Daily Tech News 30 April 2021

• The Chia blockchain has consumed over 1 exabyte of storage in its first month. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you stored it all on 3.5" floppies and stacked it up, it would reach five times further than the Moon.
  
  And it is entirely useless data.
  
  Here's a motherboard designed so you can plug 32 SSDs into it directly.
  
  Just because something is entirely useless doesn't mean there's no market for it.
  

• Meanwhile Nvidia is planning to cripple its video cards so they're useless for crypto mining. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Again, with new hardware releases, because the first time they did this they accidentally released a test driver that uncrippled them and they can't put those worms back in the can.
  
  
  
• HP is building a 10 petaFLOP supercomputer for Singapore. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It will have 110,000 CPU cores and, um, 352 video cards. They're big expensive video cards, but it's a little unusual to have a system like this so heavily focused on the CPU side of things these days.
  
  I'm guessing though that the people spending the $30 million know what they need.
  
  
  
• Dammit Walter. (Help Net Security)
  
  
  
  If you have a QNAP NAS, unplug it from the network, unplug the power, unplug all the drives, and probably just kind of leave it that way.
  
  They thought that the reason they were all getting infected with ransomware was that there was a SQL injection vulnerability. Reasonable belief because there was a SQL injection vulnerability.
  
  Turns out though that the vector was a hard-coded login for the backup service. Username walter. Password walter.
  
  
  
• Protocol analysis doesn't work on the new Arm-based Macs. (Intuibits)
  
  The Arm based Macs aren't general-purpose computers. You don't control them, and you barely own them. They're tablets with delusions of adequacy.
  
  
  
• The Vivaldi browser can now block those stupid EAT MY COOKIES messages that have infested websites ever since GDPR came into effect. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Vivaldi is one of the four browsers I'd recommend. The others are Brave, Waterfox, and in a corporate environment, Edge.
  
  Microsoft isn't particularly trustworthy, but they still prefer making lots of money to getting likes on Twitter.
  
  
  
• The IRS wants help hacking cryptocurrency wallets. (Motherboard)
  
  Good luck with that. You'd have to start out by banning arithmetic.

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:48 AM

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