Daily Tech News 21 November 2024

• The DOJ is seeking to break up Google, or rather to chip off a very small part of it. (AP News)
  
  They want to break off the Chrome browser, which has multiple competitors, including some like Brave which use the same open-source core and behave virtually identically.
  
  What this is expected to achieve is unclear. It would break Google's direct influence over the browser, but so would people switching to Brave or Vivaldi.
  
  They also want to prevent Google from making Google Search the default search engine in Android, which is something we've been through before with browsers and achieves basically nothing.
  
  Experts are freaking out, because that is what experts do:

  "It is probably going a little beyond," Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh said of the Chrome breakup. "The remedies should match the harm, it should match the transgression. This does seem a little beyond that pale."

  He should see my proposal, which involves Tasmanian devils.
  
  
  
• A Google employee union says, isn't there someone you forgot to ask? (The Verge)
  
  I don't know what you mean. The Tasmanian devils are fully on board.

• Ubuntu Linux has a decade-old bug in the needrestart tool that lets local users gain root access. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is bad, but it doesn't allow remote hackers to do anything directly. It does give them a way to completely take over your system if they are already logged in, though.
  
  To fix it, edit the file /etc/needrestart/needrestart.conf
  
  It will have a line containing
  
  #$nrconf{interpscan} = 0;
  
  Find that line, and delete the # to activate it. This has been the recommended configuration since 2022 but doesn't seem to have been adopted.
  
  Or just apt upgrade needrestart
  
  
  
• Microsoft didn't think people would actually want to play Flight Simulator 2024. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The servers that deliver the data stream have been overloaded and crashed entirely at least once. Since you can't simply download the game once and play it, that makes it more or less unplayable:

  Our editors at Tom's Hardware attempted to install the game yesterday - two of our editors managed to hit around 70% before the installation failed, and one editor managed to install the game but could only access the main menu. So, unfortunately, we'll have to postpone our review of MSFS 2024 until Microsoft's game services are actually working.

  Nice work, Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Panzer of the lake, what is your wisdom? (Stack Exchange)
  
  Tracking down an eighty year old photo of a tank. In a lake.
  
  
  
• The OneXGPU 2 is an external GPU for laptops and mini-PCs with Thunderbolt, USB4, or OCuLink. (Hot Hardware)
  
  It contains a Radeon 7800M laptop CPU, which is the 7800 XT desktop chip cut down to 12GB of RAM and a 192-bit memory bus (and also cut down from 265W to 180W).
  
  It also serves as a docking hub, with two USB ports, Ethernet, a micro-SD slot, and an M.2 slot in addition to the upstream USB4 and OCuLink ports and the three video outputs.
  
  And... Basically, it works.
  
  
  
• Reddit is back online. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Some people actually noticed that it went down.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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