Friday, February 12
Daily News Stuff 12 February 2021
Unleash The Chaos Gremlins Edition
Unleash The Chaos Gremlins Edition
Tech News
- Cover Corp has announced auditions for Hololive EN Generation 2. (Reddit)
This announcement has been met with Hololive fans' usual levels of polite detachment, by which I mean the announcement itself has received over 100 awards and 2500 comments.
It will likely be about five months before the new generation debuts.
- The Biden Administration has announced plans to address chip shortages and electronics supply chain issues. (Tom's Hardware)
They haven't announced what those plans are, just that they have them.
- AMD is set to announce Zen 3 XT models clocking at 5GHz and higher unless they're not. (WCCFTech)
Given how close they are getting to 5GHz already this one seems pretty plausible.
- Australia's Death to Google legislation will be introduced in Parliament next week. (Reuters)
That means it sill has to pass a vote in both houses, but that's likely to go smoothly since Google has ensured it has no friends in either major party.
This is not, on the whole, well-considered legislation, but fuck Google.
- Booting an Arm-based Mac from an external disk is stochastic. (Eclectic Light)
The problem occurs at the end of the normal installation phase, when presumably the installer is writing hashes up the Merkle tree, with the installer window claiming that there’s only About a minute remaining. At that stage, Activity Monitor reports that com.apple.MobileSoftwareUpdate.UpdateBrainService is taking lots of CPU, and there’s sustained and intense disk activity for many minutes. When that finally completes, instead of the Mac restarting from the external disk to complete installation, the installer just quits. Trying to restart from the external disk then results in an error.
Sounds wonderful.
How fucking hard is it to format a disk, you idiots? That was a solved problem in 1964.
- More on that NPM / PyPI / RubyGems private package vulnerability. (Bleeping Computer)
The security model for private vs. public packages on all these platforms is fundamentally and obviously broken: A public package takes precedence over a private package of the same name.
All anyone needs to do was find the name of one of your private packages, and you're dead.
And it's not fixed. There's no fix forthcoming. This is just how it is.
You can avoid it with due caution, but it's broken by design.
Go, Rust, and Crystal I know handle this properly.
- Microsoft's Surface Pro Duo, a very nice $399 productivity device that was unfortunately priced at $1399, is now $999. (Thurrott.com)
Getting there, Microsoft.
- That time Audible censored a book about censorship. (The Fire)
Audible is owned by Amazon, the company that famously deleted copies of 1984 from user's devices.
Disclaimer: Baked beans are off!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
If you could run from an external disk, you might be able to recover your data if the computer died, and apparently Apple doesn't think their customers deserve that.
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 13 2021 12:38 AM (eqaFC)
2
The way Apple implemented the T2 security chip on Macs basically eliminates data recovery. You could justify it on a phone/tablet that synced data back to a master device (even through the Clown), but I can't count the number of times I've saved Mac users by either booting from external disks or booting their half-busted laptop as an external disk. Hell, I once ran my primary MacBook Pro in target disk mode for over a month until I could get it repaired.
-j
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 13 2021 03:05 AM (ZlYZd)
3
Four probable implementations for a Biden affair cure.
1. Crash the economy, cutting demand for chips.
2. Say 'import them from China'.
3. Simply declare the problem fixed.
4. Something crazy that causes worse problems.
Biden is a senile pedophile, and neither knows nor cares about anything that is going on. The people 'working for him' are a Gu/kodoku pot of morons, who identify problems from gossip, develop incompetent plans to address them, and talk about how awesome their 'solutions' are.
Baghdad Bob in the bunker with Hitler, if Hitler were Jefferson Davis before the battle of Fort Sumter.
1. Crash the economy, cutting demand for chips.
2. Say 'import them from China'.
3. Simply declare the problem fixed.
4. Something crazy that causes worse problems.
Biden is a senile pedophile, and neither knows nor cares about anything that is going on. The people 'working for him' are a Gu/kodoku pot of morons, who identify problems from gossip, develop incompetent plans to address them, and talk about how awesome their 'solutions' are.
Baghdad Bob in the bunker with Hitler, if Hitler were Jefferson Davis before the battle of Fort Sumter.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 13 2021 05:40 AM (6y7dz)
4
"The way Apple implemented the T2 security chip on Macs basically eliminates data recovery."
I knew about that. I was assuming an external disk wouldn't have the same limitation but I guess your implication is that's not true.
I wonder if it would be feasible to put filter hardware at the (I assume) USB port the drive plugs into to implement backup capabilities. (Obvious problems occur with this idea.)
I knew about that. I was assuming an external disk wouldn't have the same limitation but I guess your implication is that's not true.
I wonder if it would be feasible to put filter hardware at the (I assume) USB port the drive plugs into to implement backup capabilities. (Obvious problems occur with this idea.)
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 13 2021 07:31 AM (eqaFC)
5
In case there was any doubts about the decline in the US security situation...
Democrats have significantly underestimated likely resistance.
Even what they are aware of is enough that they are planning to double down on last summer's terrorism. There are recruiting on campus for terror soldiers with official support at a university that hadn't given that support last year.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 13 2021 07:56 AM (6y7dz)
6
TL/DR: if the T2 chip is not fully functional and unlocked with a valid password/fingerprint, the internal ssd is completely unreadable and you can't boot from an external drive.
-j
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 13 2021 12:35 PM (ZlYZd)
7
I wonder how much effort it would take to develop a chip that you could drop into the footprint of a T2 that just always returned "true".
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 13 2021 01:50 PM (eqaFC)
8
The T2 chip actually encrypts the data on the disk, and contains a hidden key that the user can't access, so there's no way to work around it cough cough.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 13 2021 09:26 PM (PiXy!)
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