Daily Tech News 18 November 2024

• The Twitch Adpocalypse is here, with streamers reporting their income has suddenly declined by as much as 95% as the house of cards burns down, falls over, and sinks into the swamp.
  
  I don't have a link to a good story covering this yet, because the written articles are useless and the video coverage is obnoxious. Twitch was offering absurdly favourable pay scales to its preferred coterie of lunatics, and the advertisers got fed up with the crap their ads were shown against and left.
  
  Jeff Bezos has a bad habit of buying companies and leaving them to be destroyed by lunatics.
  
  
  
• So, yeah, that link yesterday in the item about Bluesky was totally wrong. Being me, it pointed instead to a Twitter post about Lego mech suits for Hololive fan mascot plushies. The only thing that could have made it more of a click magnet would be if the mechs were playing classic D&D.

• Norwegian startup Factiverse plans to fight disinformation with AI. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Few observations here:
  
  First, anyone who uses the term "disinformation" in this way is a fascist. No exceptions.
  
  Second, they say they are not using LLMs, which is good because LLMs are utterly useless for this. But they do not say what they are using.
  
  Third, good luck to fascists in a country run by communists. (Financial News)
  
  If your company sees modest success and its valuation grows, you will be hit with a effective tax rate many times your income.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has released a patch for Exchange that fixes multiple vulnerabilities and also stops it working entirely. (The Register)
  
  Microsoft has since unreleased the patch.
  
  
  
• Meanhile the WordPress plugin Really Simple Security had a really simple security flaw. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you enabled two factor authentication - requiring both a password and security token - you ended up with zero factor authentication, allowing anybody to log in as the admin account from anywhere.
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• GPD has announced pricing for its latest laptop. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  $1466 for the top model, which sounds like a lot for a device that will fit in a coat pocket. (GPD makes very small laptops.)
  
  But for that you get a 12 core Ryzen 370, 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
  
  
  
• Phishing emails are increasingly using SVG to deliver their toxic payloads. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  SVG stands for scalable vector graphics. It's a simple, readable format for delivering images that are drawn with lines rather than pixels.
  
  It's also a security nightmare. The standard guideline is that you should treat unknown SVG files with the same caution as unfamiliar executables, i.e. with a hazmat suit and 24" blacksmith tongs.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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