Daily Tech News 21 August 2021

• Apple has proudly announced that they "are the greatest platform for distributing child porn". (9to5Mac)
  
  That's a direct quote. They're putting satirists out of work.
  
  This is one of dozens of items to come out of discovery in the Epic v. Apple lawsuit. (The Verge)
  
  Also revealed is Apple explicitly documenting that they do whatever they hell they feel like from one moment to the next when it comes to the App Store, and Epic... Offering people money for games.
  
  
  
• Google collects your location data and then hands it all to the police. (Tech Crunch)
  
  At issue are "geofence" warrants, which are blatantly unconstitutional in the first place. With these, the police demand Google cough up a list of all the people in a given area at a given time.
  
  There were 982 of these warrants in 2018, and 11,554 in 2020. It's a growing industry.

• Collaborative filtering doesn't work for... Chatroulette? (Chatroulette)
  
  Not surprised given the nature of the service, but the article actually goes to some lengths to examine why, which makes it worthwhile even if I personally have no use whatsoever for Chatroulette itself.
  
  
  
• After Royal Core, Intel's Lunar Lake could bring 30% IPC improvement over Meteor Lake using Lion Cove cores. (WCCFTech)
  
  What does any of that mean? Well, future Intel processors will be faster than current ones. The article is talking about Intel's 15th, 16th, and 17th generation parts, where current chips are 11th generation. So we're looking at 2025 and 2026 before these chips finally arrive.
  
  It also mentions 40 core desktop parts - but that's still 8 large cores and 32 small ones. AMD will give you 16 large cores today. Just plunk down your money.
  
  
  
• On the other hand AMD's initial socket AM5 parts will have DDR5 support but no PCIe 5.0. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel's support for PCIe 5.0 seems useless at this point - it only applies to the video card, and not only do video cards not need PCIe 5.0, they don't support PCIe 5.0.
  
  When they do appear, at least you'll be able to run two cards because a x8 PCIe 5.0 slot is as fast as a x16 4.0 slot. But Nvidia no longer supports SLI so that's basically pointless too.
  
  AMD's Raphael - the initial AM5 part - has 28 PCIe 4.0 lanes, up from 24 on current AM4 parts. It looks like the additional 4 lanes are intended to provide two USB 4 sockets, which in addition to 40Gbps USB, support DisplayPort 2.0 video and PCIe connections. The chip can also provide two HDMI ports for a total of four displays.
  
  Like Intel, AMD really needs to get just a few lanes of PCIe 5.0 for the chipset connection. At the moment their high end chipsets (Threadripper) use 8 lanes of PCIe 4.0 to get the needed bandwidth.
  
  
  
• Hackers stole $90 million from the "most secure" crypto exchange. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Tesla's D1 AI chip can deliver 362 teraFLOPs - albeit at FP16, so useful for AI but not for scientific work generally. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is intended for use in servers that analyse data and train less powerful systems in autonomous vehicles.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:27 AM

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