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Daily Tech News 1 December 2021

Top Story

• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the company's flagship Arm v9 chip for 2022. (AnandTech)
  
  You heard me.
  
  The chip contains eight Kryo cores, of which one is a Cortex X2 at 3.0GHz, three are Cortex A710 at 2.5GHz, and the remaining four are low-power Cortex A510 at 1.8GHz.
  
  It will be produced by Samsung on a 4nm process.
  
  CPU-wise it's almost the same as MediaTek's Dimensity 9000 - just slightly slower, which isn't great news for Qualcomm.

Tech News

• There's no dumb 4K TV, just large-format computer monitors with integrated soundbars. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Philips Momentum 559M1RYV is a 55" 4k monitor with three HDMI inputs as well as DisplayPort and USB-C. Refresh rate goes up to 144Hz, colour gamut covers 90% of DCI-P3, and it supports DisplayHDR 1000. Plus an integrated 40W 2.1 channel soundbar.
  
  No Ethernet. No WiFi. No Bluetooth. No networking of any kind. And no operating system.
  
  So if you don't want your TV spying on you, this one is physically incapable of doing so.
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 G650 has Rembrandt. (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the next generation AMD laptop chip with Zen 3+ cores and integrated RDNA2 graphics. (The current Xbox and PlayStation use Zen 2 and RDNA2.)
  
  And a mobile version of the 3080 Ti. Making the fast new integrated graphics somewhat redundant.
  
  
  
• Twitter has a new CEO. What's the fastest way for him to drive the company into the ground? (Stratechery)

  Actually charging for Twitter would, of course, reduce the userbase to some degree; moreover, there are a lot of users with multiple accounts, and plenty of non-human users on Twitter. And, of course, Apple and Google would take their share. Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users—which I think vastly overstates Twitter's elasticity of demand amongst its core user base—Twitter would only need to charge $4/month (including App Store fees) to exceed the $4.8 billion in revenue it made over the last twelve months.

  This guy is retarded. If you charged people to access Twitter it would vanish overnight. The blue checks would see their audience evaporate and they'd follow.
  
  There's a small core of lunatics willing to pay for Twitter, but that requires all the other lunatics to remain.
  
  A far better option is the one I proposed earlier this year: Allow users to bid to have other users banned.
  
  
  
• Tales of Seven Proxies. (Mangadex)
  
  This stuff is only of interest if you run large public websites, but if you do - and particularly if you're on a tight budget - the volunteers running Mangadex produce a better tech blog than almost any actual tech company.
  
  
  
• Will we ever get rid of COVID-19? No. (Quanta)
  
  Nice, simple, to the point, and not what government officials want to hear.
  
  
  
• Twitter will ban sharing of photos and videos without the subjects' consent. (ZDNet)
  
  This rule will be abused for political ends in 3... 2...
  
  
  
• AWS goes all in on serverless. (ZDNet)
  
  There is no serverless, there is only someone else's server, which you now have even less control over than before.
  
  Plus it's probably in someone's bathroom. (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• Microsoft, you are two trillion dollars worth of shit.
  
  

  It’s deeply shocking this is built into the base Windows OS on billions of devices.
  
  I feel like I should start a GoFundMe for Microsoft, or teach them how to beg bounty, as clearly they need the money. https://t.co/TtZXAcZsGf

  — Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) November 30, 2021

  
  

  I’m not sure I want to be the person to open this can of worms, but if you use Edge on Win11, live in the US and do a transaction online of over $30 it triggers this - do it with network capture (with TLS decryption)… 😬

  — Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) December 1, 2021

  
  
  
  
• Which quote end-to-end encrypted unquote messaging apps can the FBI steal the data from? (The Record)
  
  Avoid WhatsApp, iMessage, and Line unless you for some bizarre reason trust the government. Signal looks like the best option.
  
  
  
• UK regulators have ordered Facebook to divest Giphy. (Axios)
  
  To preserve competition in the critical annoying blinking crap space.
  
  
  
• Why can I only order six bags of gluten-free jellybeans at once? If they're going to be out of stock for weeks at a time, I'll happily buy a dozen when they are in stock. The shelf life is something like a year after all.

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



Great guitar and bass work and a not nearly so great chorus. This one must have absolutely saturated the radio waves in Australia when I was a wee Pixy because it's drilled into my brain when I wasn't really musically aware until the 80s.

I listened to a video of the top songs each month through the 1980s, and almost all of them brought up an associated memory. That continues on through the early 90s, though by then I'd started listening to more stuff outside the mainstream and the Headless Chickens and Big Pig tend not to show up on music roundups like that.

They should though.



1970s mostly the reaction is, yeah, I've heard that, because who hasn't heard that? But no association.


Disclaimer: Maybe I should have set this blog to cruise control.