Daily Tech News 23 May 2023

• Blockchains suck.
  
  
  
• Facebook has been hit with a $1.3 billion fine for violating Europe's law against letting foreign companies keep their money. (The Verge)
  
  Block the entire fake continent at the firewall.

• Daylight, the LGBTQ+ neobank, is unexpectedly shutting down at the end of June. (Tech Crunch)

  In a blog [post] published today, [founder and CEO Rob] Curtis said he felt like "now is the right time to exit this market before the feds show up" and told customers that their "money is safe and will be fully accessible for transfer through 30 June probably."

  This is my shocked face.
  
  
  
• In more unexpectedly news China is calling in its loans to unemployed nations who never had a chance of paying them back. (Fortune)
  
  Well, not that shocked.
  
  
  
• Another day, another demarcation dispute: Journalists are in an uproar after a fake Bloomberg account on Twitter posted false news stories before they could. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Look at me. I am the fake news now.
  
  
  
• TSMC is putting "bombs" in its machines. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, sticky notes that say "bomb" on them, so if the maintenance crews don't find them they get a demerit rather than blown into tiny pieces.
  
  These machines are the size of a house and if not maintained properly can cost tens of millions in lost production and repairs, so a sticky note that says "bomb" seems an entirely reasonable precaution.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum UM790 Pro is now on sale. (Notebook Check)
  
  This is a mini PC - the size of a sandwich, if you put lots of filling in your sandwiches - with AMD's latest Ryzen 7940HS CPU. 8 Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA3 graphics cores, which makes it three times as fast as the laptop I'm using right now, both for processing and graphics.
  
  Prices start at $519 without memory or storage, and go up to $789 with 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. It has room for a second M.2 SSD, as well as two HDMI ports, four USB 3 ports, two USB 4 ports (which can also handle video, but are at the front of the system making that a little inconvenient), and 2.5Gb Ethernet.
  
  A pretty nice system at a good price. Except that you have to order it from AliExpress.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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