• The Quest for Pixy Manor continues apace.  I've found a 5 bedroom place on two acres - in the same country town I was looking at before - for around $300k less than they're asking for my current shoebox on a postage stamp.
  
  And it has gigabit internet, which is not something I can get here in suburban Sydney.
  
  It's not as nice inside as some of the other places I've looked at, but it has all the storage space I could ask for - an attached 3-car garage, plus a second detached 3-car garage.  And the land is already divided into two lots and for that $300k I could probably build something on the second lot and sell the original.
  
  

• Or I could just start my own crypto trading platform, defraud customers of $2.4 billion, and buy the whole damn town.  (MSN)
  
  And get indicted by a grand jury but that seems like a detail we can iron out later.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Lenovo's new ThinkPad X13s is a laptop power by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which is - according to this article - not just another respin of a mobile phone chip, but one designed for laptop use.  
  
  It has four fast X1 cores plus four low power A78 cores.  The fast cores in my new phone are A78, and this chip uses them as its low-power cores.  It will still lag behind Apple's M1, but this might finally make Windows on Arm viable.
  
  Wouldn't recommend it over an Intel or AMD model unless you need some serious battery life - it manages 28 hours on a single charge.
  
  13" 1920x1200 screen, and up to 32GB RAM and 1TB of SSD.
  
  
  
• Apple has filed a patent for a computer build into a keyboard, like the TRS-80 Model 1 and the VIC-20.  (The Register)
  
  Because of course they did.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:43 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:45 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: furball321 at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:01 PM (n+R81)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:13 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 01 2022 07:01 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, March 02 2022 03:46 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 02 2022 09:48 AM (Z0GF0)

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• This is the way.
  
  
  
  
  Amazon takes longer than that just to change a status page from green to yellow.
  
  
  

Questions and Answers

• From sock_rat_eez:

  Pixy, can you recommend a cheap tablet that would be (relatively) easily rooted & switched to Linux ?
  10-inch-ish size preferred, performance expectations low, SD card slot

  I'm not really up on models can easily be rooted and what versions of Linux run well, but the people at the XDA Developers forum are.  Here's the guide for the Lenovo M10 FHD Plus I have for example.
  
  It can be a fiddly process even for a tablet that is known to be rootable though.
  
  
  
• From Faffnir:

  Using Brave,videos will not display for some COB's, mostly Weasel's Gun thread.
  
  Using Chrome works.
  
  Any suggestions?

  By default Brave doesn't install the Widevine DRM extension, so if the video is DRM-protected, it won't play.  Only thing I can think of immediately.
  
  
  
• From DaveX64:

  What is your favourite data recovery utility? I stupidly left the cover off my computer and had a wireless phone sitting within 8 inches of the bottom of a Western Digital 4TB Black mechanical hard drive. It still shows in Windows but access is sporadic. I have about 2TB of data on it but a lot of it is crap anyway, would still like to get a few things off it.
  
  Thoughts?

  One I used successfully about ten years ago was Stellar Phoenix.  They have a free download that tells you if there's something that can be recovered before you actually pay for it.
  
  The other one that has a solid reputation but that I haven't needed to use is SpinRite.  It's one of the oldest data recovery apps for Windows so it looks kind of clunky, but it's well-regarded.
  
  
  
• From badgerwx:

  I've heard that an SSD drive has a certain number of writes & that determines its lifespan. My laptop has an SSD main drive & a secondary HDD. Would it be worth it to move my /home & swap directories from the SSD to the HDD? I'd like to keep using this laptop as long as possible, and I'm not handy enough to open the case to replace anything.

  SSDs do have a limited lifespan, and it's more limited if you have a cheap QLC drive instead of a TLC one.  
  
  But modern SSDs are very clever about managing this and you have to rewrite the contents of the entire drive hundreds or even thousands of times before you run into that limit.  This does happen on busy database servers - there are more expensive SSDs rated for heavy database loads - but is unlikely on the average laptop.
  
  
  
• From Rodent:

  How are things in Australia Covid/Economy wise? Hopefully they're dropping quarantines and those concentration type camp things they had.

  Here in Sydney (and the state of New South Wales generally) it's been relatively sane throughout.  Could have been better, but not crazy.
  
