• So, I have NBN.  FINALLY.  Only been waiting a decade and change.   Now I can do a whole bunch of stuff.
  
  Real download speeds seem to peak at around 50 Mb, uploads at 32 Mb.  That might be because I'm on WiFi right now and surrounded by other people's access points; I'll grab my box of cables tomorrow and get back to wired.
  
  On the plus side, having a decent amount of bandwidth means that I can run downloads and uploads at full speed and not any notice a difference with my web browsing.  I had three days worth of uploads to Dropbox queued up; that turned into two hours once I got things switched over.
  
  Also, I snagged the cables and knocked the brand new router onto the floor twice today.  The old router lived on the floor; it occasionally got stepped on but it never fell off.  I'll find a longer Ethernet cable in the box so the new router can live somewhere a bit safer.  Having all my SSH sessions disconnected any time I wander into the kitchen for a midnight snack will get tired pretty fast.
  
  
  
• Not every RX 5600 XT can hulk out.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new BIOS update significantly increases clock speeds and memory speeds, but you can only increase memory speed to 14 Gbps in BIOS if the card has 14 Gbps RAM in the first place.
  
  
  
• Please explain yourselves, YouTube.  (TechDirt)
  
  Why is it that someone can "accidentally" block hundreds of YouTube videos based on claims for copyrights they don't own?
  
  
  
• At last count, Twitter was 135% bots.  (Medium)

  Retweets and likes can be a method of radicalization.

  Insert TripleFacepalm.gif here.
  
  
  
• The Internet of Bricks.  (ZDNet)
  
  Sonos has partly walked back its original plan, which appeared to be "make customers as angry as possible without literally setting them on fire".  But the fundamental problem with companies just deciding to remotely trash your appliances remains.
  
  
  
• Space cookies!  Hand me the rap rod, plate captain!  (ABC News)
  
  
  

Posted by: Will at Saturday, January 25 2020 05:19 AM (jO0BK)

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Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 24 2020 01:41 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Avatar at Friday, January 24 2020 06:17 AM (v29Tn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 24 2020 07:35 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, January 24 2020 10:55 AM (LMsTt)

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• I'll be joining the 20th century tomorrow with (mostly) fiber internet access.  Of course, since this is a government project, it's taken 12 years and the access speeds have not increased at all in that time.
  
  Still, I'll have about six times the download speed and twenty times the upload speed I do right now, which will make things like Dropbox actually useful.
  
  
  
• If you're looking for an Australian cloud server Binary Lane offers 1 GB of RAM, 20 of GB SSD, and 1TB of monthly bandwidth for A$4.
  
  That's up from 768 MB RAM and 500 GB bandwidth on their previous plan.  Locations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.
  
  A$4 is around US$2.70, so that's not every much at all.
  
  
  
• At the middle end of the scale, WebNX offer a Ryzen 2600, 64GB of ECC RAM, 1TB of SATA SSD or 2 x 256GB NVMe SSDs, and 30TB of bandwidth for US$75.
  
  That wasn't a listed config but I asked.  They have cheaper servers but that's about the cheapest with ECC RAM.
  
  
  
• TerraMaster has a dual-drive 3.5" Thunderbolt 3 DAS.  (AnandTech)
  
  The question why immediately springs to mind, but there is an answer: It's small, cheap ($249 without drives), and has a little carry handle.  It's great for anyone who needs to be able to carry tens of terabytes of data to the work site - film shoots being probably the primary audience, but that price is low enough to be attractive to a lot of people.
  
  
  
• The Asus Republic of Gamers Zenith II Extreme Alpha is the motherboard of choice for the Threadripper 3990X unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It supports 16 phase power, DDR4-4733 RAM, USB 3.2 2x2, 10Gb Ethernet, WiFi 6, 8 SATA ports, and, um, 15 M.2 slots, all PCIe 4.0 x 4 NVMe.  3 on the board itself, two on a little adaptor, and 10 more in additional adaptors in the PCIe slots.
  
  That leaves it - if you do go all-in on NVMe - with just one PCIe 4.0 x8 slot for graphics.
  
  It also has that little OLED display.
  
  Price around US$1000.
  
  
  
• Save .org.  (savedotorg.org)
  
  I don't care about .org, I just like that domain name.
  
  
  
• On the road to Swift 6.  (Swift.org)
  
  There was a Swift 5?
  
  
  
• MongoDB announced a preview of GraphQL support...  (MongoDB)
  
  This could be useful.
  
  ... for their Atlas cloud platform.
  
  Oh look, I have some cookie crumbs left over from yesterday.
  
