Daily Tech News 3 February 2022

• So I thought I'd take a look at Phoenix NAP, the company reviewed the other day by Serve the Home. They offer dedicated servers with the convenience of the cloud, and sane terms of service which amount to "Pay your bills on time, no spam, nothing illegal, no, seriously, no spam."
  
  There's a particular model they offer that would suit us well, based on Intel's new Xeon E3-2356G (equivalent to a desktop i5-11600K). 64GB RAM, 1TB NVMe storage, and 20Gbps networking for $113 per month. That's a very fast network connection for that price. With the default operating system you can have one deployed in under a minute, or ten minutes for a custom installation. Perfect for deploying a cluster because you have lightning fast networking and complete control via the dashboard for when you screw up the firewall and/or routing settings and lose SSH access.
  
  Except... They don't have any.
  
  
  
• The Wormhole cross-blockchain platform, supporting Avalanche, Oasis, Binance, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Terra... Got hacked. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  120,000 ETH, worth about $326 million, walked out the door. In case you thought you were having a bad day.

• The WD Black SN770 is okay. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a new model of entry-level PCIe 4 DRAMless SSD; the MSRP is the same as the SN750 SE we saw on Sunday but it's up to 40% faster.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is here, where by here we mean it hasn't been announced and you can't buy it anywhere, though that latter part isn't much different to the existing 3090. (WCCFTech)
  
  Also it costs up to $6000.
  
  
  
• Scientists have invented a new metamaterial that is not just boingy, it's super boingy. (Phys.org)

  By controlling the elastic and magnetic interactions, we engineer two distinct phases—the closed and open phases—in the deforming metamaterials and show that capabilities for energy storage and management are introduced by crossing through the phase boundary. A Landau free energy–based model predicts the design space for metamaterial geometry and magnetic interactions to support phase transitions. We demonstrate that magnetic interactions, instead of only elasticity [e.g., buckling or suppression of internal rotations], can control the coefficients in the Landau free energy and modulate the phase transitions. The coexistence of the closed and open phases in metamaterials and their transition induce a stress plateau during mechanical deformation with enhanced energy storage and mitigation capacity.

  Oh, right. That's what I thought.
  
  
  
• European regulators have ruled that the cookie consent popups that have proliferated in response to European regulators ruling that tracking users without consent is illegal, are illegal. (Engadget)
  
  Either make popcorn or block the entire continent at the router.
  
  
  
• That outage that took the whole of North Korea off the internet? Just some guy. (Wired)
  
  They have a battalion of elite state hackers, we have some random dude sitting in his pyjamas in his parents' basement. It's the Greco-Persian wars all over again, except the Greeks really need a shower and the Persians are communists.
  
  
  
• The Eppur si muove problem. (The Federalist)
  
  Not directly tech related except in that so much of this is playing out online and, of course, so many of the Big Tech companies have pawned their souls for a sack of wet mice. From Twitter to YouTube to Spotify to Facebook to GoFundMe, everyone is desperately playing whack-a-mole with the truth.
  
  The problem with liberals in the US is they got what they wanted - they swore to take power by any means necessary, and they did, and now everyone is realising that liberals don't have the remotest idea how to do anything.
  
  Which will all be very amusing come January 2025 if we haven't all died in a global thermonuclear apocalypse.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:40 AM

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