• Instagram has apologised for accidentally labelling terrorists as terrorists.  (Ars Technica)

  Not everyone has accepted Meta's apology. Director of Amnesty Tech—a branch of Amnesty International that advocates for tech companies to put human terrorist rights first—Rasha Abdul-Rahim, said on X Twitter that Meta Instagram apologizing is "not good enough."

  "You're not allowed to tell the truth", said Abdul-Rahim.  "You have to lie, and you have to tell the lies we feed you."
  
  
  

Tech News

• Zotac's ZBox Pico PI430AJ uses Frore's piezoelectric Airjet cooling system.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are often called solid state, but they do have moving parts.  They're nearly silent because they vibrate too fast for you to hear - the only sound is the moving air.
  
  The catch?  This device has a 7W CPU and would run fine without a fan anyway.  Though a quick look at the benchmark results suggests it might be thermally limited, so it's possible the fan does help.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new HBM3E memory is big and fast.  (AnandTech)
  
  A single package - not exactly a chip, but a stack of 12 silicon dies - holds 36GB, runs at 9.8GHz, and is 1024 bits wide, giving a bandwidth of 1.2TB per second.
  
  
  
• Mediatek is no longer a second-tier manufacturer of chips for cheap phones.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The company used to be synonymous with budget devices, but its Dimensity 9300 is just a hair slower - 1.7% - than Apple's best mobile chips in multi-core tests.  The difference is wider in single-core benchmarks, where Apple still holds a convincing lead.
  
  I'd like to see chips like these in NUCs.  Windows Arm devices have been pretty underwhelming so far, mostly using chips that are badly out of date by the time the products hit the market.
  
  
  
• Reddit is considering blocking search engines and other web spiders - particularly those used by AI companies - though exactly how it plans to do that is an open question.  (The Verge)
  
  Google and Microsoft are big targets with lots of money that you can sue if they breach their own terms of service related to web indexing.  If you flag them in your robots.txt file - which they promise to obey - and they ignore it, that's grounds for a great big settlement.
  
  AI companies are much smaller and less scrupulous, and if your content is still public there's no simple way to block them.  Instagram has been doing this for years, and people still scrape its content.
  
  And the AI companies need Reddit far more than Reddit needs them.  You can only train AIs on AI content for a very short time before it all turns to sheep.

• AMD's Threadripper and Threadripper Pro 7000 CPUs are finally here, for users for whom time is money.  (AnandTech)
  
  These chips ain't cheap: Prices start at $1499 for the 24-core 7960X, and zoom up to $10k once you get to the 96-core 7995WX.
  
  But for comparison, a 24-core Intel Xeon W7-2495X costs $2199, and that's at the top of Intel's high-end desktop range.  The 7960X is cheaper, faster, and at the bottom of AMD's comparable range.  It's $100 more expensive than the previous 3960X, but it's a lot more than $100 faster.
  
  The regular Threadripper models provide four memory channels (up to 1TB total RAM), 48 PCIe 5 and 32 PCIe 4 lanes, and up to 64 cores.
  
  Threadripper Pro provides eight memory channels (up to 2TB total), 128 PCIe 5 lanes, and up to 96 cores.
  
  Also, similarly to Intel with its Xeon 2400 and 3400 chips, you can plug a Threadripper Pro into a Threadripper motherboard.  You probably wouldn't want to, since Threadripper already goes up to 64 cores (where the Xeon 2400 maxes out at just 24), but you can.
  
  Available wherever extremely expensive computer components are sold.

• Facebook and Instagram are censoring terrorist propaganda.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apparently this is a bad thing now that the terrorists are Arabs who murder babies rather than grandmothers from Iowa who went for a stroll on a bad day.
  
  
  
• Apple has censored John Stewart.  (The Verge)
  
  Apparently his views were not aligned with corporate on the topics of AI and China, which Apple views as good but aren't.
  
  
  
• The worst person in the world just made a good point: New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing three crypto companies on allegations of defrauding customers of over a billion dollars.  (The Verge)
  
  Guess I'll make pocorn.
  
  
  
• TSMC says it's N3P process is equivalent to Intel's 18A.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  180nm was probably the last process node where the numbers meant something real, and that was forever ago.

