Daily Tech News 12 October 2021

• More sanity in unexpected places. (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  The SMH is a left-wing rag, and yet:

  It turns out that when you reflexively imprison people they get sick of it. Some take to the streets in protest and, clearly, a great many others just silently disobey the absurd demands of their overlords. When the dust settles on this pandemic and the world assesses how to deal with a future crisis, Victoria will be used as a template of what not to do.

  I mean, yes, it's just unusual to find a journalist willing to say so.
  
  
  

• I previously complained that you couldn't find any 1080p laptops in Australia for under A$1000, at least not name brand models. That's now changed, a lot. A quick look at one online retailer showed 23 models available. None with more than 8GB of RAM, but one with 8GB RAM, 4GB VRAM, and a 1TB SSD.
  
  
  
• Which PCIe 4 SSD is best for your laptop? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a different question to which is best for a desktop, because a desktop doesn't care about a few extra watts of power draw. The Seagate Firecuda 530 is very fast, and is available in capacities up to 4TB, but it cuts three hours off the battery life compared to running the same workload on a Samsung 980 Pro.
  
  Not sure if I care because the laptop I'm planning to upgrade is not the one I'm planning to carry with me on a daily basis. But for people who don't purchase laptops in three-packs, it's worth noting.
  
  
  
• DRAM makers expect a "price correction" by the end of the year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Usually when you see this it's a warning that prices are going up. In thise case, though, it's a warning to investors that prices may go down.
  
  Which is good for everyone else.
  
  
  
• If your house is made of cheese, the best locks in the world won't keep the mice out. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The headline suggests a weakness in wildcard SSL certificates, but that's not what this is about. What they are saying is that if you generally use wildcard rather than specific certificates, and your applications don't check the domain used to talk to them, and one of your applications echoes back requests, and an attacker manages to poison your DNS results for their target users.... If all of that, then there's a problem.
  
  Using single-hostname SSL will prevent that, but so will fixing any of the other problems in that list.
  
  
  
• A Florida judge has ruled that under CDA Section 230 Wikipedia is not liable for errors in articles posted by its users. (Wikimedia)
  
  Since that is literally what the law says, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the judge ruled that way. But it does, a little.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:47 AM

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