Daily Tech News 27 December 2021

• Intel's low-end non-K Alder Lake parts are here. (WCCFTech)
  
  They're not supposed to be. They just are.
  
  The K on the end of an Intel CPU number indicates that it's unlocked and overclockable and burns power like a refrigerator with the doors open on the surface of the Sun. So if you're not looking to get 900fps in Contrastrike or whatever, the parts without the K are likely a better bet for you.
  
  As for them being here, well, sort of. We'll get to that in a moment.

• Intel ships a lot of engineering samples before a new product is launched, and although those samples are supposed to remain in the possession of Intel's approved engineering partners, sometimes they end up all over eBay and find their way into the hands of some guy named Steve with 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.
  
  
  
  
  This isn't a fully-enabled part but it does show the potential benefits of these lower-end parts: On a benchmark where the 12900K uses 240W, this part uses 70W. It's slower, yes, but not that much slower.
  
  
  
• Tumblr is having a hard time getting its app approved by Apple. (Tumblr)

  In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits' and finding porn. Sometimes they would search something more innocuous like 'socks' (yeah, i know) and find porn. Sometimes they would search something completely innocent and find porn anyways. Tumblr would get rejected.

  Tumblr used to used to serve a useful function for humanity. Not in that it hosted porn, but in that it hosted weird creepy porn so that all the otherkin demisexual newsoul types - if you don't know what that means then God bless you and keep you safe - all those furry pervert weirdos stayed on Tumblr.
  
  It was a containment field for the dregs of humanity.
  
  Then someone posted something too weird and creepy and Apple yanked Tumblr's app. Tumblr immediately removed that content, but since Apple wouldn't provide any clear guidance on what was and was not allowed - Rule One of Big Tech is Never explain, never apologise - Tumblr was left flailing around when Apple kept rejecting the app even though the creepiest of the creepy porn was now gone. Tumblr couldn't get their app reinstated even though other apps on the App Store also had weird creepy porn, so in the end they banned all adult content from their site.
  
  And without their fix the creepy porn fetishists scattered to the four winds, infecting and destroying other sites. Like Twitter. All of this was Apple's fault.

  Anywho, that's Apple for you. Why am I still an iOS developer? I dunno, I got bills to pay.

  And that was how I got banned from Twitter for the first time, for calling someone

  an exceptionally retarded bowl of cold oatmeal

  You can't use the R-word around these retards because it's too effective an insult - they are retards and on some level they know it.
  
  
  
• Py2Cr is a Python to Crystal translator. (GitHub)
  
  Not something you'd want to use to produce production code, and possibly not something you could use to produce production code, but still potentially handy.
  
  
  
• CPM Magnacut - not an 80s operating system but a new steel specifically for knives. (Knife Steel Nerds)
  
  This is an equal opportunity tech thread and though it's mostly computer stuff I'll happily toss in cool new tech from other fields as well.
  
  This is from back in March, though, since it can take a while for really specialised sites like Knife Steel Nerds to percolate through the nerd ecosystem and catch my attention.
  
  
  
• Have Single-Page Apps ruined the web? No, JavaScript frameworks ruined the web. (HTMX)
  
  Those, and Apple.
  
  
  
• Google is scanning your email and files for artcrime. (Forbes)
  
  I particularly like the way Forbes is proud to say that as no criminal charges have been filed they won't be identifying the artist - and then spend an entire paragraph triangulating them with hints.
  
  On the other hand this would land a whole lot of the useless weirdos plaguing the tech industry in jail for the rest of their lives. And half of CNN. I'm torn.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Tab M8 FHD is for sale on Amazon Australia.
  
  That's nice, even though I need to pay A$266 for something that sells for US$99, because literally the only available alternative for a decent small tablet (8" or so and at least 1920x1200 resolution) is Apple's iPad Mini starting at A$749.
  
  I've been using my Tab M10 lately because my ancient Nexus 7s are, well, ancient, but it's too large for comfort when reading in bed.
  
  Gonna get one.

• On August 1, I ventured out into occupied Sydney and bought chicken nuggets, Russia hacked 27 US Attorney's offices, Chinese hackers hacked insecure home routers, physicists built the world's first time crystal - this being the 21st century or something, the GAO told Jeff Bezos to hit the road, Intel's Itanium was finally dead, praise the cube, and the Asus ProArt Studiopro Pro 16 Pro leaked on Amazon China - wait, Amazon China?
  