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, October 21 2023 03:01 PM (sZ6tC)

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• Binance US no longer supports withdrawals in US dollars.  (Coindesk)
  
  If you want to get your money out, you can convert it to some kind of "stablecoin" (a cryptocurrency pinned 1:1 to the US dollar), transfer that to another service, and then withdraw the money there.
  
  Binance blames this on its banking partners, who in turn blame it on the SEC, which blames it on Binance.
  
  And there's actually some truth in all of that.
  
  
  
• Probably not Real USD though, because despite the name that is suddenly worth 53 cents.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  So weird how that keeps happening.

• In less than two years, a billion computers will be officially orphaned.  (PC Magazine)
  
  70% of the world's PCs still run Windows 10, and most of those can't officially upgrade.  Not that Windows 11 is an upgrade so much as an endless sequence of annoyances.
  
  But while it is relegating a billion perfectly functional computers to landfill, Microsoft is use 20% recycled plastic in its latest mice.  So there's that.
  
  
  
• After being sold by Epic Games and picked up by Songtradr (who?) Bandcamp's entire union bargaining team was laid off.  (404 Media)
  
  So weird how that keeps happening.
  
  
  
• What's inside Apple's $129 Thunderbolt cable that makes it cost so much.  Rather a lot, as it turns out.  (Twitter)
  
  USB-C cables and Thunderbolt cables look the same on the outside, but inside they are very different, and this Twitter thread runs the cables through a CT scanner to see what's going on.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 20 2023 02:19 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, October 21 2023 01:36 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 21 2023 04:38 PM (PiXy!)

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• Under new regulations China will no longer be able to buy Nvidia's cut-down A800 an H800 AI cards or AMD's MI300 models, and China's own GPU companies will lose access to advanced processes at TSMC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  However, Iran can now buy and sell missiles because our leaders totally have their eyes on what is most important, which is to say, their bank accounts.
  
  
  

• Intel's 14th gen desktop chips get put to the test and...  Eh.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're fast, but (a) for gaming they are still slower than AMD's 7800X3D, (b) for productivity they're still slower than AMD's 7950X, (c) you still have the problem with having two entirely different core designs in one chip, and (d) power consumption is insane.
  
  On the Y-Cruncher benchmark, the 7950X3D uses 99W while the 14900K uses 262W, and the 7950X3D is faster.
  
  
  
• Corsair's 4TB MP600 Core XT is selling for $160.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a DRAMless QLC drive, so not even slightly high-end, but 4TB for $160 is pretty good if you just want fast storage for video files or games.
  
  
  
• Twitter is running a trial charging $1 per year to new users for full access.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Don't cough up the buck and the site is read-only.
  
  This only applies to New Zealand and the Philippines right now, but signs are they want to take it worldwide to filter out the bots and general idiocy.
  
  At worst, make the idiots a profit center.
  
  
  
• How to hack Switzerland's new e-voting system.  (Schneier on Security)
  
  You still need to hack your targets' computers, but once you've done that, the carefully designed voting protocol does nothing to protect anyone.
  
  The solution is paper.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 18 2023 09:53 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 18 2023 11:54 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 19 2023 12:21 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, October 19 2023 08:41 AM (2tHvf)

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• Proposed legislation in New York would require a background check to buy any 3d printer capable of producing gun components, which is to say, any 3d printer at all.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Other proposed legislation in the People's Democratic Republic would ban manufacturing guns by any means (protected by the Second Amendment) and ban the sharing of firearm designs (protected by the First Amendment).
  
  There's one token socialist in the comments on that article, but mostly they seem pretty sensible.

• Intel has launched its 14th generation desktop chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are its 13th generation desktop chips.
  
  Except for the the 14700K, which has 4 extra "efficiency" cores when compared to the 13700K, they have only minor clock speed increases to go with the price increases.
  
  
  
• Cities Skylines 2 arrives next week and the hardware recommendations are "all of it".  (WCCFTech)
  
  A 12600K or 5800X CPU, and a 3080 or 6800 XT or higher.
  
  The minimum requirements are much lower, but you might not have a good time.
  
  To be fair, the original game came out in 2015 and received its last major update in May, and is still perfectly playable if you want to wait a couple of years for high-end graphics cards to become more affordable.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried's "effective altruism" consisted of stealing money, bribing people, and setting the rest on fire.  (Washington Post)
  
  Not sure exactly what effect was intended there.
  
