Daily Tech News 14 May 2022

Top Story

• Unexpectedly: This house move is now entering panic mode, despite my having had a whole five or six minutes each day to prepare for it over the last few weeks.
  
  I'm getting assistance from work, because that was only our second largest product launch this year, with the biggest one coming up in a few weeks, and they'd like me to be alive for that.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter is temporarily paused while he reviews the level of bot activity on the site after Twitter... Twitter did what, Reuters?
  
  

  Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022

  
  
  Yeah, that's what I thought you said.
  
  Musk says he's still committed to the deal, just looking to send a few executives to jail for fraud. Well, I might have added that part.

Tech News

• AMD leaks ahoy. (WCCFTech)
  
  Zen 4 and 4C we already know about. Zen 4 is the new core design; 4C is a smaller version with less cache for high-density servers. "Genoa" server chips using Zen 4 will be out this year with 96 cores; "Bergamo" chips with Zen 4C will be out early next year with 128 cores.
  
  Zen 4 desktop chips up to 16 cores will be out in Q3 or Q4 this year.
  
  Zen 4 for laptops will arrive in Q1 next year, with a choice of 8 cores and fast graphics, or 16 cores and slow graphics. 16 full-size cores too, not the 8+8 that Intel now offers.
  
  Zen 4 for Threadripper, with up to 96 cores, is expected in Q1 or Q2 next year, rather than being a full year behind mainstream desktop parts as with Zen 3.
  
  And there will be a Genoa-X server part, with up to 96 cores and 1152MB of cache per socket (up from 384MB on Genoa), launching in mid-2023.
  
  Plus some information on Zen 5 - planned for late 2023 with up to 256 cores using a 3nm process - and Zen 6 in 2025.
  
  
  
• And new "low-end" server chips too. (WCCFTech)
  
  The new Zen 4 server parts are huge, with 12-channel memory and 160 PCIe lanes. The new plan is for a range of "smaller" cheaper parts - up to 32 Zen 4 or 64 Zen 4C cores, 96 lanes of PCIe, and 6-channel memory.
  
  These will use the same size socket as current Epyc and Threadripper parts - so existing mechanical designs and cooling systems can be reused - but with a new pin arrangement, increasing the pin count from 4096 to 4844. Switching from 8-channel DDR4 to 6-channel DDR5 means they wouldn't be compatible anyway.
  
  
  
• How the Luna cryptocurrency lost 99.99% of its value in a month. (CNet)
  
  

  One week ago today $LUNA was $82.55
  
  Current Price: $0.01

  — Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) May 12, 2022

  
  
  A lot of attention has been on TerraUSD, a "stablecoin" pegged at 1:1 with the US dollar which is currently trading at 44 cents if you can find anyone to buy it.
  
  TerraUSD wasn't backed by an equal amount of US dollars, but by an interlinked guarantee with the Luna currency, such that 1 TerraUSD would buy $1 worth of Luna at any time. If that exchange rate shifted, you could make money on arbitrage, which would inherently push it back towards the 1:1 ratio.
  
  So long as people were willing and able to conduct that arbitrage - both of which broke down last week, making $40 billion evaporate.
  
  On top of that it was also an obviously unsustainable Ponzi scheme.
  
  Oops.
  
  That was just part of the overall crypto-related freak-out that had my day start at 4AM yesterday and finish at 7PM, when neither I, my employer, nor our clients are involved at all in the financial side of crypto. Panic transactions overloaded multiple blockchains that we use to do, well, useful stuff.
  
  
  
• Twitter is testing a "liked by author" feature. (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's Twitter chasing the cult of celebrity.
  
  YouTube does this, but it's meaningful there. If the creator of the video you commented on likes or responds to your comment, that actually means something more than some rando replying.
  
  On Twitter mostly the opposite is true.
  
  
  
• Get free NFTs, get your crypto stolen. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's a two-for-one deal! Don't miss out!
  
  
  
• A plan to secure open-source software will cost $150 million over two years. (Venture Beat)
  
  It's not a government plan, but one backed by businesses who spent far more than that addressing just one of the major issues that plagued us last year.
  
  
  
• Samsung is reportedly planning to increase chip prices by up to 20%. (PC Magazine)
  
  That would push up the price of everything else - literally everything else - but given that the price per transistor has fallen by a factor of about a trillion over the past few decades is not entirely unreasonable.
  
  
  
• This Synology router also turns an external disk drive into a Synology NAS. (9to5toys)
  
  Don't know if it supports multiple external drives - it only has one USB port but it's easy to get multi-bay USB storage boxes. It has 2.5Gb Ethernet so it could be usefully fast.