• OpenAI has unveiled its Google rival, SearchGPT.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Kill it with fire.

  OpenAI seems to have taken note of the blowback and says it’s taking a markedly different approach. In a blog post, the company emphasized that SearchGPT was developed in collaboration with various news partners, which include organizations like the owners of The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge. "News partners gave valuable feedback, and we continue to seek their input," Wood says.

  Kill it with fire and sow the ground with salt.

  The rapid advancements by OpenAI have won ChatGPT millions of users, but the company’s costs are adding up. The Information reported this week that OpenAI’s AI training and inference costs could reach $7 billion this year, with the millions of users on the free version of ChatGPT only further driving up compute costs. SearchGPT will be free during its initial launch, and since the feature appears to have no ads right now, it’s clear the company will have to figure out monetization soon.

  Though maybe if we just wait a bit they'll encounter the delicious salty fires of bankruptcy.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants a US-led freedom coalition to fight authoritarian AI.  (The Register)
  
  Great.  They can start by destroying ChatGPT.
  
  
  
  
• AMD's 128 core Epyc 9755 goes zoom.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD already has 128 core server chips, but those are Zen 4c and this is the full-size Zen 5 core, so it's about 60% faster.
  
  
  
• Runway AI, a startup valued at $1.5 billion, is reported to have scraped its training material from YouTube.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• AI didn't take my job.  (DAVA)
  
  Not your job, maybe.  AI still makes a lousy programmer.  The latest AI tools sometimes get typeahead right and save me 30 seconds.
  
  And sometimes get it wrong and cost me 30 minutes.
  
  
  
• But if you're an artist working for Activision Blizzard you might well be screwed.  (Player One)
  
  Half the artists are being laid off and many of the remaining staff are being tasked with training their AI replacements.
  
  I'm not sure how well that will work.  In theory art doesn't need to work; it needs to look like it works.  But that's not entirely true when you put art into a computer game.
  
  
  
• Hundreds of motherboards from Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro have completely broken secure boot functionality.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They use a brain that was marked Abby Someone.
  
  Pretty much literally.
  
  This matters less than you might think.  Your computer will still work perfectly well unless you get a BIOS virus.
  
  So...  Just don't do that.
  
  
  
• AOOSTAR (dumb name, I know) has announced an AMD version of its Intel-based four-bay NAS.  (Liliputing)
  
  While it still has four bays and two 2.5Gb Ethernet port, the 4 core N100 CPU is replaced with an 8 core Ryzen 5825U (essentially the same as the laptop I am using right now), with up to 64G of RAM and two M.2 2280 slots for SSDs.
  
  The AMD chip is about three times faster than the Intel one, so if you want to run server tasks on your NAS it's a much better option.
  
  
  
• Here's why David Sacks, Paul Graham, and other venture capitalist types got into a spat on Twitter.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Short version: They're Mean Girls with money.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 26 2024 10:17 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 26 2024 10:19 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 26 2024 11:52 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 27 2024 12:10 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, July 27 2024 02:07 AM (qPjyz)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 27 2024 08:44 AM (bg2DR)

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• KnowBe4, a US company providing security awareness training, hired a North Korean hacker.  (Ars Technica)

  KnowBe4 operates in 11 countries and is headquartered in Florida. It provides security awareness training, including phishing security tests, to corporate customers. If you occasionally receive a fake phishing email from your employer, you might be working for a company that uses the KnowBe4 service to test its employees' ability to spot scams.

  Or it could be a North Korean hacker whose scam was not spotted.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in security failure news after causing billions of dollars in damage worldwide, CrowdStrike has sent out $10 Uber Eats gift cards to its affected partners.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  No, there aren't any digits missing there.  Yes, that will just about cover a medium fries from McDonalds.

• The launch date of AMD's Ryzen 9000 series has been pushed back by one to two weeks after faulty chips were detected in the initial production run.  (AnandTech)
  
  Apparently all chips shipped to retailers have been recalled for testing before any are sold.  The low-end 9600X and 9700X will be available by the 8th of August now, and the 9900X and 9950X by the 15th.
  
  Which is a lot better than selling them for a couple of years before admitting that there's a problem. 
  
