pengin from PRISM Project.
PRISM only started up this year, and Pina is in their third generation and only debuted at the end of June - less than two weeks ago.
But she can draw:
PRISM only started up this year, and Pina is in their third generation and only debuted at the end of June - less than two weeks ago.
But she can draw:
And she can sing:
Oh, and she composed, wrote, and mixed that song herself.
And she plays Minecraft.
And she speaks fluent English and Japanese. That seems to be Prism's niche - English language streams from Japan - and I hope it works for them.
Also, she loves terrible jokes. The worse, the better.
Speaking of Minecraft, they seriously bookended my weekend. Kiara and Gura at 5AM Saturday, Calli and Gura at midnight Sunday. Amelia at 3PM Saturday. Ina jumped in early at 6 o'clock this morning, when I would normally be sound asleep except for the emergency wakeup call from work at 4AM.
And Vyolfers at 10AM. And I haven't even finished watching Elira and Pomu's (from Nijisanji EN) stream from yesterday. Oh, and Pomu was playing Shantae today.
And Ina is already talking about inviting IRyS to play Minecraft with the rest of HoloEN, and there's a whole new generation coming in a month or so.
I will watch anime again at some point. If nothing else, the new season of Non Non Biyori.
Disclaimer: Not that that is saying very much.
And Ina is already talking about inviting IRyS to play Minecraft with the rest of HoloEN, and there's a whole new generation coming in a month or so.
I will watch anime again at some point. If nothing else, the new season of Non Non Biyori.
Disclaimer: Not that that is saying very much.
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Thursday, July 08
Daily News Stuff 8 July 2021
Eternal October Edition
Anime of the day is Tenshi ni Narumon - I'm Gonna Be An Angel - from 1999. I couldn't find a decent clip of the opening credits, but here's the whole first episode.... Dubbed into Spanish. Don't say I never give you anything.
This is unusually cartoonish for anime - you can see the style in the opening credits, which fortunately were not dubbed - but it has its own weird charm.
There won't be a dry seat in the house when you get to the scene where - as I wrote at the time - our hero and his maybe-girlfriend (aged 16-going-on-4) are plummeting to their deaths from the school clock tower whence they have been ejected by a perverted demon puppet, but are rescued in the nick of time by our brave (if scatterbrained) heroine wearing mechanical wings and a rocket pack (made by her little sister) - and a durian on her head - at the precise moment the Earth is undergoing a very near miss from a rather unlikely short-period comet.
That's one episode.
Pikamee is fluent in spoken English and pretty good at written English, but her partner in the VOMS project Tomoshika is still learning and sometimes trips up resulting in clips with millions upon million of views.
The song - consisting entirely of Japanese onomatopoeia - was written by Gyari, the founder of VOMS, and covered here by Sakura Miko of Hololive Generation 0.
Eternal October Edition
Top Story
- npm audit is broken by design. (Overreacted)
To unpack that: npm audit is a tool for tracking the infinite number of vulnerabilities NPM causes. NPM is the unbelievably awful package manager for Node.js. Node.js is the godforsaken fusion of JavaScript and interrupt-driven code for server-side applications.
And JavaScript is a quick hack Brendan Eich threw together over a weekend in 1995 to get some basic field validation into Netscape Navigator.
It's all broken, in every way imaginable, and in many ways impossible to imagine.
This is unusually cartoonish for anime - you can see the style in the opening credits, which fortunately were not dubbed - but it has its own weird charm.
There won't be a dry seat in the house when you get to the scene where - as I wrote at the time - our hero and his maybe-girlfriend (aged 16-going-on-4) are plummeting to their deaths from the school clock tower whence they have been ejected by a perverted demon puppet, but are rescued in the nick of time by our brave (if scatterbrained) heroine wearing mechanical wings and a rocket pack (made by her little sister) - and a durian on her head - at the precise moment the Earth is undergoing a very near miss from a rather unlikely short-period comet.
That's one episode.
