• Looks like AMD will offer a 12-core Ryzen 3000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which doesn't exactly come as a surprise since their CEO all but announced it at CES, but anyway, someone was testing an engineering sample and it landed in a benchmark database.
  
  
  
  
• Why are eyeglasses so expensive?  (LA Times)
  
  Lack of transparency, my dear Watson.
  
  
• Intel's Pentium Silver J5005...  Wait, I recognise that numbering scheme.  That's an Atom.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's one of the good Atoms, though, and is actually a little faster than the Excavator-based Opteron X3421.  But both get squashed like bugs by any real CPU.
  
  
• Do those double-height, double-capacity DDR4 DRAMs do their duty?  (AnandTech)
  
  Yeah, basically.  If you have a system with only two memory slots (like many Dell Inspiron desktops) these might be the perfect solution to upgrade it to 128GB of RAM.  If and when the BIOS supports that.
  
  

• The Supreme Court has denied cert to an appeal of a failed lawsuit against Yelp.  (TechDirt)
  
  This means California Supreme Court decision stands - which is good because they got it right, upholding the protection of social network operators against lawsuits for user-generated content.
  
  
• Facebook will ban you if, among a whole list of other activities, you post in support of someone else they banned.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  But they have a nice new user interface to tell you so, so there's that.
  
  
• Millennials say they plan to contact companies for customer service using social media.  (ZDNet)
  
  Hi, Delta Airlines?  This is @SluttyKitty94, and I wanted to complain about...  DON'T LOOK AT MY TUMBLR!
  
  Yeah, no.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 25 2019 04:04 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 25 2019 04:06 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 25 2019 10:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 25 2019 08:04 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Samsung has announced the 970 EVO Plus as their new top-of-the-line NVMe SSD for consumers. (AnandTech)
  
  Sizes up to 1TB available now, 2TB in April.
  
  It's up to 30% faster than the original 970 in some benchmarks, particularly sequential writes, and is priced the same as the 970.  So much like the Western Digital Black SN750, not a huge upgrade, but a welcome one.
  
  
• There's a security bug in the wifi chips used in some little known products like Microsoft's Surface and Xbox One, and the PlayStation 4.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have one of those, expect it to reboot soon as it downloads a security update from the mothership.
  
  
• Sapphire has launched a crypto mining version of the Radeon 570 with 16GB RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And an HDMI port, so you can actually use it as a video card.
  
  It's a bit of an odd duck since the mining boom has largely busted, but there are some cryptocurrencies which are designed to need a large amount of memory to mine so they can't be swamped by the first person to get a bunch of ASICs back from the foundry.
  
  
• GitLab 11.7 is out with multi-level child epics, Kubernetes API integration, and cross-project pipeline browsing.
  
  No, I don't know either, and I use it every day.
  
  
• A planned update to the Chromium extension API may break ad-blockers including the widely-used uBlock Origin and uMatrix.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is pure coincidence, I'm sure.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• The PHP extension repository is still offline while that security breach is investigated.  (ZDNet)
  
  A clean and verified copy of the installer source code has been pushed to GitHub, but GitHub itself never got the hacked version.  So if you downloaded the installer from source, or if you relied on the version that came with your operating system, which would have been packaged from the GitHub source, you should be safe.  It's only if you grabbed the compromised version directly from the repository that you might have a problem.
  
  
• Intel has consigned their Quark microcontrollers to the well, that didn't work shelf next to the IAPX 432, the i860, and their entire discrete GPU product lineup so far.  (AnandTech)
  
  What discrete GPUs, you ask?  Well, precisely.
  
  
• Toshiba is sampling UFS 3.0 flash drives.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are teeny-tiny devices - the size and thickness of a fingernail - and can store up to 512GB and transfer up to 2.9GB per second.  Obviously the first market is high-end phones, but any small mobile device that needs a lot of fast built-in storage can take advantage of this technology, such as, for example, um, phones.

Social Media News

• Russia is suing Facebook and Twitter for not storing Russian users' data in Russian datacenters where Russia can conveniently steal it all.  (ZDNet)
  
  Facebook and Twitter responded to the lawsuit with, and I quote, "Say 'Moose and squirrel' again!" and then fell out of their chairs laughing hysterically.
  
  
• Reddit and Twitter have both redesigned their websites.
  
