Top Story

• It's been 20 years, but I'll let others take up that story.
  
  
  
• A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
  
  The press deals with a quietly momentous ruling in the Epic v. Apple case.
  
  Apple bests Epic, but change is coming to the App Store.  (Six Colors)
  
  Apple mostly wins in Epic Games Fortnite trial, but must ease payment rules.  (CNet)
  
  Apple risks losing billions annualy from Epic Games ruling.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Epic wins big in case against Apple.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Major win for Epic Games: Apple has 90 days to open up app store payments.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Epic vs. Apple ruling revealed: Apple must allow App Store devs to redirect users to other payment systems.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Ars Technica runs a surprisingly straight headline, but I think they do A/B testing on their headlines so I have no idea what others are seeing.  Their readers are not welcoming of the truth either.
  
  The ruling forces Apple to allow developers to use third-party payment systems, meaning you can make your app a free download and charge for activation, paying 3% to Stripe or PayPal rather than 30% to Apple.  That could reduce App Store revenue from $70 billion per year to zero.
  
  Meanwhile Epic Games is required to pay Apple $3.6 million due to breach of contract.
  
  I think we can work out who lost this one.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• So is Ars Technica right about anything else, or is it all crazytown over there?
  
  House bill would eliminate natural gas.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Crazytown it is then.
  
  
  
• I previously criticised Intel for making dumb decisions with their upcoming 12th generation platform, but if the latest leaks are accurate they merely did something weird.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Alder Lake, Intel's 12th generation desktop family, brings support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.  But it only supports PCIe 5.0 for the PCIe slots - and no consumer cards support PCIe 5.0 - and not where bandwidth is most needed, on the interface to the chipset.
  
  But the diagram in that article shows that bandwidth to the chipset has actually doubled, because the width of the band has doubled.  It's still based on PCIe 4.0, but now has 8 lanes rather than 4.
  
  That's fine.  You could still potentially saturate that link, but it would take some serious effort.  The chipset on AMD's high-end Threadripper motherboards also uses an 8 lane PCIe 4.0 interconnect, so that's pretty good for a consumer platform.
  
  The weird part is the number of PCIe lanes in total.  Between the CPU and the Z690 chipset, an Alder Lake system can have up to 48 lanes of available PCIe: 16 at 5.0 speeds, 16 at 4.0, and 16 at 3.0.  But the CPU has 28 PCIe transceivers and the chipset 36, when they are typically designed in blocks of 16.
  
  
  
• Thunderbolt adaptors aren't likely to "just work" any time soon.  (Mat Millman)
  
  If it's not built into your motherboard you're going to have a bad time.
  
  
  
• Don't rewrite your project in Rust.  (ITNext)
  
  Or at all.  Unless you know exactly why you are rewriting it, have already run a pilot project and measured the benefits, and have someone prepared to pay for it, it's a bad idea.
  
  Unless you're using Node.js, in which case, no time like the present.
  
  
  
• Quadranet has filed to have a copyright infringement lawsuit dismissed.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Quadranet notes that it is not alleged to have infringed upon anyone's IP rights.
  
  Its customer, LiquidVPN - well, LiquidVPN uses many providers, one of which is Quadranet - LiquidVPN is also not alleged to have infringed upon anyone's IP rights.
  
  Some of LiquidVPN's customers, or at least, some people using services purchased by some of LiquidVPN's customers, are alleged to have infringed upon IP rights.
  
  The plaintiffs here seem to be following the Willie Sutton rule.  Not to give them any ideas, but if they took that to its logical conclusion they might be able to force dramatic changes on the industry.
  
  Though they might also simply lose and be forced to pay the defendants' legal bills.
  
  
  
• Axios is why private citizens should be allowed to own nuclear weapons.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Because you keep hearing how terrible things are in Australia, and don't hear about riots in protest over government overreach, it's a bit hard to understand just how bad it is here in NSW right now with everyone complying with our fascist overlords.
  
  Here's video shot in Sydney today at the height of the lockdown.
  
  
  
  
  Uh.  Yeah.  We're not very good at following rules.
  
  
  
• But what about the mainstream media, you ask? They're all lefties. They'll be totally on board with whatever farcical nonsense the government pulls.
  