  
  
• JEDEC is preparing for LPDDR6 CAMM2.  (AnandTech)
  
  CAMM2 modules have just started showing up in laptops.  They are thinner than SODIMMs since they rest flat on the motherboard, and are 128 bits wide so you only need one of them for full bandwidth.
  
  With LPDDR6 the plan is to increase the width to 192 bits, and the maximum speed from 9.2GHz to 14.4GHz - more than twice as fast overall.
  
  That should allow for a significant increase in internal graphics performance for laptop chips, since they are currently limited more by memory bandwidth than anything else.  All while retaining memory upgradability.
  
  With two of these you'd get almost the bandwidth of a current high-end card like Nvidia's RTX 4080 Super - and be able to upgrade the memory on your graphics card to 192GB, maybe even 384GB.
  
  Almost enough to run the new Llama 405b.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake-S beats the 14900K by up to 18% when both are constrained to 250W.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In fact, it's even slightly faster than a 9950X at 160W.  Allow the 9950X to use its default maximum power of 230W and it regains the lead by about 7%.
  
  
  
• If you fork a public repo on GitHub, push something to it you shouldn't have, and then delete the entire fork in a panic, don't worry.  You're screwed anyway so there's no point in worrying.  (Truffle Security)
  
  And vice versa.  If someone forks your public repo, and you delete the public repo, everything is still there.
  
  
  
• Someone spent $22,000 trying to buy a Hugo Award, but failed because they are lazy and/or stupid.  (The Guardian)

  The Hugo administration subcommittee, which tallies the votes for the annual awards, issued a statement on Monday saying that they had determined that 377 votes had been cast by individuals with "obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics".
  
  These included voters with almost identical surnames, with just one letter changed and placed in alphabetical order, and some whose names were "translations of consecutive numbers".

  Most depressing point is the analysis that says that even the Best Novel Hugo is not worth $22,000 in sales.
  
  
  
• In cheerier news OpenAI is expected to lose $5 billion in 2024.  (Datacenter Dynamics)
  
  Couldn't happen to a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
  
  
  
• More technical details on Zen 5, specifically the mobile chips.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Just a note: I previously said that Zen 5 increased the instruction issue rate from 4 instructions per cycle to 8.  That's not correct.  
  
  Zen 3 and Zen 4 could decode 4 instructions per cycle, and issue 6 operations.   (One X86 instruction can be broken up into multiple operations.)
  
  Zen 5 increases both the decode and issue width to 8 per cycle.
  
  
  
• The Verge is big mad that Marc Andressen and Ben Horowitz have escaped the reservation.  (The Verge)
  
  How dare venture capitalists focus on venture capitalism and not vote for the destruction of the country like good little robots?
  
  
  
• AI needs high-quality human-generated data for training. That comes from the internet. But the internet is becoming increasingly overrun with AI-generated garbage.  How screwed is future AI training?  All the screwed.  (Tech Crunch)

  But the thing is, models gravitate toward the most common output. It won’t give you a controversial snickerdoodle recipe but the most popular, ordinary one. And if you ask an image generator to make a picture of a dog, it won’t give you a rare breed it only saw two pictures of in its training data; you’ll probably get a golden retriever or a Lab.
  
  Now, combine these two things with the fact that the web is being overrun by AI-generated content and that new AI models are likely to be ingesting and training on that content. That means they’re going to see a lot of goldens!

  The paper in Nature is pretty technical, and the supplementary content even more so, but in the Tech Crunch article there is an image that explains everything.  In just four steps, the AI goes from a fairly representative idea of dogs to complete garbage.
  
  
  

• The Fifth Circuit has issued an en banc ruling holding that the FCC's "Universal Service Fee" is a tax and therefore unconstitutional.  (Reason)
  
  They actually used the term misbegotten so you know they're serious.
  
