Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.

Thursday, September 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 September 2021


Top Story

  • 96% of third-party containers deployed to the cloud contain known vulnerabilities.  (ZDNet)

    And 63% of code used to deploy cloud solutions is also insecure.

    Basically if you follow the latest standards and best practices in deploying a containerised cloud solution, you're fucked.

    I use containers - both the old and new servers are containerised - but for isolation, not for deployment.  And I certainly don't use third-party containers for production (and rarely even for development).

    Docker...  Basically sucks.


Tech News

  • U.S. needs to work with Europe to slow China’s innovation rate, says Commerce Secretary Raimondo.  (CNBC)

    That headline struck me as still more paid propaganda for China from the mainstream press, but that's unusual for CNBC.  It's actually a direct quote:
    If we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe.  ...  We have to work with our European allies to deny China the most advanced technology so that they can’t catch up in critical areas like semiconductors.  ...  We want to work with Europe, to write the rules of the road for technology, whether it’s TikTok or artificial intelligence or cyber.
    That doesn't mean it's not paid propaganda; it's just not CNBC getting paid off.


  • Phison has shown a new PCIe 5 SSD controller for both server and client devices.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Toshiba already showed off controllers for server SSDs, but the client models are new.

    These will support transfer rates up to 14GB per second.  Which is a lot.


  • The users are always wrong.  (UTK)

    But so are the programmers, and so are the managers.  The secret to success is to never try to do anything.


  • Russia has arrested the head of a cybersecurity company on charges of high treason.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Because he wouldn't roll over for the intelligence agencies running the ransomware gangs.


  • Digital pickpocketing the Apple Pay way.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Hackers can spend unlimited amounts on your Visa card from a locked iPhone without the phone ever leaving your pocket.  Apparently does not work with Mastercard or with Android devices.

    Researchers notified Apple of this a year ago.


  • An entirely different attack has been making the rounds on Android.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Malware embedded in at least 200 apps on the Play Store has been signing people up to unwanted paid subscriptions.  The apps have been removed but that doesn't mean the subscriptions have been cancelled, and it certainly doesn't mean anyone is getting their money back.



Disclaimer: Try or try not, there is no spoon.

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Wednesday, September 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 September 2021

Floor To Ceiling Maintenance Windows Edition

Top Story

  • Dude, where's my stuff?  (JP Morgan)

    Why absolutely everything is out of stock absolutely everywhere.

    Which goes double for Australia.



Tech News

  • So that's where the 3000x2000 displays have gone.  (AnandTech)

    The Huawei MateBook X Pro has a 3000x2000 display.  On the other hand it doesn't even make an attempt at the Four Essential Keys - there aren't even labels overlaid on the cursor keys, has no storage options, and while it does have a touch screen it doesn't have the stylus that would make that display truly useful.

    Kind of meh.  Also made by slave labour for the PLA.


  • The WD Red SN700 is an M.2 NVMe SSD intended for caching duty in NAS boxes.  (Anandtech)

    That means it's designed for consistent performance and durability rather than the absolute peak throughput or the lowest possible price.  And it's available in capacities up to 4TB, which is currently an under-served category.  (I'm about to buy one, and the available models are not cheap.)


  • Twitter fell over.  (Bleeping Computer)

    And less than nothing of value was lost.

    My sixth appeal of my most recent ban is pending now.


  • Microsoft's two-factor authentication for Office 365 fell over.  (Bleeping Computer)

    And it failed safe, so that...  Wait, what?
    This issue could potentially affect any user if they leverage MFA and either Network Policy Server (NPS) or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to access Microsoft 365 services. This issue only affect on-premises users, and cloud hosted users are not affected.
    Their cloud service failed in such a way as to only affect those not using their cloud service.


  • Apple updated iWorks.  (Thurrott.com)

    And it's not a subscription.  But you have to buy a Mac, which is worse.


  • Six reasons to replace your Surface Pro 7 with a Surface Pro 8.  (ZDNet)

    It's one louder.


  • Install Windows 11 on a potato.  (Bleeping Computer)

    The Universal MediaCreationTool can now create install files for Windows 11.  You still need an activation key, but otherwise it will install regardless of whether your computer meets all of Microsoft's strict compatibility rules, or indeed any of them.


  • Microsoft is rushing to fix a bug that leaks Exchange Server login credentials.  (Bleeping Computer)

    A bug they've known about since 2017.



  • Jelly much?  (9to5Mac)

    The new iPad Mini 6 suffers from visible jelly scrolling.  Apple says this is entirely normal and totally not an issue because, and I quote, fuck you that's why.

    The actual cause is that the iPad Mini, a small tablet that will mostly be used to read content in portrait mode, has a screen that is natively in landscape mode.  Jelly scrolling - there's video at the link - appears mostly when you rotate a display so that it's refreshing on one axis and scrolling in the other.  It is to some degree unavoidable if you turn your device sideways.

