Daily Tech News 8 July 2021

• npm audit is broken by design. (Overreacted)
  
  To unpack that: npm audit is a tool for tracking the infinite number of vulnerabilities NPM causes. NPM is the unbelievably awful package manager for Node.js. Node.js is the godforsaken fusion of JavaScript and interrupt-driven code for server-side applications.
  
  And JavaScript is a quick hack Brendan Eich threw together over a weekend in 1995 to get some basic field validation into Netscape Navigator.
  
  It's all broken, in every way imaginable, and in many ways impossible to imagine.

• Gigabyte has announced a 10Gbit Ethernet card. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I can't even remember when I upgrade to gigabit ethernet - twenty years ago, maybe - and we're still mostly stuck at that speed. Recent motherboards have started to show up with 2.5Gb Ethernet, and 100Gb cards are readily available, but the switch situation is a complete nightmare.
  
  
  
• Unexpectedly: Neurons encode information in the timing of their firing. (Quanta)
  
  Speaking from a computer and network background, why the bleeping bleep was this in any way unexpected? It's entirely routine in computer networks - and in pre-computer networks like the telegraph system - so there's no reason to expect the brain not to have evolved the same tricks in some form.
  
  Neuroscientists love to tell people that the brain is not a computer, but all they show when they say that is they don't know what computers are.
  
  
  
• 36 US states and one swamp are going after Google for monopolistic shit relating to the Play Store. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Don't know if this will also run afoul of a random Hawaiian judge the way the Facebook case recently did, but keep it up guys.
  
  
  
• What browser should you use to replace Chrome? (ZDNet)
  
  They suggest Brave, and it's a good choice. I'm running it on my Android tablet and I get the occasional UI glitch - which might be due to the fact that I'm browsing huge pages on an old A53 CPU - but it's quickly fixed by switching out of the app and then back in again.
  
  It has built in ad blocking, when Chrome on Android doesn't even allow you to set up a plugin for that.
  
  
  
• A Chinese prenatal test has been used by the PLA to gather genetic data on millions of women. (Reuters)
  
  The privacy agreement promises to hold the data confidential unless... Basically unless the Chinese government wants to take a look.
  
  
  
• New Hololive member IRyS has now passed 200,000 YouTube subscribers, without posting anything, and 150,000 Twitter followers, with a single tweet and her account restricted - still, because this is Twitter.
  
  

  ||:

  — IRyS💎holoEN (@irys_en) July 7, 2021

  
  
  Meanwhile YouTube demonetised Pikamee, everyone's favourite electric kettle, and in a shocking turn of events admitted it was a mistake and fixed it in a matter of hours.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:55 AM

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