Daily Tech News 9 September 2023

• After a district court handed down an injunction in a First Amendment case basically forbidding the federal government from talking to social networks at all the government appealed to the Fifth Circuit.
  
  The Fifth Circuit just handed down a ruling narrowing the injunction to only forbid many parts of the government - particularly the White House and the FBI - from communicating with social networks in any way that implied or could be reasonably inferred to coerce infringement of protected speech. (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  The government is now appealing to the Supreme Court, saying that it can't function if constitutionally-protected rights are allowed to be protected by the Constitution.

  This case and recent probes in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives have accused government officials of actively colluding with platforms to influence public discourse, in an evolution of long-running allegations that liberal employees inside tech companies favor Democrats when making decisions about what posts are removed or limited online.

  Hunter Biden's laptop was not immediately available to comment.
  
  
  

• Your Wyze webcam might have let other people see inside your house. (The Verge)
  
  For about half an hour, if both of you were on their web portal at the same time. There was a caching issue that misdirected video streams during that short interval.
  
  So not a case of a company that cannot be trusted, but one that made a mistake and immediately fixed it.
  
  Except:

  In March 2022, Wyze revealed that it had been aware of a security vulnerability for three years that could have let bad actors access WyzeCam v1 cameras, but quietly discontinued the camera rather than telling customers about it.

  There's always an except.
  
  
  
• Node.js 20.6 is out, a bugfix and feature upgrade to Node.js 20, which is like saying a new improved version of colon cancer. (Dev Class)
  
  Node.js is bad. It's possibly not the worst thing ever, compared with say the Black Death or the Mount Toba eruption which was so devastating that it may have left fewer than 10,000 surviving humans on the entire planet.
  
  But it's pretty close.
  
  
  
• Need a good motherboard with lots of PCIe slots? Spending someone else's money? ASRock has you covered. (Serve the Home)
  
  This is an EEB-sized server motherboard - even larger than E-ATX - so you'll need to look around for big desktop cases, but they exist.
  
  It has eight PCIe slots - seven x16 and one x8 - and eight DIMM slots. It supports AMD's Epyc Genoa, Genoa-X, and Bergamo CPUs for up to 128 cores, up to 1TB of RAM (more if you can find a source for 256GB DIMMs), two M.2 slots, two 10Gb Ethernet ports, two USB ports, and VGA and serial ports.
  
  It is a server motherboard after all, so you're going to need to add cards for anything else.
  
  Still it's entirely feasible to build a high-end workstation out of this. Or a 16-port 100Gb router. The world is your mollusc.
  
  
  
• Ban all the things! (Torrent Freak)

  Speaking with IBC last week, Sheila Cassells, Executive VP at the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance, warned that entertainment companies need to be very concerned about "any technological development" which can be used to access pirated content.

  Very concerned?

  "At a basic level - and common to all the technical devices mentioned - AAPA would like to see the production, marketing and distribution of any device which can be used to infringe IP made illegal."

  Oh, very concerned.
  
  That would include all computers of every description, including all cell phones made since about 1998, all printers, scanners, cameras, and photocopiers, good old VCRs and cassette tapes, and of course the entire Internet.
  
  Sure. You go with that, Sheila.
  
  
  
• Cetabyte Ceramic is poised to unveil an entirely new generation of tape drives with storage capacities in the range of tens of petabytes, with exabyte capacities forecast in the next decade. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That would allow you to store every movie and TV show ever produced in a bread box.
  
  It's essentially optical tape, writing microscopic (and for higher densities, sub-microscopic) patterns onto the tape, and reading them back with optical or electron microscopes.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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