Daily Tech News 15 September 2024

• The Kneecap Loophole: Twelve defendants have been sentenced over a highly technical criminal scheme to steal people's cryptocurrency. (DOJ)
  
  The scheme worked like this: They'd break into your house, tie you up, and torture you until you gave up your password.
  
  Yeah.
  
  
  
• Further update to the Boeing strike story: I have a copy of the bargaining agreement, but it's 336 pages and I haven't had time to wade through it yet. There's certainly a lot more give and take than just a 25% pay rise.

• Intel's latest Ultra 7 258V laptop chip - coming out later this month - is 32% faster in some game benchmarks than AMD's previous generation Z1 Ultra chip used in handheld devices. (WCCFTech)
  
  If - and this does rather matter - you turn the graphics off. With graphics on, the Z1 Ultra is slightly faster.
  
  I'll wait for better benchmarks, thanks.
  
  
  
• AMD's laptop chips are better on paper than anything from Intel, so why does Intel still dominate the laptop market? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Supply and support. AMD consistently lags on both critical points.
  
  
  
• Underpromise and overdeliver: The NASA story. (Ars Technica)
  
  NASA needs to get out of the rocket business and focus on building clever space robots.
  
  
  
• Why Google scuttled its AI robot project after pouring untold millions of dollars into it. (Axios)
  
  After seven years of effort the robots sorted trash during the day and improvised dances at night, like minimum wage workers on TikTok.
  
  Beyond that, generative AI is a dumpster fire and giving it control of a physical body is just asking to have your eyeballs replaced with grapes to improve the colour balance in your group photo.
  
  
  
• The Polaris Dawn mission is headed back for splashdown any moment now.
  
  Update: The crew is currently talking about space pirates.
  
  Update: Chutes deployed, looking good.
  
  Update: Mission control reports that it is not a giant squid.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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