Daily Tech News 24 March 2022

• I have a local lawyer in the town I'm looking to move to checking on some things for me, and one of the things she was checking was whether there might be any council restrictions on any of the properties and yep, the house built in 1877 which is probably my preferred choice is heritage listed. So any renovations or improvements would not only have to pass by the town council but also the heritage council. Two sets of hoops and one of them on fire.
  
  Which helps explain why such a great property has been sitting on the market for so long. For my needs it's laid out pretty well (except for the original corner fireplaces which take up a ton of space and don't even work though there is a newer combustion stove in the living room) and it has been renovated fairly recently so there's not a lot of work that needs doing. The one thing that could do with an upgrade is the bathroom and that I could probably manage.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile far away from sensible bricks and mortar Solana-based stablecoin Cashio had a minor bug and lost 99.995% of its value overnight. (Decrupt)
  
  Oops.
  
  

  tl;dr because Cashio didn't establish a root of trust for all of the accounts it used, an attacker was able to steal approximately $50M by forging a chain of fake accounts

  — samczsun (@samczsun) March 23, 2022

  
  
  It's the crypto equivalent of your parents answering a call from "Windows Support".
  
  Put not your trust in stablecoins. Or anything else, really.

• Apple's brand new M1 Ultra processor has shown up in the PassMark benchmark list. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The top-of-the-line 20-core CPU is listed just behind - oh, that's gotta hurt - just behind AMD's new 12-core Threadripper Pro 5945WX.
  
  Most powerful CPU ever, except for all the others.
  
  
  
• TSMC is expanding the expansion of its 5nm and 4nm (really, they're the same thing) production lines to meet highly demanding demand. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nvidia's new enterprise (Hopper) and consumer (Lovelace) graphics cards, and AMD's Zen 4 CPUs and RDNA 3 GPUs will all be heading to TSMC's 5nm and 4nm production lines this year, joining Apple and Qualcomm who have been producing mobile chips on the new nodes for some time.
  
  
  
• Why exactly would you buy an IronWolf Pro? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Comparing two models of Seagate 20TB drives, the IronWolf NAS model is 20% more expensive than the Exos enterprise model, but has half the lifetime and workload ratings, with all other specs being the same. Okay, in sequential reads the IronWolf averaged 6% faster but even four of these in RAID can flood 10Gb Ethernet, so that's not likely to be an issue.
  
  
  
• This person doesn't know what they're doing. (Spaced Out and Smiling)

  Given i develop on a ARM Mac, i'd like to deploy to an ARM server.

  You program in Node.js. Node.js itself is a crime against humanity, but that's not your fault. But unless you are doing something spectacularly horrible, there is no technical reason to deploy to an Arm-based server.
  
  
  
• Russia has banned Google News for "unreliable information". (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Sure. Okay.
  
  
  
• Australia's NBN is opening upgrade orders for FttC customers. (ZDNet)
  
  Starting at the end of May, by which time I will be in a new house with FttP (one way or another).
  
  
  
• Old and busted: Don't be evil.
  
  New hotness: Adding legal. (Ars Technica)
  
  Like your annoying 12-year-old cousin who figured out that broken goblin berserker character build in 3.5e and is now ruining your campaign some bright spark at Google decided that if you copy one of the corporate lawyers on your internal communications everything is protected by attorney-client privilege and can't be examined by antitrust regulators which is brilliant except for the two key points that first it doesn't work that way and second that sort of bullshit is exactly what antitrust regulators are looking for.
  
  Good work, genius. Rocks fall, everyone gets broken up.
  
  
  
• Instagram now lets you see the posts of people you follow in the order they were posted. (Bloomberg)
  
  A remarkable innovation.
  
  
  
• GitHub no longer does. (The Register)
  
  Microsoft, you idiots.
  
  
  
• Lapsus$ might have accessed user data in their Okta hack. (The Register)
  
  Okta, uh, handles logins for other customers. Mostly small customers. Like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
  
  This could be nothing or it could be the biggest hack in recent history. We're not sure yet.
  
  
  
• Lapsus$ might be led by some sixteen-year-old kid. (Bloomberg)
  
  This would explain a lot. Their work so far has been technically proficient but basically pointless, and they don't really cover their tracks.

• Reuben Hick said yesterday:

  I'm fascinated by the four considerations:
  * Internet speed
  * House Size
  * Price /m²
  * transportation
  
  Nothing about aesthetics, floorplan, neighborhood, structure condition, crime rate... all of the stuff normal people consider.

  Guilty as charged.
  
  I'm moving to a mid-sized country town (about 25,000 people) so there's not that much variation in neighbourhoods and crime rates. There's basically the parts with wide streets and lots of trees, and the parts with really wide streets and really lots of trees.
  
  Internet speed (and stability) is a key concern because I live online, and I chose this town because apart from being pretty nice - I've visited a few times and stayed overnight at least twice - the whole place has fiber internet.
  
  As for house size, also yes. I work from home, and my job requires multiple computers, so I need a big office on top of the usual space. And all my accumulated technical junk also takes up a lot of room, so I either have to throw it out or find a place with plenty of storage.
  
  The one with a garage the size of a small house and a house the size of two and a half small houses is probably overkill but is priced right in the middle of other places half the size. I can just tell the movers to shove everything into the truck at one end, and shove everything into the garage at the other end except for the dining table, fridge, and washing machine, which I would not want to drag up the stairs myself. And the rest I can unpack whenever.
  
  
  
• Benzalkonium chloride kills cockroaches. Its the stuff you find in most household cleaning sprays; it's basically harmless to humans but effective on bacteria. (Not that I'd advise you to drink it.) But for some reason it is lethal to cockroaches. Spritz them with household cleaning spray instead of bug spray and they drop dead on the spot.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:16 AM

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