Tech News
- Gigabyte has announced a 10Gbit Ethernet card. (Tom's Hardware)
I can't even remember when I upgrade to gigabit ethernet - twenty years ago, maybe - and we're still mostly stuck at that speed. Recent motherboards have started to show up with 2.5Gb Ethernet, and 100Gb cards are readily available, but the switch situation is a complete nightmare.
- Unexpectedly: Neurons encode information in the timing of their firing. (Quanta)
Speaking from a computer and network background, why the bleeping bleep was this in any way unexpected? It's entirely routine in computer networks - and in pre-computer networks like the telegraph system - so there's no reason to expect the brain not to have evolved the same tricks in some form.
Neuroscientists love to tell people that the brain is not a computer, but all they show when they say that is they don't know what computers are.
- 36 US states and one swamp are going after Google for monopolistic shit relating to the Play Store. (Thurrott.com)
Don't know if this will also run afoul of a random Hawaiian judge the way the Facebook case recently did, but keep it up guys.
- What browser should you use to replace Chrome? (ZDNet)
They suggest Brave, and it's a good choice. I'm running it on my Android tablet and I get the occasional UI glitch - which might be due to the fact that I'm browsing huge pages on an old A53 CPU - but it's quickly fixed by switching out of the app and then back in again.
It has built in ad blocking, when Chrome on Android doesn't even allow you to set up a plugin for that.
- A Chinese prenatal test has been used by the PLA to gather genetic data on millions of women. (Reuters)
The privacy agreement promises to hold the data confidential unless... Basically unless the Chinese government wants to take a look.
- New Hololive member IRyS has now passed 200,000 subscribers, without posting anything, and 150,000 Twitter followers, with a single tweet and her account restricted - still, because this is Twitter.
Meanwhile YouTube demonetised Pikamee, everyone's favourite electric kettle, and in a shocking turn of events admitted it was a mistake and fixed it in a matter of hours.
- It never rains but it rains some more, particularly when there's an idiot on the roof with a hose.
Marine only has 1.4 million subscribers. No reason to maybe assign someone to take a look before deleting her entire fucking account.
Yes, it's back now. But maybe, YouTube, maybe you could try skipping the part where you delete the entire account and go straight to the having something with a functioning brain check on things?
Let's Kill Da Ho Vtuber Clip of the Day
Pikamee is fluent in spoken English and pretty good at written English, but her partner in the VOMS project Tomoshika is still learning and sometimes trips up resulting in clips with millions upon million of views.
HoloVOMS Anime Music Video Clip of the Day
The song - consisting entirely of Japanese onomatopoeia - was written by Gyari, the founder of VOMS, and covered here by Sakura Miko of Hololive Generation 0.
Disclaimer: Could be worse. Could be engulfed in a pyroclastic flow, and also raining.
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Wednesday, July 07
Daily News Stuff 7 July 2021
Reschedule Everything Edition
Anime of the day is Jungle wa Itsumo Hale nochi Guu, a.k.a Haré+Guu, from 2001 - with two OVA sequel series in 2003 and 2004.
It's the story of Guu, the cute little pink-haired girl in the credits, who is basically Cthulhu, and Hale, a ten-year-old boy who is the only person who seems to notice that she literally eats people.
Well, not eat, exactly. Swallow, yes. But not eat, as such.
This one is just a tiny bit odd.
Reschedule Everything Edition
Top Story
- Australia is getting a shiny new computer. (Tom's Hardware)
200,000 cores, 750 next-gen graphics cards (with 128GB of RAM each), 548TB of total RAM, 2.7PB of SSD, and over 100PB of total storage.
It will be used for radio astronomy and Minecraft. Well, mostly Minecraft.
- Hololive announced their new English-branch VSinger - that is, a real human vocalist using a virtual avatar - about seven hours ago.
Her name is IRyS - her equivalent in the Japanese branch is called AZKi, so there's something of a theme there - and she has 122,000 subscribers on YouTube so far.
Without actually streaming anything - she won't debut until Sunday.
100,000 subscribers used to be a lot for a vtuber. Nijisanji's new EN branch all hit it in their first month; Hololive talents now hit it before their channels go live.
Meanwhile, Twitter being Twitter has restricted her account.
