Miscellaneous Tech News
-
Xiaomi’s Apple Watch clone removes everything good about the Apple Watch
The Xiaomi Mi Watch combines Apple design with Wear OS and a CPU from 2011.
Xiaomi has gone back to its roots as a purveyor of shameless Apple ripoffs, and hot off the photocopier is the Xiaomi Mi Watch, a new wearable that is decidedly Cupertino-inspired. The Mi Watch is an Apple Watch clone, but the design is pretty much the only thing that's cloned here. You won't get a good SoC, a good operating system, good battery life, good haptics, or a good app ecosystem. From a distance, though, some people might mistake the Mi Watch for an Apple Watch, and maybe that's enough. -
Meet MLPerf, a benchmark for measuring machine-learning performance
MLPerf benches both training and inference workloads across a wide ML spectrum.
When you want to see whether one CPU is faster than another, you have PassMark. For GPUs, there's Unigine's Superposition. But what do you do when you need to figure out how fast your machine-learning platform is—or how fast a machine-learning platform you're thinking of investing in is? Machine-learning expert David Kanter, along with scientists and engineers from organizations such as Google, Intel, and Microsoft, aims to answer that question with MLPerf, a machine-learning benchmark suite. Measuring the speed of machine-learning platforms is a problem that becomes more complex the longer you examine it, since both problem sets and architectures vary widely across the field of machine learning—and in addition to performance, the inference side of MLPerf must also measure accuracy. -
UAP-BeaconHD
The UniFi AP Beacon HD is the fastest way to extend Wi-Fi coverage and increase throughput in your home or office. The sleek design integrates easily into any environment and plugs into a standard US wall outlet. The 5 GHz uplink connection is 15 dB stronger than typical Wi-Fi devices, which results in more than a 4x larger Wi-Fi coverage range in an open space. -
Rocket Report: Aloha to Hawaii launch site, China tests grid fins
"Use of a commercial launch vehicle would provide over $1.5 billion in cost savings."
Welcome to Edition 2.22 of the Rocket Report! This week, there is a lot of news on medium-sized launchers, as well as the first real estimate for the combined marginal and fixed costs of a Space Launch System flight. Also, I want to note that this report will not publish next week as the author will be taking time off to work on a book project. As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. -
Backblaze Q3 drive stats:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q3-2019/
-
-
Google: You can trust us with the medical data you didn’t know we already had
Google has 50M people's medical records but won't merge them with other Google data.
Google now has access to detailed medical records on tens of millions of Americans, but the company promises it won't mix that medical data with any of the other data Google collects on consumers who use its services.Google provided this statement yesterday shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is partnering with Ascension, the country's second-largest health care system, "on a project to collect and crunch the detailed personal-health information of millions of people across 21 states." "To be clear: under this arrangement, Ascension's data cannot be used for any other purpose than for providing these services we're offering under the agreement, and patient data cannot and will not be combined with any Google consumer data," Google said in a blog post. That would mean Google won't use the medical data to target advertisements at users of Google services. -
@RojoLoco said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Backblaze Q3 drive stats:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q3-2019/
The answer is unchanged. Don't buy Seagate.
-
-
The ByteCode Alliance wants to bring binary apps into your browser
The Bytecode Alliance aims to promote safe use—and reuse—of untrusted code at speed.
Back in 2015, a consortium including Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and the WebKit project announced WebAssembly. This week, Mozilla, Intel, Red hat, and Fastly announced a new consortium called the Bytecode Alliance, which aims to foster WebAssembly and other "new software foundations" that will allow secure-by-default ways to run untrusted code, either inside or outside the Web browser environment. For many, this raises an obvious question: what is WebAssembly? WebAssembly (wasm) was and is a potentially exciting project, offering a way to run native bytecode inside the browser for potentially very large increases in performance over the Javascript engines in use both then and today. Javascript is frequently misunderstood as a scripting language that is interpreted at runtime. Although it is generally loaded into the browser as source code, it may be either interpreted or compiled to bytecode and executed. Compilation means higher performance execution—particularly inside tight loops—but it also means a startup penalty for the time needed to do the JIT compilation itself. -
Impeachment hearing reveals major White House phone security fail
Diplomat's testimony of Sondland-Trump call just the latest apparent OPSEC lapse by administration.
