« We're Gonna Need A Bigger ONT | Main | The Morning Report - 1/21/22 »

Daily Tech News 21 January 2021

Top Story

• A lot is made of how the blockchain is distributed and decentralised and fault-tolerant and no one person can control it and then a hamster in Hong Kong sneezes and all your NFTs disappear. (ZDNet)
  
  OpenSea's site went down around 6AM and was restored by 8:30AM. And the blockchains themselves - Ethereum, Klaytn, and Polygon are the ones OpenSea supports - were working as usual, or in the case of Polygon, completely fucked - again - but still technically alive.
  
  But NFTs were missing from users' wallets another seven hours. What was going on?
  
  Well, you have to understand that blockchain APIs are basically garbage. Writing a wallet that can actually display a user's NFTs on an Ethereum-compatible network using the standard APIs is nightmarishly difficult. It's the mobile app equivalent of making a chicken sandwich from scratch.

  It ultimately took him six months and $1,500 to make the final product using a thorough 16-step process that required him to grow a garden (step 1), harvest wheat (step 10) and even, yes, slaughter a chicken (step 14).

  But OpenSea has an API that makes it much easier. So, not wanting to spend six months only to end up choking a chicken, every wallet developer uses the OpenSea API.
  
  Every wallet developer.
  
  When OpenSea hiccups, every NFT wallet in the world breaks.
  
  Because decentralisation.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• C kind of sucks. (Jean G3nie)
  
  Use Ada.
  
  Seriously.
  
  
  
• The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a bill intended to curb the self-promotion of Big Tech. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Basically the companies will be forbidden from promoting their own products over those over competitors. Amazon can't push Amazon Basics higher up in the search results than Random Factory In China.
  
  Whether this will happen and whether it will have any effect remains to be seen.
  
  
  
• Twitter is stupid. (ZDNet)
  
  It just is.
  
  
  
• The FAA says that 78% of planes can safely land and airports with 5G C-band. (The Verge)
  
  By next year they hope to figure out which 78%.
  
  
  
• Samsung has new tablets on the way. (Liliputing)
  
  Ranging from 11" to 14.6" with screen resolutions starting at 2560x1600, so small and cheap these are not, but all models will have Qualcomm's brand new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 with an Arm X2 core.

Pixy Is Watching Video of the Day



I was scrolling through Amazon Prime (I cancelled Netflix long ago but keep Prime for the free deliveries) wondering if they had anything worth my time. They have House but it doesn't have Teardrop as the opening theme so forget that. And then I tripped over Iroduku. And ended up watching it until around 2AM.
Rewatching it, because I've seen it already; it's just that good.

Also, the YouTube ID for that video is zZSksScSczs.

If you don't have Amazon Prime don't fret because somehow the whole thing is also on YouTube.





House Like It's 2022 Video of the Day



The three opening themes of House. The first is Teardrop by Massive Attack, and is the only correct theme. The second one is like when your favourite brand is out of stock and you have to buy store brand and you get it home and you find that it's actually not that bad but you go right back to your regular brand anyway.

The third is predigested crap.

So guess which one Amazon is giving me.



Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day





Disclaimer: The problem with making a chicken sandwich from scratch is you just can't get good scratch anymore.