Archive for March 12, 2021

BREAKING: 800K Canadians To Be Locked Out Of Their CRA Accounts Tomorrow

Posted in Commentary with tags , on March 12, 2021 by itnerd

From the “this does not inspire confidence” department comes news that 800,000 Canadians will be locked out of their Canada Revenue Agency accounts tomorrow due to “cybersecurity risks”. This sounds similar to what happened less than a month ago where 100,000 other Canadians had their accounts locked as their credentials were allegedly floating around the dark web. Those who are affected by this will get instructions as to how to unlock their accounts.

I’m sorry, but this is once again a #fail on so many levels.

  1. Simply sending an email out saying that your Canada Revenue Agency account has been locked is going to freak people out. That’s because the history of the Canada Revenue Agency when it comes to IT security quite frankly sucks as they have been repeatedly pwned by hackers.
  2. Clearly their defenses are so poor that they clearly have to resort to locking out accounts. That’s pretty poor.

The fact is that the Canada Revenue Agency needs to really explain this. They can’t keep resorting to locking to accounts to solve what is clearly a larger IT security issue. So they need to step up their game otherwise they will not be trusted by Canadians.

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Rainbow Six: Your Guide To The 2021 North American Season

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 12, 2021 by itnerd

With the debut of the North American League in 2020, Ubisoft is excited for a brand new 2021 Season! After the Canadian and US Division merger, they are continuing forward with 9 teams in the North American League who will be playing in an offline environment at the Esports Arena in Las Vegas, NV, the home of the North American League.

This year, nine teams will be playing in a best-of-1 round robin format with no draws. While they may not have a Canadian division per say anymore, that just means that Canadian teams like Mirage and other Canadian players need Canadian love and support more than ever!

Make sure you tune into the action for the 2021 Season kick-off on March 24th and bring that Canadian pride with you. As always, you can tune into the action on Twitch.tv/Rainbow6. You can also take a look at the full guide to the 2021 NAL Season for more info.

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Apple M1 Mac SSD Swap Issues – Should You Be Concerned?

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 12, 2021 by itnerd

I’ve gotten a number of emails asking me about SSD swap issues with the new M1 Macs made by Apple and if they as new owners of M1 Macs should be concerned. Thus I decided to write this article explaining the issue, and giving you as much factual information to help you to decide if you should be concerned or not. First some background.

Every computer has two things. RAM which stands for Random Access Memory and storage which in the M1 Mac’s case is an SSD or Solid State Drive. Your programs run in RAM. But when that starts to fill up because you have a lot of apps open, or when macOS decides it’s not optimal to have so much data in RAM, it will do a swap of the data to the SSD to free up RAM. This will move some data from the RAM to the SSD which frees up RAM. And when it’s required, it will swap that data back. Every operating system does this. By that I mean Windows and Linux among others.

Now this is great, but a Twitter user named Longhorn posted this Tweet about his two month old M1 Mac:

Now SSDs have a lifespan that is calculated on the amount of writes that it does. Data recovery company Ontrack estimates this to be 60 to 150 terabytes written. So based on the Tweet above, going through 1% of the drive’s life in two months is insane as it will wear out the SSD faster. And the fact that you cannot replace the SSD once it fails doesn’t help.

Once that Tweet started to go viral, other users of M1 Macs reported the same thing. So clearly there’s an issue here. But if you own an M1 Mac, should you be concerned?

Well, for starters, I would say it’s a issue for all Mac owners as during the process to research this story, the same phenomena is happening to Intel based Mac owners as well:

https://twitter.com/m3gaboy/status/1369922546871660546

That implies to me that this is more of an issue with macOS than an issue with the M1 chip. That also got me curious to see what my SSD stats are on my 15″ MacBook Pro from 2015. So I used a paid utility called DriveDx to find out:

So at least my drive isn’t going to die anytime soon. And it implies that I do not have this problem. So what is the issue? I have a few guesses:

The fact is that we don’t know. But given how popular Macs appear to be these days, especially the M1 processor based Macs, I think we need to find out. Now it’s a safe bet that Apple is looking at this. And they might be working on a fix or already have a fix. It would be nice if they said something though as they are giving users the silent treatment as usual.

Now if you are worried about this issue, I have some suggestions:

  • If you are buying a new M1 Mac, buy a 16GB model or more. That is likely to swap to disk less.
  • Higher SSD storage options tend to have longer lifespans in terms of the amount of writes that it can do. So you can buy a 512GB or 1TB or higher M1 Mac to mitigate this issue.

One thing that I would not do is disable the ability for macOS to swap to disk. Swapping to disk is there for a reason and you will likely take a performance hit if you disable it.

The bottom line is that I don’t think that this is an issue that you need to worry about. At least not with the evidence that exists at present. But if you are worried about this issue, there are some mitigations that you can take. But it would be nice if Apple speaks to this and addresses this in a timely manner. That would make all mac users feel better.

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