  
  
• On August 2, we planned to get three of the slimline Intel NUCs and they were immediately discontinued, Thunderbolt 5 was trinary, Google scrapped Google Reader, YAPSP, and Paul Hansmeier continued running the scam that landed him in jail from his jail cell.
  
  
  
• On August 3, Huawei set up an Arm-based datacenter in Moscow for when you want your data backed up by all the world's major intelligence agencies, a dual-socket Epyc motherboard for just over a grand, Windows 10 started blocking PUPs which could have been useful if it worked properly but it doesn't so it isn't, China was hacking phone companies throughout Southeast Asia, and the Pentagon's new AI could predict what day it would be several days in advance.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 4, the server crashed and I promised to get us migrated to a new server soon and we all know how that turned out - which is to say, I just got a database snapshot over to my new development server, the US government tried to fund $1 trillion of expenditures with $28 billion in revenue, Apple had new video cards, and a keyboard that somehow only worked on a couple of specific Mac models, build your own CDN in 5 hours, Journalists for Censorship were at it again, DRAMless SSDs - just say no, I was getting a Dell - which I did, and it was very nice, and was immediately discontinued, Microsoft ran out of servers, supply chain attacks were getting worse, ten-year-old unpatched Android devices finally lost support, and South Korea declared war on Apple and Google's payment monopolies.
  
  
  
• On August 5, our friend Brickmuppet suffered a stroke - and blogged about it while waiting for the ambulance, my twin HP Spectre X2s turned out to be toast thanks to battery bloat, supercomputing could fix the blockchain said idiots, and the IRS seized $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency.
  
  
  
• On August 6, Apple wasn't spying on you - they were spying on your children, Apple cared so much about your privacy that they wouldn't permit anyone else to violate it, Intel's upcoming Alder Lake chips with their super-efficient low-power cores would eat electricity like popcorn, I was getting a second Dell laptop - and in fact I now have two of that model since it didn't get immediately discontinued, getting put on a secret list as a service (GPOASLAAS), the US government planned to track you everywhere you went, and Google's new cameras worked.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 7, an internal Apple memo called people who opposed their plans to spy on children "the screeching voices of the minority", perpceptual* hashes had the same problem as all AI - they're 90% A and only 10% I, the Tame Apple Press got shredded, WhatsApp joined the pile-on, CalyxOS was Android without the Google, Intel was investing $120 billion in a new chip fab location, the TSVs were coming from inside the die, venue shopping above and beyond, and just how doomed was the blockchain exactly.
  
  * I mean "perceptual" but that typo is too good to fix.
  
  
  
• On August 8, Sydney pissed on the lockdown rules, the Tame Apple Press bit the hand that beat it, you could finally expand the storage on your Playstation 5 which you don't have because you can't get it anywhere, why CAPTCHA photos are so depressig, yeet that router, octal considered harmful to everyone, everyone was collateral damage in the Elastic War, and a long way to a small angry your mom joke.
  
  
  
• On August 9, we looked at SCEditor and pronounced it pretty darn good, th first of those Dells arrived, Edge dived head-first into a giant swirling cauldron of suck, a DMCA takedown notice was sent to Google demanding the removal of links to 127.0.0.1, a long list of broken stuff in Windows 11, testing high-end SSDs across different CPUs, and a 256MB boot partition, why?
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 10, Brickmuppet came back to us at the turn of the tide, anti-government hackers hacked the entire Belarus government, Intel's Arrow Lake targeted AMD's Zen 5 - probably sometime in 2024, Synology took its turn in the massive security vulnerability chair, and the second hardest naturally-occurring substance.
  
  
  
• On August 11, the Radeon 6600XT was a video card, you could finally run Windows 11 on an Arm-based Mac and it sucked, hackers stole $600 million from Poly Network, a cyrptocurrency exchange, what's wrong with Ethereum: a wrong answer, both QNAP and Synology NASes got targeted by ransomware - though not mine because they're unplugged and turned off right now, and Amazon was awarded a double-top-secret contract to provide cloud services to the NSA because sure why not.
  
