• Murphy's Law has rarely been more fully in display than in the recent Facebook security breach.  (TechDirt)
  
  Not only did a very simple trick allow you to view private details of other users' accounts, it let you impersonate those accounts.
  
  If you used Facebook to sign in to other services, it let people sign in as you on those services.
  
  And if you tried to post a warning about this to your friends on Facebook, your post was filtered out by the automated security system.
  
  This is a platform used by more than a billion people.
  
  
• Elon Musk has settled with the SEC, will step down as chairman of Tesla and pay a fine, but remain a board member and CEO  (TechCrunch)
  
  This seems appropriate.
  
  
• There is something in the water in Rhode Island.  (NPR)
  
  
• A federal judge has ruled against a joint state and federal police task force suing Facebook for access to Messenger messages.  (Reuters)
  
  Of course, they could have just waltzed right in and downloaded them anyway, making it all a bit pointless.
  
  
• In Australia?  Need a new laptop?
  
  The Lenovo E485 is $400 off - meaning $100 off the launch price (which to be fair was a great price) - and SSD upgrades are also $50 off, so with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD it's currently a very reasonable A$1124.
  
  The HP Spectre X2 is still on sale for A$1350 for the next week (while stocks last, but it is currently in stock), including 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, detachable keyboard and pen.  Well worth a look if you were considering a Microsoft Surface Pro.

• Ashe Schow dissects what is going on in US social media and politics right now, and it ain't pretty.  (Daily Wire)
  
  Sound article, though.  Read, as they say, the whole thing.
  
  
• Jonah Goldberg is more focused on the politics but also addresses the social media aspects of the present moral panic.

Kids, Don't Try This At Home

• Ian Cutress gets his hands on a not-too-wildly-expensive 24-port 10GBase-T switch.  (AnandTech)
  
  Unfortunately the price has now jumped by 60% so it's probably a couple more years before we really get 10G in the home.
  
  
• How do the Ryzen desktop APUs scale with overclocking?  (AnandTech)
  
  The cheaper 2200G scales very well; the more expensive 2400G less so.  This is almost certainly due to memory bandwidth; the 2200G has 8 graphics cores to the 2400G's 11, so it has more room to scale before it reaches the limits of the DDR4 interface.
  
  Which means that these won't get much faster until they can get faster memory, whether that's DDR5 or some sort of caching as found in Intel's Kaby Lake G.
  
  
• LG has their own 32" 4K DCI-P3 FreeSync HDR monitor.  (AnandTech)
  
  Best part: $500.
  
  
• ZADAK has 32GB unbuffered DDR4 modulesp.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are based on 8Gb chips, not the very new and scarce 16Gb chips, so they're bigger than normal.  They have both full-size and SO modules, so in theory I could use these to upgrade my Dell desktops to a full 64GB, assuming they fit.
  
  Anyone with one of Dell's Inspiron tower systems who needs to upgrade to 64GB could benefit from these too.
  
  
• A bug in remote management features in older Dell servers might affect tens of millions of systems ugh.  (Serve the Home)
  
  

Social Media News

• Facebook had a security breach, leaking details of 50 million accounts  (PCPer)
  
  They don't know who, or how, or what.  Fortunately, everything on my Facebook profile is a lie.
  
  There seem to have been at least three different security bugs being exploited in this.
  
  
• This of course comes just a day after the story about them misusing private customer data.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Use Instagram?  You might be affected too.  (TechCrunch)
  
  
• USA Today smarmily insinuated Brett Kavanaugh is a pedophile on Twitter and the tweet is still up eight hours later.
  
  They need to fire the writer (in their sports department), the person who posted it, and whoever is supposed to be monitoring their social media responses.

Bonus Video of the Day

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, September 30 2018 01:43 AM (3bBAK)

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Tech News

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 28 2018 11:53 PM (Q/JG2)

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• Arm has announced the Cortex A76AE, a safety-oriented processor for autonomous vehicles (and presumable other advanced automation). (AnandTech)
  
  It supports lockstep operation similar to the old Tandem Nonstop mainframes. Each instruction is executed on two independent cores, and if the results diverge it's immediately treated as an error. It scales up to 64 total cores.
  
  
• Memory prices may drop 5% this year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Woo. Leaving them at 3x their low point from four years ago.
  
  
• The Asustor A4004T is a cheap 4-bay NAS with 10 gigabit Ethernet. (Serve the Home)
  
  10GbE sounds like overkill for a small cheap NAS, but in fact four drives like the current BarraCuda Pro in RAID-5 can deliver a peak transfer rate of about 8Gbps.
  
