Daily Tech News 19 May 2022

• I have a house.
  
  
  
• I ended up working until 2AM yesterday tracking down a difficult performance issue, then was doing house-related stuff until 4AM, then got up again at 7AM for a meeting, which was lots of fun.
  
  
  
• A new plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste. (UT News)
  
  Normally this is a what could possibly go wrong item, but they're talking about an enzyme here, not bacteria or anything that can reproduce itself. Enzymes are catalysts - a small amount of an enzyme can process a large amount of raw material - but still finite and will break down fairly quickly.
  
  So... Good?

• Google Russia is bankrupt after Russia stole all their money. (Ars Technica)
  
  This is how it works, yes.
  
  Google has not closed services in Russia, and was rewarded for this about how you'd expect.
  
  
  
• A legal brief from TechFreedom, a "libertarian" "think" tank, frets about the possibility of people saying mean things online and not getting banned. (Ars Technica)
  
  The Texas law they're opposing is probably unconstitutional anyway, but there's nothing less libertarian than "libertarian" think tanks.
  
  
  
• DigitalOcean's pricing went up. (DigitalOcean)
  
  A $5 virtual server is now $6. Still down from $10 a few years ago.
  
  Salaries and energy prices have been on the rise for years, but that was offset by rapidly falling hardware costs. But with the chip shortage, server prices have been flat at best, so sooner or later than means the users need to pay more.
  
  If Zen 5 does arrive late next year with up to 256 cores, that will allow one server to replace four current ones, and start pushing prices down again. But until then there's not a lot of relief in sight for these mid-tier hosting providers.
  
  
  
• Mid-tier hosting competitor Vultr hasn't increased pricing, but has announced new datacenters in Mumbai, Madrid, Melbourne, Honolulu, and Warsaw so far this year. (Vultr)
  
  I have some small servers with them. A good option if you live near one of their 25 locations around the world, which you probably do unless you're in Africa.
  
  
  
  
• Aussie Broadband is steadily picking up market share in the Aussie broadband space. (ZDNet)
  
  They answer emails, their pricing is decent, and they offer speeds up to 1000/400.
  
  I'm going with an Aussie Broadband 500/200 plan at the new house, which is five times what I currently have. Fast enough to run backups to a local server and stop paying for a backup server in the cloud, which will easily cover the increase in cost for my internet access.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:18 AM

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