  
  
  
  Not so much.  Outside of the loonies on Twitter, everyone has had enough of this shit and has stopped listening.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 12 2021 12:16 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 12 2021 02:52 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 12 2021 08:19 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 12 2021 08:25 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, September 12 2021 09:10 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 12 2021 12:04 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 12 2021 02:42 PM (PiXy!)

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• Germany gotta Germ.  (Washington Post)
  
  Someone insulted a German politician on Twitter...  So police raided his house looking for evidence.
  
  Evidence of what?  The insult is public; he called the sports minister for Hamburg a dick.  What more evidence is there to gather?
  
  If this sort of idiocy applied to the US or Australia you'd need more police than there are ants in the whole of Texas.  Insulting politicians is the national pastime.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, as we worry about all our gadgets being made in China, that country is getting set for an economic implosion.  (Washington Post)
  
  Chairman Xi is fast rolling back the - let's not pretend they're reforms, the fascism of his recent predecessors - and going right back to communism.  I predict famines making a regular reappearance within the decade.  China can't feed itself and its government is only making the situation worse.
  
  
  
• Taiwan is paying attention and just launched the first of a new class of ship designed to take out aircraft carriers.  (Asia Times)
  
  Small, fast, and relatively cheap, the new corvettes are loaded with anti-aircraft, anti-ship, and medium-range supersonic cruise missiles, as well as torpedoes.

• Back to regular tech stuff, never click the enable editing button.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  A bug in Internet Explorer lets a sneaky document take over your computer.
  
  
  
• Oh, and if you are running containers on Azure cloud and received  a Service Health Notification you can start worrying now.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  A bug let other users' containers steal credentials from your containers and use that to break into your system and do, basically, whatever they wanted.
  
  Remember, there is no cloud, there's just computers run by idiots.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, you can't buy a Microsoft Visio subscription as a regular user.  You have to first set up a corporate account with Microsoft.  So yes, I now have two accounts, which I'm sure is going to make my life easier.
  
  
  
• Michael Freedman proved the four-dimensional Poincaré conjecture back in 1981 but no-one remembers how.  (Quanta)
  
  It's a very complicated proof and the published paper isn't entirely complete, so Freedman sat down with other mathematicians and took them through the proof in detail until they were satisfied.  He won the Fields Medal for his work, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
  
  Freedman was 30 when he published his proof.  Now he's 70, and the colleagues who understood his proof are mostly either retired or dead.  So a new generation of mathematicians has got together to write a book about it before there's no-one left alive who understands how he proof works.
  
  
  
• Want something faster than an SD Card in your laptop?  SD Express is almost here.  (AnandTech)
  
  SD Express uses the PCI Express interface - either 1 or 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0.  That means it can potentially approach 2GB per second.  The reference device tested here has 1 lane and runs at up to 890MBps. though sustained sequential writes are a lot slower.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, September 11 2021 04:11 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 11 2021 09:17 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 12 2021 02:35 AM (eqaFC)

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• Australia's High Court - that is, our Supreme Court, because our Supreme Courts are lower courts - just pooped in everyone's cornflakes by ruling that if someone posts a defamatory reply to your Facebook post, you are personally liable.  (Gizmodo)
  
  That is, not Facebook, and not the person who actually committed defamation.
  
  Now this is Gizmodo and the article is full of vacuous left-wing drivel, but even they see the problem with this, calling it one of the court's "dumbest decisions in recent memory".
  
  Since this decision directly hurts the entire media industry in Australia, though, left and right alike, we are sure to see poorly-formulated and ill-considered legislation rushed through Parliament with bipartisan support to make the situation even worse.
  
  There's more at Australia's ABC - also run by left-wing lunatics - but it doesn't contradict anything at Gizmodo.
  
  
  
• Chicken nuggets are back on the menu!  Six boxes of gluten free nuggies set to arrive tomorrow morning, and three boxes of tendies as well.  And, yes, choccy milk.
  
  Might have to turf an old bag of frozen beans from the freezer to make room.  With the random shortages going on I keep it packed full, but somehow there's always a bag of frozen beans I don't remember buying.
  
  

• Intel's NUC X15 reference gaming laptop seems to get a lot of things right.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It comes with (all specs up to) an 8 core 11800H processor, RTX 3070 graphics, 15.6" 165Hz 2560x1440 display, 64GB of RAM, and two M.2 slots (one PCIe 4.0 and one 3.0).
  
