Daily Tech News 14 July 2024

• Meet the soft robots that can amputate limbs and fuse with other robots. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I for one welcome our Mengelean Borg overlords.

  In one demo video, we see a soft quadruped robot crawling along when a falling rock traps a back leg. The reversible joint attaching the leg is heated with current, allowing the robot to break free of its leg and escape. Although it's not shown in the video, the limb can be re-attached, as well.

  Oh. They can amputate their own limbs. That's still slightly horrifying, but much less so.
  
  Kind of like a lizard that drops its tail, uses it as a club to beat a frog to death, and then reattaches the tail and eats the frog.
  
  

• The goggles do nothing! Pushing the 9950X to 320W doesn't really help much. (WCCFTech)
  
  At 120W it's essentially tied with the 253W Intel 14900K, and at any power level above that it rapidly breaks away.
  
  Interestingly the upcoming sixteen core laptop chip codenamed Strix Point Halo is rated at 120W, so that will deliver what is currently considered leading-edge desktop performance.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the 14900K, I wouldn't. (Tech Radar)
  
  The problems with Intel's high-end chips persist.
  
  A study of crash logs for video games showed that for some types of problem, 90% of all recorded errors happened on the 13900K and 14900K. Those chips are just pushed too hard and run too hot.
  
  This is not an Intel problem in general; it only seems to affect the company's top-of-the-line consumer desktop chips. But that's bad. If you buy their most expensive chips you don't expect to get dramatically worse reliability.
  
  
  
• Disney's internal Slack was allegedly hacked, with 1.1TB of data exfiltrated. (HackRead)
  
  I haven't encountered this site before, but it looks the Web3 is going great of online services.
  
  Bookmarked for later reference.
  
  
  
• Signal is downplaying a security flaw that it has now fixed after a Twitter drama. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This was a local security issue, rather than an online one. Anyone with access to your computer could read your Signal history without needing your password. The local database was encrypted, but the encryption key was sitting right there for anyone to use.
  
  
  
• Linksys Velop routers send your WiFi passwords to servers in the US. (StackDiary)
  
  In plain text.
  
  Yay.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, I just picked up a mesh wifi system for the new house - a D-Link M32 Eagle Pro three node setup. I've been running a router I had before the move, but the coverage is not that great since the new house is twice the size of the old one.
  
  I probably went a little overboard, though. The bundle was 75% off on a one-day sale so I bought two, which should be enough to cover the house, the garage, the entire garden, and a couple of my neighbours.
  
  
  
• The NSA has rediscovered the tape of computing pioneer Admiral Grace Hopper's 1982 lecture, but says it lacks the ability to read it. (MuckRock)
  
  It's one inch Ampex reel-to-reel video tape, which is hardly uncommon. It took me two minutes to find a commercial service that will convert an entire tape to digital format for $150.
  
  
  
• The Sipeed Lichi Pi 3A is a development board for RISC-V programmers. (Liliputing)
  
  RISC-V itself is an open-standard competitor to Arm. Anyone can build their own processors with no licensing fees, which makes it attractive to companies like Western Digital, who need to embed multiple processor cores into ever SSD they make.
  
  The board itself starts at $49 for a bare module with 4GB of RAM, going up to $139 with 16GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and a carrier board with two M.2 slots.
  
  This is slightly confusing because the Lichee Pi 4A already exists and is more powerful, just lacking those two M.2 slots.
  
  
  
• Journalists for Censorship strikes again: Shooting conspiracies trend on X as Musk endorses Trump. (The Verge)
  
  Following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at his rally in Pennsylvania, the left did what the left does best: Act like crazy people in public.

  On X, neither trending topic about the shooting is flush with particularly robust or coherent conspiracies; clicking through, you'll largely find short posts from X users saying that the shooting looks fake or is a stunt. (There is no evidence of either.) But by placing the subjects into X's trending topics area, the conspiracies are elevated to more people.

  The complaint here seems to be that Twitter is not censoring Democrats.
  
  I can see how this would be bad for the Democrats.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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