• Is Web3 a scam?  (Stack Diary)
  
  <shake shake>
  
  Signs point to yes.
  
  
  
• NFT projects are MLMs for tech elites.  (Every)
  
  Yes.  Mostly.  I'm trying to do work using NFTs to solve practical problems, as ownership or identity tokens for digital property, where an NFT has an intrinsic value of a few cents to a few dollars.
  
  The people who burn tens of thousands of dollars on intrinsically worthless garbage annoy the hell out of me because they price the blockchain out of reach of the practical stuff I want to do.  At best it's money laundering.  That's at least an understandable motive.
  
  
  
• Blockchain apps are not what they appear to be.  (Molly White)
  
  All too often they fail to deliver on their promises - and fail in the worst possible way.
  
  You could at least eat tulip bulbs.

• The PCIe 6 spec has been finalised.  (AnandTech)
  
  This doubles bandwidth yet again - to as much as 128GBps in each direction on a x16 slot - by using four electrical levels rather than just 1 and 0, an encoding method known as PAM4.
  
  I don't expect it to arrive soon, but then I didn't expect PCIe 5 in consumer systems until maybe 2023, and it actually showed up in the new Intel Alder Lake systems last year
  
  
  
• Intel NUC 12 is on its way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Some models have been cancelled but the regular models are still expected to ship.  
  
  These will probably be using the 1200P range of CPUs, which have 8 low power cores and 2, 4, or 6 fast cores.  Only the fastest model has 6 fast cores and that might not make it into a NUC, but the four i5 and i7 models with a 4+8 core configuration should be about twice as fast as current model NUCs, which is a pretty substantial generational advance.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel is desperately trying to pretend that they've never heard of Xinjiang province.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's a no-win situation for them.  True, it's a no-win situation because the company is run by spineless worms, but it's still a no-win situation.
  
  
  
• Windows has an HTTP vulnerability tht is not currently being actively exploited.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Only really affects Windows servers.  Friends don't let friends run IIS.
  
  
  
•  T-Mobile said it isn't "broadly blocking" Apple's Private Relay function.  (9to5Mac)
  
  They blamed it mostly on an iOS bug that turns the function off.
  
  I mean, which is more likely, a cellular carrier behaving badly, or a stupid bug in an Apple operating system?
  
  
  
• Podcasting hasn't produced a hit in years.  (Bloomberg)
  
  No surprise.  Podcasting caught cancer in 2020 and died.  Everyone with talent moved to YouTube.
  
  
  

• Web3 can't fix the internet.  What we need is socialism.  (Jacobin)
  
  Socialists: Celebrating 180 years of finding problems and making them worse.

• How to secure your QNAP NAS.  (Serve the Home)
  
  1. Follow the menus in QTS or QUTS depending on your device to perform a clean shutdown.
  2. Turn off the power and unplug the power and network cables.
  
  
  
• Linux Mint has sold out to the commies at Mozilla.  (ZDNet)
  
  Who get their money in turn from the commies at Google.
  
  This is in place of previously selling out to Yahoo, so I'm honestly not sure very much has changed here.  It's free money; they'd be fools not to take it.
  
  
  
• Multiple carriers including T-Mobile/Sprint are blocking Apple's Private Relay.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Private Relay is a sort of low-grade corporatist TOR, and T-Mobile is blocking it specifically because it prevents them from spying on their customers.
  
  
  
• How NPM can prevent a new colors attack.  (RSC)
  
  Pinned versions.
  
  My first suggestion would be burn it and piss on the ashes, but pinned versions might work too.
  
  
  
• If you want to build the next Cobalt Qube the Interceptor board from Axzes might be what you need.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 - a smaller version of the Raspberry Pi with just the CPU and RAM, no I/O ports - that provides five SATA ports, four gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB ports (plus two USB headers), and two HDMI ports.  $99 plus the cost of the compute module itself, which is, um, out of stock.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wednesday, January 12 2022 12:21 AM (EvAdG)

Posted by: MadRocketSci at Wednesday, January 12 2022 04:04 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: MadRocketSci at Wednesday, January 12 2022 04:07 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, January 12 2022 06:04 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 12 2022 07:50 AM (PiXy!)

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• Oh nyo.
  
  
  This is the game that wrecked my vacation and now that I'm back from vaction has wrecked my first day back at work.
  
