• To everyone's surprise, Microsoft has announced Windows 11.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's mostly a theme pack for Windows 10, with a bunch of mandatory features you don't want.  Teams integration, for example, and Widgets, which Microsoft has been failing at since Vista.
  
  It does have some new features like the ability to run Android apps, so I can run all my Kairosoft games on my Windows desktop.  Except that it integrates with the Amazon app store and not Google Play, so I'd have to buy them all again.
  
  And it sidelines Cortana and Skype, so that's good.
  
  
  
• You will need to fill out the TPM report before you can install it, though.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Do you have TPM 2.0 enabled on your PC?  If not, you won't be able to upgrade to Windows 11.
  
  And to give you an idea just how much of a mess this is going to create, I have absolutely no idea if it's enabled on any of my PCs.  I have a very nice laptop with a 4K display, but it's seven years old and I think that's older than TPM 2.0.
  
  Microsoft has an upgrade checker, but it just gives me a big fat NOPE with no details whatsoever.
  
  
  
• Windows 11 also requires 64-bit hardware.  That shouldn't be a problem; the Athlon 64 came out in 2003, so any PC fast enough to run Windows 11 in the first place is going to be 64-bit.
  
  
  
• I've noted that the state of Victoria accounts for 90% of Australia's Bat Flu deaths and 99% of the insanity, but 99% is not 100%.  Four local council areas within Sydney are currently in a week-long lockdown after an outbreak of new cases.*
  
  Including the CBD.
  
  Small mercies; there's no curfew.  You can go out at any time to buy groceries.  You can freely exercise outside and gather in small groups.  But a lot of stuff is closed down again.
  
  Not where I live, fortunately, not that I go outside anyway.
  
  * Not deaths.  Cases.
  
  

• My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. The ICY DOCK device that shoves a dozen M.2 drives into a 5" drive bay is SATA.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I wondered how it worked.  At the price I suspected a PCIe card that split out a bunch of x1 connections, but no, just SATA.
  
  It does look cool, though, because each tiny drive has its own indicator LED, so it looks like a 1:4 scale rack mount server.
  
  
  
• Older Western Digital MyBook NASes are doing factory resets.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It sounds like this is an attack, but a factory reset at least doesn't wipe the drive.  It just...  Looks exactly like it's wiped your drive.  You can pull the drive out, stick it in a Linux system, and recover everything.  If you're a wizard.
  
  
  
• If you have Altice cable for internet - I don't know exactly who Altice is, but they apparently have over four million customers - your upload speeds are about to get wrecked.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.  Altice says they have no trouble maintaining current speeds, but because other providers are slower they've decided they have to make their own service worse to compete.
  
  
  
• The House Judiciary Committee has put forward tough new legislation aimed at kneecapping Big Tech.  (Ars Technica)
  
  On the one hand, Apple and Google hate the proposed legislation.
  
  On the other hand, the House Judiciary Committee has an aggregate IQ in the low single digits.
  
  On the third hand...  Look at the definition for companies covered by the bill:

  Democrats define "covered platform" as one that has at least 50 million US-based monthly active users and at least 100,000 US-based businesses using the platform, is owned or controlled by an entity with net annual sales or market capitalization greater than $600 billion

  Pretty sure we don't have annual sales over $600 billion here just yet.  I'll keep you posted when it exceeds zero.
  
  
  
• Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, shuttered for daring to be a newspaper, is being backed up to the blockchain.  (Reuters)
  
  You can look forward to China shutting down any and all cryptocurrency activity.  They'll be giving away video cards with cornflakes shortly.
  
  
  
• NASA can't figure out what's wrong with the the computer on the Hubble Space Telescope, which was built in the 1980s and has been in space for more than thirty years.  (NPR)
  
  Scientists suspect that it has something to do with having been built in the 1980s and having been in space for more than 30 years.  "It's probably just fucked", one said.

Not At All Tech News

• The counter-revolution has begun: Anime Expo (which is virtual this year because California) will be featuring HoloMyth, LazuLight, and Vshoujo.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I don't watch Vshoujo, since they're mostly on Twitch and I don't have time for another platform, but Hololive has kept me sane...  Well, helped keep a lid on my insanity, this past year, and particularly HoloMyth which is the first generation of English-language talents from Hololive.  (There's a zeroth generation as well.)
  
  LazuLight is the name for the first generation of English-language talents from Nijisanji, the other big Vtuber agency in Japan.  They've only been around for a month so they're a lot smaller - 100,000 subscribers each vs. HoloMyth's 1,000,000+ - but they've been playing a lot of Minecraft and that's what I like to watch.  (And today, Terraria).

Let Them Eat Tumblr Video of the Day

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