Daily Tech News 25 April 2024

• President Biden has carried out his ceremonial duties as pudding-in-chief and smeared the TikTok divest-or-die bill into law. (The Verge)
  
  Huzzah, I guess.

• Snap is the worst thing since systemd.
  
  If you are running LXD, and you install it with Snap, MAKE SURE TO PIN THE VERSION OR IT WILL DIE.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, Ubuntu 24.04 is here. (Techzine)
  
  The beta version was delayed by a week due to the near-catastrophe with the xz hack, while the team at Canonical (makers of Ubuntu) rebuilt every single package to ensure that no trace of the hack was left.
  
  I had expected the release of the live version to be likewise delayed, but it has shipped on time.
  
  While I wouldn't install it on a production server just yet, the 22.04 release was remarkably trouble free. And I do have a couple of Beelink mini-PCs waiting to be set up.
  
  (Ubuntu releases twice a year, and the even-number year April releases are LTS - guaranteed free support for five years with paid support for another five beyond that.)
  
  
  
• IBM is buying Hashicorp for $6.4 billion. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Hashicorp does... Stuff. I dunno. Docket strangulation, something like that.
  
  
  
• Stellar Blade is here and the perpetually outraged classes have a new game to be perpetually outraged about. (WCCFTech)
  
  In this case, they're mostly outraged that the game represents impossible standards of feminine beauty, a claim somewhat weakened by the fact that the in-game character looks almost exactly like the motion-capture actress who worked with the animation team.
  
  WCCFTech, which is not a game review site, gives it 9 out of 10.
  
  The actual game review sites hate it because they're all run by the perpetually outraged classes.
  
  
  
• The man who destroyed Google. (Where's Your Ed)
  
  The man running Google Search for the past five years - replacing the man who built Google Search for the previous 20 - was previously head of search at Yahoo.
  
  Which was such a success that they had to replace it with Bing.

  Raghavan's story is unique, insofar as the damage he's managed to inflict (or, if we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid in the case of Yahoo) on two industry-defining companies, and the fact that he did it without being a CEO or founder. Perhaps more remarkable, he's achieved this while maintaining a certain degree of anonymity. Everyone knows who Musk and Zuckerberg are, but Raghavan's known only in his corner of the Internet. Or at least he was.

  Did Google Search fall or was it pushed?
  
  A little of both, it seems.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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