  Also interesting that there are now low-cost embedded Arm processors with built-in 10GbE, which is what this device uses. Oh, and it's normal 10GBase-T - Cat6a - not some weird crap.
  
  
• Delicious 1700lb giant turkeys once roamed Madagascar. (Inverse)
  
  Lina and Gourry ate them all.
  
  
• Sydney's Olympic Park (site of the 2000 Summer Olympics) is hosting trials of driverless shuttle services. (ZDNet)
  
  So far hardly anyone has been horribly killed.
  
  
• Kairosoft has some sort of new RPG out.
  
  Only in Japanese right now, but they are much quicker than they used to be at translating games into English.
  
  
• That Linux code revocation thing?  Not going to happen.  The Software Freedom Conservancy said no, so I went and read the GPLv2 myself, and I have to agree with them.  By contributing code to a GPL project you agree to the license, granting other users an irrevocable license so long as they also agree to the license.
  
  You could sue over it, but you'd likely fail.
  
  So terminal cancer it is.

• Suck it up, you got twenty-two freaking billion dollars for a company with no revenue. (ZDNet)
  
  Fair point.
  
  
• Oh, good fucking work, Facebook, you asshats. That will definitely make things better for everyone.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Facebook had a huge push earlier this year for people to secure accounts with two-factor authentication using the mobile phone number.  Sometimes they forced users to enable two-factor auth to unlock their accounts.
  
  Guess what Facebook did with those numbers?
  

  Ugggghhh. Facebook confirms what @kashhill reported: Facebook is taking phone numbers given to them for two factor authentication and using them for ad targeting. Gross and completely irresponsible. https://t.co/t73ehenUWRpic.twitter.com/TNpPUxsKz6

  — Eric Mill (@konklone) September 26, 2018

  
  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 28 2018 05:47 AM (e+hus)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 28 2018 06:09 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 28 2018 11:10 AM (PiXy!)

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• Firefox Monitor tells you that your accounts have been hacked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Your accounts have been hacked.
  
  Thanks Firefox Monitor!
  
  
• The EFF's constitutional challenge to the hopelessly vague FOSTA legislation has been dismissed by the District Court.  (TechDirt)
  
  The court seems to have ruled that the less-vague parts of the Act outweigh the more vague parts, which seems like nonsense to me.  I hope this continues to a higher court and this decision is overruled.
  
  
• Facebook's policy of we'll swallow, but we won't digest has come to an end.  (TechCrunch)
  
  It was never true anyway.
  
  The co-founders of Instagram have resigned.  Not that they needed a day job, but they were clearly angered by the way Facebook has been running their baby.
  
  
• Digital Ocean now supports importing custom images.
  
  That's very useful, yes, but how do I export an image?
  
  
• A bug in the Monero cryptocurrency protocol basically left it open to high-tech looting.  (ZDNet)
  
  Last week a bug was found in Bitcoin that exposed it to similar attacks, but require a more elaborate operation: You needed to first knock good Bitcoin nodes off line with false allegations so you could sneak in with 51% of the vote and approve fraudulent payments.
  
  
• Columbia Journalism Review asks is the podcast bubble bursting?
  
  Yes.  Yes, CJR.  Ten years ago.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, September 27 2018 01:32 PM (8i+JN)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 27 2018 03:10 PM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, September 26 2018 04:47 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: brickmuppet at Wednesday, September 26 2018 06:57 AM (ijr53)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 26 2018 11:54 PM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 27 2018 01:27 AM (PiXy!)

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• Zhaoxin announced an 8 core 3GHz x86 CPU fabbed by TSMC on their 16nm process.  (AnandTech)
  
  Wait, what?  Who?  Only three companies have licenses to produce x86 chips, and those are Intel, AMD, and - oh.  This is Via, back from the mostly dead.
  
  
• Microsoft has announced new Surface Hub thingies with swappable processor modules.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Those huge touchscreens are hugely expensive, because the usual capacitative or resistive touch sensors don't work at a large scale.  So keeping the screen and periodically upgrading the processor module makes a lot of sense.
  
  
• Google's new version of Chrome might be violating the GDPR.
  
  
• California has passed an IoT security bill.  (diginomica)
  
  Unnoticed in the fine print was an allocation of $40 billion to the San Mateo Maker Faire.  State officials have not been able yet to determine at what point that clause was added.
  
  
• The Cosmic Cuttlefish are coming!  (Phoronix)
  
  They only just got the Bionic Beavers working properly, dammit.  (These are Ubuntu Linux 18.10 and 18.04, respectively.)
  