  This one will be going to the Supreme Court for sure.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 25 2024 07:48 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, July 25 2024 09:33 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 25 2024 11:53 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 26 2024 12:06 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 26 2024 12:18 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, July 26 2024 01:40 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: David Eastman at Friday, July 26 2024 02:37 AM (rmrII)

8 AI training problems - maybe they can give this a fancy name...like GIGO

Posted by: Frank at Friday, July 26 2024 05:36 AM (qPjyz)

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• SpaceX is cheaper and more capable than any other rocket company, and it's not even close.  Here's why that's a bad thing.  (Ars Technica)
  
  NASA estimated that de-orbiting the ISS in 2030 would cost $1.7 billion.
  
  SpaceX gave them a fixed-price quote of $680 million.
  
  The closest competitor, Northrop Grumman, came in around NASA's estimate.
  
  Sure, it would be great if we had a couple of other companies capable of competing with SpaceX.  But the key here is scale, and SpaceX is creating its own scale with Starlink.  It's not at all clear how another company is going to compete.
  
  
  
• Local Hyte distributor expects the Calliope Mori and Amelia Watson Hyte / Hololive limited edition cases in stock in the next few days.  I've been chasing the Calli case for an entire year at this point, and was looking at having to spend hundreds of dollars to ship one by air from the US.
  
  They still won't be cheap, but they'll be a lot cheaper this way.
  
  There's a Dokibird model coming out in November but I think I'll have enough cases after these two.  If it was Sana or perhaps Maid Mint I'd consider it, but while I like Doki I'm not sure I $300 like Doki.
  
  Or Pippa, but I don't need ants.

• Visual effects studio ModelFarm says fuck this we're going AMD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They say 50% of their 13900K and 14900K CPUs have failed, and their new systems will all be based on the Ryzen 9950X.
  
  
  
• The Intel problem - as finally confirmed by Intel, is twofold:
  
  First, the CPUs ask the motherboard for voltage levels high enough to fry their circuits.
  Second, the chips rust from the inside.
  
  
  
  Not a great combination.
  
  Intel is pushing out a microcode update next month to fix the first problem, but if your chip is already affected, this comes much too late.
  
  Intel has also been rejecting warranty returns despite knowing of these problems internally for some time.
  
  My most recent Intel system is a 12th gen laptop, so I escaped this one.
  
  
  
• AMD's new 9900X is slower than the 7800X3D for gaming.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure exactly how relevant this is, because AMD's 12 core chips are not ideal for gaming.  Current generation consoles have 8 cores on a single chip, and AMD's 12 core CPUs have 6 cores on each of two chips, so they have cross-chip latency for games that need 8 cores.
  
  If you're focused on gaming, get the cheaper 9700X, or the 9800X3D when it arrives, or if you run heavy productivity workloads as well as games, go all out and get the 9950X.
  
  
  
• Facebook's new Llama 3.1 405b LLM is billed as the world's largest open-source AI model.  (The Register)
  
  As a 16-bit model it requires 810GB of video RAM to run.
  
  There's also an 8-bit version that brings that down to 405GB.
  
  Which used to be a lot, and still is.
  
  
  
• 1 bit LLMs can be nearly as good though.  (IEEE)
  
  These are typically 1 trit models though - they are trinary, so each element can have a negative, positive, or zero weighting.
  
  This would reduce Llama 3.1 405b down to around 80GB of video RAM.
  
  Which, yes, is still a lot.
  
  
  
• GitHub is starting to feel like legacy software.  (Misty's Internet)
  
  Not entirely accurate.  Legacy software often works very well, because nobody dares touch it in case it blows up.
  
  GitHub feels like legacy software that someone is pasting an ill-considered flashing interface over.  
  
  Because it is.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum V3 tablet - the 32GB / 1TB model - is currently $949 on Amazon.  (Liliputing)
  
  That's a pretty good price, though I don't know if I'd spend that much on a single device from a company in that tier.
  
  Though my Beelink PCs were about $250 each and they work perfectly, so maybe I'm overly cautious.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 24 2024 10:44 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 24 2024 10:48 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 24 2024 10:59 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 25 2024 03:20 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, July 25 2024 04:04 AM (YqWY6)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 25 2024 04:41 AM (LADmw)

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• The US is all-in on nuclear rockets.  For realsies.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The article starts with a review of past US experiments with nuclear rockets:

  The first of those reactors was called Kiwi-A. The test done on July 1, 1959, proved that the concept worked, but there were devils in the details. Vibrations caused by the flow of hydrogen damaged the reactor after just five minutes of operation at a relatively meek 70 megawatts. The temperature reached 2,683 K, which caused hydrogen corrosion in the rods and expelled parts of the core through the nozzle, a problem known as "shedding."

