• Twitter has bought chat platform Quill.  (Quill)
  
  If you use Quill, you have three days to download your history before they turn the servers off.  I'm not being snarky, they are literally doing that.

  Can I export my team’s Direct Messages (DMs)?

  No, we do not allow the export of Direct Messages.

  If I don’t export, will you delete my data?

  Yes. On 1pm PST, Saturday, December 11th 2021 we will delete all user data, whether or not you’ve exported it.

  Well, thanks.
  
  
• So, that happened.
  
  

• Amazon's US-East-1 datacenter suffered increased error rates today.  (CRN)
  
  This is in the same sense as "Jeffrey Epstein didn't increase his own error rates".  AWS US-East-1 burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp.
  
  With it went a few little sites like Netflix and Disney+ and, oh, Amazon itself.  Tens of thousands of Adele fans waiting in virtual line for pre-release tickets were not impressed when the whole thing was rescheduled, and they weren't notified by email because email services relying on AWS were also down.  (Fortune)
  
  Coinbase, Binance, dYdX (which is a cool name for a derivatives trading platform I must admit) and blockchain gateway Infura all suffered outages, which makes you wonder just how decentralized this decentralized finance thingy really is.  (Be In Crypto)
  
  Alexa wouldn't talk to you, Kindles couldn't kindle, Roombas couldn't roomb, and Ring video doorbells couldn't burn down your house.  (The Verge)
  
  Within Amazon, not a creature was stirring, not even a wireless mouse.  (Business Insider)
  
  AWS is not just a product, it's Amazon's own computer system.  With that down, the storefront went down, and all the inventory and logistics services went with it.  Delivery drivers were paid and sent home because there was nothing they could do - there's no paper trail for this, not at Amazon's scale.
  
  Instacart, Venmo, CashApp, Roku, McDonald's app and automated kiosks, Tinder, and Delta Air Lines all went off the air.  (USA Today)
  
  We only have one direct AWS dependency at work, and that's at US-West-2 a thousand miles away, but it went down for six hours anyway.
  
  We have quite a few indirect dependencies, though, so my day was spent cleaning up after all of those services failed.
  
  
  
  There is no cloud, there's just someone else's computer, and it's down.
  
  
  
• Oh, QNAP.  Not again.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Do not under any circumstances attach your network-attached storage to a network.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's Blue SN570 is pretty good and pretty cheap.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a DRAMless TLC drive, which is a viable option if you're on a budget and not running Oracle databases.  But if you look around you'll likely find the Samsung 970 EVO for only about 10% more, and it's worth the 10%.
  
  
  
• Leaked benchmarks of AMD's new laptop chips puts the graphics performance just short of a GTX 1650.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is to day, pretty darn good for integrated graphics, more than double the performance of the current generation.
  
  
  
• Notepad now has a dark mode.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Its mother insists it's just a phase.
  
  
  
• DARPA-funded researchers did not accidentally create the world's first warp bubble.  (The Debrief)
  
  The article is horseshit.

  "To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,” White toldThe Debrief, quickly dispensing with the notion that this is anything other than the creation of an actual, real-world warp bubble. "Hence the significance.”

  Yeah.  Funnily enough, the actual published research paper - of which White himself is the lead author - says nothing of the sort.  It's full of words like "intriguing" and "correlation" and starkly short on "actual real-world warp bubbles".

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 09 2021 12:24 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 09 2021 12:30 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 09 2021 12:46 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 09 2021 01:09 AM (Z0GF0)

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Now I get to spend the rest of the day cleaning up the mess.  Though after a couple of incidents where AWS was having trouble but we had to report to our customers that no, we had a bug in our platform, it sure is nice to be able to drop all the blame on someone else for a day.

• With the new software lab buildout I'm going to end up with eight computers on my desk - half laptops and half NUCs, so they don't take up much room.  And it's a big desk.  Huge actually, it's made from the oak floorboards of an old wool warehouse and weighs about three thousand pounds.
  
