Daily Tech News May 11 2021

• Congratulations on your purchase of a new iPhone, made using slave labour under a genocidal fascist regime! (The Information)
  
  Original article requires registration but most of the details have been reposted elsewhere. (The Verge)
  
  Apple gets the stick in the headline, but the investigation also implicates contract manufacturers used by Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

• Amazon destroyed 2 million counterfeit products in 2020. (Ars Technica)
  
  The comments note that (a) it's likely that a lot of these weren't counterfeit, but merely undocumented products from smaller sellers - Amazon is infamous for simply taking and destroying sellers' entire stock without explanation or recourse, and (b) the site is awash with obviously fake products.
  
  Ars Technica is a left-leaning site that agrees with Amazon's politics (though it wasn't always thus) so this is not political animus speaking, but bitter experience.
  
  
  
• You're sciencing it wrong!
  
  

  MIT researchers 'infiltrated' a Covid skeptics community a few months ago and found that skeptics place a high premium on data analysis and empiricism.
  
  "Most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, and not an institution."https://t.co/jsoAG8G2VT pic.twitter.com/CpEvCKz2HK

  — commie lee jones (@commieleejones) May 10, 2021

  
  
  Researchers at MIT are horrified to find that mask mandate skeptics are doing rigorous research and not blaming everything on white supremacy.
  
  I am not making this up.
  
  

  "For these anti-mask users, their approach to the pandemic is grounded in more scientific rigor, not less."

  — commie lee jones (@commieleejones) May 10, 2021

  
  
  

  And yet in the conclusion they lament "the skeptical impulse that the 'science simply isn’t settled,' prompting people to simply 'think for themselves” to horrifying ends."
  
  They then compare it to the January 6 Capitol riot.
  
  Bizarre and fascinating document.

  — commie lee jones (@commieleejones) May 10, 2021

  
  
  

  This paper reads as an appeal to eradicate skepticism and affix in its place, a strict adherence to dogma, absent of critical thinking.
  
  Feels like they would just prefer people take it on faith that the church of science is infallible, and stop questioning it.

  — Derrick S. (@DuLouef) May 10, 2021

  
  
  You can read the full paper for yourself. (Arxiv.org)
  
  It reads like a bad parody of woke "science", but it's real.
  
  
  
• Supermicro put two of Intel's new Ice Lake Xeons on a standard ATX motherboard. (AnandTech)
  
  Due to space constraints - these are huge chips, and there's two of them - it only supports four of the eight memory channels on each CPU, and only one module per channel, though that's still enough for 1TB of RAM, or even 2TB if you can find the high-capacity modules necessary.
  
  I think the only reason this exists is that you need two Intel server CPUs to compete with one from AMD; it makes no sense otherwise.
  
  
  
• The DHS is spying on you for your own good. (NBC News)
  
  You will learn to love Big Brother, you ungrateful little bastards.
  
  
  
• Petrol supplies - what you folks call "gas" even though it's a liquid - may resume in the eastern US states by the end of the week. (ZDNet)
  
  The FBI and the perpetrators have both confirmed this was caused by a Russian hacking group, supposedly not at all under the thumb of the Russian government.
  
  Pull the other one, it's got little Brooklyn Bridges on.
  
  
  
• It's not a labour shortage, it's just that the country is run by retards. (Washington Post)
  
  When you subsidise bad behaviour, you get more of it.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:12 AM

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