The European Commission on Wednesday said U.S. chipmaker Broadcom's proposed $61 billion takeover of cloud computing company VMware could restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components. From a report: The Commission said it had informed Broadcom of its objection that the deal could restrict competition in the global markets for the supply of so-called fibre channel host bus adapters (FC HBAs) and storage adapters, by limiting access for competitors' hardware to VMware's software.

Tesla will open a factory in Shanghai to produce its Megapack large-scale batteries, cementing another foothold for the U.S. company in China even as political and economic tensions between Washington and Beijing swirl. The Washington Post reports: Tesla said in a brief tweet on Sunday that its "Megafactory" in Shanghai will be capable of producing 10,000 Megapacks annually, an output equivalent to its other Megafactory in Lathrop, Calif., about 70 miles east of San Francisco. The company, which disbanded its public relations department, did not provide further details. Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive, said in a tweet that the factory in Shanghai would "supplement" the production in California.

The Chinese factory will be built in Lingang, a suburban area of Shanghai where Tesla's vehicle factory is also located, according to Chinese media. Lu Yu, an official in Lingang, told local media that production could start as soon as the second quarter of 2024. The investment in China by Tesla comes after the coronavirus pandemic brought some supply chains to a halt as factories in China shut down amid strict "zero covid" protocols. With those setbacks still fresh in many executives' minds -- and amid concerns over alleged human rights violations and chilly relations between Washington and Beijing -- China has struggled to attract foreign investment since the pandemic.

The Megapacks differ from most of Tesla's consumer-focused offerings, like the electric vehicles it is widely known for, in that they are more a piece of energy infrastructure than a consumer product. The batteries are intended to store energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar, allowing energy to be drawn even when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Batteries like the Megapack are not yet widely implemented in the United States and purchases of the technology have mostly been kept under wraps. But the Megapack has been bought for Apple's renewable energy storage project in California, according to the Verge, and for a storage project outside Houston, Bloomberg first reported. A Megapack, Tesla says, "stores energy for the grid reliably and safely, eliminating the need for gas peaker plants and helping to avoid outages." Each pack can store enough energy to power 3,600 homes for an hour, Tesla says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Z-Library appears to be shrugging off a criminal investigation as if nothing ever happened. The site continues to develop its shadow library and, following a successful fundraiser, now plans to expand its services to the physical book market. Z-Library envisions a book 'sharing' market, where its millions of users can pick up paperbacks at dedicated "Z-Points" around the globe. [...] With more than 12 million books in its archive, Z-Library advertised itself as the largest repository of pirated books on the Internet. This success was briefly interrupted late last year when the U.S. Government seized the site's main domain names. The enforcement action also led to the arrest of two alleged Russian operators of the site, who now find themselves at the center of a criminal investigation. A crackdown of this magnitude usually marks the end of a pirate site, but Z-Library appears to be going in the opposite direction. The site has made a full comeback with a more 'censorship-resistant' setup and recently collected tens of thousands of dollars in donations.

In a new message, posted this week, Z-Library thanks its userbase for their generous contributions, noting that it secured all the necessary funds to ensure continued development. Apparently, this includes support for offline sharing. In addition to offering millions of ebooks, Z-Library says that it's working on a new service that will help users to share physical copies with each other. "Books you have read should not gather dust on your shelf -- instead, they can get a second life in the hands of new readers! This helps to preserve the literary heritage and spread the knowledge and ideas contained in books to more people," they write. "[W]e want to organize 'Z-Points' -- collection and storage points for books that will be the link between those who share their books and those who need them. Book owners who are willing to share them with other users can send books to the nearest Z-Point in their region. And those who need books stored in these points will be able to receive them for their use."

This sounds like a P2P competitor for traditional libraries. Interestingly, however, Z-Library believes that existing libraries are ideally suited to become Z-Points. People can also volunteer to run a Z-Point from their own homes. Running a book lending point will require quite a bit of storage space and organizational effort so fulfillment centers and third-party logistics services are also welcome to join in. The Z-Point idea is still in the planning phase. According to Z-Library, users will be able to send books by mail. These can then be loaned by others and/or sent by mail when requested. This proposal is quite different from the traditional pirate ebook library Z-Library offers now. And loaning a book to someone is generally not seen as copyright infringement either unless it's a copied ebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Like so much in our modern era, Australia's high-stakes gamble on renewable energy starts with an Elon Musk Twitter brag. South Australia's last coal-fired power plant had closed, leaving the province of 1.8 million heavily reliant on wind farms and power imports from a neighboring region. When an unprecedented blackout caused much of the country to question the state's dependence on clean power, Tesla boasted -- on Twitter, of course -- that it had a solution: It could build the world's biggest battery, and fast. "@Elonmusk, how serious are you about this," replied Australian software billionaire and climate activist Mike Cannon-Brookes. "Can you guarantee 100MW in 100 days?" Musk responded: "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?"