  Just click the opt out / return to legacy site option.  I can see what they're going for, but I don't have to like it.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 24 2019 01:26 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 24 2019 01:28 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 24 2019 01:31 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 24 2019 01:36 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 24 2019 01:38 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: muon at Wednesday, January 30 2019 03:58 PM (vMYTH)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 31 2019 10:49 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Why don't people use formal methods?
  
  Because 95% of the time there isn't even a proper requirements doc.
  
  
• The Orange Pi 3 is a competitor to you-know-what.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Made by Shenzhen Xunlong Software (who?) so of course you'd want to integrate it into your next security-critical IOT prototype.
  
  
• Sun's new EPYC-based Ultra 24 workstation.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Okay, there may have been a few aftermarket upgrades.  Like, everything except the case.
  
  
• Some Amazon shareholders have called for the company to stop providing face Rekognition services to the US government.  (Computer Weekly)
  
  Partly because it might be used for border security and immigration enforcement, which shows that these people are dingbats.  There are many valid concerns, with this technology, but those ain't it.

• CNIL (who?) has fined Google 50 million Euros for GDPR violations.
  
  If you visit CNIL's website, you are greeted with this.
  
  
  
  I would bet, oh, 50 million Euros, that they are not GDPR compliant.
  
  
• Facebook's WhatsApp has limited users to forwarding a message five times.  (Reuters)
  
  A limitation that will be bypassed in approximately 0.23 seconds.  Frankly, the people calling for this restriction worry me far more than WhatsApp or its users.

Bonus Video of the Day

Bonus Picture of the Day

Posted by: Kayle at Wednesday, January 23 2019 07:48 AM (magRz)

Posted by: Kristophr at Wednesday, January 23 2019 08:58 AM (9759K)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 23 2019 12:08 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Ethereum is really annoying.
  
  Okay, yes, I am trying to analyse the entire blockchain, but nevertheless...
  
  Update: Well, whatever it was I just did it sure as hell worked.  That's six times faster than before.
  
  
• The PHP extension repository PECL was compromised and has been taken offline.
  
  Exactly how much damage this has caused is not yet clear; I haven't used PECL directly in years.  But the internet hasn't exploded yet.  Or at least not so that we can tell the difference.
  

• Facebook is planning a new offensive on misinformation because the company is run by morons.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Facebook added 24,000 content moderators in 2018, and is blocking a million accounts per day.  Including mine, until I dug an old photo out of the company website and uploaded it to satisfy their screechy little bots.
  
  Just give people the tools they need to manage their own feeds, and be transparent in how the feeds work.  Stop being sociopathic money-grabbing control freaks.
  
  
• Twitter has lost its collective marbles.

Video of the Day

• Kingston is aiming to bring NVMe SSD prices below SATA. (AnandTech)
  
  I don't know of any specific reason why this would be impossible.  The flash chips are the same and there's little difference in controllers.
  
  They're aiming for 1500MB/s writes and 2000MB/s read, which is middle-of-the-pack for NVMe but three to four times faster than SATA.
  
  Launch date and pricing are yet to be set.
  
  
• Netflix is full of shit. (Gamasutra)
  
  Netflix VP: We are losing subscribers.  Quick, what do we blame to placate investors?
  Exec 1: The trade war?
  Exec 2: Fortnite?
  Exec 3: All our original content sucks, competition is stronger than ever, and we just increased our pricing?
  
  [Exec 3 exits via window.]
  
  
• Two is one and one is none.
  
  Also, if it's Synology, two may be none, because those things seem to simply drop dead without warning.
  
  
• Apple users are very, very slowly coming to the realisation that a hermetically sealed ecosystem might not be great for consumers. (Apple Insider)
  
  Very, very, very slowly.
  
  
• According to Amazon 50,000 retailers on their platform had more than $500,000 in sales in 2018. (TechSpot)
  
  200,000 had sales over $100,000.
  
  That's a lot of small businesses making good money.  I don't entirely like Amazon, but they don't suck the life out of everything they touch the way Facebook and Google do.
  
  
• We had a recent mention of a bug in scp where a hostile server could attack your client.  Usually this sort of problem runs in the other direction.
  
  Well, there's a similar bug in MySQL, though you're even less likely to actually run into it.  scp is used to connect to remote hosts all the time; it is far less common to connect to a MySQL server outside your control, for dozens of excellent reasons.
  

  So the answer is YES. Mysql docs even explicitly state it 😬Thanks to Adminer's author @jakubvrana for pointing that out: https://t.co/qEFTYvw6uApic.twitter.com/cDO57JEYve

  — Willem de Groot (@gwillem) January 18, 2019

  
  

• Facebook may be facing record fines by the FTC for violating a 2011 consent decree. (Ars Technica)
  
  Give Facebook credit: They've worked very hard to earn this.