  Anyway, with three or possibly four monitors each with four inputs, there'll be no problem plugging everything in to a display.  But then there's sound.  What I want is all of those systems wired up to a single good speaker system, so it doesn't matter what the sound source is, it comes through loud and clear.
  
  I could use a Behringer mixer; they're easy to find and reasonably priced.  But they are mono, and designed for XLR or at best 1/4" phone jacks, so for each 1/8" stereo input I'd need a cable to convert to it two 1/4" mono plugs, which again, easy to get, but having eight of those plugged into a 16 channel mixer seems like overkill.
  
  If only there were something small, cheap, and purposed-designed to take five 1/8" stereo inputs, provide suitable fader, gain, and balance controls, and deliver three 1/8" outputs at line, speaker, and headphone levels respectively and maybe - stop me if I'm dreaming - have a special cable to loop multiple units together like the Maker Hart Loop Mixer (Amazon) oh wait that's just what I need hang on (clicking noises) right that should arrive next week.
  
  
  
• Included in my lab shopping list is regrettably a MacBook Air because I will need to test some things on a Mac.  Plan is - with all four notebooks - that they will sit on a shelf while plugged in to two 27" monitors each, and rarely actually move.  They're laptops in potentia.
  
  That's fine with Windows.  Do it all the time.  Scaling support isn't perfect but it works.
  
  On an M1 Mac though if you venture outside standard 4k resolution the results are likely to be poop which is odd because Apple doesn't make a computer with a 4k screen.  (The Register)
  
  MacBook Air is 2560x1600; MacBook Pro 14" and 16" are 3024x1964 and 3456x2234 respectively; the 24" iMac is 4480x2420 and the 27" 5120x2880; and the Pro Display You Can't Afford It Edition is 6016x3384.
  
  So it's kind of curious why M1 Macs only give reliable results on third-party monitors if they run natively at 4k.
  
  But credit to Apple for creating new opportunities for independent software developers fixing their shitty operating system.
  
  
  
• The jelly beans arrived too.  Amazon still won't let me order more, even though they're in stock.
  
  Were they really worth the wait?
  
  ...
  
  Yeah, actually.  These are pretty good.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Imagination has announced its Catapult range of RISC-V cores.  (AnandTech)
  
  Are they any good?
  
  No.
  
  
  
• AMD is following up its weird 4700S desktop kit thing with the new 4800S.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These use recycled PlayStation 5 chips, which are AMD CPUs with AMD graphics built in.  If the graphics component doesn't work - there's some built in redundancy, but if there are too many microscopic defects on that particular sliver of silicon - Sony can't use it, but it is still a perfectly functional 8 core CPU.
  
  The 4700S gave these damaged chips new purpose in life.  Unfortunately it kind of sucked.  The integrated graphics were disabled, and it only had a PCIe 2.0 x4 interface for a graphics card, which severely restricted performance.  This new board upgrades that to PCIe 4.0 x4, which is four times as fast and faster than the interface on external Thunderbolt graphics cards.
  
  Still seems slightly pointless but we'll see how it goes when it arrives.
  
  
  
• AMD, Intel, and Nvidia will be giving their CES keynotes on January 4.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I expect my brand new laptops to be immediately obsoleted.  Hell, one of them was dropped from Dell's product line the day it arrived.  
  
  But I wanted that specific configuration; having see the leaks of Intel's new laptop CPUs I don't think they're going to work better for my use case, which as I said is more of a shelftop.
  
  
  
• Fastly (a CDN) says Cloudflare (another CDN) is lying about its relative performance in edge computing.  (Fastly)
  
  Some of their points are quibbles, but some of them seem valid, like the fact that Cloudflare compared their own platform against a beta product using a free trial and a compute workload that involved no computation.
  
  
  
• YouTube's ContentID system has an abuse rate 40 times higher than other copyright claim mechanisms, according to a study performed by, uh, YouTube.  (ZDNet)
  
  So, YouTube, maybe you could, I don't know, stop doing that?
  
  
  
• The Australian federal government is building a "data tool" for tracking labour market needs.  (ZDNet)
  
  By which they mean job roles going unfilled because there ain't no-one to fill them.

