Daily Tech News 26 April 2021

• No reasonable person, says Apple, would assume that they owned the products they had bought. (Ars Technica)
  
  Apple is about to discover that the world is full of unreasonable people.

• Hackers breached Apple contract manufacturer Quanta and pilfered schematics of existing and new devices. (Ars Technica)
  
  They are demanding $50 million in ransom or they will release the documents, which would potentially allow people to repair Apple devices rather than replace them.
  
  
  
• Apple is also being sued over misleading claims of water-resistance ratings on iPhones. (WCCFTech)
  
  Apple, it seems, rates water resistance with regards to distilled water. Unless you have some very specific living or working conditions, it is unlikely that this is what your phone will encounter.
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Strix G15 has the four essential keys.
  
  I know this because a colleague's work laptop died this morning, and our boss being sensible about this stuff told her to go to the local electronics store, buy whatever she preferred, within reason, and expense it.
  
  She needed 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD to handle our development environment, and the ROG Strix is what they had in stock. It also happens to have a 144Hz screen, a six-core i7-10750H CPU, and an RTX 2060, so it's probably better for gaming than anything I own.
  
  
  
• Twitter is blocking tweets that criticise the Indian government. (The Wire)
  
  In India, yes, but that is where they are most relevant.
  
  India still has a tendentious relationship with free speech. They're not blatantly totalitarian like China, but they certainly tend towards the authoritarian.
  
  
  
• This is why we can't have nice things. (LayerCI)
  
  Many providers of CI - continuous integration testing tools - offered free tiers useful for individual programmers and baby startups. That's fast disappearing because people are abusing these facilities to mine cryptocurrencies.
  
  This is spectacularly inefficient - one commenter noted it cost them $50 for a user to mine $1 worth of Monero - but that doesn't matter because they are not personally bearing the cost.
  
  If that reminds you of anything - or indeed everything - in politics, that just means you're paying attention.
  
  
  
• Note to self: Look into Envoy. (Better Programming)
  
  Envoy is an application router - similar to a reverse proxy like Caddy or Nginx, but smarter and more automated at directing requests for pages to the right endpoint. I ran into some issues trying to load-balance servers last week when we came under some sort of weird garbage-HTTP-request attack, because Caddy's routing isn't flexible enough.
  
  It also offers caching, what they call "circuit breaking", where you'll automatically get the cached content if the back-end server is overloaded, and fault injection, which basically acts as the Handicapper General from Harrison Bergeron to make sure that when things actually do go wrong, your configuration will handle it.
  
  
  
• Linux Foundation to UMN: Bite me. (Kernel.Org)
  
  Apology not accepted.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:25 AM

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