Daily Tech News 5 December 2021

• "I'm going to need your smallest violin."
  "This is the Stradicaster 50000. Each one is hand-crafted by an ancient order of Bolivian nuns from a single neutrino. Only three of its kind exist, and nobody knows where the other two are. The price is-"
  "I'll take it."
  
  Right-wing activists are openly 'weaponizing' Twitter's new private media policy. (CNN Business)
  
  You'd have to have a heart of basalt not to collapse in a fit of giggles. Twitter's latest attempt to curtail unapproved speech has backfired because it turns out - as everybody except apparently the room-temperature IQ goldfish running Twitter immediately realised - that the new policy banning the sharing of photos, even those taken at public events, without the explicit consent of everyone depicted therein directly targets the most popular pastime of Twitter's own core audience of rabid Maoist lunatics, which is to say, doxxing and destroying the lives of everyone with whom they disagree.
  
  Twitter thought they were targeting conservative pushback against violent left-wing nutcases, but what the rule actually says is that nobody can post photos of people without their consent.
  
  So everyone to the right of Kropotkin has started reporting the offenders en masse and they're getting them banned.

  In January, Samuel Braslow was covering an anti-mask protest at a Los Angeles mall for the Beverly Hills Courier, the 56-year-old local newspaper where he is a staff reporter. During the public event, Braslow tweeted a video of a standoff between anti-maskers and a mall official – a common practice in the age of digital reporting.
  
  Braslow couldn't have known that, this week, someone would file a report about that same photojournalism and cause Twitter to lock down his account. The complaint led to Braslow being unable to tweet until he either successfully appealed the report or deleted the old tweets. He was stuck.

  Ahahahahahaha.

  "The videos in [my] post clearly represent newsworthy content, as they subsequently were picked up for broadcast by multiple affiliate stations and national outlets," said Braslow, who has previously appeared on CNN discussing his coverage of anti-vaccine rallies.

  Let me see where Twitter's policy has an exemption for newsworthiness....
  
  Oh wait, it doesn't, because the entire point of this policy is to shut down free speech.

  The rapidly unfolding campaign highlights how a tool intended to help protect vulnerable individuals has quickly evolved to help shield others from the scrutiny that might stem from their public actions.

  Funny how nobody predicted that this is exactly what would happen. Oh wait.

  "It's really important to view the current mass-reporting actions by the far right as just the latest salvo in an ongoing, concerted effort to memory-hole evidence of their crimes," said Chad Loder, an anti-fascist activist* who said they use their Twitter account to document examples of far-right extremism and police misconduct.

  Translator's note: "Anti-fascist activist" means fascist.

  On Thursday, Loder said they were trapped in an "endless cycle" of reports, account locks and appeals as one of their tweets was reported under the policy, restored by Twitter following an appeal, and then reported again on the same day, resulting in another temporary suspension linked to the same tweet.

  I am so upset by this that I have the hiccups.

  The speed, scale and enthusiasm with which some groups have invoked the policy – along with numerous enforcement errors – have prompted some experts to conclude that Twitter's policy is backfiring.

  Where would we be without experts?
  
  Probably Alpha Centauri.
  
  Even that idiot Popehat is weighing in:

  It's impossible they didn't know this would happen, and it's inexplicable they didn't plan for it.

  No, Ken, that's easy to explain. They're morons.
  
  
  

• Apple's M1 Max CPU has a secret interconnect bus. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And when I say secret, not only did Apple fail to mention it, they edited the published die photos to hide it.
  

  You guys seeing this or am I just crazy? The actual M1 Max die has an entire hidden section on the bottom which was not shown at all in Apple's official renders of the M1 Max die. Just flip another M1 Max and connect it for an M1 Max Duo chip. Then use I/O die for M1 Max Quadra. https://t.co/McWmofJAls pic.twitter.com/JogRwUGvF6

  — Vadim Yuryev (@VadimYuryev) December 2, 2021

  
  Not until someone sacrificed an expensive MacBook Pro and took their own die photos was this discovered.
  