  The demand for digital skills is widespread, but computing skills are what will become a major need, according to the government.

  Thank you and welcome to 1968.
  
  
  
  
• Crypto trading platform BitMart lost $200 million.  (ZDNet)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Decentralised finance platform Badger lost $120 million.  (ZDNet)
  
  Oops.
  
  I mean, thanks for so thoroughly validating my concerns with smart contracts, but you can stop now.
  
  
  
• Nuh-uh says MongoDB.  (The Register)
  
  Amazon has a MongoDB-compatible database called DocumentDB.  Rather than taking the sane approach and building on the last open-source release of MongoDB, they added an interface layer to PostgreSQL which, um, should at least be entertaining.

  "It is not MongoDB compatible," Porter said. "That is an untruth… it is 34 per cent compatible, through our tests. Most importantly, for our users and our customers, it is not compatible in all the ways that make MongoDB magical.

  "There's no aggregation, there's no change streams, there's not as many languages; it is a 'Frankenbase', there is no other word for it.

  On the other hand, it doesn't create duplicate keys in unique indexes and irrecoverably lose your data the way MongoDB releases 5.0.0, 5.0.1, and 5.0.2 all did.
  

That's the mixer I just ordered.  Apparently it's halfway decent, which is all I ask.  If I end up doing audio engineering that isn't 100% digital I'll buy something else.

Disclaimer: Oi, the name's Sharon ya berk.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 08 2021 02:24 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, December 08 2021 09:34 AM (r9O5h)

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Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 07 2021 12:34 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 07 2021 02:54 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 07 2021 03:03 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, December 07 2021 07:12 AM (bHHXR)

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• "I'm going to need your smallest violin."
  "This is the Stradicaster 50000.  Each one is hand-crafted by an ancient order of Bolivian nuns from a single neutrino.  Only three of its kind exist, and nobody knows where the other two are.  The price is-"
  "I'll take it."
  
  Right-wing activists are openly 'weaponizing' Twitter's new private media policy. (CNN Business)
  
  You'd have to have a heart of basalt not to collapse in a fit of giggles.  Twitter's latest attempt to curtail unapproved speech has backfired because it turns out - as everybody except apparently the room-temperature IQ goldfish running Twitter immediately realised - that the new policy banning the sharing of photos, even those taken at public events, without the explicit consent of everyone depicted therein directly targets the most popular pastime of Twitter's own core audience of rabid Maoist lunatics, which is to say, doxxing and destroying the lives of everyone with whom they disagree.
  
  Twitter thought they were targeting conservative pushback against violent left-wing nutcases, but what the rule actually says is that nobody can post photos of people without their consent.
  
  So everyone to the right of Kropotkin has started reporting the offenders en masse and they're getting them banned.

  In January, Samuel Braslow was covering an anti-mask protest at a Los Angeles mall for the Beverly Hills Courier, the 56-year-old local newspaper where he is a staff reporter.  During the public event, Braslow tweeted a video of a standoff between anti-maskers and a mall official — a common practice in the age of digital reporting.
  
  Braslow couldn't have known that, this week, someone would file a report about that same photojournalism and cause Twitter to lock down his account.  The complaint led to Braslow being unable to tweet until he either successfully appealed the report or deleted the old tweets.  He was stuck.

  Ahahahahahaha.

  "The videos in [my] post clearly represent newsworthy content, as they subsequently were picked up for broadcast by multiple affiliate stations and national outlets," said Braslow, who has previously appeared on CNN discussing his coverage of anti-vaccine rallies.

  Let me see where Twitter's policy has an exemption for newsworthiness....
  
  Oh wait, it doesn't, because the entire point of this policy is to shut down free speech.

  The rapidly unfolding campaign highlights how a tool intended to help protect vulnerable individuals has quickly evolved to help shield others from the scrutiny that might stem from their public actions.

  Funny how nobody predicted that this is exactly what would happen.  Oh wait.

  "It's really important to view the current mass-reporting actions by the far right as just the latest salvo in an ongoing, concerted effort to memory-hole evidence of their crimes," said Chad Loder, an anti-fascist activist* who said they use their Twitter account to document examples of far-right extremism and police misconduct.

