Daily Tech News 9 December 2021

• Welcome to my world: Everyone is burned out. That's becoming a security nightmare. (ZDNet)
  
  I started working from home back in 2010, when long hours and frequent illness made it impossible for me to keep up with the demands of my job if I had to commute every day. (Later that year I was diagnosed with celiac disease and the illness mostly went away, to be replaced with being very annoying in restaurants.)
  
  Anyway, the first thing that happens when you start working from home is that you don't have to go in to the office.
  
  The second thing that happens is that you realise you can now never leave the office.

  The research suggests that 84% of security professionals are feeling burned out, compared with 80% of other workers.

  That's not a big difference, but if only one in six IT security specialists are actually functional - less than that, because a lot of the ones who aren't burned out will be idiots - we're basically doomed.
  
  All of us, not just QNAP and Ubiquiti.
  
  
  

• Chinese companies are recycling old laptop and server CPUs as gaming systems. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The example shown is a 16 core AMD Opteron. AMD's current 16 core systems are great. This one is not current, though; it's from 2010, and its single-core performance is worse than a cheap Atom-based laptop, despite using 20 times the power.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD server CPUs, there are new benchmarks of the new Milan-X chips, (WCCFTech)
  
  It is, um, slightly slower in these tests than regular Milan.
  
  The only difference here is that the X parts have three times as much cache, so the performance gain will be very much application-dependent, but it shouldn't make them slower.
  
  
  
• Details of Intel's new laptop chips continue to trickle out. (WCCFTech)
  
  A maximum of 6 full-sized cores, down from 8 in the previous generation, plus up to 8 low-power cores. Overall they will be faster in most tasks, but I'm avoiding these for a while because I'm worried about how well operating systems will handle the different core speeds.
  
  That was the issue that broke DRM on more than 50 games, and I don't think that's all it broke. Certainly not eager to combine Intel's new CPUs with Microsoft's new Windows. I'll let millions of other people do that.
  
  Meanwhile, my second Inspiron 16 Plus has shipped from the factory and is due to arrive before Christmas. They might need to deliver by submarine though.
  
  
  
• Writing a simple VM in less than 125 lines of C. (Andre Inc)
  
  Every serious programmer should write a virtual machine, and a simple compiler for it.
  
  
  
• Russia is busy banning TOR. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
  
• Which is weird because I was under the impression that they were busy hacking it. (Gizmodo)
  
  Pick one, guys, and stick with it.
  
  
  
• Upgraded to Windows 11 already? Disk running up to seven times slower? There's a fix on the way, at some point, probably. (The Register)

  Microsoft got back to us to say that a fix for this issue is in a preview build of Windows 11 issued on November 22nd.
  
  This preview includes a fix which states: "Addresses an issue that affects the performance of all disks (NVMe, SSD, hardisk) on Windows 11 by performing unnecessary actions each time a write operation occurs. This issue occurs only when the NTFS USN journal is enabled.

  NTFS USN journal? I didn't enable that.

  Note, the USN journal is always enabled on the C: disk.

  Gee, thanks.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:10 AM

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