Daily Tech News 15 January 2023

• So a couple of years ago Apple launched its own credit card, backed by Mastercard and Goldman Sachs.
  
  How's it going?
  
  Well, Goldman Sachs has lost about $3 billion on it so far. (9to5Mac)
  
  Which used to be a lot, but -
  
  
  
• The Swiss Central Bank just posted a loss of $143 billion. (CNBC / MSN)
  
  Not a decline in market cap, but a realised loss.
  
  Pretty sure that's still a lot.

• I read the news today, oh boy. 19,618 transistors in Intel's 8086. (Righto)
  
  Now they know how many transistors it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
  
  The author arrived at this number by the simple expedient of counting them all. The usual number given is 29,000, but that includes mask ROM and PLA grids where a logical zero means the transistor isn't actually present.
  
  
  
• The CircleCI hack was done by compromising an employee's laptop and stealing session tokens. (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's not 100% clear but it sounds like a proper corporate VPN would have prevented reuse of those tokens.
  
  This kind of thing is why, while I could easily buy a nice tablet like the Legion Y700 imported from China and with the Google Play Store preinstalled by, well, someone, I haven't. It's part of my job to be paranoid about this stuff.
  
  
  
• Medium, the failing Substack clone launched by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, now has a Mastodon instance. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which is something any sysadmin can set up on a Friday morning and then spend the afternoon drinking beer.
  
  So, yeah, news is quiet again.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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