Daily Tech News 14 February 2022

• Not up on the news sites yet but GiveSendGo was briefly taken offline by a redirection attack that sent visitors to GiveSendGone.
  
  Also GiveSendGo information apparently sourced from a misconfigured S3 bucket is circulating on the internet. For contributors this just seems to be names, dates, and amounts, the same information that was already public on the site. For campaign organisers it apparently includes photos and scans of drivers licenses and other ID. I've seen screenshots of the contributor data, but no IDs, so I can't confirm that exactly.
  
  
  
• In slightly brighter news, that 4TB SSD that suddenly got an massive unexplained discount right when I was looking for a 4TB SSD - and went up by 50% right after I bought it - suddenly got a massive unexplained discount when I was back on Amazon checking my order statuses. (Everything has been delivered except some gravy. Long story.)
  
  It's A$1500 if I buy it through Amazon US; that seems to be the MSRP. I don't know what Amazon's pricing algorithm is playing at; yesterday on Amazon AU it was A$1307, this morning it was A$873, and after I bought one, it went straight up to A$1147.
  
  Anyway, where I said I shoulda bought two, now I didda bought two. Also I'm $200 over budget for my lab buildout, but I think I'll cope.

• Intel's Sapphire Rapids vs. AMD's Milan-X server CPU. (WCCFTech)
  
  The benchmarks aren't of huge interest to me personally because they are all floating-point workloads, but there's an interesting chart on cache and memory latencies. AMD does surprisingly well here, getting 17.3ns latency to 1.5GB of total L3 cache. Intel has 28.4ns latency to - I think - 180MB of total L3 cache.
  
  Which is not what the chart says but the chart is wrong.
  
  
  
• Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY. (Saagar Jha)
  
  If you spend much time reading tech company blogs, you've seen this post hundreds of times. About 10% of them have some true insight, the rest are just overpaid hamsters spinning in their wheels.
  
  
  
• I'm in the wrong business. Or in the wrong branch of the right business. A white hat hacker was awarded $2 million for pointing out a critical bug in the Optimism layer-2 blockchain. (Crypto Adventure)
  
  "Hey, did you know you can create infinite ETH tokens on your site?"
  "Thanks, fixed, here's two million bucks."
  
  Not a bubble.
  
  
  
• France is planning to build up to 14 new nuclear reactors. (The Guardian)
  
  At least 6, and as many as 14.
  
  Germany meanwhile apparently plans to starve in the dark.
  
  
  
• This is actually not stupid: Tech startup Giga runs a mobile bitcoin mining operation. (CNBC)
  
  When oil exploration hits natural gas instead, the gas is often burned off (which is safer and better for the environment than letting it escape).
  
  So what Giga decided to do is build a gas-powered mobile Bitcoin mining facility that can be towed out the oil field and tapped into the gas on the spot. Mining Bitcoin is immensely wasteful, but that gas was considered waste in the first place, so any purposeful use is a win.
  
  
  
• No shit, Sherlock: YouTube's Olympics highlights are riddled with propaganda. (Wired)
  
  That's the entire reason China wanted to host the games in the first place.
  
  
  
• NFT marketplace Cent has suspended most transactions because NFTs are mostly garbage. (Reuters)
  
  I mean, yes, this is true, but you might be in the wrong business if you're planning to just come right out and admit it.
  
  
  
• Copyright holders want the United States to invade Iraq again. Or something. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Sure guys. Whatever. We'll get right on that.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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