• Chinese AI DeepSeek not only writes insecure code - of course it does, they all do - it selectively writes more insecure code if it thinks you are associated with one of the Chinese Communist Party's long list of enemies.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Also if you're trying to write code for industrial control systems.  
  
  But if you're a citizen of Taiwan or Tibet or a member of the Falun Gong, and you tell it you're writing a monitoring system for a nuclear reactor, it's going to have a field day.
  
  (Go away, Bing.  Yes, I did search for an non-paywalled version that WaPo article, but now just go away.)

• Asus gaming laptops have been broken for four years.  (GitHub)
  
  Uh.  I'm typing this on an Asus laptop less than four years old.  Not sure if it's considered a gaming laptop as it has no dedicated GPU.  The same bug does affect ROG, TUF, and Zephyrus models, and symptoms were reported starting in 2021.
  
  Anyway, on a regular schedule, every 30, 45, or 60 seconds depending on model, an interrupt fires off a BIOS ACPI call that in turn includes a sleep() call, something that would get a programmer shot, hung, drawn, and quartered back in the day.  That makes everything stall for 13 milliseconds or so - not a lot of time, but if you're gaming at 80fps that's one frame just gone.
  
  Oh, and sometimes it makes the entire system blue screen.
  
  
  
• Asus did slightly better with its new prosumer 6k 32" monitor, the ProArt PA32QCV.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At no point during testing did the monitor make the entire system blue screen.  I like the warning that's it's not a super-wide gamut monitor, since it "only" covers 100% of DCI-P3.
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 5 digital edition has been upgraded to 825GB of storage from an original 1TB at no extra cost.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No need to thank us.
  
  
  
• The latest NPM attack.  (SafeDep)
  
  Not the other one.  That was so last week.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Games, creator of the Borderlands franchise, has responded to criticism of the performance of the latest game in the series...  Badly.  (TechSpot)
  
  Pitchford claimed the title is "a premium game made for premium gamers" and told customers to stop being poor if they couldn't afford the latest top-of-the-line hardware needed to run it acceptably.
  
  He then told customers who were complaining about Borderlands 4's miserable performance compared to, say, Borderlands 3, "code your own engine and show us how it's done".
  
  Meanwhile Silksong will run perfectly well on a GTX 1050 with just 2GB of VRAM.

• AMD has announced four new CPUs that are all cut-down versions of existing models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Two 9000 series chips with the integrated graphics disabled, one 7000 series chip with half the L3 cache disabled - and also a 400MHz lower clock speed than the most directly comparable model, and one 5000 series chip with just the lower clock speed.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel has filled in the bottom of its 200-series desktop chips with the Core Ultra 3 205.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  4 P cores and 4 E cores, and reportedly better performance than recent low-midrange chips like the i5 14400.
  
  Remember though that there will be no new CPU generation that uses compatible motherboards; next year's Nova Lake will come with a new socket.
  
  
  
• I like trains.  (Nature)
  
  Well, that's nice for you, Timmy, but who told you that you could use the photocopier in the staff room?
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 18 2025 12:51 AM (D/dqQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 18 2025 12:53 AM (D/dqQ)

Posted by: RickT at Thursday, September 18 2025 08:44 AM (xeXUW)

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• If you want to run Borderlands 4 at higher than 1080p at a reasonable frame rate, you are almost required to own an RTX 5090.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Borderlands 3 meanwhile will run just fine on an RTX 5050.
  
  Nvidia has published an optimisation guide that consists entirely of improving performance by making the game look like a dog had diarrhea all over the texture maps.
  
  With the same hardware Borderlands 3 looks far better while also performing better.  Not a direct comparison, but so does Cyberpunk 2077, even with ray tracing enabled to increase the load on the GPU.

• React won by default.  (Loren Stewart)
  
  If you wonder why this is a bad thing - particularly if you don't know what React is - imagine if 98% of cars sold were the Ford Escort, even in 2025, simply because it was the default car.
  
  
  
• China says Nvidia violated antitrust regulations.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Did it?  Did it, indeed?
  
  Specifically related to its 2020 acquisition of networking company Mellanox.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 17 2025 12:39 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 17 2025 05:47 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 17 2025 06:01 PM (PiXy!)