In testimony yesterday before the House Intelligence Committee, diplomat William Taylor said that he had recently learned of a phone call between George Sondland—the US ambassador to the European Union—and President Donald Trump. Taylor, the senior diplomat for the US in Ukraine, said that his staff overheard Trump during a call with Sondland while at dinner with the ambassador at a restaurant in Kiev. -
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
The ByteCode Alliance wants to bring binary apps into your browser
The Bytecode Alliance aims to promote safe use—and reuse—of untrusted code at speed.
Back in 2015, a consortium including Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and the WebKit project announced WebAssembly. This week, Mozilla, Intel, Red hat, and Fastly announced a new consortium called the Bytecode Alliance, which aims to foster WebAssembly and other "new software foundations" that will allow secure-by-default ways to run untrusted code, either inside or outside the Web browser environment. For many, this raises an obvious question: what is WebAssembly? WebAssembly (wasm) was and is a potentially exciting project, offering a way to run native bytecode inside the browser for potentially very large increases in performance over the Javascript engines in use both then and today. Javascript is frequently misunderstood as a scripting language that is interpreted at runtime. Although it is generally loaded into the browser as source code, it may be either interpreted or compiled to bytecode and executed. Compilation means higher performance execution—particularly inside tight loops—but it also means a startup penalty for the time needed to do the JIT compilation itself.Basically the browser just becomes "yet another" abstracted app platform.
-
-
Unrelenting “ad blocker” plasters users with—you guessed it—ads
Ads Blocker uses several tricks to covertly and constantly bombard users with ads.
A fake ad blocker available outside of Google Play is bombarding Android users with ads, many of them vulgar, and to make matters worse, the cleverly hidden adware is hard to uninstall. As documented by antimalware provider Malwarebytes, Ads Blocker, as the app is called, employs several tricks to surreptitiously and constantly bombard users with ads. The first is to simply ask for usage rights to display over other apps. Next, it makes a connection request to "set up a VPN connection that allows it to monitor network traffic." Finally, it seeks permission to add a widget to the homescreen. -
-
@hobbit666 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Disney's system is definitely broken.
they claim that one account accesses all Disney stuff - but that clearly is not true.
I just tried to log into disney.com and shopdisney.com and my disneyplus.com account didn't work there - in fact it sent me a password reset email because possible compromise.
Get your shit together Disney!
-
@Dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@hobbit666 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Disney's system is definitely broken.
they claim that one account accesses all Disney stuff - but that clearly is not true.
I just tried to log into disney.com and shopdisney.com and my disneyplus.com account didn't work there - in fact it sent me a password reset email because possible compromise.
Get your shit together Disney!
Disney and modern have never really gone hand-in-hand.
-
@coliver said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@Dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@hobbit666 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Disney's system is definitely broken.
they claim that one account accesses all Disney stuff - but that clearly is not true.
I just tried to log into disney.com and shopdisney.com and my disneyplus.com account didn't work there - in fact it sent me a password reset email because possible compromise.
Get your shit together Disney!
Disney and modern have never really gone hand-in-hand.
Who's talking modern? I'm just asking them to fulfill what they are claiming - that one account is good across all of their sites - which clearly it is not.
Even the link that hobbit posted has a tweet where someone gained access to their DVC account, but not their Disney+ account.
They clearly have backend authentication issues.
-
@Dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@hobbit666 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Disney's system is definitely broken.
they claim that one account accesses all Disney stuff - but that clearly is not true.
I just tried to log into disney.com and shopdisney.com and my disneyplus.com account didn't work there - in fact it sent me a password reset email because possible compromise.
Get your shit together Disney!
It seems as there is no (so far) evidence of a Disney+ hack.
What I got out of it is lots of account credentials stolen from other previously hacked websites and services that now work to log in to Disney+ due to people using the same username and password across different websites and services.
-
@Obsolesce said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@Dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@hobbit666 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Disney's system is definitely broken.
they claim that one account accesses all Disney stuff - but that clearly is not true.
I just tried to log into disney.com and shopdisney.com and my disneyplus.com account didn't work there - in fact it sent me a password reset email because possible compromise.
Get your shit together Disney!
It seems as there is no (so far) evidence of a Disney+ hack.
What I got out of it is lots of account credentials stolen from other previously hacked websites and services that now work to log in to Disney+ due to people using the same username and password across different websites and services.
This is the best part about the "We recorded you on your webcam" scam emails. I know what past passwords and emails have been breached completely.
