Tuesday, December 21
Daily News Stuff 21 December 2021
Snowpocalypse Edition
Disclaimer: If I had a nickel for every hit Australian song from the late 70s / early 80s that was about underage sex I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird it happened twice.
Snowpocalypse Edition
Top Story
- Go to Politico's EU website. (Politico)
Or don't, which is probably safer for all concerned, but if you do, take a look at the GDPR cookie popup you get. If you've previously visited the site there's a button at bottom right.
Click on the Site Vendors tab, all the companies the site potentially shares your data with. And start scrolling. Let me know when you're done, I'm going to go take a nap.
...
Done?
Okay. Well, the article itself is about how Facebook is arguing that EU users' data is safe with them and the EU arguing that it is not, but from looking at that popup I can say safely say that data is safer with Facebook than it is with whoever the hell is running things at Politico.
- Madeleine from Tucows reached out to us to note that Tucows is still very much alive. The original article included in yesterday's roundup explained that the original download site closed down in January after 27 years but the other parts of the company continued operations, but the roundup truncated those details.
Tech News
- The Gigabyte Z690 Aero G doesn't have Thunderbolt. (Tom's Hardware)
Helpful review, because I honestly thought it did. It doesn't have USB4 either. It has one USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port with DisplayPort alt mode.
- Ubisoft is finding it hard to retain staff. (WCCFTech)
Can't imagine why.
- Last month we mentioned QOI, a lossless image file format that was almost as efficient as PNG, up to 50 times faster, and much, much simpler to implement.
That last part is probably why in the space of a month it has accumulated 21 implementations including a plugin for Paint.NET. (Phobos Labs)
The specification is a single page.
Good. Simple is good. Simple doesn't include JNDI interfaces in logging libraries.
- If you use 9.9.9.9 for DNS that link above might not resolve. Don't know why.
- Systemd is not simple. (Phoronix)
Systemd is metastatic.
- Employees who don't have to go back to the office don't want to go back to the office. (ZDNet)
No kidding.
- Philadelphia woman gives birth in front seat of Tesla on autopilot. (The Guardian)
The combined IQ of the adults in the story and the reporter and the car is barely into the double digits.
- Thinking of getting a Raspberry Pi? Good luck, 'cause there ain't none. (The Register)
Not only are distributors out of stock, they don't know when they might have stock.
February
- On February 1, the Amazon Telescreen was available in burnt orange, harvest gold, and avocado, for any X build your own X, we lint-picked the MIT license, and Android emulators delivered malware.
- On February 2, Perth caught fire during a Bat Flu lockdown which must have been inconvenient, the specs for AMD's Milan server CPUs leaked - accurately as it turned out, Alder Lake-P was on its way - and still is, and the Odroid H2+ had six 2.5Gb Ethernet ports except you couldn't get one and still can't.
- On February 3, Huawei's completely new and original mobile operating system still said Android on the info screen, PCIe 5.0 switch chips were sampling, there was a local exploit on all popular versions of Unix, and Big Tech was whining that some politicians wouldn't stay bribed.
- On February 4, Google got into a slap fight with Australia, Microsoft made popcorn, AMD shipped a million Ryzen 5000 CPUs which wasn't nearly enough, Sony shipped 4.5 million PlayStation 5s which wasn't nearly enough, and Mass Effect got high resolution textures.
- On February 5, Mass Effect edited Miranda's butt, Disqus sucked, Huawei remained on the shitlist, and Haachama taught us how to speak English.
- On February 6, Myanmar very sensibly banned all social networks, Intel fire back against Apple's selective benchmarks with their own selective benchmarks, Fujitsu was working on a 1PB tape cartridge, and Apple was the apatosaurus in the room of software immortality. Plus truth in computer advertising.
- On February 7, PCIe 5.0 SSDs were due next year and still are, we reverse engineered a 1 bit processor, Iran stopped the Signal, apps in the App Store openly lied, an article about privacy issues set 87 distinct tracking cookies, and the internet was full of crazy people.
- On February 8, Google locked the YouTube and Gmail accounts for Terraria and ignored the company's attempts to contact them, Google locked the accounts of one of its own employees and ignored his attempts to contact them, I attempted to make gluten-free donuts and failed, and an Android barcode scanner app with ten million users suddenly turned into malware.
The actresses in these ads are from the pop group Nogizaka46 and can actually play the instruments they are pretending to play. I had a great video of a drum solo but it's disappeared because we can't have nice things.
- On February 9, if you needed a 28GBps SSD and couldn't wait for PCIe 5.0 Highpoint had you covered, Tesla bought $1.5 billion worht of Bitcoin, CD Project Red got hacked, Zen 4 could deliver a 40% total performance boost - next year, and we discovered Monkeys R Us.
- On Fabruary 10, Haachama from Hololive hit a million subscribers, I had no groceries again, Rocket Lake wouldn't work on existing motherboards - despite fitting into the existing socket, Amazon removed a fashion range from its store after a competitor filed a report saying they contained drugs, and fuck Apple.
- On February 11, Amelia from Hololive hit a million subscribers, we compared the Threadripper Pro 399WX to mortal systems, Samsung planned a $17 billion fab for Texas, I air fried baby potateos, Let's Encrypt joined the preppers, what was it with Democrats and fake screenshots, and the Matic blockchain was two million times cheaper than Ethereum. (This has since been corrected.)