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, January 20 2019 05:39 PM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 20 2019 06:11 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, January 21 2019 07:48 AM (bz2EX)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Western Digital has announced the WD Black SN750, their third-generation high-end consumer NVMe SSD. (AnandTech)
  
  Turns out it's their second-generation high-end consumer NVMe SSD.  Same controller, same flash memory, updated firmware.  Since the second generation was already very good (and a big upgrade over the first generation) this is not a bad thing.  It can already saturate PCIe 3.0, and PCIe 4.0 motherboards and SSD controllers aren't out yet, so there wasn't much more for them to do.
  
  
• Everything we know about Ryzen 3000 (Interesting Edition®) and the 500-series chipsets. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• AMD will support PCIe 4.0 on existing motherboards, but it's up to the manufacturers to qualify specific boards and update the BIOS to enable it.
  
  
• The 500 series chipset will likely be brand new and designed by AMD rather than ASMedia, based on the current EPYC server chipset.  (Gamers Nexus)
  
  It will support PCIe 4.0 as well, and have a higher power consumption as a result (15W vs. 8W).  It may not appear until a few months after the CPUs, which is why it's so important that existing motherboards get updated to support the new CPUs.
  
  
• The AM4 socket remains the same, so chips and motherboards are backwards and forwards compatible. (Assuming BIOS updates.)
  
  
• Meanwhile, AMD's next-gen Navi graphics, which were a no-show at CES, replaced at the last minute by Radeon VII due to delays, are now expected to appear at E3 in July.
  
  
• Chooseco is suing Netflix over Bandersnatch. (TechDirt)
  
  I just love that they're called Chooseco.  The lawsuit however seems to be pure garbage.
  
  
• MIDI 2.0 is coming!
  
  The original MIDI standard was laid out in 1983.  It's older at this point that most of its users.
  
  
• What happens when identical twins send their DNA samples to consumer DNA testing companies will surprise you unless you have been paying attention and realise that doing a full DNA sequence is still very expensive and these companies are to the Human Genome Project what a class of pre-schoolers enjoying a finger-painting session are to the Italian Quattrocento. (CBC)
  
  
• Google manipulates search results to suppress offensive content.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  The main story is via Breitbart, which has become a swamp of nonsense since Andrew Breitbart's death, but other reports appear to back this up.  Knowing Google, the truth is probably  far worse than is currently being reported.
  
  
• In a happy surprise, Star Control: Origins is back on Steam  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  

• Nice one, Facebook. Way to go. (TechDirt)
  
  Refusing to refund charges run up by underage users is a surefire PR coup.
  
  
• There is joy in Mudville - the EU's godawful copyright legislation has unexpectedly struck out!
  

  BREAKING: Council has failed to find an agreement on its #copyright position today. This doesn’t mean that #Article11 and #Article13 are dead, but their adoption has just become a lot less likely. Let’s keep up the pressure now! https://t.co/DEYBhuRyGz#SaveYourInternet

  — Julia Reda (@Senficon) January 18, 2019

  Note that it's only mostly dead.  Mostly dead is still partly alive.
  
  
• The GDPR is still in full and hideous effect, though, with Amazon, Apple, and other companies facing potential fines totalling up to €18.8 billion.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This week.  For complaints from one advocacy group.
  
  
• Mike Godwin (yes, that Mike Godwin) reports on the problem of epistemic closure.  (TechDirt)
  
  The book Network Propaganda demonstrated that the problem with epistemic closure in American news sources lies not with explicitly biased sources like blogs, but with the mainstream media.  But Mike apparently suffered an aneurysm mid-way through the article when he offered this hypothetical for the reader's consideration:

  Consider: if progressives had cocooned themselves in a media ecosystem that had cut itself from the facts—that valued tribal loyalty and shared identity over mere factual accuracy—conservatives and centrists would be justified in pointing out not merely that the left's media were unmoored but also that its insistence on doctrinal purity in the face of factual disproof was positively destructive.

  Mike, you idiot, that's precisely what has happened.
  
  67% of Democratic voters believe that the Russians changed the vote counts in the 2016 election.  (The Economist/YouGov poll, November 4-6, 2018)
  
  This is of course completely false, and everyone in the administration is on record as saying it is completely false, but it is the mainstream belief among Democrats.
  