  This is the same as with their Lucene search support.  That would be amazingly useful if it were part of their open source product.  As part of their cloud platform the only thing it offers is vendor lock-in.
  
  
  
• The experience of getting caught as the cat's-paw in a credit card fraud scheme.  (Free Code Camp)
  
  1. We've had $60,000 in donations in the past 24 hours!
  2. That's about 60x normal.
  3. So...
  4. Fuck.
  
  The solution:
  
  1. Hang on the phone until you find the right person to speak to.
  2. Refund every single transaction manually.  All 3537 of them.

1 Hopefully that ROG mobo is enough to finally shut up the storage nuts.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 24 2020 01:44 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 24 2020 07:36 AM (PiXy!)

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• The long weekend is over (for America; mine is coming up) and the Radeon RX 5600 XT reviews are out.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Initial impressions on the announcement were lukewarm, but an after-the-last-minute performance boost from AMD changed everything. 
  
  Both Sebastian Peak at PC Perspective and Ryan Smith at AnandTech comment that their reviews turned out far more positive than they were expecting thanks to AMD's BIOS update that unlocked more performance.
  
  Instead of competing against Nvidia's 1660 Ti, it now trades benchmark wins with the RTX 2060.  The 5600 XT also uses less power than the 2060, even with that last minute update and a factory-overclocked card, and that's an area where AMD really needed to catch up.
  
  Both sites reviewed the Sapphire Pulse, which seems to be a well-engineered card even if it doesn't look like a cat or an owl or something.
  
  
  
• Google wants the government to regulate their AI research.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As always, this has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with raising barriers to entry for smaller competitors that aren't carrying tens of thousands of hyper-woke dead weight employees.
  
  
  
• Comet Lake won't support PCIe 4.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have not the faintest idea at this point which one is Comet Lake and didn't know that Intel was even considering PCIe 4.0 support for it, then welcome to the club, membership 7.8 billion.
  
  
  
• Another early benchmark of the Ryzen 4700H mobile part puts it ahead of Intel's desktop i7-9700K unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the 45W part so it's just a very solid result rather than an astounding one.  Still, good stuff, and AMD if you're listening please double everything and give us a chip with 16 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores, and 4 four memory channels.
  
  
  
• Lego ISS.  (CollectSpace)
  
  At $70 it's a lot more affordable than that Saturn V, and includes a rather chibi-looking Space Shuttle.
  
  
  
• That's it!  That's exactly it!
  
  
  
  
  For the antithesis of Google's latest mess:
  
  
  
  
  Nobody likes the new Google.  (Hacker News)
  
  
  
• DuckDuckGo is relatively small.  (DuckDuckGo)
  
  Only 15 billion searches in 2019?  That's just - wait, does the calculator still work now that I've switched?  Yes! - just 475 per second on average.
  
  
  
• PHP in 2020: Just say no.  (Stitcher.io)
  
  They try to paint a happy face on a corpse.  Just let it die already.
  
  (Had to help fix a legacy PHP app today.  Nobody enjoyed the experience.)
  
  
  
• Blocked by default.  (dijit.sh)
  
  Cloudflare is not the worst of the vast overbearing internet companies with too much power and zero accountability, but it's a low, low bar.
  
  
  
• Intel's $2.40 2.5Gb Ethernet controller is not suitable for servers - say server motherboard manufacturers - because it doesn't support sharing the port with BMC which is a terrible idea they should stop doing anyway.  (Serve the Home)
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 23 2020 01:33 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Intel's high-end Xe DG2 graphics chips will be manufactured on TSMC's 7nm process unless they won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's gotta sting unless it doesn't.
  
  
  
• Intel also took a break from showing off oversized NUCs to leak a normal-sized NUC that you can't get.  (PC Perspective)
  
  The NUC 11 Performance model - codenamed Panther Canyon - will reportedly come with a 28W Tiger Lake U CPU with integrated Xe graphics, a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot, HDMI 2.1, mini DisplayPort 1.4, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, three USB 3.1 ports, 2.5Gb Ethernet, and WiFi 6.
  
  If the integrated Xe graphics are at least competent those will be nice little systems.  But since Tiger Lake U is only a 4 core part, a Ryzen 4700U would thoroughly squish them.
  
  
  
• This explains why VMS chooses to treat the year 2000 as a leap year.
  
  
  
• How to corrupt your SQLite database.  (SQLite.org)
  
  Absolute power, or running it on older versions of NFS.
  
  
  
• 160,000 data breach notifications have been submitted since GDPR came into effect.  (ZDNet)
  
  As best I can tell that is everyone in Europe who actually has any customer data at all, and multiple times over at that.
  
