Daily Tech News 1 January 2022

• 2021 in review: A year of data disaster. (ZDNet)
  
  The top 30 data breaches of 2021. It was such a year that not all of these even made my own roundup.
  
  
  
• The 10 "best" VPN deals available for 2022. (ZDNet)
  
  When something on ZDNet is marked "ZDNet Academy", that's bait. They want to sell you something that is almost certainly garbage.
  
  
  
• The best phones of 2022 so far. (ZDNet)
  
  This article is not marked "ZDNet Academy" and the phones listed are decent if horribly overpriced. The catch here is the article is chock full of affiliate links.
  
  Gotta make a buck somehow, I guess, and I'm sure as hell not going to unblock ads on the typical commercial website.
  
  
  

• A program for cheaper internet for low-income households launches today. (The Verge)
  
  They're not making internet cheaper, of course. They're not doing anything except shuffling money around and making sure some of it sticks to their fingers.
  
  
  
• Just like green energy projects. (The Verge)
  
  Fund research directly, sure. But at some point you have to kick it out of the nest to plummet to the ground where it will either thrive or get eaten by a weasel.
  
  
  
• More alleged rumours of leaks of AMD's new Rembrandt chips have surfaced. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has 8 Zen 3 (or possibly Zen 3+) CPU cores, 12 RDNA2 graphics cores - by comparison the Xbox Series S has 20 so this isn't bad at all for a laptop chip, a 128-bit DDR5/LPDDR5 memory interface - not clear if this is backwards compatible with DDR4 and LPDDR4 but probably, dual USB 4.0 ports, dual USB 3.1 ports, dual 10Gb Ethernet ports which probably aren't going to see much use in laptops, and 20 lanes of PCIe 4 - enough for a chipset, two SSDs, and dedicated graphics.
  
  It's built on TSMC's 6nm process, which is really just a refresh of 7nm, but does provide worthwhile benefits on power, performance, and size.
  
  This should make for some really nice laptops this year.
  
  
  
• All the remaining Alder Lake parts have leaked as well. (VideoCardz)
  
  Again. Nothing really new here and these are going to be announced officially in a couple of days at CES anyway.
  
  
  
• SIXBIT OR BUST. (OpenCore)
  
  Unicode sucks. Even lower case is an unwelcome neologism,
  
  
  
• Half a dozen serious vulnerabilities persist in Netgear's Nighthawk R6700v3. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Hmm. I just ordered a Netgear Nighthawk router, but I went much higher up the food chain because I want my WiFi network to just work. Maybe I should have gone Asus again. After all, my fingers have grown back after last time.
  
  Update: Okay, the Asus model they recommend is 10% faster than the Netgear I have on order and 80% more expensive, so no.
  
  
  
• Azure is half the size of AWS. (Thurrott.com)
  
  That's honestly not too bad. AWS owns 40% of the cloud space and Azure 20%. I'd rather they all crashed and burned and were never heard from again, but at least no-one owns half the market.
  
  
  
• Intel's thread director is coming to Linux. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The problem with Intel's new Alder Lake chips is that there's a huge difference between the performance and efficiency cores, both in speed and power consumption, and the operating system has to keep track of which cores should be running which programs.
  
  I'd prefer not to have to deal with this at all, but the efficiency cores truly are efficient - for suitably multi-threaded tasks they can deliver twice the throughput per watt.
  
  
  
• Threw some more money at GOG. Didn't know there was DLC for Grim Dawn, for example. It's rather refreshing to see reviews for DLC and instead of 2/5 It's a cash grab but it does add a couple of useful things it's 5/5 The developer has hit it out of the park yet again.
  
  Plus War for the Overworld, which looks like the true successor the the classic Dungeon Keeper, Stellar Tactics which looks like the work of a single developer, the classic Emperor of the Fading Suns, and some more Stellaris DLC.
  
  Also, GOG's order history page is weird. If you got to the checkout and then decided to go back and change your order it creates an entry marked "pending order" that I sure hope goes away after a while because I did that a lot and the page is full of them.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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