• What the hell happened to ZDNet?  (ZDNet)
  
  Everything about this is bad.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Buttons and bows: Better control surfaces at a reasonable price with Loupedeck.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I have a Stream Deck, which gives me 32 individually programmable buttons - each one with a little colour LCD built into it.  Loupedeck goes one better by adding things other than buttons - knobs, sliders, and dials to be specific.
  
  
  
• TSMC beings production of 3nm chips next month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Right on schedule.
  
  AMD is set to start shipping 5nm chips made by TSMC next month, so it might be a while before 3nm lands in your PC.
  
  
  
• A parasitological evaluation of edible insects and their role in the transmission of parasitic diseases to humans and animals, or, do not eat the bugs.  (PLOS)
  
  Do not.
  
  
  
• Broadcom has announced a 64-port 800Gb Ethernet switch chip.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Is that a lot?  That seems like a lot.
  
  
  
• If you have a router with a Realtek RTL819x you should unplug it right now, kill it with an axe, and set the pieces on fire.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  A firmware bug allows attackers to break in even if you have everything set up securely.  There have been patches out since March but they may or may not have been released for your device.
  
  So how do you know if your router has a Realtek RTL819x?  Well, that's the neat thing.  You don't.
  
  
  

I Think People Figured It Out Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 18 2022 09:37 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, August 18 2022 09:54 PM (vA2rE)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 18 2022 11:35 PM (LADmw)

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• AMD has announced a launch event for Ryzen 7000 on August 29.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With hardware presumably shipping a few weeks later during September.
  
  I'll keep an eye on the event and post the details here, but I think everything about Ryzen 7000 has already either been officially announced or leaked.

• DotNET 6 is now in Ubuntu 22.04.  (Microsoft)
  
  Okay, I guess.  Is it any worse than Java?
  
  
  
• Hard drive shipments dropped 15% in the most recent quarter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A combination of factors at work here, including the timely demise of the Chia storage-based blockchain bullshit.  MSRPs haven't changed but if you shop around you can save up to 40% on high-end drives - making them fairly competitive with low-end drives that don't offer such deals.
  
  
  
• MailChimp kinda sucks.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They made my shitlist previously for summarily dropping conservative-leaning customers, but this time the got hacked - which can happen to anyone - and didn't keep their customers informed.  Including Digital Ocean, which is a cloud provider and rather expects its emails to be secure.
  
  Digital Ocean is no longer a MailChimp customer.
  
  
  
• It's only a model: American Airlines has signed a deal to buy 20 supersonic passenger jets from startup Boom Supersonic.  (CNBC)
  
  Boom currently has no planes.
  
  Boom currently has no working prototype.
  
  They have a model.

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, August 18 2022 10:46 AM (2tHvf)

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• Android 13 is here, bringing with it uh.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Apparently you can stream certain things from a thing to another thing, and it has spatial audio support for headphones - it makes the sound feel like you're walking around in a room.
  
  Okay.
  
  I think the last Android release which was really a must-have was version 6 with adoptable storage.  Of course, most of the major manufacturers - particularly Samsung and Sony - immediately broke adoptable storage and leave it broken to this day, and Google's own hardware can't support adoptable storage because it has no storage to adopt.

• Linux 6.0 is here too.  (The Register)
  
  It doesn't bring any big changes either, but that's because they just flip the version number when it gets too unwieldy.  No-one wants to remember whether they're running 5.20.21 or 5.21.20.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 7000 will cost around 10% more than Ryzen 5000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At MSRP.  Since Ryzen 5000 is now selling at well under MSRP - the $799 5950X is available on Amazon for $546 - this could lead to a street price gap of as much as 50%.
  
  And the new chips will require new motherboards and more expensive DDR5 RAM, leaving Ryzen 5000 as a still attractive option for price/performance builds.
  
  
  
• It's only a model: Russia unveiled a model of its proposed taking-my-ball-and-going-home space station.  (The Guardian)
  
  It's no Lego Millennium Falcon, but it's okay, I guess.
  
  
  
• New Jersey police used a blood sample from a baby - taken to test for genetic issues - to pin a crime on its father.  (Wired)
  
  There are no federal laws against this and there are no state laws against it in New Jersey, but the problems are so obvious that even the ACLU is opposed to it.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 16 2022 09:26 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 17 2022 06:28 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 17 2022 10:07 AM (obo9H)

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• A California startup is offering subscriptions to electric vehicles.  (BNN Bloomberg)
  
  Not only will you own nothing, you won't be able to charge the car you don't own because the power grid will be down.