To the astonishment of many, Tesla succeeded, and today, almost seven years later, that battery and more like it have become central to a shockingly rapid energy transition. By the middle of the next decade, major coal-fired power stations that generate about half of Australia's electricity will shut down. Gas-fired plants are being retired, too, and nuclear power is banned. That leaves solar, wind and hydro as the major options in the country's post-coal future. "It's really a remarkable story," said Audrey Zibelman, the former head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, or AEMO, the agency that runs the grid, and now an adviser to Alphabet's X. "Because we're not interconnected, we've had to learn to do it in a much more sophisticated way, where a lot of other countries will go once they've shut down their fossils."

It may be Australia's biggest power buildout since electrification in the 1920s and 30s. And, if successful, could be replicated across the 80% of the world's population that lives in the so-called sun belt -- which includes Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, southern China and Southeast Asia, says Professor Andrew Blakers, an expert in renewable energy and solar technology at Australian National University. That, in turn, would go a long way to halting climate change. Building battery storage is just one critical piece of the national project, and AEMO and others are worried coal plants will shut before there's enough additional electricity supply. Australia needs to increase its grid-scale wind and solar capacity ninefold by 2050. Connecting all that generation and storage into the grid will require more investment. Overall, the cost could be a staggering A$320 billion ($215 billion), and the money is starting to flow: Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., Macquarie Group Ltd., and billionaires Andrew Forrest and Cannon-Brookes have all been involved in headline-grabbing energy deals in recent months. New government support for renewables has also improved investor sentiment, according to the Clean Energy Investor Group, which includes project developers and financiers.

Google is backtracking on its decision to put a file creation cap on Google Drive. From a report: Around two months ago, the company decided to cap all Google Drive users to 5 million files, even if they were paying for extra storage. The company did this in the worst way possible, rolling out the limit as a complete surprise and with no prior communication. Some users logged in to find they were suddenly millions of files over the new limit and unable to upload new files until they deleted enough to get under the limit. Some of these users were businesses that had the sudden file cap bring down their systems, and because Google never communicated that the change was coming, many people initially thought the limitation was a bug.

Apparently, sunshine really is the best disinfectant. The story made the tech news rounds on Friday, and Ars got Google on the record saying that the file cap was not a bug and was actually "a safeguard to prevent misuse of our system in a way that might impact the stability and safety of the system." After the weekend reaction to "Google Drive's Secret File Cap!" Google announced on Twitter Monday night that it was rolling back the limit. [...] Google told us it initially rolled the limitation out to stop what it called "misuse" of Drive, and with the tweet saying Google wants to "explore alternate approaches to ensure a great experience for all," it sounds like we might see more kinds of Drive limitations in the future.

Google is bringing Android's "Nearby Share" feature to the desktop with a new Windows app. Google says the new program will make sharing between Windows and Android easier, letting you send files over in just a few clicks and taps. From a report: Google's Nearby Share has been built into Android for a few years now and allows you to locally transfer files over Wi-Fi, with the initial device-pairing happening over Bluetooth. Nearby share has been kind of tough to use in real life, since most people share files over the Internet. And for personal use, most people only have one Android device, their phone, so there has been nothing to share files with. A ton of Android users have Windows PCs, though, so for many this will be the first time Nearby Share has an actual use. Using the app is easy. Just download it from the Android website and click a few "next" buttons in the installer. You need a 64-bit Windows PC (not ARM, ironically) with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. From there you can easily share by dragging and dropping on Windows or by using the Android "share" button and hitting "Nearby Share." You have the option of signing in to the Windows app or not. If you don't you'll need to manually approve every transaction on both the phone and PC. If you sign in, you can set up auto-accept from yourself, anyone in your contacts, or the probably not advisable "everyone" option.

Data storage giant Western Digital has confirmed that hackers exfiltrated data from its systems during a "network security incident" last week. From a report: The California-based company said in a statement on Monday that an unauthorized third party gained access to "a number" of its internal systems on March 26. Western Digital hasn't confirmed the nature of the incident or revealed how it was compromised, but its statement suggests the incident may be linked to ransomware. [...] Western Digital notes that the incident "has caused and may continue to cause disruption" to the company's business operations.