  Translator's note: "Anti-fascist activist" means fascist.

  On Thursday, Loder said they were trapped in an "endless cycle" of reports, account locks and appeals as one of their tweets was reported under the policy, restored by Twitter following an appeal, and then reported again on the same day, resulting in another temporary suspension linked to the same tweet.

  I am so upset by this that I have the hiccups.

  The speed, scale and enthusiasm with which some groups have invoked the policy — along with numerous enforcement errors — have prompted some experts to conclude that Twitter's policy is backfiring.

  Where would we be without experts?
  
  Probably Alpha Centauri.
  
  Even that idiot Popehat is weighing in:

  It's impossible they didn't know this would happen, and it's inexplicable they didn't plan for it.

  No, Ken, that's easy to explain.  They're morons.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apple's M1 Max CPU has a secret interconnect bus. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And when I say secret, not only did Apple fail to mention it, they edited the published die photos to hide it.
  
  
  Not until someone sacrificed an expensive MacBook Pro and took their own die photos was this discovered.
  
  There are rumours that Apple is working on 20 core and 40 core Arm CPUs to replace Intel in their high-end systems, and now we know exactly how they plan to do that.  The M1 Max is a 10 core chip, so two or four of those connected together will produce the rumoured high-end parts.
  
  AMD has been doing this for years - the 32 core Epyc server processors released in 2017 were simply four 8 core desktop chips wired together using the built-in interconnect.
  
  AMD has also done the secret feature trick more recently - apparently all Zen 3 chips shipped in the past year have the circuitry needed for the expanded cache in the recently announced high-end Milan-X server chips.
  
  It costs a lot of money to design a new chip and prepare it for production, so if you can bundle in a feature that you're not going to need for a year without delaying anything else, that can make commercial sense.
  
  It's likely that the interconnect, while present, isn't 100% functional yet, and there will be either a respin or a whole new version before the high-end multi-die processors can ship.  But in the meantime Apple has an unlimited supply of test units.
  
  
  
• ActiLizzard management are not nice people. (WCCFTech)
  
  "I am shocked, shocked, to find bad behaviour going on in the gaming industry."
  "Your underaged Belorussian sex slave sir."
  "Oh, thank you very much."
  
  
  
• Windows 11 now lets you set a default browser. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  In earlier releases you had to track down at least four separate settings.

  "Through the Windows Insider Program you will continue to see us try new things based on customer feedback and testing.  Most of them will be complete shit because ninety percent of our UX team is on meth, but what are you gonna do?  No, seriously, what are we gonna do?  These idiots are killing me."

  
  
  
• A hermaphroditic cannibal has washed up dead on a beach near San Diego. (MSN)
  
  Hrm.
  
  Oh, fish.  A hermaphroditic cannibal fish has washed up dead on a beach near San Diego.
  
  That's normal.
  
  
  
• Python library of the day is LocalStack, which provides a local test version of AWS. (GitHub)
  
  Without the Amazon part.  Install it on your own hardware or hosted server and spin up whichever services you need.
  
  The free version doesn't support every single AWS feature, but it goes a long way:
  
  
• ACM
• API Gateway
• CloudFormation
• CloudWatch
• CloudWatch Logs
• DynamoDB
• DynamoDB Streams
• EC2
• Elasticsearch Service
• EventBridge (CloudWatch Events)
• Firehose
• IAM
• Kinesis
• KMS
• Lambda
• Redshift
• Route53
• S3
• SecretsManager
• SES
• SNS
• SQS
• SSM
• StepFunctions
• STS

There's a paid version for €20 per month per developer that has even more features, but that's kind of a problem.  What happens to the software running on my own server if I stop paying the monthly license fee?

The answer seems to be, don't do that.  Inviting as it might be, this is for testing not for persistent data.  Even the paid version has only a very basic persistence mechanism.  The free version uses a replay log to restore the state - if you reboot it starts with a blank slate and just runs every API call you've send since you last explicitly reset the data.

What If Everything Were Spiders?

