• Google is facing a $425 million fine, not from Europe for once but from a federal court in California, for continuing to track millions of people for years after they had turned off the tracking feature.  (AP News)
  
  Okay, yeah.
  
  Nail their hides to the wall on this one.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Business Insider retracted forty articles because they were obvious low-grade AI slop.  (MSN)
  
  The freelancer violated the first rule of journalism: Don't be obvious.
  
  
  
• The oldest database transaction in the world is a cuneiform tablet recording the sale of malt and barley groats from around 3100 BC.  (Avi.im)
  
  Meanwhile MySQL cannot even record a date that old.
  
  
  
• Benchmarking Seagate's new 30TB HAMR hard drive.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Spoiler: It's slow even for a hard drive.
  
  
  
• Everything old is new again: Memory expansion cards for PCs are back.  (Gigabyte)
  
  This particular model from Gigabyte lets you add up to 512GB of DDR5 registered memory to a suitable CXL-supporting Threadripper motherboard like the TRX50 AI TOP which already supports 2TB of RAM.
  
  So not immediately useful for most people.
  
  
  
• Is the Lenovo Idea Tab any good?  (Notebook Check)
  
  If you're looking for a budget tablet, rather than a high-end workhorse, then the answer may well be yes.  It's a basic 11" model with a sharp 2560x1600 screen.  The A76 CPU cores are far from the latest but twice as fast as older models that just had something like the A53.
  
  It all depends on what price Lenovo is offering right now - Lenovo runs sales every day of the year and just cycles products around.  Right now in Australia the 4GB/128GB version of this tablet is available for $249 including tax and delivery - around US$150 - making it a very affordable option to keep a second screen handy.
  
  Cheaper in fact than the less capable Lenovo Tab One with half the resolution.
  
  Thinking of picking one up because my current large tablet - also a Lenovo - is one of those older models with just an A53 CPU and a 1920x1200 screen.

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