Daily Tech News 21 February 2021

• Hackers took advantage of the confusion around an update to OpenSea's smart contracts to launch a phishing attack and steal NFTs worth between $0 and $200 million. (The Verge)
  
  Apparently they managed to make $1.7 million in real crypto before being caught at it and locked out. The NFTs can easily be rendered untradeable and worthless, but once sold the cryptocurrency is harder to block.
  
  So the ALV (Average Laundering Value) of the NFTs - the imaginary hyper-inflated prices they were listed for - was around $200 million, the thieves actually made off with $1.7 million in ETH, and the remaining stolen NFTs are now worth absolutely nothing.
  
  
  
• Here's how it went down translated into non-crypto terms:
  
  1. The Open Seas Zoo was planning on transferring $200 million worth of extremely rare monkeys to a new secure location in a U-Haul with security features and GPS tracking.
  2. The thieves stole an identical truck and added removable U-Haul decals to make it look exactly like the real thing.
  3. On the night of the transfer, they parked their U-Haul right behind the Zoo one and overpowered the driver.
  4. They then directed the monkey wranglers to fill their truck with monkeys.
  5. The original U-Haul was ostentatiously driven off, breaking the speed limit and getting caught on camera before being abandoned in an open field where it would be quickly tracked and found.
  6. Meanwhile the decals were stripped off the fake U-Haul and it was driven sedately from the crime scene and parked under a disused railway bridge where it wouldn't be found.
  7. The thieves now laid low for a few weeks while the police traced the real U-Haul but found no sign of the monkeys.
  8. A month later after the fuss had settled down the thieves could return to the stashed truck at their leisure.
  9. This is all your fault, Brian.
  10. You can have your monkeys back, guys.
  
  
  
• These crypto enthusiasts are idiots. (CNBC)

• I have two lights now on my fiber internet box. Yesterday it had one; it's supposed to have three. Progress, I guess.
  
  
  
• I also have the new phone, a new SIM card on a 120GB plan instead of a 2GB plan, and probably a 400GB microSD card. I say probably because I accidentally bought it from a third-party vendor when ordering from Amazon, something you should never ever do for SD cards and USB drives. It's probably real though. If it's fake, it's a very good fake. I've bought a dozen or so SanDisk cards and it looks 100% legit.
  
  The Samsung A52s is very close in specs to the Oppo A91 I already have - same 2400x1080 AMOLED screen, just 0.1" bigger, same camera layout, same 128GB storage - but has an A78 core instead of A73. It's about 140% faster according to benchmarks, and by far the fastest Android device I own. Will be interesting to play with it.
  
  
  
• San Francisco mayor London Breed also wants to flush workers who have fled their offices back into the city. (SF Chronicle)
  
  In her case it is rather more literally a shithole.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Radeon 660M RDNA2 integrated graphics outperforms Intel's fastest Iris Xe offering in most benchmarks. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the one hand, it's not a lot faster than Intel's best integrated graphics.
  
  On the other hand, this is the cut-down version with 6 graphics cores. The full version has 12 cores and isn't too far behind dedicated GTX 1060 and 1650 desktop cards. (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Yet another thunderstorm rolling in this evening, but at least this one isn't directly on top of me.
  
  
  
• Was going to share the worst take in the history of takes, but he got ratioed out of existence.
  
  
  
• At least in software I can just sigh and deploy to older, crappier, but still working hardware.
  
  

  Designing hardware in 2022 pic.twitter.com/LP91dlzL10

  — stacksmashing (@ghidraninja) February 20, 2022

  
  
  
  
• Speaking of older crappier but still working hardware, 2.82TB of backups transferred so far. I could reduce that way down with some cleanup effort, but never have the time.
  
  Compression and dedup on the new backup server reduce the actual storage used to 1.67TB.
  
  Also, hard drives are really slow when you have 100 million files.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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