• DiGi, the industry association formed by all the big tech companies we love to hate and something called Redbubble to manage the new and stupid proposed Australian rules on misinformation before our stupid government turns them into stupid laws has created a new subcommittee to police the voluntary code for policing misinformation.  (ZDNet)
  
  Which is a good way to guarantee that nothing ever gets done.
  
  Meanwhile Australian Communications and Media Authority Oberstleutnant Nerida O'Loughlin said she was still concerned about the voluntary and opt-in nature of the code.  "Everything mandatory is forbidden.  Everything forbidden is mandatory."
  
  
  
• Public hearings* in a major corruption investigation of the Victoria state government are under way.  It turns out that people who will pepper-spray children, violently assault the elderly, send in air support over the report of two people in hi-vis jackets in a local park, and kick down doors over a Facebook post might have other nasty habits.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  If you know of the old-school Democratic vote-buying schemes, that's pretty much what's going on here.  And there's a lot of it, and it's been going on a long time.
  
  * As you might imagine, given these are the same mob who banned aerial footage of the recent anti-lockdown protests, the moment something juicy threatened to bubble up in the public hearings, the live feed cut out.  Testimony entangled not only the entire government but most of the political party, but when the investigators pressed for names, the public suddenly got static.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• The major change coming with Intel's 12th generation Alder Lake - that's right, isn't it?  Yes, Alder Lake parts, is that they have low-power Atom cores in addition to the high performance Core cores.  (Don't look at me, that's what Intel calls them.)
  
  Since AMD already has desktop chips with 16 fast cores and Intel will have at most 8 fast and 8 slow cores, a lot is riding on how fast the slow cores are.
  
  Signs are they'll be at least respectable.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I checked and there hasn't been an architecture update to Atom since Gemini Lake was announced in 2017.  Those chips, which commonly lurk inside budget laptops, are, well, not terrible.  That's in contrast to early Atom chips that were terrible.
  
  There are a lot of updates to the design of the new cores, which could potentially lift performance from not terrible to adequate.
  
  I suspect  the low-end parts with just two fast cores will prove to be a costly mistake, though.
  
  
  
• NEC is building a half-petabit transatlantic fiber link - for Facebook.  (ZDNet)
  
  Whatever you are doing that needs half a petabit of bandwidth, please do less of that.
  
  
  
• Can Bitcoin save an aging, broke, and scandal-ridden nuclear power station?  (Gizmodo)
  
  Probably not.  But they're sure gonna try.
  
  
  
• HP leaked some details of its upcoming all-in-one desktop systems including 12th generation Intel and Ryzen 7000 CPUs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  AMD's Ryzen 7000 range will make great chips for all-in-one desktops with their updated RDNA 2 graphics.  The other specs on these all-in-ones say that they come with 1080p screens, which is pretty sad compared to any iMac from recent years.
  
  
  
• The new PCIe 5 power connector - the cable, not the slot - can deliver up to 600W.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I believe the slot itself remains at 75W.  The new high-power cable is designed to replace the current trend of multiple six and eight-pin cables with one new 16-pin cable.
  
  
  
• I just realised I can make an ender chest in Minecraft.
  
  An ender chest is a portable personal transdimensional storage container, a really handy item that I don't have.  If you put your stuff in one it's safe even if you fall into lava or the void of the End.  If you lose the chest entirely you can just make a new one and all your stuff will be there.
  
  I was playing on the weekend - the first I've really had off in three months, all the others taken over by scheduled or unscheduled work.  Rather than carrying everything back 2500 blocks from Camp Pandaton - and it would have taken three trips - I built my first Nether Portal with the idea of building a rail line back to base.  (Distances in the Nether are one eighth that in the overworld, so it's a lot faster and needs a lot less rails.)
  
  I did that, and the portal opened up directly under a lava flow.  Fortunately the portal itself acts as a barrier giving me time to block it off.
  
  And the moment I left the portal I found a black brick hallway.  On my first try I'd opened the portal on top of a Nether fortress.  And promptly got attacked by wither skeletons and blazes.
  
  So now I have blaze rods.  I already have at least one ender pearl, and plenty of obsidian, so I have the three components needed for an ender chest.
  
  And the rail, which got built and cuts the travel time from 15 minutes to about 45 seconds, now serves as access to the fortress.
  
  Edit: One ender pearl, many blaze rods.  But with blaze rods you can get more ender pearls, so with a bit of villager shuffling I'll have an inexhaustible supply.
  
  
  

1 Well, intels core cores aren't quite as stupidly named as their "one api level zero 1.2.13", but I'm sure they have some marketing wanker working on that.

2 If you feel like playing mc with strangers online, there's a really nice semipublic server themed around Hololive that you might enjoy, called Hololive Construction. Holocons.xyz.  Each of the girls has a town themed after them, plus holostars and a few other vtubers.