Daily Tech News 1 September 2021

• The Australian Federal Police - our equivalent of the FBI - now have the authority to compel Australian social network providers (of which there are none) to hand over or even alter the details of your accounts. (Tutanota)
  
  Of course this had strong bipartisan support as only the very worst legislation does.
  
  And of course the FBI does this already, even where they're forbidden to do so by law, but it doesn't help anything to grant such broad powers. Basically all networks now need to be designed with the explicit expectation of faithless nodes.
  
  Now, that's not a news site - it's the blog of a company selling encrypted email - but it's an entirely legitimate concern.
  
  
  

• A Node.js library that is downloaded 3 million times a week - and is used in Amazon's developer libraries - has a remote execution flaw. (HTTPToolkit)
  
  An attacker that can convince you to read a malicious URL can run whatever code they like on your server.
  
  The problem is it uses the vm module to run untrusted code - when the vm module explicitly says not to use it to run untrusted code.
  
  
  
• If you're stuck at home in Australia waiting for one of (1) the 70% vaccination target to be met and things at least in NSW open up again, (2) the police kick your door down over a Facebook post that they posted for you, or (3) your package arrives in the mail don't bet too much on option 3. (ZDNet)
  
  I understand they have staff out sick, can't easily hire more with this fucking lockdown going on, and are working to shift a much greater than usual volume, but I'm not sure how stopping accepting packages for three days is meant to help.
  
  
  
• Get your own Amiga! (Apollo Core)
  
  In case you're too young to have joined in the fun back in the 80s and 90s, the Vampire V4+ has a Motorola-compatible "68080" chip implemented in an FPGA - not emulated - with 512MB of RAM and a new (but compatible) chipset.
  
  It's around eight times faster than the most powerful stock Amiga ever sold - the A4000 - and uses just 2W of power. It has both Amiga-style mouse and joystick ports and USB, plus the usual things like Ethernet, don't-call-it-HDMI-and-we-don't-need-to-pay-royalties, and an internal CF slot and an external SD card slot for extra storage. (Actually, that should also be a don't-call-it-SD slot.)
  
  About 600 Euros so it's not exactly a bargain unless you compare it with what those systems cost originally in which case it is absolutely dirt cheap.
  
  
  
• On the other end of the scale, if you're looking for an AMD motherboard with Thunderbolt 4 the Asus ProArt B550 Creator is one. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  One of exactly two such, in fact.
  
  It has dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, dual M.2 slots, HDMI out, DisplayPort in - it's routed to the Thunderbolt ports - and otherwise the usual bits and pieces. Oh, and a PS/2 combo keyboard and mouse port in case you have a 30 year old keyboard that you just can't bear to part ways with yet.
  
  I wonder how well it works if you just plug two of these together with a Thunderbolt cable.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:15 AM

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