  Very limited vaccine mandates.  Mask mandates have been on again / off again.  Currently you need to wear masks on public transport and in hospitals, and you need proof of vaccination for large indoor music events.  And there's a couple of types of venues - night clubs, strip clubs, and, um, houses of ill-repute - where you have to check in.
  
  I have never once checked in.  I don't have the check-in app installed.  I have worn masks half a dozen times.
  
  Economy is going mostly okay.  Our government did spend a lot of money keeping people in jobs during the various restrictions, but it seems to have been better managed than US efforts.  Smaller scale makes that easier, I guess.
  
  Definitely seeing inflation starting to bite here.  Each week some other item on my grocery list has gone up by 10%.  My Amazon Prime subscription is paying off there - fresh food prices don't seem to be affected nearly as much, and other groceries I can often order cheap in bulk from Amazon if I don't care what day they arrive.
  
  
  
• From questioning pookysgirl:

  What's the internet bandwidth for most of Australia? Do they use satellite for the Outback?

  Anyone in a metropolitan area and almost all country towns have 100Mbps available, 250Mbps or so if you're on cable, and 1Gbps on fibre.  Outside of town it's either fixed 5G (you get a big antenna for better reception) or a satellite solution.  There's a home-grown satellite solution called Sky Muster for the Outback, and Starlink just started deploying here too.
  
  

  How many undersea cables go into Australia? Do you ever have it that you're on an international call and it sounds like the whales are attacking the undersea cables with AK-47s? (Pooky and I used to get that sound circa 2012-2014. We'd laugh and make up stories about whale cartels.)

  There's at least a dozen major undersea cable links, the two biggest being Southern Cross which connects Sydney and LA via two different routes, and SEAMEWE3 from Perth to Singapore.
  
  It used to be that connecting from Sydney to Singapore would travel all the way to the US and back again, but they seem to have fixed that in the past couple of years.
  
  Sadly, no, I have not heard the whales.
  
  
  
• From mildly citrusy:

  What is your take on blockchain data storage such as filecoin?

  Unfortunately that's rather like asking what flavour of unicorn I prefer.  Crypto developers are really bad at keeping their tenses straight, and often speak of future events in the present tense.  Unless you have very small amounts of data or very large amounts of money, you can't store data on the blockchain.
  
  
  
• From markreardon:

  After 20+ years living on my corporate e-mail address, I'm coming up on retirement at the end of fiscal 2022.
  Can you discuss free vs pay e-mail and give suggestions for preferred options.

  Of all the big tech companies that will give you free email, I distrust Microsoft the least.  They'll just spam you with advertising, probably, and not report you to the Stasi so long as you are profitable.
  
  For paid solutions, ProtonMail is the benchmark, but they give you very little online storage.
  
  
  
• From Lexistexas:

  So, proof of work, to get on the blockchain requires solution of an algorithm, right? Who comes up with the algorithm? And how do the other nodes on the network know the answer in order to verify it?

  The algorithm is baked into the blockchain when it is designed (which means that a poorly-chosen algorithm can wreck a blockchain further down the road).
  
  The algorithms are designed so that it is hard to compute the right answer, but easy to verify that a supplied answer is correct.  This generally involves very large prime numbers and probably elves.
  
  
  
• From Bildo:

  I have an Asus ROG laptop that won't connect over wifi to any printer. I've checked my router, my firewall, and all the laptop settings I can I think of. No matter what I try I get the same "Wireless Printer Not Found" message. Any ideas as to what's going on?

  Elves again?  Possibly dark elves.  The combination of Windows networking and printers has always involved black magic.
  
  
  
• From The Mantastic Tor:

  You often make references to the Four Essential Keys. I've worked in IT for 25 years and had never heard this phrase before you, and I haven't been able to find any other mention of this phrase in my web searches. So, if you please, which keys are these?

  PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End.  If you are using a modern IDE without those keyboards you often to hold down three, sometimes four keys at once to perform common functions.
  
  I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that on small laptops there is no good solution to this.  Either the keys are missing, or they are present but the keyboard is too crowded or too small, or shifted one key to the left so the keys are never where you expect if you touch type.
  
  

Tech News

• Swapped the 512GB SSD in my Dell Inspiron 14 for the spare 4TB QLC one I had.  (I was originally going to use two 4TB QLC drives in my two Inspiron 16s but then (a) the QLC model went out of stock and (b) Amazon had the TLC model at the same price.  So I got two of those and the QLC drive I already had ended up surplus.)
  