- And now YouTube has demonetised Pikamee.
Pikamee.
If they don't fix that quick smart, we riot.
Update: They fixed it quick smart. For once. Riot cancelled.
It's the story of Guu, the cute little pink-haired girl in the credits, who is basically Cthulhu, and Hale, a ten-year-old boy who is the only person who seems to notice that she literally eats people.
Well, not eat, exactly. Swallow, yes. But not eat, as such.
This one is just a tiny bit odd.
Tech News
- Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks: Oppo is doing weird shit, and not always to their advantage. (AnandTech)
Apps don't always load on the fastest X1 core - I don't know of any phone CPU that has more than one of Arm's new X1 core - and don't always even run the A78 cores at full speed. In some cases Vivaldi can run six times faster than Chrome even though they use the same rendering engine.
It looks like an error in the power vs. performance profile of the phone, that it's trying to reduce power of apps where it should be maximising performance. Phones have been caught cheating benchmark results before by detecting that a benchmark was running and turning everything up to max just short of melting the phone entirely.
But this is the opposite of that.
- JEDI has been cancelled. (Tom's Hardware)
The Trump Administration awarded a major contract to Microsoft to run cloud services for the DoD, as the obviously least sucky option.
New administration, new priorities. Since the goal now is to make everything suck as much as humanly possible, the deal has been cancelled and will now be split up into an obviously unworkable hell-brew spread across every cloud platform in existence.
- There's a big bug in Windows printing. (WCCFTech)
If you have remote printing enabled, and attacker on your network can take over your computer - bad enough if you're just sharing a printer from your PC, a lot worse if it's an enterprise server.
Patches are out now for Windows 7, 8, 10, and Server 2008 R2, 2012, and 2019.
If you're running something older than 7, you probably still have the bug, but there's not going to be a patch.
- An 800GB Optane P5800X costs $2044. (Serve the Home)
It is fast, yes. But for that price you can get a 6.4TB Micron 9300 Max, with an 11 microsecond average write latency - barely slower than the Optane - and a 37PB total write endurance.
The big difference is in read latency, but given the price difference it might be better to save your money and add 256GB of RAM instead.
- WSL2 on Windows 11 vs Ubuntu. (Phoronix)
I use WSL - Linux on Windows - every day. Its a big upgrade over Cygwin, since it's real Linux, and you can just download regular Linux apps and run them.
These benchmarks show that if you're not doing a lot of I/O, it's basically indistinguishable from the real thing.
If you are doing a lot of I/O, though... Not so hard to distinguish.
- The US has reserved the right to consider sending a strongly-worded letter to Russia if it keeps attacking US companies. (Bleeping Computer)
Maybe Joe can make another list.
Stacy's Mom's Anime Music Video of the Day
Nearly forgot about this one, which would have been a crime.
Disclaimer: Mep.
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Tuesday, July 06
Daily News Stuff 6 July 2021
Faster Than The Bear Edition
Anime of the day is Keroro Gunso, a.k.a Sgt. Frog, which ran for 358 episodes and five movies from 2004 to 2011. The manga for it in fact is still running today.
It tells the story of an alien invasion that doesn't go entirely as the conquerors had planned, when the invasion force turns out to be five small frogs who are bullied into submission by a teenage girl.
Faster Than The Bear Edition
Top Story
- REvil has asked for $70 million to decrypt all the victims of their latest attack. (Bleeping Computer)
I can't be the only one wondering what would come out of comparison shopping that price against contracting the Russian mob to remove the problem entirely.
REvil themselves appear to have been doing some calculations because they quickly lowered the price to $50 million.
It tells the story of an alien invasion that doesn't go entirely as the conquerors had planned, when the invasion force turns out to be five small frogs who are bullied into submission by a teenage girl.
Tech News
- News you can use: How to uninstall Windows 11 and roll back to Windows 10. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, if you followed yesterday's news, step one is to delete your virtual machine.
- Don't buy a GPU! (WCCFTech)
They're actually in stock consistently right now, and prices are starting to trend downwards, but indications are this is going to accelerate in the next few weeks as Chinese crypto miners dump their cards onto eBay.