• Canada and Germany have signed a deal to use wind power in Canada to produce hydrogen to ship to Germany to use as fuel.  (CTV News)
  
  This is enormously inefficient and generally stupid.  They deserve what happens to them.
  
  
  
• A function added to new projects in Apple's Xcode 13.2 release punched a hole in every protection offered by MacOS.  (Sector 7)
  
  You won't believe this one stupid trick.
  
  
  
• I ordered a new computer case.  (Hyte)
  
  It's a decent case, though not what I'd normally buy, and overpriced because it's a special edition.  But I found my collection of anime cels and felt like celebrating.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 16 2022 12:56 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, August 17 2022 12:49 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 17 2022 06:06 PM (PiXy!)

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• Running Android without Google.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  Okay, so the hardware in the two tests reported here is sold by google - the Pixel 4a and Pixel 5 - but the software is two versions of Android - /e/OS and GrapheneOS - stripped of all the Google-specific software and tracking.
  
  You can still install the Play Store and install all your usual apps, and they will (mostly) work the same as before.  The one thing highlighted here is that you will lose Google's custom camera app - and this results in a marked drop in photo quality because the software is doing most of the magic there.
  
  But if you want out of the Google trap without losing compatibility entirely, either of these might be a viable option.

• What's coming up in AMD motherboards.  (PC Magazine)
  
  AMD launches Ryzen 7000 and the matching Socket AM5 motherboards on September 15, and the motherboard makers have gone beyond leaks to official previews of the hardware.
  
  The new boards will bring a few new features: PCIe 5 for double the I/O bandwidth, DDR5 for about 60% more memory bandwidth, and USB 4 for double the bandwidth there if and when 40Gbps USB devices show up.
  
  10Gb Ethernet also seems to be more common than on the last generation, which is welcome given the paucity of PCIe slots these days.
  
  
  
• AMD is also releasing a new range of video cards this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These will offer a lot more compute power than the current generation - two to three times at the high end, but it remains to be seen what that translates to in terms of graphics performance and power consumption.  I suspect you'll get something like a 50% improvement at the same MSRP and TDP, with the high-end cards being way out there on both numbers.
  
  
  
• Does the Dog Die is a cute idea driven into the ground and then nuked from orbit.  (Does the Dog Die)
  
  There's a Twitter account CanYouPetTheDog which simply documents what video gams let you pet a dog.  That's fun.
  
  Does the Dog Die tries to catalog every potential trigger for the most hyper-neurotic people in existence.  That's not fun at all.

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 15 2022 08:12 AM (obo9H)

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• Oceania's funniest home telescreen recordings.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Amazon's latest plan for MGM - we are not making this up - is clip shows of Ring doorbell surveillance footage.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Epson is deliberately bricking multiple models of printers because the tiny pads that soak up used ink are full of ink.  (Ars Technica)
  
  You can replace them easily enough, but they won't let you.
  
  
  
• A site that let you anonymously deliver a box full of shit to your nearest and dearest got hacked and all the customer records exposed.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  What is the world coming to when you can't anonymously deliver boxes full of shit to your loved ones?
  
  
  
• If you're looking for a modern and affordable small Android tablet this is definitely not it.  (ZDNet)
  
  The Galaxy Z Fold 4 is here, and it's still an outrageously expensive niche product.  Which wouldn't matter so much if there were any modern and affordable small Android tablets.  Any.  Even one.
  
  
  
• It turns out that installing customised browsers and digital warcrime Node.js all over people's PCs was not a good idea.  (Motherboard)
  
  Discord, Microsoft Teams, and Spotify are among the huge number of apps that use the Electron platform and are vulnerable to hackers.
  
  
  
• 8K monitors are too expensive and 5K monitors are impossible to find so here's half of one.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'd rather a complete one, thanks all the same.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 13 2022 10:33 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Sunday, August 14 2022 06:08 AM (yCp8E)

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 15 2022 12:33 AM (obo9H)

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• $15 well spent I'd say.  (Towards AI)
  
  For $15 the author got, well, see for yourself.
  
  Most of the $15 was spent figuring out how to ask for what he wanted, but that's kind of the deal in any artistic endeavour.

