Daily Tech News 19 October 2022

• Indian independent tech news site The Wire broke the story that Meta (i.e. Facebook) had handed the ability to censor posts to officials within the Indian government. (Washington Post)
  
  Meta responded:

  That never happened, and the documents you cite appear to be written in crayon.

  The Wire in turn responded:

  That's merely Meta's corporate style and we stand by our report... Never mind.

  Did they hire ex-Bloomberg staff or what?
  
  
  
• I'm going to buy that HP Pavilion Plus 14. The only real difference between it and the Asus Zenbook 14X Space Edition is that the Asus has 32GB of RAM rather than 16GB - but HP's current sale puts it at half the price.
  
  I was wondering why the i7 model was so much more expensive than the i5. Turns out it's a completely different i7. The i5 model sold in Australia is the i5-1240P, and I thought that the i7 was the only marginally faster 1260P. Instead it's the 12700H, and between 50% and 60% faster.
  
  Also, I thought that the H series had a serious flaw compared to the P series with regards to integrated graphics. This was true with the 11th gen counterparts: The eight core 11800H has 32 graphics cores compared to 96 on the quad core 1165G7.
  
  But the 12th gen parts all have 96 graphics cores, so there's no downside... Except the reduced battery life if you actually use all that power.
  
  Instead of being 60% faster than my current travel laptop, it's about 160% faster. And costs 10% more. And has a higher resolution OLED screen. And a better keyboard layout. And - there's always something - all the ports are on the other side compared with my current laptop.
  
  
  

• Speaking of ex-staff, Amazon's high turnover costs the company nearly $8 billion a year. (Engadget)
  
  To put that into perspective, that's nearly twice what they spend shipping all my packages up to me here in New House City.
  
  
  
• Missing some neat computer file from the good old days? Discmaster has it. (Ars Technica)
  
  The volunteer-run site contains 113 million files totaling 11.4TB, and a handy search engine to find exactly what you.... Oh.

  Oct 10 8:04PM EST
  
  Sorry, but search is currently DOWN. We are super bummed about it.
  We are ACTIVELY working on it.
  
  No ETA at this time.

  Well then. Time to fire up wget -r -np.
  
  
  
• Apple has new iPads. (Six Colors)
  
  They support the Apple Pencil for drawing. Except that the Pencil can charge wirelessly by clipping it to the iPad's magnetic docking thingy, or via the iPad's Lightning port, and these iPads don't have either of those.
  
  
  
• Cut off from western chip suppliers, Russia has turned to China and is seriously regretting it. (The Register)
  
  They're reporting component failure rates of 40%. Which makes for an assembled product failure rate of somewhat more than 100%.
  
  
  

• Kanye West has announced he is buying Parler, and Journalists for Censorship is up in arms. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The article is paywalled but all you're missing out on is Stasi wannabees crying into their soup, and you can get that for free on Twitter.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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