Daily Tech News 14 October 2024

• SpaceX's Starship test completes with a remarkable "chopstick" booster catch. (The Verge)
  
  The most successful Starship test so far, with both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship itself performing flawlessly.
  
  I'm linking The Verge for this one because the story is reported completely straight - just the facts, ma'am - and the comments are cheerfully ripping apart The Verge's usual two minute hate pieces.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Elon Musk is planning to sue the Combat Camel Corps over blatant First Amendment violations. (MSN)
  
  The CCC - wait, I'm told that stands for California Coastal Commission - and specifically Gretchen Newsom - were stupid enough to say that they rejected the SpaceX application for additional launch slots at Vandenburg because of what Musk posted on Twitter.

• Turns out 23andMe is a genetic robot vacuum cleaner. (SFGate)
  
  If you used the service - or if anyone in your family did - you should probably log in and delete your data.
  
  This won't do anything but it might work in your favour in the resulting class action lawsuits.
  
  CEO Anne Wojcicki says she's open to takeover offers. Or people who want to buy the company. Either one.
  
  
  
• Unidentified drones swarmed Langley Air Force Base, and the Pentagon is "stumped". (MSN)
  
  The drones circled the base for seventeen days.
  
  
  
• The average LLM (AI) jailbreak attempt takes 42 seconds. (SC World)
  
  20% of attacks succeed, and of those, 90% leak confidential information.
  
  
  
• A detailed review of the Terramaster F8 Plus. (Liliputing)
  
  This is an 8 bay M.2 NAS with 10Gb Ethernet and an 8 core CPU. It's only slightly larger than an external 3.5" hard drive, and can store up to 64TB of data and hold up to 32GB of RAM for running applications (it ships with 16GB as standard, but it uses a regular SO-DIMM slot.)
  
  There's also cheaper F8 Nonplus, with a 4 core CPU and shipping with 8GB of RAM. That should be fine if you just need the server functions and don't want to run apps on it.
  
  
  
• Gotta catch 'em all, but I'm out of disk space: A Game Freak leak has dumped company info and a terabyte of Pokemons. (Notebook Check)
  
  Game Freak is the company developing the Pokemon games, though the franchise is owned by the Pokemon Company and Nintendo. Anyway, the Skitty is definitely out of the bag now.
  
  
  
• The Beelink SER9 is the fastest mini-PC you can get right now. (WCCFTech)
  
  It has more than twice the CPU performance and three to four times the graphics performance of my Beelink SER5. But I have three of those and the SER9 costs more than three times as much if you already have memory and SSDs you can reuse.
  
  The Ryzen 370 used in the SER9 only supports LPDDR5X memory, not regular SO-DIMMS, so you can't install your own unless you have a desoldering station and a very steady hand. It does have two M.2 slots though.
  
  But if you don't need three computers and just want something small and quiet that gets the job done including moderate gaming loads, it does.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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