Daily Tech News 17 July 2024

• Microsoft's former DEI leader has blasted the company in an internal email after the entire team was laid off, sort of. (IGN)
  
  Yes, a Microsoft DEI team leader did indeed blast the company in an internal email after their entire team was laid off. That is true.
  
  But don't celebrate just yet. Microsoft has many DEI teams.
  
  The email though is exactly what you would expect from these parasites:

  Unofficially in my opinion, not specific to Microsoft alone, but Project 2025 looms and true systems change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020. Hence the purposeful and strategic 3-5 year shelf life of many company's inclusion commitments post the murder of George Floyd are being reevaluated.

  Fire them all.
  
  
  

• Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of Bay Area venture capitalist firm Andreesen Horowitz, which I am assured is purely a coincidence, have made an announcement with respect to the coming election. (Tech Crunch)

  "I wish we didn't have to pick a side," said Horowitz, who also acknowledged that his political choice would upset many of his friends and even his mother. "We literally [believe] the future of our business, the future of technology, and the future of America is at stake."

  The comments are about what you'd expect. There's less shrieking that you'd find at The Verge, because Tech Crunch focuses on the money side of tech where The Verge focuses on the intersection of tech and politics from an explicitly leftist viewpoint.
  
  
  
• Western Digital has announced an 8TB model of its high-end SN850X SSD. (AnandTech)
  
  It's more than three times the price of the 4TB model.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare reports almost 7% of internet traffic is malicious. (ZDNet)
  
  And 92% is garbage.
  
  
  
• Google has resolved the dual crisis of SEO spam and AI spam by, uh, not indexing your site. (Vicent Schmalbach)
  
  Looking for something on the internet? Try, well, AltaVista is dead, but MetaCrawler is still around.
  
  And it seems to be active too; a search on "Pixy Misa" found a page of hits for the anime character, and then yesterday's tech thread from this very blog. No visual clutter, no spam that I saw, no AI crap, and commendably fast.
  
  
  
• MySQL 9.0 is here, apparently. (The Register)
  
  It hasn't made much of a splash despite being what Oracle calls an "Innovation Release". Partly because it doesn't innovate very much, and partly because what little innovation there is, is found only in the paid version.
  
  Go with MariaDB instead if you can.
  
  Or PostgreSQL if you have the time and inclination.
  
  
  
• Personal data for 2.2 million customers has been stolen from Rite Aid. (The Register)
  
  This only affects purchases from June 2017 to July 2018, so it sounds like a backup copy of a database was left lying around somewhere not properly secured, and then forgotten until this incident.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is moving the headquarters of Twitter and SpaceX from California to Texas. (Tech Crunch)
  
  He specifically cited Gavin Newsom as the reason.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:45 AM

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