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Daily Tech News 8 June 2021

Top Story

• Rule One of Encryption: Never roll your own encryption
  
  Rule Two of Encryption: Never trust anyone else's encryption either. (Reuters)
  
  Australian police arrested 224 suspects and seized $45 million in cash after hacking into a custom messaging app used by a criminal ring - and also stopped a murder plot.
  
  All in all not a bad day's work.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in the US, the DOJ stole back $2.3 million from the Darkside gang that hacked Colonial Pipeline. (Justice)
  
  The moral of this story is that everyone is dumb, but criminals exceptionally so. If they were smarter they'd go into politics, or if they were smarter and less ethical, marketing.
  
  
  

Anime of the day is Irozuku Sekai no Ashita Kara, a.k.a Iroduku, from 2018. There's no manga or novel behind this; it's an anime original, and there was no buzz about it at the time, so I stumbled across it during a lull at work when I actually had time to watch anime. (That situation has since been corrected.)

I tend to give these shows my own names, because it's shorter, like Re: Slime, or as with Autistic Psychic Alien Yakuza Battle Robot because if someone just mentions Hinamatsuri I can't remember if that's the one with the girls practicing traditional Japanese festival dances (it's not).

Anyway, this is Colourblind Timetravelling Granddaughter Witchfriends. There's rather a lot going on in the plot. I really do recommend this one; it came as a surprise even to me, and I watch far too much anime.



Tech News

• It's Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, the one week each year where they try to persuade developers they didn't really mean what they said the other 51 weeks. (AnandTech)
  
  Apple themselves announced a bunch of stuff no-one cares much about except for the update to Siri. Siri will now process voice commands locally on your device and send only data requests to the cloud.
  
  That's how it should have worked all along, but it couldn't be done at the time; devices just weren't fast enough.
  
  Of course Siri doesn't work very well anyway, but at least now it doesn't spy on you quite so egregiously.
  
  
  
• AMD's new FidelityFX game upscaling feature is coming to the new Xboxen. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Since these are basically PCs running a cut-down version of Windows on AMD processors and graphics and FidelityFX will run anywhere, even on Nvidia hardware, this comes as very little surprise.
  
  
  
• CPUs are back in stock, so should you even consider the 11700K? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Performance is, well, it's fine. It's pretty close to the Ryzen 5800X.
  
  Power consumption - and thus heat - is a different story. Under load it not only uses significantly more power than the competing 5800X, or even the 12-core 5900X, it uses twice as much power as last year's 10700K.
  
  Intel have cranked things up to the max to remain competitive with AMD across a big gap in process nodes, and that means a lot more heat and noise for the same performance.
  
  Alder Lake, due later this year, should improve things.
  
  
  
• Your antivirus will now mine Ethereum for you. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I remain unconvinced that this is a good idea.
  
  
  
• Step One: Release a useful online tool.
  Step Two: Quietly subvert it to hack other people's websites.
  Step Three: Get caught, because you're dumb. (@wrede)
  
  You're doing this in public, you idiots. How do you expect to not get caught?
  
  
  

I Can't Belive It's Not Haruhi Anime Music Video of the Day



Sharada is the definitive AMV for season one of Haruhi, but this is the definitive AMV for season two. It reduces the Endless Eight arc to five and a half minutes, which is probably worth a Nobel Prize. In physics, or maybe medicine.

For those who haven't seen it, the story spends eight episodes trapped in a time loop, with scenes repeating over and over, but with not a single frame of animation reused. It's a lot of fun if you start out with a high SAN score, but watch out if you used that as your dump stat.



Got Milk? Don't Got a Kitchen Knife? Let's Fix That Video of the Day



Yes, there's an entire channel where the guy makes knives out of things it shouldn't be possible to make knives out of. Milk is not even the most surprising.

Disclaimer: Or even the tastiest.