ReHacked #77: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20%, Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD, An Illustrated Guide to Post-Orwellian Censorship and more
Censorship is the power to make 2 + 2 equal 5. Or 3. Or whatever people in power say it is.
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The most underused browser feature | Frank's blog #internet #ui #ux
The web has been plagued by cookie consent popups and banners since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come into effect. See for yourself when you visit articles like this and this. Now what if I told you there is a one-click solution to hide those banners and make your reading experience on websites such as these examples a lot simpler?
I’m talking about the “reader mode”. When available for a website, it is displayed as an icon at the end of the url bar in Firefox. The same is true for Chrome, but you first need to enable it at chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode. Safari on iOS includes it in the menu at the left of the url bar.
TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage - Nikkei Asia #hardware #economy
Contract chipmaking giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. told clients Wednesday that it plans to raise prices on products by as much as 20%, in what would be the company's steepest single increase.
The price increases and the time frames for the hikes differ depending on the client, according to reports by Taiwan's Liberty Times newspaper and other media outlets. For some companies that received TSMC's notice, the hikes took effect immediately.
yt-dlp/yt-dlp: A youtube-dl fork with additional features and fixes #software #internet
yt-dlp is a youtube-dl fork based on the now inactive youtube-dlc. The main focus of this project is adding new features and patches while also keeping up to date with the original project
How I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple #software
After using Macs for about fifteen years, I switched to Linux as my main operating system in July of 2018 and I’m enjoying it. Here’s an introduction to Linux that may help you if you too are looking for a change.
Update, 4:40 pm EDT: A Western Digital spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the company had replaced the NAND flash and updated the firmware in the WD Blue SN550 beginning in June 2021 and updated the drive's data sheet to reflect the changes. "For greater transparency going forward, if we make a change to an existing internal SSD, we commit to introducing a new model number whenever any related published specifications are impacted," a company spokesperson told Ars. "We value our customers and are committed to providing the best possible solutions for their data storage needs."
Original story, 6:30 am EDT: Western Digital's WD Blue SN550 budget SSD is a well-reviewed popular NVMe device that has regularly shown up on various sites' "best SSD" lists since it was released at the tail-end of 2019. The drive uses a four-lane PCI Express 3.0 interface and was novel for being able to perform better than SATA SSDs for about the same amount of money.
Why are hyperlinks blue? #internet #history (MDN blog).
The hard men removing squatters in Spain - BBC News #society
Squatting has a long history in Spain, often fuelled by high rates of homelessness. But there is now a darker phenomenon too - squatters who demand a "ransom" before they will leave a property. And this has led to the rise of private eviction companies, some of which use threats to achieve their goal.
EXCLUSIVE Microsoft warns thousands of cloud customers of exposed databases | Reuters #software #internet #security
Microsoft (MSFT.O) on Thursday warned thousands of its cloud computing customers, including some of the world's largest companies, that intruders could have the ability to read, change or even delete their main databases, according to a copy of the email and a cyber security researcher.
The vulnerability is in Microsoft Azure's flagship Cosmos DB database. A research team at security company Wiz discovered it was able to access keys that control access to databases held by thousands of companies. Wiz Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak is a former chief technology officer at Microsoft's Cloud Security Group.
Valneva and Pfizer Announce Initiation of Phase 2 Study for Lyme Disease Vaccine Candidate | Pfizer #health
The Phase 2 study will include both adult and pediatric subjects with an aim to support acceleration of the vaccine candidate’s pediatric program
VLA15 will be tested at two different schedules (Month 0-2-6 or Month 0-6) receiving the selected dose of 180µg
VLA15 is the only Lyme disease vaccine candidate in active clinical development
cs-books/influential-cs-books: Most influential books on Computer Science/programming #programming #learning
An Illustrated Guide to Post-Orwellian Censorship | The MIT Press Reader #censorship #society #longread
Censorship is the power to make 2 + 2 equal 5. Or 3. Or whatever people in power say it is.