  Opened it up (kind of fiddly), found the SSD slot (hidden but not very), installed the new drive, closed it up, and...
  
  Wouldn't power on.
  
  Opened it back up, swapped the original drive back in, powered it on with the case open - works.
  
  Installed the 4TB drive again, crossed fingers - powered on this time.
  
  Okay, done.  I promise to never open this one up again.  That just leaves, uh, four more laptops to do.  Including the Aero 13 which doesn't even have visible screws.
  
  Speaking of the Aero 13, it came with a big clunky barrel jack charger.  I have a little USB charger on the bedside table with one USB-C port (and four regular ones), and wanted to see if it would charge from that.
  
  Yep.  No problem.  It's only getting 35W so it won't charge very quickly, but since it only gets used in the evening for watching YouTube and checking websites, the chance of me running through its battery life is basically zero anyway.
  
  
  
• Intel, AMD, and TSMC have cut off supply of chips to Russia.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China has also been banned from shipping products using those chips to Russia, which doesn't mean they won't do it on the black market anyway, but restrictions on volume and higher prices will fairly quickly strangle Russian IT.
  
  China's own chip production is mostly at 20nm, several years behind Taiwan and South Korea which are both at 5nm, or Intel at 7nm.
  
  
  
• Nvidia was reportedly breached by South American extortion group LAPSU$.
  
  South American extortion group LAPSU$ was also reportedly breached by Nvidia.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The story is Nvidia followed the backchannel to the hackers' own servers, encrypted their data, and is now holding them to ransom.
  
  Many grains of salt with this one, though the initial hacking attempt appears to be confirmed.
  
  
  
• Russia is gradually being cut off from the SWIFT payment network.  (The Guardian)
  
  Russia has $500 billion in foreign reserves...  Digitally.  They can't spend it if no foreign bank will talk to them.
  
  Of course with the idiots currently in charge in Washington DC and Berlin this won't be a clean isolation, but they can turn the thumbscrews tighter day by day.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 28 2022 03:23 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, February 28 2022 07:23 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 28 2022 09:31 AM (PiXy!)

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• Weekends are Question and Answer time, when I'm not working because the blockchain has blown up again, or stuck on a mobile link with a two second ping time, or tied up moving house, or whatever is scheduled for next week that I don't want to think about.
  
  Drop your questions in the comments today and if I don't get crushed by a meteorite I will endeavour to answer them tomorrow.
  
  
  
• Internet is back on.
  
  It was the cable between the modem and the wall socket.
  
  How exactly that got fried by the lightning strike when nothing else was affected I do not know.  Maybe they have optoisolators at both ends to protect against this sort of thing.
  
  First thing I watched was a Minecraft stream with Pina Pengin of Prism Project, possibly the single nicest vtuber in the world, which got gatecrashed by Pipkin Pippa of Phase Connect who has a standing invitation to join Nick Rekieta's livestream if that gives you any indication.
  
  
  
• Wait, HoloEN is having an unarchived off-collab?!  Amelia, Ina, Mumei, Fauna, and Kronii are all in the same room.  You can tell by the acoustics - they're terrible.  Right now they're singing the guitar solo from Bohemian Rhapsody, as you are required to by law in any karaoke session involving more than three people.
  
  
  
• The US and allies including Taiwan have announced broad export restrictions of technology to Russia.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Does that mean video card prices will finally come down?
  
  
  
• China's supreme court has ruled that fundraising via crypto tokens is a crime punishable by ten years in prison.  (The Star)
  
  Does that mean video card prices will finally come down?
  
  
  
• Nvidia is investigating an attack that took down parts of its internal network for two days.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  Nvidia says that its "business and commercial activities continue uninterrupted" - which means that the attack was aimed at its R&D.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Russian hacking group Conti basically announced that it's an arm of the FSB.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There might be some independent criminal hacking groups operating in Russia, but for the most part it's government controlled to a greater or lesser degree.
  
  Also in that article: The FSB got hacked.
  
  
  
• The poor you will have with you always because poverty is relative.  (Jeff Kaufman)
  
  Shoots down a Twitter meme about how modern minimum wage earners make less than Bob Cratchit, because minimum wage earners throughout history by definition earn minimum wage.  The meme ignores purchasing power, which has gone through the roof.
  
