Daily Tech News 3 September 2023

• A maker of "smart" chastity belts left users details - including names and delivery addressers - exposed on the internet. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company's website itself was also exposed to hackers, so the researcher who discovered this, on getting no response from the company, edited the sight to add a warning.
  
  The company removed the warning, but did nothing to fix the vulnerabilities.

  The company sells a chastity cage for people with a penis that can be linked to an Android app (there is no iPhone app). Using the app, a partner — who could be anywhere in the world — can follow their partners' movements, given that the device transmits precise GPS coordinates down to a few meters.

  Normally I'd mock the insanely woke "people with a penis" line, but in this one case it is apropos.
  
  
  

• PyPI is Tensorflow and noise. (PyCode)
  
  PyPI is the Python Package Index, a central repository of freely available Python code.
  
  TensorFlow is a popular general-purpose machine learning library for Python. Not just generative AI, but actual useful stuff too.
  
  TensorFlow is not just one of the largest libraries on PyPI; it is four of the five largest libraries on PyPI, totaling 8.8TB all by itself. The other entry in the top five is LALSuite, a library for gravitational wave analysis, a relative lightweight at a mere 1.1TB.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  In total, PyPI contains over 200 billion lines of code, which still is a lot.
  
  And about 10,000 assorted API keys that aren't supposed to be there at all.
  
  
  
• The Burning Man site has been cut off by rain. (Reno Gazette Journal)
  
  Oh no.
  
  The original headline said something to the effect of roads being closed in both directions, which was a wonderful snark magnet, but sadly they fixed it.
  
  
  
• AMD's 8000-series model numbers will be even more annoying. (Guru3D)
  
  The 8040 range will be rebadged current 7040 models. We don't yet know if there will be 8035, 8030, or 8020 models to muddy the waters as well.
  
  The 8050 family will be new Zen 5 chips with up to 12 CPU cores and 16 RDNA3.5 graphics cores. Since Zen 5 is expected to be a major upgrade, these could be twice as fast for multi-threaded apps as current 7040 mainstream laptop chips.
  
  The 8055 family will replace the 7045 range - desktop chips fitted into a smaller socket and with reduced power envelopes, with 16 Zen 5 cores replacing 16 Zen 4 cores, and likely still just two graphics cores.
  
  And then there's Sarlak, which doesn't have a number because they're out of numbers. This is the monster chip with 16 Zen 5 cores and 40 RDNA3.5 graphics cores.
  
  To give you an idea of how that will cope with games, the PlayStation 5 has 36 older RDNA2 graphics cores - and just 8 Zen 2 CPU cores.
  
  No prices or dates yet, these are all 2024 products.
  
  
  
• If you need to pack eight E1.S form factor server SSDs into your desktop PC, well, now you can. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The card from Highpoint costs $1500, but might still be the most cost-effective way to add 120TB of solid-state storage to your windows desktop, since E1.S drives seem to be surprisingly inexpensive.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:07 AM

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