  I/O includes Thunderbolt 4, HDMI, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (that is, 10Gbps), WiFi 6 and wired 2.5Gb Ethernet, a full size SD card slot, and a headphone jack.
  
  And it has the Four Essential Keys.
  
  Weight is just under 2kg, which is typical for a full size laptop, though the LG Gram models get well under that.
  
  Price is TBA.
  
  Really the only thing missing is a 16:10 display - it's the more common 16:9 - but other than that it looks pretty solid.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel's E-2300 Xeon lineup is here, just in time to be made obsolete.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These are low-end server chips based on the 11th generation desktop parts, but 12th generation desktop parts are only a couple of months away.
  
  On the other hand - and it's a pretty important hand - I don't know what the state of support is in sever operating systems for disparate core performance in Intel chips, since the 12th generation parts will be the first from Intel to actually have that.
  
  
  
• ASRock Rack has a bunch of server motherboards from the Xeon 2300 range.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Including one that can support 128GB of RAM, dual 10Gb Ethernet, and 8 SATA ports in a mini-ITX form factor.
  
  
  
• Russian internet company Yandex - the country's Google with all that implies - is facing the largest DDoS attack in the country's history.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The biter, bited?  Or is this someone else?
  
  
  
• Acronis True Image is now Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office Plus Ultra Case Nightmare Green.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I think I got that right.
  
  Anyway, buried somewhere in the updated management interface there is still a button that backs up your PC.
  
  
  
• "There will always be some number of instances of software on the internet that are out of date and being exploited" says Atlassian's CISO.  "Mostly Confluence.  Wait, turn that thing off."  (ZDNet)
  
  
  

The Vtuber Your Vtuber Could Smell Like Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 09 2021 11:26 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, September 11 2021 04:33 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 11 2021 09:20 PM (PiXy!)

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• WhatsApp - the secure end-to-end encrypted messaging app - isn't quite.  (Gizmodo)Says WhatsApp:

  We can’t read or listen to your personal conversations, as they are end-to-end encrypted.  This will never change

  On the other hand, if someone reports you for misconduct, WhatsApp's moderation team can see your messages.
  
  You need to read past the scary headline and get into the details before you find out what's going on: Someone pressing that report button sends the decrypted messages  from you straight back to WhatsApp.  It has to work that way, or you'd have no way of handling complaints.  But it means - and this should be obvious anyway - that no matter how secure the channel, if the person at the other end can't be trusted, you have no security at all.
  
  Think of WhatsApp as a room full of classified documents and the report button as Bradley Manning.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Or think of WhatsApp as a McDonald's Monopoly contest and the report button as a database connection error.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  One thing I learned long ago is if you're lazy and hard-code database connection parameters in some pre-production code, make sure they're assigned to variables well outside any potential stack trace.  Because if you put them right in the connection call, and you forget that debug mode is enabled on the application server, and the pre-production code gets rushed into production - all events with a 95% or better probability - then the first time you have a connection error every single user will see your database password.
  
  Of course your database should be locked to your internal network and firewalled both locally and at the network boundary, right?  And you wouldn't also leak the login credentials for the server itself.  Nobody would be that silly.
  
  
  
• IBM's Power 10 CPUs are on their way.  (AnandTech)
  
  15 cores with 8 threads per core on each chip, and two chips per socket.  30MB L2 and 128MB L3 cache.  1TB memory bandwidth per socket, 1TB of inter-socket interconnect, and 512GB of PCIe 5.0 for I/O.
  
  Just don't ask how much it costs.
  
  
  
• The SEC is suing Coinbase over its Lend program which doesn't even exist yet.  (Coinbase)
  
  The SEC asked the crypto industry to provide information on upcoming projects so that the SEC could provide regulatory guidance.  Coinbase - the fools - took them at their word.  And now the SEC has filed notice of intent to sue Coinbase, over a product that doesn't exist, without at any point before or since saying what the substance of the complaint is.
  
  
  
• GitHub creates useless garbage merges.  (Kernel.org)
  
  It's just Linus Torvalds spouting off again.  It's not like he invented Git or anything.
  
  ...
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• Hacking hackers hacked the Jenkins project's Confluence server...  And used it to mine Monero.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This could have been a crippling supply-chain attack, because Jenkins is widely used to automate software testing.
  
  Fortunately for us all, the hackers were idiots.
  
