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Daily Tech News 3 July 2021

Top Story

• It's the weekend, so time for a proper Tech News thread! During the week these will likely be shorter than before for the next several weeks, while we train up new staff at work to cope with all the new customers.
  
  
• Facebook has gone full Stasi, asking users to report anyone expressing unapproved opinions. (The Verge)
  
  The Verge, it turns out, has learned to love Big Brother:

  Facebook, like other platforms, has had issues with extremism for a long time, and though it's good that it's trying to combat it, some of its efforts feel like they should've been implemented long ago.

  No, you fascist-fellating bumblefucks, what Facebook is doing is extremism.

Anime of the day is Galaxy Angel, which ran for four seasons (or six, depending on how you count) and 126 episodes from 2001 to 2004.

If you imagine Dirty Pair, with the competence dialed down and the comedy dialed up, but keeping the supportive but long-suffering boss intact, and also dial the destruction up to 12, you might have something like Galaxy Angel.

Because of that destruction factor, the continuity resets pretty frequently. They die several times, and destroy the entire universe twice.

Each season also has an episode that plays things completely straight, often looking at a particular character's past. Those have a very different feel to the general chaos and add needed depth to the story, but aren't kid material, when most of the series is. (I watched some of this with my oldest nephew when he was maybe five or six.)



Tech News

• Asus is bringing its ZenFone 8 to the US. (AnandTech)
  
  It delivers a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 888 CPU and starts at $599 with 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 5.9" 2400x1080 OLED display. That's pretty small for a modern phone, because there's almost no bezel. The diagonal on my new Oppo A91 is 0.1" greater than my old Xperia Z Ultra, but overall it's tiny next to the old phone.
  
  The ZenFone 8 has a proper headphone jack, but no SD card slot, because we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Oppo, they're merging with OnePlus, and merging their versions of Android as well. (Thurrott.com)
  
  The corporate merger doesn't mean a whole lot since OnePlus is a subsidiary of Oppo which is a subsidiary of BBK. I had to look that up; I couldn't remember which was the parent company.
  
  OnePlus flagship devices will now be guaranteed to receive three Android updates and four years of security updates.
  
  My A91 - not exactly a flagship - just updated painlessly to Android 11, so there's that.
  
  
  
• The PCI Express 6.0 spec is expected to be finalised this year. (AnandTech)
  
  That full-size PCIe SSD I mentioned last year, with 28GB/s transfer rates, will be possible with a simple M.2 device with PCIe 6.0.
  
  But it will likely need a hefty heatsink. Power consumption went up sharply from PCIe 3 to 4, and is going up again with 5 later this year. 6 is hardly going to reverse that trend.
  
  The most likely place for this is in servers, where high-speed network cards already saturate a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. PCIe 6.0 will allow for 400Gb Ethernet, which is currently limited to high-end switches and routers.
  
  
  
• The first customers to sign up for TSMC's 3nm process are Apple and... Intel. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  3nm promises 70% more logic transistors per square millimetre - only a 20% improvement for memory though - when compared to 5nm.
  
  Since Apple is eating most of the world's 5nm capacity, though, the most direct comparison is with 7nm, which AMD is using for its CPUs, APUs, and GPUs, and for the Xbox and PlayStation 5. TSMC's 5nm is 80% denser than 7nm for logic, so 3nm is 3x as dense as 7nm.
  
  So AMD could in theory deliver a 48 core desktop CPU or a 192 core server CPU when 3nm arrives.
  
  Next year.
  
  AMD won't be able to get capacity right away, but TSMC is aggressively expanding production in multiple locations, so things should improve.
  
  Intel in particular has ordered production of two 3nm CPU designs. (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel is probably booking what capacity it can so it can show off a CPU that beats AMD. Even if supply is limited, taking back that position would be a psychological victory.
  
  
  
• A closer look at AMD's Broken Xbox motherboard, the 4700S. (WCCFTech)
  
  This reuses Xbox chips with broken graphics as Ryzen CPUs. The problem is the chips have limited I/O and can't use regular DDR4 RAM, so it's more of a curiosity than a practical platform.
  
  If it had even some of the GPU section functional it would be a different story, but possibly AMD's agreement with Microsoft forbids that.
  