PINE64 has an update about their Star64 single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor: it will be available on April 4th in two configurations: 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99: Let me just quickly reiterate the Star64 features:


- Quad core 64bit RISC-V
- HDMI video output
- 4x DSI and 4x CSI lates
- i2c touch panel connector
- dual Gigabit Ethernet ports
- dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth
- 1x native USB3.0 port, 3x shared USB2.0 ports
- PCIe x1 open-ended slot and GPIO bus pins (i2c, SPI and UART).
- The board also features 128M QSPI flash and eMMC and microSD card slots.


The board will be available in two different RAM configurations — with 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99 respectively. The Star64 store page ought to already be live when you read this, but will be listed as out of stock until the 4th.
Liliputing offers this summary: The Star64 is a single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor, support for up to 8GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage (as well as a microSD card reader). Developed by the folks at Pine64, it's designed to be an affordable platform for developers and hobbyists looking to get started with RISC-V architecture. Pine64 first announced it was working on the Star64 last summer...
Meanwhile, PINE64's Linux tablets, the PineTab2 and PineTab-V, will launch one week later on Tuesday, April 11th.

Other highlights from this month's community update: there's now a dedicated Debian with GNOME image with tailored settings for grayscale for their Linux-based "PineNote" e-ink tablets. ("Other OSes and desktop environments are being worked on too.")

And the update also includes photos of one user's cool 3D-printed replacement cases for their PinePhone featuring Tux the penguin.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Authorities in Germany this week seized Internet servers that powered FlyHosting, a dark web offering that catered to cybercriminals operating DDoS-for-hire services, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. FlyHosting first advertised on cybercrime forums in November 2022, saying it was a Germany-based hosting firm that was open for business to anyone looking for a reliable place to host malware, botnet controllers, or DDoS-for-hire infrastructure. A statement released today by the German Federal Criminal Police Office says they served eight search warrants on March 30, and identified five individuals aged 16-24 suspected of operating "an internet service" since mid-2021. The German authorities did not name the suspects or the Internet service in question.

"Previously unknown perpetrators used the Internet service provided by the suspects in particular for so-called 'DDoS attacks', i.e. the simultaneous sending of a large number of data packets via the Internet for the purpose of disrupting other data processing systems," the statement reads. The German authorities said that as a result of the DDoS attacks facilitated by the defendants, the websites of various companies as well as those of the Hesse police have been overloaded in several cases since mid-2021, "so that they could only be operated to a limited extent or no longer at times." The statement says police seized mobile phones, laptops, tablets, storage media and handwritten notes from the unnamed defendants, and confiscated servers operated by the suspects in Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Like electronics or photonics, magnonics is an engineering subfield that aims to advance information technologies when it comes to speed, device architecture, and energy consumption. A magnon corresponds to the specific amount of energy required to change the magnetization of a material via a collective excitation called a spin wave. Because they interact with magnetic fields, magnons can be used to encode and transport data without electron flows, which involve energy loss through heating (known as Joule heating) of the conductor used. As Dirk Grundler, head of the Lab of Nanoscale Magnetic Materials and Magnonics (LMGN) in the School of Engineering explains, energy losses are an increasingly serious barrier to electronics as data speeds and storage demands soar. "With the advent of AI, the use of computing technology has increased so much that energy consumption threatens its development," Grundler says. "A major issue is traditional computing architecture, which separates processors and memory. The signal conversions involved in moving data between different components slow down computation and waste energy."

This inefficiency, known as the memory wall or Von Neumann bottleneck, has had researchers searching for new computing architectures that can better support the demands of big data. And now, Grundler believes his lab might have stumbled on such a "holy grail". While doing other experiments on a commercial wafer of the ferrimagnetic insulator yttrium iron garnet (YIG) with nanomagnetic strips on its surface, LMGN Ph.D. student Korbinian Baumgaertl was inspired to develop precisely engineered YIG-nanomagnet devices. With the Center of MicroNanoTechnology's support, Baumgaertl was able to excite spin waves in the YIG at specific gigahertz frequencies using radiofrequency signals, and -- crucially -- to reverse the magnetization of the surface nanomagnets. "The two possible orientations of these nanomagnets represent magnetic states 0 and 1, which allows digital information to be encoded and stored," Grundler explains.