  
• Online CRM provider Zoho got taken offline by their domain registrar over phishing complaints that may not have even happened.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The outage affected an estimated 30 million users.
  
  Cost of a .com registration: $11 per year.
  
  Don't trust one of anything.  Even intangible items like domain names can fail.
  
  
• Zotac's ZBOX-CI660 Nano is a fanless quad-core i7 system.  (NotebookCheck)
  
  It's a bit bigger than other, similar mini-PCs for an interesting reason: It has no fan.  It is passively cooled, and completely silent.
  
  
• Image recognition systems are bad at coping with unexpected elephants.  (Quanta)
  
  So, to tell the truth, are most of us.  I mean, just the other day I found three of them in the upstairs bathroom...
  
  
• NBN upgrades its backbone network to 19.2Tbps, still can't be bothered to connect any customers.  (ZDNet)

• Yes, Virginia, there is a draft executive order to regulate social media floating around the White House.  (TechDirt)
  
  But it's just a draft, and officials have officially disavowed any intent to put it into action.  There's speculation that Yelp might be behind it, but I have no idea whether such speculation is any better informed than the rest of the nonsense sloshing around Washington this week.
  
  
• If you need a laugh this absurdly stupid take on the split between the open internet and the we-will-drag-you-off-to-Siberia/Manchuria-at-3AM internet might do the trick.  (TechCrunch)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 25 2018 11:40 PM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 26 2018 03:43 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, September 26 2018 11:52 AM (8i+JN)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 26 2018 05:46 PM (PiXy!)

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• The New York Times has gone insane. (TechCrunch)
  
  
• Why I'm done with Chrome.
  
  Not me personally, though I'm rapidly getting there.
  
  
• Others are picking this up too.
  
  Chrome now logs you in whether you tell it to or not. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Chromium - the open source basis of Crhome - now has a handy de-googling patch
  
  
• An analysis of TSMC's 16nm, 10nm, and 7nm processes reveals that those numbers aren't all hot air.
  
  7nm provides more than three times the transistor density of 16nm. It would be roughly five times if the numbers were precise, so taking 16nm as a baseline, 7nm is really closer to 9nm. Still a huge advance.
  
  
• The Node.js ecosystem is a fire looking for its dumpster.
  
  Everything about Node.js is awful.
  
  
• OVH is expanding its cloud to target the US market. (Serve the Home)
  
  They're already in Australia. However (a) they're completely sold out of all cloud servers and (b) they offer limited storage and no expandability. They're not a replacement for tier-two players like DigitalOcean, let alone the big names like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
  
  
• Singapore has fined Grab-Uber over anti-competitive practices (ZDNet)
  
  Given past stories of Uber's corporate culture, that seems like an unfortunate confluence of names there.

My little girl just said to me: "Mom, how is progress possible if our growth is stunted by perpetual tribalism and xenophobia?”

Wow. Literally at a loss for words. She’s a german shepherd. I had no idea this was possible

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) June 25, 2018

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, September 25 2018 09:04 AM (3bBAK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 25 2018 02:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: muon at Wednesday, September 26 2018 07:31 PM (vMYTH)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 26 2018 11:53 PM (Q/JG2)

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• Australia's godawful mathematics-denying encryption bill has been passed to a joint committee for review, rather than being set on fire and flushed down the toilet as is proper. (ZDNet)
  
  
• Chrome is a google Cloud service with a browser attached.
  
  Particularly noteworthy:

  Chromium is apparently also affected by this.

  This extends even into the open source version. This is an extension of how I got locked out of YouTube for eight years. And of course, Google's terms of service forbid you getting around that by having multiple accounts.
  
  
• Intel's Optane 905P is now available in useful capacities. (Serve the Home)
  
  More interesting, STH notes that their own server is now using an Optane drive for their databases.
  
  
• Paul Thurrott (he's on Windows Weekly, um, weekly, on the TWiT network) takes a look at the Intel version of the HP Envy x2, another take from HP on the detachable design like the Spectre x2 I just got. (Thurrott^TM)
  
  Paul reviewed the Arm version previously and found that it was a beautiful, elegant, functional system that completely sucked for getting anything done because the Arm CPU was painfully slow running Intel software under emulation.
  
  The new Envy version has a lower resolution screen than the Spectre, and a slower CPU, and less memory and storage, but has LTE support and is aimed at delivering all-day battery life.
  
  He also reviewed the Spectre x2 last year for those interested in a comparison.

• China has banned Twitch streaming. Unexpectedly. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Ahaha! Ahahaha! Ahahahahahaha!
  