- On February 12, Cover Corp announced auditions for EN Gen 2 - now known as the Council and a bigger bunch of lovable dorks you can't find anywhere, the Biden administration had plans for stuff, Australia introduced legislation to really annoy Google, everyone had package vulnerabilities, and Audible censored a book on censorship. Also, Apple couldn't figure out how to format a disk:
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.
- On February 13, I predicted you wouldn't be able to get an RTX 3060 - and though it's been a while, I now have two of those, Rocket Lake was on its way, Amazon claimed that state laws didn't apply to them, YouTube shadowbanned everybody, and a Yandex employee was caught selling access to other people's email.
- On February 14, the Pimoroni Tiny was an alternative for when the Pi Pico was just too damn large, we remembered that the other person on the tech support call was a human being too - probably, Arm shipped 6.7 billion chips, and 1921 Duesenberg, one careful owner, with original toolkit.
- On February 15, the RTX 3060 hit shelves at two to three times MSRP, SELECT * considered harmful, the Pi Pico could output VGA despite having no video hardware at all, and bubble dwellers rose up against reality.
- On February 16, YouTube banned Sakura Miko, my router caught fire - literally; I burned myself yanking the power cord, the WD Green SN350 was serviceable but overpriced, Clubhouse was sending your data to China, and the idiots at Bloomberg ran another story claiming that Supermicro motherboards were compromised based on absolutely zero evidence.
- On February 17, Coco from Hololive hit a million subscribers despite having her million subscriber stream banned by YouTube, testing the Lenovo Thinkstation P620, Pine64 announced a new Quartz64 SBC, Samsung's new memory chips ran at 1.2TFLOPs, Texas froze over, Adata changed the hardware on their SX8200 Pro SSDs without notification for the third time, and Parler came back online for a few minutes.
- On February 18, we were briefly blessed when Facebook blocked Australia, we were sad to note that Google was not planning to block Australia, the Spectre x360 14 had a 3000x2000 display and the Four Essential Keys, Citibank blew half a billion bucks and it was not a blockchain bug, and the CEO of Minds was not a lunatic.
- On February 19, Nvidia skorked the 3060, the Aurora A7 had up to seven screens - unusual in a laptop, a leak said that Intel's 12th generation parts would be faster than 11th generation, WhatsApp was owned by Facebook, Photoshop couldn't draw lines, and we discovered indie Indo vtuber Vyolfers, who just just yesterday celebrated the anniversary of her first stream.
This was before the great English-language vtuber explosion, so if HoloEN weren't streaming you had to go hunting for something. Now we have eleven HoloEN girls instead of just five, plus ten in NijisanjiEN, plus thirteen in Prism, which while based in Japan streams almost entirely in English, plus ten in Cyberlive (though I have only found time to watch Lumi). I not only can't keep up with all the content, I can't keep up even with just the content I particularly want to watch.
- On February 20, ethicists behaving unethically, 10Gbit/mm², build your own Voodoo 5 6000, and Brave found a bug and had a fix released in under 24 hours.
- On February 21, bits fell off Boeings, an expansion board for the Pi Pico turned it into the perfect 1980s home computer, leaks of what turned out to be the M1 Max were mostly accurate, and we bound to localhost:0.
- On February 22, Ethereum sucked, we headed off into a Brave New World, liberals got the bullet too, Totalitarianism for Dummies, and we lamented video card pricing that now looks cheap.
- On February 23, unexpected technical difficulties with Chinese online platforms, Facebook sadly unblocked Australia, JPEG XL was JPEG 2000 but fixed, JWCC was in retrospect a terrible idea, Concise Encoding was a universal data file format still only available in Go, and a news article got everything wrong.
- On February 24, a Chrome extension that blocked Google, a review of console architecture in a lot of depth, Betteridge's Law of Quantum, and the trouble with MinIO was Cassandra, and the other problem with MinIO was their entire business model.
- On February 25, AMD was to announce the Radeon 600XT on March 3 which they did, it was expected to sell at double MSRP which it did, and Ubuntu took a chill pill on LTS updates.
- On February 26, Redbean was a web server that ran on Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD using the same binary, semiconductor demand was 130% of supply, the RTX 3060 was pretty good, all we wanted was an edit button, Australia's stupid link tax law passed through Parliament, and the language of technical difficulties was universal. Humanity will one day be saved by everyone on the planet coming together to try to figure out how to operate the Doomsday Machine.
- On February 27, don't connect critical industrial control systems directly to the internet you idiots, Dell's water-cooled systems were still noise (reportedly the latest models are better), the Sabrent Rocket Q4 was the fastest 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive available, YouTube sucked, and we discovered why gluten free chicken nuggets are better than the regular kind.
- And on February 28, mining Ethereum on the M1, Redbean got Lua support, meaning it needed only SQLite to become a universal lightweight app server - and I wasn't the only person to note that because it now has exactly that, Lastpass vs. Lastpass, the last of the dumb TVs, and we discovered we discovered a cheap source of vanilla vodka.
Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day
Disclaimer: If I had a nickel for every hit Australian song from the late 70s / early 80s that was about underage sex I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird it happened twice.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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