Daily Tech News 24 September 2021

• I got to load 1595 web pages last night and manually click a button on each because a certain company's API no longer works.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile not only is Melbourne sending the stormtroopers after anyone in a high-vis jacket, they are sending the brownshirts after Twitch livestreams of said stormtroopers to prevent the government propaganda efforts being punctured.
  
  Time for an intervention, if not a visitation.
  
  
  
• Facebook allegedly volunteered to pay a $5 billion FTC fine as a payoff to keep the agency quiet. (Ars Technica)
  
  A shareholder lawsuit says that the maximum fine was a little over $100 million - which would put a dent in your pocketbook or mine but would be insignificant to Big Tech, and Facebook accepted a much larger fine just to hush it all up.
  
  Seems plausible. They suck.
  
  
  

• What is the point of a 200MP camera sensor when the red pixels are smaller than the wavelength of red light? Not much. (AnandTech)
  
  The physics are a bit more complicated than that, and the layout means that you can easily get 50MP or 12.5MP images out of it, but 200MP isn't really going to work even for a sensor that is quite large for a phone camera.
  
  
  
• The EU is pushing the enforce USB-C as a standard phone connector. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, it's better than mini-USB, which was large and clunky, or micro-USB, which was fragile and clunky.
  
  At the high end the list of features a USB-C port might support is incomprehensibly complicated, but if you just want 10W or 20W of power and USB 2.0 data rates you shouldn't have any problems.
  
  
  
• There's another three vulnerabilities in iOS. (Habr)
  
  Data at risk includes:
  

  • medical information (heart rate, count of detected atrial fibrillation and irregular heart rhythm events)

  • menstrual cycle length, biological sex and age, whether user is logging sexual activity, cervical mucus quality, etc.

  What?
  
  
  
• Minecraft Dungeons is now on Steam. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Unfortunately it doesn't involve mining or crafting, it's just a blocky version of Diablo.
  
  
  
• Twitter is adding Bitcoin tipping to its authoritarian digital hellscape. (Bloomberg)
  
  There is nothing on Twitter that is worth a Bitcoin transaction fee, much less the tip. Unless they let you bid to have other people's accounts suspended. They could make billions that way.
  
  
  
• California just signed their Fuck you Amazon bill into law. (The Verge)
  
  It targets Amazon's abusive working conditions and obsessive control. Very much a let's you and him fight situation.
  
  
  
• Now that I have a new computer - still in its box, but I have it - the monitor I wanted is out of stock again. The LG 27UP850-W, which is a 27" 4K model with USB-C input for my laptop, DisplayPort, HDMI, a 95% DCI-P3 colour gamut, HDR, speakers, a USB hub, Freesync, and a tilt/pivot/height adjustable stand without being horribly overpriced.
  
  Just can't actually get it.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:50 AM

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