• Gladys Berjerkelian...  Bejekele...  Brelekj...  Gladys, premier of NSW and probably the least horrible state government leader in Australia right now though that's not saying much, has abruptly resigned due to an ongoing corruption investigation.
  
  Expecting things to somehow get worse.
  
  Meanwhile Dictator Dan down south remains firmly entrenched.
  
  
  
• USPS!  Can we ship it?  No we can't.  (USPS)
  
  Not to Australia or New Zealand, anyway.
  
  
  
• Do not use SMS-based two-factor authentication to protect anything of real value.  (The Record)
  
  It's not secure and people will steal your stuff.  In this case, Coinbase wallets.  It sounds like the people affected here might have reused a password leaked by a different site, and the attackers then bypassed  2FA to break into the accounts.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Acer FA100 looks like a pretty decent lowish-end NVMe SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a DRAMless TLC model; the alternative at this price point is QLC flash with DRAM.  The tradeoffs are complex but for the average user TLC is still a better bet.
  
  The drive is rated up to 3.3GBps for reads and 2.7GBps for writes, which used to be a very high-end product and is now available at under $100 in a 1TB drive.
  
  It's also very power-efficient, so a good choice for upgrading a laptop.
  
  
  
• The Kingston Datatraveler Max UFD is a USB thumb drive that can hit 1GBps.  (AnandTech)
  
  And can sustain that rate for writes for 95 seconds before it runs out of cache and slows down a bit.  Though it gets pretty toasty if you do that, with the chip temperature - not the case - spiking as high as 92C.
  
  
  
• Backblaze data shows SSDs failing nearly as often as hard drives.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Showing an annual failure rate for newer devices of 1.05% for SSDs and 1.38% for hard drives.  That's quite high and I'd like to dig into the details, but I can certainly report having seen expensive enterprise SSDs simply dropping dead without warning.
  
  
  
• ARM server CPUs are cheaper than AMD (and a lot cheaper than Intel).  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ampere's 80 core Arm server chips can rival AMD's 64 core parts on many benchmarks (though not as I recall for PostgreSQL) at around half the price, and they now offer 128 core models.  They're not as easy to get as AMD or Intel parts, but I've been trying without success to acquire some AMD Epyc Milan servers for work, so "easy to get" is all relative.
  
  
  
• Crypto trading platform Compound gave $90 million to its users by mistake.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not hacked, just dumb.
  
  
  
• Dude, where's my privacy?  (ZDNet)
  
  Amazon's new devices siphon up your persona data and make you pay for the privilege.
  
  
  
• Jeffy B has praised Amazon Games for its first successful release.  (WCCFTech)
  
  See below.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 03 2021 01:33 AM (obo9H)

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