  
  
• LastPass is apparently suffering a partial outage affecting long-standing user accounts.  (ZDNet)
  
  Currently they don't know the cause, but it only affects accounts originally created in 2014 or earlier.  Since LastPass has been around since 2008, that is not necessarily a small number.
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 5 will launch this October for US $499 unless it won't.  (Reddit)
  
  The leak is on Reddit via 4chan so make of it what you will.  Maybe a hat, or a little boat.
  
  
  
• So, Google messed up their search results page by splattering favicons everywhere.  I tried DuckDuckGo but it was no better, and then briefly used Bing, which provided better formatting of results - but worse results.  At least on whatever the hell it was I was searching for at the time.
  
  Turns out that if you click on the Settings dropdown on DuckDuckGo you can turns those annoying icons off, change the typeface and font size, pick a theme, and generally make it look and work exactly the way you want.
  
  Well, that's one less Google application I'm tied to.
  
  
  
• 2020 AV2 is not a torrent download listing but an asteroid that resides entirely within the orbit of Venus.  (EarthSky)
  
  And is thus safe to click on except that it is probably red hot.
  
  It is the first known asteroid that orbits entirely within the orbit of Venus, though there are a handful that cross Venus's orbit.
  
   
• Tesla says you're holding it wrong.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And since they have detailed telemetry data they're very likely right.  But then so was Audi and their sales still cratered for ten years.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 22 2020 12:45 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 22 2020 12:48 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 22 2020 12:52 AM (Iwkd4)

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• So my washing machine is making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, clearly an unbalanced load, and I go into the laundry and shut it off before it can damage itself.  The clothes aren't quite done spinning but near enough, so into the dryer with them and in goes the next load.
  
  And I close the door and am rewarded with an almost comically perfect sound of something breaking off and falling down inside the machine, which no longer works.
  
  
  
• Google search sucks.
  
  So does Google everything else, pretty much.  How the basically competent now are fallen.
  
  
  
• Twitter no longer has tooltips for emojis.  Brought home sharply by this bit of nonsense:
  
  
  
  
  Quick, name the top five countries on that list.
  
  
  
• I had a clever idea today.
  
  And when I say "clever" I mean "using a platform in a way it was never intended to be used and will likely horrify the developers of said platform".
  
  
  
• Why build this blog on IPFS?  (Teetotality)
  
  No, not this blog, that blog.  While IPFS has its place, there is no magic.  There's no "serverless", there is just total dependence on things you cannot fix. 
  
  WordPress may be a dinosaur, but dinosaurs ruled the planet for 160 million years.  WordPress is also a piece of crap, but crap has ruled the planet for even longer.
  
  
  
• No, you still can't solve the halting problem.  (Gizmodo)
  
  What you can now do - thanks to that mathematical breakthrough I mentioned yesterday - is determine, if you have a network of computers which can solve the halting problem, which isn't possible, whether they are telling the truth.
  
  Which is a rather useful trick when you have computers solving problems that they can solve but which you cannot.
  
  
  
• Netgear put the private keys for the certificates included on their routers up on their support website.  (GitHub)
  
  Astoundingly, this doesn't look like a fuckup.  The keys and certificates are used only for providing HTTPS for your router's config page, and nowhere else.  Providing them like this is necessary if you're making a complete firmware bundle available for download.
  
  And you need HTTPS because browsers can't tell a LAN site from a public one and are increasingly freaked out about HTTP sites.
  
  As one person summed it up:

  It's better than HTTP because it requires active MitM
  It's worse than HTTP because it gives the user a false sense of security.
  It's better than TOFU/self signed because the user is not presented with a browser warning (and thus can use the device)
  It's worse than TOFU/self signed because the user is not presented with a browser warning (and thus does not know about attacks)
  It's a solution to an unsolved problem...

  
  
  
• TerraMaster has a new 5-bay 10Gb NAS.  (AnandTech)
  
  Price $599, available soon.  It looks pretty good, but I don't have 10Gb Ethernet, so probably going to stick with USB for now.
  
  
  
• I mentioned that DigitalOcean was laying off about 5% of their staff.  A co-founder of the company showed up on a Hacker News thread to explain things.
  
  It went well.
  
  Not being facetious.
  
  If you've ever seen the AWS platform dashboard you would know why.
  
  
  
• Don't use Opera.  (Android Police)
  
  Yeah, based on that, time to uninstall Opera entirely.
  
  
  
• A list of Telnet passwords for 500,000 devices has been published online.  (ZDNet)
  
  Internet of Insecure Pieces of Crap.

• This is the most extraordinary thing, and will probably be deleted soon.
  
  
  
  

  Chants of "we will not comply” from gun rights protesters in Richmond.