  Shedding, also known as "Fuck this I'm moving to Bouvet Island and you can contact me by albatross".
  
  The primary impetus for this renewed interest despite some issues with past attempts is China's growing space industry.  Nuclear rockets make far more efficient use of the reaction mass than chemical rockets, but are only practical for general use once you pass a certain size - about the size of SpaceX's starship - because you can't make small nuclear reactors.
  
  Not unless you are willing to kill everyone who works on the project, anyway.

• Greece's land registry was hacked and 1.2GB of data stolen.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you think that's not a lot for a national government department, you're right.  The attackers accessed the database but were stopped before they could steal more than 0.0006% of the data.
  
  
  
• An interview with the lead architect of AMD's Zen lineup, discussing Zen 5 which arrives in the next week.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A couple of interesting points:
  
  First, the laptop versions do not have the full 512-bit version of AVX-512.  They have a half-size version, the same as Zen 4.
  
  Second, the compact cores (AMD's equivalent of Intel's efficiency cores) are planned for desktop...  Eventually.  Not yet though.
  
  Third, Zen 5 will be launching on TSMC's 4nm process, but 3nm versions will follow relatively soon.  No mention on which specific models will get the 3nm chips though.
  
  
  
• Wiz has turned down a $23 billion offer from Google.  (Fortune)
  
  I would have taken the money and allowed Google to ruin my work.  Google is Google, but $23 billion is $23 billion.
  
  
  
• Inside a 64-port 800Gb Ethernet switch.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That's a whole lot of bits.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk's X and xAI have fired up their new training system.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This training system has 100,000 of Nvidia's $30,000 H100 AI processors.
  
  That's a lot.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 23 2024 07:14 PM (bg2DR)

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• Southwest Airlines escaped the CrowdStrike debacle because they are still running Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  One small problem with this story: It's complete bullshit.  (Twitter)
  
  It's an internet meme.  But even the guy who created the meme got confused and thought it was real.
  
  Seriously, nobody runs their business on Windows 3.1.  It doesn't even work properly on a computer with more than 512MB of RAM.  Neither does Windows 95.

• Speaking of which: The Apollo DN10000, a four-processor Unix workstation form 1988 with up to 128MB of memory.  (Jim Rees)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Global IT outage shows dangers of cashless society, campaigners say.  (The Guardian)
  
  Yeah, no shit.
  
  
  
• A ransomware attack has shut down the largest trial court in the US, the Superior Court of Los Angeles County.  (AP News)
  
  Shame.  A couple of hours later and all their computers would have been down with the CrowdStrike disaster and safe from hackers.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which more than 1500 flights were cancelled yesterday as technicians continue to turn things off and on again.  (CNN)
  
  Meanwhile interest in retiring and moving to Idaho to take up potato farming is at an all time high.
  
  
  
• A fake hotfix for the CrowdStrike problem is actually a RAT.  (HackRead)
  
  Because of course it is.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is "gambling with Tesla's future" by endorsing Donald Trump.  (The Verge)
  
  Gotta love how they quote Trump saying But you can’t have 100 percent of your cars electric. as though it's a gotcha moment rather than a simple fact.
  
  
  

Posted by: madrocketsci at Monday, July 22 2024 07:36 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 23 2024 01:38 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, July 23 2024 02:02 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Sam P at Tuesday, July 23 2024 06:41 PM (C5GOk)

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• Microsoft: CrowdStrike mishap impacted less than 1 percent of Windows PCs.  (Thurrott)
  
  CrowdStrike's faulty update crashed 8.5 million Windows devices, says Microsoft.  (The Verge)
  
  It's the same number; there's something like 1.5 billion Windows PCs in use worldwide.
  
  The problem is that the computers running CrowdStrike are the ones used in critical roles by large organisations.  The 99% that went right on working weren't embedded in ATMs or airport terminals or healthcare providers.
  