  
  
• Intel is spending $80 billion on two new chip plants in Europe.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  You might well ask why not in the US, and the answer is they are already expanding all their facilities in the US and building a huge new facility in Arizona as well.
  
  They're betting that demand for semiconductors isn't going to decline any time soon - and hedging against the possibility of disruption in the Far East.  Even short of a war, China could cause significant mischief.
  
  
  
• Almost forgot this one.  We've used two monitoring services at my day job - Datadog and StatusCake.  (I also use StatusCake for my own servers.)
  
  The monitoring agent for Datadog is a 750MB install that includes its own version of Python.  I have no idea what is going on in there; it's completely unauditable and I consider it a supply chain attack waiting to happen.
  
  The monitoring agent for StatusCake fits on one page.  I read through it, passed it on to our new sysadmin, he read through it, and we shrugged and are going to install it on all our servers.
  
  Not everything needs to be an avalanche of crap.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, September 09 2021 12:44 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 09 2021 12:18 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, September 09 2021 03:37 PM (SjASx)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Thursday, September 09 2021 11:41 PM (nRMeC)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, September 10 2021 10:47 AM (AnIjE)

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• Privacy is one thing, but not even ProtonMail is going to jail for you.  (ZDNet)
  
  ProtonMail is based in Switzerland and doesn't release private information on its customers without an order from the Swiss courts.  The problem is, the Swiss courts are complying with foreign requests for such orders - the number has skyrocketed from 13 in 2017 to 3572 in 2020.
  
  Still a better bet than Gmail.

• What it takes to run Mangadex.  (Mangadex)
  
  The site hosts a roughly infinite amount of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese comics, translated by fans into every human language including some that no-one actually knows how to read.  It handles more than 10 million unique visitors per month and 2000 pages per second.
  
  On a budget of around $1500 per month.
  
  They run two separate locations, using KVM and LXC managed with Proxmox, with MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, and RabbitMQ.  They moved reluctantly to Ubuntu 20.04 from CentOS 7 because CentOS 8 is basically dead.  I moved rather earlier than that, but for much the same reason.
  
  It's a good look at a system built by people who know what they are doing but don't have VC money to splash around.
  
  
  
• The Gigabyte AORUS 7000s goes whoosh.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It is one of he fastest M.2 SSDs available, delivering up to - in fact, slightly over - 7GB per second on sequential reads, and sustaining over 1GB per second on sequential writes even when its pseudo-SLC cache is long since filled up.
  
  $200 for 1TB is a lot more than the cheapest models, but it's a lot faster.

Posted by: Physics Geek at Wednesday, September 08 2021 05:27 AM (huQJB)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 08 2021 03:05 PM (PiXy!)

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• We just hired a suitably grey-haired sysadmin at my day job.  The kind of guy who knows about flow and lp0 on fire.
  
  This is the third recent hire taking on various components of my job, effectively cutting my workload by half.
  
  
  
• There's a constant war between spammers and spam filters, and between marketing providers and spam filters.  The marketing providers have the twin advantages of being nominally trustworthy and being absolutely loaded.  They have battalions of tech drones dedicated to making sure the latest marketing drivel reaches your inbox unimpeded.
  
  So...  What happens if the spammers just subscribe to a marketing provider like Salesforce?  (eSecurity Planet)
  
  The internet treats censorship as an error and routes around it, and so do spammers.
  
  
  
• Chicken nuggets are back in stock, maybe.  I managed to order some from Coles - the only place I can get edible gluten-free nuggets.  Woolworths have some, but they cost twice as much and somehow smell of fish.  Not great.
  
  I say maybe because the first time around it wouldn't let me check out with the nuggets in my cart.  Just in case, I also ordered three pounds of chicken breast pieces and some red wine marinade, so I can make my own nuggets, with blackjack, and hookers.  And freeze them for later.  The nuggets, that is.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Chia miners are selling off used disk drives and SSDs as new.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The problem is, Chia caused the price of storage to spike sharply early this year, and drives were in short supply for months.  Now that Chia is 80% down from its peak and mining has become less efficient, drives are becoming plentiful again, because, unlike the situation with graphics cards, Chia is the only cryptocurrency that uses storage for mining.
  
  I noticed that prices are starting to come down - 16TB drives are around $320 on Newegg when they had spiked as high as $500.  Great for me because I plan to build either a new NAS or a Linux box in the next couple of months.
  
