• I was promised eight inches of rain today.  So far only two.  I feel robbed.
  
  
  
• The Conti malware gang - who have thrown in their lot with Russia - have been hacked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If your team is going to side with one side it helps not to have the other side on your team - the deed seems to have been done dirt cheap by a Ukrainian gang member.
  
  Oops.
  
  Internal communications and source code have been published, as usual.

Tech News

• Benhmarking AMD's Ryzen 6000 laptop CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  Short story: It's the same chip (on the CPU side) as the old one, but a series of clever tweaks has made it 9% to 14% faster.
  
  On graphics it's in a class of its own.
  
  Meanwhile the Ryzen 5000 desktop range, no longer the fastest gaming processors around, 
  have received price cuts of 20 to 25%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ryzen 7000 is due out later this year, though, and will use a different motherboard.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's new 20TB Red NAS drives are rated for 300TB of writes or reads per year.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That's not a lot.  Particularly for reads.  You can do that in two weeks, leaving the remaining fifty somewhat empty.
  
  
  
• Small, cheap, fast: With Intel's new NUC, pick one.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It's basically a mini-ITX Alder Lake system, just with Intel branding.  If that's what you want, it is that.

• Shot:  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
  
  Chaser:
  
  
  
  
  In a warzone, has faster download speeds than 90% of Australia.
  
  
  
• Particularly Tasmania.  (ZDNet)
  
  The entire state lost internet access around 1:30 PM today.
  
  Major internet problems in Queensland and New South Wales today as well, due to large parts of those states being underwater.  We're currently in the latter half of "Of droughts and flooding rains".
  
  Come to think of it, I should check what towns are in trouble right now and scratch them off my list.  Armidale is a reported emergency area but so is the part of Sydney where I live right now, and while everything outside is thoroughly soggy, it's not coming inside.  Lismore and Ballina are less fortunate.  A couple of my co-workers in Queensland are cut off but otherwise safe.
  
  Update:

  The State Emergency Service put out a flood watch for the whole Sydney region, with the worst predicted for areas around the Upper Nepean River.

  That's unusual.  The Nepean, yes, but the entire Sydney region?  I'll be fine; I'm up on a hill in Sydney's north, but much of the western parts of Sydney are low-lying and flat.
  
  Update Two: Five to eight inches of rain predicted where I live tomorrow, with similar falls across Sydney.  Time to batten down.
  
  Update Three: I've been so busy with work that I missed the fact that Sydney flooded last week.  (ABC - the Aussie one)
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• 40Gb DisplayPort 2.0 connections connectors will be labelled DP40.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And the new higher speed 80Gb connectors will be labelled DP80.
  
  This will work over existing Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 cables which are rated for 40Gbps, because DisplayPort only needs to send data in one direction.  It actually switches all the receive wires into transmit mode.  (Except for the single USB 2.0 pair in the middle.)
  
  
  
• Western Digital's new 20TB NAS drive has 64GB of flash on board.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not, I understand, used for data caching, but to record metadata that is normally written to the disk itself.  This will still improve performance, and NAS units have their own dedicated SSD caching slots now so it's not so important it be built into the drives themselves.
  
  
  
• Internet domain registry and other services company Namecheap has stopped supporting Russia.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Russian customers and .ru, .by, and .su (which still exists) need to find a new home.
  
  The CEO is responding to questions at Hacker News.  The company apparently has staff in Ukraine.
  
  
  
• Toyota has suspended operations on 28 production lines after a key supplier got hit by a cyberattack.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There's a reason armies work on "hurry up and wait" rather than "just in time".  A perfectly efficient "just in time" strategy is 100% fragile; any problem at all propagates downstream.
  
  
  
• And the entire internet, like it or not, is a warzone.  (The Register)
  
  24/7.  It's a wonder anything works at all.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, March 02 2022 08:09 AM (bHHXR)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, March 02 2022 10:45 AM (MuaLM)

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