  The audio isn't perfect, but it is clear enough.  The crowd is reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
  

• My supermarket now stocks gluten-free donuts.  Found them when I was looking for the lamingtons.
  
  $3.75.
  
  Each.
  
  
  
• Hosting providers are starting to offer Ryzen servers.  (WebHostingTalk)
  
  In this case WebNX (who I haven't used before) but also ReliableSite (who I have).
  
  For example, a Ryzen 2600 with 32GB RAM, 2x256GB NVMe drives (or 1x1TB SATA SSD), and 30TB monthly bandwidth costs $59 per month.
  
  The 2600 isn't as fast as the models that came out a few months ago, but it is cheap, has the same single-threaded performance as the E3 Xeons you commonly find in budget servers, and has six cores rather than four.
  
  They offer a 3600X model for $79, and a 3800X with 64GB ECC RAM and 100TB monthly bandwidth for $99.
  
  At the higher end, they have Threadripper 3970X servers starting at $399 per month.  I was wondering when those would pop up.  Obviously Epyc is the safe choice for servers - it's explicitly a server CPU - but Threadripper has a clock speed advantage of around 50%.  I don't know if that model has a server motherboard; the others explicitly list IPMI but that one doesn't, and I haven't seen a server board for third-generation Threadripper so far.
  
  
  
• Zotac's Inspire Studio is a double-height double-width double-depth NUC.
  
  Mini-ITX size but not a standard Mini-ITX board or case, but it looks pretty nice regardless.  Core i7-9700 and an RTX 3060 Super in a pretty compact case - 8" x 9" x 5".  6 USB 3.1 and two 1Gbit Ethernet ports.
  
  They also have a professional mini-workstation in the same case with a Xeon E CPU and Quadro graphics, and a gaming version with the 9700 CPU and a 2070 Super.  (Zotac)
  
  For some reason both those models have 2.5Gbit Ethernet but the Studio model doesn't.
  
  
  
• The Radeon RX 5600 XT just got 11% faster.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With just a BIOS tweak and an extra 10W TDP allocation.
  
  
  
• Write your own operating system kernel.  (GitHub)
  
  Admittedly all the project does so far is boot, print "my first kernel", and hang, but I've had pretty much that experience trying to boot with Grub on older hardware.  (For a while I had a server with 12 cores, 128GB RAM, and 12TB of SSD that could only boot using LILO.)
  
  
  
• A poem.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• That naughty list is a month late, guys.  (Slate)
  
  They compiled a list of the most evil and dangerous tech companies.  Though this being Slate (corporate motto: At least we're not Salon) their definition of evil ranges from sensible (arresting reporters for reporting the news) to nonsensical (securing the border from drug smugglers).
  
  Most of them are soft targets, but at least they put Baidu and Tencent on the list.
  
  Also Twitter.
  
  But Slate's gonna Slate:

  One evil thing: Last month, Dorsey announced a high-flying idea to decentralize social networks that evoked the ideals of an older, purer internet. But some critics saw the proposal as a convenient way for Twitter to eventually offload responsibility for what its users do.

  Yeah, that's the one thing they call Twitter out for.
  
  
  
• And then there's the companion piece.  (Slate again, sorry)

  I worked at Gizmodo for about three years, a job I acquired by falsely claiming to know what Android is.  ...  I do firmly believe that Facebook and Amazon are both objectively evil, which is what brings us here today.

  These are your betters, peasant.
  
  
  
• Speaking of those idiots, vile racist lunatic Louis Farrakhan finally got suspended.  Is Twitter coming to its corporate senses at long last?
  
  No, of course not.  It was all a dream.  (Washington Examiner)
  
  
  
• MIP* = RE  (Arxiv.org)

  Here PSPACE is the set of problems solvable by a classical computer with a polynomial amount of space. Subsequent results showed that if one allowed a verifier able to interact with multiple provers, the verifier could be convinced of a solution of any problem in NEXPTIME, a class conjectured to be much larger than PSPACE. For a while, it was believed that in the quantum case, the set of problems might actually be smaller, since multiple quantum computers might be able to use their shared entangled qubits to "cheat" the verifier. However, this has turned out not just to not be the case, but the exact opposite: MIP* is not only large, it is about as large as a computable class can naturally be.

  Well, good.
  
  Also the Connes Embedding Conjecture is false.
  
  
  
• Kids these days don't know where the term soap opera comes from.  (Digital Trends)
  
  They are shocked at the notion of "a TV show brought to you by a single advertiser".
  
  
  
• Joe Biden came out against CDA section 230 and the usual suspects are in a complete meltdown.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Exploded heads everywhere.
  