  This is interesting...apparently Linux kernel devs can revoke their contributions to the kernel. This gives them some protection in case they are caught up in arbitrary and false Code of Conduct rulings or ejections from the community. https://t.co/08wQSjGujF

  — Mark Kern (@Grummz) September 20, 2018
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 24 2018 02:19 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 24 2018 04:10 PM (PiXy!)

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• HP's Spectre x2 (2017) is really good.  If you can find one at, say, a 66.25% discount, go for it.
  
  The screen is great, the sound is surprisingly good for a notebook, it's fast and (if you get the 1TB model) has a ton of room for stuffs.  It charges very quickly - it can fast charge to 50% capacity in half an hour.  The bezels are large by 2018 standards, but you need something to hold onto in tablet mode, so I won't ding it for that. 
  
  The keyboard is a remarkable creation - incredibly light but at the same time a great surface to type on.  Attaching it to the tablet part is a piece of cake - you wave it in approximately the right direction and powerful magnets pull it in and two little tabs guide it into the right place.  The back of the keyboard is some kind of woven plastic, rather than the aluminium and glass of the tablet part, which gives you a solid grip on the whole thing.
  
  The pen is interesting too - I didn't realise it could sense proximity and not just touch.  Hover the pen over the screen and it will register a cursor at that location.  This is why it originally did nothing at all before I discovered the tiny battery compartment in the box in the other box.
  
  Few minor downsides: The trackpad buttons take a little getting used to; they're rather firm.  The fan will spin up under load and make a steady hissing noise as though you'd left your pet snake in the microwave, and if you keep it under load the notebook gets quite warm.  The USB-C ports are awkwardly located in the middle of the sides of the tablet part, and a USB charging cable is bulkier than the typical power cord for a small laptop, so it's left sticking out inconveniently to the side.
  
  Overall initial impressions though are extremely positive, and I'm very grateful to the anonymous benefactor who bought that domain from me and funded this out-of-budget purchase.  (I'll know who it is eventually, but they don't have a website up yet.)
  
  

  Into stock and out again
  Off to HP's store I go
  Includes a keyboard and a pen
  Great for taking notes you know.
  
  Terabyte of SSD
  $1350 for your sins
  I have two, could make it three -
  He who dies with most toys wins.

  One other thing I've found: For some reason, CPU virtualisation (VT-x) is disabled by default in the BIOS.  A quick trip to the BIOS settings fixed that and all was well, but I thought for a moment I'd mistakenly installed the 32-bit version of VirtualBox.*
  
  
• Lenovo has their own mini laptop out, the A285.  (AnandTech)
  
  
  
  This has better specs in some respects: A Ryzen Pro CPU (up to the 2700U, so four CPU cores and 10 graphics cores), up to 16GB RAM and 512GB of SSD, four USB ports, HDMI, and wired gigabit Ethernet.
  
  Touch screen is optional but the non-touch option is garbage - a cheap 1366x768 TN panel - and should be avoided at all costs.
  
  Also, it has PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, which the Spectre x2 does not.
  
  No price as yet.  Lenovo's prices change daily anyway.
  
  Update: Found the price.  US$990 for the crap version no-one should ever buy.  Useful models start at $1140.
  
  
• Intel is ramping up its 14nm production to offset delays in 10nm which is now three years behind schedule.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• You won't believe this one simple trick to calculate billions of digits of pi using the wrong formula.  (PDF)
  
  
  
  This formula is wrong.  But it is accurate for the first 42 billion digits.
  
  
• An artist drew copies of some of Andy Warhol's Polaroids by hand, crumpled them up, drew copies of the crumpled versions, created t-shirts with printed copies of the drawings of the crumpled drawings of the Polaroids, and packed them for sale into replica Campbell's soup cans, and got a C&D letter and not from the Warhol estate either.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• PyPy, the Python compiler written in Python, is a marvellous beast, delivering typically twice the performance on the same code and sometimes much more, at a cost of only the occasional horrendous memory leak that takes out your entire server not that this has ever happened to me more than, say, fifteen times in the space of a week.
  
  Anyway, the one goat in the ointment was that calling traditional Python C extensions from PyPy was slower than molasses in Boston in January 1919.
  
  This has now been fixed.

• Twitter may have been sending your private direct messages to app developers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  But only for sixteen months.
  
  
• PayPal banned Alex Jones / Inforwars from using its service for receiving payments.  (CNet)
  
  This is even more troubling than the rest of the tech cartel banning him from their various services.  He'd be crazy not to sue over this.  He doesn't even need to win.  I loathe the guy, and I'd still contribute to his legal fun...  Wait.