  
  
• The claimed effect size is about a zillion times higher than is plausible.  (Statistical Modeling and Stuff)
  
  Good article about how you can immediately disregard certain scientific papers as garbage if they claim unreasonably large effect sizes.
  
  So if an article says that babies whose mothers regularly sang to them average 2 weeks earlier on learning goals than the control group, that's just normally dubious stuff.  But it they claim six months earlier, it's trash, throw it out right away.
  
  
  
• How to use an iPad Pro to power your home office.  (ZDNet)
  
  Step One: Don't have a real job.
  Step Two (optional): Get offended when people point this out.
  
  
  
• The USPS has told the EPA to go fuck itself and is proceeding with the purchase of 150,000 new trucks with internal combustion engines.  (Washington Post)
  
  "If you give us more money, we'll think about also buying some electric ones," they added.
  
  
  
• The world's largest bacterium has a sort of proto-nucleus.  (Science)
  
  Bacteria normally have their DNA just scattered about like toys in a kid's bedroom after a playdate, but this one has it all neatly stored away like that one kid who you just know is going to have a Wikipedia page before they turn 21.
  
  Also of note is the size: It's 9mm long, on average, with specimens up to twice that.  Bacteria are not supposed to do that either.
  
  
  
• How to achieve a completely secure link between two devices that are not themselves secure.  (Quanta)
  
  Quantum.
  
  The difference in this article is that they actually did it - it's not just theory anymore.
  
  
  
• Status pages at large internet companies are garbage.  (The Register)
  
  There was an outage at AWS last week, but you wouldn't know it from their status page or their official announcements - because those are the same thing.  Changing a single indicator from green to yellow on the AWS status page is a management decision, not an automated process.  Without approval, that light stays green even if the entire datacenter just got eaten by Nyarlathotep.
  
  That's where Status Page Status Page comes in.  (Status Page Status Page)
  
  It checks what the status pages for AWS, GitHub, and Slack are saying, compared with what is actually happening in the real world, and goes red if they don't match up.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: Mumberthrax at Sunday, February 27 2022 09:14 AM (YVq1I)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, February 27 2022 10:57 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 27 2022 12:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: John D at Monday, February 28 2022 01:08 PM (VAiJm)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Found a house I like.  Well, I say like, but that's not quite the right word.  Listed at around the market value of my current place, but (a) the lounge/dining area alone is roughly the size of my entire home, (b) the land area is larger than the land footprint of this entire townhouse complex, and (c) it has gigabit internet available (rare in Australia).
  
  Catch is it's a bit of a commute.  Like about ten hours.
  
  On the third hand we don't have an office in Sydney anymore, so I don't have a commute.
  
  
  
• Samsung shipped a hundred million phones with broken encryption.  (ThreatPost)
  
  They were quietly notified last year and slipped a couple of patches into the regular updates, so if you've updated your phone since last September you should be good.
  
  Samsung chose a robust encryption method but got the implementation details wrong, leaving it leaky and prone to attack by unprivileged apps on the phone.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Zion Pro is a 15.6" 4K AMOLED portable touchscreen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You probably don't need a 15.6" 4K AMOLED portable touchscreen, but if you do, this certainly is one.  Even I don't need a 15.6" 4K AMOLED portable touchscreen, but now I want one.
  
  
  
• Smaller, lower resolution, possibly more practical, and still OLED is the Asus Vivobook 13 Slate.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  A Windows tablet with a detachable keyboard starting at $599 - don't buy that one, it only has 4GB of RAM - with a 13" 1080p screen and a Pentium Silver N6000 CPU.
  
  That CPU is...  Oh.  I looked it up.  It sucks.  Forget I mentioned this.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's next-generation RTX 4000 range will be much faster than the 3000 series but not much more power-efficient.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which means power consumption will go through the roof - allegedly as high as 850W.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 26 2022 12:19 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 26 2022 12:46 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 26 2022 12:47 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 26 2022 02:06 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: DougO at Saturday, February 26 2022 06:04 AM (G1vK4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 26 2022 08:20 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 26 2022 03:47 PM (ZlYZd)

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Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 25 2022 03:22 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Today has been a shitty day for the world in general.  Also I have to move out of my home for the past decade since I'm renting and the owner is putting it on the market.
  
  Might be looking to buy this time.  Move to a less expensive area with worse transport, as long as it has good internet access.
  
  Didn't think I could necessarily swing the deposit but I had completely forgotten about certain financial reserves that have just been sitting there while I've been working 48 hours a day.  So...  I can swing the deposit on a reasonable place.
  
