Daily Tech News 27 June 2023

• There's a donut chain in Melbourne that sells several gluten-free varieties, and I really wanted to try them out while I was down there. This turned out to be very easy because there was one in the shopping mall next to my hotel, and another at the airport.
  
  I got an assortment of six: One plain, one jam filled, one Nutella-filled, and three glazed.
  
  They're terrible.
  
  
  
• Social network IRL, just recently hailed as a "unicorn" for quickly attracting 20 million active users, is shutting down after it turned out that 19 million of them don't exist. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Having bots on your social network is not intrinsically bad, so long as you can still get a count of human users somehow. If you can't, and your depending on investor or advertising money, you're bound for serious trouble seriously quickly.

• If 64GB isn't enough for your laptop Mushkin's new 96GB DDR5 SODIMM kit is available now. (Serve the Home)
  
  This should work in both Intel and AMD laptops, but you should probably check compatibility first; there have been BIOS issues with some desktop motherboards and it's likely the same will be true for laptops.
  
  I just switched to a new laptop with 64GB of RAM, and the difference from 16GB is night and day. Frankly 32GB would have been fine, but going all the way up to 64GB was only another $100 - Australian, so $3.50 in real money. If I only had the one laptop for all my work the 96GB kit would be worth it, but I have one or two or three others.
  
  
  
• The Flipper Zero is on its way to selling $80 million worth of, uh, professional security testing tools. (Tech Crunch)
  
  It is actually very useful for security testing; the problem is more that it's a little too good at what it does. If you're building a garage door system, for example, and want to make sure that it's secure, the device that does that can also open any garage doors that aren't secure.
  
  It can also emulate security cards, key fobs, arbitrary Bluetooth and infrared devices, and IoT and smart home systems which are notoriously unreliable anyway. Which again is great for developers who need to test those things, not so good if the kid next door keeps locking you out of your own home.
  
  
  
• Google's Pixel Fold is a great $500 device with the slight drawback that it actually costs $1800. (The Verge)
  
  And the secondary drawback that if you get a tiny bit of grit on the screen and then fold it closed it could die after just four days. (Ars Technica)
  
  $450 a day seems like rather a lot for a mobile phone.
  
  
  
• If you want one of those little five port 2.5GbE routers only with eight ports you can now get that too. (Liliputing)
  
  Available with up to a Core i7-10510U, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, which is more than you could possibly need for a simple router, so it can double as a small Linux server.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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