Daily Tech News 25 January 2022

• Just want to make it clear that the crew of The Incomparable network are definitely probably not communists and their D&D podcast Total Party Kill in particular is great fun.
  
  Unless they've switched to 5e in which case I will be duty bound to declare it anathema. Honestly it's been all downhill since they removed level names.
  
  
  
• Also, Tucows is still not dead.
  
  
  
• This way to the egress: Save 99% on your Amazon Cloudfront bill with this one simple trick! (Fleet)
  
  Don't use Cloudfront.
  
  In this case Fleet reduced their monthly bandwidth expenses from $2457 to $41 by delivering content from German hosting platform Hetzner rather than directly from AWS. Amazon - and Google and Microsoft and IBM - charge absurd rates for bandwidth.
  
  I posted an item not long ago about Amazon reducing their bandwidth charges except that I couldn't find the price reductions listed anywhere. Turns out the reason is that there was no reduction.
  
  They increased the limit of the free tier, but all the paid tiers remained exactly the same. Instead of the first dose being free, now the first two doses are free.
  
  
  

• Intel's i7-12700H mobile chip performs well at a 115W TDP. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Wait, what?
  
  No, it's not running at a 115W TDP. It's running at a 115W maximum turbo power; it's still a 45W TDP.
  
  Waiting on some more detailed benchmarks, but it looks about 10% faster single-threaded than the fastest 11th generation mobile part.
  
  
  
• 40 people have been arrested in Turkey over a money laundering scheme operating on Twitch. (Kotaku)
  
  Send money to Twitch streamers using stolen credit cards and have them kick back the majority of the funds. Which unfortunately for them leaves a digital paper trail a mile wide.
  
  Get with the times guys and just mint NFTs like everyone else.
  
  
  
• Or steal them. Hackers stole $1 million worth of off-brand monkey JPGs from OpenSea. (ZDNet)
  
  Apparently there was a bug where you could relist an item for sale at a higher price without going through the process of delisting the first sale, so all the hackers needed to do was find the original sale and buy it. Which is not much of a hack except that OpenSea doesn't have a public API for that kind of thing, so they needed to reverse-engineer the weirdness that goes on within OpenSea's website.
  
  And that's the problem with having a publicly-exposed private API: You don't lock it down to the same degree because you know you'll be the only ones using it, right up until you're not.
  
  
  
• Spoiler-bot, Spoiler-bot, kind of unfriendly Spoiler-bot: Twitter has banned a bot that told you the solution to tomorrow's Wordle puzzle. (The Verge)
  
  And also insulted people.
  
  Which is very Twitter.
  
  
  
• Speaking of very Twitter Flocks will let you send tweets to up to 150 of your least hated enemies. (9to5Mac)
  
  The one good thing about Twitter is that it's all out in the open. It doesn't matter who you are; if you say something stupid you will immediately get dogpiled.
  
  If they start breaking that you would be better off using basically anything else, up to and including hieroglyphs carved into steles and delivered by trebuchet.
  
  
  
• Hackers claim to have infected the Belarus railroad system with ransomware to delay movement of Russian troops. (Ars Technica)
  
  Unsubstantiated so far but given that they recently hacked and released the entire database and video archives of the Belarus secret police, it is entirely plausible.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Department of Homeland Security has warned that if the US interferes with Russia's invasion of Ukraine which is totally not going to happen Russia might respond with a cyberattack on US interests which has totally not been happening for several years already. (ABC News)
  
  They should detonate a nuke in a remote part of Alaska and send Joe out to apologise profusely and say he genuinely thought that bit was Russia. Then have Jen Psaki circle back until no-one knows what to believe and everyone's too frightened to even breathe loudly.
  
  Okay, it's a terrible plan but I'm not hearing any better suggestions.
  
  
  
• Google is being sued by Washington DC and multiple states for lying. Again. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This time for claiming that with location history turned off, your location history was in fact turned off.
  
  Which - this is Google after all - it wasn't.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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