Daily Tech News 26 February 2022

• Weekends are Question and Answer time, when I'm not working because the blockchain has blown up again, or stuck on a mobile link with a two second ping time, or tied up moving house, or whatever is scheduled for next week that I don't want to think about.
  
  Drop your questions in the comments today and if I don't get crushed by a meteorite I will endeavour to answer them tomorrow.
  
  
  
• Internet is back on.
  
  It was the cable between the modem and the wall socket.
  
  How exactly that got fried by the lightning strike when nothing else was affected I do not know. Maybe they have optoisolators at both ends to protect against this sort of thing.
  
  First thing I watched was a Minecraft stream with Pina Pengin of Prism Project, possibly the single nicest vtuber in the world, which got gatecrashed by Pipkin Pippa of Phase Connect who has a standing invitation to join Nick Rekieta's livestream if that gives you any indication.
  
  
  
• Wait, HoloEN is having an unarchived off-collab?! Amelia, Ina, Mumei, Fauna, and Kronii are all in the same room. You can tell by the acoustics - they're terrible. Right now they're singing the guitar solo from Bohemian Rhapsody, as you are required to by law in any karaoke session involving more than three people.
  
  
  
• The US and allies including Taiwan have announced broad export restrictions of technology to Russia. (Ars Technica)
  
  Does that mean video card prices will finally come down?
  
  
  
• China's supreme court has ruled that fundraising via crypto tokens is a crime punishable by ten years in prison. (The Star)
  
  Does that mean video card prices will finally come down?
  
  
  
• Nvidia is investigating an attack that took down parts of its internal network for two days. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  Nvidia says that its "business and commercial activities continue uninterrupted" - which means that the attack was aimed at its R&D.
  
  
  

• Russian hacking group Conti basically announced that it's an arm of the FSB. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There might be some independent criminal hacking groups operating in Russia, but for the most part it's government controlled to a greater or lesser degree.
  
  Also in that article: The FSB got hacked.
  
  
  
• The poor you will have with you always because poverty is relative. (Jeff Kaufman)
  
  Shoots down a Twitter meme about how modern minimum wage earners make less than Bob Cratchit, because minimum wage earners throughout history by definition earn minimum wage. The meme ignores purchasing power, which has gone through the roof.
  
  
  
• The claimed effect size is about a zillion times higher than is plausible. (Statistical Modeling and Stuff)
  
  Good article about how you can immediately disregard certain scientific papers as garbage if they claim unreasonably large effect sizes.
  
  So if an article says that babies whose mothers regularly sang to them average 2 weeks earlier on learning goals than the control group, that's just normally dubious stuff. But it they claim six months earlier, it's trash, throw it out right away.
  
  
  
• How to use an iPad Pro to power your home office. (ZDNet)
  
  Step One: Don't have a real job.
  Step Two (optional): Get offended when people point this out.
  
  
  
• The USPS has told the EPA to go fuck itself and is proceeding with the purchase of 150,000 new trucks with internal combustion engines. (Washington Post)
  
  "If you give us more money, we'll think about also buying some electric ones," they added.
  
  
  
• The world's largest bacterium has a sort of proto-nucleus. (Science)
  
  Bacteria normally have their DNA just scattered about like toys in a kid's bedroom after a playdate, but this one has it all neatly stored away like that one kid who you just know is going to have a Wikipedia page before they turn 21.
  
  Also of note is the size: It's 9mm long, on average, with specimens up to twice that. Bacteria are not supposed to do that either.
  
  
  
• How to achieve a completely secure link between two devices that are not themselves secure. (Quanta)
  
  Quantum.
  
  The difference in this article is that they actually did it - it's not just theory anymore.
  
  
  
• Status pages at large internet companies are garbage. (The Register)
  
  There was an outage at AWS last week, but you wouldn't know it from their status page or their official announcements - because those are the same thing. Changing a single indicator from green to yellow on the AWS status page is a management decision, not an automated process. Without approval, that light stays green even if the entire datacenter just got eaten by Nyarlathotep.
  
  That's where Status Page Status Page comes in. (Status Page Status Page)
  
  It checks what the status pages for AWS, GitHub, and Slack are saying, compared with what is actually happening in the real world, and goes red if they don't match up.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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