  
• Oh, snap.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Sorry.  Had to.

Picture of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, January 20 2019 02:48 AM (LMsTt)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• PCIe 5.0 is on its way. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 5.0 spec is expected out in the next two months. 3.0 has been the standard for a long time, so this rapid update is really just getting things back on track.
  
  PCIe 5.0 is likely to take some time to deploy to the consumer space, though. Where PCIe 4.0 can work on some existing motherboards, 5.0 - which is twice as fast again as 4.0 - will require new materials and layouts.
  
  
• A fascinating examination of the death of the tech industry by a writer who places the tech industry's "first era" as beginning in two thousand and fucking seven. (The Atlantic)
  
  Author Derek mentions Apple (founded in 1976) and Samsung (founded in 1938) but displays no idea that they existed prior to the iPhone and the Galaxy range.
  
  If someone told him that Nintendo has been around since the 19th century, he'd probably expire on the spot.
  
  
• Singapore is half the distance from Sydney as San Francisco, but ping times are only 6% better. Interestingly, I have better ping times to San Francisco from my home than from the virtual server I run here in Sydney, even though the virtual server is plugged straight into a ten gigabit uplink and is a couple of milliseconds away from the AU-US cable head.
  
  Someone needs to fix that speed of light thing. It's annoying.
  
  
• An AMD APU with eight Zen cores and Navi graphics?  (Computerbase.de)
  
  This is an engineering sample and looks like another semi-custom part like the on in the Subor game console.  Might be next-gen Xbox or Playstation, but it seems early for that.
  
  Speaking of that Subor game console, other Linus got his hands on a pre-release version.
  
  

• The EU is still trying to legislate unicorns into existence.
  

  The new text by the Romanians requires platforms to prevent uploads of copyrighted works, but requires next to no cooperation from rightholders! How is that supposed to work? #Article13#SaveYourInternetpic.twitter.com/8LaEoDTiui

  — Julia Reda (@Senficon) January 17, 2019

  Observers of this nonsense are unimpressed. (Tech Dirt)
  
  
• Facebook's "10 year challenge" is just a harmless meme says Facebook. (Wired)
  
  There is nothing to be alarmed about, the company added. We are not working to improve our facial recognition algorithms. We did not lie about "suspicious activity" and demand you upload a picture of yourself to reactivate your account. Nuh-uh. That totally didn't happen.
  
  
• A debate in the Swedish parliament took an unusual turn.  (CBC)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  (Older story, but slow news day.)

Video of the Day

Picture of the Day

Dumb Fact of the Day

Posted by: Kristophr at Saturday, January 19 2019 10:38 AM (xGbzc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 19 2019 02:07 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 19 2019 07:09 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, January 19 2019 07:49 PM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 19 2019 10:36 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Ugh. It's, like, 197 degrees here at Pixy Central and the air con keeps cutting out. I work from home most of the time so there's no escape and I'm melllllllting.
  
  
• Farewell, Cortana. Or fare poorly. Whatever. Just go away. No-one likes you. (PC Perspective)
  
  
• Nvidia is allegedly working on a GTX 1660 Ti. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The GTX designation is the key; this wouldn't have the currently useless ray tracing and AI features. The rumour also says that it would be an entirely new chip, not just an RTX 2060 with some strategic snippery. That would make sense because the RTX 2060 die is large and expensive - about 40% bigger than the chip for AMD's Radeon VII.
  
  
• WordPress plugins are the spawn of the Devil. (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Amazon has launched AWS Backup, a backup service. (Tech Crunch)
  
  What the hell? It's not called, I don't know, Amazon Frog Farm? Or Amazon Deep Ocean Outfall? Or Amazon Psychotropic Baba Ganoush Dehumidifier 27X?  How is anyone expected to know what it does?
  
  
• Mastercard has somehow done something not evil. If you sign up for a free trial online with Mastercard merchants are now required to get your permission again before they charge you at the end of the trial period.
  
  They have still failed, however, to address reports of collusion with the global couscous cartel.
  
  
  
  
• Need more storage for your phone? Like, a lot more? Sandisk's 400GB microSD cards are currently $83.98 on Amazon.

• Don't be a journalist in Turkey. (TechDirt)
  
  Or a school teacher or an army officer or...
  
  Also, if you follow that link, remember Rule One: Don't read the comments.
  
  
• With the EU's godawful new copyright legislation looming, Google has rolled out a beta version of a compliant Google News service. (Search Engine Land)
  
  
  
  
• Free Press, an organisation that is dedicated to - and I quote - fighting for your rights to connect and communicate - turns out to have neglected to mention which side they have been fighting on all this time.
  
