Daily Tech News 22 September 2022

• PayPal appears to be going on a banning spree in the UK. (The Telegraph)
  
  Groups targeted include UsForThem, which advocates for keeping schools open, and the Daily Skeptic and the Free Speech Union, which advocate for, well, skepticism and free speech.
  
  The Daily Skeptic is asking for any donors in Texas to contact them. (Daily Skeptic)
  
  Because with the recent Fifth Circuit decision, PayPal just lit up the Sue Me signal.

• Alongside three very expensive new consumer graphics cards, Nvidia just announced its extremely expensive new professional graphics card. (Serve the Home)
  
  The RTX 6000 replaces the RTX A6000, which rather confusingly replaced the RTX 6000. Someone might need to explain to Nvidia how numbers work.
  
  This is very similar to the new RTX 4090, but with 48GB of ECC RAM instead of 24GB of non-ECC, a 300W TDP down from 450W, and a conventional two-slot design instead of the massive four-slot boards being produced for the 4090.
  
  Unfortunately it's likely to cost around four times as much.
  
  
  
• An unpatched bug in a Python library has led to vulnerabilities in an estimated 350,000 projects. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The bug is in the tarfile library, which has an explicit warning about extracting tarfiles from untrusted sources, but doesn't prevent the risk.
  
  Researchers found that there are nearly 600,000 Python projects out there that use the tarfile module, which, I mean, why? And only 40% of them have safety checks.
  
  
  
• Amazon's 2022 model of the Fire HD8 replaces the old, slow A53 cores with the new, slow A55 core. (Thurrott.com)
  
  It starts at $100 so you can't expect that much, and a 6 core 2GHz A55 is quite reasonable for light use - email, web browsing, reading ebooks, that sort of thing.
  
  The problem is that it still has a 2012-quality 1280x800 screen, and there's no better model available, the HDX range having been long since discontinued.
  
  If you want a small device with a good screen for reading books, the choice right now is either the Kindle Paperwhite, which is quite small and can't do anything but read books, or the iPad Mini, which is a decent device except that it's Apple and costs about four times as much as a small Android tablet.
  
  Lenovo's Legion Y700 exists, but is only sold officially in China, so it might as well not.
  
  
  
• The James Webb space telescope has captured a remarkably clear view of the rings of Neptune. (NASA)
  
  It looks a bit weird because the Webb is an infrared telescope, not visible light.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:35 AM

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