Daily Tech News 20 December 2022

• Apple is having trouble building a new Mac Pro. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They originally planned to use the M1 Extreme - made from four M1 Max chips, giving a total of 40 cores. They couldn't get it to work, so they planned instead on the M2 Extreme, with a total of 48 cores. They can't get that to work either.
  
  Meanwhile AMD is shipping 96 core CPUs - and you can use two of them. And they have a 128 core model up their sleeves.
  
  
  
• Russia meanwhile can't get CPUs at all. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're even worse off than China, which can make its own 12nm chips, albeit at high cost and in limited volumes. The most advanced chipmaking facilities in Russia are at 90nm - nearly 20 years behind Taiwan, Korea, and the US.
  
  
  

• You can 3D print meth now. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or something.
  
  
  
• There could be two ranges of Threadripper 7000 coming next year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  An expensive version for high-end desktops, and a really expensive version for workstations.
  
  And no Mac Pro to compete with.
  
  
  
• Rumours are already around for the specs of RDNA4. (WCCFTech)
  
  This early they're probably just made up. Leaks aren't really solid until a design gets sent to the fab - about six months before products ship. And RDNA4 is probably two years away.
  
  
  
• Eleven laws of software estimation. (Maarten's Newsletter)
  
  Pretty good laws too.
  
  
  
• Microsoft found a bug that lets malware bypass all MacOS security checks. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That is, they found another bug that does that. When you build in multiple independent security layers it is important that they are actually independent.
  
  
  
• Is Binance the next domino? (Reuters)
  
  Maybe. Maybe not. The company is secretive but far less so than FTX, and it handled withdrawals of $6 billion in the past week without faltering.
  
  
  
• Sharing your Netflix password is criminal fraud according to the UK IPO. (Torrentfreak)
  
  Fuck the UK IPO.
  
  
  
• The New York legislature passed a right-to-repair bill with bipartisan support. Now it's dying on the governor's desk. (Ars Technica)
  
  Little surprise there considering who is governor of New York.
  
  
  
• The IRS accidentally published private data of over 100,000 taxpayers. (Bloomberg)
  
  Again. This isn't a repeat story; they did it again.
  
  
  
  

• On January 1 we looked back at 2021, alleged rumour leaks of AMD's Ryzen 6000 were 100% accurate, and SIXBIT OR BUST.
  
  
• On January 2 we enjoyed Microsoft's Y2.022K bug, Intel killed AVX-512 on the desktop, Lenovo's Y700 tablet leaked and you still can't get it outside China, and a bank, jealous of this crypto stuff, accidentally misplaced $176 million, which used to be a lot.
  
  
• On January 3 Huawei's revenue was down by $100 billion, which still is a lot, Apple was planning a monitor that was merely exorbitantly expensive, Dwarf Fortress was heading to Steam, and don't work with FOOF.
  
  
  
  
• On January 4 Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on four chargers of bullshit with intent, CES was a whole bunch of nothin', Intel's Arc A380 was only mostly terrible, rumours of AMD's Ryzen 7000 were 0% accurate, Apple hit a market cap of $3 trillion despite not having any products worth buying, and 14,000 gaming companies in China shut down because China.
  
  
• On January 5 AMD announced Ryzen 6000 for laptops and Ryzen 5000X3D for desktops, Intel announced 22 new desktop CPUs several of which weren't awful, and Asus and Lenovo were missing the Four Essential Keys.
  
  
• On January 6 sunflowers ruined everything, Honda joined in with its own Y2.022K bug, and Arbix Finance stole $10 million in customer funds which used to be a lot back in, oh, 1913 or so.
  
  
  
  
• On January 7 we ate popcorn and watched communists fight over money, Kazakhstan shut down the internet, a New York art gallery owner lost $2 million worth of monkeys, the hot new anime series was So It's a Ponzi Scheme, So What?, and QNAP announced a $7500 NAS that automatically auctions off your personal data and splits the proceeds with you.
  
  
• On January 8 we blocked Europe at the router, SonicWall joined the Y2.022K bug party, the Ruby MongoDB library changed what "OR" meant, Web3 was doing great, and a fire in a critical part of ASML's Berlin factory didn't fuck things up enough to be noticed above the global background level of complete disaster.
  
  
• On January 9 we answered questions - remember that?, the James Web Space Telescope entirely failed to explode, and YouTube launched into an entire year of brokenness.
  
  
  
  
• On January 10 Canon printers went DRM free because they couldn't get the DRM chips for the toner cartridges, Pixy's First Law of Personal Responsibility, and someone sprayed those damn sunflowers with RoundUp.
  
  
• On January 11 what the internet really needed was more socialism, securing your QNAP NAS with this one easy trick, Apple tried to do something good (ish) for once and the phone companies blocked it, and building your own Cobalt Qube.
  
