Daily Tech News 25 July 2023

• If you're going to be evil, be all the way evil: Google's new Web Integrity API plans to lock you out of your own browser and track your activity everywhere with in-depth fingerprinting and unblockable DRM. (Ars Technica)
  
  I've switched to Brave. Finally.
  
  Once Google was a tech company,
  They wrote a lot of code.
  But baby that was years ago,
  Before the advertising motherlode.
  
  For all their flaws Apple and Microsoft still make actual products. Amazon at least ships products. With Google, you are not the customer.

• A 2nm fab - chip factory - is under construction in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's major islands. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The venture, called Rapidus, is backed by the Japanese government and a who's who of major Japanese companies from NTT to Toyota, and is in large part a hedge against China fucking everything up.
  
  Worst case if cooler heads prevail and the world doesn't go up in radioactive smoke, they still have a home-grown, leading edge chip production facility.
  
  
  
• Intel's new AVX10 instruction set is AVX-512 without the 512. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AVX-512 has two features: 512-bit operations and a better-designed instruction set than AVX and AVX2. AMD actually implements it as two 256-bit operations in sequence, mostly using the existing AVX2 logic, and it still works very well.
  
  Intel implemented AVX-512 as a full 512-bit design and has been having problems with it ever since. On servers it uses too much power and reduces clock speeds; on desktop CPUs it's simply broken.
  
  AVX10 solves these problems by making the hard stuff optional. AMD's solution is still better, and proven to work, so it's not clear why Intel isn't following suit.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman-Fried's Worldcoin scans your eyeballs and puts them on the blockchain, because who wouldn't want to do that? (Tech Crunch)
  
  This scheme from a third-rate Bond movie has raised $250 million so far.
  
  
  
• The Flipper Zero hacking security testing tool now has its own app store. (Liliputing)
  
  Now your hacking tool can get hacked. How convenient!
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Slim Pro 9i Gen 8 14 (a.k.a Yoga Pro 9i Gen 8 14) has a 3072x1920 14.5" display with 100% everything and an eye-searing 1200 nits maximum brightness. (Notebook Check)
  
  It has soldered RAM, but there are options for 32GB and 64GB as well as the base 16GB, and those options are actually available in Australia. Though if you choose the 64GB option here you also need to choose the fastest CPU and RTX 4070 graphics.
  
  It actually might be the laptop I was looking for except that (a) I spent all my laptop money already, (b) I'm fairly happy with the much cheaper HP I have now, and (c) there are no good photos of the keyboard I can find anywhere so the Four Essential Keys are stuck in a state of quantum indeterminism.
  
  The Yoga 9i 14 has four non-essential keys in the place of the Four Essential Keys, so PowerToys could turn it into something acceptable. But judging from the corner of the keyboard in one photo I think the Pro model does away with them.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:10 AM

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