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• Children are hacking their own schools for fun, warns the UK Information Commissioner's Office.  (BBC)
  
  Translation: The British government is run by and staffed with idiots.

  It says more the majority of so-called "insider" cyber attacks and data breaches in education settings - meaning they have been carried out by someone with access to internal systems - originate with students.

  I think they've confused insider with inmate.  An insider attack would be by the staff, not by the students.

  "What starts out as a dare, a challenge, a bit of fun in a school setting can ultimately lead to children taking part in damaging attacks on organisations or critical infrastructure," said Heather Toomey, Principal Cyber Specialist at the ICO.

  Reefer madness, IT edition.

  Since 2022, the ICO has investigated 215 hacks and breaches originating from inside education settings and says 57% were carried out by children.

  Translation: The British government is run by and staffed with idiots.
   

• Why grandma won't buy Betty Crocker cake mixes any more.  (Cubby)
  
  Shrinkflation and ratios.
  
  Specifically, the boxes have shrunk from 18.25 oz to 15.25 oz and now to 13.25 oz.  So if you follow an older recipe specifying a box of cake mix and specific amounts of wet ingredients, you're going to end up with slop rather than cookies.
  
  You can get away with changes like this in cooking generally, but not in baking.
  
  
  
• I checked the benchmarks of the two tablet CPUs on Nanoreview.  The Idea Tab's A76 (in a Mediatek Dimensity 6300) scores 782 on single-threaded Geekbench.
  
  The Legion Tab's X4 core (in a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3) scores 2193 - nearly three times as fast.
  
  The A715 core used in the Idea Tab Plus lands right in the middle with 1398.
  
  For an idea of how far we've come, an A53 core running at 1.3GHz from the beginning of 2016 scored just 141.  So the A76 is a lot faster than older low-end tablets which mostly ran the A53 core, and it's just a little slow compared to modern high-end hardware.
  
  
  
• A look inside the Beelink ME NAS device.  (Liliputing)
  
  The ME is almost a latter-day Cobalt Qube - you can even buy it in blue.  Two network ports, HDMI, and USB ports accompany an Intel N150 CPU, 12GB of RAM, a 64GB boot device, and six M.2 slots (five PCIe 3.0 x1 and one PCIe 3.0 x2).
  
  One interesting point that I hadn't considered: The N150 has nine PCIe lanes but only supports five independent devices.  The ME has the six SSDs and two 2.5Gb Ethernet controllers, and eight is more than five.
  
  So how did Beelink do that?  Apparently they just did it and it worked.
  
  The review goes into benchmarks but they're pretty much as you'd expect - the CPU is not particularly fast, but is more than fast enough to fill both 2.5Gb Ethernet ports simultaneously.
  
  The also tested with a 5Gb USB Ethernet adaptor, and it worked and filled that with data easily, with a top read speed of around 600MBps.
  
  
  
• Vibe coding has turned senior developers into AI babysitters but they say it's worth it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  While blinking rapidly in Morse code.
  
  
  
• Indian tech startup Hike took one.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company abruptly shut down after crowing about how well its US division was doing on Saturday.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 16 2025 12:53 AM (qs+Fu)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, September 16 2025 08:36 AM (rcPLc)

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• China's Great Firewall turns out not to be watertight: It sprang a leak involving 500GB of code and documentation relating to the firewall itself.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a lot of data to sift through but it spells years of trouble for the maintainers of the firewall, whether in China itself of in it client states Myanmar, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Ethiopia, all of which run versions of the same totalitarian control software.

• Didn't get a lot of time to test the tablets, but they are both set up and working fine.
  
  The two 2560x1600 displays look great.  The "paper-like" screen on the cheaper Idea Tab stands out in particular as a pleasant user experience.  Colours don't pop quite the way they do on my OLED screens, but it's not washed out or muted, just not aggressive about grabbing your attention.  It's listed as covering 72% of the NTSC colourspace, which is the number to look for - it's the equivalent of 100% sRGB.  It doesn't seem to handle DCI-P3, which you'll find on televisions and OLED panels, but it's a perfectly good screen, and considering that it's on a budget tablet it's a very good screen.  And the resolution is as sharp as you could ask for unless you have some very specific needs.
  
