Daily Tech News 10 July 2021

• Nothing has gone horribly wrong in the tech world in the last 24 hours.
  
  
  
• The NSW state government has gone full fascist, though. And this is what passes for our conservative party; the other lot are even worse.
  
  So far the police have just said they may arrest people for buying things "we don't think they need" - like shoes. In Victoria they were kicking down doors over Facebook posts.
  
  They actually did something similar - arresting people suspected of existing without a license - during the first outbreak early last year - but then the had the slim excuse of not knowing how severe it was or how fast it might spread, and there was no vaccine.
  
  But thin as that excuse was back then, it doesn't exist at all now. I'll see these fuckers in Hell before they get my vote again.
  
  
  
• Samsung's 3nm GAA process will go into early production next year, with full commercial production in 2023. (AnandTech)
  
  TSMC's 3nm process is expected to go into full production next year, but it's still what is known as FINFET - the transistor design introduced by Intel with their 22nm node. Gate All Around, or GAA, is the next generation design, but TSMC have pushed it back to their 2nm node, which will probably appear in 2023 at the same time as Samsung's commercial ramp up.
  
  The early production next year probably means just Samsung's own chips, which could give their devices a competitive edge for a while.
  
  Samsung will also have a 4nm process in full production next year. As a reference point, Nvidia's latest graphics chips are produced on Samsung's 8nm process, so there are some big upgrades in the pipeline if they ever get the pipeline under control.

• Backblaze says that farming Chia - the cryptocurrency, that is - isn't profitable. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not even for them, and they have better economies of scale than anyone else in the world.
  
  They'll still let you pay to do it on their servers, they just point out that you're going to lose money.
  
  
  
• Intel's SSD D7-P5510 SSD is nearly as fast as that Optane drive from the other day, has ten times the capacity, and is 20% cheaper. (Hot Hardware)
  
  There are reasons Intel and Micron's Xpoint storage technology - used in Optane - hasn't set the world on fire: It's too expensive to produce in bulk, and smart controllers and caches mean flash-based storage can keep up with Xpoint in almost all cases.
  
  Xpoint is also being targeted at non-volatile memory, but even there it's not much cheaper than RAM, so it's another niche market.
  
  Anyway, $1600 for a 7.68TB PCIe 4.0 enterprise SSD is pretty good value. Still a lot of money, sure, but that's roughly the same price per GB as high-end desktop drives like the Samsung 980 Pro. And the kind of server you'd put this drive in would probably have two CPUs in the $4000 to $8000 range.
  
  
  
• Tencent is spying on children. (Bloomberg)
  
  Kids are staying up late playing games. I know, lets monitor their activity using video cameras and secret AI. That'll fix everything.
  
  
  
• Samsung's app to control their internet-connected washing machine requires access to your location, phone calls, media, contacts, bank account, voting record, last three payslips, and the contents of your fridge. (Vice)
  
  I've noticed something similar with Japanese web apps - they just ask for a whole slate of permissions they can't possibly need because their audience just clicks okay.
  
  And there's an added problem that if you change the permissions requested you need to re-submit your app for authorisation. Even if you require fewer permissions than before.
  
  I have an internet-enabled washing machine from LG. I wanted a combination washer/dryer, and they all had that.
  
  The fact that it's internet-enabled doesn't mean it has internet access, of course. It's a bit of a pain, though, because simple, obvious functions like remembering the wash cycle from last time are relegated to the LG Android app, and there is no way in Hell I'm going to use the app.
  
  
  
• Chrome for Android is always connected to Google Search. (Ctrl Blog)
  
  This makes sense from a performance standpoint, because resolving DNS - particularly over a secure connection - and then establishing the secure connection for the website itself - takes long enough for a user to notice.
  
  And in theory Brave could arrange to do the same with Duck Duck Go. Not without asking, though, because millions of unused connections that are permanently open would be rather a nuisance.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:41 AM

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