Daily Tech News 20 May 2021

• They addressed the email to "Quis".
  
  
  
  I said I would hang around Twitter and poke the bear until they kicked me out, so I shouldn't be surprised if the bear occasionally takes a swipe at me, particularly when the bear is a terrorist-sympathising communist with a room-temperature IQ.
  
  Did I break the rules? Obviously not. But that doesn't matter; it's a seven-day suspension and their appeals process takes more than seven days and results in an automatic rejection anyway. Been there. Done that.
  
  To be accused is to be tried, convicted, and punished.... Punished by having a week off from patrolling the sewers of Plague City.
  
  Oh no.

• Libera.Chat is a new IRC network formed from the ashes of Freenode. (Libera.Chat)
  
  Freenode had been around since 1998, maintained by a staff of volunteers. It had a legal corporation formed to allow it to hold real-world conferences, and that was sold under unexplained circumstances to a holding company in 2017.
  
  Recently the holding company decided this meant it owned the network, so the entire volunteer staff said fuck you and left.
  
  The same shady corporate structure owns VPN provider Private Internet Access, so probably give them a miss as well.
  
  
  
• Telegram founder Paul Dirov says Apple users are "digital slaves". (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, yes.
  
  
  
• Hetzner - a major European hosting provider - has banned cyrpto mining. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I've mentioned before that Chia will fry low-end consumer SSDs, but you're just fine on hard drives or enterprise SSDs... Says the founder of Chia, who totally wouldn't have a stake in this.
  
  

  For some odd reason the 'Chia burns out hard drives!' is getting repeated as the fashionable fud. This is odd, because for the most part it's just plain wrong (thread)

  — Bram Cohen (@bramcohen) May 16, 2021

  
  
  
  
• Google is supporting RSS again. (Thurrott.com)
  
  At some point and in some form. Maybe. There's an experimental feature currently in the Android version of the Chrome canary release that only works in the US, so thanks, Google, that really helps me test it.
  
  
  
• Android 12 targets the iPhone's biggest weakness. (ZDNet)
  
  More open? Longer update guarantees? Better support for third-party app stores?
  
  Nope. You can change the colours of the UI.
  
  
  
• MacOS is also the sewers of Plague City says... Apple's Senior Vice President for Software Development. (9to5Mac)
  
  This is another gem coming out of Epic's lawsuit over Apple's digital slavery. (Note that no-one cares much about Apple's real-world slavery. No lawsuits for them.)
  
  Apple is so determined to protect their theft of 30% of everything the comes within 400 yards of the App Store that they are willing to throw the entire Mac division under the bus.
  
  Though they've been working privately towards that goal for years, so I guess it's really nothing new except for the public announcement.
  
  
  
• China has banned financial services providers from having anything to do with cryptocurrencies. (CNBC)
  
  The price of Bitcoin plunged 30% on the news, from $insanity to $insanity-30%.
  
  This is, of course, entirely about power. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are massively popular in China because they allow some glimpse of an illusion of escaping the totalitarian regime that runs the country. The totalitarian regime of course cannot permit that.
  
  
  
• The EU Parliament has adopted a report demanding 24x7 takedowns of pirate streams with a 30-minute mandatory resolution time. (TorrentFreak)
  
  There's no way that's not going to cause problems.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:53 AM

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