Daily Tech News 3 October 2021

• Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Cisco, SAP, and Atlassian have joined forces to establish Trusted Cloud Principles. (ZDNet)
  
  The principles are:

  1. A government may not harm a cloud provider's profits, or through inaction, allow a cloud provider's profits to come to harm.
  2. A cloud provider must obey the laws enacted by its government except where such laws would conflict with the First Law.
  3. Users get screwed.

  The silver lining is that this is self-serving corporate bullshit, which is infinitely less harmful than the self-destructive woke bullshit that is so prevalent these days.
  
  
  

• Speaking of woke bullshit Ruby has embroiled itself in a code of conduct war. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  "To promote inclusion" they have removed the First Law of their existing code of conduct, which previously read:

  Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.

  The rule of the day is now intolerance in the name of inclusion.
  
  Also, Square's "Global Neurodiversity Chair" is - unexpectedly - a fuckhead.
  
  
  
• HP's Chromebook x2 looks nice. (Thurrott.com)
  
  It's not, of course. It runs Chrome, leaving all your data hostage to the lunatics at Google. But the industrial design is close to that of my deceased Spectre x2, which is very nice indeed.
  
  At $680 including the detachable keyboard and pen it's reasonably priced compared to an iPad or Surface Go, both of which charge a bundle if you want to type or draw anything.
  
  It uses a Snapdragon 7c, which is not a fast chip, but would be fine for ChromeOS or Linux, if you can get it to run your preferred distribution.
  
  
  
• Do not buy an Xbox Series S. (Tom's Guide)
  
  Given that you can't buy an Xbox Series X or a PlayStation 5, that means just don't play games.
  
  Except Minecraft, which will run on a potato with a little overvolting. (On the desktop. My busy village pegs the server CPU at 100% though.)
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 4 was doomed to die because of a bug that would trigger when the CMOS battery failed. (Ars Technica)
  
  If the battery fails, the console connects to the PlayStation Network to set the clock. If it can't do so, it refuses to play any games. Doesn't matter that the game disk is in the drive, it won't work.
  
  So they fixed it.
  
  
  
• Apple did not fix the phone number field in their AirTag interface, despite being alerted to a security issue. (Ars Technica)
  
  Scanning the tag with your iPhone reads the phone number, but that could contain anything at all, including JavaScript, which your phone will then run.
  
  
  
• Everything you never knew you didn't know about JIT compilers and didn't ask because you didn't know you didn't know it. (Carol Chen)
  
  A pretty good look at PyPy and Graal (a Java JIT compiler), with some information on LuaJIT as well.

posted by Pixy Misa at 02:08 AM

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