Daily Tech News 16 January 2022

Top Story

• Newly unsealed documents allege that Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg personally signed off on a secret - and illegal - advertising deal. (BuzzFeed)
  
  Wow, it's totally unlike Google to do that.
  
  
  
• A California court has ruled that Google's confidentiality agreements break labour laws. (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Wow, it's totally unlike Google to do that.
  
  

Questions and Answers

• From Filthy Lurker:

  If I'm looking to purchase a desktop to be used primarily for playing the occasional game on the intertubes with intertube (nothing demanding on a system) friends in a different state, but need it to have the ability to do some serious video editing, and have a budget of less than $1000, what would you recommend?

  That's not an easy one. If you build your own you're going to pay 50% to 150% over MSRP for a video card. If you buy a prebuilt desktop system it's likely going to suck. (Gamers Nexus / YouTube)
  
  I like my Dell Inspiron 16 Plus but that's a laptop and if you want one with dedicated Nvidia graphics you're looking at about $1280 which is rather more than $1000.
  
  
  
• From Sam Adams:

  Pixy Misa, could you please give a few new browser recommendations, with a brief explanation why you like them? I would really love to get the hell away from Google, Microsoft, etc.

  Sure. It's not a long list though.
  
  1. Brave. It doesn't spy on you - much - and it's highly compatible with Chrome other than the spying parts, being built on the same open source Chromium project. The built-in ad blocker seems to work fairly well.
  
  Downside is that it likes to inject little crypto buttons into certain websites. You can turn that off easily enough, but it's turned on by default. I understand that they want to present a way to keep independent websites alive while blocking ads, but a browser should never alter the contents of a website without you explicitly requesting that.
  
  2. Vivaldi. Also based on the Chromium project, so you can switch over and expect sites to work as before.
  
  If you like choosing exactly how you want your browser to behave, this is the one to go for. It has twenty tabs full of settings for you to play with. I'm not sure if there's anything that's not customisable.
  
  Plus it has built-in email and RSS support. Not news (Usenet / NNTP) alas, but a pleasant reminder that the internet didn't always consist largely of walled gardens controlled by communists.
  
  
  
• From mongo:

  You mentioned Lenovo today. My understanding is that the company is owned by the Chinese which, let's face it, means the CCP. Is there any indication that their computers come preloaded with viruses or other malware to make it easier for them to spy on you?

  Good question.
  
  It's worth noting that Huawei didn't get banned for putting spyware on their consumer devices. They got banned for putting spyware on their high-end telecommunications equipment.
  
  Why spy on your own customers and risk getting caught because every security researcher with a couple of hundred bucks can get their hands on one of your phones, when you can put the spyware in a 5G cell tower and spy on an entire country?
  
  That said, Lenovo did get embroiled in a scandal back in 2014, not for spying on customers directly but for inadvertently sabotaging customer security in a deal that might have netted them all of $1 per system sold.
  
  The other two companies involved, Superfish and Komodia, went out of business in 2015 and 2018 respectively.
  
  People have been keeping a close watch on Lenovo since then.
  
  
  
• From Inquiring Minds:

  Why does it take 900 network requests and one minute for ace.mu.nu to load (using the Brave browser on Linux)?

  You know how there are lots of long articles posted here every day? You know how you can click to instantly show the full content of any post?
  
  That's because all that content and the embedded content behind the posts is right there in the main page. Once the visible content has loaded your browser continues to load all the invisible stuff.
  
  There's JavaScript that can be used to lazy load it all, but it's not entirely seamless. We should look into doing that anyway.
  
  
  
• From CppThis:

  I like my current PC but it's probably going to start giving trouble in a few years. If I start sourcing components for a new build this year, including a GPU, will they all become available and make it through the supply chain by 2026?

  Given that the RTX 2060 from 2018 is the hot new card for 2022, that sounds about right.

• AMD could be raising prices of Epyc server CPUs by as much as 30%, while the launch of Intel's new Sapphire Rapids server CPUs is delayed until Q3. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sapphire Rapids is supposed to be competitive with AMD's 3rd generation Epyc CPUs. 4th generation Epyc will be out later this year and is expected to blow current chips out of the water, with 25% better performance core and 50% more cores.
  
  So Intel's delay puts their new 56-core parts squarely in front of the bulldozer, since AMD has three server updates in the pipeline: Milan-X with up to 64 cores and 768MB of cache, Genoa with 96 cores, and Bergamo with 128 cores.
  
  
  
• The RTX 3050 showed up early in Japan and sold out instantly. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At 60% over MSRP.
  
  
  
• Intel's Celeron C6900 struggles with the latest AAA games. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's hardly surprising since it costs less than a single current game title and runs at a modest 46W. If you want to play current games you should be looking at the i3-12100 at least. It's more expensive, still just 60W, and will run much faster.
  
  
  
• Yikes: Safari 15 is leaking your browser activity. (FingerprintJS)
  
  If a site uses the IndexedDB API to store local data in your browser, every other site you visit can see that you visited the first site. Every embedded frame can see that you visited the first site. If you're using private mode, it doesn't matter, every site can still see it. If you're on an iPhone or iPad and using a different browser it doesn't matter, every site can see your browser activity.
  
  That's because there aren't really any other browsers on iOS, just Safari in drag.
  
  
  
• Intel has launched its new Atom-based Atlas Canyon NUCs. (Serve the Home)
  
  These don't entirely suck. Over time Atom has reached the point where it's fine for basic tasks. You'd still want the quad core and not the dual core, but single-threaded performance is actually better than the i7-5500U that I still use as a spare laptop, and multi-threaded performance with the quad core Atom is a lot better.
  
  
  
• QNAP devices are under attack again. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This seems to be existing vulnerabilities and not new ones, but there are a lot of existing vulnerabilities.
  
  
  
• A year with a crappy MacBook. (ZDNet)
  
  As always, what a journalist considers a heavy workload is laughable, so take the comments on 8GB being adequate with a a kiloton of salt. More importantly:

  This is something that pros especially should be aware of: bootable backups are possible, but if your internal SSD completely dies, that bootable backup will fail too.

  So... Your backups work a long as you don't need them, and die the instant you do?
  
  How very Apple.
  
  
  
• Is open source really free if we aren't allowed to break it? (The New Stack)
  
  No.
  
  Fortunately GitHub has restored the account of the developer who most recently blew up the entire Node.js ecosystem and allowed him once again to access the code that he created. With any luck this whole drama will soon be forgotten and then immediately repeated.