  
  
• Bandcamp - which was in the process of unionizing - has been hastily sold by owner Epic Games and laid off half its staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Bandcamp seems to be (or have been) popular with indie musicians, but when tech companies unionise, destruction follows.
  
  
  
• The neighbour of the beast: LinkedIn is firing another 668 employees.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oddly specific.
  
  
  
• Micron has a new range of "mainstream" SSDs - the 7500.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These are U.3 drives for servers, meaning you need a cheap adaptor cable or PCIe card to plug them into a desktop PC.  But if you need a lot of storage, an 8TB enterprise drive like this is actually cheaper than an 8TB M.2 drive, and not much more than a pair of budget 4TB models.
  
  (U.3 drives are backwards-compatible and will work in U.2 drive bays and adapters, but the reverse is not true.)

• Minecraft has sold over 300 million copies.  (The Verge)
  
  That's a lot.  That's a lot of a lot.
  
  Also, with Henya pushing the crabs and Pina Pengin naturally enough backing the penguins, the Minecraft userbase voted for the armadillo to be the next animal added to the game.
  
  Seriously, what are they going to do?  There aren't any 18 wheelers for them to run under.
  
  
  

Tech News

• With Microsoft now the owner of Activision (as well as Minecraft) (although the US government is still fighting that despite the deal having gone through) (Activision, not Minecraft) what is going to happen to the old Infocom games?  (Zarf)
  
  Yes, Activision has been around that long.
  
  
  
• Why is the frontend stack so complicated.  (Matt Rickard)
  
  By "frontend stack" he means the user side of web development, and the reason it's so complicated is that JavaScript is kind of bad and server-side JavaScript is cancer, and yet it's used everywhere.
  
  There is no solution except fire.
  
  
  
• The Asus Expertcenter PN64-E1 is perfectly adequate.  (Serve the Home)
  
  No stand-out qualities.  No notable weaknesses.
  
  Oh, it's a NUC.  A desktop mini-PC.  Intel.
  
  
  
• Plant-based cheese.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I like my plant-based cheese just like my plant-based steak: Thoroughly cowed.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 16 2023 06:41 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 16 2023 07:10 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 17 2023 12:12 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Brendan at Tuesday, October 17 2023 05:28 AM (V8yYW)

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• Canon (the Japanese printer company) has announced a new chipmaking process, where the chip pattern, call a mask, is stamped physically into the chip rather than being used as a filter for a high-energy beam of ultraviolet light.  (Canon)
  
  Stamped gently like an ink stamp, rather than jammed into the surface like a metalworking stamp, because the lines in the pattern are only 15nm wide and it would disintegrate instantly.
  
  15nm lines are small enough to fabricate 5nm chips, because the numbers are pure marketing spin and have been for a couple of decades now.

• There's a slim model of the PlayStation 5 arriving next month, called the PlayStation 5 Slim.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  Seems reasonable.
  
  
  
• Forget that, just buy the current model.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  Seems reasonable.
  
  
  
• The thief who stole $470 million in stolen funds from failed Ponzi scheme FTX is busy trying to launder his gains while chief thief Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial.  (BBC)
  
  Signs point to Russia.

• NASA has just launched its Psyche mission, an aptly named probe to explore the asteroid Psyche.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Sent into space atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy - and in fairness, it's much better for NASA to build just the spacecraft and leave the launches to private industry - the mission is expected to total $1.4 billion between the craft, the launch vehicle, and eight years of operations.
  
  The estimated value of the minerals on Psyche itself is in the range of $10 quintillion.  That's 400,000 years of the US GDP, or about 7 trillion times the cost of this mission.
  
  Say what you will about government waste; this one would appear to be justified.

• Twitter has started to flag explicit pornography as explicit pornography.  Here's why that's a bad thing.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Talk to the hand.
  
  
  
• Clinical trials at the Sheep Hilton show that Vitamin C is a safe and effective treatment for sepsis in humans.  (Florey)
  
  Researchers at Australia's Florey Institute - the aforementioned Sheep Hilton - have shown that sodium ascorbate - Vitamin C - is effective at treating clinical cases of sepsis.
  
  You just need to inject it directly into your veins.
  
  Better than the alternative, and it gives your blood a refreshing citrusy tang.
  
