Ambient Irony

Sunday, January 05

Daily News Stuff 5 January 2020

Actually We Did Start The Fire Edition

Tech News

Intel has PCIe 4.0 Optane SSDs. (Tom's Hardware)

But no PCIe 4.0 processors or motherboards, so they'll only work with AMD hardware.

Well, you can get adaptor cards that convert a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot to a PCIe 4.0 x8 slot, but those are for hardware developers and definitely not for production.
And then they immediately fucked it up: After simplifying WiFi naming with numbers 1 through 6 to identify speeds, the Wi-Fi Alliance has introduced WiFi 6E. (Tom's Hardware)

This is WiFi 6, but with support for the 6GHz spectrum. Since that isn't approved yet you can't actually use it anywhere, but that's not a problem right now because it also doesn't exist.
mount -t thewholedamninternet /mnt/everything (GitHub)
Ethical but stupid. (Perens.com)

Bruce Perens - who wrote the definition for "open source" - on well-meaning but unenforceable and ultimately harmful "ethical" licenses.
Speaking of Bruce Perens, he just resigned from the OSI over something called the Cryptographic Autonomy License which is exactly one of these well-meaning cancers. (The Register)

Here's the full text of the proposed CAL. (GitHub)

Here, for comparison, is the MIT license. (Opensoruce.org)

Yeah, we are going down the wrong path here.
The unexpected creation and timely demise of promiscuous cookies. (TroyHunt.com)

This is (part of) why sites force you to enter your old password in order to change your password, even when you're already logged in.
The 45th Wing of the US Space Force will conduct its first launch of 2020 on Monday. (Space News)

I love the way military numbering works. The Space Force has a 460th Wing, but has only five wings in total.
MangaDex is back. (MangaDex.cc)

So, it seems that the reason this all happened without much planning or advance warning is that (a) someone uploaded a licensed chapter of Boruto and (b) instead of issuing a DMCA takedown the English-language publisher issued a subpoena. (TorrentFreak)

MangaDex's hosting company - which apparently also handled their domain registration and donation processing - scuttled the ship, but at least allowed them access to migrate the data to an undisclosed location.

Some interesting stats on this page.

Their total storage requirements are 9TB, which I have to spare, but they push 1 to 2 PB per month, which I definitely don't. You can get a storage server with 16TB RAID-10 for $99 per month, but the 10Gb unmetered connection you'd need - at a minimum - would cost another $999. (Also there's no way a single disk-based server could handle the IOPS.)

Other News

Feel-bad story of the day: 98 people have been arrested in Queensland alone in recent weeks for deliberately starting fires. (Brisbane Times)

This ranges from arson down to disobeying total fire bans, but it appears that these numbers are up significantly from normal.