  Thanks anonymous hacker, but couldn't you have done this a week earlier?

• Canon can't get the chips it uses to lock users into approved toner cartridges and has had to issue instructions on how to unlock your printer to use toner cartridges without those chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which means you no longer have to buy Canon cartridges at all.  Every silver lining has a cloud, or however that saying goes.
  
  
  
• Pixy's First Law of Personal Responsibility: Once you choose to use Node.js, everything that happens subsequently is your own damn fault.
  
  One developer broke about 20,000 Node.js projects after getting fed up with Big Tech taking advantage of open source developers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  He uploaded broken versions of two of his libraries in protest against being treated basically as slave labour.  The guy appears to be something of a nut and reportedly set his own apartment on fire with amateur pyrotechnics experiments, but he's not wrong.
  
  And for uploading unapproved changes to his own code - which broke the functionality but didn't do anything malicious - he's now locked out of GitHub. 
  
  Which is owned by Microsoft.
  
  
  
  That's exactly how people should be trained.  It's entirely correct.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 11 2022 01:16 AM (LADmw)

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• Currently reading Tim Powers' Stolen Skies, the third book in the Vickery & Castine series.  Powers doesn't really do sequels; other than this series there's Earthquake Weather which was mostly solid and Hide Me Among the Graves which was not - his only novel in 30 years that came up short.
  
  The first of these was great, classic Powers; the second was pretty good but not quite as good; the third is shaping up to be better than the second.  Recommended.
  
  Also recently read (or re-read) Lawrence Watt-Evans' Obsidian Chronicles - Dragon Weather, Dragon Society, and Dragon Venom.  Turns out I had never read the third volume before - I would have remembered that ending.  Quite a change from the more light-hearted Ethshar stories; people die in all sorts of gruesome ways throughout the series.
  
  
  
• Let's call the whole thing off.
  
  
  
  
  
• Totally Not Feds R Us
  
  
  
  

This Is Getting Out of Hand, Now There's Five of Them Video of the Day

Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, January 10 2022 05:26 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 10 2022 08:43 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, January 10 2022 12:03 PM (5iiQK)

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• Everyone in this story deserves everything that is about to happen to them: A new "tech startup" wants to allow people to bet on lawsuits using purpose-made cryptocurrencies.  (Motherboard)
  
  That's an awful idea in at least three different ways but the people behind it aren't likely to have much time to enjoy the chaos because they are dumb enough to market the idea with "50%+ annual returns".
  
  Yes, anything that offers that is a Ponzi scheme - or a robbery - and yes, the feds do still take a dim view of such things.
  
  Unless they're the ones running it.
  
  
  
• Weekends are Question and Answer time.  Drop your tech questions in the comments and I'll attempt to answer them tomorrow.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• If you offer a Patreon subscription in an international subscriber's local currency, you are now subject to the laws of that country.  (The Register)
  
  Says a ruling by Lord Justice Fuckbiscuit of Britain.
  
  Since this is in regards to a libel suit, and libel laws in Britain are shit, this is important.
  
  The solution is to block all GDPR countries at the router.  Let them eat cold kippers and warm beer.
  
  
  
• SonicWall has its own Y2K22 bug.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There is at least a patch for this one, unlike Honda cars which are trapped in 2002 until August.
  
  
  
• How a routine gem update created $73k in subscriptions.  (SerpApi)
  
  They weren't hacked and subscribed to garbage services as I first thought.  Rather, after updating the libraries for a code deployment (Ruby libraries are called "gems") their software charged existing customers an extra $73k.
  
  Why?
  
  Because (after much debugging on their side) there was a change in what "or" meant in a MongoDB database library.
  
  The maintainers of that library should be strapped to the outside of a rocket and launched directly at Cygnus X-1 because you do not ever, ever, ever do that.
  
  
  
• First impressions of Web3.  (Moxie)
  
  Web3 is the web, only fucked up with catastrophically bad blockchain implementations which promise to decentralise everything but in fact centralise it on new platforms that don't answer to you any more than the current ones do but also cost you money.
  
  The article gives a specific example of the rapid corruption of a supposedly decentralised protocol.
  
  
  
• What is Web3?  (Substack)
  
  Is it all a scam, or is it only almost all a scam?
  
