Daily Tech News 8 June 2023

• It's not the nine-to-five (well, eight-to-six) that gets me, it's the wakeup call at one and the working until nine again.
  
  Got hit by a botnet at work and, well, Docker is complete and utter shit the moment anything unexpected happens.
  
  
  
• Oh, hey, Monday is a public holiday here. Forgot about that one. I might actually get some of the repeatedly delayed blog upgrades done.
  
  
  
• Good Omens, everyone!
  
  When Good Omens aired on Amazon I had two reactions: First, that they had perhaps not nailed it perfectly but they had done as well as could be hoped in this debased age, and far better than could be expected; and second, what do you mean "season one", there's only one book and you've already covered it.
  
  Good Omens season two airs July 28. (Ars Technica)
  
  It's based on a sequel Pratchett and Gaiman planned together many years ago but never wrote because that was when their individual careers took off. Gaiman is attached to the project, and the original cast is all returning, so maybe, just maybe, this one also won't suck.

• A judge has granted the SEC's request for a global restraining order on Binance doing anything with funds generated from its US subsidiary, BAM. (Tech Crunch)

  The respective parties have between five and 10 days to move the crypto assets involved in the restraining order to BAM. Within the next 30 days, the defendants have to transfer all customer crypto assets to "new wallets with new private keys, including new administrative keys." The keys, along with the crypto assets and staking assets, will be in sole control of BAM Trading employees based in the U.S. and will "not be provided to or in any way shared" with Binance, Zhao or any Binance entity.

  What the SEC is alleging here is nothing specific to the blockchain, but the sort of thing major banks get in trouble with all the time when they don't strictly separate customer deposits from investments.
  
  And given the way Binance operates - it's not a total scam but they do play fast and loose with the rules - the SEC likely has a strong case.
  
  
  
• If you recently deployed a modded Minecraft server, you may have creepers spawning on your computer right now. (Prism Launcher)
  
  A number of popular mods and modpacks on CurseForge and Bukkit had nasty malware added after individual creator accounts were compromised.
  
  The malware is known to work on both Windows and Linux, but is not believed to be active on other platforms. (Minecraft runs on everything, including some of the more advanced toasters.)
  
  Additional details at Bleeping Computer.
  
  It's pretty serious, so if you're running mods and don't want your computer turned into some hacker's personal raid farm, worth checking.
  
  
  
• AMD has released details of its new Epyc Bergamo chip with 128 Zen 4c cores. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, not chip exactly - it's made up of nine smaller chiplets, but everyone does that these days.
  
  The interesting part is the new 16 core Zen 4c chiplet is only 10% larger than the 8 core Zen 4 chiplet from just a few months ago. Partly because it has the same amount of L3 cache as before - 32MB - and only doubles the cores.
  
  And partly because AMD has taken the same Zen 4 core design but optimised it to reduce the size of the chip rather than maximise the clock speed.
  
  It's a different approach to efficiency cores. Intel's efficiency cores are a completely different design to its performance cores, dropping instructions like AVX-512 that take up too much space (which led to Intel disabling AVX-512 on its performance cores as well). Intel's E cores provide half the performance of its P cores, but are one quarter the size.
  
  AMD's E cores (Zen 4c) look to be half the size of its P cores (Zen 4), a much lesser reduction, but could deliver 80% of the performance of the full-size cores, also a much lesser reduction.
  
  This looks pretty good. If Zen 4c cuts power consumption along with die size, it would be a welcome addition to Ryzen chips, particularly on laptops. For now though it's for servers only.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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