    Apple saves you the trouble by delivering the device sideways out of the box.


  • RemObjects Elements for personal use is available for $199 per year.  (Elements)

    It supports Object Pascal, C#, Basic, Swift, Java, and Go, and compiles to .NET, iOS, Android, WebAssembly, JVM, and native binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux - including the Raspberry Pi.








Disclaimer: Nobody knows the rice I've seen.

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Tuesday, September 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 September 2021

Way Worse Edition

Top Story

Tech News



Disclaimer: Thank you for contacting me. I am currently away on leave, traveling through time, and will be returning last week.

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Monday, September 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 September 2021

Vtubers Channeling Donald Trump Edition

Top Story

Tech News


Disclaimer: Not the turtle!

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Sunday, September 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 September 2020

Pessimalism Anonymous Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Even South Canada Still Has Some Freedom of Speech Video of the Day


A Wisconsin teen sued after being threatened with jail over an Instagram post - and won.

Though Joseph Conrad is a great name for a sheriff.



Disclaimer: Splunge.

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Saturday, September 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 September 2021

Update And/Or Smash All The Things Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • China has banned cryptocurrencies.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Well, except for one, controlled by China.

    Be interesting to see what happens with video card prices.  Hard drive prices are on their way back down after the Chia mining crazes fizzled out, but video cards are in short supply even without the miners.

    Anyway, I have an RTX 3060 now - albeit a laptop 3060 - which should do for a while.


  • A teenager on TikTok invalidated the garbage research of thousands of garbage scientists.  (The Verge)



    How it happened is you're lazy and stupid and your research is worthless.


  • Your face is not a bar code.  (UCLA)


  • Your butthole on the other hand...  (The Guardian)


  • A look at the Asus Zenbook 13.  (Hot Hardware)

    This one has a Ryzen 5800U, an OLED display covering 100% of DCI-P3, albeit only at 1080p, the four essential keys, two USB-C, one USB-A, HDMI, microSD...  No headphone jack and soldered RAM, but oh well.


  • Using Nim instead of Python for data processing.  (Benjamin D Lee)

    Nim is essentially a statically typed and statically compiled Python.  I say essentially because the languages are just very similar, not actually compatible.

    There is a Python JIT compiler - it's called PyPy and it works very well - and in this case it's already nine times faster than Python, but Nim is three times faster again.


Disclaimer: Three girls, two bony ponies.  No, just watching Hololive play Minecraft.  Get your mind out of the gutter and into the other gutter.

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Friday, September 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 September 2021

Circling The Drain Edition

Top Story

  • I got to load 1595 web pages last night and manually click a button on each because a certain company's API no longer works.


  • Meanwhile not only is Melbourne sending the stormtroopers after anyone in a high-vis jacket, they are sending the brownshirts after Twitch livestreams of said stormtroopers to prevent the government propaganda efforts being punctured.

    Time for an intervention, if not a visitation.


  • Facebook allegedly volunteered to pay a $5 billion FTC fine as a payoff to keep the agency quiet.  (Ars Technica)

    A shareholder lawsuit says that the maximum fine was a little over $100 million - which would put a dent in your pocketbook or mine but would be insignificant to Big Tech, and Facebook accepted a much larger fine just to hush it all up.

    Seems plausible.  They suck.



Tech News

  • What is the point of a 200MP camera sensor when the red pixels are smaller than the wavelength of red light?  Not much.  (AnandTech)

    The physics are a bit more complicated than that, and the layout means that you can easily get 50MP or 12.5MP images out of it, but 200MP isn't really going to work even for a sensor that is quite large for a phone camera.


  • The EU is pushing the enforce USB-C as a standard phone connector.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Well, it's better than mini-USB, which was large and clunky, or micro-USB, which was fragile and clunky.

    At the high end the list of features a USB-C port might support is incomprehensibly complicated, but if you just want 10W or 20W of power and USB 2.0 data rates you shouldn't have any problems.


  • There's another three vulnerabilities in iOS.  (Habr)

    Data at risk includes:
    • medical information (heart rate, count of detected atrial fibrillation and irregular heart rhythm events)

    • menstrual cycle length, biological sex and age, whether user is logging sexual activity, cervical mucus quality, etc.

    What?


  • Minecraft Dungeons is now on Steam.  (Thurrott.com)

    Unfortunately it doesn't involve mining or crafting, it's just a blocky version of Diablo.


  • Twitter is adding Bitcoin tipping to its authoritarian digital hellscape.  (Bloomberg)

    There is nothing on Twitter that is worth a Bitcoin transaction fee, much less the tip.  Unless they let you bid to have other people's accounts suspended.  They could make billions that way.


