Daily Tech News 19 July 2024

• Everything is down. (ABC) (no, the other one)
  
  Supermarkets, airports, petrol stations, universities, law firms, Bunnings, blood donation services, banks, government departments, Microsoft, police computer systems, NSW emergency services, 7-11 and the ABC's own video editing department are offline across Australia because security company Crowdstrike went splat.
  
  Reportedly any computer with Crowdstrike installed is now throwing the Blue Screen of Death after a bad update and the only solution is to boot into safe mode and remove the driver.
  
  Banks, airlines, and emergency services in the US are also affected. (Twitter)
  
  And Europe.
  
  Fortunately hamsters are naturally immune.
  
  And so apparently is Twitter.

IT teams waking up this morning pic.twitter.com/MS76Lo80zV

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) July 19, 2024

• AMD's latest 12-core laptop chip comes in just slightly behind Apple's 16-core M3 Max on multi-threaded workloads. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And ahead on single-threaded tasks.
  
  No word on respective power consumption but the M3 Max is not a lightweight in that regard.
  
  It's up to 46% faster than Intel's Core i9 185H as well. (WCCFTech)
  
  Can't buy it yet, but laptops are expected to be in stores before the end of the month.
  
  
  
• Type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut. (GitHub)
  
  Take that, Bob from the NSA.
  
  
  
• Don't think I mentioned this one: Email addresses for 15 million Trello users have been leaked. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  We used this at work for a brief time, some years ago.
  
  It sucks.
  
  
  
• Google has ruined Fitbit. (Ars Technica)
  
  Google has ruined Google, so that's no surprise.
  
  
  
• The DOJ's assault on Apple will harm consumers, says App... Rand Paul. (Reason)
  
  I respectfully disagree. Or more precisely, respectfully don't give a damn.
  
  
  
• The USPS shared customer postal addresses with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these asshats from violating your privacy.
  
  
  
• RealPage says it hasn't done anything wrong in building its illegal rental price-fixing scheme. (Ars Technica)
  
  "Nobody is above the law, except us", explained a spokesman.
  
  
  
• Meta won't release its new multimodal Llama AI in Europe, because fuck Europe. (The Verge)
  
  The words they actually used were "the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment" but that translates to "fuck Europe".
  
  
  
• Russia has slammed Google's censorship while at the same time demanding Google remove 5.6 million search results just for mentioning VPNs. (TorrentFreak)
  
  It's a free country. Well, it's not, but... I guess there really isn't a but.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:10 AM

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