- QNAP has fixed a critical vulnerability in their backup and disaster recovery software. (Bleeping Computer)
No, not that one, a new one.
- Is Audacity suddenly spyware? (PC Magazine)
If you have to ban children from using your product because it forcibly collects personal data, that's a pretty clear signal you're doing something you shouldn't.
And it's proof that there are worse hosts for open-source projects than Oracle, who, amazingly, still haven't ruined MySQL. I mean, it has some - quirks, shall we say - but it's still free.
- Facebook, Twitter, and Google have threatened to drop services to Hong Kong. (WSJ)
I mean.... Fuck everyone in this situation except for the citizens of Hong Kong.
Disclaimer: Fuck Google in particular, twice. After I secure supplies of amoxicillin.
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Monday, July 05
Daily News Stuff 5 July 2021
All The Minecrafts Edition
Anime of the day is Hellsing from 2001 - the original TV series, not the later OVA series, which I haven't seen.
The series follows the work of the Hellsing Organisation, led by Sir Integra Hellsing - the blond woman you can see ranting in the opening credits, Japan still not quite grasping British titles - to defend Britain against the depredations of the Catholic Church, or at least rogue elements thereof.
It also features Alucard - never much of a pseudonym, that - and Seras Victoria, a policewoman-turned-vampire who carries first a .50 sniper rifle, and later, when things start to get rough, twin 30mm autocannons.
Hellsing Ultimate is supposed to be a better and more complete adaptation, but the animation in the clips I've seen drove me forcibly away.
Disclaimer: Part of this complete breakfast.
All The Minecrafts Edition
Tech News
- The Russian ransomware attack that had hit over five hundred companies a couple of days ago has now expanded to thousands of victims in 17 countries. (AP)
The attack vector was managed services provider Kaseya. (Who?)
I look on all such companies as disease vectors. I've had to integrate with some of them to meet customer requirements but those integrations live in their own little containers with tightly controlled access.
Coincidentally, REvil, the group behind the attack, is also a managed services provider - of ransomware.
- Speaking of vtubers trying to kill me with Minecraft streams, today's lineup included Pomu and Elira from Nijisanji EN, Vyolfers, Mooyü, Nymroot, and Hyanna from VMN having a 4th of July fireworks party, Pina Pengin from PRISM, Ollie from Hololive Indonesia - live right now - and shortly Pikamee from VOMS.
All in English, or at least multilingual.
The series follows the work of the Hellsing Organisation, led by Sir Integra Hellsing - the blond woman you can see ranting in the opening credits, Japan still not quite grasping British titles - to defend Britain against the depredations of the Catholic Church, or at least rogue elements thereof.
It also features Alucard - never much of a pseudonym, that - and Seras Victoria, a policewoman-turned-vampire who carries first a .50 sniper rifle, and later, when things start to get rough, twin 30mm autocannons.
Hellsing Ultimate is supposed to be a better and more complete adaptation, but the animation in the clips I've seen drove me forcibly away.
Tech News
- How to install Windows 11 in a virtual machine. (Tom's Hardware)
That's not a bad idea. It's very tempting, in fact.
I'm not sure how well virtualisation handles gaming these days, not that I have time to play anything more demanding than Minecraft - and the last few weeks, not that either.
- Qualcomm might move to TSMC's 4nm node for the Snapdragon 895+. (WCCFTech)
The other reason the 888+ is barely faster than the 888 is that Samsung hasn't made much with its fab technology in the past year. Qualcomm is using Samsung because - like Nvidia - they waited too long to book capacity at TSMC.
Not that Samsung is bad; they're just a year or so behind the cutting edge.
- Well, you can't prove it wasn't a cosmic ray. (Google Groups)
An SSL certificate chain got derailed by a single-bit error in one of the entries. The hashes used to verify this have no built-in error-checking or redundancy; that's expected to be handled at lower levels. So if a bit flip happens in a way to escape those checks, the whole thing falls over.
Well, one copy of the whole thing. There are also multiple copies.