  

  Hateful conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is back on Facebook just a few months after the site kicked him off. Urge Facebook to ban him permanently. https://t.co/pNG2GGULt8pic.twitter.com/GvKw6jncDS

  — Free Press (@freepress) January 16, 2019

Posted by: Kristophr at Friday, January 18 2019 08:28 AM (9759K)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 18 2019 08:31 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 18 2019 08:34 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: ArcticHen at Friday, January 18 2019 09:10 AM (tSfkw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 18 2019 10:02 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, January 18 2019 01:07 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 18 2019 02:04 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The game Red Dead Redemption 2, set in the Old West in the late 19th century, features a couple of characters who work for the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
  
  Which is fine and all, because Pinkerton really existed and played a role in several real-life stories of the Old West.
  
  Only problem is that Pinkerton still exists today and filed a C&D letter with Take 2 Interactive over trademark abuse.  (TechDirt)
  
  It's not clear, given the murky nature of trademark law, who is in the right here.
  
  
• The telescreen was behind the painting.  (TechDirt)
  
  Sorry, spoiler warning.
  
  
• Netflix is hiking prices for US subscribers, secure in the knowledge that they will return for such hit series as [insert name of hit series].  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Don't look at me, I already cancelled.  Netflix Australia is garbage.
  
  
• RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 comes bundled with several databases, including MySQL, MariaDB (a MySQL fork), PostgreSQL, not you MongoDB, and Redis.
  
  Because MongoDB's new open source license isn't.
  
  
• Intel still doesn't have a CEO and it's starting to become obvious.  (Network World)
  
  Looking at you, Core i9 9990XE.
  
  
• The Ada 202x Draft Reference Manual.
  
  It's no Algol 60, but it's not all bad either.
  
  
• A planned upgrade to the Ethereum network has been put on hold after security researchers found a bug in the behaviour of smart contracts that could have allowed malicuous contact owners to steal all your monies.  (ZDNet)
  
  Ethereum is fully programmable - you can actually write programs and run them on the blockchain.  This makes it extremely powerful and also a giant fucking pain.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 17 2019 06:49 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 17 2019 06:53 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, January 17 2019 02:53 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 17 2019 04:35 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, January 18 2019 04:48 AM (tgyIO)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Micron has bought Intel's share of their flash memory joint venture.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's still big news, though something that has been in the works for over a year.  The IMFT joint venture is the manufacturer for Intel's Optane chips, and now Micron will own it.
  
  
• How is Intel going to respond to AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 series?  With the Core i9-9990XE, a 14 core 255W part with a base clock of 4.0GHz and a boost clock of 5.0GHz.  (AnandTech)
  
  About that power draw:

  Motherboard vendors will have to support 420 amps on the power delivery for the chip (which at 1.3 volts would be 546 watts), and up to 30 amps per core. It will be for the socket 2066 X299 motherboards already on the market, and perhaps importantly, there is no warranty from Intel.

  Oh, and the price?  There is no price.  It will be sold only to approved system vendors by private auction.
  
  
• The Opteron whichwhat?  The Opteron X3421 is...  Oh, that's Excavator, isn't it?  (Serve the Home)
  
  Yes, Excavator.  Meh.
  
  
• Apple says Qualcomm refused to sell them modems for the latest iPhones.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Qualcomm says Apple already owes them thirty-seven trillion dollars, so of course they didn't sell them any more chips.
  
  
• Why is my keyboard connected to the cloud?  (ZDNet)
  
  Good question, I'll ask Google.
  
  Hmm, the answer appears to be It is safe and secure.  Please remain calm and stay in your current location.
  
  
• Xapiand is a search engine designed to compete with Elasticsearch but written in nice clean C++ and not icky Java.
  
  (Or is that the other way around?)
  
  Anyway, it's clearly written around the Xapian search library, which I have used extensively and works well.  I haven't looked at it for about four years so I'm not sure if it's entirely kept up, but even at the state it was in then it's a solid foundation.
  
  Xapiand specifically is in a pre-release state and needs some love, most obviously in the documentation.  But it's all on GitHub and it's MIT licensed, so it's open to anyone who wants to help out.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 15 2019 03:14 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, January 15 2019 03:48 PM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 15 2019 03:58 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 16 2019 01:12 AM (Q/JG2)

Hide Comments | Add Comment