Daily Tech News 29 September 2024

• In the ongoing legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games over Apple's theft of 30% of everything, Apple was ordered to produce a million documents relating to changes to the App Store.
  
  Apple asked for an extension to that deadline, following its habit of dragging out unfavourable cases forever. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The judge was not having it.

  As Epic constantly points out, this document production is all downside for Apple because it relates to Apple's alleged lack of compliance with the Court's injunction. It is not in Apple's interest to do any of this quickly. This is a classic moral hazard, and the way Apple announced out of the blue four days before the substantial completion deadline that it would not make that deadline because of a document count that it had surely been aware of for weeks hardly creates the impression that Apple is behaving responsibly.
  
  Apple's request for an extension of time is DENIED. The deadline for the substantial completion of document production is Monday, September 30. It's up to Apple to figure out how to meet that deadline, but Monday is indeed the deadline.

  Good to see. I have no particular love for Epic Games, but Apple acts like a classic monopolist, constantly skirting the edge of open illegality.

• SpaceX's rescue mission for the stranded Boeing Starliner astronauts is on its way to the ISS. (AP)
  
  This is SpaceX's 15th crewed mission.
  
  
  
• A bug in Nvidia's Container Toolkit leaves AI cloud servers exposed to hackers. (The Register)
  
  This doesn't affect desktop users at all, or people running their own server hardware. Only cloud users and operators with Nvidia cards.
  
  
  
• The CWWK X86-P5 is a mini-PC with up to an 8 core N305 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and four M.2 SSDs. (Liliputing)
  
  The N305 (and the other option, the four core N100) don't have a lot of PCIe lanes so those four SSDs all run at PCIe 3.0 x1 - a maximum speed of 1GB per second each.
  
  But this is designed to run as a simple NAS, and the two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports combine to about 0.5GB per second, so that bandwidth is unlikely to be the limiting factor.
  
  Apart from that there are two HDMI ports and two USB ports. A pretty spartan selection but just fine for a mini-NAS.
  
  
  
• Can addressing gut issues treat long COVID in children? (Ars Technica)
  
  At least as well as it does for Morgellons disease.
  
  
  
• How does Discord store trillions of messages? ScyllaDB. (Discord)
  
  They previously used Cassandra, which is written in Java, and which I have used myself. ScyllaDB is compatible but written in C++, and they have found it to be far more robust on this scale than Cassandra.
  
  They've also cut the number of database servers needed in half, now having 72 servers each with 9TB of storage. Which is a lot of servers, but not a lot of disk; you could easily fit that much storage in a single 2U rackmount system. And it would only cost about $100k - a lot for you or me, but nothing for even a modestly successful company.
  
  So if you are stuck with a Cassandra database and it is causing you pain, ScyllaDB might be the way out.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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