Daily Tech News 11 September 2021

• It's been 20 years, but I'll let others take up that story.
  
  
  
• A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
  
  The press deals with a quietly momentous ruling in the Epic v. Apple case.
  
  Apple bests Epic, but change is coming to the App Store. (Six Colors)
  
  Apple mostly wins in Epic Games Fortnite trial, but must ease payment rules. (CNet)
  
  Apple risks losing billions annually from Epic Games ruling. (Bloomberg)
  
  Epic wins big in case against Apple. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Major win for Epic Games: Apple has 90 days to open up app store payments. (Ars Technica)
  
  Epic vs. Apple ruling revealed: Apple must allow App Store devs to redirect users to other payment systems. (9to5Mac)
  
  Ars Technica runs a surprisingly straight headline, but I think they do A/B testing on their headlines so I have no idea what others are seeing. Their readers are not welcoming of the truth either.
  
  The ruling forces Apple to allow developers to use third-party payment systems, meaning you can make your app a free download and charge for activation, paying 3% to Stripe or PayPal rather than 30% to Apple. That could reduce App Store revenue from $70 billion per year to zero.
  
  Meanwhile Epic Games is required to pay Apple $3.6 million due to breach of contract.
  
  I think we can work out who lost this one.
  
  
  
• Because you keep hearing how terrible things are in Australia, and don't hear about riots in protest over government overreach, it's a bit hard to understand just how bad it is here in NSW right now with everyone complying with our fascist overlords.
  
  Here's video shot in Sydney today at the height of the lockdown.

  Sydney gives us hope today.
  
  pic.twitter.com/NZA7xpCYX7

  — Avi Yemini 🇦🇺🇮🇱 (@OzraeliAvi) September 11, 2021

  
  
  Uh. Yeah. We're not very good at following rules.
  
  
  
• But what about the mainstream media, you ask? They're all lefties. They'll be totally on board with whatever farcical nonsense the government pulls.
  
  

  Meanwhile in Australia. pic.twitter.com/I4nzXIXDak

  — Avi Yemini 🇦🇺🇮🇱 (@OzraeliAvi) September 11, 2021

  
  Not so much. Outside of the loonies on Twitter, everyone has had enough of this shit and has stopped listening.
  

• So is Ars Technica right about anything else, or is it all crazytown over there?
  
  House bill would eliminate natural gas. (Ars Technica)
  
  Crazytown it is then.
  
  
  
• I previously criticised Intel for making dumb decisions with their upcoming 12th generation platform, but if the latest leaks are accurate they merely did something weird. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Alder Lake, Intel's 12th generation desktop family, brings support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. But it only supports PCIe 5.0 for the PCIe slots - and no consumer cards support PCIe 5.0 - and not where bandwidth is most needed, on the interface to the chipset.
  
  But the diagram in that article shows that bandwidth to the chipset has actually doubled, because the width of the band has doubled. It's still based on PCIe 4.0, but now has 8 lanes rather than 4.
  
  That's fine. You could still potentially saturate that link, but it would take some serious effort. The chipset on AMD's high-end Threadripper motherboards also uses an 8 lane PCIe 4.0 interconnect, so that's pretty good for a consumer platform.
  
  The weird part is the number of PCIe lanes in total. Between the CPU and the Z690 chipset, an Alder Lake system can have up to 48 lanes of available PCIe: 16 at 5.0 speeds, 16 at 4.0, and 16 at 3.0. But the CPU has 28 PCIe transceivers and the chipset 36, when they are typically designed in blocks of 16.
  
  
  
• Thunderbolt adaptors aren't likely to "just work" any time soon. (Mat Millman)
  
  If it's not built into your motherboard you're going to have a bad time.
  
  
  
• Don't rewrite your project in Rust. (ITNext)
  
  Or at all. Unless you know exactly why you are rewriting it, have already run a pilot project and measured the benefits, and have someone prepared to pay for it, it's a bad idea.
  
  Unless you're using Node.js, in which case, no time like the present.
  
  
  
• Quadranet has filed to have a copyright infringement lawsuit dismissed. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Quadranet notes that it is not alleged to have infringed upon anyone's IP rights.
  
  Its customer, LiquidVPN - well, LiquidVPN uses many providers, one of which is Quadranet - LiquidVPN is also not alleged to have infringed upon anyone's IP rights.
  
  Some of LiquidVPN's customers, or at least, some people using services purchased by some of LiquidVPN's customers, are alleged to have infringed upon IP rights.
  
  The plaintiffs here seem to be following the Willie Sutton rule. Not to give them any ideas, but if they took that to its logical conclusion they might be able to force dramatic changes on the industry.
  
  Though they might also simply lose and be forced to pay the defendants' legal bills.
  
  
  
• Axios is why private citizens should be allowed to own nuclear weapons.
  
  

  Top Republicans are calling for a public uprising to protest Biden's broad vaccine mandates, eight months after Jan. 6.
  
  It has been decades since America has witnessed such blatant and sustained calls for mass civil disobedience against the government.https://t.co/0guCuydFwZ

  — Axios (@axios) September 10, 2021

  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 02:18 AM

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