  
  
• OpenZFS 2.1 is here with support for distributed hot spares, automatic worker scaling, and InfluxDB for tracking statistics. (Phoronix)
  
  InfluxDB isn't built in, I take it; it feeds live statistics to your specified database so that you can monitor I/O across all your servers.
  
  It runs on Linux kernel 3.10 or later (3.10 is pretty old at this point), and FreeBSD 12.2 or later (12.2 is very recent).
  
  
  
• How to avoid the TPM report requirement for Windows 11. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  At least for the preview release. I don't expect this to survive to the final version.
  
  
  
• How about that: Another massive Russian cyber-attack on US businesses. (BBC)
  
  Funny how this is happening now.
  
  Some have asked why I believe the fingers pointing conveniently at Russia, and the reason is that this pointless destruction is exactly Russia's style. China's hacking efforts are even more pervasive, but aim mostly at stealing information without getting caught. Everyone knows about it but it rarely makes the news.
  
  It's another supply chain attack on a company providing monitoring software. (ZDNet)
  
  I hate this crap. I mentioned one company I have personal experience with - their name rhymes with "DataDog" - whose monitoring agent was 750MB of crap including a complete standalone Python install.
  
  They're idiots, yes, but they're hardly alone in that market.
  
  
  
• Microsoft was warned of a critical vulnerability in PowerShell. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Joy.
  
  
  
• Tame Apple press delighted to embed themselves ever deeper into Big Brother's embrace. (Six Colors)
  
  The article celebrates being able to move from Authy - a perfectly functional application for secure two-factor authentication - to Apple's iCloud Keychain.
  
  So now he has the ability to automatically fill in two-factor auth codes.
  
  Which means he doesn't have two factor auth.
  
  His passwords are synced with Apple. His 2FA codes are synced with Apple. The first breach that happens, he'll have Zero Factor Auth.
  
  
  
• If you factory-reset your Amazon device before selling it or giving it away, congratulations, you just handed over all your passwords. (Ars Technica)
  
  If you have an IoT - Internet of Things - device, the only appropriate security measure is to take it out behind the barn and kill it with an axe.
  
  My goddamn washing machine is IoT-enabled, but I'm not stupid enough to let it connect to my WiFi. I can hear its jaunty little your sheets have finished drying tune just fine without it.
  
  
  
• The EU has told Apple to quit with the transparently self-serving excuses for its monopolistic behaviour. (Reuters)
  
  The EU doesn't actually care about competition, but they care a lot about being able to soak foreign companies for billions of dollars over imagined infractions.
  
  It's a start.
  
  
  
• Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app, says photo-sharing app Instagram. (Engadget)
  
  And I'm no longer a 19-year-old anime girl.
  
  Wait.
  
  
  
• Twitter is working to provide idiots new facilities to protect their stupid opinions from well-deserved ridicule. (The Verge)
  
  They have to do this, because their target market is the room-temperature IQ crowd, which is as fragile as a cut crystal decanter in a ball bearing factory.
  
  
  

The Zombie Apocalypse Might Not Be So Bad Video of the Day



World-famous zombie idol Kureiji Ollie from Hololive Indonesia is teaching calculus. And has 4000 people watching.



This is her theme song.

Speaking of Hololive, as well as duck girl Subaru hitting a million subscribers on her birthday, in the past day Iofi from the Indonesian branch hit 400,000 subscribers, and Rushia and Fubuki from the main branch hit 1.25 million and 1.5 million respectively.

This is Fubuki.



Coco's farewell stream had 490,000 live viewers and pulled in $300,000 in superchats. And then she ate a tarantula.

I know I talk about Hololive a lot, but they put out more high-quality entertainment each week than Hollywood does in a year.



News From the Crapping All Over Everything Wars Video of the Day



TSR Games - the original publisher of Dungeons and Dragons - is back, with D&D co-creator Gary Gygax's son in a lead role. Apparently Hasbro forgot to renew the trademark and Ernie Gygax managed to retrieve it.

Major gaming convention Gen Con has banned TSR for being insufficiently subservient to the wokescolds that are ruining everything.

TSR told them to get fucked.

Oh, and Gen Con was also founded by Gary Gygax.



Disclaimer: Commies. Helicopters. Some assembly.