Daily Tech News 31 July 2021

• Not tech news but close to home: The conservative Coalition in Australia just committed political suicide. (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  The bullshit lockdowns are supported by Labor voters - lefties - but opposed by a strong majority of conservatives. The Liberal Party is about to find out that their voters don't appreciate this rapid swing to fascism.
  
  Labor voters are just fine with fascism, but aren't going to vote for the Liberal Party anyway.
  
  I wouldn't mind these useless fucks getting the boot except that the other party is significantly worse on every measure.
  
  But there is no way I will vote for either of our major parties again. Not that I have ever voted Labor in the first place.
  
  
  
• Blockchains. Can't live with them, can't nuke 'em from orbit.
  
  Major crisis at work today because a platform with a ten-figure market cap returns the same bland response for "transient network error, please retry" and "your wallet is empty you idiot".
  
  

• The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks are fighting again. (New York Times)
  
  It will be fun to watch the New York communists try to take on the Beijing communists.
  
  
  
• Samsung is jacking up chip prices. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  RAM prices are already up 50% since last year, and flash memory prices are up too.
  
  It's not clear how this will affect non-commodity parts - CPUs and GPUs - because the great bulk of the cost there goes to designing, testing, and preparing for production. Just prepping a minor update to a CPU to go into production on a leading-edge fabrication process can run over $100 million.
  
  That's why they patch problems in firmware; it's both too time-consuming and too costly to update the hardware every time.
  
  
  
• Static.Wiki is Wikipedia shoveled into and served directly from a SQLite database. (Static.Wiki)
  
  A 43GB SQLite database.
  
  This isn't an app running on a SQLite database; every single page is rendered and stored in SQLite.
  
  
  
• Idiots and maniacs. (Earthly.dev)
  
  Idiots are people who don't do what I do; maniacs are people who do what I don't do. Most people are both.
  
  
  
• eBPF - the Extended Berkeley Packet Filter - lets user code run inside the Linux kernel in a sandbox. Turns out that provides a local privilege escalation vulnerability for free. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  To the surprise of absolutely nobody.
  
  
  
• Amazon has been fined $888 million for GDPR violations, specifically targeted advertising. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I find it difficult to be offended on Amazon's behalf.
  
  
  
• I used to blithely install packages from PyPI whenever I needed to.
  
  But baby that was years ago, I left it all behind. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  For my cheap wine and not having my credit cards stolen.
  
  
  
• Russian hackers continue their attacks despite Biden's warning. (Bloomberg)
  
  Unexpectedly.
  
  
  
• Amazon's delivery partners routinely tell drivers to ignore safety checks. (CNBC)
  
  What's a dead hobo here and there compared with free delivery?

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:44 AM

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