  
  
• AMD's cheap(ish) new RX 6500 XT video cards kinda suck.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Only 4 PCIe lanes and missing hardware for  video decoding, meaning that task lands back on your CPU, makes it a big pile of meh.
  
  
  
• A fire at ASML's factory in Berlin affected less than 1% of the floor space.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But the area is involved in making key components for EUV lithography, and ASML is the only company in the world that makes machines for EUV lithography.  
  
  And EUV lithography is what is used to make all the latest computer chips.  All of them.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 08 2022 11:10 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 08 2022 11:33 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick at Sunday, January 09 2022 03:05 AM (hLJXN)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 09 2022 05:25 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 09 2022 05:31 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 09 2022 06:14 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: benzeen at Sunday, January 09 2022 08:06 AM (/p5qM)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, January 09 2022 08:55 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 09 2022 02:05 PM (PiXy!)

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• Nerds have swarmed Mozilla, the organisation behind the Firefox browser, after it announced it would accept donations in cryptocurrencies.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Chief nerd and Mozilla cofounder Jamie Zawinski was quoted as saying:
  
  
  Which made me laugh out loud because there's nothing better than watching communists fight over money.
  
  
  
• Talking to the blockchain camp and the anti-blockchain camp makes me understand why jocks shoved nerds into lockers back in the day.  Insufferable asshats the lot of them.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of communist and money global Bitcoin mining suffered a blow when Kazakhstan shut down its internet.  (The Guardian)
  
  The people of Kazakhstan barely rate a mention.  The effects of massive civil unrest on Bitcoin's price, though, that's important.
  
  
  
• The Signal messaging app meanwhile now supports untraceable-ish crypto payments.  (Wired)
  
  The blockchain is public, but that doesn't mean you need to make it easy to track payments.  You just need to be able to prove that a given amount has or has not been paid, and you can do that while keeping other details secret.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile comedy struck Manhattan when an art gallery owner lost two million dollars worth of imaginary monkeys.  (Motherboard)
  
  Oh no.  Anyway-
  
  
  
• Yes, it's a Ponzi Scheme.  So what?  (CoinDesk)
  
  That's illegal is what, you chucklefucks.  Doing it in purely digital fashion just makes you automatically eligible for wire fraud charges.
  
  
  
• In non-crypto news (I hope) Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 has an 8 inch tablet.  (CNet)
  
  Not is an 8 inch tablet, has an 8 inch tablet.  To the right of the keyboard.
  
  And it's one of those shitty 1280x800 models too because we can't have nice things even when they are otherwise absurd.
  
  
  
• France has fined Facebook and Google €210 million over asymmetric cookie popups.  (The Register)
  
  Being jerks, Facebook and Google made it much harder to turn down cookies than to accept them.
  Being jerks, France decided to steal their lunch money.
  
  Nearly as good as watching communists fight over money.
  
  
  
• The ESA is sending a probe to visit the moons of Jupiter.  (Popular Science)
  
  All 67 of them, in fact.  Which makes sense.  Why travel all that way and not see the sights when you arrive?
  
  
  
• QNAP's TS-h1290FX is a 12-bay 2.5" NAS.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And an Epyc server CPU and dual 25GbE and a $7500 price tag.  So probably won't be finding its way into Starlab any time soon.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, got another box today - including the first of the 4TB SSDs.
  
  Still waiting on the laptop RAM to arrive though.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 08 2022 12:27 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, January 08 2022 01:11 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, January 08 2022 02:56 AM (ZlYZd)

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• Read the room.
  
  
  Thanks, @DappRadar.  I was blissfully unaware of this new game until it took over the entire fucking blockchain, pushing gas prices from 30 as high as 5000.  (Reddit)
  
  Polygon's response to their blockchain crossing the Shoe Sunflower Event Horizon is apparently it's a blockchain, what did you idiots expect?  (Reddit)
  
  Because of course they still get their money.  It's only a problem if they don't get paid.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Phanteks Evolv Shift XT is a mini-ITX case that can easily expand into a large mini-ITX case.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All the fun stuff was announced yesterday.
  
  
  
• Handling 80TB and 5 million page views per month for $400.  (Poly Haven)
  
  1. Abuse Cloudflare's $20 per month plan to offload the 80TB of file downloads.
  2. The mee.nu server - which costs $50 per month - is closing in on 2 billion total page views.  And that server is kind of broken.
  
