Daily Tech News 17 July 2021

• Google has banned distributing what they deem to be "content that deceives, misleads or confuses users" - on Google Docs.
  
  Yeah, they're watching you, you and your sneaky words.
  
  Top comment on Hacker News is from a Google employee who now loathes the company.
  
  
  
• Oh, and when they ban you and your sneaky words - probably for telling the truth - the federal government expects the rest of Big Tech to follow suit.
  
  

  Jen Psaki just suggested that people spreading misinformation be banned from other/all platforms if they're banned from one. pic.twitter.com/SlNXJTXi0I

  — jordan (@JordanUhl) July 16, 2021

  
  

But they're totally not fascists, because fascism is the other guys.

• Oberon+ is a cross-platform Oberon compiler and IDE. (GitHub)
  
  It compiles down to LuaJIT bytecode rather than native code, which is fine by me. LuaJIT is a work of art in the compiler space and it makes total sense for smaller projects to reuse it.
  
  
  
• A closer look at Threadripper Pro. (AnandTech)
  
  Threadripper Pro starts at 16 cores for $1150, vs. $800 for a 16 core Ryzen. And the cores are slower (though the base clock is higher).
  
  On the other hand, you get 120 PCIe lanes instead of 20, 8 memory channels instead of 2, and a maximum of 2TB of RAM compared to 128GB. So if your work depends on any of that it's not a particularly costly option.
  
  The motherboards are certainly more expensive than even a top-of-the-line Ryzen board, but you get up to 7 PCIe x16 slots, dual 10GbE ports, up to 16 SATA ports, and official rather than just unofficial ECC support.
  
  
  
• Speaking of unofficial ECC support, unbuffered ECC DDR4-3200 modules seem to be readily available for about 25% more than non-ECC. So if I do build a new system this year it will be AMD with ECC RAM. Easily worth the extra hundred bucks on 64GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• More details on the Steam Deck. (PC Perspective)
  
  One thing not on the specs list but reported by Linus Tech Tips is that the storage is user-upgradeable. You'll need an M.2 2230 drive - the smallest size available. Regular drives are 2280, meaning 22x80mm. A quick look around only showed 128GB drives, though and the next size up, 2242, you can easily get 2TB.
  
  There will also be a dock coming so you can plug it into monitors and keyboards and such. Personally I'd prefer a 1080p screen, but the GPU isn't really up to 1080p gaming on recent titles, and people would complain.
  
  
  
• Oh, and while it's called the Steam Deck, it supports other app stores too. (WCCFTech)
  
  It's an open PC running Linux with a gaming compatibility layer, and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. In fact, it's so open that some games won't run because they have embedded anti-cheating measures depending on locked-down hardware.
  
  
  
• NASA dug yet another C64 out of the garage and got the Hubble working again. (Science)
  
  One of the onboard computers failed. They have multiple backup systems, but after switching to a backup they still got the same error, and couldn't work out why.
  
  Turns out that two of the onboard computers have failed. Good thing there are four of them.
  
  
  
• There was a remote execution vulnerability in Cloudflare's CDNJS. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There was a bug in the handling of build scripts that could have compromised 12% of all the world's websites.
  
  More generally, build scripts for interpreted / JIT-compiled languages are cancer.
  
  
  
• Sea walls might simply make floods someone else's problem, study suggests. (Ars Technica)
  
  The oldest known standing wall is in Theopetra Cave in Greece, and dates to around 23,000 BC. Scientists, meanwhile, are just now figuring out that the entire purpose of walls is to make problems happen somewhere else.
  
  
  
• Pocket Casts - the podcast app - has been bought by Automattic, which runs WordPress and the ashes of what used to be Tumblr. (The Verge)
  
  I like Pocket Casts and used it for years before half of the podcasts I listened to got eaten by brain worms. But it's also been losing money for years - not a lot of money, but consistently in the red.
  
  So I hope this works out for them.

posted by Pixy Misa at 02:09 AM

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