Daily Tech News 18 August 2021

• Well, that's one way to handle things. PolyNetwork - the crypto site that got hacked recently and lost $600 million - has its money back and has offered the hacker half a mil and a job as Chief Security Advisor.
  
  

  #PolyNetwork has no intention of holding #mrwhitehat legally responsible and cordially invites him to be our Chief Security Advisor. $500,000 bounty is on the way. Whatever #mrwhitehat chooses to do with the bounty in the end, we have no objections. https://t.co/4IaZvyWRGz

  — Poly Network (@PolyNetwork2) August 17, 2021

  
  
  
  
• Meanwhile down south Reichskaren Ardern of New Zealand just locked down the entire country over one case of Bat Flu.
  
  And Tasmania in turn has declared New Zealand to be a high-risk zone.
  
  No matter how bad your political leadership may be, there's worse nearby.

• Memory prices are starting to come back down. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Still well above the all-time low of A$3 per GB, but at that price half the world's DRAM manufacturers went out of business.
  
  Good news for me because I'm looking to buy 128GB pretty soon.
  
  
  
• Package specs for AMD's Zen 4 server CPUs have leaked. (WCCFTech)
  
  Max instantaneous power draw on the new server parts is 700W, up from 450W. That lines up with the leaked increase of maximum continuous power from 280W to 400W, and that lines up with the increase from 64 to 96 cores.
  
  The I/O die by itself can use up to 126W, but it's driving 12 Infinity Fabric links, 12 channels of DDR5 (actually 24, but let's not go into that), and 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 so that's not really a surprise. A lot of it seems to go to the Infinity Fabric links, since the smaller parts have all the PCIe and memory channels active but fewer links, and have much lower I/O die power.
  
  
  
• Zen 3 Threadripper and Threadripper Pro parts are expected to arrive soon. (WCCFTech)
  
  I considered getting a low-end Threadripper system for my new PC, but I think I'll be better off with two Ryzen systems - running Windows and Linux respectively.
  
  
  
• Scientists at LLNL triggered a fusion reaction that released 10% as much energy as all the sunlight hitting the Earth. (NYT)
  
  More than enough to power human civilisation.
  
  For 0.1 nanoseconds, anyway, which is how long it lasted.
  
  
  
• A critical security flaw affects 83 million IoT devices. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The flaw is called IoT.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:03 AM

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