Daily Tech News 18 September 2021

• Deliver sixteen tons what do you get
  A bottle of piss and deeper in debt
  Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
  I owe my soul to the Amazon store. (Bloomberg)
  
  On the one hand, anything that hastens the exodus from and collapse of large liberal cities is an unalloyed good. On the other hand, all the people pushing for these company towns vote Democrat anyway and they will turn out to be just as bad as the first time around.
  
  
  
• Speaking of company towns, bit of a kerfuffle in Melbourne today. The old-school working class socialists have had quite enough of the new-wave managerial class socialists and decided to break things.
  
  Safe prediction: The Victorian government, which collectively has the decision-making capacity of a week-dead wombat, will promptly step in to make everything much worse.

• There's a chipset driver bug that affects security on all AMD desktop and laptop systems. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This probably doesn't affect Linux servers, particularly ones with Epyc CPUs, which don't actually have a chipset. And it only affects you if you're running untrusted software on your computer, at which case you're already screwed.
  
  
  
• The lower-end Alder Lake desktop parts won't have the low-power efficiency cores. (WCCFTech)
  
  Which makes total sense for several reasons. Those cores are mostly for laptops where you need to save power, but are also useful for Intel's high-end desktop parts because they draw about as much power as a space heater. The lower-end desktop parts don't fall into either of those categories. Mostly.
  
  
  
• The Biden administration is planning to sanction crypto exchanges and wallets used by ransomware groups. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That description is a bit confused, but the idea is not without merit - prevent them from turning their ill-gotten digital gains into ill-gotten fiat gains. I expect the implementation to be a disaster.
  
  
  
• The operator of a DDoS for hire service is facing 35 years in prison. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• If you're a Linux admin on Microsoft Azure you're probably having a lousy week.
  
  As mentioned yesterday, if you don't pre-emptively firewall every single thing it only takes one network packet to get root access. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you do, it still only takes one network packet from a local user.
  
  Also, you need to manually update every single server because Microsoft neither told you about the management agent it was installing nor provided automated updates.
  
  And it's already being actively exploited. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  So if you don't want all your Azure servers mining crypto and joining botnets, update them now.
  
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:56 AM

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