Daily Tech News 8 December 2021

• Twitter has bought chat platform Quill. (Quill)
  
  If you use Quill, you have three days to download your history before they turn the servers off. I'm not being snarky, they are literally doing that.

  Can I export my team's Direct Messages (DMs)?

  No, we do not allow the export of Direct Messages.

  If I don't export, will you delete my data?

  Yes. On 1pm PST, Saturday, December 11th 2021 we will delete all user data, whether or not you've exported it.

  Well, thanks.
  
  
• So, that happened.
  
  

  The bad: AWS is down
  The good: I've seen so many dogs today #AWSOutage #awsdown pic.twitter.com/BoGNLu7ZAa

  — Candice Singh (@cgirl312) December 7, 2021

• Amazon's US-East-1 datacenter suffered increased error rates today. (CRN)
  
  This is in the same sense as "Jeffrey Epstein didn't increase his own error rates". AWS US-East-1 burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp.
  
  With it went a few little sites like Netflix and Disney+ and, oh, Amazon itself. Tens of thousands of Adele fans waiting in virtual line for pre-release tickets were not impressed when the whole thing was rescheduled, and they weren't notified by email because email services relying on AWS were also down. (Fortune)
  
  Coinbase, Binance, dYdX (which is a cool name for a derivatives trading platform I must admit) and blockchain gateway Infura all suffered outages, which makes you wonder just how decentralized this decentralized finance thingy really is. (Be In Crypto)
  
  Alexa wouldn't talk to you, Kindles couldn't kindle, Roombas couldn't roomb, and Ring video doorbells couldn't burn down your house. (The Verge)
  
  Within Amazon, not a creature was stirring, not even a wireless mouse. (Business Insider)
  
  AWS is not just a product, it's Amazon's own computer system. With that down, the storefront went down, and all the inventory and logistics services went with it. Delivery drivers were paid and sent home because there was nothing they could do - there's no paper trail for this, not at Amazon's scale.
  
  Instacart, Venmo, CashApp, Roku, McDonald's app and automated kiosks, Tinder, and Delta Air Lines all went off the air. (USA Today)
  
  We only have one direct AWS dependency at work, and that's at US-West-2 a thousand miles away, but it went down for six hours anyway.
  
  We have quite a few indirect dependencies, though, so my day was spent cleaning up after all of those services failed.
  
  

  @awscloud @AWSSupport #AWSOutage pic.twitter.com/lQvSchNqtn

  — stackable.Ξth / Adam Grohs 🏝 (@agrohs) December 8, 2021

  
  There is no cloud, there's just someone else's computer, and it's down.
  
  
  
• Oh, QNAP. Not again. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Do not under any circumstances attach your network-attached storage to a network.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's Blue SN570 is pretty good and pretty cheap. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a DRAMless TLC drive, which is a viable option if you're on a budget and not running Oracle databases. But if you look around you'll likely find the Samsung 970 EVO for only about 10% more, and it's worth the 10%.
  
  
  
• Leaked benchmarks of AMD's new laptop chips puts the graphics performance just short of a GTX 1650. (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is to say, pretty darn good for integrated graphics, more than double the performance of the current generation.
  
  
  
• Notepad now has a dark mode. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Its mother insists it's just a phase.
  
  
  
• DARPA-funded researchers did not accidentally create the world's first warp bubble. (The Debrief)
  
  The article is horseshit.

  "To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble," White told The Debrief, quickly dispensing with the notion that this is anything other than the creation of an actual, real-world warp bubble. "Hence the significance."

  Yeah, nah. Funnily enough, the actual published research paper - of which White himself is the lead author - says nothing of the sort. It's full of words like "intriguing" and "correlation" and starkly short on "actual real-world warp bubbles".

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:35 AM

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