Daily Tech News 29 April 2021

• Chia is bad news.
  
  The new and extra-stupid cryptocurrency based on storage rather than compute has spiked Adata's SSD sales by 500%. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's good for Adata, right up until their regular customers can't find SSDs anymore, so, about a week.
  
  Also, Chia's write-heavy workloads might void your warranty.
  
  The original main server here has an enterprise SSD rated at 5 DWPD - drive writes per day - and since it's a 3.2TB drive that's 16TB of writes. (The second main server I just added has two Samsung 970 Evo drives - 1TB for the system and backups, 2TB for VM storage.)
  
  Second and third-tier consumer drives from companies like Adata and Galax don't come anywhere near that endurance and will die if you write to them continuously day after day.
  
  Actually, I've fried a 7.6TB enterprise MLC drive with a 2.5 million hour MTBF, but I think that was a freak event and not an endurance issue, since we had six of them in production and only one failed.

• The Acer Nitro XV272U KVbmiiprzx is a 27" 170Hz 1440p gaming monitor. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It supports DisplayHDR 400 and a 90% DCI-P3 colour gamut. I'd much prefer a 4K monitor at 60Hz though.
  
  But they can't seriously be that short of names.
  
  
  
• AI Dungeon leaks data. (GitHub)
  
  Details of your dungeon may have been [reads article] definitely were publicly accessible. Not your username or password or email address or driver's license or credit score or phone number or date of birth or blood type... Just the information about the adventure you were working on.
  
  More significantly, the imbeciles running AI Dungeon were busy filtering private content.
  
  
  
• Speaking of imbeciles Experian. (Krebs on Security)
  
  If you jumped from just the name to the conclusion they leaked my personal information and credit score you are mostly correct. They leaked everyone's personal information and credit score.
  
  
  
• Australia's corporate watchdog, the ACCC - more-or-less equivalent to the US FTC - is investigating Apple and Google over unfair practices in their respective app stores. (Thurrott.com)
  
  International watchdogs are more likely to have teeth here than US ones because if they can find an excuse to levy huge fines, it's basically free money. And Big Tech spends an inordinate amount of time generating exactly that sort of excuse.
  
  Also, the comments on that article are full of the kind of people who would have reported their parents to the Stasi and then declined the reward. Disappointing, because Paul Thurrott, who runs the site, is more sensible than that.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:10 AM

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