You still think there are four. … You must try Harder! So said George Orwell in his classic, “1984,” which he wrote in the 1940s. Horrified by Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, Orwell spun a tale that continues to color how we picture state censorship in controlled societies. Zero tolerance for dissent. Erasure of inconvenient data. Even the wrong thoughts are against law — “Thoughtcrime.”
Israeli Study: Natural Immunity Is 13x Stronger Than Pfizer COVID Shots - ThinkCivics #health
A new pre-print Israeli study has found that people with natural immunity to COVID-19 could be 13 times less likely to contract the respiratory virus than those who were solely vaccinated against the disease.
Conducted by researchers at Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University, the yet-to-be peer-reviewed study found that when comparing individuals previously infected with the virus and those that received two jabs of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, those with natural infection saw greater protection against the delta variant and breakthrough infection.
Repairs of Leaning San Francisco Skyscraper on Hold; Engineering Expert Blasts Plan – CBS San Francisco #engineering #architecture
There were two fixes proposed for the leaning, sinking Millennium Tower. The first, an internal fix, would have screwed pilings through the foundation of the building. It was designed by a New York firm that rebuilt the World Trade Center.
The second fix — which has now been put on pause — would place external pilings along Mission and Fremont streets to support up to half of the building’s load.
TekSavvy Takes Pirate Site Blocking Battle to Canada's Supreme Court * TorrentFreak #copyrights
Internet provider TekSavvy is taking the legal battle over Canada's first pirate site blocking order to the Supreme Court. The company has no sympathy for pirate sites but feels that it's obligated to defend the neutral role of ISPs and prevent freedom of speech from being violated.
In 2018, Canada’s Federal Court approved the country’s first pirate site-blocking order.
Following a complaint from major media companies Rogers, Bell and TVA, the Court ordered several major ISPs to block access to the domains and IP-addresses of pirate IPTV service GoldTV.
“Worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine” discovered in Microsoft Azure | Ars Technica #security #software #cloud
Cloud security vendor Wiz announced yesterday that it found a vulnerability in Microsoft Azure's managed database service, Cosmos DB, that granted read/write access for every database on the service to any attacker who found and exploited the bug.
Although Wiz only found the vulnerability—which it named "Chaos DB"—two weeks ago, the company says that the vulnerability has been lurking in the system for "at least several months, possibly years."
Boys in Custody and the Women Who Abuse Them — ProPublica #society
The older authority figure wins the trust of the young target by cultivating a false friendship, having heart-to-heart conversations, giving gifts, offering protection. And then the sex ensues, sometimes forced, sometimes seemingly consensual.
It is a classic predatory tactic known as “grooming,” and no one familiar with it could have been terribly surprised when a new report from the U.S. Department of Justice declared that young people in the country’s juvenile detention facilities are being victimized in just this way. The youngsters in custody are often deeply troubled, lacking parents, looking for allies. And the people in charge of the facilities wield great power over the day-to-day lives of their charges.
Big company tale: six months for a list and a button #software #bigcorp
How fake animal rescue videos have become a new frontier for animal abuse #nature
On Auliya’s screen, a Burmese python, a constrictor that normally kills birds and small mammals, was locked onto a gibbon. The panicked primate was fighting for its life as the snake, coiled around its torso, began squeezing. Soon, the gibbon stopped moving. A man in a blue soccer jersey and jeans appears. Hurriedly, he uncoils the python, freeing the gibbon, and carries the snake offscreen. The traumatized gibbon cowers, covering its head.
“It’s so obvious this is fake, but people believe it,” says Auliya, a herpetologist at the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig. The video seemed to suggest that the rescuer had arrived just in time to save the gibbon. But pythons first bite prey animals to anchor their constriction—something that didn’t happen in the gibbon video, Auliya says. Pythons also are nocturnal hunters, yet this video and many like it were shot during the day.
This is a list of links to different freely available learning resources about computer programming, math, and science. #learning
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