Daily Tech News 23 October 2024

• The San Francisco MTA is spending $212 million to move its train control system off floppy disks. (GovTech)
  
  The system was installed in 1998, which is rather late to be using floppy disks that were (assuming it uses 3.5" disks) introduced in 1982. But Compact Flash, the only real alternative at the time that is still supported today, was only introduced in 1994 and was likely not readily available when the project started.
  
  And given that it's been working for 26 years so far, we can't really blame the designers for being short-sighted.
  
  

• De-extinction company Colossal has provided an update on its work to bring back the Tasmanian tiger. (Ars Technica)
  
  The company now has a near-complete genome for the creature, which went extinct in 1936. (Though some people suspect a few specimens might still exist in south-west Tasmania, which is extremely rugged and mostly uninhabited.
  
  The plan is to produce new embryos by engineering eggs from its nearest living relative, the fat-tailed dunnart, which is basically a carnivorous mouse.
  
  Since it is - was - a marsupial, we wouldn't need to bring it to term in a womb; it evolved to latch on to a nipple and feed at a point that would be an embryo in a placental species.
  
  
  
• Flock you: A lawsuit in Virginia argues that networks of license plate cameras constitute unlawful warrantless searches under the Fourth Amendment. (404 Media) (archive site)
  
  It's an interesting question. In Norfolk, the police know the travel habits of pretty much everyone thanks to cameras distributed through the city.
  
  You don't have an implicit right to privacy in public, but the government is explicitly restricted in how it can infringe on your privacy.
  
  
  
• VMWare has fixed critical vulnerabilities in its vCenter management application. (The Register)
  
  Again.
  
  Fixes were pushed out last month, but they didn't fix it.
  
  
  
• The Beelink SER9 is the fastest mini-PC around. (Serve the Home)
  
  And its quiet.
  
  On the other hand, it's expensive at $999 and memory is locked at 32GB. It's soldered in place (the Ryzen 370 laptop chip it uses doesn't support regular DIMMs) and there's no 64GB model.
  
  
  
• The iPad Mini 2024 model is the best iPad Mini yet. (The Verge)
  
  But it's not much better than the old model, and it still suffers from the "jelly scrolling" problem that everyone noted when the old model first appeared.
  
  Apple doesn't seem to care about this product at all. If you want a good small tablet, there's this and the Lenovo Legion Tab which you basically can't buy anywhere.
  
  
  
• My Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC case is here.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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