• Is the Supreme Court going to gut CDA Section 230 like a fish?  Probably not.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The court heard oral arguments in Gonzales v. Google today, and will hear arguments in another case also hinging on Section 230 today.
  
  Both cases involve recommendation algorithms promoting terrorist content - not the modern type of "stochastic" terrorism like unbowdlerised editions of Roald Dahl, but the real kind with guns and bombs and random body parts strewn all over the landscape.
  
  The question at hand is whether actively recommending and promoting such content has the same protection as merely failing to remove it.  The tenor of the questioning from the justices - and not just the liberal whack jobs - suggests that the court is disinclined to strike down the law.

• Airtable, a software startup developing code for codeless coding whatever the fuck that means, suddenly has a lot fewer coders after laying off 20% of its staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  "We have plenty of money from the last investment round", said Airtable spokesman Bob "Bob" Bobson, "but with the fuckwits running the planet these days were unlikely to see any more."
  
  This article is actually two months old - I don't remember if I saw it at the time - but tripping over it today I found a link to Layoffs.FYI which is pure automated schadenfreude.
  
  Polygon laid off 20% of its staff today?  Guys, your entire blockchain got derailed by a game about growing flowers.
  
  Digital Ocean laid off 11% last week?  Well, that actually sucks; they provide a good service and I haven't heard of them being insanely woke or any other variety of asshole.
  
  GoDaddy laid off 500 staff?  Was that before or after you discovered that hackers had free roam of your hosting platform for several years?
  
  Dell is laying off 6650 employees - which seems like a lot but apparently represents just 5% of its workforce.
  
  
  
• Best of hands: A Pentagon email server was apparently connected to the internet without a password.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm not even sure how you do that.  Email servers are normally connected to the internet without a password - passwords apply to individual user accounts, not to the server itself.  But apparently they managed:

  The exposed server was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers, which uses servers that are physically separated from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data. The exposed server was part of an internal mailbox system storing about three terabytes of internal military emails, many pertaining to U.S. Special Operations Command, or USSOCOM, the U.S. military unit tasked with conducting special military operations.

  But a misconfiguration left the server without a password, allowing anyone on the internet access to the sensitive mailbox data inside using only a web browser, just by knowing its IP address.

  Again, I don't know how this is even possible.  It takes real talent to screw up this bad.
  
  
  

• Got $15,000 of someone else's money burning a hole in your pocket and a hankering for some obsolescent hardware?  Dell has you covered with the Precision 7865 workstation.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Inside and outside it looks like crap to be honest, but it works well.  The 64 core AMD Threadripper Pro 5995WX has not actually yet been superseded (though the latest Epyc server CPUs are faster) and the Ampere-based A6000 graphics card is still as fast as a 4070 Ti.
  
  Plus, although the look the review provides at the cooling solution raised questions, it gets the job done and fan noise only hits 45 dB at maximum speed under the FurMark stress test.
  
  It uses more power than a regular desktop PC, but not that much more - and actually less than a system based on Intel's 6GHz 13900KS limited edition.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, February 22 2023 10:38 PM (obo9H)

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