Daily Tech News 10 August 2023

• Seattle looks set to be the first city in the US to protect gig workers from being arbitrarily revoked. (KUOW)
  
  Companies like Uber have a bad habit - well, they have lots of bad habits, but they have a particular bad habit of treating their workers like accounts on social networks: You get up in the morning and your job is gone.
  
  No warning, no explanation, no recourse, it's just not there anymore.
  
  I haven't read the legislation and I don't expect Seattle to get it right - though it's worth noting that two council members voted against it because they thought it was overbroad - but if you behave unreasonably for long enough, someone, somewhere, is going to hit you with a rock.

• Silicon Motion is preparing a PCIe 5 SSD controller with a power consumption of 3.5W. (AnandTech)
  
  That's about one third of current PCIe 5 controllers and in line with existing PCIe 4 models. If they can also cut the price drastically, PCIe 5 SSDs might actually have a reason to exist.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix meanwhile is sampling 321-layer flash memory chips. (Serve the Home)
  
  The very first multi-layer flash chips were introduced 10 years ago this week with 24 layers. At the time the flash memory industry was approaching a crisis because flash cells couldn't be made smaller without becoming so unreliable as to be basically useless.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel's 1TB 670p is available on Amazon for $34. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a QLC model with DRAM cache, so not amazing but also not terrible.
  
  It launched in 2021 with an MSRP of $154, so that's a 75% price reduction in two years.
  
  
  
• CNET is deleting thousands of old articles in order to improve its Google search ranking. (Gizmodo)
  
  Google says this won't work, but what would they know?
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM

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