  The CPU on the Idea Tab...  Is a budget CPU.
  
  Using the much more expensive Legion Tab (my price A$799), tasks are done before you can start to wait for them.  Using the Idea Tab (my price A$249) it's not slow, exactly, but you can definitely feel the 2018 Arm A76 shouldering the weight of a 2024 version of Android.
  
  Maybe I should have set up the slower model first.
  
  I haven't tested sound extensively but the speakers on both tablets sound just fine at the default settings.
  
  The 11" Idea Tab has a headphone jack and a microSD slot in addition to the USB-C port.  The 8.8" Legion Tab has two USB-C ports, which might be useful, I guess, but I'd much rather they just return the headphone jack and microSD slot.  (Reportedly the coming Legion Tab 4 will restore the microSD slot.)
  
  I also need to test the pen that came with the Idea Tab.  The web site doesn't say this, but according to 9to5Google that pen and only that pen also works with the Legion Tab.  (You can also buy that pen by itself, but general-purpose Android pens aren't supported by the Legion Tab.)
  
  Perfect opportunity to confirm this, or at least the first part.
  
  
  
• Also mowed the lawn.  Last time I did that I noted my cardiovascular health seemed to be shot from the earlier bout of RSV.  It was just two days later that I got my scary blood pressure reading and found new things to worry about.
  
  So: Definitely on the mend, but definitely not fully mended. 
  
  
  
• Are heart attacks contagious?  (TUNI)
  
  I mean, probably not, but nobody believed that stomach ulcers and gastric cancer were largely caused by bacteria until Barry Marshall chugged a beaker of H. pylori in 1984 and landed himself in hospital and in the history books - winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology for an unauthorised experiment on himself.
  
  (He got better.)
  
  
  
• Five years ago KK Park in Myanmar was farmland.  Now it's a bustling town, home to many of the country's 100,000 trafficked slaves working in scam call centers.  (The Guardian)
  
  Null route the entire fucking country.
  
  
  
• We clean up after vibe coding.  Literally.  (404 Media)
  
  Vibe coded your way into disaster?  Know literally nothing and can't find your way out?  Now you can outsource your mess to a Polish tech team which maybe you should have done in the first place.
  
  (I took a moment to look up the location of one of the countries mentioned in the article.  Not the third world.  Potentially a viable solution.)
  
  
  
• "Forever chemicals" have been found in 95% of beer tested in the US.  (Science Daily)
  
  At long last you can buy beer and not just rent it.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, September 15 2025 01:59 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, September 15 2025 06:00 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 16 2025 03:44 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, September 16 2025 11:01 AM (ZLF73)

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• Intel has announced two new desktop CPUs.  Do not buy them.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The first is the i5 120, a six core part that has the exact same specs as the Core i5 12400 from 2022, mostly because that's what it is.  Admittedly not an awful part, particularly if you didn't run a workload that would make good use of the "efficiency" cores, because it didn't have any of those.
  
  The second is the i5 110, a six core part that has the exact same specs as the Core i5 10400 from 2020, mostly because...  Yeah.  The 10th generation chips didn't even have "efficiency" cores yet, so you're safe there.  But you will need to find a five year old motherboard and DDR4 RAM for it, because none of this modern stuff will work.
  
  Oh, and it's 14nm.
  
  
  
• Arm has introduced four new CPUs.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The C1 Ultra replaces the X925 (which replaced the X4) as Arm's new flagship mobile core.
  
  The C1 Premium replaces the A725 (latest in the same line as the A78, for example) as a sub-flagship core.
  
  The C1 Pro also replaces the A725 which is a bit confusing, but is optimised for smaller size and lower power.
  
  And the C1 Nano replaces the A520 (latest in the same line as the good old A53) as a core that also exists and powers your budget tablet probably.

• Speaking of budget tablets, I have my Lenovo Idea Tab and Lenovo Legion Tab charging right now ready for testing tomorrow.  (Notebook Check)
  
  And a couple of older models I dug out to see how things have improved over the years.
  