- PCIe 5.0 SSDs are on their way. (Serve the Home)
For servers, anyway. Not for you just yet.
One of the use cases is for redundant backplane links for high availability. These drives can provide two x2 connections to different controllers, each as fast as an existing PCIe 4.0 x4 interface.
- Windows on Arm is not great. (ZDNet)
Microsoft's support is half-hearted, and Qualcomm's hardware is half-assed. And the devices are not designed to be fixed when they go wrong.
Like Apple, only somehow worse.
- Rent seekers gonna rent seek. (TorrentFreak)
"The Smart Fund is not a tax, as a tax would be paid to government. It's good old-fashioned extortion," The Smart Fund says.
Making Bacon Pancakes Anime Music Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Part of this complete breakfast.
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Sunday, July 04
Daily News Stuff 4 July 2021
You Know, The Thing Day Edition
Anime of the day is Tenshi na Konamaiki from 2002. It's the story of Megumi - voiced by Megumi Hayashibara - who is a boy cursed by a demon and changed into a beautiful girl.
Who still acts like a boy, and punches the crap out of anyone who gets too familiar.
Megumi and her friends are trying to track down the demon to get her uncursed, not that anyone entirely believes her. And in fact the story is a bit more complicated than she is letting on.
It's not the best quality video clip, unfortunately. I have a number of favourites I've put off posting because there aren't good clips available of the opening credits. Sometimes it's just the video quality of older shows that haven't had a digital re-release, but most often it's Japanese record labels deleting everything on sight.
Anime: Girls und Panzer, High School Fleet, Gate, Strike Witches.
You Know, The Thing Day Edition
Top Story
- Happy Independence Day, everyone!
- Windows 11 is all about security. (PC Perspective)
For Microsoft. Not for you.
It's kind of refreshing to see a blatant money grab instead of a company refusing to take your business because you once were within 400 yards of someone who expressed an unapproved opinion.
Because when a corporation only cares about money, the problem can be solved with money.
Who still acts like a boy, and punches the crap out of anyone who gets too familiar.
Megumi and her friends are trying to track down the demon to get her uncursed, not that anyone entirely believes her. And in fact the story is a bit more complicated than she is letting on.
It's not the best quality video clip, unfortunately. I have a number of favourites I've put off posting because there aren't good clips available of the opening credits. Sometimes it's just the video quality of older shows that haven't had a digital re-release, but most often it's Japanese record labels deleting everything on sight.
Tech News
- Samsung has a new small tablet - the 8.7" 2021 A7 Lite. (Tom's Guide)
8.7" is rather pushing the boundary of small, and this is heavier than my 2013 Nexus 7. That's not the problem, though; it's still smaller and lighter than my 10.4" Lenovo tablet
It uses the same CPU as the Lenovo - an 8-core A53 - so it's not super fast. But it's adequate. That's not the problem either.
It's not sold in Australia, so I have to import it, which gives a budget tablet a mid-range price. That's still not the problem.
The problem is that it has a 1340x800 screen. That's essentially the same as the original model of the Nexus 7 from 2012, and everyone remarked how much better the 2013 model was with its 1920x1200 screen.
That resolution is not good enough for reading books or web pages on a screen that size. The defects in the typography are very noticeable. You can maybe get away with it on a 6" phone screen, but I went with the Oppo A91 specifically because it had a 1080p screen and most of the competition at that price point didn't.
Though they did last year. Things have gone backwards.
Given the cost of importing this, I might as well get Lenovo's 8" tablet at less than half the price. It also has an inadequate screen, but at least it's priced to match.
- If you can't get a graphics card right now the Ryzen 5700G provides the fastest desktop integrated graphics around without skimping on the CPU. (Tom's Hardware)
You can't get the 5700G either, or not as a retail part. It's shipping in prebuilt systems already and should be available as a retail component next month.
Really looking forward to seeing what Rembrandt can do. The 5700G can play current games on low settings at reasonable frame rates - but at 720p. Rembrandt updates the graphics hardware to RDNA2 - the same as used by the current Xbox and PlayStation - and supports DDR5 RAM. That should deliver the same frame rates as the 5700G but at 1080p.