  
  
• Untergruppenfuhrer Thierry "Klaus" Breton has turned his fiery gaze from Twitter to YouTube.  (The Verge)
  
  Probably because Twitter ignored him.
  
  By the way, Klaus, antibiotics will clear that right up.
  
  
  
• Can open source be saved from the EU's Cyber Resilience Act?  (The Register)
  
  Sure.  Easy peasy.  Null-route the entire useless continent.
  
  Maybe offer exceptions for Poland and Hungary.

Not Even Remotely Tech News

Update: Oof.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, October 15 2023 12:00 AM (r9O5h)

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• In which The Verge tries to explain a joke.  (The Verge)
  
  So Rick and Morty is back with season seven, though without series co-creator and the voice of both Rick and Morty, Justin Roiland, who got Me Too'd.
  
  Given the way the show was headed in seasons four through six - straight downward - this is less of a loss than it might have been otherwise.
  
  But that's not the point here.  The point is that The Verge spends eight paragraphs discussing an episode called How Poopy Got His Poop Back and makes it sound about as entertaining as a simultaneous barium enema and double root canal.
  
  It's a talent.  Of some sort.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apple is a cult.  (Tokyo Dev)
  
  If you lose your MacBook, Apple will very helpfully kill it for you.  Even if you get it back, it will still be dead.  And no, they won't fix that - even though that can.  And they won't let you fix it either.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, be prepared for some drama if you want to run Linux on the latest Framework laptops.  (Zach Codes)
  
  It can be done, but it's certainly not as smooth an experience a you'd hope.
  
  On the other hand, it's yours.  You can pop it open and replace anything.  No subscriptions, no cloud, none of that.
  
  
  
• After petulant impotent threats, the EU Office of the Bookburner General has opened a petulant impotent investigation into "disinformation" at Twitter.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Unsurprisingly the Ars Technica commentariat sides with the book burners.
  
  Wonder if I'll get banned again.
  
  
  
• Intel's Arc A580 is here, and at $180 it's a decent card for 1080p gaming.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Its key strength is that it keeps a full 256-bit memory bus at a price point where AMD and Nvidia only offer cut-down 128-bit cards.
  
  Its key weakness is that Intel's A750 is a good bit faster and only $10 more.
  
  Intel does seem committed to its graphics efforts, and the early driver issues seem to be mostly resolved, but if you're inclined in that direction it's definitely worth spending the extra ten bucks.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 13 2023 11:57 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 14 2023 02:01 AM (LADmw)

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• CRISPR skimmed chicken: Genetically engineering chickens to not get sick and die by the millions any time a sparrow sneezes in Mongolia.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  There are three specific proteins that the H5N1 virus hijacks in chickens to reproduce itself, and the scientists adjusted each one slightly so that it couldn't do that.
  
  Result: Chickens that don't catch colds.
  
  Or almost.  They've grown healthy chickens with any one of those genes altered, which are highly resistant to the flu, but not yet with all three genes updated; that's only been tested in cell cultures.
  
  Still great progress, and I'm expecting in five years or so we'll see these on the supermarket shelves, and shortly after that we'll be told that somehow they got pangolin genes in the mix and we all have to be buried alive for our own good.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Chinese government hackers are exploiting a new zero-day exploit in Atlassian.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Do not run Atlassian products on the public internet.  This is not complicated, people.
  
  
  
• AVX10/128 is dumb and should be thrown into a volcano before it angers the gods.  (Chips and Cheese)
  
  AVX10 is a dumbed-down version of AVX512 because Intel couldn't get AVX512 to work.  (Though AMD did just fine.)
  
  AVX10/128 is the entry-level version, minimally compatible with AVX1 and 2, but it manages to be simultaneously more complicated and less compatible than AMD's AVX implementation in its Bulldozer family of CPUs...  In 2011.
  
  
  
• Russia plans to mass-produce 28nm chips by 2027.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's rather unlikely; Russia was, last I checked, stuck at either 65nm or 90nm.  They can get their hands on 28nm equipment, but getting full-size fabs set up is a different matter.
  
  Still, 28nm is a decent process; the Bulldozer chips I mentioned above were mostly produced on 28nm.
  
  
  
• Everyone involved in this story is an idiot and I feel dumber for having read it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Do not dumb here.
  Not dumb area here.
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, October 12 2023 09:54 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 12 2023 11:31 PM (LADmw)

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