Monday, April 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 April 2021

And Then There Were None Edition

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Tech News

  • Was looking for a second main server to pair with the current main server.  Found one last night that fit the requirements but cost a bit more than I wanted to spend.  Went back this morning after deciding that it was probably worth the price and it's gone.

    Eh.

    Meanwhile, trying out Amazon's cold storage for backups.  At 1.5¢ per GB it's as cheap as you'll find anywhere and seems to work okay at my day job.  The question is, can a cheap little t2.micro server copy with the stress of rsync and ZFS, or is it going to throttle me to death?


  • AMD's Van Gogh processors are aimed squarely at the low end of the laptop market.  (WCCFTech)

    These have Zen 2 cores - last year's version - and latest generation RDNA 2 graphics.  The Cezanne parts for mid-to-high-end laptops have current model Zen 3 CPU cores but older Vega graphics.  I'm guessing this is because there hasn't been time yet for the separate CPU and graphics teams at AMD to bring their latest designs together.


  • Renaming the nanometers.  (EEJournal)

    Not the SI unit of length itself, but how we talk about new semiconductor process nodes.  Apple's M1 Arm chip is built on TSMC's latest 5nm node, but that's all marketing.  Nothing about the 5nm node is actually 5nm.  The names for new process nodes haven't matched the physical measurements for twenty years.

    Which is good in a way, because if the chips were really built at a scale of 5nm they wouldn't work due to quantum effects.  Because it's just marketing nonsense, they expect to get down to around 1.2nm before the chips start to fail.


  • An Nginx cheat sheet.  (Hashnode)

    For when you have to set up a proxy server in fifteen minutes at 2AM.

    What?  That's never happened to you?  How odd.  Happens to me at least once a month.

    Needs to add caching though.


  • Even Wordpress is automatically disabling Google FLoC.  (Bleeping Computer)

    This turkey is getting deader by the day.  It's wonderful to see an industry come together for a moment over something that stinks so bad that no-one can bear to go near it.


  • Death by stupidity.  (Click2Houston)
    No-one was driving the car, officials say.
    How could that possibly have turned out badly?


  • Even a dead squirrel can get hit on the head by an acorn: China and Huawei are proposing a redesign of the internet to go with 6G mobile networks.  (Just Security)

    And when they say redesign they mean taking Orwell's nightmares and seasoning them with Kafka's fever dreams.  And they're working with the UN - specifically the International Telecommunications Union - to bring this dystopian digital concentration camp to reality.

    Problem for them is that the ITU has no say whatsoever about how the internet is run.  That's up to the IETF, which views the ITU with the same friendly camaraderie as a seagull with half a chicken nugget views another seagull.

    I can't recommend that site generally - in fact some of their content is mind-meltingly stupid - but they got this one right.


Anime Music Videos of the Day

Regular readers of my blog will have seen these, but they'll be new to - oh, hi regular readers, did I mention I'm cross-posting these to Ace of Spades now?





Disclaimer: Error 444 joke already used.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:09 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 624 words, total size 5 kb.

1 Yeah.

My organization has a list of strategic objectives that strikes me as absurd.  I'm basically here because of my boss, not because of the senior management.

Also not a place where freedom of speech is encouraged.

There is a venue for project proposals that would cross the organization, and serve the strategic goals.  The people running it are mostly crazy, and the things they are most interested in are very far from what I want to work on.

So, I've been tempted to put in a trolling proposal that 6G be designed for population control and extermination.  I have not done that.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, April 19 2021 10:59 PM (6y7dz)

2 The internet by design, and the web by inheritance, is insecure.  Bodging a bunch of privacy and/or security "features" onto that while keeping it open and free is untenable.  Taking away the openness and freedom in the name of security or/and privacy is a Bad Thingâ„¢.  Or, in the old days the phrase was something about the Internet viewing censorship as damage and routing around it.
I suppose I'm starting to see a point behind the "Right to be Forgotten" laws.  I mean, in one sense, if I foolishly put something on line, that's my fault.  The idea of google or facebook collecting (and frankly creating via inferences) terabytes (or tribbleplops, or whatever made-up SI prefix the wikipedia dimbulbs are pushing these days) of data about me and then "accidentally" exfiltrating it is rather horrible.  Of course those laws are all foolishly designed and poorly written and probably won't actually have any effect on what google or facebook or apple or any of the ugly giants are collecting (and "getting hacked" oops haha no somehow it's not our fault), it'll only make the smaller sites utterly untenable (gee, almost like the piont of nutty regulation is to discourage competition).
Of course, what the ChiComs are pushing is just the next logical step, although it's a bit of a doozy.  I'm mean we're quite literally already at the point where stating that "women with penises" are men can get you fired, kicked out of your apartment, your business(es) shut down, and your bank accounts closed.  This is just taking that and making it significantly easier for political speech that the ChiComs don't like to end you up in the same place.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 20 2021 12:16 AM (LADmw)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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