Daily Tech News 10 September 2021

• Germany gotta Germ. (Washington Post)
  
  Someone insulted a German politician on Twitter... So police raided his house looking for evidence.
  
  Evidence of what? The insult is public; he called the sports minister for Hamburg a dick. What more evidence is there to gather?
  
  If this sort of idiocy applied to the US or Australia you'd need more police than there are ants in the whole of Texas. Insulting politicians is the national pastime.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, as we worry about all our gadgets being made in China, that country is getting set for an economic implosion. (Washington Post)
  
  Chairman Xi is fast rolling back the - let's not pretend they're reforms, the fascism of his recent predecessors - and going right back to communism. I predict famines making a regular reappearance within the decade. China can't feed itself and its government is only making the situation worse.
  
  
  
• Taiwan is paying attention and just launched the first of a new class of ship designed to take out aircraft carriers. (Asia Times)
  
  Small, fast, and relatively cheap, the new corvettes are loaded with anti-aircraft, anti-ship, and medium-range supersonic cruise missiles, as well as torpedoes.

• Back to regular tech stuff, never click the enable editing button. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  A bug in Internet Explorer lets a sneaky document take over your computer.
  
  
  
• Oh, and if you are running containers on Azure cloud and received a Service Health Notification you can start worrying now. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  A bug let other users' containers steal credentials from your containers and use that to break into your system and do, basically, whatever they wanted.
  
  Remember, there is no cloud, there's just computers run by idiots.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, you can't buy a Microsoft Visio subscription as a regular user. You have to first set up a corporate account with Microsoft. So yes, I now have two accounts, which I'm sure is going to make my life easier.
  
  
  
• Michael Freedman proved the four-dimensional Poincaré conjecture back in 1981 but no-one remembers how. (Quanta)
  
  It's a very complicated proof and the published paper isn't entirely complete, so Freedman sat down with other mathematicians and took them through the proof in detail until they were satisfied. He won the Fields Medal for his work, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
  
  Freedman was 30 when he published his proof. Now he's 70, and the colleagues who understood his proof are mostly either retired or dead. So a new generation of mathematicians has got together to write a book about it before there's no-one left alive who understands how the proof works.
  
  
  
• Want something faster than an SD Card in your laptop? SD Express is almost here. (AnandTech)
  
  SD Express uses the PCI Express interface - either 1 or 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0. That means it can potentially approach 2GB per second. The reference device tested here has 1 lane and runs at up to 890MBps. though sustained sequential writes are a lot slower.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:00 AM

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