Daily Tech News 9 October 2021

• Where exactly is Tether's $69 billion? (Bloomberg)
  
  Tether is a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged at 1:1 against the dollar. Tether says they can do this because they have a 1:1 ration of liquid dollar assets to the Tether coins issued.
  
  Tether acts like a bank, but this report suggests it's somewhere between a hedge fund and a Ponzi scheme.
  
  
  
• Unexpected sanity:

  It's a sign of Australia's COVID parochialism that we seem to think allowing 10 people into the homes of the double-vaccinated, instead of five, is a measure of radical risk-taking.

  That's two academics from the left-wing Sydney University writing in the left-wing Sydney Morning Herald to berate the left over their COVID psychosis.
  
  Being what they are they feel obligated to take a dig at Donald Trump before they get on to criticising the Labour Party here in Australia.

  Perrottet's political calculation is that we are now ready for take-off. This is one politician who isn't afraid of freedom. His instincts tell him that the people of NSW increasingly aren't either.

  For Labor and those on the political left, there is huge political danger in all of this.

  If it works, Labor is sunk.

• Hydrogen's moment is here at last. (The Economist)
  
  Not. None of the problems with storing and transporting hydrogen in bulk have been solved. It's a lousy fuel.
  
  
  
• Hydrogen has its faults, but oil isn't necesarily any safer. (The New Yorker)
  
  The F.S.O Safer, to be specific, which is a former oil tanker turned fuel store, sitting unpowered and unmaintained just off the coast of Yemen with a million barrels of oil on board.
  
  This being Yemen, it may also be surrounded by mines, preventing it from being moved to safety by tug boats.
  
  This being Yemen, the person in charge of laying mines in that area is dead, and there aren't any records.
  
  The only question is whether it leaks, causing an ecological disaster for the Red Sea, catches fire, causing an ecological disaster for Yemen, or simply explodes and kills everyone in the area. They can't close the port either, because there isn't another port available.
  
  
  
• How the .NET Foundation kerfuffle became a brouhaha. (Rob Mensching)
  
  .NET is Microsoft's development platform, or one of them anyway. .NET Core has been made open source. The .NET Foundation manages that open source project.
  
  Poorly.
  
  
  
• Apache has released an emergency update for the incomplete fix in the emergency update for the bug they introduced introduced in the recent update. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Someone's having a bad week.
  
  
  
• Nijisanji EN Wave 3 - named Ethyria - just launched. (YouTube)
  
  Pomu is the only one I follow regularly; with Hololive EN Gen 2 active now there's rarely a need to actually look for content. But best of luck to them all.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:36 AM

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