  
  
• So how do we avoid a repeat of this?
  
  Dunno.

• A look at Western Digital's latest SN5000 4TB SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's another DRAMless QLC model, and...  It doesn't suck.  It's pretty good actually.
  
  MSRP prices it higher than better drives so only buy it if the price is right.
  
  
  
• Intel says its 13th and 14th generation laptop chips are crashing but not for the same reason as its 13th and 14th generation desktop chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oh.  Well, that's alright then.
  
  
  
• Intel has also announced a range of "E" series chips that have no "E" cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That makes sense.
  
  
  
• Large models of what?  (Arxiv.org)
  
  LLMs are bullshit:

  Work within the enactive approach to cognitive science makes clear that, rather than a distinct and complete thing, language is a means or way of acting. Languaging is not the kind of thing that can admit of a complete or comprehensive modelling. From an enactive perspective we identify three key characteristics of enacted language; embodiment, participation, and precariousness, that are absent in LLMs, and likely incompatible in principle with current architectures. We argue that these absences imply that LLMs are not now and cannot in their present form be linguistic agents the way humans are. We illustrate the point in particular through the phenomenon of 'algospeak', a recently described pattern of high stakes human language activity in heavily controlled online environments. On the basis of these points, we conclude that sensational and misleading claims about LLM agency and capabilities emerge from a deep misconception of both what human language is and what LLMs are.

  Verbing weirds language.
  
  
  
• I didn't know I was dead until I saw it on Google.  (The Guardian)
  
  Google is worth $2 trillion and has 90% of the global search market.  And ever since it started trying to answer questions itself rather than point you to the answers elsewhere, it has been going downhill fast.
  
  
  
• The judge in the SEC's lawsuit against SolarWinds regarding their 2020 security debacle has granted the company's motion to dismiss on most points.  (MSN)
  
  It was another massive power grab by a federal agency.  The SEC claimed authority to regulate all aspects of how companies manage computer and network security and the judge smacked them across the nose with a newspaper.
  
  The one claim not dismissed is that executives at the company lied about the adequacy of its security controls in public statement, which the SEC claims amounts to securities fraud, something the SEC does have the authority to police, since that's what the S stands for.
  
  
  
• Just a reminder that all the race-baiting and lies you see in the mainstream media infest the tech press as well: Some black startup founders feel betrayed by Ben Horowitz's support for Trump.  (Tech Crunch)

  "His reputation will definitely take a hit among well-thinking Black people because it shows that he doesn’t actually understand our lived experiences," David Mullings, founder of Blue Mahoe Holdings, told TechCrunch.

  Lived experiences?  David Mullings is a Jamaican multi-millionaire.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 22 2024 12:22 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 22 2024 10:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, July 22 2024 09:42 PM (5rlmi)

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• What is CrowdStrike, and what happened?  (The Verge)
  
  We were expecting Skynet, and all we got is this lousy antivirus update.
  
  
  
• Blue Screen of Death photos from around the world.  (The Verge)
  
  Thank you Microsoft and CrowdStrike for bringing us all together in shared loathing.
  
  
  

Tech News

• How to fix a computer affected by the CrowdStrike problem.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The problem is you need direct access to each affected computer, which is a slight problem when there are thousands of them spread through a major airport, or worse, in ATMs across an entire country.
  
  
  
• CrowdStrike's market cap has fallen by $12.5 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  "Oops", said CEO George Kurtz.
  
  
  
• Russia escaped the CrowdStrike debacle unscathed, because it is not allowed to run CrowdStrike.  (Yahoo)
  
  Small mercies.
  
  
  
• Tenstorrent's new Wormhole AI cards can deliver 466 FP8 teraflops at 300W.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's a little over a quarter the performance of Nvidia's H100, but the H100 costs $30,000 and the Wormhole costs $1400.
  
  The big difference is that the Wormhole is built on an older 12nm process, where the H100 is built on a recent 4nm process.  That makes the Wormhole more power hungry but also much cheaper to produce.
  
  
  
• If this is the real pricing for AMD's Ryzen 9000 lineup, it's good.  (WCCFTech)
  
  $499 for the 9950X would make it a very attractive product, and an easy upsell over the $399 9900X.
  