  There are rumours that Apple is working on 20 core and 40 core Arm CPUs to replace Intel in their high-end systems, and now we know exactly how they plan to do that. The M1 Max is a 10 core chip, so two or four of those connected together will produce the rumoured high-end parts.
  
  AMD has been doing this for years - the 32 core Epyc server processors released in 2017 were simply four 8 core desktop chips wired together using the built-in interconnect.
  
  AMD has also done the secret feature trick more recently - apparently all Zen 3 chips shipped in the past year have the circuitry needed for the expanded cache in the recently announced high-end Milan-X server chips. Though I don't think AMD went so far as to edit die photos.
  
  It costs a lot of money to design a new chip and prepare it for production, so if you can bundle in a feature that you're not going to need for a year without delaying anything else, that can make commercial sense.
  
  It's likely that the interconnect, while present, isn't 100% functional yet, and there will be either a respin or a whole new version before the high-end multi-die processors can ship. But in the meantime Apple has an unlimited supply of test units.
  
  
  
• ActiLizzard management are not nice people. (WCCFTech)
  
  "I am shocked, shocked, to find bad behaviour going on in the gaming industry."
  "Your underaged Belorussian sex slave sir."
  "Oh, thank you very much."
  
  
  
• Windows 11 now lets you set a default browser. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  In earlier releases you had to track down at least four separate settings.

  "Through the Windows Insider Program you will continue to see us try new things based on customer feedback and testing. Most of them will be complete shit because ninety percent of our UX team is on meth, but what are you gonna do? No, seriously, what are we gonna do? These idiots are killing me."

  
  
  
• A hermaphroditic cannibal has washed up dead on a beach near San Diego. (MSN)
  
  Hrm.
  
  Oh, fish. A hermaphroditic cannibal fish has washed up dead on a beach near San Diego.
  
  That's normal.
  
  
  
• Python library of the day is LocalStack, which provides a local test version of AWS. (GitHub)
  
  Without the Amazon part. Install it on your own hardware or hosted server and spin up whichever services you need.
  
  The free version doesn't support every single AWS feature, but it goes a long way:
  
  
• ACM
• API Gateway
• CloudFormation
• CloudWatch
• CloudWatch Logs
• DynamoDB
• DynamoDB Streams
• EC2
• Elasticsearch Service
• EventBridge (CloudWatch Events)
• Firehose
• IAM
• Kinesis
• KMS
• Lambda
• Redshift
• Route53
• S3
• SecretsManager
• SES
• SNS
• SQS
• SSM
• StepFunctions
• STS

There's a paid version for €20 per month per developer that has even more features, but that's kind of a problem. What happens to the software running on my own server if I stop paying the monthly license fee?

The answer seems to be, don't do that. Inviting as it might be, this is for testing not for persistent data. Even the paid version has only a very basic persistence mechanism. The free version uses a replay log to restore the state - if you reboot it starts with a blank slate and just runs every API call you've sent since you last explicitly reset the data.

No people. No language. No war. Only spiders.

We communicate through sensation alone, touch, smell, taste. Feeling with our eight long legs. Beady black eyes look out, only to see a swarm of our brothers and sisters. They look back. We click. We scamper.

No air. No sea. No land. Only spiders.

We crawl over the bodies of one another. Suffocate against one another. A dark, writhing mass. We eat one another for sustenance. We lay our eggs in the carcasses of the deceased. Life and death cycle as it can, the living spring from the dead to have their turn. We breed. We rot.

No heat. No time. No space. Only spiders.

Were a wayward, miraculous human scientist to somehow observe us, it could be speculated that our atoms and molecules resemble the mass of our whole selves. Were a wayward, miraculous human scientist to somehow speculate on our universe, the shape of it could be thought to have a large abdomen, and eight scampering legs. We are, everything is spiders.

posted by Pixy Misa at 02:00 AM

| Access Comments