Daily Tech News 17 January 2025

• New York passed legislation requiring ISPs operating within the state to offer service for $15 to low-income customers. AT&T said "okay, bye". (Ars Technica)
  
  AT&T only offered wireless internet in New York.
  
  AT&T no longer offers wireless internet in New York.
  
  The communists at Ars Technica are extremely upset that the entirely predictable outcome of such a law... Happened.
  
  

• Joe Biden, nominal president for a couple more days, pre-forget to enforce his own ban on TikTok. (The Verge)
  
  Time runs out for the spyware app on the 19th, but the current administration isn't going to bother doing anything about that.
  
  The Supreme Court may decide tomorrow that the law is not enforceable. But it may not.
  
  
  
• Will Chinese spyware app RedNote be banned in the US? (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  Maybe. The law applies equally to RedNote as it does to TikTok.
  
  I will note that RedNote is not banned in China, and crazy leftist Americans are getting banned en masse.
  
  So my perspective that TikTok should be banned in other countries because it is banned in its country of origin does not apply here.
  
  
  
• If you want to build your own firewall/router/NAS/server here's a motherboard that might suit. (Liliputing)
  
  It's a mini-ITX board with up to an eight core Intel N355 CPU - so efficiency cores only - and 32GB of RAM, plus six SATA ports, four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, two M.2 slots, a PCIe slot if you're only using one of the M.2 slots, HDMI, DisplayPort, and the usual assemblage of USB things.
  
  Only problem is the N355 only has 9 PCIe lanes in total. Each Ethernet port uses one, each M.2 slot uses one - not four, the PCIe slot uses one, USB uses one, SATA uses one, and something else uses the other one, which makes 10. Hence the PCIe slot and the second M.2 slot can't be used at the same time.
  
  Also, not particularly cheap. If you are going to AliExpress you can find cheaper boards with 10Gb Ethernet pretty easily.
  
  
  
• An analyst working for holding company Epyllion believes that pricing the forthcoming GTA VI at $100 presents a unique opportunity to save the gaming industry. (Hot Hardware)
  
  In the sense that the gaming industry came back stronger than ever once it had rebuilt from the Atari crash of the 1980s, sure.
  
  In the sense that anyone would pay that much, no.
  
  
  
• Nepenthes is a tarpit aimed at AI webcrawlers. (Zadzmo)
  
  Which raises an interesting point. Nepenthes is obviously utter garbage. It generates useless web pages very slowly, with lots of random links to keep web crawlers busy forever.
  
  Which, if it works, means that AI web crawlers don't use AI.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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