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Daily Tech News 29 May 2021

Top Stories

• When our main datacenter burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp - which is several weeks ago now - I had to bring up other sites on the mee.nu server and I made some hacks to limit performance-crunching features.
  
  I haven't had time to undo those hacks yet because we also had servers at that datacenter for my day job and the following weeks were somewhat.... Fraught.
  
  Anyway, I'll be working to undo those de-featurings this weekend.
  
  
  
• It's time to firewall your firewalls to defend your defenses from attacking attackers.
  
  Just before a report was released about Chinese hackers compromising Pulse Secure VPN appliances, the hacks were quietly removed. (The Record)
  
  FireEye, the company monitoring this, has revised its report from "a group likely connected with Chinese espionage did this" to "China did this".
  
  
  
• The Russia-based hackers who compromised the SolarWinds management software are targeting the governments of 24 countries. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again, this is not a rogue criminal organisation operating in Russia. This is the Russian government.
  
  
  
• If you have SonicWall security appliances, patch that shit now. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It never ends.
  
  If you don't want to sleep for a week, go over to Bleeping Computer and start scrolling.

Anime of the day is Azumanga Daioh.... Wait, no, it's not. I can't find a clean version of the opening credits. There is that version, but no.

Anime of the day is Zettai Karen Children... Wait, no it's not. I can't find a clean version of the opening credits. There is the live version... I'll include that at the bottom of the post, because if nothing else it has some historical significance.

Anime of the day is Nanaka 6/17... Well, crap.

Uh...



Anime of the day is Ranma ½, Rumiko Takahashi's third and probably still biggest hit series. It ran for 161 episodes from 1989 to 1992 and as usual still didn't cover all the story (which ran to 38 volumes of manga).

The story? Well, that cute redhead in the opening credits? His name's Ranma. He's under a curse that many teenage boys would pay money for, and searching desperately for a cure. As these things usually go, most of the cast of the show also ends up cursed.

It does get a little repetitive after a while. Actually, it gets a lot repetitive after a while. It's worth watching some of it as long as you don't feel obliged to watch all the way to the end because there isn't one.

Update: Swapped out the nice creditless version for one that will play in the US.



Tech News

• Back in the Paleolithic Era I had a YouTube channel. It will come as a surprise to many of you that it was a curated collection of anime openings and endings. No full episodes, no full songs, just the opening and ending credits.
  
  Then the first version of ContentID got switched on, and I got three strikes instantly because the music in some of those clips matched their database, and it was gone forever.*
  
  That was more than a decade ago, but proving that a trillion dollars in market cap doesn't mean you have the faintest clue about anything Twitch is replicating YouTube's fuckup in every last detail. (The Verge)
  
  Nice Twitch channel you have here. Shame if anything were to happen to it. Like, for example, Twitch happened.
  
  * I still have all the video files and if you search very carefully you might still find them, but the YouTube channel got yeeted to Yeetsville.
  
  
  
• USB power delivery is getting amped up to 240W. (AnandTech)
  
  Well, that's technically the exact opposite of what's happening. Standard USB-C cables can deliver up to 60W - 20V and 3A. Specifically rated cables can deliver 100W - 20V and 5A. The new standard keeps the same current rating but increases the voltage to 48V.
  
  That's only for 5A rated cables and you'll need a new cable anyway, with capacitors rated at 60V+ for safety.
  
  This can replace power bricks for even most high-end laptops - and smaller all-in-one desktops as well - with a single standard port. The power bricks won't necessarily be smaller, but the same power brick will work for any device unless the manufacturers explicitly cripple them so that is almost certainly what will happen.
  
  The new standard also supports stepping the voltage up in 100mV increments, so you can expect chargers that support all of that to cost a bit more than the typical cheap phone charger from Kmart.
  
  
  
• I came looking for weed, and found Ethereum. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  British police took a break from confiscating butter knives to check out a suspected pot farm using an illegal electricity tap. They confirmed the location using an infrared-sensing drone, which is a common way to spot these sites because their grow lamps put out a lot of heat.
  
  But so do 100 specialised mining rigs stuffed full of Nvidia graphics cards, which is what was actually found.
  
  
  
• Sabrent's 2TB Plotripper Pro has a 54PBW rating. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  To unpack that a little, this is a 2TB NVMe SSD, one of those little M.2 drives that plugs into a slot on newer motherboards. It can write a total of 54PB - 54,000TB - over its lifespan.
  
  Assuming a 5 year warranty, that's 30TB per day - 15 times the drive's capacity, which is termed as 15 DWPD (drive writes per day).
  
  That is the highest rating I have ever seen on a general-purpose SSD. Expensive enterprise drives go as high as 10 DWPD.
  
  This is - of course - for crypto mining with Chia.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti is a 3090 with half the RAM. (WCCFTech)
  
  People complained when the 3090 was launched because the MSRP of $1500 was considered excessive. Compared to what it costs to get one of those cards now, that seems laughably low.
  
  
  
• Twitter has confirmed their paid plan, Twitter Blue.
  
  

  Twitter confirms “Twitter Blue”, which costs $2.99 per month by publicly including such In-App Purchase on the App Store
  
  For testing, I’ve become the first paying Twitter Blue customer 😅
  
  Twitter Blue comes with Color Themes as well as custom App Icons
  
  Reader Mode coming soon https://t.co/RxQHwi6apl pic.twitter.com/UC7kfNS9PE

  — Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 27, 2021

  
  
  For $2.99 per month you get absolutely nothing.
  
  There is one feature Twitter could offer that would be worth paying for - it rhymes with edit button - but they absolutely refuse because they know that their users are batshit insane and it would be an unimaginable clusterfuck.
  
  
  
• What's new in Swift 5.5? (Hacking with Swift)
  
  Swift is Apple's programming language to replace Objective C, which absolutely nobody liked. There was a lot of buzz around it early on as a new systems programming language with a clean and thoughtful design, but then people tried using it and the buzz died.
  
  There are third-party compilers and you can write apps in Swift and run them anywhere including Android, but nobody wants to.
  
  
  
• If you have a last-generation iPad Pro with 6GB of RAM, a single app can use at most 4.5GB of that, leaving 25% of the RAM for the operating system and other apps.
  
  If you have a new 16GB iPad Pro your apps can now get 5GB of RAM - a whole extra 512MB. (MacRumors)
  
  iPads are a good device for artists, with their high resolution screens and stylus support. Why plug an expensive drawing tablet into an expensive PC when you can just get an iPad?
  
  Well, this is why. Because Apple hates you.
  
  

Karen Girls Music Video of the Day



This is the theme song for Zettai Karen Children, and those are the girls who sang it. Keen-eyed observers will be wondering if that is, and the answer is yes. It's a very young Suzuka Nakamoto, from even before she became the lead singer for Babymetal.



Babymetal Music Video of the Day



The connection doesn't stop there; the other two members of Babymetal first caught attention in a talent contest performing a dance routine to the song Over the Future.... Which is the theme song for Zettai Karen Children.


Disclaimer: See you in the mosh'sh pit.