Daily Tech News 27 April 2022

• "Fear" is not the word I'd use here: Under Musk, some fear Twitter's moderation progress could unravel. (NBC News)
  
  Twitter's moderation stance was generally sound through to 2016, mostly tolerable from then until 2018, and on an oscillation cycle between Orwell and Kafka since then.
  
  And the star of this article is none other than Brianna Wu:

  Brianna Wu knows firsthand how bad the harassment on Twitter can get. A software engineer and game developer, Wu was targeted with death and rape threats during GamerGate, an online harassment campaign against women in the gaming industry that started in 2014.

  Everything in this opening paragraph is not only wrong but a direct lie.

  Wu, who has more than 100,000 Twitter followers and has used the platform throughout her career, said she consulted with the company's trust and safety team in an unofficial, unpaid capacity from 2014 to late 2021.

  Apparently this is true though - Wu has been working as an informant for Twitter's corporate mutawa.
  
  

  By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
  
  I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
  
  If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
  
  Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2022

  
  
  Follow US law, ban the spambots, and give users the tools to block the trolls and lunatics.
  
  Oh, and Elon? Close any offices Twitter has in Europe.
  
  
  

• Yes.
  
  

  Elon Musk could have put that $44billion towards tackling world poverty, instead he's used it to send millions of woke Liberal narcissists into a spiral of depression, and honestly I think it's money well spent.

  — Andrew Lawrence (@andrewlawrence) April 26, 2022

  
  
  
  
• History didn't repeat for once: The Erie Railroad War of 1869 has eerie parallels with the Twitter board's poison pill. (ThoughtCo)
  
  That time, Cornelius Vanderbilt - the richest man in America - failed in his takeover bid and the board looted the company, which went bankrupt in 1878. And 1893. And 1938. And today is part of the Norfolk Southern Railway, railroads having some intrinsic utility unlike social networks.
  
  
  
• Lucid group has an order for 50,000 electric vehicles from... Saudi Arabia? (WCCFTech)
  
  The company is not a major player in the field so far, but just announced a new 1050hp model with a 0-60 time of 2.6 seconds. This deal follows on the back of a February agreement to build a manufacturing facility in Saudi Arabia. That's not something the country is known for, but the oil isn't going to last forever.
  
  
  
• You wouldn't download a Mac, would you? Not when you can run it right in your browser. (MacOS8.app)
  
  It has Civilization installed, and SimCity, and Photoshop alongside Kai's Power Tools, and Claris Works and Microsoft Word. It's actually pretty functional.
  
  
  
• Sorry, I can't come in to work on the pyramid today. A scorpion bit me while I was brewing beer. (Open Culture)
  
  Which is probably a good excuse if you live in Texas today. And are working on a pyramid.
  
  
  
• The Ugly Monkey JPEG Instagram group got hacked, and $0 worth of ugly monkey JPEGS were stolen. (ZDNet)
  
  The article claims $3 million, but journalists will say anything for clicks.
  
  
  
• With memory prices steady SK Hynix has doubled its profits against the same quarter a year ago. (ZDNet)
  
  This is good news for memory manufacturers - and for the rest of us too, because there aren't many of them left. Memory prices are cyclic, and a lot of the companies exited the business one way or another in the last two bust cycles, leaving just Korean SK Hynix and Samsung, and US-based Micron.
  
  
  
• Who is Risa Hoshino, Instagram MD? (Sarah Burwick)
  
  Unusually it turns out she genuinely is a medical doctor. The rest of it is a mishmash of half-truths and apparent fabrications - mostly relating to COVID, which an offense that would get your account terminated if you weren't pushing falsehoods in the service of the "consensus" viewpoint/
  
  
  
• Why not just sell NFTs? (BuzzFeed)
  
  That way at least everyone knows you're lying.

  Some doctors tried to refrain from giving out medical advice in the Ask a Doc channel. In April, one user posted: "Sometimes I'll wake up with my kidney area in bad pain from sleeping on my side, is this normal?" A lead MetaDocs doctor identifying as Dr. Fayez Ajib, a "Part-time doctor, full-time gamer," according to their Discord bio — advised the user to see their physician.

  Huh. Even NFT doctors are more ethical than Risa.
  
  
  
• The Dell XPS Desktop 8950: Not complete trash. (Hot Hardware)
  
  They weren't testing it as a high-end gaming machine, and noted that the included water cooling solution is designed for quiet and not maximum performance. But given Dell's reputation of unnecessarily loud air cooling, that in itself is an advance.
  
  With a 12600K and a 3060 Ti it's not a terrible power hog: 469W in their torture test but a more reasonable 300W with a normal gaming load - and idle power levels are excellent at just 43W. The included power supply is 750W so it could easily cope with an upgrade to a faster graphics card later.
  
  Single-threaded performance is great, multi-threaded is decent, and gaming is solidly mid-range - about the same as a previous generation RTX 2080.
  
  I'd like to see Gamers Nexus' take on it, but from this review it seems like a decent prebuilt. It does use a non-standard motherboard - all of Dell's desktop systems do - so keep that in mind.
  
  
  
• On iOS, all browsers are really just Safari in varying degrees of fancy dress. Apple forbids any other browser on their platform. The EU's new Digital Markets Act appears to make that illegal. (The Register)
  
  Explicitly so. While not calling out Apple by name, it does call out the imposition of specific browser engines on a software platform.
  
  Given that Safari causes more swearing from our UI team than all other browsers combined, forcing Apple to compete on a level playing field seems like a good thing, even if it comes via massively overbearing regulation from a grossly engorged Pan-European superstate, like a gargantuan blood-sucking tick that coughs up the occasional bit of ambergris.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM

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