  I particularly like their description of Josh Hawley as "far right" when the only thing of note that he has done is speak out against CDA section 230.
  
  
  

Video of the Day

Disclaimer: 

• Australia Day coming up and you cannot get gluten-free lamingtons for love or money.
  
  
  
• Nvidia cut the price of the RTX 2060 to compete with the Radeon 5600 XT so AMD increased the performance of the 5600 XT.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, it's already shipping; this is a BIOS update.  Since the 5600 XT is a cut-down 5700, AMD potentially has a lot of room to tinker like this.
  
  
  
• When your smart home gets a lobotomy.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Don't buy vendor-locked products if there's any alternative.
  
  
  
• What's this "InstantInk" thing?
  
  
  
  
  Oh.
  
  Don't buy vendor-locked products if there's any alternative.
  
  
  
• California really, really, really wants companies to move to Texas.  (Fox Business)
  
  
  
• DigitalOcean is laying off between 6 and 10% of its staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not sure what is going on here because as far as I know DigitalOcean is growing and hasn't needed to raise money since 2017.
  
  
  
• The Rust community collectively went bananas this week.  It will blow over.
  
  Here's a Reddit thread discussing a blog post discussing the Reddit threads discussing the events.
  
  Yes, one of those.
  
  
  
• A dual 2.5Gb Ethernet adapter.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Okay, first of all, why?  I mean, it's $50, so I guess the answer is why not, but still...
  
  
  
• An unknown hacker has been remotely patching vulnerable Citrix servers.  (ZDNet)
  
  Apparently to keep out the competition and not out of the goodness of his or her heart.
  
  
  
• There's a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer.  (ZDNet)
  
  Use one of the other 700 browsers available for free.
  
  
  
• 97.5 is the new 98.6.  (Smithsonian Magazine)
  
  For some reason, average human body temperatures seem to be going down, and it's not just due to older measurements being less accurate.  The cause is most likely environmental, because human evolution doesn't act that fast.
  
  
  
• It's not just you, Google really did crap all over their search results last week.  (The Verge)
  
  Here's how to remove the crap with UBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus.  (LifeHacker)
  
  
  
• So, my NBN plan has no bandwidth cap.  On ADSL I had a pretty generous limit of 1.2TB which only became a problem when my external drive died and I had to re-sync my entire Dropbox account and all my Steam and iTunes files.  If I hadn't had local backups that would have taken months.  Now...  Days.

Picture of the Day

Miku by 千夜QYS3

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 19 2020 07:53 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 19 2020 07:57 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 19 2020 08:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 19 2020 04:49 PM (PiXy!)

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• Finally got around to ordering my upgrade to NBN.  Instead of spending 30 seconds online to select a plan and enter my payment details, it was an hour on the phone because my ISP is run by...   Well, probably because they are now run by another ISP, honestly, and their respective systems do not talk to each other at all.
  
  Also, because the system they do have was designed by people with the intelligence of eggplants, you have to have a registered business name to get a static IP.
  
  Anyway, 100 down, 40 up, unlimited bandwidth, and I save about $50 a month over my old ADSL + phone bundle.
  
  
  
• AMD talks 64 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They say that even at 64 cores 4 channel memory is usually enough, thanks in large part due to the 256MB of L3 cache.
  
  One thing a lot of tech journalists forget is that there is a 64 core Epyc priced about the same as the 64 core Threadripper.  It's only the dual-socket model that runs to $7000.
  
  
  
• Just in case anyone was confused, Justin Boots definitely isn't not Shane Bieber.  (TechDirt)
  
  Is that clear?
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• If you're between the ages of 13 and 15, get the fuck off the internet, says Congress.  (TechDirt)
  
  This is so stupid you know it's gotta be a bipartisan effort.
  
  
  
• Investors are idiots.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• Huawei's Mate X - the one that folds the other way, so the screen is on the outside and the bend isn't as sharp - also breaks under normal use.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Unless it doesn't.
  
  
  
• How to fix Twitter.  (Bloomberg)
  
  1.  Fire everyone not in an engineering role.
  2.  EVERYONE. 
  
  
  
• BlackVue internet-enabled dashcams turned out to double as publicly-accessible tracking devices.  (Vice)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Don't accidentally hold down the power button while you're cleaning the screen on your Mediapad M3 while waiting for a game update to install if you've forgotten the password you used and the game doesn't have an automated password reset function, particularly when the update you were installing is the biggest event of the year.
  
  
  
• Betelgeuse is still there.
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 18 2020 12:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 18 2020 12:40 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 18 2020 12:46 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 18 2020 10:44 PM (PiXy!)

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