Daily Tech News 30 June 2024

• Europe wants to deploy datacenters into space. Studies say it's feasible. (CNBC)

  ASCEND's space-based data storage facilities would benefit from "infinite energy" captured from the sun and orbit at an altitude of around 1,400 kilometers (869.9 miles).

  Well congratulations, your datacenter is now permanently running away from you at sixteen thousand miles per hour.
  
  Fortunately the writer of this piece spoke to some people who aren't certifiably insane:

  Winterson estimates that even a small 1 megawatt center in low earth orbit would need around 280,000 kilograms of rocket fuel per year at a cost of around $140 million in 2030 - a calculation based on a significant decrease in launch costs, which has yet to take place.

  That's not the launch cost, that's the upkeep.
  
  And that's for a tiny datacenter. The AI center Tesla is building right now is targeting not 1 megawatt but 500 - which would cost $70 billion per year to maintain given these assumptions.
  
  Back on Earth, Tesla is spending around $4 billion on the entire datacenter.

• After the malicious domain polyfill.io was shut down by the domain registrar, it switched to polyfill.com. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which had much less impact because nobody was using polyfill.com.
  
  The registrar for that domain shut it down as well, and the hackers switched to polyfill.cloud - and a whole list of other domains, including various forms of bootcdn, bootcss, and staticfile.
  
  In an interesting twist, the hackers behind the polyfill.io scheme (the original Polyfill library itself is innocuous and its developer innocent of all this) put their code on GitHub including their API keys and database password.
  
  So if they hadn't already been taken off line they would have been hacked by now.
  
  
  
• Unraveling Factorio's Lua security flaws. (Memory Corruption)
  
  The game Factorio lets you add scripts written in the programming language Lua, which is intended to be safe - or mostly safe - for such things.
  
  One researcher found that a malicious script could hack every player in a multi-player Factorio game simultaneously.
  
  The article is excruciatingly detailed, which is great for me because I myself have written code that embeds Lua for scripting and I need to know this stuff.
  
  Normal people will likely tune out after page 30.
  
  
  
• A French court ordered global DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare to poison their data in order to block a pirate streaming site. Rather than comply, OpenDNS blocked France. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Which has the same net effect: If you're in France you can't access the site by using OpenDNS.
  
  Time to run my own DNS server again, maybe. Not that it's particularly hard; I have two dedicated and two virtual Linux servers running at the new house now.
  
  
  
• The Associated Press is setting up a sister organisation explicitly for pay-to-play propaganda. (AP News)
  
  The AP itself will continue with its current function of providing propaganda for backroom deals and political favours rather than cash.
  
  
  
• Writing technical books for money. (The Architect Elevator)

  Rule 1: Never write a technical book for the money.

  Oh. Also:

  Authors are those people who consider $500 a lot of money.

  Publishing is pretty miserable for small authors now - which is to say anyone who isn't getting the benefit of a seven-figure money laundering deal - but then it always has been.
  
  
  
• An experiment in Denver doled out varying levels of UBI to three test groups. (Colorado Sun)
  
  Oh? What happened.

  The percentage of people who had housing at the 10-month check-in of the Denver Basic Income Project climbed to 45%.

  Well, that sounds great. What's the catch?

  They were separated into three groups. Group A received $1,000 per month for a year. Group B received $6,500 the first month and $500 for the next 11 months. And group C, the control group, received $50 per month.

  Seems reasonable.
  
  Group A gets a small but steady income. Group B gets a big advance so they can get out of whatever hole they're in, but a much smaller income. And Group C gets shafted. Such is life.

  About 45% of participants in all three groups were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point, according to the research.

  If the results in the control group are indistinguishable from the results in the trial group, the medicine had no effect.  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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