• The ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 10 is another thin-and-light laptop with the goods.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  12th gen Intel CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD**, choice of displays up to a 3840x2400 touchscreen, dual Thunderbolt ports, dual USB-A, HDMI, and headphone jack.  No microSD slot but at least with USB-A you can plug in a little adaptor.
  
  Base model is more reasonably priced in Australia than the HP Pavilion Plus - the ThinkPad is currently on sale - but neither the 32GB nor 2TB options are available here.
  
  
  
• Redis explained.  (Architecture Notes)
  
  Redis is not a database server, it's a data structure server.  I wouldn't recommend it for permanent data storage (though you can do that, and I have), but for manipulating data before writing it to your primary database it is unrivalled.
  
  
  
• The CDC says forget all that stuff we told you about COVID; we give up.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Thanks guys.
  
  
  
• Intel has dumped an estimated $3.5 billion into its GPU division so far.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's my estimation that it will take the company five years to come up with a truly competitive product, which would likely mean spending another $3.5 billion.  Industry analysts are 50/50 on whether the company is willing to commit to that.
  
  Most of the benefit would be in the datacenter - accelerator cards for things like the dunking llama in the first item sell for far higher prices than desktop graphics cards.  Do they need the volume side of the business to keep the effort afloat?  I don't know.  Should you buy a first-generation Arc graphics card?  Absolutely not.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 12 2022 11:47 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Saturday, August 13 2022 02:16 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, August 13 2022 01:22 PM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 14 2022 05:05 AM (BMUHC)

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• Too many employees, but few work.  (Business Standard)
  
  Mark Zuckerberg:

  Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.  And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.

  Sundar Pichai:

  There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have. [We need to] create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer-focused

  Maybe you should have thought of that before you spent ten years hiring communists and destroying your respective companies from the inside.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's Arc A750 video card competes with Nvidia's RTX 3060.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Couple of caveats:
  
  1. You can't get the A750 yet.
  2. The 3060 is due for replacement soon.
  3. The benchmarks were run by Intel.
  4. To quote Gamer's Nexus:

  Intel's Arc GPU driver software is completely and utterly broken. Although the drivers work 'fine' for some gaming, as we showed in our initial review, the actual driver suite is a buggy and embarrassing mess that Intel should be afraid to even upload for use. Many of its features, like Intel Smooth Sync (which we tested here) and Intel Arc Control cause artifacting, flickering, crashes, or are just otherwise useless.

  Avoid.
  
  
  
• LG's new 97" OLED TV needs no speakers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because the entire screen is a speaker.  It allegedly supports 5.1 surround sound, which is odd because 5.1 means there are rear speakers which in this case means you'd need a rear screen.
  
  
  
• While Intel was losing money for the first time in decades, AMD posted a 70% year-on-year revenue increase.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except that AMD just acquired Xilinx, as evidenced by the 10,538% growth of their embedded sector revenues, so the results aren't directly comparable.
  
  They still made a profit, and grew market share in ever sector, so not a bad quarter.
  
  
  
• GM has made the OnStar subscription plan a mandatory option on many new models.  (The Drive)
  
  That will be an extra $1500, thanks.  On top of your regularly scheduled price increases.
  
  
  
• If you want to spend far too much on a small Android tablet with a visible crease down the middle of the display which is uncomfortably wide in any case now is your chance.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  About A$2500 on pre-order though they do offer a free upgrade from 256GB to 512GB - which is good because this doesn't appear to offer any options for upgradeable storage.

Posted by: normal at Friday, August 12 2022 08:44 AM (obo9H)

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• Nvidia looks to have tamed the power consumption of the upcoming RTX 4000 cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The RTX 4080 is now expected to use 320W rather than 450W.  This probably comes with something like a 10% reduction in performance, because that power consumption goes up exponentially as you push any chip to its limits.
  
  
  
• AppLovin (who) has offered $17.5 billion for game development framework Unity.  (Axios)
  
  Unity would be stupid not to take it in this market.
  
  In an all-stock deal.
  
  Never mind.
  
  
  
• 10 Python packages on PyPI have been found stealing developer credentials.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
  
• Twilio has disclosed a data breach following a phishing attack on employees.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
  
• Cloudflare was hit by the same phishing attack.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This one apparently failed because Cloudflare uses company-wide hardware 2FA.
  
  
  
• Intel's SGX security module has been breached.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Again.

Posted by: Kurt Duncan at Wednesday, August 10 2022 10:13 PM (y8o1E)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 10 2022 10:59 PM (BMUHC)

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