Daily Tech News 5 March 2022

• Weekends are Question and Answer time, unless I have to work, or I just worked two 18 hour days back-to-back, or I need to pack up and move house to a house I don't have, or my internet is down again, or my entire state is under flood and storm warnings, or every gluten-free foodstuff I normally eat is out of stock at the same time (possibly related to eastern Australia being underwater right now), or it's freaking World War III, but if it's all of those they cancel out somehow so Q&A is on.
  
  Drop your tech questions in the comments today and I will attempt to answer them tomorrow, unless I am struck by lightning. Again.
  
  
  
• In the first sensible move of any of the participants in this whole debacle Russia has banned Twitter and Facebook. (CBS / MSN)
  
  And over 140 other domains including the BBC. Sadly we are not on the list, but this is just new additions and we may have been blocked previously.
  
  The BBC has responded by restarting its shortwave news broadcasts. (The Verge)
  
  Everything old is new again.
  
  
  
• Russia doesn't have anything like China's Great Firewall but US companies are stepping up to help with leading provider of bad internet backbone connections Cogent cutting off access to Russia. (ZDNet)
  
  They're justifying this by a broad reading of new EU regulations, but the regulations never actually say Russia has to go back to acoustic couplers and hope.
  
  
  

• One moment, need to reboot my keyboard...
  
  
  
• With many of Ukraine's existing communication systems offline the new shipment of Starlink satellite dishes could become a target. (Ars Technica)
  
  They're small and low-power and not easily spotted in the normal soup of radio waves, but if everything else has been knocked out one way or another they're much easier to detect.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the normal soup of radio waves the FCC is looking to crack down on crappy wireless avionics. (Ars Technica)
  
  There's long been a fight between mobile carriers who say their operations don't infringe upon frequencies used in aircraft and aircraft makers and operators who say your phone will make their plane crash.
  
  It seems they're both correct - and the fault is with the aircraft, or rather wireless receivers used in some instruments. They're so poorly designed that they pick up signals hundreds of megahertz outside their designated band.
  
  
  
• Yandex, Russia's version of Google only even more obnoxious about its web crawling efforts may be technically bankrupt. (CNN)
  
  While the parent company is based in the Netherlands, most of its operations are in Russia, and recent sanctions act as a network partition event in an improperly balanced cluster.
  
  
  
• Microsoft meanwhile has blocked all new sales to Russia. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Microsoft has also been providing assistance to Ukraine to defend against hacking attempts, so whether you agree with their decision or not, they are actually doing more than just virtue signalling.
  
  
  
• Major cryptocurency exchanges are very pointedly not blocking Russia. (CNN)
  
  Whatever you think of cryptocurrencies generally, the underlying point is that there's no central control, and no-one can block your access to the blockchain. So again, they're operating based on principles rather than profit, or rather, a little of one and a lot of the other.
  
  
  
• Similarly, ICANN is not intending to revoke Russian domain names. (Ars Technica)
  
  That one was never on the cards. The old .su TLD is still active.
  
  
  
• The US Space Force is planning to start patrolling the far side of the Moon. (Ars Technica)
  
  Because that is civilisation's chief area of concern right now.
  
  
  
• Firefly's ITX-3588J is a high-end alternative to the Raspberry Pi. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Can you get it?
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Oh, and one more thing? Half the world's supply of ultra-pure neon used in chipmaking comes from Ukraine. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This was highlighted in 2014 when spot prices for neon shot up 600% during the invasion of Crimea, but then everyone went right back to sleep.
  
  
  
• Belarus is now on the tech industry shitlist too. (WCCFTech)
  
  Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  
  
  
• The great thing about paying twice as much to get a Mac is that it just works. (Derek Seaman)
  
  After trying three different docks and three different Thunderbolt to DisplayPort adaptors, it just works.
  
  
  
• More on the suckage of Western Digital's new high-capacity NAS drives. (Serve the Home)
  
  Base on their ratings, having a ZFS pool of 20TB drives with a weekly data scrub would exceed the annual workload rating after four months, even if nobody was accessing the data.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, have a drive failure already on my new ZFS server. Good thing I configured RAID-Z3.
  
  
  
• Apple is reportedly preparing to release the new Mac Studio. (Liliputing)
  
  This is either a smaller version of the Mac Mini, or a larger one, or something else entirely.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments