Daily Tech News 7 September 2024

• College grades have become a charade. It's time to abolish them. (MSN)
  
  The colleges? Sounds good to me.

  If everyone outside hard-core engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system loses meaning. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend–to themselves and to others–that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, this system creates perverse incentives. To name but one, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses.

  All true, if somewhat less daring than I had hoped.
  
  The proposal is that every course be reduced to pass/fail. Which is better than the current situation, but doesn't actually fix the problem.
  
  I like my plan better.

• Threads is full of exactly the sort of tiresome idiots you mute on Twitter. (Werd)
  
  Full of them.
  
  Thank you for your service, Facebook. You truly took one for the team.
  
  
  
• Cisco has warned that there is a backdoor admin account in its own license managing tool. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The tool Cisco provides to manage your software licenses for the hardware you bought from Cisco also allows anyone nearby to break into your network. If you're dumb enough to leave the license manager open to the internet, you're toast.
  
  (And there are lots of people who are exactly that dumb. They post on Threads.)
  
  
  
• Godot - an open source library for game developers - desperately hoped that Unity wouldn't commit suicide. (Game Developer)
  
  As we covered at the time, Unity did indeed commit suicide, implementing a new payment structure that could easily cost more than 100% of a game's revenue.
  
  Godot is one of Unity's main competitors, but it is a less polished library built by a smaller team, so taking on all those developers fleeing Unity was going to be a struggle, and they knew it.
  
  Makes me like the Godot team all the more.
  
  (Also, it's officially pronounced however you want.)
  
  
  
• Lenovo's latest Thinkpad Carbon X1 (Gen 13) is almost a good laptop. (Liliputing)
  
  Well, it is a good laptop (though not a cheap one). Intel's latest Lunar Lake CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a 14" 2880x1800 OLED display. Those screens are great.
  
  And it has the Four Essential Keys. Not in my preferred arrangement, but they are all there.
  
  And it weighs less than 1kg.
  
  What's not to like?
  
  Two things: First, pricing starts at $1999. This is not in the same ZIP code as cheap.
  
  Second, Lunar Lake. Apart from the fact that you cannot upgrade the RAM, ever, it is not all that fast. We haven't seen the numbers yet, but with just four P cores and four E cores, and no hyper-threading, even if its single-core performance is extraordinary it is unlikely to outperform a four year old Ryzen 5800U for multi-threaded tasks.
  
  And I already have a four year old Ryzen 5800U. Well, the very slightly updated 7730U, but it's the same silicon.
  
  
  
• Google is now facing another antitrust case, this time in the online advertising market. (The Verge)
  
  This is the gold standard of "let's you and him fight".
  
  
  
• An AI company's misconfigured server exposed 5TB of patient mental health records. (HackRead)
  
  This includes full patient identification - names, addresses, drivers licenses, insurance information; medical records including health conditions, family histories, and traumatic experiences; test results and prescription medications; and audio and video recordings of therapy sessions.
  
  All sitting on a server connected directly to the internet without a password.
  
  This is the worst security fuckup I have ever seen. Whether the data was stolen is unknown - it was discovered by a security researcher - and will not be known unless or until the data starts circulating on the Dark Web.
  
  
  
• Sony's $100 million woke flop Concord is now deceased, having failed to reach 1000 players in the entire world in the ten days since release.
  
  Meanwhile Valve's competing game Deadlock, which you cannot buy, has had zero advertising, and has not even been announced yet, has over 170,000 players. (Tweaktown)
  
  All you need to do is not actively hate your customers.
  
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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