  But if you're buying make damn sure that you're getting new drives and not that have spent the past couple of months in an accelerated stress test.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Nvidia is repurposing failed silicon for their highest end compute cards to mine Ethereum.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They have a complete lineup of dedicated mining cards using older GPU chips, but this is the first one to recycle current-generation designs.
  
  Ethereum mining is set to end entirely next year, and Bitcoin can't be mined effectively on GPUs, so it will be interesting to see where all that hardware ends up.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 07 2021 12:29 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: David Eastman at Tuesday, September 07 2021 08:49 AM (t/97R)

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• [Not pure tech news, but I do branch out into the infectious cancer that is social media from time to time, so please bear with me -- Pixy.]
  
  Rolling Stone, the best time to delete your account was right before you posted this.  The second best time is now, except you're apparently all passed out in the bathroom.
  
  
  
  
  Shall we make a list?
  
  
1. "Doctor says."
   
   
2. Calling ivermectin a "horse dewormer" when it is one of the premier drugs for treating parasitic illness in humans.
   
   
3. Photo that shows people rugged up for winter in an area where recent daytime temperatures have been in the high 90s.
   
   
4. An apparent - and yet somehow entirely unreported - epidemic of gun violence in rural Oklahoma.
   
   
   
• The story was of course circulated by the usual "intellectuals" and "epidemiologists" and "news organisations".
  
  
  
  
  
  
• So what is the basis in truth for these claims?
  
  Turns out, there isn't any.  Every single word is a lie.
  
  
  
  
  There are ZERO cases of ivermectin overdose being treated in the eastern Oklahoma hospital system, and NOBODY has been turned away from emergency care.
  
  
  
• So, Rolling Stone, seeking to avoid another humiliation, immediately retracted their fairy tale, right?
  
  Nope.
  
  
  
  
  I did see one person back down when presented with these facts.  They were not of the American left, though.
  
  
  

• The Ryzen 5300G may be the best APU you can't buy.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not the fastest, but the best value for money, except that we don't know how much it costs because you can't buy it so the whole article is kind of guesswork.
  
  If you don't need sixteen cores and a 24GB graphics card, if you just want to check email, write your new novel, watch YouTube, play Minecraft - a modern quad core CPU with solid integrated graphics for $150 is likely all you need.  If this does cost $150, which we don't know, because, well.
  
  Intel has quad core desktop parts with integrated graphics, but their desktop parts have the graphics engine scaled way down from the laptop parts, and lag well behind AMD.  On GTA V for example, at 1080p low quality, the 5300G manages 80 fps, while the more expensive Core i5-11600K gets 52.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AMD's next-generation Rembrandt APUs have already entered mass production.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If that seems early, you need to understand that it takes months for a complex chip to make its way through the factory.  There are dozens of processing steps and they're not fast.
  
  These chips support DDR5 (though not PCIe 5.0) and should deliver twice the graphics performance of AMD's current fastest APUs - well, other than their actual fastest APUs which power the Xbox and PlayStation.  Something like 60% of the performance of the Xbox Series S.
  
  
  
• Spying on children is bad.  Don't do that.  (The Atlantic)
  
  When you've crossed the line so far that even The Atlantic - I refer to it as Fascist Quarterly - even The Atlantic notices, you might want to pause, take a deep breath, and quit your job and go take up potato farming because you're a miserable excuse for a human being where you are now.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare: Threat, menace, or just turning HEAD requests into GETs?  (KMitov)
  
  A normal web request  is an HTTP GET - it says "give me this page" and the server sends the page.
  
  There's another request type called HEAD - yes, I know - which says "just let me know if you have this page, but don't send it to me".
  
  So if you accidentally turn HEADs into GETs, the load on the server and network utilisation will jump dramatically as every check for the existence of a web page suddenly has to deliver the entire page.
  
  Cloudflare - which is designed to protect websites from being overloaded by their users - misconfigured several hundred servers to do exactly that, in effect DDOSing their own customers.
  
  
  
• I bought a 1TB microSD card for the new laptop.  And, since I was on Amazon, some cutlery as well.  Been that kind of day, whatever that kind of day is.
  