No people. No language. No war. Only spiders.

We communicate through sensation alone, touch, smell, taste. Feeling with our eight long legs. Beady black eyes look out, only to see a swarm of our brothers and sisters. They look back. We click. We scamper.

No air. No sea. No land. Only spiders.

We crawl over the bodies of one another. Suffocate against one another. A dark, writhing mass. We eat one another for sustenance. We lay our eggs in the carcasses of the deceased. Life and death cycle as it can, the living spring from the dead to have their turn. We breed. We rot.

No heat. No time. No space. Only spiders.

Were a wayward, miraculous human scientist to somehow observe us, it could be speculated that our atoms and molecules resemble the mass of our whole selves. Were a wayward, miraculous human scientist to somehow speculate on our universe, the shape of it could be thought to have a large abdomen, and eight scampering legs. We are, everything is spiders.

A Long Walk Down a Windy Beach Video of the Day

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

I think this is the stage of the party where it's getting late and the couples are slow dancing and I'm in the corner talking to the cat.



Disclaimer: You're the only intelligent person here, Miss Fluffyboots.

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 06 2021 01:38 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 06 2021 02:41 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 06 2021 02:42 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 06 2021 02:49 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 06 2021 02:50 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 06 2021 04:27 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 06 2021 05:30 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 06 2021 06:29 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 06 2021 08:44 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 06 2021 08:50 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 06 2021 08:58 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 06 2021 10:00 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 06 2021 10:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 06 2021 12:38 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, December 06 2021 02:10 PM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 06 2021 02:24 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, December 07 2021 02:53 AM (j3+MC)

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• This server is beginning to annoy me.  I disabled the audible monitoring alert while I was fixing it from the last crash and forgot to turn it back on, so all I got this time was an email, which is not always sufficient to wake me up despite my hypertrophied site outage senses honed to a microtome edge by nearly two decades of pain.
  
  Server move imminent.  Got three weeks off starting the 18th.  I know I'm going the get interrupted by work stuff and three weeks will turn into two, but that's better than my usual Christmas break which is one week turning into zero.
  
  
  
• I found another source for the perennially out of stock gluten free jelly beans I'm currently waiting on from Amazon.  They're a little more expensive, but only by about 10% if you buy in bulk, and you can buy in bulk, which Amazon won't let me.  They also have jelly babies from the same brand, which I didn't know were sold separately; I've only had them before in their "party mix" which has too much stuff I don't like to be worth the trouble.
  
  Their site tracks expiry dates of the products and they're all late next year.  So I'm considering buying 12 pounds of candy a month after Halloween.
  
  
  
• We're number one.  Again.  (The Guardian)

  Frequency of being drunk – top 10 countries
  
  1 Australia
  2 Denmark
  3 Finland
  4 US
  5 UK
  6 Canada
  7 Ireland
  8 France
  9 Sweden
  10 Netherlands

  Also of note, Russia is suffering crippling alcohol shortages and New Zealand is lying.
  
  
  
• Apple has started test production on the M3 chip using TSMC's 3nm process.  (WCCFTech)
  
  While that's a rumour and Apple hasn't said anything about it, Apple was TSMC's first customer on 5nm and 7nm, so it's implausible that Apple hasn't already started testing on the new production node. 
  
  The details of the rumour are that there will be M2 chips in between on either 5nm or 4nm.  That's also plausible since it's not expected that 3nm will deliver in volume until early 2023, with a few more months beyond that before products using the chips can reach customers.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• The new Lego AT-AT model - which is huge and looks just like the ones in The Empire Strikes Back and costs a small fortune - can't be taken apart once assembled.  (Brickset)
  
  Well, it's not entirely impossible; there's a tiny slot in one of the components where if you slip in the point of an X-Acto knife and lever it verrrrry carefuly you can unlock it and tease it all apart again.
  
  Looks like it's inadvertent; it's just that things slide too neatly into place and leave no affordances for disassembly.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has confirmed that it won't leave the mess that is Windows 11 unpatched for the next year.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Also, if you order Dell's business-grade notebooks, including higher-end Inspirons, they are still perfectly happy to give you Windows 10 Pro.
  