- What's the difference between the Snapdragon 888 Plus and the original Snapdragon 888? (WCCFTech)
In short, one CPU core is 5% faster.
Yay.
- Qualcomm is going back to custom CPU cores. (Thurrott.com)
They shut down their internal CPU design team after the Snapdragon 820 - which wasn't great - and have been sticking to Arm designs since then.
Recently they bought Arm server chip startup Nuvia for $1.4 billion. (Android Authority) Nuvia was founded by two of the top CPU architects at Apple, and Apple's CPU designs - while not as good as the tame Apple press likes to claim - are genuinely good.
I hope Qualcomm succeeds with this. The quality of Apple's hardware designs is irrelevant to me because their software environment is locked down to the point where I can't use it for the work I do. Getting something equally good out into the open market and running Linux, or even Windows, will be a big advance.
I questioned the move at the time, but if the best they can do with a mid-cycle refresh using Arm's core designs is a 5% speed bump, you can see why it was worth over a billion bucks.
- Intel might be bringing their next-gen Sapphire Rapids server platform to the desktop as well. (WCCFTech)
Right now Intel has abandoned the workstation market to AMD. Intel's workstation parts peak at 28 cores, while AMD goes up to 64 cores. The new chips are expected to ship in Q2 of next year and go up to 56 cores.
Only problem is, later next year AMD is expected to release 128 core CPUs for both servers and workstations.
This goes back to why Intel is signing up to produce CPUs at TSMC. Without that they're locked out of key markets by the delays in updating their own fabs.
- Swedish supermarket chain Coop had to close 500 stores after the company running their cash registers got hit by that ransomware attack I mentioned yesterday. (Bleeping Computer)
<deep breath>
STOP OUTSOURCING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE!
- Here's a handy list of Apple devices to steer clear of if you have a pacemaker. (ZDNet)
Yes, the list includes pretty much everything Apple makes. But the safe distance is 6-12 inches. So just don't go to sleep with your iThis or MacThat resting on your chest and you should be fine.
- Out: Death panels. In: Death algorithms. (The Guardian)
"Sure, we left you alone to see whether you'd starve or freeze first", said a government spokesman. "But it wasn't us, it was the algorithm."
I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Entire Site From Orbit Where by "Site" I Mean Twitter Video of the Day
Salute to America With Shipgirls Anime Music Video of the Day
Anime: Girls und Panzer, High School Fleet, Gate, Strike Witches.
I know those aren't American insignia or uniforms or, well, anything else, but you guys also don't have flying catgirls carrying 20mm anti-materiel rifles, so please bear with it.
Disclaimer: Get with the catgirl program already. Ask Elon Musk, I'm sure he has some.
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Saturday, July 03
Daily News Stuff 3 July 2021
Never Go Full Stasi Edition
Anime of the day is Galaxy Angel, which ran for four seasons (or six, depending on how you count) and 126 episodes from 2001 to 2004.
If you imagine Dirty Pair, with the competence dialed down and the comedy dialed up, but keeping the supportive but long-suffering boss intact, and also dial the destruction up to 12, you might have something like Galaxy Angel.
Because of that destruction factor, the continuity resets pretty frequently. They die several times, and destroy the entire universe twice.
Each season also has an episode that plays things completely straight, often looking at a particular character's past. Those have a very different feel to the general chaos and add needed depth to the story, but aren't kid material, when most of the series is. (I watched some of this with my oldest nephew when he was maybe five or six.)
World-famous zombie idol Kureiji Ollie from Hololive Indonesia is teaching calculus. And has 4000 people watching.
This is her theme song.
Speaking of Hololive, in the past day Iofi from the Indonesian branch hit 400,000 subscribers, and Rushia and Fubuki from the main branch hit 1.25 million and 1.5 million respectively.
Coco's farewell stream had 490,000 live viewers and pulled in $300,000 in superchats. And then she ate a tarantula.
I know I talk about Hololive a lot, but they put out more high-quality entertainment each week than Hollywood does in a year.
