Daily Tech News 15 September 2023

• California has passed its new right-to-repair legislation, the most stringent in the nation. (Ars Technica)
  
  The legislation, backed by repair companies like iFixit and, uh, anti-repair companies like Apple, takes effect next July. Products costing more than $50 will be covered for three years, and products costing over $100 will be covered for seven years.
  
  Staring on that date manufacturers are required to make available parts, tools, manuals, and software needed to repair devices sold after July 1 2021 - so it affects devices you've already bought as well as new ones.
  
  What's the catch? Apple supports this, and Apple is the most aggressively anti-repair company in this or any other industry, so what gives?
  
  We won't see for a few months, but I can hazard a guess. The law requires that replacement parts be made available, but it doesn't require that those replacement parts be in any way reasonable.
  
  "Oh, your MacBook's screen has failed and you need to replace a five-cent Hall effect sensor to fix it? Here's a replacement lower case for $250, a replacement screen for $500, and a replacement motherboard because the other components are keyed to a chip soldered onto the motherboard for $1000.
  
  "Your laptop only cost $1099? Too bad."

• The Khadas Mind Premium is a NUC for people with too much money. (AnandTech)
  
  Who would probably buy a Mac anyway. At $1099 I don't see them selling many.
  
  
  
• Google has extended the update period for all Chromebooks to 10 years. (Google)
  
  That's... A lot better than it was before. After 10 years laptops tend to be beat all to hell anyway, and much better options are available cheaply.
  
  I still don't trust Google, but it's a step in the right direction.
  
  
  
• Loom's nightmare AWS outage. (Overmind)
  
  It wasn't an AWS outage, but okay.
  
  They reconfigured their CDN and ended up caching API requests by path, ignoring parameters, leading to users getting responses meant for other users.
  
  Where have we seen that before?
  
  At my day job, we don't have a CDN in front of our API for precisely this reason, just a collection of firewalls and proxies that route and log requests but never cache anything.
  
  
  
• Sony held it's PlayStation State of Play Event and announced... Nothing. (The Verge)
  
  Well, there are two new colours of the PS5, and you can't load your save game from part one of the FFVII remake into part two, but that's really it.
  
  
  
• I've started watching Netflix's live action One Piece adaptation. It's not bad. Some of it rises to being genuinely good, but in these early episodes there's a lot of characters being introduced and it's a bit uneven.
  
  Technically it's mostly very good. It is being made on a streaming budget rather than a movie budget, but that only shows here and there - imperfect compositing on a green screen shot, or a slightly awkward transition on location because they couldn't find a corridor and a corridor that matched up.
  
  The actors fit the roles, the story hasn't been hacked to pieces so far as I can tell, and they don't actively despise their audience. 8/10. 10/10 with rice.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:15 AM

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