  
  
• On August 12, Samsung flipped and folder, the hacker who stole $600 million from Poly Network sent them $256 million and a thank you note, NSW police arrested a man posting mean tweets... involving threats to harm horses, so yeah, throw the book at him, and Stardock announced Start11.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 13, Apple needed to be thrown in a volcano - and many Apple employees agreed, DDR5-4800 was the new DDR4-3200, physicists created a Wigner Crystal this time, Reddit was valued at $10 billion somehow, and Twitter push an update that everyone hated. I couldn't remember which one this was - it was their own stupid font. They're still using that thing but they've banned me again so it doesn't really bother me since I rarely see it.
  
  
  
• On August 14, Apple "regretted" "confusion" over its plans to spy on your children, and rolled out checklists to "explain" to customers why it was spying on their children, the WD Black SN750 4TB model was real, the Wuhan Bat Virus Lab was not actually across the road from the Wuhan Bat Soup Market, MacOS 11.5.2 was a 2.5GB patch that fixed - Apple wasn't saying so we don't know, a look at a new QNAP NAS, and Facebook Messenger got end-to-end encryption.
  
  
  
• On August 15, 64GB of RAM is enough for anybody, if you have two of them, it wasn't 1Password's fault that MacOS sucked, and the Perl development community disintegrated.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 16, the Biden Administration admonished the Taliban for being insufficiently woke, everyone wished they had waited a week before airing their dirty laundry, Microsoft wanted to emulate the Belarussian secret police, Russia was caught doing exactly what everyone already knew they were doing, Huawei was caught doing exactly what everyone already knew they were doing, T-Mobile said they may or may not have been hacked (spoiler - they were hacked), do not buy the Crucial P2, Nestflix and chill, and this incident report:

  An SUV collided with a bus. The bus collided with a power pole, which fell on the bus and took power out.
  
  The fire station is right next door, but the doors are electrically operated. When they crank them open manually, there are live electrical cables blocking access. The rear exit is blocked by an electrically operated gate.
  
  Meanwhile the SUV is on fire but the passengers on the bus are trapped by the downed power cables.
  
  Then things get complicated.

  
  
  
• On August 17, the Biden Administration leaked the entire secret terrorist watchlist onto the internet - it even got indexed by search engines, the Memorial Health System got hacked, T-Mobile confirmed that it got hacked which everyone already knew, and Chase Bank wasn't hacked - they were just idiots.
  
  
  
• On August 18, Poly Network got all its money back and offerered the hacker half a million bucks and the position of chief security advisor, which seems appropriate, Reichskaren Ardern locked down New Zealand over a single case of Bat Flu, memory prices were coming down, new Threadripper and Threadripper Pro parts were expected soon - which didn't happen, an Earth-shattering kaboom, and the critical flaw was coming from inside the house.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 19, researchers showed that Apple's magical neural hashes were broken, this is how you get consent decrees, Raptor Lake would have up to 24 cores sort of, the US Census Bureau got hacked - last year, 46.8 million past and present T-Mobile users had a bad day, and with the ongoing Chinese implosion TSMC was the most valuable company in Asia.
  
  
  
• On August 20, Intel announced the announcement of Alder Lake, their GPU team went full chuuni, Apple's neural hashes collided with reality, LinkedIn had a tiny flaw that let anyone post a job opening on any company's LinkedIn page, OnlyFans committed autotumblrisation, and TikTok was collecting biometric data on its users because of course they were.
  
  
  
• On August 21, Apple announced - we swear we are not making this up - that they were "the greatest platform for distributing child porn" - a direct quote and phrase you might wish to avoid accidentally pasting into your search bar like I just did, Google handed your location data to the police, collaborative filtering didn't work for Chatroulette, and Tesla's D1 hit 362 TFLOPs or 80mpg, whichever came first.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 22, Intel's 12th gen parts outperformed 11th gen parts - on a GPU benchmark, how to beat Windows 11 into submission, Google bribed game developers not to abandon the Play Store, AT&T said they definitely weren't hacked and the database of 70 million customers was fake - which is actually plausible,because these lists are sold to other hackers and its easier to fake it than to actually hack in and get the real data, GM recalled 73,000 faulty Bolts, a judge ruled that California voters had infringed upon the rights of California politicians by, uh, voting, and I found the perfect monitor and it was out of stock - but it eventually came back into stock and right now is on sale at about 25% off so I'm going to get two more of them.
  
