Daily Tech News 23 January 2024

• Don't buy HP printers: They're hopelessly insecure piles of garbage, says... HP's CEO? (Ars Technica)
  
  He was trying to argue that if you buy third-party ink cartridges they could contain a virus that could take over your entire network, but you'd have to have delegated your design efforts to middle-schoolers in Myanmar to fuck up that badly.
  
  Or use Node.js. That would do it too.
  
  He's lying. Or at least, I really hope he's lying, because I'm using an HP laptop right now and I don't want it turn burn my house down.

• Palworld is a hit, and it's easy to see why. (The Verge)
  
  In which the article is relatively sane and the comments are a mud-wrestling match of crazy people, none of them weighing less than three hundred pounds.
  
  The argument going on in the article is that one of the 3D models used in the game has very similar proportions to one of the 3D models used in one Pokemon game... Because they're both fucking wolves.
  
  The argument going on in the comments is that Palworld is nothing but a direct ripoff of another game... Though nobody can agree which other game.
  
  
  
• Oh, and it's now sold 6 million copies with a peak of 1.5 million simultaneous players.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Apple may have sold 180,000 units of its Vision Pro high-gloss e-waste device. (Engadget)
  
  Which is and isn't a lot. At a minimum price of $3499 that's a lot of idiots who just set their money on fire. On the other hand, with an estimated 1.2 billion users worldwide, just 0.015% of Apple's customers have shown an interest in the Vision Pro.
  
  I don't think VR goggles are pointless, but consumer-grade VR goggles at $3499 a pop definitely are.
  
  
  
• A hacker has cloned a Game Boy Advance game by crashing the console at just the right time. (Engadget)
  
  So that instead of playing a single sound from the game's ROM cartridge, it played the entire contents of the 16MB ROM cartridge over the speaker. So all he had to do was record it, spend a couple of days cleaning up the recording, and then more time debugging the issues with the resulting code, and then it booted, albeit with bugs.
  
  Of course, you can also just read the ROM cartridge over a parallel interface in about four seconds, but where's the fun in that.
  
  
  
• Terraform Labs has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (Tech Crunch)
  
  At first I thought this was Terraform the Docker management thing, but that's owned by HashiCorp. There is no corporation named "Terraform" associated with the product "Terraform".
  
  No, this is the Terraform associated with the Terra "stablecoin", which imploded in 2022 and took the company's market cap from $40 billion to zero inside of a week.
  
  I'm surprised they still exist. Their former CEO is in jail in Montenegro after fleeing the country, awaiting extradition back to the US.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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