Daily Tech News 25 December 2021

• Is it even worth working on open source software anymore? (Gavin Howard)
  
  The world largely runs on open source software, but not only is 99.9% of the revenue swallowed up by huge corporations, those corporations work tirelessly to make sure that the people that made that revenue possible will never see a penny of it.
  
  This is why GPL - and AGPL - exist. Richard Stallman might be crazy, but he's not wrong.
  
  The same author notes that the problems are not isolated to open source software, but plague the entire industry.
  
  I think that's one reason so many developers jumped on cryptononsense - you can skim the money off directly without needing anything from Big Tech.
  
  
  
• Yesterday we reported on upcoming dual-socket Threadripper workstations and today there's a benchmark of a dual-socket Threadripper workstation. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except that this benchmark is of current-generation chips, not next-generation.
  
  This is more marketing than engineering because Threadripper chips are exactly the same hardware as Epyc server chips, just configured with different power/performance curves. The motherboards are different, but there's no fundamental reason you couldn't just two Threadrippers into a server board.

• Gigabyte's 2022 Aero 16 will have the Four Essential Keys. (VideoCardz)
  
  And the new 12900HK CPU, new 3070 Ti or 3080 Ti graphics, and according to the article a 16" 3840x2600 display. That's an odd resolution but it's roughly 3:2 which is becoming popular. And it's an OLED display, with 100% coverage of DCI-P3 and HDR500 support.
  
  But looking at the photos it seems to have lost many of the ports of the 2021 model - it only has three USB-C and a headphone jack, where the current model also has HDMI, mini-DisplayPort, USB-A, and wired Ethernet.
  
  
  
• Chrome release 100 will be out soon, wreaking havoc for users of badly-written websites. (Cyber Kendra)
  
  Not because it changes anything, but because those sites sort in alphabetical order rather than numeric and won't understand that version 100 is newer than version 99.
  
  
  
• The Iodyne Pro Data is interesting but horribly overpriced. (Serve the Home)
  
  It offers 12 M.2 slots in a fairly compact case, and eight Thunderbolt ports so you can connect multiple computers to it. It handles RAID and some sort of filesystem sharing though it's not clear exactly what, since it's not a conventional NAS.
  
  
  
• Door Dash will require all employees to spend a day doing deliveries once a month. (MarketWatch)
  
  All employees are understandably upset, but this is overall a good idea. A lot of companies would be less terrible if everyone had to spend a day a month performing the shitty jobs at the very roots of the corporate tree.

• On June 1, Ryzen desktop CPUs received integrated graphics, the 3080 Ti arrived because why not, Wikpedia's own Wikipedia page got hit with a DMCA takedown notice, and Microsoft announced a package manager for managing packages.
  
  
  
• On June 2, Russian hackers - which is to say, Russia - targeted meat processor JBS, everyone banned Belarus, Amazon scored 75,000 own goals, and magical metamaterial microscopes.
  
  
  
• On June 3, Amazon's warehouse injury rates were somehow, like, totally off the charts, man, video cards were HOLY CRAP THAT'S EXPENSIVE, the next version of windows loomed, there would never be a Python 4, Huawei launched its own operating system - Harmony OS - which was a very hastily papered-over version of Android, and don't use Chinese web browsers.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 4, the Supremes reined in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which had been seen by prosecutors as a convenient way to double criminal charges on almost anything, we gave up and ordered pizzas, firewall your firewalls, and Cloudflare was a big fat bag of money waiting to be sued.
  
  
  
• On June 5, Microsoft blamed "human error" for the suspicious disappearance of inconvenient search results, the Radeon Pro W6800 was a very expensive way to buy a Radeon 6800, Medium was the latest company to post a "no communism on company time" notice, there was nothing more expensive than a free tier, Apple really hated its own developers, and DON'T CONNECT CRITICAL FUCKING INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET.
  
  
  
• On June 6, Apple fixed the problem frying M1 Macs' SSDs - which cannot be repair or replaced, all Zen 4 desktop CPUs would have integrated graphics (latest news is that it will just be four RDNA2 clusters, which isn't enough for gaming but is better than nothing), Big Tech discovered that getting socialists elected is a terrible idea, Windows 11, and Amelia from Hololive raised $18,000 for an animal shelter... In three minutes.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 7, Microsoft Edge continued its descent into crapware, Chia ruined everything, and the USAF contracted SpaceX to deliver rocketmail.
  
  
  
• On June 8, Rule One of Never Trust Anyone Club, Quis stealodiet ipsos stealodes, it was the one week of the year when Apple pretended not to hate all its own developers, CPUs were back in stock, and antivirus software became indistinguishable from a virus.
  
  
  
• On June 9, paging James Burke, laptop makers ran out not of CPUs or GPUs or RAM or anything like that but the power interface chip needed to provide Thunderbolt powers, patch all your Adobes, patch all your Windows, and everyone's favourite foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza dragon announced her retirement.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 10, Bitcoin vs. the volcano, ransoming cows, the 3070 Ti arrived in reviewers' hands to a resounding meh, Western Digital and Seagate ramped up production of disk drives - just a bit, knowning full well that Chia would crash, patch your Chrome, Ring said, and a certain foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza indie vtuber gained 200,000 followers overnight.
  
  
  
• On June 11, networks didn't, Intel offered $2 billion for RISC-V designer SiFive, dirt as a service, hackers broke into Electronic Arts' network and discovered there are worse things than chipped Cthulhu on toast, Samsung's security kinda sucked, and Melbourne really sucked.
  
