• It's Public Domain Day - or was, yesterday - meaning a slew of new content is in the public domain, unless it isn't, in which case it's not. (Duke University)
  
  Sometimes it's hard to be sure particularly when dealing with 95-year-old material where everyone directly involved is probably dead.
  
  But entering the public domain this year - yesterday - is A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury, The Maltese Falcon, Is Sex Necessary by James Thurber and E. B. White, Alfred Hitchcock's first sound film Blackmail, and The Cocoanuts, the first feature film by the Marx Brothers.
  
  Also the characters - though not the stories - of Popeye and Tintin, the first speaking roles of Mickey Mouse, Singin' in the Rain, Ain't Misbehavin', and Ravel's Bolero.
  
  
  

Tech News

• CES is almost here so all the hardware news is waiting until then. So until next week it's mostly leaks of varying veracity.
  
  
  
• California seeks to fix soaring insurance premiums and outright lack of coverage due to wildfires caused by the state's incompetent forestry policy by... Making things worse. (Fast Company)
  
  We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.
  
  
  
• The RTX 5060 could be 20% faster than the current 4060 and have 0% more memory. (Notebook Check)
  
  It's stuck at 8GB which is already posing problems.
  
  Meanwhile Intel's 12GB B580 is already out and cheaper than Nvidia's old card, let alone the new one.
  
  On the third hand, precisely because the Intel card offers such good value, you can't find it anywhere.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 03 2025 09:19 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 03 2025 09:20 AM (NEIix)

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• It's not always the Chinese: A US soldier has been arrested for his role in hacking AT&T and Verizon and attempted extortion of the president and vice president.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  This seems like a very poor choice of career paths for a soldier, but Cameron John Wagenius does not strike me as the sharpest spoon in the drawer:

  "In the event you do not reach out to us @ATNT all presidential government call logs will be leaked," Kiberphant0m threatened, signing their post with multiple "#FREEWAIFU" tags. "You don’t think we don't have plans in the event of an arrest? Think again."

  It turned out those plans involved going to prison for an extremely long time.
  
  

• April Fool's Day is still three months away, guys: 9to5Mac has named Apple's Vision Pro headset as its product of the year.  (9to5Mac)
  
  The Vision Pro made history for being the first Apple product where more units were returned than were ever purchased in the first place.
  
  
  
• It didn't even live long enough to be bricked by a bad firmware update.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Good work, Facebook.  Bonus points for telling customers that you weren't going to fix it and they had to buy a new device, before rapidly backtracking when legal woke up from their drunken stupor.
  
  
  
• What happened in AI in 2024?  A whole lotta nothin'.  (Simon Willison)
  
  Actually, while the industry leader OpenAI produced a whole lotta nothin', smaller AI companies and the open source community were busy eating their lunch.  So as a whole not much changed, but the distribution of the nothin' changed greatly.
  
  Still, on consideration, Carthago delenda est.

  I think telling people that this whole field is environmentally catastrophic plagiarism machines that constantly make things up is doing those people a disservice, no matter how much truth that represents.

  I don't know, maybe you could stop building the Torment Nexus.
  
  
  
• Though at least AI killed off $1600 laptops with 8GB of RAM.  (Ars Technica)
  
  8GB in 2024 cost manufacturers about $8, and renders Windows almost unusable.  Now I'm looking for something to kill off expensive 16GB laptops as well.
  
  Cheap 16GB laptops?  Sure.  Fine.  Perfectly usable for basic tasks.  But expensive ones can burn.
  
  
  
• The Verge's year in review: Advertising masquerading as content and miserable failures.  (The Verge)
  
  But at least they tried.  Sort of.
  
  
  
• Tech Crunch's year in review: Trying its hardest to be worse than The Verge.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A laudable effort if a questionable goal.