Saturday, November 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 November 2019

Neighbours Who Go Thump In The Night Edition

Tech News

  • Fiorefox is dropping support for sideloaded extensions.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Probably Firefox too.

    This is a bad move.  Yes, it lets users download bad extensions and install them, but users can download bad things and install them regardless.

    Fortunately Fiorefox is open source so someone will probably put it back again.

  • Google has a different problem with browser extensions.  (CNet)

    An internal Google extension for Chrome activates automatically whenever employees create calendar events involving more than 100 people.  Google needed to do this because their employees are insane.  Google's employees are insane because the company hires crazy people.  Google hires crazy people because the company is run by idiots.

  • Deadspin is being burnt to the ground by its staff.  (TechDirt)

    And nothing of value was lost.

  • A timely reminder that it's not just the US government that has spectacularly stupid ideas.  (TechDirt)

    Yay Australia or something.

  • Google bought Fitbit.  (Tech Crunch)

    Fitbit's share price has been in the dumps lately so this is a relatively cheap purchase for Google.

  • Windows 7 will no longer be supported after January.  (WCCFTech)

    Fair enough, it's ten years old.  It's older than CentOS 6, and that is antique.  (And also dropping support next year.)

    But Windows 7 still represents 26% of the market, which makes this a problem.

  • Need a small server with high clock speeds?  You could do worse than the Xeon E-2288G.  (Serve the Home)

    It's the server edition of the i9-9900K, with 8 cores and base / boost clocks of 3.7GHz and 5.0GHz respectively.  A Ryzen 3900X would deliver better total througput, but there are only a handful of Ryzen server motherboards, while Socket 1151 Xeon motherboards are everywhere.

  • You need two pairs of AirPods says Apple.  (ZDNet)

    I'll settle for none.

  • Motorola is launching a new Razr flip phone.  (Ars Technica)

    The difference with this one is that it has a folding screen, and is rather more compact than the Galaxy Fold.  Limited information right now; launch event is on the 13th of this month.

  • TLS Delegated Credentials are a good thing.  (ZDNet)

    Basically, this new standard turns anyone with an SSL certificate into their own micro-issuer, able to create short-lived delegated certificates for their own domain.

    Currently, if you have multiple web servers and someone manages to steal the certificate from one of them, they have the certificate and you have to get it revoked (a messy process) and get a new one.  The new standard means you can have a central server that issues short-lived certificates to your web servers, and if someone manages to steal one, they only have a week at most before it self-destructs.

  • The cloud is full.  Go away.  (ZDNet)

    Specifically in this case Azure in US East.  This happens all the time with smaller cloud providers like Vultr, who have 15 datacenters but none of them very big.  The larger players generally try to avoid it, or at least keep it quiet when it does happen.

  • Now why did I ever pay for this junk?  Hooked up 80 channels streaming services and each one stunk.  (Bloomberg)

    ...

    ...

    Um, why isn't there even a half-decent AMV for I Can't Watch This?  The Weird Al canon has some odd gaps.

    Have this instead.  Different song but just as relevant.



  • Speaking of which, AT&T and basically every other streaming service in the world is bleeding subscribers and money.  (TechDirt)

    Morons.



  • If even Amazon is flooded with fake products you shouldn't be surprised that other, less well-run sites have similar problems.  (Vice)

    Hey, Airbnb: Fix this shit or the government will fix it for you, and you won't like it.

  • How to tell if you are living in a dystopia: The government has the ability to shut down the internet.  (CNet)

    (Looks at Australia's NBN.)

    Uh-oh.

  • CDNJS has gone poo poo.  (GitHub)

    The project founder restricted access to the project and promptly disappeared, leaving the maintainers no way to actually maintain anything.

    I thought this was a Cloudflare project, but Cloudflare just provide CDN services for it.  It's run by volunteers, and while the volunteers are still around they can't do anything.

  • Damn those insecure Samsung Huawei televisions anyway.  (Reddit)

    How someone's Amazon account got hacked - twice - bypassing all 2FA and notification measures.
    It wasn't my TV. In fact, I've never owned an Android device, or anything made by Huawei.

    Of course I already suspected this, but the proof was plain to see. Now we're digging deeper. So it appears someone managed to access my account from another smart TV device (we assume) and make purchases through it. But why then, could I not see this device on my account dashboard or anywhere in my account settings for that matter? "Because," he explains, "non-Amazon devices, such as smart TVs, Roku devices, game consoles... do not show up there. In fact, even Amazon customer support cannot see those authorized devices. We have a special tool in this department to use to see all non-Amazon devices attached to your account."
    Well, that's...  WTF?

  • Default parameter values are there to simplify things, not just to save time.

    Above all, the default settings shouldn't give wrong answers or produce surprising results.  If that's a possibility, force the programmer to provide an explicit value.


Video of the Day



Gamer's Nexus builds a Ryzen-based server.  There aren't a lot of Ryzen server motherboards, but there are some.  And unlike Intel's desktop parts, Ryzen CPUs all support ECC out of the box.



Disclaimer: Ouch.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:15 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 926 words, total size 9 kb.

1 They tried giving me Windows 10. Alas, I'm not interested in malware.

Posted by: Will at Saturday, November 02 2019 04:01 AM (x9VFU)

2 Windows 10 is fine, so long as (a) you turn off all those privacy settings that are turned on by default (and make sure the little fuckers stay turned off) and (b) you install Start10 from Stardock.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 02 2019 04:10 AM (PiXy!)

3 I don't mind the Windows 10 start menu.  I realize this is a controversial position, but I prefer the bigger hitboxes, and letting me pin icons lets me keep my desktop clearer.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 02 2019 02:48 PM (Iwkd4)

4 Also, re: Fitbit--dammit, I was considering buying one of those.  Guess it's a Xiaomi Mi Band or something now.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 02 2019 02:49 PM (Iwkd4)

5 Also you just got spam-hammered.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 02 2019 02:49 PM (Iwkd4)

6 Just a bit, yeah.  Banned a couple of dozen IPs.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 03 2019 01:29 AM (PiXy!)

7 My Windows 7 system has been really unstable lately, but I can't pin down the cause. Frequent but not consistent bluescreens under load, all with different causes. Hardware? Possibly, but hard to tell. My Laptop with 8.1 is very stable, but I'm not playing WoWS on it.

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, November 03 2019 08:53 AM (Ix1l6)

8 Maybe because it's 197 years old?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 03 2019 04:36 PM (PiXy!)

9 Win7 is very stable on the systems I have it on, but it does not like the Ryzen processor I have stabled with it on one of my systems.

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, November 04 2019 10:47 AM (LMsTt)

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




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