Daily Tech News 6 April 2025

• What's truly inside that bright red flame retardant used on bright red flames from the fires caused by California's definitely not bright but certainly Red government? No-one would say so we drank some to find out. (LAist)
  
  If you scroll way down in the article you'll find a table with the tiny legend:

  Measurements in micrograms per liter.

  Most of the metals mentioned are benign in the quantities found. Zinc and manganese you will find in dietary supplements because you need them to live.
  
  But what does 591 micrograms per liter mean for arsenic, a well-known poison?
  
  Well, the LD50 for arsenic in humans is somewhere between 1 and 3 mg per kg of bodyweight for adults. (It's better known for rats because nobody complains if you try it out on them.)
  
  Which means that if you drink twice your bodyweight in flame retardant, you'll likely die. So don't do that.
  
  To be fair, LAist interviewed scientists who told them exactly that, and they put it in the article:

  That said, multiple health experts told LAist that the risk to members of the public exposed to the retardant when doing activities like hiking, is likely low, given the concentration of contaminants present in our samples.

  "It should not be a reason for panic, but maybe it's a reason for caution," said Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, professor and chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, who reviewed the results.

  Also, the stuff hangs around afterwards, and residents and cleanup workers should be careful with it. You can suffer ill effects from doses far short of lethal.
  
  Fortunately, the stuff is, as we noted, bright red.
  
  

• Reminder: Daylight savings has ended here in Oz, so from tomorrow I'll be posting at 4:30 AM, since otherwise I have 15 minutes tops from the end of my work day to the post needing to go up.

• Also red but definitely not bright is Elizabeth Lopatto of The Verge, who screeches "We just started a trade war with the world". (The Verge)
  
  Reciprocal, adj: We didn't start the fire.
  
  
  
• Trying out the GMKTec Nucbox G9. (Liliputing)
  
  This is one of the new raft of tiny networked storage devices that pair four M..2 bays with a low-power CPU, in this case the Intel N150. Along with that it has 12GB of RAM (soldered), 64GB of eMMC storage for a boot drive (also soldered), two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, one USB-C port running at 10Gb with DisplayPort alt mode, a headphone jack, and another USB-C port for power.
  
  The problem with these low-end solutions, the article notes, is that the N150 only has nine PCIe lanes in total. The eight PCIe 3 lanes are used for the four drives, and the single PCIe 2 lane for the two network ports.
  
  Given those limitations, how well does it work?
  
  Well, with four drives in RAID-5 (actually RAID-Z1 using ZFS, but that's essentially the same thing) it can deliver 3.6GB per second locally.
  
  Which is rather a lot.
  
  From a single network port you can get 300MB per second, so it can easily saturate the network bandwidth. Liliputing tried it with a 5Gb USB Ethernet adaptor and they got 600MB per second over that, again saturating the connection.
  
  So given those limitations, it works just fine.
  
  
  
• Is Indonesia's rice megaproject doomed to fail? Yeah, probably. (Science)
  
  They're trying this in western New Guinea, which has a much lower population density than the main islands of Indonesia, and has never been intensively cultivated, because the soil is crap.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is using AI to find security vulnerabilities in open-source bootloaders. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is actually a good thing and we should see more of it. Because if the good guys don't find these bugs first, you can bet the hackers will.
  
  And it's something where it doesn't matter if the AI is wrong half the time. If it reports bugs that don't exist, it just wastes your time checking them. As long as the false positive rate isn't too crazy, it's still valuable.
  
  
  
• RealPage, a company that specialises in price-fixing software for rental markets, is suing the city of Berkeley for banning it for, uh, specialising in price-fixing software for rental markets. (AP News)
  
  RealPage is currently being sued itself by the DOJ, as well as Arizona and Washington D.C. and multiple private parties.

  Berkeley's ordinance, which fines violators up to $1,000 per infraction, says algorithmic rental software has contributed to "double-digit rent increases ... higher vacancy rates and higher rates of eviction."

  RealPage said all these claims are false, and that the real driver of high rents is a lack of housing supply.

  RealPage has a point there, since the exact same thing happens in markets where the company has never operated.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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