  
  
• Two men have been indicted over a $20 million YouTube Content ID scam.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The scam is pretty simple: Assert copyright over content you don't own, post claims against YouTube channels you don't run, and steal all the advertising money.
  
  This goes on all the time and YouTube doesn't care.  This particular scam was big enough that it caught the attention of law enforcement, which is also rare.
  
  False DMCA takedown claims can be perjury, but Content ID doesn't require a DMCA takedown claim.  The charges in this case relate to wire fraud and money laundering.
  
  
  
• Alder Lake laptops are on their way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Something worth noting is that these new chips go backwards in terms of full-size cores.  The low-power parts only have two P-cores; the full-size parts have six.  Current 11th-gen laptops have four or eight full-size cores.
  
  
  
• Test results of an early sample of next year's Raptor Lake have popped up on the net.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These results - if real - confirm the configuration of 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

I don't think I've heard the extended album version of this song before, and I certainly haven't seen this video.  Everything about it is great.



Disclaimer: Well I'm cold-blooded; I'm a lizard you see.  If there's a cold snap I'll fall out of a tree.

• Ellipse and ellipsis have the same plural.  That's annoying.
  
  
  
• Twitter has banned 2000 genocide apologist accounts linked to the Chinese Communist Party.  (ZDNet)
  
  That's good.
  
  Also:

  "Every account and piece of content associated with these operations has been permanently removed from the service," Twitter said.

  That's retarded.
  
  Yes, remove their access, but leave their posts there so that everyone can see what bullshit they were up to.
  
  This paranoid need to erase everything considered bad utterly from existence is a trait entirely shared by Twitter and the CCP.

• People who attended Anime NYC last month might have a mild case of the sniffles.  (CBS)
  
  It's a convention, in New York, in November, so...  Yeah.
  
  
  
• Google has delisted the Pirate Bay and 100 related domains within the Netherlands following a court order.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The thing is, the court order didn't apply to Google.  They decided to do this all on their own.
  
  
  
• The FTC has filed a lawsuit to block Nvidia's acquisition of Arm.  (Anandtech)
  
  Eh.  Whatever.
  
  
  
• TSMC has entered risk production of 3nm chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Risk production is the silicon equivalent of early access on Steam.  It's not 100% done, and there's no refunds, but if you want to get access early you can start right away.
  
  Well, except that it takes as much as 20 weeks for a chip to traverse the manufacturing pipeline, so if you start right away you might get something back some time in April.
  
  Volume production is expected to start late next year, with products shipping in 2023.
  
  It's a pretty big advance though, packing up to 70% more transistors into a given area than 5nm, which in turn is 80% denser than the 7nm process that is common right now.  (The computer I'm typing this on is 14nm, which is positively antediluvian.)
  
  
  
• Microsoft has daddy issues.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you load up Edge and try to download Chrome - from which codebase Edge is derived - it throws a tantrum.
  
  Well, allegedly.  I see the ad in Bing search, but not all of the other items listed in the article.  Though I've stomped pretty hard on notifications throughout Windows and my default search engine even in Edge is DuckDuckGo.
  
  
  
• If you have a WiFi router, it's almost  certainly insecure, and you should set it on fire right now.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you have an Asus, um, whatever model it was I used to have, it might even helpfully do this for you.  When I saw the smoke coming out of it I grabbed the power plug and yanked it out right away.  But I grabbed it at the router end and it turned out that what I was grabbing was boiling hot molten plastic, so that was not a lot of fun.
  
  Much simpler to act now and just throw all your electronics in the nearest dumpster.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 04 2021 12:09 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 04 2021 12:13 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 04 2021 12:15 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 04 2021 12:28 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 04 2021 06:53 AM (obo9H)

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• Qualcomm has announced the 8cx Gen 3, its new Arm-based chip for PCs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unlike the 8cx Gen 2, this actually seems to be a new chip - the Gen 2 was exactly the same silicon as the Gen 1, and both were, to put it mildly, bad.
  
