• Kanye West is not buying Parler after all.  (Axios)
  
  Bullet dodged.  For both parties, but after today, particularly for Parler.

  Ye has just around 55,000 followers on Parler, compared to 18.5 million on Instagram and zero on Twitter.

  Oops.
  
  
  
• The Ikea desk legs I needed for my main office, that were out of stock for weeks, came back in for days, and then went out of stock again, are back in stock.
  
  I ordered 35.  I think I need 31 - maybe fewer if I use fixed drawers rather than the mobile ones, since you can mount the desktop directly onto the drawer units.  Since the legs are $4 each and they've been blocking my plans for thousands of dollars worth of furniture, I don't exactly mind if I end up with a few spares.
  
  (The longer desks - they come in 120, 140, and 200 cm lengths - recommend an extra leg in the middle, hence the odd number.)

• How much slower does automatic bounds checking make your Rust code?  (ReadySet)
  
  Rust is designed to make it hard to write unsafe code - the sort of code that causes security nightmares for sysadmins around the world because one line in one library from 20 years ago didn't check the size of the input and now everyone is mining Monero on your production servers.
  
  Anyway, the answer is none.  None slower.
  
  
  
• Google has halved the number of memory safety issues with Android since they started using Rust for some of the code.  (9to5Google)
  
  And it's none slower.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare is raising its prices by 25% starting from May.  (The Register)
  
  There's going to be a lot of that about.  Computers have been one of the few things consistently getting cheaper, but there's only so much you can do when real inflation is well into double digits.
  
  (I also switched my Amazon Prime subscription from monthly to annual to lock in the current low price - A$59 for a year, about US$40.  Given the cost of shipping stuff to New House City it's gone from being a nice-to-have to essential.)
  
  
  
• Apple blocked a new feature in the Coinbase wallet that allowed users to transfer NFTs to other wallets.  (MacRumors)
  
  Apple said that the "gas fee" - a small amount of cryptocurrency that you need to pay to perform any transaction - had to be purchased using Apple's own payment platform for the new feature to be approved.
  
  You can't purchase crypto using Apple's payment platform.
  
  
  
• The relaunch of Twitter Blue is delayed because Twitter doesn't want to give Apple 30% of everything it earns.  (WCCFTech)

  Twitter is planning on finding a way to circumvent the 30% fee that Apple charges, but so far, we don't see a way out. I mean, remember what happened to Epic Games and Fortnite when they refused to circumvent the in-app fee?

  Yes.  Epic launched an entire new online games store and now has over two thousand staff and half a billion users.
  
  It doesn't seem like much of a threat, to be honest.
  
  
  
• Stable Diffusion - the AI image generator - now runs on Arm-based Macs.  (9to5Mac)
  
  While this is new, I was under the impression that it only ran on Nvidia graphics cards.  Not true, as it turns out; with a little fiddling it runs on most AMD cards from the last six years as well.
  
  
  
• The Kindle Scribe is absolutely adequate.  (The Verge)
  
  If you want a large (10.2") high resolution (300dpi) e-ink reader with a pen, this is that.  And some clunky software aside, it works exactly as it says.
  
  I'm getting a Kindle Paperwhite while I wait for somebody - anybody - to release a good, small Android tablet that I don't have to order from AliExpress.

Posted by: normal at Friday, December 02 2022 07:39 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 03 2022 02:24 AM (BMUHC)

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• Here's everything that went wrong with FTX. (The Verge)
  
  Yeah, it just "went wrong".  By accident.
  
  
  
• FTX’s Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident. (CoinDesk)
  
  That's more like it.

  In the weeks since Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire was revealed to be a house of lies, mainstream news organizations and commentators have often failed to give their readers a straightforward assessment of exactly what happened.  August institutions including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have uncovered many key facts about the scandal, but they have also repeatedly seemed to downplay the facts in ways that soft-pedaled Bankman-Fried’s intent and culpability.

  More October institutions, possibly November, but yes.

  It is now clear that what happened at the FTX crypto exchange and the hedge fund Alameda Research involved a variety of conscious and intentional fraud intended to steal money from both users and investors.  That’s why a recent New York Times interview was widely derided for seeming to frame FTX’s collapse as the result of mismanagement rather than malfeasance.  A Wall Street Journal article bemoaned the loss of charitable donations from FTX, arguably propping up Bankman-Fried’s strategic philanthropic pose.  Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, court chronicler of the neoliberal status quo, seemed to whitewash his own entanglements by crediting Bankman-Fried’s money with helping Democrats in the 2020 elections – sidestepping the likelihood that the money was effectively embezzled.

  This is the straight shit.  If you're interested in the real story behind this latter day love child of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff, read most of the thing.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk met with Tim Cook and announced that the war is cancelled.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Build your own war.

• Samsung's GDDR6W memory doubles capacity and performance by the clever trick of, um, being two chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's literally two chips.  One device to surface-mount, which might make assembly simpler and cheaper, but two slivers of silicon inside it, with twice as many leads and twice the power consumption.
  
  
  
• Laspass says hackers breached its systems and accessed customer data.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again.
  
  They're probably running Elasticsearch on QNAP.
  
  
  
• The hackers got GoTo too.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  GoTo - formerly LogMeIn - apparently shares the same QNAP device as Lastpass.
  
  
  
• Security researchers at Akamai left a space out of a command line and accidentally murdered a botnet.  (Bleeping Computer)

  "In our controlled environment, we were able to send commands to the bot to test its functionality and attack signatures," Akamai vulnerability researcher Larry Cashdollar - we swear we are not making this up - explained in a new report.
  
  "As part of this analysis, a syntax error caused the bot to stop sending commands, effectively killing the botnet."

  Mission failed successfully.
  
  
  
• Autonomous trucking company Embark has silently evaporated.  (Crunchbase)
  
  The company's market cap has dwindled from $5 billion to $110 million, even though it still has $190 million in cash reserves.
  
  If that's not a show of confidence, I don't know what is.
  
  And they did it without any splashy fraud or missed earnings - they don't have any earnings yet.  Investors just decided, yeah, not so much.
  
  Autonomous vehicles are hard, and with interest rates up sharply investors are looking for returns in this lifetime rather than the next.
  
  
  
• Anker lied about the security of its security cameras.  (The Verge)
  
  There isn't any.