Summary of the week of July 31, 2023

[cobito]

The Internet to come

Google has been working on making its pages increasingly less usable when ad blockers are used. Now it wants to exploit that technology on all pages that use its advertising service.

Intel's 3nm for 2024

Intel has said that Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids will come out in 2024 using its 3nm lithography. For now, the new gate width (which, by the way, was previously known as 5nm, to give you an idea of how uninformative the nomenclature has become) is not scheduled to be released in the domestic sphere.

Textual Paint

Someone has created a version of Microsoft Paint for the Linux console. The program is called Textual Paint, it works exclusively in text mode and is capable of handling a multitude of image formats.

Core i9-13900KS

Someone has brought us a Raptor Lake with 8 P cores and 16 E cores. The i9-13900KS achieves the first position in the floating-point test in both single and multi-threaded modes. In the overall ranking, it achieves the silver medal.

AMD's random number generator failures

It seems that the random number generator of AMD's fTPM causes crashes and all kinds of problems on both Windows and Linux. It's such a problem that Linus Torvalds got angry (expressed in the kernel mailing lists) about how frustrating it is to use the system when HWRND is activated.

Superconductor at room temperature

A few days ago, a group of researchers published an article in which they claimed to have found a superconductor at room temperature. Their results have been reproducible in other laboratories through simulations, although one must remain skeptical since two other laboratories have not been able to achieve the announced superconductivity using the same material and the same environmental conditions.

Used DDR4 chips found in new memories

It seems that the RAM market is being flooded with used DDR4-3200 RAMs that are being dismantled from old server RAMs and being assembled into new kits and devices.

Firefox 116 available

Firefox 116 is now available. The sidebar now allows access to history, bookmarks, and synchronized tabs. It is also possible to copy and paste files from the operating system to the browser. In addition, a volume control has been added to Picture-in-Picture videos.

New distro for ARM Macs

Fedora Asahi Remix is a new Linux distribution intended for Mac computers with Apple Silicon series processors that are based on the ARM architecture.

Backblaze's statistics for this quarter

Backblaze has published the statistics for the second quarter of 2023 on hard drive failures. Leaving aside the classic comparison between brands (WD once again surpasses Seagate in reliability), in this case they have compiled a table with the failure rate by disk size and it seems that 16TB disks are outperforming the rest even taking into account the age of the batch.

An AMD security flaw harms Tesla

A security flaw has been found in AMD processors used in Tesla cars that makes it possible to unlock unlimited paid features. In addition, it is known that the problem has no solution.