Daily Tech News 17 May 2021

• The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys. (Bloomberg)
  
  Or in this case, buy up the small companies working as sub-contractors in your field, pay everyone more to keep the staff happy, and squeeze out the middlemen who were taking all the profits.

  Software engineers are underpaid in Japan compared to the U.S. and there's a shortage of them, according to Saito.

  Funny how that correlation escapes so many people. Mind you, the shortage of good engineers is universal.
  
  
  

• URLs too short? Lengthen them with aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com! (aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com)
  
  I mean, why not?
  
  
  
• Apple is introducing 3D lossless audio streaming. (9to5Mac)
  
  Completely unable to tell the difference? That's you and everyone else on the planet, except for some of the bats.
  
  
  
• A new aluminium ion battery design from Australia is claimed to charge up to 60 times faster than lithium ion batteries. (Forbes)
  
  Hmm.
  
  And hold three times as much energy.
  
  Yeah, I'm not sure about-
  
  And have no upper current limit or overheating problems.
  
  coughbullshitcough
  
  Dave from EEVblog hasn't weighed in yet, but I expect he will. He loves tearing these sorts of claims apart.
  
  
  
• Huawei has been able to monitor all calls on one of the Netherands' largest mobile networks for ten years. (The Guardian)
  
  And the owners of the network have known about this for... Ten years.
  
  On the other hand, congratulations, Huawei, you infiltrated a country the size of a suburban back yard most noted for its wooden shoes and hilariously overpriced flower seeds.
  
  
  
• A security vulnerability has been found in the Universal Turing Machine. (The Register)
  
  This confused me for a moment because Turing machines do not have a security model; it's like claiming to have found a bug in arithmetic. In this case, it's a bug in a specification by Marvin Minsky for a Turing machine simulator - from 1967, making this one of the longest-standing security bugs ever.
  
  
  
• Nijisanji EN launched while I wasn't looking. I watch Hololive EN pretty regularly - mostly their Minecraft streams, but some other stuff too - so I was looking forward to this, but they announced it on Wednesday and launched on Sunday, so it was easy to miss.
  
  Just three girls in the initial roster, but Nijisanji iterates rapidly. Finana's debut blew up on the launch pad at T+8 seconds when technical difficulties not only shut down her stream but prevented her starting a new one, but Pomu, who seems to be a herbaceous shrub, looks fun. She sang the Hamtaro theme in her debut stream.
  
  
• Via the comments (thanks GnuBreed): eBay is banning the sale of all material of, by, from, to, about, or in any other way relating to sex. (The Verge)
  
  This worked out so well for Tumblr that the genii running eBay simply could not wait to replicate that success themselves.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:34 AM

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