The scientists made their discovery using a conventional vector network analyzer, which sent a spin wave through the YIG-nanomagnet device. Nanomagnet reversal happened only when the spin wave hit a certain amplitude, and could then be used to write and read data. "We can now show that the same waves we use for data processing can be used to switch the magnetic nanostructures so that we also have nonvolatile magnetic storage within the very same system," Grundler explains, adding that "nonvolatile" refers to the stable storage of data over long time periods without additional energy consumption. It's this ability to process and store data in the same place that gives the technique its potential to change the current computing architecture paradigm by putting an end to the energy-inefficient separation of processors and memory storage, and achieving what is known as in-memory computation. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Google Drive is enforcing a new file limit for the total number of files you can store on an account. 9to5Google reports: Some Google Drive users have recently noticed a message on their accounts which says that the account has reached its "creation limit" and won't accept any new files until existing ones are deleted. The issue was first highlighted by Ars Technica, and appears to be enforced for both free accounts as well as those subscribed to Google Workspace and Google One.

The issue was flagged by users on Reddit as well as Google's Issue Tracker and appears to have been put in place around mid-February. The file limit in place puts a hard ceiling on the total number of files stored in Google Drive at five million items. This limit ignores file size and type, and is a simple count of the number of files in your online storage bucket. This also includes items stored in the trash (which is automatically emptied every 30 days). When that limit is reached (or if the account has already exceeded it), Google Drive shows the following message: "This account has exceeded the creation limit of 5 million items. To create more items, move items to the trash and delete them forever."

One user reports having seven million items in their account prior to the limit being enforced, with their account no longer able to add any new files. Effectively, that user and anyone else in the same situation are locked out of their accounts, with the files stored now in a "read-only" mode. Google appears to have confirmed the limit to some users via support, but has yet to speak out publicly about it.

The UK government will defy scientific doubts to place a massive bet on technology to capture and store carbon dioxide in undersea caverns, to enable an expansion of oil and gas in the North Sea. From a report: Grant Shapps, the energy and net zero secretary, on Thursday unveiled the "powering up Britain" strategy, with carbon capture and storage (CCS) at its heart, during a visit to a nuclear fusion development facility in Oxford. Shapps said the continued production of oil and gas in the North Sea was still necessary, and that the UK had a geological advantage in being able to store most of the carbon likely to be produced in Europe for the next 250 years in the large caverns underneath the North Sea. "Unless you can explain how we can transition [to net zero] without oil and gas, we need oil and gas," he said. "I am very keen that we fill those cavities with storing carbon. I think there are huge opportunities for us to do that."

Shapps pointed to the $24.7bn the government is planning to spend over 20 years on developing CCS, which he said would generate new jobs and make the UK a world leader in the technology. Among the 1,000 pages of proposals to be published on Thursday will be boosts for offshore wind, hydrogen, heat pumps and electric vehicles. A green finance strategy, to be set out by the chancellor of the exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, will be aimed at mobilising private-sector money for investments in green industry, and there will be a consultation on carbon border taxes, aimed at penalising the import of high-carbon goods from overseas. But the plans contain no new government spending, and campaigners said they missed out key elements, such as a comprehensive programme of home insulation and a full lifting of the ban on new onshore wind turbines in England.

quonset writes: In what has to be one of the most inconceivable confluences ever, the Norwegian company Nammo says it is unable to expand its production of artillery shells to support Ukraine because of "cat videos" on TikTok. To placate European scrutiny, TikTok is opening two data centers in Europe to house European user data locally. One of those data centers is in the Hamar region of Norway. Because of this expansion, there is no excess capacity for the factory to ramp up production of artillery shells.

"The chief executive of Nammo, which is co-owned by the Norwegian government, said a planned expansion of its largest factory in central Norway hit a roadblock due to a lack of surplus energy, with the construction of TikTok's new data centre using up electricity in the local area," reports the Guardian. "Elvia, the local energy provider, confirmed to the Financial Times that the electricity network had no spare capacity after allocating it to the data center on a first-come, first-served basis. Additional capacity would take time to become available." "We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos," Morten Brandtzaeg told the Financial Times.

The US Federal Trade Commission is paying close attention to developments in artificial intelligence to ensure the field isn't dominated by the major tech platforms, Chair Lina Khan said Monday. From a report: "As you have machine learning that depends on huge amounts of data and also a huge amount of storage, we need to be very vigilant to make sure that this is not just another site for big companies to become bigger," Khan said at an event hosted by the Justice Department in Washington. Khan said companies offering AI tools need to make sure they are not "overselling or overstating" what their products can do. "Sometimes we see claims that are not fully vetted or not really reflecting how these technologies work," Khan said, noting recent guidance from the agency on AI-enabled products. "Developers of these tools can potentially be liable if technologies they are creating are effectively designed to deceive."