  
  
• On June 12, Microsoft promised they would finally stop updating Windows 10 in 2025, the 11900KB was as fast as the 11900K at half the power and you couldn't have one, TSMC expanded the expansion of its expansion plans, BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize - for documenting China's genocide, where the New York Times won the same prize for covering up Stalin's genocide, Slack considere harmful, and the New York state senate passed a right to repair bill - sort of but not really.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 13, Codecov got hacked because they are retards, Audi / VW got hacked because they are retards, McDonalds got hacked, blockchain ruined everything, China ruined blockchain which was maybe a good thing, no-one was silly enough to announce PLC flash, click on this link, and when in doubt bribe the reviewer.
  
  
  
• On June 14, any sufficiently profound incompetence was indistinguishable from malice, 80% of the audience of the Microsoft / Bethesda E3 stream was watching Hololive, dude, where's my flying car, room 222 got banned, and a prebuilt system that didn't suck.
  
  
  
• On June 15, Apple ruined everything, GaN chargers were small but expensive, there was a new Razer laptop which didn't have the Four Essential Keys because they never do, everyone got hit by ransomware, and the new US National Security Advisor was a complete wanker.
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 16, Windows 11 leaked, Amazon blocked FloC too, RAID expansion arrived for ZFS, Google's phishing protection sucked, and exercise bikes got hacked, somehow.
  
  
  
• On June 17, GPU prices were dropping - just not very much, upcoming motherboards for the upcoming Alder Lake CPUs where coming up, Tim Cook said that fundamental human rights were all well and good but not at the expense of, well, expense, President Biden gave Russia a list of things not to attack - yes, really, Amazon blamed everyone else, and Datadog left something unwelcome on the carpet.
  
  
  
• On June 18, it was time to stop worrying and start panicking, update your Chrome - yes, again, Carnival joined the ransomware fleet, Ukrainian hackers actually got arrested, and AMD's latest high-end video card was not actually available to purchase, at all, anywhere.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 19, Windows had eight inconsistent UI designs, the US Senate proposed tax credits for new silicon chip fabs - which is far from the worst waste of money they've come up with recently, handy HTML tricks, Russia banned VPNs that were too secure for their liking - and hacked Poland's email servers, Oregon legalised human composting, and I forgot that I was the one who came up with that name
  
  
  
• On June 20, DDR5 RAM was here - only to disappear once there was actually a use for it, QNAP had a dual 100GbE adaptor so you could get hacked 100x faster, North Korea hacked South Korea, yet another news story that was previously an episode of Doctor Who, and journalists turned mental illness into performance art.
  
  
  
• On June 21, the New Yorker tried to blame anime on Donald Trump, carbonised chikuwas, the Asus ROG Swift PG32UQX was honestly not worth it, Intel promised that its GPUs would eventually not entirely suck, we all sang the Doom song, and I wisely excluded Rust from the list of the three most important programming languages.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 22, we got a leak of the upcoming Ryzen V3000 embedded chip and it looked exactly the same as the latest leak of the upcoming Ryzen 6000 laptop chip - because it is, China continued ruining crypto mining and therewas great rejoicing, being 100% compatible meant reproducing all the bugs too, and ADATA was in the news.
  
  
  
• On June 23, AMD's upscaking solution worked pretty okayish sort of, SiFive caught up with Arm chips from 2017, Brave had its own search engine sort of, a bug found in 800,000 firewalls got patched sort of and the beatings would continue until the smiles improved.
  
  
  
• On June 24, a couple of kids in South Africa made off with $3.6 billion in Bitcoin - I wonder if their remains were ever found, John McAfee was found dead in a Spanish prison, NewsBlur got hacked and held to ransom and restored from backups and was back online in a couple of hours, the Microsoft Store was crashing on Windows but fortuntely not on any of the other operating systems that it doesn't run on anyway, "What they should do is tell the Chinese government to shove a pumpkin up its ass and sing Lili Marlene.", and West Taiwain was working its way forward into 2014.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 25, Microsoft actually got around to announcing Windows 11, you need to fill out the TPM report first, Sydney had its first brush with Bat Flu lockdowns, we remembered when $600 billion was a lot of money, Hong Kong's Apple Daily got written to the blockchain, and someone needed to go into orbit, unplug the Hubble, blow on the connector, and plug it back in.
  
  
  
• On June 26, Macs couldn't run Windows or corporate VPNs, update your Dell SupportAssist - or uninstall it, either works, we had no computers that could run Windows 11 either, kids these days, Mozilla announced Rally, a 100% secure data sharing system that didn't exist, making it really easy for the thiees, and right to unglue.
  
  
  
• On June 27, Microsoft's own flagship Surface Studio 2 wasn't on the Windows 11 compatibility list, Google delayed Floc by two years after the entire world told them to shove it, genocide, schmenocide said YouTube, Huawei was sus, Microsoft signed the package of a Chinese rootkit, and NASA did a software update of a helicopter on Mars.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 28, the Eternal October begins, Windows 11 didn't need TPM, it just required it, Unicode 14.0 supported Toto, Cypro-Minoan - which no-one can read, Vithkuqi, Tangsa, and Old Uyghur, Binance was refused licenses to operate anywhere, and open offices sucked.
  
  
  
• On June 29, Microsoft didn't know what hardware you needed to run Windows 11 so please stop asking, the Fuck You software pattern, the SafeDollar stable coin plunged in value by, uh, exactly 100%, and with everyone fleeing Google's AMP they rebaited the hook and started fishing again.
  
  
  
• And on June 30, Microsoft apologised for the confusion over Windows 11 and explained that the cheese was supposed to go in the silver cup and the addled mice in the bronze soup bowl, the HP Pavilion Aero looked pretty good actually expect for the limit of 16GB of RAM, yes, those WD My Books got hacked, because the master password was, um, commented out, Russia hacked Denmkar's central bank, and the 700 million publicly accessible emails of LinkedIn users were publicly accessible because they were publicly accessible.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 02:00 AM

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