  But none of this is confirmed yet.  And it would price the 9950X below the launch MSRP of the 7900X, which might be too good to be true.
  
  
  

1 Avoiding a repeat?  Based on past IT job experience, it will only happen when management takes quality and testing as required steps.  Said testing needing more than reading the specs and code while on the way to the quality inspection meeting.  Gotta keep meeting those keystroke requirements...  Should I mention meetings that consume time and deliver nothing to coders themselves, but check the boxes for management.  How about hiring practices

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, July 21 2024 06:34 PM (5rlmi)

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• Everything is down. (ABC) (no, the other one)
  
  Supermarkets, airports, petrol stations, universities, law firms, Bunnings, blood donation services, banks, government departments, Microsoft, police computer systems, NSW emergency services, 7-11 and the ABC's own video editing department are offline across Australia because security company Crowdstrike went splat.
  
  Reportedly any computer with Crowdstrike installed is now throwing the Blue Screen of Death after a bad update and the only solution is to boot into safe mode and remove the driver.
  
  Banks, airlines, and emergency services in the US are also affected.  (Twitter)
  
  And Europe.
  
  Fortunately hamsters are naturally immune.
  
  And so apparently is Twitter.

• AMD's latest 12-core laptop chip comes in just slightly behind Apples 16-core M3 Max on multi-threaded workloads.   (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And ahead on single-threaded tasks.
  
  No word on respective power consumption but the M3 Max is not a lightweight in that regard.
  
  It's up to 46% faster than Intel's Core i9 185H as well.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Can't buy it yet, but laptops are expected to be in stores before the end of the month.
  
  
  
• Type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut.  (GitHub)
  
  Take that, Bob from the NSA.
  
  
  
• Don't think I mentioned this one: Email addresses for 15 million Trello users have been leaked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  We used this at work for a brief time, some years ago.
  
  It sucks.
  
  
  
• Google has ruined Fitbit.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Google has ruined Google, so that's no surprise.
  
  
  
• The DOJ's assault on Apple will harm consumers, says App...  Rand Paul.  (Reason)
  
  I respectfully disagree.  Or more precisely, respectfully don't give a damn.
  
  
  
• The USPS shared customer postal addresses with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Snapchat.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these asshats from violating your privacy.
  
  
  
• RealPage says it hasn't done anything wrong in building its illegal rental price-fixing scheme.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "Nobody is above the law, except us", explained a spokesman.
  
  
  
• Meta won't release it's new multimodal Llama AI in Europe, because fuck Europe.  (The Verge)
  
  The words they actually used were "the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment" but that translates to "fuck Europe".
  
  
  
• Russia has slammed Google's censorship while at the same time demanding Google remove 5.6 million search results just for mentioning VPNs.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  It's a free country.  Well, it's not, but...  I guess there really isn't a but.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, July 19 2024 09:06 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 19 2024 10:48 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 20 2024 12:22 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 20 2024 12:22 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, July 20 2024 01:39 AM (5rlmi)

Posted by: David Eastman at Saturday, July 20 2024 02:27 AM (rmrII)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 20 2024 04:43 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 21 2024 07:29 PM (bg2DR)

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• The biggest data breaches of 2024.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  So far this year personal details have been stolen for a billion people.
  
  The internet was a mistake.
  
  
  
• After its multiple recent massive data leaks, senator are asking why AT&T is storing sensitive information like customer call logs in an "AI Data Cloud".  (Ars Technica)
  
  Specifically, Snowflake.  And it's a good question.
  
  I worked in telco billing systems for a while.  That data did not go anywhere outside of our in-house datacenter, except as encrypted tapes in a locked box to a secure backup location.
  
  

• A tiny flaw in Cisco's Smart Software Manager allows anyone to alter any user's password.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And by anyone I mean anyone - you don't need to be logged in.
  
  And by any user I mean any user - without logging in you can change the admin password, and then log in.
  
  I don't think the rate of data breaches is going to slow down any time soon.
  
  
  
• More 9950X benchmarks at various power levels.  (WCCFTech)
  
  We already know there's no point running it at 320W, since it offers performance barely better than the default boost power of 230W.
  