  The Gen 3 is supposedly 85% faster and built on a 5nm process, which is interesting because that means it's not the same device as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 announced yesterday.  In fact, it is most likely last year's Snapdragon 888, which - if true - would further cement the fact that Qualcomm just doesn't give a shit about the PC market.  PCs need more power, not less, and last year's chips just don't cut it.
  
  The 888 and also the newer 8 Gen 1 are also limited to 16GB of RAM, which also doesn't cut it.  That's enough for many users, but it's not enough when it's the maximum your chip can support.
  
  This being a Qualcomm announcement, there is no specific information about anything.  There never is.
  
  
  

Tech News

• This shouldn't have happened.  (Project Zero)
  
  Mozilla's NSS library had a 2k buffer for digital signatures.  What happened if you gave it more than that?
  
  If you think the answer is memory corruption and a security nightmare, you win a kewpie doll.  (Horrible things, kewpie dolls.)
  
  The bug was there for 9 years before being discovered, despite extensive testing.
  
  Stop writing code in a language best described as a portable PDP-8 assembler and start using something modern, well-designed, and with a solid team behind it like...
  
  Okay, yeah, point taken.  Keep using C, but treat any fixed-length buffers as radioactive waste.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has confirmed the RTX 2060 will be available soon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, the 2060 launched more than three years ago.  It will also be available soon.
  
  
  
• Intel's entry-level Alder Lake i3-12100 is faster than AMD's 2019 entry-level Ryzen 3300X.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I mean, it would be kind of embarrassing if it weren't.
  
  
  
• Making websites small.  (Santurce Software)
  
  Not every image needs to be 2 megapixels.
  
  And not all text needs to be font-weight: 500.
  
  Why is it that sites espousing a faster, lighter web are so often themselves fucking awful?
  
  
  
• The hack is coming from inside the house.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Networking company Ubiquiti was the target of a hacking and extortion attempt earlier this year, with the hacker leaking damaging information to the media in an attempt to get the company to pay up.
  
  It was one of their own staff.
  
  Not only did he allegedly hack the company, steal confidential data, and attempt to extort them out of $2 million, the FBI claims he doubled down on this activity after they raided his home and seized evidence of his crimes thus far.
  
  Ten out of ten for determination but minus several million for good thinking.
  
  Of course, this is the FBI, so there's at least an even-money chance they did it all themselves.
  
  
  
• Square is now Block.  (BusinessWire)
  
  Jack Dorsey's other company, which owns Cash App, TIDAL, and TBD54566975, has a new name.
  
  That's it.  That's the story.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm and Razer are partnering in a new Android-based handheld gaming device.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The device is based on the all new Snapdragon G3x Gen 1, which, this being a Qualcomm announcement, we know absolutely nothing about.
  
  
  

Party Like it's 1979 Video of the Day

Stop me if you've heard this one.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 03 2021 01:34 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 03 2021 01:37 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 03 2021 05:18 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 03 2021 05:21 AM (Z0GF0)

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The idea is that one will primarily be my desktop system and the other will primarily run Linux VMs, but they'll have identical configs so that either one can do it all.

That will leave me with 128GB of DDR4 SODIMMs from the two laptops and my two old desktops, so I'll be looking for some cheap NUCs to complete the lab with a Linux cluster.

First Inspiron 16 is named Sana, new one will be Pomu.  The Inspiron 14 is Pina.  Yes, I do have a lot of new computers all of a sudden.

Side note: Two Dell Inspiron 16s each with 64GB RAM* and 5TB of SSD cost around $100 less than one 16" MacBook Pro with 64GB RAM and 4TB of SSD.  On the other hand the MacBook Pro CPU is around 8% faster, so Apple has that going for them.

* And a 6GB RTX 3060.

• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the company's flagship Arm v9 chip for 2022.  (AnandTech)
  
  You heard me.
  
  The chip contains eight Kryo cores, of which one is a Cortex X2 at 3.0GHz, three are Cortex A710 at 2.5GHz, and the remaining four are low-power Cortex A510 at 1.8GHz.
  
  It will be produced by Samsung on a 4nm process.
  