  Couple of things immediately evident:
  
  First, the more expensive Legion Tab boots much faster, which it should do since it has a much faster CPU (Arm X3 vs. A76 cores).
  
  Second, while the Legion Tab has a glossy screen, the Idea Tab is matte.  Very matte.  Lenovo's marketing material describes it as "paper-like" and at first glance that is correct.
  
  
  
• UTF-8 is a brilliant design.  (I Am Vishnu)
  
  A brilliant implementation of a terrible idea.
  
  UTF-8 is the default implementation of Unicode, and Unicode is an attempt to create a single alphabet that can encode every human symbol ever, from all languages including ones we can't read and ones that have syllabaries or pictograms rather than alphabets, and also everything else.
  
  But it's just an alphabet.  There is no embedded context as to what language you are using if the same symbol appears in more than one.  Which happens all the time.
  
  Which makes it impossible to write anything that can be read unambiguously.
  
  
  
• AI-generated medical data can be used without ethical concerns, say exceptionally unethical people.  (Nature)
  
  If you are wondering how the AI learned to generate useful fake medical data, then your most likely guess is precisely correct: It was trained on real human medical data.
  
  The issues here are large enough and obvious enough to provide roosting space for the entire former eastern seaboard population of the passenger pigeon.
  
  
  
• The employee of a DVD manufacturer who leaked the Spider-Man Blu-Ray has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison...  (TorrentFreak)
  
  ... On unrelated firearms charges.
  
  
  
• Samsung is releasing the Galaxy Tab A11 range, consisting of unusable low-resolution garbage.  (Liliputing)
  
  1340x800 on even an 8" screen is unacceptable. Google fixed that in the Nexus 7 in 2013.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 14 2025 04:25 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 14 2025 04:30 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Gopher at Monday, September 15 2025 12:59 AM (h2BK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 15 2025 01:12 AM (1zWbY)

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• AI use in large companies - over 250 staff - is showing a decline, with adoption rate falling from 14% to 12% since June, the largest drop off ever recorded by the survey.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Which is not saying that much since the survey has only existed for two years.
  
  But not good news if your company was planning to burn through $115 billion in the next four years and just signed up for a $300 billion five-year cloud services plan.

• Apple's A19 Pro beats AMD's 9950X3D in Geekbench single-core tests.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though the A19 Pro has two full-speed cores and the 9950X3D has sixteen of them.  Though Geekbench seems to favour Apple, it's still a solid result.
  
  
  
• Nano11 can have Windows 11 installed and working in just 2.8GB of disk space.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Minuscule by today's standards.  I expect it will bloat up quite a bit once Windows Update has had a chance to work its will for a few months.
  
  
  
• Deploy your Rails app on SQLite and relax.  (Arko)
  
  A guide to the possible fireworks and how to avoid them.
  
  
  
• Javascript, Node, and NPM are all plagues.  (43081j)
  
  Burn them.
  
  
  
• "No tax on tips" now applies to vtubers.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  For the first $25,000 of income anyway.  If you're earning less than $150,000 overall.  But that should definitely be welcome to most of the smaller US-based channels that I watch.
  
  
  
• VMWare looks to lose 35% of its customers over the next three years.  (The Register)
  
  Don't worry, they just need to increase prices by 50% to cover that.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 12 2025 11:01 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 13 2025 07:52 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 13 2025 02:22 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 14 2025 01:43 AM (rcPLc)

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• Oracle's contracted-but-unbilled revenue projections have soared 359% since last year to $455 billion, with share prices up 27% and Larry Ellison poised to retake the title of richest man in the world.  (The Register)
  
  It's not a bubble.
  
  
  
• OpenAI will pay Oracle $300 billion over the next five years in its wild pursuit of scale.  (The Register)
  
  It's not a bubble.
  
  
  

• Bending Spoons (who?) has bought dying video platform Vimeo for $1.38 billion.  (Petapixel)
  
  Bending Spoons bought Filmic - maker of camera app Filmic Pro - in 2022 and subsequently laid off the company's entire staff.
  
