Summary of the week of August 9, 2021

[cobito]

Here's the latest batch of news up to September:

Backblaze's statistics for the second quarter

The storage service has published its quarterly hard drive reliability statistics. HGST remains the most reliable brand and Seagate's models continue to be the worst performers.

Game deals

Free on GOG.com for a few days, a good pack of classics. Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, Syndicate Plus and Syndicate Wars. Greetings gamers!

Gigabyte hit by ransomware attack

Gigabyte's servers have been encrypted. In addition, the motherboard and GPU manufacturer suspects that 112GB of confidential information from Intel, AMD and AMI may have been stolen.

Firefox 91 improves privacy

The new version of Mozilla's browser comes with improvements in Total Cookie Protection. It now also tries to connect only to HTTPS sites, falling back to HTTP if the secure option is not available.

Why Valve has switched from Debian to Arch

Valve has decided to change the base of SteamOS from Debian to Arch because Arch's rolling-release policy brings new features faster.

RX 6600 XT receives bad reviews

They say the mid-range in graphics cards has disappeared and the RX 6600 XT may demonstrate this. It's a GPU priced at €380 that's good for playing at 1080p.

Intel hires ray tracing developer

A former Nvidia employee who was involved in the development of ray tracing and DLSS has been hired by Intel.

AMD achieves its highest market share since 2006

AMD's golden era of the 2000s with its Athlon competing with Pentium 4 is being repeated with Zen. The end of that era came with the arrival of Core 2.