Daily Tech News 11 April 2023

• We'll make our own Twitter API! With blackjack, and hookers! (PyPI)
  
  Twitter recently cancelled the existing free API plan and replaced it with a free API plan which is useless and a paid API plan which is absurd.
  
  If you know what an API is, you might wonder how the Twitter website works, and the answer is that it uses an API.
  
  A free one.
  
  So now there's software that lets you use that instead of paying $100 per month for 50 API requests, which would last you nearly 11 seconds of active use.

• Hackers have flooded NPM with over 600,000 fake software packages, which is a huge problem because no-one can tell them apart from the 800,00 genuine but terrible software packages that were already on there. (The Hacker News)
  
  Oh no.
  
  
  
• PC sales dropped nearly 30% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2023, with Apple the odd one out among the major manufacturers with a 40% drop in units shipped. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• How to cluster nine Raspberry Pi Picos into one very slow and basically useless computer. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Two Picos - or better, two of the RP2040 chips the Pico uses - makes sense. The RP2040 has no built-in graphics but it's clever enough that you can get it to produce an HDMI output just in software. Only that takes all the memory and half the CPU capacity, so having a second one as the actual CPU makes for a neat embedded / hobby system.
  
  Nine is right out.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 4070 is basically the short-lived 12GB RTX 3080 model without the cost or power consumption, maybe. (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not out yet, but it might finally be a merely expensive and not actually insane card in the current generation. An announcement is expected this week.
  
  
  
• A previously unknown isotope of uranium, U-241, has been discovered. (Phys.org)
  
  Where the most common isotope, U-238, has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, U-241 has a half life of 40 minutes. We probably missed it because we were always at lunch when it showed up at the lab.
  
  
  
• How Starlink lost an entire fleet of satellites. (Inverse)
  
  Red ionosphere at morning, Elon take warning.
  
  
  
• The FTX has fined supplement maker Nature's Bounty $600,000 for Amazon review hijacking. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is a trick where you take an Amazon page for a product with positive reviews - possibly even legitimate ones - and change all the contents to push your own brand of bullshit while keeping the reviews in place.
  
  Sometimes the remaining reviews are wildly inappropriate for the new product but most people just see 500 reviews with an average rating of 4.8 and click the buy button.
  
  Notably the FTC did this. Amazon hasn't done squat.
  
  
  
• The Geekom Mini IT12 is basically last year's Intel NUC model only now it's sold by a Taiwanese company you've never heard of. (Liliputing)
  
  It's not bad, I'm just not sure what the point is. An AMD-based NUC, sure, but an Intel one when Intel already makes them?
  
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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