  
  
• Intel has confirmed Arrow Lake Refresh chips for Socket 1851 next year, to be followed almost immediately by Nova Lake on Socket 1954.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So while AMD's Socket AM5 will see Zen 4, Zen 5, and Zen 6, plus the in-between APU generations, currently limited to the Ryzen 8000 range.
  
  Where Intel's Socket 1851 will see...  Arrow Lake.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has announced the 12.1" Idea Tab Plus for $270, which seems to slot in between the 11" Idea Tab and the 12.7" Idea Tab Pro.  (Liliputing)
  
  This market segment is getting just a wee bit overcrowded, it seems to me.
  
  My Idea Tab arrived today.  I was looking at buying the pen for it, but it seems to be both expensive and hard to find.  Turns out it comes with a pen.
  
  I'll get it set up this weekend and post a quick review of both it and the Legion Tab.

Not Remotely Tech News

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, September 11 2025 07:34 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 11 2025 09:04 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Walter at Thursday, September 11 2025 10:27 PM (G9j0D)

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 12 2025 01:03 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: collwstrel at Friday, September 12 2025 08:42 AM (fuMh5)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 12 2025 09:07 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Friday, September 12 2025 12:33 PM (ljX0H)

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• Apple has announced its new phones: The iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, and the iPhone Air.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These start at eight times the price of my Moto G14 from last year, and with the 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max go up to 21 times the price - ranging from very expensive to painfully expensive.
  
  The iPhone 17 and iPhone Air feature the new six-core A19 chip, while the Pro and Pro Max feature the new six-core A19 Pro chip.
  
  Yeah, Apple is really phoning it in with this announcement.
  
  ...
  
  Sorry.

• Microsoft is battling those cheap key resellers in court, arguing that its software licenses can't be resold because they do not license the software.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Specifically that yes they license the software but only the software, not, for example, the user interface that allows you to use the software.
  
  Apparently the key resale market is enabled by European law and Microsoft wants desperately to kill it, but this argument is far worse than the disease itself.
  
  
  
• Claude can now use Excel.  (Anthropic)
  
  Making it so that AI can drive programs that actually work rather than attempting to do everything itself and inevitably getting it wrong is a potentially positive step, though I'm not sure it's worth $115 billion.
  
  
  
• HHS has asked all employees to start using ChatGPT.  (404 Media)
  
  Blergh.
  
  
  
• Intel has fired its CEO of Products.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel had a CEO of Products?
  
  
  
• The US government has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, siding firmly with Cox against the $1 billion decision against it from a jury verdict in the inferior courts, since upheld by the Fourth Circuit.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Pinterest have also sided with Cox.
  
  So have AT&T and Verizon, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Library Association, Re:Create, Public Knowledge, the CCIA, the ACLU, a collection of legal scholars, the Internet Society, and the platform formerly known as Twitter.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Yoga Tab is a smaller, cheaper, and, oddly, higher resolution version of the existing Yoga Tab Plus.  (Liliputing)
  
  Scaled down from 12.7" to 11.1" - making it pretty standard for a full size tablet and almost exactly the same size and weight as the budget Idea Tab I mentioned a couple of days ago - it also boasts a 3200x2000 display, which is so sharp you could cut yourself.
  
  It features a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and 12GB of RAM, the same as my Legion Tab, putting it in pretty serious performance territory too.
  
  Price is expected to be $550 when it ships next month.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Top Story

Tech News

• Plex got hacked too, with an unauthorised third party gaining access to email addresses, usernames, and encrypted passwords.  (Nerds)
  
  Time to reset your password.
  
  
  
• Experimenting with LLMs locally on your Mac without spending $115 billion.  (Fatih's Personal Blog)
  
  Including a guide to prebuilt LLMs that can be run on modest hardware.
  
  
  
• Nova Launcher has left the building.  (The Verge)
  
  This was my Android app launcher of choice for many years.
  
  Nova was bought by mobile analytics company Branch in 2022, and since then all the developers including the original creator have left the new company.
  
  
  
• All 54 games written for the original clickwheel iPod have now been recovered.  (Ars Technica)
  
  You just need an iPod to play them.
  
  It's not like saving a long-lost Scopitone film reel, but it's something.
  

Musical Interlude