  (You forgot you had how much money?  Yeah, I've been busy.  Also it's not exactly liquid.)
  
  Update: Or move out of Sydney entirely and save about a million bucks plus interest. That seems... Inviting.
  
  
  
• Russia may attempt using cryptocurrency to evade the worst of the incoming sanctions.  (New York Times)
  
  I can see the headline now: Ruble falls to new low of 40 trillion to the dollar as Russia's crypto reserves drained by bot network Weed_Slut_420.

• Intel is working on a new chip aimed at beating Apple's M1 in all respects.  (9to5Mac)
  
  9to5Mac being Tame Apple Press calls this "too late" but the only way to get an M1 is to buy completely into Apple's ecosystem, and the company, frankly, sucks ass.
  
  The new Arrow Lake mobile chips won't have more CPU cores but will have a much faster integrated GPU.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Still 14 cores on the low-to-midrange laptop parts, but 320 (and possibly 384) graphics cores, up from a current maximum of 96.
  
  It will be built on Intel's 20A process node - a nominal 2nm, but as always that's just marketing.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel has also officially announced their 12 generation mobile parts, due next Month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Up to 14 CPU cores (6 performance and 8 low-power) and up to 96 graphics cores at a base power of 28W.  That provides a significant upgrade over the 11th generation chips which maxed out at 4 cores in that power range.
  
  Arrow Lake desktop parts meanwhile will have 8 performance cores and as many as 32 low-power cores. Since the low-power cores are about half the speed of the performance ones, that's effectively 24 full cores on a mainstream desktop processor. If the low-power cores also get a design and/or clock upgrade as they surely will, that will be a powerhouse.
  
  
  
• TPG aims for 4G and 5G wireless internet out outgrow wired broadband.  (ZDNet)
  
  Yeah, about that.  I'm with TPG (not willingly, they bought iiNet) and right now my ping times to 8.8.8.8 are on the order of TWO SECONDS.
  
  Around 8 milliseconds on my late lamented fiber link.
  
  
  
• And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
  But we've proved it again and again,
  That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
  You never get rid of the Dane.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If only someone had warned us.

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Thursday, February 24 2022 10:40 PM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 25 2022 01:17 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 25 2022 03:24 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Friday, February 25 2022 03:37 AM (Klg5K)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, February 25 2022 02:00 PM (ZlYZd)

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• Internet is still out.  Playing telephone tag with the idiots at my ISP - how the hell can you run an internet business when your only support is by phone?
  
  Meanwhile I have a 5G phone, a 5G SIM card, and a 5G plan.  What I do not have is a 5G signal, because that would make life too easy.  If I go upstairs and stand by the window I can just about get a second bar on the 4G signal sometimes.
  
  At least I have a much better mobile plan.  The bandwidth fees I was paying would have quickly added up to the cost of the new phone.
  
  
  
• I was wrong, we need crypto.  (Hey.com)
  
  A heartfelt and un-woke post from the guy behind Ruby on Rails, a long-time crypto-skeptic (justifiably) now shocked into being a true believer:

  This is crazy. Absolutely bonkers. Terrifying.
  
  I still can't believe that this is the protest that would prove every Bitcoin crank a prophet. And for me to have to slice a piece of humble pie, and admit that I was wrong on crypto's fundamental necessity in Western democracies.
  
  And that it was the Canadians who brought this on? You might as well have told me that it was really the Care Bears who ran Abu Ghraib.

  I work mostly with Python, though I do like Ruby.  Might be worth taking a look at Rails even though - yep - it does have a Code of Cancer.
  
  
  
• In a cashless society, freezing someone's bank account is a prison sentence.  (The Hub)

  The fact that weaponizing the financial system against nonviolent protestors and their distant supporters was the government’s tool of first resort should worry anyone who understands the role of civil disobedience in democracy. I would like to think Minister Steven Guilbeault, who was once arrested for scaling the CN Tower to hang a Greenpeace banner, lost a little sleep when he considered that disrupting critical infrastructure is still a common tactic of his environmentalist comrades. But somehow I doubt it. If there is one thing we haven’t seen much of in Ottawa recently, it’s principled consistency.

  Very true.
  
  
  

Tech News

• This tweet is by the author of that Hey.com article:
  
  
  Lots of agreement in the quote tweets.  Lots of disagreement from the pronoun-in-bio crowd, who claim to be against government oppression.
  