TSR Games - the original publisher of Dungeons and Dragons - is back, with D&D co-creator Gary Gygax's son in a lead role. Apparently Hasbro forgot to renew the trademark and Ernie Gygax managed to retrieve it.
Major gaming convention Gen Con has banned TSR for being insufficiently subservient to the wokescolds that are ruining everything.
TSR told them to get fucked.
Oh, and Gen Con was also founded by Gary Gygax.
Disclaimer: Commies. Helicopters. Some assembly.
Never Go Full Stasi Edition
Top Story
- Facebook has gone full Stasi, asking users to report anyone expressing unapproved opinions. (The Verge)
The Verge, it turns out, has learned to love Big Brother:Facebook, like other platforms, has had issues with extremism for a long time, and though it’s good that it’s trying to combat it, some of its efforts feel like they should’ve been implemented long ago.
No, you fascist-fellating bumblefucks, what Facebook is doing is extremism.
If you imagine Dirty Pair, with the competence dialed down and the comedy dialed up, but keeping the supportive but long-suffering boss intact, and also dial the destruction up to 12, you might have something like Galaxy Angel.
Because of that destruction factor, the continuity resets pretty frequently. They die several times, and destroy the entire universe twice.
Each season also has an episode that plays things completely straight, often looking at a particular character's past. Those have a very different feel to the general chaos and add needed depth to the story, but aren't kid material, when most of the series is. (I watched some of this with my oldest nephew when he was maybe five or six.)
Tech News
- Asus is bringing its ZenFone 8 to the US. (AnandTech)
It delivers a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 888 CPU and starts at $599 with 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 5.9" 2400x1080 OLED display. That's pretty small for a modern phone, because there's almost no bezel. The diagonal on my new Oppo A91 is 0.1" greater than my old Xperia Z Ultra, but overall it's tiny next to the old phone.
The ZenFone 8 has a proper headphone jack, but no SD card slot, because we can't have nice things.
- Speaking of Oppo, they're merging with OnePlus, and merging their versions of Android as well. (Thurrott.com)
The corporate merger doesn't mean a whole lot since OnePlus is a subsidiary of Oppo which is a subsidiary of BBK. I had to look that up; I couldn't remember which was the parent company.
OnePlus flagship devices will now be guaranteed to receive three Android updates and four years of security updates.
My A91 - not exactly a flagship - just updated painlessly to Android 11, so there's that.
- The PCI Express 6.0 spec is expected to be finalised this year. (AnandTech)
That full-size PCIe SSD I mentioned last year, with 28GB/s transfer rates, will be possible with a simple M.2 device with PCIe 6.0.
But it will likely need a hefty heatsink. Power consumption went up sharply from PCIe 3 to 4, and is going up again with 5 later this year. 6 is hardly going to reverse that trend.
The most likely place for this is in servers, where high-speed network cards already saturate a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. PCIe 6.0 will allow for 400Gb Ethernet, which is currently limited to high-end switches and routers.
- The first customers to sign up for TSMC's 3nm process are Apple and... Intel. (Tom's Hardware)
3nm promises 70% more logic transistors per square millimetre - only a 20% improvement for memory though - when compared to 5nm.
Since Apple is eating most of the world's 5nm capacity, though, the most direct comparison is with 7nm, which AMD is using for its CPUs, APUs, and GPUs, and for the Xbox and PlayStation 5. TSMC's 5nm is 80% denser than 7nm for logic, so 3nm is 3x as dense as 7nm.
So AMD could in theory deliver a 48 core desktop CPU or a 192 core server CPU when 3nm arrives.
Next year.
AMD won't be able to get capacity right away, but TSMC is aggressively expanding production in multiple locations, so things should improve.
Intel is probably booking what capacity it can so it can show off a CPU that beats AMD. Even if supply is limited, taking back that position would be a psychological victory.
- A closer look at AMD's Broken Xbox motherboard, the 4700S. (WCCFTech)
This reuses Xbox chips with broken graphics as Ryzen CPUs. The problem is the chips have limited I/O and can't use regular DDR4 RAM, so it's more of a curiosity than a practical platform.