  
  

Mission Failed Successfully Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 05 2021 11:37 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 05 2021 11:48 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, September 06 2021 08:51 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 06 2021 01:47 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 06 2021 01:58 PM (obo9H)

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• Susprised by backlash from every sentient being in the entire galaxy and even some journalists, Apple has postponed its plans to (checks notes) spy on children.  (MacRumors)
  
  Not cancelled, mind you.  They are still 100% committed to spying on children.  They just need time to recalibrate their spin.
  
  
  
• I used to listen to tech podcasts all the time, and stopped last year because (a) they were getting dull because all the tech companies suck, (b) they were becoming overtly political and most of the commentators are closet commies, and (c) Hololive.
  
  One example of what I mean is Jeff Jarvis, who was (maybe still is) a regular on This Week in Google - and who teaches at a journalism school funded by Facebook.
  
  Let's see what kind of person Jeff is.
  
  
  Yeah. Not wasting my time on that.
  
  And if you ever wondered how journalism in the US came to be what it is today, its through being taught by professors like Jeff.
  
  

• The new best small laptop may be the HP Pavilion Aero.  (PC Magazine)
  
  A 1kg / 2.2lb 13" laptop isn't that new - I have an LG model from 6 years ago that fits those specs - but this one ticks all the other boxes as well.
  
  Up to an 8 core Ryzen 5800U, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and a 2560x1600 display covering 100% of sRGB.  The charging jack is on the right, but if it can charge from the USB-C on the left that's not a problem.
  
  This being HP, the Four Essential Keys are present and in their proper place.  And it's available in four colours if you care about such things - silver, white, gold, and rose gold.
  
  It starts at around $680 right now - with 6 cores, 8GB/256GB, and a 1920x1200 screen - with a maxed-out configuration going for $1050.
  
  But because there's a universal law that we can't have nice things, it has no SD card slot.  Sure, you can get a little USB adaptor for a few dollars, but what the fuck, HP?  You almost had it, and you threw it away.
  
  For a change this is actually available in Australia - though only a single configuration at present - and is not yet in stock in HP's US online store.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Four Essential Keys, I thought the MSI Modern 14 had 'em.  There they are on the right of the main layout, just where you'd want them.
  
  Then I took a look.  Insert?  Delete?  What the hell?  Bad MSI!  No biscuit!
  
  
  
• Intel's 12th generation desktop CPUs are launching on November 19.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Just in time to be out of stock for Christmas.
  
  On the one hand, these will bring welcome updates including DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, on the other hand, leaked tests indicate that they are every bit as power hungry as existing 9th, 10th, and 11th gen parts and not all that much faster.
  
  
  
• If you're running Gzip on a recent IBM mainframe, it just got orders of magnitude faster.  (Phoronix)
  
  One of the things that IBM does with its mainframe CPUs is shovel in dedicated hardware for common functions.  Every CPU these days implements hardware for encryption, but compression is uncommon.
  
  I wonder if this extends to ZFS.  Gzip compression works great with ZFS, but if you copy terabytes of data over a very fast link it also puts a substantial load on the CPU.
  
  
  
• An open letter to Microsoft: Stop putting ads in Windows, you fucking retards.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you're annoyed with ads on websites breaking page layouts, you ain't seen nothing.  A promotion for Microsoft Teams broke the explorer, taskbar and start menu on preview builds of Windows 11.
  
  It wasn't an update, it just broke.  And it stayed broken even if you completely reinstalled your computer.
  
  Paul Thurrott has more.  He's more polite than I am but equally unimpressed.
  
  
  
• Mass exploits of a bug in Atlassian Confluence are underway.  (ZDNet)
  
  Happy Labor Day long weekend, sysadmins!  Glad you got three hours of sleep, because you're going to need it!
  
  Atlassian used to have a program where small teams could get any of their products for $10 per year.  Obviously it's a "first dose is free" thing, but if your company has had a small developer team for years and isn't growing, it might still be attractive.
  
  This sort of thing makes it less so - any authenticated user, or possibly just anyone on the network, could run any code they wanted on the company's Confluence server.
  
  Which if that server is connected to the internet and not behind a VPN DON'T EVER DO THAT means you're completely screwed.
  
  
  
• Apple is discovering the cost of hiring progressive lunatics: They're facing an investigation from the US Labor Board for (checks notes) putting crazy people on paid leave.  (Engadget)
  
  Where can I get a gig like that?  Full pay for zero hours per week sounds like a rather cushy deal.
  
