Daily Tech News 13 July 2024

• That's going to leave a mark: Call and text records for the past six months for almost all AT&T customers have been stolen in slow-motion train wreck that is the Snowflake breach. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Snowflake was an online data analytics platform with some major customers including Ticketmaster and Santander Bank. Technically I think Snowflake is still operating but I wouldn't expect them to be around for much longer.
  
  While Ticketmaster is international and the number of customers affected far outweighs AT&T, in that breach the hackers got your name, address, last four digits of your credit card, that kind of stuff.
  
  In this hack they got the phone numbers of everyone 110 million people called or texted over a period of six months. And it's all out there, forever.
  
  It does not (according to AT&T) include the contents of the text messages, and calls even if recorded for whatever reason would not be stored in this kind of database. I hope. That would raise it from a mere disaster to a catastrophe.
  
  And if you're not an AT&T customer you might still be affected if your phone company uses the AT&T network behind the scenes.

• Meta has dropped the special restrictions it had placed on Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts. (The Verge)
  
  You can enjoy the screaming in the comments there, if you like.
  
  
  
• Emmanuel Goldstein's X faces big EU fines as paid checkmarks are ruled deceptive. (Ars Technica)
  
  Sorry, I mean Elon Musk. It's pure coincidence that every Ars Technica article mentioning SpaceX, Twitter, Tesla, or Starlink has the name ELON MUSK in it as a signal for the zombies to swarm.
  
  Anyway, the headline is a lie. There is no such ruling.
  
  But EU Bookburner General Terry Britain claims that blue checkmarks used to denote trustworthy sources of information which is either a direct lie or a sign of galloping early-onset Alzheimer's.
  
  Musk fired back asserting that the EU offered Twitter an illegal secret deal under which they would hold off on fines if the company would enact secret censorship under their direction.
  
  Terry Britain claimed that the EU doesn't do that, but... It does.
  
  Also interesting to see on that article, Ars Technica's creative director Aurich Lawson getting savaged by his own mob.
  
  
  
• Don't run your Ryzen 9 9950X at 60W. (WCCFTech)
  
  More leaked benchmarks, but there's something interesting here because the same tests were run at power levels of 60W, 90W, 120W, 160W, and 230W, with the last of those being the maximum boost power setting without manual overclocking.
  
  At 60W the CPU ran cool at 41C and managed 4GHz on all cores. Bumping it up to 90W pushed the temperature to 49C but the clock to just over 5GHz. At 160W it reaches 5.55GHz and at 230W 5.6GHz, so there's no real point in going over 160W.
  
  
  
• Emmanuel Gold - sorry. SpaceX's Falcon 9 has been grounded after issues with a second stage caused the latest cluster of Starlink satellites to miss their orbital target. (Reuters)
  
  They are trying to boost the satellites into the correct orbit with the on-board ion drives - really - but even if that works it will reduce their service life.
  
  This comes after, if you weren't keeping track, 365 consecutive Falcon 9 launches without issue.
  
  
  
• Looking to buy a Z80 computer before supply of the chip runs out forever? Tindie (who) and Zeal have you covered. (Tindie)
  
  For $180 you get a 10MHz Z80, 256k of flash storage, 512k of RAM, VGA graphics, and four voice sound synthesis.
  
  It's kind of neat if you're into retrocomputing.
  
  
  
• Speaking of retrocomputing the German navy is working on phasing out eight inch floppy disks. (Ars Technica)
  
  I have no idea why they are used because the ships involved were commissioned in the mid-nineties, by which time even 3.5" floppies had been around for a decade, and eight inch models had been dead for years.
  
  
  
• A "red team" from CISA broke into another federal agency and had free rein in its network, undetected, for five months. (The Register)
  
  Wait, the federal government noticed a massive problem in only five months?
  
  
  
• Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately it's fucked. (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, they use the term broken, but I felt it needed a little more oomph.

  The practice of peer review was developed in a different era, when the arguments and analysis that led to a paper's conclusion could be succinctly summarized within the paper itself. Want to know how the author arrived at that conclusion? The derivation would be right there. It was relatively easy to judge the "wrongness" of an article because you could follow the document from beginning to end, from start to finish, and have all the information you needed to evaluate it right there at your fingerprints.
  
  That's now largely impossible with the modern scientific enterprise so reliant on computers.

  Specifically because scientific papers very rarely include the code used to analyse the data. All the assumptions - and the errors - in that code are hidden from reviewers.
  
  Noting that peer review is f - broken, the author, not a journalist but real life astrophysicist Paul Sutter, moves on to science's second line of defense, replication, where things are no better:

  There's a complex swirling septic tank of problems that all contribute to the replication crisis, but the first issue is that replication isn't sexy. You don't get to learn new things about the world around us; you just get to confirm whether someone else learned new things about the world around us. As an added ugly bonus, non-results often don't even get published. Novelty is seen as a virtue, and if you run an experiment and it doesn't provide a positive result, journals are less likely to be interested in your manuscript. Additionally, because replication isn't seen as sexy, when it is done, it isn't read. Replication studies do not get published in high-impact-factor journals, and authors of replication studies do not get as many citations for their work. This means that their h-index is lower, which lowers their chances of getting grants and promotions.

  What's the solution? I'm glad you asked:

  Altogether, the scientific and technical publishing industry rakes in about ten billion dollars a year, often with double-digit profit margins. Of course they don't want this ship to change course. I can't really blame them; they're just playing by the accepted rules of their own game.

  Yes, there isn't one.
  
  
  
• Despite selling literally dozens of units, several of which were not returned, developers are ignoring Apple's wildly expensive and basically useless Vision Pro AR headset. (Ars Technica)
  
  Not even porting existing iOS apps.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is reportedly working on an AI that can reason, instead of just regurgitating pre-digested Reddit posts and telling you that backpacks are as safe as parachutes when jumping out of a plane. (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, first up, Terry Winograd, SHRDLU, 1968.

  Person: Had you touched any pyramid before you put the green one on the little cube?
  Computer: YES, THE GREEN ONE.
  Person: When did you pick it up?
  Computer: WHILE I WAS STACKING UP THE RED CUBE, A LARGE RED BLOCK AND A LARGE GREEN CUBE.
  Person: Why?
  Computer: TO GET RID OF IT.
  Person: Why did you do that?
  Computer: TO CLEAN OFF THE RED CUBE.
  Person: Why did you clear off that cube?
  Computer: TO PUT IT ON A LARGE GREEN CUBE.
  Person: Why did you do that?
  Computer: TO STACK UP THE RED CUBE , A LARGE RED BLOCK AND A LARGE GREEN CUBE.
  Person: Why did you do that?
  Computer: BECAUSE YOU ASKED ME TO.

  Second, that parachutes and backpacks thing is really an answer given Google's AI Overview. (Fast Company)
  
  And it's based on a real result from a real scientific study. (NPR)
  
  But it's a study of whether people actually read scientific papers.
  
  The plane was parked on the ground.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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