If it had even some of the GPU section functional it would be a different story, but possibly AMD's agreement with Microsoft forbids that.
- OpenZFS 2.1 is here with support for distributed hot spares, automatic worker scaling, and InfluxDB for tracking statistics. (Phoronix)
InfluxDB isn't built in, I take it; it feeds live statistics to your specified database so that you can monitor I/O across all your servers.
It runs on Linux kernel 3.10 or later (3.10 is pretty old at this point), and FreeBSD 12.2 or later (12.2 is very recent).
- How to avoid the TPM report requirement for Windows 11. (Bleeping Computer)
At least for the preview release. I don't expect this to survive to the final version.
- How about that: Another massive Russian cyber-attack on US businesses. (BBC)
Funny how this is happening now.
Some have asked why I believe the fingers pointing conveniently at Russia, and the reason is that this pointless destruction is exactly Russia's style. China's hacking efforts are even more pervasive, but aim mostly at stealing information without getting caught. Everyone knows about it but it rarely makes the news.
It's another supply chain attack on a company providing monitoring software. (ZDNet)
I hate this crap. I mentioned one company I have personal experience with - their name rhymes with "DataDog" - whose monitoring agent was 750MB of crap including a complete standalone Python install.
They're idiots, yes, but they're hardly alone in that market.
- Microsoft was warned of a critical vulnerability in PowerShell. (Bleeping Computer)
Joy.
- Tame Apple press delighted to embed themselves ever deeper into Big Brother's embrace. (Six Colors)
The article celebrates being able to move from Authy - a perfectly functional application for secure two-factor authentication - to Apple's iCloud Keychain.
So now he has the ability to automatically fill in two-factor auth codes.
Which means he doesn't have two factor auth.
His passwords are synced with Apple. His 2FA codes are synced with Apple. The first breach that happens, he'll have Zero Factor Auth.
- If you factory-reset your Amazon device before selling it or giving it away, congratulations, you just handed over all your passwords. (Ars Technica)
If you have an IoT - Internet of Things - device, the only appropriate security measure is to take it out behind the barn and kill it with an axe.
My goddamn washing machine is IoT-enabled, but I'm not stupid enough to let it connect to my WiFi. I can hear its jaunty little your sheets have finished drying tune just fine without it.
- The EU has told Apple to quite with the transparently self-serving excuses for its monopolistic behaviour. (Reuters)
The EU doesn't actually care about competition, but they care a lot about being able to soak foreign companies for billions of dollars over imagined infractions.
It's a start.
- Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app, says photo-sharing app Instagram. (Engadget)
And I'm no longer a 19-year-old anime girl.
Wait.
- Twitter is working to provide idiots new facilities to protect their stupid opinions from well-deserved ridicule. (The Verge)
They have to do this, because their target market is the room-temperature IQ crowd, which is as fragile as a cut crystal decanter in a ball bearing factory.
The Zombie Apocalypse Might Not Be So Bad Video of the Day
World-famous zombie idol Kureiji Ollie from Hololive Indonesia is teaching calculus. And has 4000 people watching.
This is her theme song.
Speaking of Hololive, in the past day Iofi from the Indonesian branch hit 400,000 subscribers, and Rushia and Fubuki from the main branch hit 1.25 million and 1.5 million respectively.
Coco's farewell stream had 490,000 live viewers and pulled in $300,000 in superchats. And then she ate a tarantula.
I know I talk about Hololive a lot, but they put out more high-quality entertainment each week than Hollywood does in a year.
News From the Crapping All Over Everything Wars Video of the Day
TSR Games - the original publisher of Dungeons and Dragons - is back, with D&D co-creator Gary Gygax's son in a lead role. Apparently Hasbro forgot to renew the trademark and Ernie Gygax managed to retrieve it.
Major gaming convention Gen Con has banned TSR for being insufficiently subservient to the wokescolds that are ruining everything.
TSR told them to get fucked.
Oh, and Gen Con was also founded by Gary Gygax.
Disclaimer: Commies. Helicopters. Some assembly.
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