Daily Tech News 8 January 2022

• Everyone in this story deserves everything that is about to happen to them: A new "tech startup" wants to allow people to bet on lawsuits using purpose-made cryptocurrencies. (Motherboard)
  
  That's an awful idea in at least three different ways but the people behind it aren't likely to have much time to enjoy the chaos because they are dumb enough to market the idea with "50%+ annual returns".
  
  Yes, anything that offers that is a Ponzi scheme - or a robbery - and yes, the feds do still take a dim view of such things.
  
  Unless they're the ones running it.
  
  
  
• Weekends are Question and Answer time. Drop your tech questions in the comments and I'll attempt to answer them tomorrow.
  
  
  
  

• If you offer a Patreon subscription in an international subscriber's local currency, you are now subject to the laws of that country. (The Register)
  
  Says a ruling by Lord Justice Fuckbiscuit of Britain.
  
  Since this is in regards to a libel suit, and libel laws in Britain are shit, this is important.
  
  The solution is to block all GDPR countries at the router. Let them eat cold kippers and warm beer.
  
  
  
• SonicWall has its own Y2K22 bug. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There is at least a patch for this one, unlike Honda cars which are trapped in 2002 until August.
  
  
  
• How a routine gem update created $73k in subscriptions. (SerpApi)
  
  They weren't hacked and subscribed to garbage services as I first thought. Rather, after updating the libraries for a code deployment (Ruby libraries are called "gems") their software charged existing customers an extra $73k.
  
  Why?
  
  Because (after much debugging on their side) there was a change in what "or" meant in a MongoDB database library.
  
  The maintainers of that library should be strapped to the outside of a rocket and launched directly at Cygnus X-1 because you do not ever, ever, ever do that.
  
  
  
• First impressions of Web3. (Moxie)
  
  Web3 is the web, only fucked up with catastrophically bad blockchain implementations which promise to decentralise everything but in fact centralise it on new platforms that don't answer to you any more than the current ones do but also cost you money.
  
  The article gives a specific example of the rapid corruption of a supposedly decentralised protocol.
  
  
  
• What is Web3? (Substack)
  
  Is it all a scam, or is it only almost all a scam?
  
  
  
• AMD's cheap(ish) new RX 6500 XT video cards kinda suck. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Only 4 PCIe lanes and missing hardware for video decoding, meaning that task lands back on your CPU, makes it a big pile of meh.
  
  
  
• A fire at ASML's factory in Berlin affected less than 1% of the floor space. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But the area is involved in making key components for EUV lithography, and ASML is the only company in the world that makes machines for EUV lithography.
  
  And EUV lithography is what is used to make all the latest computer chips. All of them.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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