  
  
• Party like it's 2002.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Honda has been hit by its own Y2.022K bug that resets their cars' navigation computers to 2002.  The bug will fix itself in August.  Until then, where were you going to go anyway?
  
  
  
• Crypto platform Arbix Finance has disappeared with $10 million of user funds.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Only $10 million?  Scarcely seems worth it.
  
  
  
• Norton 360 - in case you weren't aware - is utter garbage.  (The Register)
  
  Norton Utilities back, back in the day, was great.  In 2022, it comes bundled with a cryptocurrency mining app that installs itself without notification, skims off 15% for Symantec, and is protected from removal by the other utilities.

Posted by: Andrew Horn at Friday, January 07 2022 07:15 AM (uEGFG)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 07 2022 08:26 AM (obo9H)

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• AMD at CES:
  
  Ryzen 6000 laptop CPUs with RDNA2 graphics.  (AnandTech)
  Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache in H1 and Ryzen 7000 CPUs with Zen 4 in H2.  (AnandTech)
  Radeon 6500XT cards for basic gaming.  (AnandTech)
  New mobile graphics parts - Radeon 6000S and a bunch of new Radeon 6000M, ranging from 25W to 165W.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not a huge amount of new information here since the leaks were pretty accurate, and they didn't go into an detail on Zen 4.
  
  I haven't seen anything using Ryzen 6000 with DDR4 so I'm not sure if it is compatible or not.
  
  
  
• Intel at CES:
  
  22 new desktop CPUs, 8 new laptop CPUs, three new chipsets.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 12100 and 12300 (4 core) and 12400, 12500, and 12600 (6 core) parts offer good options of general-purpose desktop PCs.  They'll be fast and aren't nearly as power-hungry as the high-end parts.
  
  The H670 and B660 chipsets offer a good range of features if you don't need a high-end motherboard supporting four SSDs at once.  The H610 at the low end is crap and should be avoided.

• Nvidia was also present and announced its RTX 3050 low-end card.  (WCCFTech) 
  
  They teased the 3090 Ti, and the 3070 Ti 16GB model and 3080 12GB model are still expected to show up soon.
  
  
  
• Samsung has a new 55" wraparound monitor to deliver an immersive experience to Excel spreadsheets.  (ZDNet)
  
  Don't look at me.
  
  
  
  
  
• Apple's new VR headset will feature three displays.  (MacRumors)
  
  One for each eye.
  
  Don't look at me.
  
  
  
• Asus has a few new laptops.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Notable lack of the Four Essential Keys though.  Asus is a bit hit-and-miss there.
  
  The Zephyrus Duo 16 has the new Ryzen 6000 CPU - specifically the high-end 6980HX - and Nvidia 3060, 3070 Ti, 3080, or the new 3080 Ti mobile graphics.  Plus a 2560x1600 or 3840x2400 16" display delivering 165Hz or 120Hz respectively and 100% of DCI-P3 colour, plus a second 3840x1100 screen just above the keyboard with stylus support.
  
  Dual PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, and dual DDR5 memory slots, which is going to suck given the price of DDR5 RAM.  Two USB-C ports with DisplayPort alt mode and one HDMI. plus wired Ethernet and the usual other bits.
  
  High end model weighs in at 2.5kg, which is not light but the extra screen is nice.
  
  The ROG Flow 13 - Asus' new gaming tablet - has an Alder Lake CPU (up to the 12900H) and optional Nvidia graphics (up to the 3050 Ti).  16GB RAM soldered to the board and a 1TB M.2 2230 SSD.  Which is replaceable in theory but you can't get anything larger than that in the 2230 form factor.
  
  Screen on the high-end model is a 3840x2400 display with 85% DCI-P3 which isn't amazing but isn't terrible.  Weight is 1.18kg which I suspect excludes the detachable keyboard.
  
  
  
• Missed it by that much, Lenovo.  (Windows Central  / MSN)
  
  The new ThinkPad Z13 and Z16 have the new Ryzen 6000 CPUs, up to 2TB of SSD and 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM, up to a 3840x2400 OLED display, an anti-notch - a little camera bump that doubles as a catch for opening the laptop - and two of the Four Essential Keys.
  
  Why?  It would have cost another 50 cents to add the other two.  Why did you stop there?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 06 2022 07:40 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 06 2022 11:21 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 06 2022 02:57 PM (PiXy!)