  
• On January 12 Web3 was still doing great, the PCIe 6 spec was finalised (a year later there are still no PCIe 5 cards available anywhere), and friends don't let friends run IIS.
  
  
  
  
• On January 13 I made the mistake of not buying two Lenovo Tab M8 FHDs, Plausible Analytics was plausible, Intel's 12400 was pretty good, and Apple fixed an unintended kill switch in iOS.
  
  
• On January 14 our hosting company found the missing payment and we didn't get cut off, TSMC increased CapEx for 2022 to $44 billion, QNAP released 317 security patches, Chrome patched a long-existing and very obvious security hole that affected every browser in the world, and China made NFTs worse. Somehow.
  
  
• On January 15 Russia "neutralised" the REvil hacker gang by which they mean they assigned them a new name and new targets, FedEx planned to deploy laster missile-defense systems, and what happened to that Google antitrust case anyway?
  
  
  
  
• On January 16 it was question time again, Safari leaked your browser history, Intel's next gen server chips where delayed to Q3 - which turned out to be wildly optimistic, and you couldn't back up a MacBook.
  
  
• On January 17 Tonga's internet went down due to (checks notes) being blown up by a volcano, NPM was worse than Cthulhu, you couldn't get a 3090 Ti, and emulating the Sega Genesis.
  
  
• On January 18 Google banned an Android app because they - Google - translated the description incorrectly, and then banned it again because an app without logins didn't have a test login, the RP2040 cost 70 cents, and China did China stuff.
  
  
  
  
• On January 19 Microsoft announced it was buying Actilizard for $687 trillion, everyone planned price hikes, SQLite was genuinely good, and regulatees told regulators that regulation was bad.
  
  
• On January 20 disinformation was disinformation, Intel announced 20 new mobile CPUs, DevToys was a toy for devs, and the Polygon blockchain fell in a heap. Again.
  
  
• On January 21 NFT marketplace OpenSea vanished for a couple of hours and took every wallet supporting NFTs with it because the blockchain is distributed and resilient you guys, use Ada, Twitter was - still mostly is - stupid, and 78% of planes could land safely with mobile phones switched on so just hope you're not on one of the 22%.
  
  
  
  
• On January 22 intel announce a $20 billion facility in Ohio, Google was working tirelessly to prevent offense to inanimate objects, China was back to doing China stuff, and the Radeon 6500 XT sucked as a desktop graphics card because it was designed as a mobile graphics card.
  
  
• On January 23 we explained Hololive, Australia's government said the surveillance state was "maybe kind of bad" and naturally lost the election, everything had two prices and three elevators, and fuck WordPress.
  
  
• On January 24 an entire country got DDOSed off the internet just so that someone could cheat at Minecraft, you can't log in from here, how Medium turned to shit, and how everything else did.
  
  
  
  
• On January 25 the crew of The Incomparable including Lex Friedman with an e were definitely probably not communists, save 99% on your Cloudfront bill with this one simple trick, hackers stoll a million dollars worth of store brand ugly monkey JPEGs, and Russia was totally not going to invade Ukraine swearsies.
  
  
• On January 26 Google dropped its new spying scheme in favour of a different new spying scheme, there was a privilege escalation and/or remote execution vulnerability in everything, there was a shortage, and Google banned the numeral 1.
  
  
• On January 27 in particular there was a shortage of my usual gluten-free food which I have since resolved by buying an entire house and a larger fridge and a separate freezer, solving Apple's 30% cut problem, and the RTX 3050 wasn't entirely awful.
  
  
  
  
• On January 28 Facebook's blockchain adventure came to an abrupt end when it got eaten by a grue, Lex Fridman (without an e) got hacked because QNAP, Microsoft got hit with 46 billion modems, a MacOS update broke critical apps for the first time ever cough cough, and the RTX 3050 was sold out already.
  
  
• On January 29 80% of NFTs created on OpenSea were fraud or spam according to OpenSea, Qubit asked thieves to please return the $80 billion they - wait, $80 million, hardly seems worth it, Samsung definitely did not dump 763,000 gallons of sulfuric acid into an Austin creek, something was headed for the Moon, and Neil who?
  
  
• On January 30 the Wonderland crypto protocol turned out the work of a serial fraudster unlike everything else in the industry which is mostly the work of first-time fraudsters, case in point - over three thousand blockchain projects stole users' money and disappeared in 2021, the IRS decided that maybe you shouldn't have to go through an audition just to pay your taxes, and chip makers started investing more in older, cheaper processes.
  
  
  
  
• And on January 31 there were still no nuggies (a situation which has improved over the course of the year - I currently have ten boxes), censorship was bad, memory leaks were worse, civil asset forfeiture stole ten times as much as social media scammers, and PCs were back on the menu.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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