Daily Tech News 2 December 2022

• Kanye West is not buying Parler after all. (Axios)
  
  Bullet dodged. For both parties, but after today, particularly for Parler.

  Ye has just around 55,000 followers on Parler, compared to 18.5 million on Instagram and zero on Twitter.

  Oops.
  
  
  
• The Ikea desk legs I needed for my main office, that were out of stock for weeks, came back in for days, and then went out of stock again, are back in stock.
  
  I ordered 35. I think I need 31 - maybe fewer if I use fixed drawers rather than the mobile ones, since you can mount the desktop directly onto the drawer units. Since the legs are $4 each and they've been blocking my plans for thousands of dollars worth of furniture, I don't exactly mind if I end up with a few spares.
  
  (The longer desks - they come in 120, 140, and 200 cm lengths - recommend an extra leg in the middle, hence the odd number.)

• How much slower does automatic bounds checking make your Rust code? (ReadySet)
  
  Rust is designed to make it hard to write unsafe code - the sort of code that causes security nightmares for sysadmins around the world because one line in one library from 20 years ago didn't check the size of the input and now everyone is mining Monero on your production servers.
  
  Anyway, the answer is none. None slower.
  
  
  
• Google has halved the number of memory safety issues with Android since they started using Rust for some of the code. (9to5Google)
  
  And it's none slower.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare is raising its prices by 25% starting from May. (The Register)
  
  There's going to be a lot of that about. Computers have been one of the few things consistently getting cheaper, but there's only so much you can do when real inflation is well into double digits.
  
  (I also switched my Amazon Prime subscription from monthly to annual to lock in the current low price - A$59 for a year, about US$40. Given the cost of shipping stuff to New House City it's gone from being a nice-to-have to essential.)
  
  
  
• Apple blocked a new feature in the Coinbase wallet that allowed users to transfer NFTs to other wallets. (MacRumors)
  
  Apple said that the "gas fee" - a small amount of cryptocurrency that you need to pay to perform any transaction - had to be purchased using Apple's own payment platform for the new feature to be approved.
  
  You can't purchase crypto using Apple's payment platform.
  
  
  
• The relaunch of Twitter Blue is delayed because Twitter doesn't want to give Apple 30% of everything it earns. (WCCFTech)

  Twitter is planning on finding a way to circumvent the 30% fee that Apple charges, but so far, we don't see a way out. I mean, remember what happened to Epic Games and Fortnite when they refused to circumvent the in-app fee?

  Yes. Epic launched an entire new online games store and now has over two thousand staff and half a billion users.
  
  It doesn't seem like much of a threat, to be honest.
  
  
  
• Stable Diffusion - the AI image generator - now runs on Arm-based Macs. (9to5Mac)
  
  While this is new, I was under the impression that it only ran on Nvidia graphics cards. Not true, as it turns out; with a little fiddling it runs on most AMD cards from the last six years as well.
  
  
  
• The Kindle Scribe is absolutely adequate. (The Verge)
  
  If you want a large (10.2") high resolution (300dpi) e-ink reader with a pen, this is that. And some clunky software aside, it works exactly as it says.
  
  I'm getting a Kindle Paperwhite while I wait for somebody - anybody - to release a good, small Android tablet that I don't have to order from AliExpress.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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