Daily Tech News 6 September 2021

• We just hired a suitably grey-haired sysadmin at my day job. The kind of guy who knows about flow and lp0 on fire.
  
  This is the third recent hire taking on various components of my job, effectively cutting my workload by half.
  
  
  
• There's a constant war between spammers and spam filters, and between marketing providers and spam filters. The marketing providers have the twin advantages of being nominally trustworthy and being absolutely loaded. They have battalions of tech drones dedicated to making sure the latest marketing drivel reaches your inbox unimpeded.
  
  So... What happens if the spammers just subscribe to a marketing provider like Salesforce? (eSecurity Planet)
  
  The internet treats censorship as an error and routes around it, and so do spammers.
  
  
  

• Chia miners are selling off used disk drives and SSDs as new. (WCCFTech)
  
  The problem is, Chia caused the price of storage to spike sharply early this year, and drives were in short supply for months. Now that Chia is 80% down from its peak and mining has become less efficient, drives are becoming plentiful again, because, unlike the situation with graphics cards, Chia is the only cryptocurrency that uses storage for mining.
  
  I noticed that prices are starting to come down - 16TB drives are around $320 on Newegg when they had spiked as high as $500. Great for me because I plan to build either a new NAS or a Linux box in the next couple of months.
  
  But if you're buying make damn sure that you're getting new drives and not that have spent the past couple of months in an accelerated stress test.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Nvidia is repurposing failed silicon for their highest end compute cards to mine Ethereum. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They have a complete lineup of dedicated mining cards using older GPU chips, but this is the first one to recycle current-generation designs.
  
  Ethereum mining is set to end entirely next year, and Bitcoin can't be mined effectively on GPUs, so it will be interesting to see where all that hardware ends up.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:18 AM

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