  That was always a lie.  They just want to be the oppressors.
  
  
  
• Also, fuck you Samsung. (Samsung)

  Adoptable storage is not available on Samsung devices. Using a microSD card for adoptable storage will reduce the overall performance of your phone or tablet, and is meant for devices with very low internal memory sizes. MicroSD cards used for adoptable storage are encrypted and cannot be removed from your device without factory resetting your phone or tablet, and formatting the SD card.

  It's not your phone, assholes. I bought it. It's mine.
  
  
  
• The AeroCool Cipher case has room for eleven 3.5" and four 2.5" drives in a fairly average-size ATX tower.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Specifically targeted at Chia mining. 
  
  Gonna be expensive-
  
  $75.
  
  I'll take two.
  
  Though I already have a 5-bay and an 8-bay external 3.5" drive arrays and two 2-bay 2.5" boxes, so I'm actually ahead of this.  Did cost rather more than $75 though.
  
  
  
• What is this shit?  (Krebs on Security)
  
  IRS delenda est.
  
  
  
• Woolworths online sales increased 48% in the second half of 2021.  (ZDNet)
  
  I don't know how because they routinely lose half my order.
  
  
  
• Peloton sold rusty bikes that don't move to idiots for $2495.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Why are there so many rich idiots in the world?  Though I guess I could afford to buy a $2495 exercise bike myself; I just wouldn't.
  
  
  
• Truth Social is at the top of Apple's App Store charts.  (CNBC)
  
  I can't speak to the quality of the service because right now it's Apple-only and I won't buy Apple products, and US-only and I can't be bothered fussing with my VPN.
  
  
  
• Salesforce employees are up in arms over the company's NFT plans.  (Some weird Reuters site)
  
  Live by the woke idiot, die by the woke idiot.
  
  
  

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, February 24 2022 12:22 AM (UMMAA)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 24 2022 02:47 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 24 2022 02:48 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 24 2022 04:12 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 24 2022 07:35 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 24 2022 07:47 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Crypto engineers would welcome a prolonged "crypto winter" says Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin.  (Business Insider)

  "In Russian winter, only strong survive.  Weak are thrown from troika to be devoured by wolves." said Buterin.  "The wolves are the financial regulators in this analogy," he added, "and the troika is Ethereum and the ecosystem of Layer 2 blockchains and DAOs.  The snow-swept tundra is of course conventional financial systems."

  At night the ice weasels come.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Netherlands has fined Apple $5 million again.  (Reuters)
  
  This is over Apple locking developers into their own payment processing system and with its 30% transaction fees.  The Netherlands is fining Apple $5 million per week until it fixes it.
  
  
  
• Atlassian cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes wants to wreck Australia's electricity supply.  (Wall Street Journal)
  
  He's offered $3.5 billion for energy company AGL, and wants it to shut down its coal-burning power stations.  Australia doesn't have any nuclear power for some weird reason - we have one reactor for research and production of radioisotopes for medicine and industry - so this would mean leave hydroelectric as the only reliable baseload capacity, in a country noted for routinely suffering years-long droughts.
  
  
  
• Full specs on Lenovo's Legion Y700 8" gaming tablet.  (Liliputing)
  
  Interestingly it uses the Core A77-based Snapdragon 870 compared to the 778G in my new Samsung A52s, which has A78 cores.  So if I manage to find this tablet it would still only be my second fastest Android device.
  
  
  
•  Is Firefox okay?  (Ars Technica)
  
  No.  The company is run by communists.
  
  
  
• Intel's 13th generation Raptor Lake chips could be up to 40% faster than Alder Lake on multi-threaded workloads.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is not that big of a deal.  They're going from an 8+8 core layout to 8+16, which given the relative performance of the cores should improve performance by 33% with no other changes.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 23 2022 12:12 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 23 2022 12:15 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, February 23 2022 07:52 AM (MuaLM)

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• Hackers took advantage of the confusion around an update to OpenSea's smart contracts to launch a phishing attack and steal NFTs worth between $0 and $200 million.  (The Verge)
  
  Apparently they managed to make $1.7 million in real crypto before being caught at it and locked out.  The NFTs can easily be rendered untradeable and worthless, but once sold the cryptocurrency is harder to block.
  
