Daily Tech News 19 September 2023

• A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction against California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, noting that the law - passed unanimously by both houses in the state legislature - is almost certainly unconstitutional. (The Verge)
  
  Laws by other states - including Texas and Arkansas - to protect children from online porn have foundered on the same principles as California's law to prevent data collection of children: You can't conclusively prove that someone is a child online without placing an unconstitutional burden on adults, or on the children, or both. Sometimes the threat is sufficiently direct that this is not considered unconstitutional - as for example in creating porn rather than merely viewing it - but none of these laws appear to reach that mark.
  
  Australia recently dropped planned age-verification legislation because, while we don't have the same constitutional protections here, someone involved was sensible enough to recognise that the the whole thing was an unworkable mess.

• Speaking of sense in unexpected places, the CDC doesn't have any:

  Updated COVID-19 vaccines are recommended for everyone 6 months and older and will be available by the end of this week at most places you would normally go to get your vaccines.

  But Australia:

  For younger people or older adults without severe immunocompromise who have already had a dose in 2023, no further doses are currently recommended. Their baseline risk of severe illness is low if they have already been vaccinated, and particularly if they have also had prior infection. Therefore a further 2023 dose will offer little additional benefit even if it has been more than 6 months since their last dose.

  Australia's Department of Health doesn't recommend an additional booster for adults under 65 unless they are severely immunocompromised, or for children under any circumstances.
  
  You have to wonder how two health organisations can look at the same set of data and come to two so widely diverging opinions.
  
  
  
• Tonga is filling up with scrap. (ABC)
  
  With a booming economy comes garbage, and with a small island comes nowhere to put that garbage.
  
  You might be thinking, wait, doesn't Tonga have an active volcano? Build a trebuchet and problem solved.
  
  Well, yes, it does, but (a) it just exploded and (b) the caldera is about 500 feet under water. Perhaps not insurmountable issues but that does make it harder to recoup costs by making it a tourist attraction.
  
  
  
• HyperDX is an open source alternative to DataDog, which is to say, a flexible monitoring platform for complex server environments. (GitHub)
  
  I discussed DataDog briefly a while back after finding that the monitoring client was a 250MB download - 750MB installed - that included an entire Python runtime and who knows what else.
  
  After seeing that monstrosity I took at the matching client for StatusCake, which while somewhat less comprehensive was a single shell script that I could and did audit in under half an hour.
  
  The entire HyperDX codebase is a 5.6MB download.
  
  
  
• AMD has announced its Epyc 8004 Zen 4c low-end server CPUs, codenamed Siena. (AnandTech)
  
  "Low end" now goes up to 64 cores, it seems.
  
  These start at around $400 for an 8 core chip, which isn't bad considering they have six memory channels and 96 lanes of PCIe 5.
  
  But they also run at around half the clock speed of Ryzen desktop chips, so just to match a 16 core 7950X (around $600) you'd need a 32 core Epyc ($1900) and things don't get interesting until you get to the 48 core model ($2700).
  
  We'll have to wait and see what the pricing is like on Zen 4 Threadripper workstation parts, but since clock speeds will be higher I wouldn't expect prices to be lower.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk has again floated the idea of charging a small fee for all Twitter users. (Tech Crunch)
  
  He's focused on bots again, reasonably enough; they're a plague. And charging any sort of monthly fee would eradicate them.
  
  Presumably these bots aren't using the official APIs and work by faking a web user, because the official APIs have already moved to paid plans (and absurdly expensive ones at that).
  
  The problem is, charging a monthly fee would eradicate the bots, but it would eradicate Twitter too.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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