  • California just signed their Fuck you Amazon bill into law.  (The Verge)

    It targets Amazon's abusive working conditions and obsessive control.  Very much a let's you and him fight situation.


  • Now that I have a new computer - still in its box, but I have it - the monitor I wanted is out of stock again.  The LG 27UP850-W, which is a 27" 4K model with USB-C input for my laptop, DisplayPort, HDMI, a 95% DCI-P3 colour gamut, HDR, speakers, a USB hub, Freesync, and a tilt/pivot/height adjustable stand without being horribly overpriced.

    Just can't actually get it.


Disclaimer: There's always a catch.

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Thursday, September 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 September 2021

Dictator Dan Edition

Top Story

  • Knock at the door and the sound of a package being left while I was busy on a video conference.  I assumed it was either the new glasses I ordered or the Dell laptop that I've been waiting on for, hmm, four weeks to the day.

    It was both.

    Which is great because I've been having increasing trouble with both my old PC and my old glasses.


  • If you have been following the protests in Melbourne at all, you should be aware that everything the Victoria state government says is a lie, everything the police say is a lie, and almost everything the mainstream media says is a lie.

    Sometimes it's the same lie, but sometimes it's mutually contradictory lies.

    ...

    Okay, this space unintentionally left blank.  The account that was live-tweeting all the Melbourne protests has just erased their Twitter history.

    You'd think if there had been an attack (the discussion of which is now gone) there would be video all over the place but Dictator Dan has banned live video from Melbourne.

    What we do have evidence of is this:



    World's most liveable city, ladies and gentlemen.

    Fortunately the federal courts aren't having it.



    Unfortunately the news networks are worthless.


Tech News

  • Microsoft's new Surface lineup is here.  (AnandTech)

    Looks like the leak was legit.

    The Surface Pro 8 has a 2880x1920 13" display (why not 3000x2000?) with a quad core CPU and up to 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.  The SSD appears to be a tiny M.2 2230 unit that is user-replaceable, which is a nice improvement over the usual state of everything being glued in place.  If you buy the low-end 128GB model you can upgrade it yourself, except you can't because the biggest M.2 2230 cards you can find at retail are 128GB.

    It also has two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a headphone jack, but no microSD slot because we can't have nice things.

    There's also a new Surface Laptop model which has a flippy hinge so that the screen lies flat on top of the keyboard in tablet mode, and a Surface Pro X which is Arm-based and sucks.


  • There's also a Surface Duo 2.  (Thurrott.com)

    Microsoft's dual-screen Android phone is still expensive but at least it now has near-flagship specs, with a Snapdragon 888, 8GB of RAM, and up to 512GB of storage.


  • The article doesn't mention the password used this time but we can guess.  (Bleeping Computer)

    A second farming co-op has been hit with ransomware - despite being on the list of industries that Russia should not attack.



  • If you're running a really old Android device - before 6.0 - it's time to install Firefox.  (Tech Crunch)

    Let's Encrypt's old root certificate is expiring at the end of the month.  They already have a new one, but Android versions through 5.0 don't know about it and can't be updated.

    Firefox has its own certificate registry, though, and will continue to work.


Disclaimer: Believe half of what you hear and nothing that you see.

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Wednesday, September 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 September 2021

Beware The Ides Of Whenvember Edition

Top Story

  • So I'm banned from Twitter again.  They have at least sped up the appeals process.  Where it used to take a week for a bot to automatically reject your appeal, it now takes less than 24 hours.

    I only really used it to mock the stupid - because that's where they congregate - and it turns out the stupid didn't appreciate it.


  • Specifically I was banned for suggesting that Comrade Dan Andrews - Premier of Victoria - should resign or be thrown into a volcano, whichever works.  And this morning Melbourne got hit by a 5.6 earthquake, so while Twitter might have banned me it appears that someone was listening.

    Oh, and despite the earthquake the tradies were on the march again - and Comrade Dan banned the news networks from filming the protest from the air.  That's because they want to keep up the propaganda effort that it's a small group of Neo-Nazis, and that lie dies instantly when you see the extent of the protests from above.

    (Also dies instantly when you see the large Sikh contingent.)


  • If you're a farm service provider don't use chicken1 as your password.  (ZDNet)

    Make it chicken123 next time.  Get the hackers to put in a little effort.

Tech News


Disclaimer: Chicken125.

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Geek

The Other News Stuff 22 September 2021


So what's going on with the protests in Melbourne today - oh.



If you've seen the crowds you might have noticed a strong Sikh presence.  This propaganda is insultingly stupid and absolutely vile.



Volcanoes are too good for him.

Update: Walk like an authoritarian:



History doesn't repeat, but it reverberates.

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