Daily Tech News 12 January 2022

• If the site suddenly goes offline... I did pay the bill, but the payment disappeared. I've given them the PayPal transaction details and also authorised them to charge my credit card, and they're looking into it, so it should all get sorted out. But I took an extra backup anyway.
  
  
  
• Is Web3 a scam? (Stack Diary)
  
  <shake shake>
  
  Signs point to yes.
  
  
  
• NFT projects are MLMs for tech elites. (Every)
  
  Yes. Mostly. I'm trying to do work using NFTs to solve practical problems, as ownership or identity tokens for digital property, where an NFT has an intrinsic value of a few cents to a few dollars.
  
  The people who burn tens of thousands of dollars on intrinsically worthless garbage annoy the hell out of me because they price the blockchain out of reach of the practical stuff I want to do. At best it's money laundering. That's at least an understandable motive.
  
  
  
• Blockchain apps are not what they appear to be. (Molly White)
  
  All too often they fail to deliver on their promises - and fail in the worst possible way.
  
  You could at least eat tulip bulbs.

• The PCIe 6 spec has been finalised. (AnandTech)
  
  This doubles bandwidth yet again - to as much as 128GBps in each direction on a x16 slot - by using four electrical levels rather than just 1 and 0, an encoding method known as PAM4.
  
  I don't expect it to arrive soon, but then I didn't expect PCIe 5 in consumer systems until maybe 2023, and it actually showed up in the new Intel Alder Lake systems last year
  
  
  
• Intel NUC 12 is on its way. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Some models have been cancelled but the regular models are still expected to ship.
  
  These will probably be using the 1200P range of CPUs, which have 8 low power cores and 2, 4, or 6 fast cores. Only the fastest model has 6 fast cores and that might not make it into a NUC, but the four i5 and i7 models with a 4+8 core configuration should be about twice as fast as current model NUCs, which is a pretty substantial generational advance.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel is desperately trying to pretend that they've never heard of Xinjiang province. (WCCFTech)
  
  It's a no-win situation for them. True, it's a no-win situation because the company is run by spineless worms, but it's still a no-win situation.
  
  
  
• Windows has an HTTP vulnerability that is not currently being actively exploited. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Only really affects Windows servers. Friends don't let friends run IIS.
  
  
  
• T-Mobile said it isn't "broadly blocking" Apple's Private Relay function. (9to5Mac)
  
  They blamed it mostly on an iOS bug that turns the function off.
  
  I mean, which is more likely, a cellular carrier behaving badly, or a stupid bug in an Apple operating system?
  
  
  
• Podcasting hasn't produced a hit in years. (Bloomberg)
  
  No surprise. Podcasting caught cancer in 2020 and died. Everyone with talent moved to YouTube.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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