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• Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos CEO and Steve Jobs groupie, has been found guilty on four charge of wire fraud, and "whatever" on seven other charges.  (Axios)

  Why it matters: Holmes was the poster child of Silicon Valley hubris, taking "fake it till you make it"

  Yeah, that's enough out of you, Axios.  You have no place talking about "Silicon Valley hubris" or "fake it till you make it" in anything but the first person.
  
  Also just wanted to not that wire fraud is a lovely crime.  It is literally fraud involving a wire.
  
  
  
• It's CES time again and there's a whole bunch of...  Frankly, a whole bunch of nothin' so far.
  
  MSI did jump the gun and announce its new laptop range with 12th generation Alder Lake-P CPUs.  (VideoCardz)
  
  They also come with updated Nvidia GPUs including the mobile forms of the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti.
  
  They also come with DDR5 RAM which as we've noted is thus far basically a waste of money and only useful at all in a notebook if you're running AMD's new Ryzen 6000 chips - which these laptops are not - and even then you'd be better off with cheaper DDR4 RAM and dedicated graphics.
  
  
  

Tech News

• That's something, I guess.  (AnandTech)
  
  Netgear's new RAXE300 router can deliver up to 7.8Gbps of WiFi bandwidth....  And has a 2.5Gbps Ethernet link.
  
  While wired bandwidth falls a little short it's at least better than existing models that do 5.4Gbps over WiFi but have only 1Gbps over Ethernet.
  
  
  
• Intel's Arc A380 GPU matches Nvidia's GTX1650.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not terrible.  For their low-end card (possibly not entry-level, but low end), that will do just fine for casual gaming up to and including titles like Minecraft and GTA.
  
  
  
• AMD's Ryzen 600 is expected to be announced today. But what about Second Ryzen Ryzen 7000?  (WCCFTech)
  
  If the rumours are correct - okay, some heavy lifting on the if there - if the rumours are correct, each Ryzen 7000 chiplet will have 8 big cores and 8 bigger cores.
  
  The bigger cores will be the new Zen 4 architecture; the big cores will also be the new Zen 4 architecture but optimised to run at a lower voltage and clock speed.  The 8 big cores by themselves are expected to outrun an existing 8 core Ryzen 5800X.  The 8 bigger cores will be significantly faster than that, and all 16 cores together will of course be even more faster.
  
  And you'll be able to get two such chiplets on one CPU.  32 core mainstream desktop processors.
  
  Plus all Zen 4 CPUs are expected to have integrated graphics, which regular Zen 3 CPUs do not.
  
  
  
•  The HP T740 Thin Client: Putting the Mega in TinyMinyMicro.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The T740 is bigger than most tiny dekstops - the size of a Mac Mini rather than an Intel NUC - but to its advantage it has a low-profile PCIe slot, so you could (for example) add a four-port Ethernet card and make it into the 2022 version of the Cobalt Qube.  It also has four DisplayPort ports, seven USB ports, two SO-DIMM slots, and two M.2 slots, albeit one NVMe and one SATA-only.
  
  CPU is an embedded Ryzen part, competitive with Intel laptop chips from 2020.  It's not blazing fast but by no means terrible.  And if you want a name-brand compact PC with a PCIe slot you don't have that many options.
  
  Not sure if this is still in production; a quick scout around showed many listings but no stock - but that's true of a lot of things these days.
  
  
  
• Apple has hit a market cap of $3 trillion.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  As I observed this time last year:

  If you keep pumping money into the economy, you're going to get inflation. Somewhere. If it's not grocery prices, it's something else.

  All the bullshit economic trends we're seeing today stem from the same bullshit economic policies of the last couple of years.
  
  
  
• Don't waste your money on these Apple products.  (ZDNet)
  
  Okay, sure.
  
  
  
• Over 14,000* gaming companies have closed their doors in China.  (Apple Insider)
  
  China "temporarily" suspended licenses for new and updated games last July and nothing has changed since then.  Unless you're a Chinese game developer in which case you've had to eat your own shoes.
  
  * The article says 140,000 but it's wrong.
  
  
  
• Fuck that shit: Samsung is putting an NFT marketplace directly into its smart TVs.  (Engadget)
  
  The large-format computer monitor option is looking better every day.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 05 2022 04:03 AM (Z0GF0)

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