  CPU-wise it's almost the same as MediaTek's Dimensity 9000 - just slightly slower, which isn't great news for Qualcomm.

• There's no dumb 4K TV, just large-format computer monitors with integrated soundbars.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Philips Momentum 559M1RYV is a 55" 4k monitor with three HDMI inputs as well as DisplayPort and USB-C.  Refresh rate goes up to 144Hz, colour gamut covers 90% of DCI-P3, and it supports DisplayHDR 1000.  Plus an integrated 40W 2.1 channel soundbar.
  
  No Ethernet.  No WiFi.  No Bluetooth.  No networking of any kind.  And no operating system.
  
  So if you don't want your TV spying on you, this one is physically incapable of doing so.
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 G650 has Rembrandt.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the next generation AMD laptop chip with Zen 3+ cores and integrated RDNA2 graphics.  (The current Xbox and PlayStation use Zen 2 and RDNA2.)
  
  And a mobile version of the 3080 Ti.  Making the fast new integrated graphics somewhat redundant.
  
  
  
• Twitter has a new CEO.  What's the fastest way for him to drive the company into the ground?  (Stratechery)

  Actually charging for Twitter would, of course, reduce the userbase to some degree; moreover, there are a lot of users with multiple accounts, and plenty of non-human users on Twitter. And, of course, Apple and Google would take their share. Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users —which I think vastly overstates Twitter’s elasticity of demand amongst its core user base — Twitter would only need to charge $4/month (including App Store fees) to exceed the $4.8 billion in revenue it made over the last twelve months.

  This guy is retarded.  If you charged people to access Twitter it would vanish overnight.  The blue checks would see their audience evaporate and they'd follow.
  
  There's a small core of lunatics willing to pay for Twitter, but that requires all the other lunatics to remain.
  
  A far better option is the one I proposed earlier this year: Allow users to bid to have other users banned.
  
  
  
• Tales of Seven Proxies.  (Mangadex)
  
  This stuff is only of interest if you run large public websites, but if you do - and particularly if you're on a tight budget - the volunteers running Mangadex produce a better tech blog than almost any actual tech company.
  
  
  
• Will we ever get rid of COVID-19?  No.  (Quanta)
  
  Nice, simple, to the point, and not what government officials want to hear.
  
  
  
• Twitter will ban sharing of photos and videos without the subjects' consent.  (ZDNet)
  
  This rule will be abused for political ends in 3... 2...
  
  
  
• AWS goes all in on serverless.  (ZDNet)
  
  There is no serverless, there is only someone else's server, which you now have even less control over than before.
  
  Plus it's probably in someone's bathroom.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• Microsoft, you are two trillion dollars worth of shit.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Which quote end-to-end encrypted unquote messaging apps can the FBI steal the data from?  (The record)
  
  Avoid WhatsApp, iMessage, and Line unless you for some bizarre reason trust the government.  Signal looks like the best option.
  
  
  
• UK regulators have ordered Facebook to divest Giphy.  (Axios)
  
  To preserve competition in the critical annoying blinking crap space.
  
  
  
• Why can I only order six bags of gluten-free jellybeans at once?  If they're going to be out of stock for weeks at a time, I'll happily buy a dozen when they are in stock.  The shelf life is something like a year after all.

Great guitar and bass work and a not nearly so great chorus.  This one must have absolutely saturated the radio waves in Australia when I was a wee Pixy because it's drilled into my brain when I wasn't really musically aware until the 80s.

I listened to a video of the top songs each month through the 1980s, and almost all of them brought up an associated memory.  That continues on through the early 90s, though by then I'd started listening to more stuff outside the mainstream and the Headless Chickens and Big Pig tend not to show up on music roundups like that.

They should though.



1970s mostly the reaction is, yeah, I've heard that, because who hasn't heard that?  But no association.


Disclaimer: Maybe I should have set this blog to cruise control.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 02 2021 10:31 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 02 2021 11:37 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Will at Saturday, December 04 2021 11:41 PM (8548M)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 05 2021 01:15 AM (PiXy!)

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