  This chart shows that you also don't want to run it at 40W.  Below 60W the performance craters.  You can probably improve on that by adjusting the clock details, but with the automated settings the sixteen core 9950X runs like a six core 5600X.
  
  
  
• Checking out the Crucial P310 - a 2TB M.2 2230 SSD.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These drives are the size of a postage stamp, and fit in portable devices like the Steam Deck and ultra-slim laptops like Microsoft's Surface line.
  
  This one is QLC and DRAMless, a combination I would generally recommend avoiding, but on these benchmarks it holds up very well.  Read speeds up to 7GB per second, and write speeds up to 6GB.
  
  Under sustained heavy write loads it will slow down, but in all other cases it actually looks good.
  
  
  
• You can now run Windows NT on a PowerMac.  (The Register)
  
  I have a couple of PowerMacs in the garage.  I'm not really inclined to try this out though.
  
  
  
• Looking to build a mini-ITX storage server?  This motherboard from (random AliExpress vendors) might be what you need.  (Liliputing)
  
  For $130 it has a four-coure Intel N100, two M.2 slots, six SATA ports, 10Gb Ethernet, dual 2.5Gb Ethernet, HDMI and DisplayPort, and the usual complement of USB ports.
  
  And one memory slot.
  
  There may be an eight-core N305 model on the way if you need a little more power.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 18 2024 06:42 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 19 2024 03:29 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 19 2024 04:55 PM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft's former DEI leader has blasted the company in an internal email after the entire team was laid off, sort of.  (IGN)
  
  Yes, a Microsoft DEI team leader did indeed blast the company in an internal email after their entire team was laid off.  That is true.
  
  But don't celebrate just yet.  Microsoft has many DEI teams.
  
  The email though is exactly what you would expect from these parasites:

  Unofficially in my opinion, not specific to Microsoft alone, but Project 2025 looms and true systems change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020. Hence the purposeful and strategic 3-5 year shelf life of many company's inclusion commitments post the murder of George Floyd are being reevaluated.

  Fire them all.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of Bay Area venture capitalist firm Andreesen Horowitz, which I am assured is purely a coincidence, have made an announcement with respect to the coming election.  (Tech Crunch)

  "I wish we didn’t have to pick a side," said Horowitz, who also acknowledged that his political choice would upset many of his friends and even his mother. "We literally [believe] the future of our business, the future of technology, and the future of America is at stake."

  The comments are about what you'd expect.  There's less shrieking that you'd find at The Verge, because Tech Crunch focuses on the money side of tech where The Verge focuses on the intersection of tech and politics from an explicitly leftist viewpoint.
  
  
  
• Western Digital has announced an 8TB model of its high-end SN850X SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's more than three times the price of the 4TB model.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare reports almost 7% of internet traffic is malicious.  (ZDNet)
  
  And 92% is garbage.
  
  
  
• Google has resolved the dual crisis of SEO spam and AI spam by, uh, not indexing your site.  (Vicent Schmalbach)
  
  Looking for something on the internet?  Try, well, AltaVista is dead, but MetaCrawler is still around. 
  
  And it seems to be active too; a search on "Pixy Misa" found a page of hits for the anime character, and then yesterday's tech thread from this very blog.  No visual clutter, no spam that I saw, no AI crap, and commendably fast.
  
  
  
• MySQL 9.0 is here, apparently.  (The Register)
  
  It hasn't made much of a splash despite being what Oracle calls an "Innovation Release".  Partly because it doesn't innovate very much, and partly because what little innovation there is, is found only in the paid version.
  
  Go with MariaDB instead if you can.
  
  Or PostgreSQL if you have the time and inclination.
  
  
  
• Personal data for 2.2 million customers has been stolen from Rite Aid.  (The Register)
  
  This only affects purchases from June 2017 to July 2018, so it sounds like a backup copy of a database was left lying around somewhere not properly secured, and then forgotten until this incident.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is moving the headquarters of Twitter and SpaceX from California to Texas.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He specifically cited Gavin Newsom as the reason.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 17 2024 07:56 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, July 18 2024 12:20 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, July 18 2024 01:59 PM (nk1Z+)

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