Daily Tech News 10 August 2021

• File this under probably good news - the problem with running a modern-day Stasi: Anti-government hackers have stolen all the data collected by the Belarus secret police. (Current Time)
  
  The article mentions the personal data of government officials, and passport data for the entire country, but it goes beyond that: Government phone calls, security footage from police cameras, the government's complete propaganda database, a huge volume of tapped private phone calls, and a complete log of the activities of every government informant.
  
  

  They’ve also downloaded the last 10 years of emergency calls history which contains all personal details of regime supporters who reported their coworkers and neighbours for wearing white-red-white colours and similar “crimes”. 3/6 pic.twitter.com/KCtxA3gvW2

  — Tadeusz Giczan (@TadeuszGiczan) August 9, 2021

  
  
  
  

• Intel's Arrow Lake will target AMD's Zen 5. (WCCFTech)
  
  The new chip with have up to 14 cores and 2560 graphics shaders and show up in, um, 2024 maybe.
  
  
  
• Apple was planning to encrypt cloud backups but dropped the plan after the FBI bitched at them. (Reuters)
  
  So... It's all just sitting there wide open like a Belarusian police station?
  
  
  
• Don't buy QNAP storage devices, I said. Stick to Synology, I said. They're relatively secure, I said. Well, fuck, I said. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This doesn't seem to be too severe, just that there aren't enough safeguards against brute-force guessing weak passwords. A secure system will lock accounts for, say, 15 minutes after a few failed logins, and apparently these don't.
  
  
  
• Chinese scientists report having created an amorphous carbon compound - basically carbon-based glass - that is harder and stronger than natural diamond. (National Science Review)
  
  Natural diamonds have flaws and are softer than artificial ones, so this doesn't mean that the new substance is the hardest known.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:11 AM

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