Daily Tech News 14 November 2021

• Finally got my new pressure washer out of the box to clean the back deck as planned. Last few weekends I've either been working or it's been pouring with rain, or both.
  
  Snap the connector in place for the hose to the cleaning wand. Snap the connector in place at the wand end. Connect up the garden hose.
  
  SNAP.
  
  Take a look. It's the garden hose that's broken off. It has no flex left to it at all - it's now stuck in a rigid coil - and it doesn't take much force to snap it into pieces.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, it turns out you can get a garden hose delivered in under an hour.
  
  
  
• An FBI / DHS server got hacked and used in a phishing campaign targeting sysadmins. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Fortunately whoever did it was an idiot, and though the emails did legitimately come from an FBI server, it was easy to spot them as fakes.
  
  Hat tip to Bitblt in the comments yesterday who spotted a Reddit thread about this before it made the news.
  
  
  
• It was a shallow hack, not a penetration of the FBI's network. (Krebs On Security)
  
  Made possible because the FBI has an internet-accessible registration page for staff of law enforcement agencies, part of a system called LEEP. And that registration system could easily be suborned to send any email you want to any address you want - while still being cryptographically signed by the FBI.
  
  Oops.
  
  While we are endangered by the fact that a lot of these systems are designed, built, and run by idiots, we are frequently saved by the fact that most hackers are also idiots.
  
  This could have been a used for a careful, long-term campaign to compromise all sorts of companies and services. But instead it was so blatant it got shut down in a matter of hours.
  
  
  
  

• The Biden Administration is at odds with Intel over the company's plans to expand production in China. (PC Magazine)
  
  I never thought I'd see the day that the Democrats had more sense than Intel senior management, but here we are.
  
  
  
• Intel's brand new Core i5-12600K with DDR5 RAM beats AMD's year-old Ryzen 5600X and its cheaper DDR4 memory on gaming benchmarks by an average of 2.7%. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Um. Okay.
  
  It does a lot better on application performance - 21% faster on single-threaded tasks and 38% faster multi-threaded. It does use more power than the 5600X, which is a 65W part, but we're talking a relatively modest 125W.
  
  Also worth noting that it ran the benchmarks slightly faster on average with DDR4 RAM than with DDR5.
  
  
  
• Faster DDR5 memory is starting to appear now. (WCCFTech)
  
  I mean, it's been a whole week since these chips came out. What were they waiting for?
  
  The benchmarks show huge performance gains over DDR4 and low-end DDR5 on heavy multi-threaded benchmarks - number crunching and data compression can see gains of as much as 60%.
  
  On games, though, the difference is on the order of 2%. 3% with a tailwind. That's because games are optimised to run well on existing hardware, even if that means changing the result, where number crunching applications are constrained by the requirement of producing the correct answer.
  
  
  
• The top twelve tech turkeys of 2021. (ZDNet)
  
  Actually a good list for the most part. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook all get a well-earned kicking, as do NFTs, Telsa, Zillow, and SolarWinds.
  
  
  
• Vizio makes twice as much money from shoving ads in your face on their smart TVs as it does selling the things in the first place. (The Verge)
  
  Buy a large format computer monitor and your choice of playback device and streaming subscriptions - Roku, Apple TV, Amazon, whatever. If that device turns out to suck, toss it in the trash and get something else.
  
  
  
• MangaDex interprets Verizon as damage and routes around it. (TorrentFreak)
  
  The archive of over twelve trillion Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian, Tibetan, Cambodian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Hmong, Khmer, Andamanian, Funan, Chenlan, and Kunlun comics is now available again to Verizon victims customers.

posted by Pixy Misa at 02:33 AM

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