  
  
• On August 23, Bus Factor Zero, puppy murder was not the vote grabber it used to be, ShotSpotter was decidedl sus, the latest Firecuda was very fast indeed, Samsung showed of 512GB DDR5 memory modules, a new Mac Mini was allegedly on its way, AMD discussed 2D, 2.5D, 3D, and 4D chiplet technology using hydrophilic Dielectric-Dielectric Bonding with Direct CU-CU bonded interconnects, the book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty was based on fake data, and how to get admin access to any Windows machine with a mouse and, um, no, pretty much just the mouse. Oh,and there was a sudden outbreak of very, very Australian vtubers.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 24, over 1000 apps built with Microsoft's Power Apps tool leaked private data because nobody ticked the "don't leak private data" box, Western Digital silently swapped out the flash chips in their SN550, AMD CPU pricing returned to Earth, though GPUs remained in orbit somewhere beyond Mars, and IBM's new mainframe CPUs were big chips full of stuff.
  
  
  
• On August 25, the Cerebras CS-2 was a single chip with 850,000 cores using 15kW of power, Google's new motto appeared to be "If you control language, you control thought", Google told its slaves to shut up and get back to work, a hacker stole 600,000 private photos from iCloud by pretending to be from Apple tech support, if you unlocked the bootloader on a Galaxy Z Fold 3 the wheels fell off, and Hololive Indonesia announced auditions for Gen 3.
  
  
  
• On August 26, slavery with benefits, Intel's upcoming 12900K showed early signs of not completely sucking, CanIStillUse was a site tracking feature deprecation the way CanIUse tracked implementation, OnlyFans adopted antidesentumblrarianism, there was a big bug in Geth, and how to escape a hungry bear using math.
  
  
  
• On August 27, with all the component swapping in SSDs we we suggested you just buy a970 Evo Plus - which turned out to also have been the victim of component swapping, Synology had another big bug, though in its networking gear rather than its NASes, and Reddit said no to the Nazis. The real Nazis - the ones who call everybody else Nazis.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 28, Microsoft consigned hundreds of millions of PCs to the landfill, Fractal Design's new case was recalled before it burned anyone's house down which was a nice change, Uncaught RangeError: Value undefined out of range for undefined options property undefined, which Android tablet was right for you, and a teeny tiny HUGE FUCKING BUG in Microsoft's Cosmos cloud database.
  
  
  
• On August 29, Microsoft announced that if you manually install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware you wouldn't get any updates and there was much rejoicing, Asus NUCs had no audio because there were no audio chips, Alder Lake chips could draw up to 350W, that Cosmos DB bug was called "the worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine at least until December when expectations will get reset like you couldn't believe", and Facebook was banning certain Bat Flu links in private messages.
  
  
  
• On August 30, I added the third verse:

  January 20, 2021 -
  The press goes back to sleep
  After four years
  Of moral outrage
  At being forced
  To pretend
  To do their jobs.
  
  Now again they can bask
  In the warm praise
  Of government apparatchiks
  For asking pre-screened questions
  Regarding the color
  Of the paint
  On the presidential plane.
  
  Some months later
  When everything has gone
  Quite predictably to Hell
  The question on every journalist's lips
  Is how could the public
  Have got all of this
  So wrong?

  That was posted originally to Twitter in three parts. They've since banned me and deleted it, but that's a story for another day.
  
  
  
• Still on August 30, 40% of code suggestions by GitHub's new AI tool Copilot contained security vulnerabilities, the new Threadripper Pro 5995WX was 40% faster than the 3995W - if it ever showed up, Google Play turned a profit of $8.5 billion on presumably net revenue of $11.2 billion, and a very large computer case.
  
  
• And on August 31, Arm China hoisted the black flag and began slitting throats, China generally was busy scrubbing that internet thing clean of facts, a roundup of the best consumer hard drives, there was one good small Android tablet - but it was completely unavailable in Australia, a situation I just discovered has been corrected, and a bug in Google's search app prevented some phones from, um, making phone calls.

posted by Pixy Misa at 02:00 AM

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