Daily Tech News 14 September 2022

• Congressional testimony from Peiter Zatko says that Twitter is run by idiots and infested with foreign spies. (WCCFTech)
  
  Which former we knew and latter comes as no surprise.
  
  Also that the company executives have been routinely lying to the board, to shareholders, and to the SEC.
  
  Zatko was, until January, Twitter's head of security, before being abruptly fired and then receiving a $7 million settlement.
  
  
  
• It must be purely coincidence then that at least six "research firms" are offering money to besmudge Zatko. (New Yorker)
  
  Former coworkers at Stripe, Google, and DARPA report being bombarded with aggressive requests for paid interviews about Zatko - with the clear implication that you had better be prepared to dish the dirt.

  The consultant told Provos that its analysts were assessing Zatko's "personality professionally and socially," his "strengths and weaknesses," "motives for his whistle-blower complaint and any similar past complaints," his "need for attention," and whether he was a "zealot or ideologue," "conspiratorial," or "vengeful." She also said they were interested in Zatko's "view of Elon Musk and Musk's bid for Twitter."

  And they were prepared to pay $1000 for this, which is a wonderful motivation for discovering a previously latent speech impediment.
  
  How this reads to me is that everything Zatko has said is true and Twitter's management is in serious trouble, but I should beware of wishcasting.

• A long review of Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach with no part IV. (Less Wrong)
  
  I first read GEB when I was 16 - it was a Christmas gift from my mum. Which tells you something about both of us. It's probably heavy going for a 16 year old but the way it is written you can read it once and get the surface of it, skimming over the maths-heavy pages, and then come back to it again a year later an get a lot more out of it. Maybe more than once.
  
  Also, Hofstadter is right about the nature of consciousness.
  
  
  
• GlobalWafers is starting construction of a $5 billion factory in Texas this November. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Before you can build a silicon chip you need a silicon wafer - a sliver of ultra-pure crystalline silicon the size of an LP record. There are many chip factories in the US but this will be the first new wafer factory in 20 years.
  
  
  
• A tale of two hardware firewalls. (Serve the Home)
  
  One good, one less good. And the only difference being the case - but since these are passively cooled, the case makes a big difference.
  
  
  
• China has formally accused the NSA of spying, which is the function of the NSA. (Gizmodo)
  
  This may be true, in which case it's dog-bites-man except that the NSA broke Rule One of Spycraft, which is don't get caught.
  
  Or it may be China making shit up to divert attention from getting caught spying on other countries itself, which, well, same as above.
  
  
  
• They said I was daft to build a datacenter in Strasbourg, but I built it all the same. It burned down. Then I built another one. (The Register)
  
  OVH has built a new, hopefully less flammable, datacenter on the site of the one that burned to the ground last year.
  
  Last year was not a good time for datacenters.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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