Daily Tech News 31 January 2022

• Still no gluten-free chicken nuggets, but gluten-free chicken tenders are inbound. Guess I'll live another week.
  
  
  
• The Royal Society says stop trying to censor scientific disagreements online. (Royal Society)
  
  Even if one side is wrong, even if one side is obviously, blatantly wrong, censorship doesn't serve the truth.
  
  The comment thread at Hacker News is interesting.
  
  There's certainly a range of opinions but most of the comments agree that (a) censorship has no place in scientific debate or outreach and (b) science has enough problems with the Replication Crisis that it can't afford to be pointing fingers at anyone else.

• Memory leaks: The forgotten side of web performance. (Read the Tea Leaves)
  
  Somebody needs to wrap this around a brick and toss it through the window of the YouTube web client team. Try watching a busy Hololive livestream on a computer with less than 32GB of RAM to find out why.
  
  
  
• Americans lost $770 million to social media scams in 2021. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's about a tenth of blockchain fraud or civil asset forfeiture, never mind the real wealth killers like inflation and government waste.
  
  The FTC shared useful tips on how to avoid getting scammed on social media:

  Stay off social media.

  Thanks. Helpful.
  
  
  
• PCs are back again. But for how long? (ZDNet)
  
  For as long as people actually need to get work done, you latte-swilling weenie.
  
  
  
• Went ahead and got a PinePhone to break free of the Apple/Google diarchy? Wondering what operating system to run on it? Here's an easy way to test the 15 current options. (Liliputing)
  
  That's quite a difference from Apple, or even from Android, where if you are really determined you often can install some alternative OS that is only fully functional on hardware that you can no longer buy.
  
  
  
• Ohio promised Intel $2 billion in incentives to attract the $20 billion chip factories recently announced. (AP)
  
  A combination of new infrastructure (roads and water supply upgrades), tax breaks, and some sort of rebate to defray the relative expense of local construction against, um, places Intel had no intention of building a fab anyway.
  
  Still, of all the ways governments find to waste our money, this is one of the least destructive.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:10 AM

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