  So the ALV (Average Laundering Value) of the NFTs - the imaginary hyper-inflated prices they were listed for - was around $200 million, the thieves actually made off with $1.7 million in ETH, and the remaining stolen NFTs are now worth absolutely nothing.
  
  
  
• Here's how it went down, translated into non-crypto terms:
  
  1. The Open Seas Zoo was planning on transferring $200 million worth of extremely rare monkeys to a new secure location in a U-Haul with security features and GPS tracking.
  2. The thieves stole an identical truck and added removable U-Haul decals to make it look exactly like the real thing.
  3. On the night of the transfer, they parked their U-Haul right behind the Zoo one and overpowered the driver.
  4. They then directed the monkey wranglers to fill their truck with monkeys.
  5. The original U-Haul was ostentatiously driven off, breaking the speed limit and getting caught on camera before being abandoned in an open field where it would be quickly tracked and found.
  6. Meanwhile the decals were stripped off the fake U-Haul and it was driven sedately from the crime scene and parked under a disused railway bridge where it wouldn't be found.
  7. The thieves now laid low for a few weeks while the police traced the real U-Haul but found no sign of the monkeys.
  8. A month later after the fuss had settled down the thieves could return to the stashed truck at their leisure.
  9. This is all your fault, Brian.
  10. You can have your monkeys back, guys.
  
  
  
• These crypto enthusiasts are idiots.  (CNBC)

• I have two lights now on my fiber internet box.  Yesterday it had one; it's supposed to have three.  Progress, I guess.
  
  
  
• I also have the new phone, a new SIM card on a 120GB plan instead of a 2GB plan, and probably a 400GB microSD card.  I say probably because I accidentally bought it from a third-party vendor when ordering from Amazon, something you should never ever do for SD cards and USB drives.  It's probably real though.  If it's fake, it's a very good fake.  I've bought a dozen or so SanDisk cards and it looks 100% legit.
  
  The Samsung A52s is very close in specs to the Oppo A91 I already have - same 2400x1080 AMOLED screen, just 0.1" bigger, same camera layout, same 128GB storage - but has an A78 core instead of A73.  It's about 140% faster according to benchmarks, and by far the fastest Android device I own.  Will be interesting to play with it.
  
  
  
• San Francisco mayor London Breed also wants to flush workers who have fled their offices back into the city.  (SF Chronicle)
  
  In her case it is rather more literally a shithole.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Radeon 660M RDNA2 integrated graphics outperforms Intel's fastest Iris Xe offering in most benchmarks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the one hand, it's not a lot faster than Intel's best integrated graphics.
  
  On the other hand, this is the cut-down version with 6 graphics cores.  The full version has 12 cores and isn't too far behind dedicated GTX 1060 and 1650 desktop cards.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Yet another thunderstorm rolling in this evening, but at least this one isn't directly on top of me.
  
  
  
• Was going to share the worst take in the history of takes, but he got ratioed out of existence.
  
  
  
• At least in software I can just sigh and deploy to older, crappier, but still working hardware.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Speaking of older crappier but still working hardware, 2.82TB of backups transferred so far.  I could reduce that way down with some cleanup effort, but never have the time.
  
  Compression and dedup on the new backup server reduce the actual storage used to 1.67TB.
  
  Also, hard drives are really slow when you have 100 million files.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 22 2022 12:30 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 22 2022 02:13 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: David Eastman at Tuesday, February 22 2022 07:30 AM (qSKtI)

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• I noticed this too.  Apart from the usual propaganda outlets like the CBC and the mainstream Canadian press, there's a huge amount of bot activity supporting police brutality against peaceful protestors.
  
  
  
  
  They're not even very good bots.  This really needs an investigation because if what I'm seeing is real, it's a massive scandal.

• This exchange was real - though the best part is now deleted.
  
  Bots tend not to actively embarrass themselves like that.
  
  
  
• Google is making updates to Android to improve user privacy, sort of.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Similar to steps taken by Apple with iOS in recent years, the changes would prevent third parties from tracking Android user activity across the internet.  While doing absolutely nothing to protect users from Google.
  
  This is not about what's best for the customer.  It's entirely about control.
  
  
  
• Clearview AI aims to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
  
  (And no, they're not talking about porn. Though it might be better if they were.)
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, February 20 2022 10:22 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, February 20 2022 11:24 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, February 21 2022 05:03 AM (r9O5h)

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