  
  
• The chief software officer - the first such - of the US Air Force has quit because the senior staff of the US military are idiots.  (The Register)
  
  And if he expected anything else, he is also an idiot.
  
  
  
• A hacker scammed a victim out of over $300,000 for a fake Banksy NFT by the clever trick of listing the NFT on Banksy's own website.  (BBC)
  
  They did return the funds (less postage and packing).  But anyone who is dropping $300k on an NFT is going to get fleeced again tomorrow anyway.
  
  
  
• I was going to say this article was obvious horseshit, but I took a look and it might actually just be normal competent engineering with a bad headline.  (Fast Company)
  
  The claim is a new wind turbine design can capture five times the energy of existing turbines.  I thought at first that this was claiming five times the efficiency, which is impossible.  Instead, it's a new design made up of multiple smaller - but still huge - rotors, that collects more energy than a current single large turbine because it's the size of 20 football fields.
  
  Which breaks no laws of physics and will probably actually work.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, September 04 2021 02:21 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 05 2021 12:10 AM (obo9H)

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• So I've been working crazy hours recently - and less recently, this has been going on since February - but it's paying off.  Not only did they give me a raise, and even backdate it, they've offered me a second raise starting next month.
  
  And now that things are slightly less insane and I have some money to spend, it turns out that everything I want to buy, from gluten-free chicken nuggets to a second one of those Dell laptops, is now out of stock.  
  
  Fortunately, given the looming nugget famine, I can actually cook.  I just tend not to.
  
  
  
• Turns out I can order a Lenovo Tab M8 FHD from Amazon US.  I can't order it from Amazon US via Amazon AU, though, because...  Yeah, I got nothing.
  
  
  
• GM can't get its nuggies either it seems, and is temporarily shutting down all but four of its US factories.  (Engadget)
  
  Nuggies make the world go 'round.
  
  
  
• Yes, we need to nuke South Australia.  Again.  As with the burning of Washington, the British had the right idea but no follow-through.

• IBM and the L3 Cacheless society.  (AnandTech)
  
  I mentioned this previously - IBM's new mainframe CPUs have no L3 cache.  Or L4 cache, which is also something the previous model had.
  
  Instead, they have very large L2 caches - 32MB per core - and share them between cores as a virtual L3 cache, and between sockets as a virtual L4 cache.  A large system can have 8GB of virtual cache this way.
  
  The article notes that this L2 cache has a 19-cycle latency, where AMD's current Ryzen chips are 12-cycle, but Ryzen only has 512kb per core and the L3 cache is much slower.

  How Is This Possible?
  
  Magic. Honestly, the first time I saw this I was a bit astounded as to what was actually going on.

  
  
  
• Windows 11 is launching October 5.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Hurrah.
  
  
  
• The Silicon Power XD80 gives you a terabyte of TLC flash with proper DRAM caching for $110.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a PCIe 3.0 drive so it peaks at "only" 3.4GB per second - which is astoundingly fast, really - and not quite up with the top models in that class like the WD SN750 or the Samsung 970 Evo Plus.  But it's priced to compete with low-end DRAMless and/or QLC drives and it blows them out of the water.
  
  Worth a look.
  
  
  
• The 1170 words you can't say on GitHub.  (The Register)
  
  Or more specifically, can't say to GitHub Copilot.
  
  The list includes such horrific slurs as "Israel", "man", and "woman".
  
  
  
• UK ISP Sky Broadband feeds your bandwidth data straight to a bunch of sleazy lawyers so they can sue you over copyright infringement.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  If we have any nukes left over after South Australia...
  
  
  
• The Chinese mafia - which is to say, the Chinese government - is looking to steal $15 billion from Alibaba.  (Reuters)
  
  Watch for their economy to unexpectedly tank in a couple of years.
  
  
  
• Asus is going all-in on OLED in its new notebooks.  (Engadget)
  
  Including the - I've mentioned this before and I swear I am not making this up - ProArt Studiobook Pro.  It will come with a 16" 4K panel with 550 nit brightness and 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut.
  
  Asus is also pretty good (if inconsistent) about including the Four Essential Keys, so I'll keep an eye out for these new models.  I only have one OLED device so far - my new phone - and that screen is pretty great.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, September 03 2021 10:30 PM (knj0d)

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 03 2021 11:25 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, September 04 2021 01:08 PM (x0epN)

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