Daily Tech News 8 May 2022

• Starting to get cooler weather in Sydney - overnight lows around 8C at my old place. I checked what it was up at the new place, and it was nudging 0C. So when I move in a couple of weeks it will be straight into winter.
  
  
  
• We have always been at war with West Taiwan: Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter could face national security scrutiny because Saudia Arabia is rolling its existing 5.2% stake into the private company rather than taking the cash. (Ars Technica)
  
  Saudi Arabia is no friend of free speech and regulators are worried that this might lead to bias and censorship on the revived platform.
  
  Stop laughing.

  Reuters noted that "China blocked Twitter in 2009 but many Chinese officials have been active on the social media platform. Some of them have complained that the company's efforts to restrict misinformation have targeted them unfairly."

  Well, I guess you can laugh a bit.
  
  Dumb as the article itself is, the comments are downright Orwellian - in the useful idiot sense, rather than the dire warning sense. The regressive left is panicked over the possibility that their bubble might get punctured.

• Recycling of plastic doesn't work, particularly when you don't do it. (Nasdaq)
  
  California's Attorney General has launched an attack on the petrochemical industry, blaming them for the failure of California's recycling program... Which doesn't recycle much of anything.
  
  As reported previously, if you put plastic out for recycling in the US, it most likely gets shipped overseas - because that's cheaper - and dumped in a river rather than processed - because that's cheaper. It's far better for the environment to dispose of it in a regular landfill.
  
  Recycling aluminium actually works - you can tell, because they pay you for it rather than charging you to take it away.
  
  
  
• How to back up your Gmail account. (ZDNet)
  
  1. Install a local email program.
  2. Use it.
  
  
  
• Crypto miners: Menace or just studying algebra? New mining software bypasses the hash rate limiter on Nvidia graphics cards. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With the ongoing slump in crypto prices this probably won't make graphics cards disappear from the shelves again. It will probably be something else that causes that.
  
  
  
• The upcoming Threadripper 7000 range will bring up to 96 Zen 4 cores sometime late next year. (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not clear why AMD is delaying workstation chips for a year after server and desktop parts come out, particularly when this release will be close to twice as fast as Threadripper 5000.
  
  
  
• VPN installations have spiked by 1500% in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine. (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  The Russian government is trying to stamp out use of VPNs but even China can't keep up with that task and Russia is having even less luck, so an increasing number of Russians are able to access accurate and unbiased reporting from sources like the BBC, CNN, and the New York Times.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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