Daily Tech News 10 November 2021

• The Surface Laptop SE is compact, lightweight, and repairable. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's designed to be taken apart with just a screwdriver and all the components are easily replaceable. I mean, yes, the storage and memory are soldered onto the motherboard, but the motherboard itself can be swapped out. I guess that's something, right?
  
  And it starts at $249.
  
  Only problem... Wait, first problem. First major problem: The hardware is kind of crap. It's an Atom-based Celeron with two or four cores, with 4GB or 8GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of storage. The higher end of those specs is reasonably useful; I have a laptop with 8GB of RAM (albeit a much faster CPU) and it's fine for browsing the web and running SSH sessions. Though the SE comes with an 11" 1366x768 TFT display, where my laptop (which did cost a little more than $249, yes) has a 14" 2560x1600 IPS panel.
  
  Second major problem: It runs Windows 11 SE. This has the minor limitation of preventing you from installing software on it. You need to use special administrator tools from Microsoft and even then there's a tiny list of software to choose from.
  
  The target here is not other laptops but Chromebooks and the education market. Not sure just how much better Microsoft is than Google as the controller and repository of all your personal information. Maybe a little.
  
  
  

• Rolls-Royce is building nuclear reactors. (BBC News)
  
  Good.
  
  Their mini-reactors are expected to run about £2 billion and produce enough power for a million homes. Which latter figure seems rather optimistic when you do the calculations.
  
  
  
• France is building nuclear reactors. (Spectrum)
  
  Good.
  
  The regular kind.
  
  If you want to cut greenhouse emissions - and all the other crap that coal dumps into the environment - and your solution is nuclear power, then you are at least paying attention and choosing a path that isn't guaranteed to end in disaster.
  
  
  
• Got a spare $13k? Need a 64TB SSD? OWC has one for you. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They also have smaller models that cost less, including the bare controller board that can fit eight M.2 drives for $799.
  
  Top speed of 26 gigabytes per second, which is a lot.
  
  
  
• Apple will no longer disable Face ID if you swap the screen on your iPhone 13. (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a critical security feature that is critical for your security... Or was, yesterday.
  
  
  
• How to save millions of dollars on your storage needs. (Heap)
  
  Step 1: Upgrade your ZFS volumes from lz4 to Zstandard compression. Zstandard is a new algorithm similar to gzip but with a greater compression range - at low compression settings it is as good as gzip but faster; at high settings it is as fast as gzip but with better compression.
  
  Step 2: Have a petabyte scale PostgreSQL cluster that costs a fortune to run.
  
  The savings are on the order of 20%, so if that saves millions the starting point has to be pretty damn high.
  
  
  
• TeamTNT targets misconfigured Docker servers. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use Docker. Problem solved.
  
  
  
• Exploits in the wild are targeting vulnerabilities in Exchange Server. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use Exchange Server. Problem solved.
  
  
  
• Ransomware gangs are still targeting unpatched SolarWinds servers. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use—look, if you're still running SolarWinds, unpatched, at this point, you deserve to get hacked.
  
  
  
• Epic games suffered a Pyrrhic defeat in their recent lawsuit against Apple: They were ordered to pay a few million to settle a breach-of-contract dispute, while Apple was hit with an order to open up payment options that could cost them billions each year.
  
  Apple asked for a stay pending appeal. The judge said, and I quote, LOLGF. (ZDNet)
  
  Starting December 9 Apple will be required to allow developers to use third-party payment services, denying them their 30% cut of everything that goes through the App Store.
  
  
  
• BRB moving to Portugal. (Vice)
  
  No reason.
  
  
  
• Tim Cook says if you don't want to live in a pod and eat bugs, why don't you just buy an Android phone? (MacRumors)
  
  Message received, Tim. Message Received.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:07 AM

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