Saturday Arduino announced "a new, revolutionary revision of the iconic UNO board," promising "a long-awaited update on performance and possibilities." The Arduino UNO R4 indeed preserves the well-known features of the UNO family — standard form factor, shield compatibility, 5V operating voltage, outstanding robustness — while offering no less than a 32-bit Cortex-M4 and a 3-to-16x increase in clock speed, memory and flash storage....

The UNO R4 will come in two versions — UNO R4 WiFi and UNO R4 Minima — offering unprecedented performance and possibilities for the maker community. The WiFi version comes with an Espressif S3 WiFi module, expanding creative opportunities for makers, educators, and hobbyists alike; while the UNO R4 Minima provides a cost-effective option for those seeking the new microcontroller without additional features....

SRAM went from 2kB to 32kB, and flash memory went from 32kB to 256kB to accommodate more complex projects. In addition, following the requests from the community, the USB port was upgraded to the USB-C and maximum power supply voltage was increased to 24V with an improved thermal design. The board provides a CAN bus, which allows users to minimize wiring and execute different tasks in parallel by connecting multiple shields. Finally, the new board includes a 12-bit analog DAC.

All in all, Arduino UNO R4 is the answer to the requests for improvement and updates the developer and maker community has been advancing, making it easier than ever to get started with Arduino.... On the software side, a big effort is being made to maximize retrocompatibility of the most popular Arduino libraries so that users will be able to rely on existing code examples and tutorials.

Google defended its use of "history-off chats" for many internal communications, denying the US government's allegation that it intentionally destroyed evidence needed in an antitrust case. The history-off setting causes messages to be automatically deleted within 24 hours. Ars Technica reports: The US government and 21 states last month asked a court to sanction Google for allegedly using the auto-delete function on chats to destroy evidence and accused Google of falsely telling the government that it suspended its auto-deletion practices on chats subject to a legal hold. Google opposed the motion for sanctions on Friday in a filing (PDF) in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Google said it uses a "tiered approach" for preserving chats. "When there is litigation, Google instructs employees on legal hold not to use messaging apps like Google Chat to discuss the subjects at issue in the litigation and, if they must, to switch their settings to 'history on' for chats regarding the subjects at issue in the litigation, so that any such messages are preserved," the Google filing said.

Google said the government plaintiffs "contend that the Federal Rules specifically mandate that Google should have applied a forced history on setting for all custodians for all chats created while the custodian was on legal hold, regardless of the possible relevance of the message to the litigation." But federal rules only require "reasonable steps to preserve" information, Google pointed out. "Google's vast preservation efforts here -- and specifically its methodology with respect to history-off chats -- were 'reasonable steps' under the Rule," Google argued. Google said the US and state attorneys general "have not been denied access to material information needed to prosecute these cases and they have offered no evidence that Google intentionally destroyed such evidence." Google also argued that the objections came too late, alleging that the government knew before litigation began "that there was a subset of chats not automatically retained." "Plaintiffs' motions are barred at the outset because they were on notice of Google's approach to chats for years, yet did not object until well after the close of discovery. Those tactics should not be countenanced," Google told the court.

Google said its November 2019 disclosures in an ESI (Electronically Stored Information) questionnaire "show that the distinction between 'on-the-record' and other chats was apparent to anyone who wanted to pursue the matter from the outset of DOJ's investigation. For instance, the ESI Questionnaire response specifies that chat 'messages are generally retained for a period of 30 days if they have been marked on-the-record, and potentially longer if on-the-record messages are on legal hold.'" Google also said, "it is no secret how Google's Chat product operates" because it's a publicly available product and the Google Chat website explains the history-off feature. The Justice Department's motion last month said things happened very differently. "Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours" for nearly four years, the government motion said, continuing [...].

An anonymous reader writes: Last week, we learned that Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 graphics chips so that partner OpenAI could train the large language models (LLMs) behind Bing's AI chatbot and ChatGPT.

