Daily Tech News 14 May 2021

• President Biden signed an executive order "boosting the cyber posture of the federal government". (ZDNet)
  
  Not doing anything, just boosting their posture.
  
  
  
• The FBI and CISA published a joint advisory on DarkSide ransomware. (ZDNet)
  
  It's ware and it's ransom, the advisory explains.
  
  
  
• Don't negotiate with terrorists and kidnappers, says UK Home Secretary Priti Patel. (ZDNet)

  Paying a ransom in response to ransomware does not guarantee a successful outcome, will not protect networks from future attacks, nor will it prevent the possibility of future data leaks. In fact, paying a ransom is likely to encourage criminality to continue to use this approach. Just shoot the fuckers. Oh dear, is the mic still hot?

  I may have embellished that very slightly.
  
  
  
• Colonial Pipeline paid close to $5 million in ransom. (ZDNet)
  
  And received an unlock code that is too slow to be of any use.
  
  
  
• On the other hand hackers posted psych evals of DC police after the department asked for a 97.5% disability discount. (Ars Technica)
  
  This story broke a while ago, but this is the first I've heard of a data leak connected with the hack.
  
  
  
• ZFS snapshots, people.

• Inland - that is, Micro Center's - Performance Plus PCIe 4.0 SSDs also don't suck. (AnandTech)
  
  Unlike their PCIe 3.0 models, though, they're not particularly budget friendly; they're priced just barely under competing models from Samsung and Western Digital.
  
  
  
• Samsung has increased its planned semiconductor manufacturing expansion to $150 billion. (WCCFTech)
  
  That's over nine or ten years, though, so while the total is larger it's still around half the rate of TSMC. Though I'm not sure what's included and if the numbers are directly comparable.
  
  Either way, that's a lot.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is killing its Azure blockchain-as-a-service component. (ZDNet)
  
  Private blockchains are much faster and orders of magnitude cheaper than public, fully-distributed blockchains using proof-of-work algorithms - and don't hoover up all the world's video cards - but it's not clear exactly what they are for.
  
  There are valid uses for a publicly readable cryptographically secure ledger, particularly one that can have hard-wired contracts. Just not as many as people first hoped.
  
  
  
• Another day, another US government department illegally spying on its own citizens. (Motherboard)
  
  Today it's the DoD.
  
  The article mentions the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act, which would require by law that government departments do that which they are already required by law to do, i.e. come back with a warrant.
  
  
  
• How many CPU cores do you need for great PC gaming? (Hot Hardware)
  
  6.
  
  
  
• Samsung has shown off a CXL memory expander. (Serve the Home)
  
  A which what?
  
  CXL is a new interface based on PCIe 5.0 - which is expected to show up this year - that will allow you to attach memory to the I/O bus as easily as video cards or SSDs. A PCIe 5.0 x16 slot actually has about the same unidirectional bandwidth as a DDR5-8400 slot, and PCIe is bidirectional.
  
  This will allow servers to have memory bays the way they currently have drive bays, possibly even with the ability to swap modules live if the operating system can swap out the necessary pages.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Surface Duo, a great $400 business communications device that had the misfortune to be priced at $1400, is now $700. (Ars Technica)
  
  That's a lot more reasonable but certainly not cheap.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:05 AM

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