Friday, August 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 August 2018

Tech News

  • A security researcher has found a direct user mode to hypervisor security flaw that gives anyone complete access to the entire system...

    ... If you are running a 2003 Via C3 chip.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Update: Looks like this was an explicitly documented debugging interface that should have been disabled at boot time in any production hardware.  Not a bug on the part of Via, but in some specific BIOS implementations.

  • Samsung has announced the Galaxy Note 9 with bonus "doesn't catch fire" technology.

    It has a Snapdragon 845 running at 2.8GHz, 6GB or 8GB RAM, and 128GB or 512GB of storage.  Screen is 2960x1440 OLED with those annoying curved edges.  (AnandTech)

    My local office doodads store is offering the overpriced 512GB model for the price of the overpriced 128GB model.  The specs are terrific - it's more powerful and has more memory and storage than the older of my two notebooks - but I don't need that in a phone.

    Still, Android Central called it "near-perfect in materials and execution".

    And...  I could get it on a monthly plan with unlimited 4G LTE, potentially faster than my existing ADSL.  Not cheap, but less than I pay for the ADSL plus fixed line phone plus existing mobile.

  • Seagate is playing with multi-actuator disk drives again setting a speed record of 480MB/s, about the same as a budget SATA SSD.  (WCCFTech)

  • GoDaddy accidentally exposed details of 30,000 serviers in a public S3 bucket.  Details like...  Host names and pricing.  If you're going to accidentally leak server details, this is the way to do it.  (Engadget)

  • Julia 1.0 is out.

    But wait, you say, didn't 0.7 come out, like, yesterday?  Indeed it did.  1.0 has some changes that break backward compatibility, so 0.7 was released as a final version with backward compatibility to help developers move forward, and 1.0 is the production version recommended for new code.

  • An interesting paper discusses the features likely to be seen in the next 700 programming languages - from the perspective of 1965.  PDF  (Hacker News)

  • Don't look at that, you'll go blind.


Social Media News

  • I'm back on Twitter after a week-long suspension over the Retarded Goldfish Incident.  Twitter is still full of idiots.

  • Dataturks rates image moderation APIs from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Clarifai (who?) for false-positive and false-negative results.

    Google got the best results overall, but falsely rated this image of Denise Milani as NSFW.

    https://ai.mee.nu/images/DeniseMilaniSFW.jpg?size=400x&q=95

    Yes, well.  Ms. Milani could be in another room in the dark with the door closed and still trigger a NSFW filter.

  • The Atlantic discusses why the left is so afraid of Jordan Peterson.  A large part of the answer is that social media allowed him to simply bypass all the gatekeepers of culture and information - who are almost exclusively on the left themselves.  (The Atlantic)

Cryptocurrency News

  • That Chinese distributed cancer is still killing the Ethereum network.  (Cryptovest)

    The advantage of a distributed network is that no-one has control.  The disadvantage of a distributed network is that no, seriously, no-one has control.

    It looks like a combination of a Ponzi scheme and a Three-card Monte hustle: Not only is the payout supported by continued payments in rather than intrinsic value, but the payments in and the payments out are mostly shills - bots maintained by the operator of the scam.

    Also, it looks like the code behind it is a copy of a game called FOMO3D, which simulates a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme.  Only they've taken the game and made it real.

    One estimate put the running costs of the scam at nearly $300,000 per day, because it has driven up transaction fees for all Ethereum apps, including itself.  This seems...  Dumb.


Glyph of the Day

Is U+2368, APL functional symbol tilde diaresis, also known as the "I think that milk was a bit off this morning" symbol: â¨



Video of the Day


Made in Abyss is strange and lyrically beautiful and sometimes fucking creepy as all hell.



Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/Montmartre.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Montmartre

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:21 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 672 words, total size 6 kb.

1 I was thinking I've heard of Iswim somewhere, probably some programming languages papers back in college. The last sentence of section 1 reminded me of the seris of "Lambda, the ultimate x" papers (about Scheme). Then I hit section 6. Aha!

Posted by: Kayle at Saturday, August 11 2018 12:51 PM (TtvMc)

2 Yes, Peter Landin, the author, was the Lambda calculus guy.  There's an active programming language community at a blog called Lambda the Ultimate.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 11 2018 02:42 PM (PiXy!)

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




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