Daily News Stuff 24 June 2021

• The Radeon 6600 XT is on its way. (WCCFTech(
  
  It's not super-fast; it amounts to a low-mid-range card by today's standards. It has 32 compute units compared to 40 on the 6700 XT - pretty close - but only 32MB of cache compared to 96MB on the 6700 XT.
  
  But the advantage of that part is that it makes for a smaller chip that will still fly through games at 1080p and might actually be available at a reasonable price.
  
  

• A couple of kids in South Africa made off with $3.6 billion in Bitcoin. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's the biggest in a series of massive scams that have looted billions of dollars in cryptocurrencies. It's notable that the two directors of this particular scam are aged 20 and 17.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which - on a much smaller scale and less direct, and also unproven and maybe pure bullshit - John McAfee has been found dead in his cell in a Spanish prison. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Kind of a weird guy. May have actually killed himself. Not saying he did. Not saying he didn't.
  
  I'll miss him being a thorn in the side of the feds.
  
  
  
• NewsBlur got hacked and their data held to ransom. (NewsBlur)
  
  If you go to that site you won't notice anything amiss. That's because they had backups. It took them a few hours to re-sync their database but after that everything came right back up.
  
  
  
• The Microsoft Store is crashing on Windows, affecting literally dozens of people. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Actually I don't know how many people use the Microsoft Store to download apps. With the number of Windows PCs out there it's probably not insignificant.
  
  
  
• VMWare has fixed another bug that let anyone on the management network simply take over servers. (Bleeping Compute)
  
  There are no workarounds, so if you're running the affected software it's upgrade time right now.
  
  
  
• LinkedIn is blocking people in China. (WSJ)
  
  You know what you did.
  
  Most such sites don't have the problem of having to block particular accounts because they - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube - are banned outright in China. LinkedIn isn't, yet.
  
  What they should do is tell the Chinese government to shove a pumpkin up its ass and sing Lili Marlene. What they are doing is blocking individual accounts from being accessed from China.
  
  
  
• Three people have been arrested in Japan for summarising movies. (TorrentFreak)
  
  They squish movies down to 10 minutes or so, add narration, and upload them to YouTube. The movie studios are claiming that each view of these squishies constitutes a lost sale, totalling about a billion dollars in the past year.
  
  Which is unmitigated bullshit, but even in the US this likely wouldn't pass the fair use test.
  
  
  
• West Taiwan is ramping up production of 14nm chips. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is new for the backwards province, which sees most of its production at much older processes - 28nm and larger.
  
  Mainland Taiwan meanwhile is ramping up production at 4nm.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:04 AM

| Access Comments