Don't have access to all that capital or space for all that hardware for your own LLM project? Nvidia's DGX Cloud is an attempt to sell remote web access to the very same thing. Announced today at the company's 2023 GPU Technology Conference, the service rents virtual versions of its DGX Server boxes, each containing eight Nvidia H100 or A100 GPUs and 640GB of memory. The service includes interconnects that scale up to the neighborhood of 32,000 GPUs, storage, software, and "direct access to Nvidia AI experts who optimize your code," starting at $36,999 a month for the A100 tier.

Meanwhile, a physical DGX Server box can cost upwards of $200,000 for the same hardware if you're buying it outright, and that doesn't count the efforts companies like Microsoft say they made to build working data centers around the technology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An analysis of 2,007 damaged or defective hard disk drives (HDDs) has led a data recovery firm to conclude that "in general, old drives seem more durable and resilient than new drives." The statement comes from a Los Angeles-headquartered HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery firm aptly named Secure Data Recovery that has been in business since 2007 and claims to have resolved more than 100,000 cases. It studied the HDDs it received in 2022. "Most" of those drives were 40GB to 10TB, according to a blog post by Secure Data Recovery spotted by Blocks & Files on Thursday.

Secure Data Recovery's March 8 post broke down the HDDs it received by engineer-verified "power-on hours," or the total amount of time the drive was functional, starting from when its owner began using it and ending when the device arrived at Secure Data Recovery. The firm also determined the drives' current pending sector count, depicting "the number of damaged or unusable sectors the hard drive developed during routine read-and-write operations." The company's data doesn't include HDDs that endured non-predictable failures or damage by unexpected events, such as electrical surges, malware, natural disasters, and "accidental mishandling," the company said.

Among the sample, 936 drives are from Western Digital, 559 come from Seagate, 211 are Hitachi brand, 151 are Toshiba's, 123 are Samsung's, and there are 27 Maxtor drives. Notably, 74.5 percent of the HDDs came from either Western Digital or Seagate, which Secure Data Recovery noted accounted for 80 percent of hard drive shipments in 2021, citing Digital Storage Technology Newsletter data shared by Forbes. The average time before failure among the sample size was 2 years and 10 months, and the 2,007 defective HDDs had an average of 1,548 bad sectors. "While 1,548 bad sectors out of hundreds of millions or even billions of disk subdivisions might seem minuscule, the rate of development often increases, and the risk of data corruption multiplies," the blog said. "We found that the five most durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made before 2015," says Secure Data Recovery. "On the other hand, most of the least durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made after 2015." One of the reasons for this may have to do with HDD manufacturers "pushing the performance envelope," adds Ars. "This includes size limits that cut 'allowance between moving parts, appearing to affect mechanical damage and wear resistance.'"

Secure Data Recovery also believes that shingled magnetic recording (SMR) impacts HDD reliability, as the disks place components under "more stress."

"What this study shows is not the average working life of a hard disk drive," notes Blacks & Files. "Instead it provides the average working life if a failed disk drive. Cloud storage provider Backblaze issues statistics about the working life of its disk drive fleet and its numbers are quite different." A recent report of theirs found that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs.

After almost 17 years online, file-hosting veteran Zippyshare will shut down at the end of the month. TorrentFreak: Founded in 2006, Zippyshare was known for its free, no-nonsense, no-frills approach to storing files online. Having changed very little over the years, Zippyshare's operators say the platform is now a dinosaur that costs too much to run in a world where ad-blocking is widespread. Zippyshare said, "Since 2006 we have been on the market in an unchanged form, that is, as ad financed/free file hosting. However, you have been visiting in less and less over the years, as the arguably very simple formula of the services we offer is slowly running out of steam. I guess all the competing file storage service companies on the market look better, offer better performance and more features. No one needs a dinosaur like us anymore."

Liliputing.com has an update about the System76 Meerkat, which they describe as "a compact desktop computer with support for up to 64GB of RAM, up to two storage devices (for as much as 16TB of total storage), and up to an Intel Core i7 mobile processor. It's basically a rebranded Intel NUC." (Escept that System76 offers a choice of Pop!_OS or Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.)

"Previously available with a choice of 10th or 11th-gen Intel Core processor options, the Meerkat now also supports 12th-gen Intel chips." That means there are a total of 9 different processor options available. Prices start at $499 for an entry-level model with a Core i3-10110U processor, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. The prices rises by $50 if you want to go with a Core i3-1135G4 model, while prices start at $599 for a Meerkat mini PC with a 12th-gen Intel Core processor....

But the biggest difference is that Intel's 12th-gen processors introduce a hybrid architecture that pairs Performance and Efficiency cores, leading to much higher core counts for better multi-core performance.