• The EU is considering scaling back the GDPR rules after learning that every website on the planet uses cookies.  (The Verge)
  
  Finally.

  "We have all the ingredients in the EU to succeed.  But our companies, especially our start-ups and small businesses, are often held back by layers of rigid rules," said Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president for implementing layers of rigid rules at the European Commission.

  You don't say.

• Is the detector that detects whether the watcher that is watching the monitor that monitors DownDetector down?  (A Site Whose Name Is Too Long)
  
  No.
  
  But DownDetector itself was down during the Cloudflare outage.
  
  
  
• If you need to replace your Nintendo GameBoy - which you likely do since the original came out in 1989 - the Ayaneo Pocket Vert looks like just the thing.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's about the same size as the original model, but has replaced the 2.5" monochrome screen with a 3.5" colour model, and upgraded the resolution from 160x144 to...  1600x1440.
  
  Which is better than a whole lot of things.
  
  It has four hidden trigger buttons on the back and turns the blank areas of the faceplate into an invisible touchpad.
  
  No pricing information yet.
  
  
  
• More PowerPoint slides than you ever wanted about the upcoming Snapdragon Elite X2.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The Snapdragon Elite sank without a trace in the PC hardware market because it wasn't better enough - and certainly not cheap enough - to make up for the compatibility issues that come from running x86 software on Arm hardware.
  
  As for this second attempt, the 18 core flagship model looks nice, but unless they've solved the pricing and compatibility issues that may not matter.
  
  
  
• Screw you guys, I'm installing Linux.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  2026 will be the year of Linux on my desktop, at least.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: David Eastman at Friday, November 21 2025 02:20 AM (OZKzj)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 21 2025 02:25 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 21 2025 04:26 AM (IHmO8)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 21 2025 07:08 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, November 21 2025 07:58 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 21 2025 10:09 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 21 2025 05:17 PM (PiXy!)

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• So, Cloudflare.  (Cloudflare)
  
  Cloudflare carries something like 20% of the world's web traffic, but for a few hours late last night (my time) or early yesterday morning (US time) it wasn't carrying much of anything, because it stopped working.
  
  Six times.
  
  Not a DNS problem like the recent outages at Azure and Amazon, but a fumbled configuration file change like that massive Crowdstrike outage sixteen months ago.
  
  
  
• And it's going to keep happening, so buckle up.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  I run traditional unshared physical servers at a smaller datacenter, not bound to any of the major players.  On the one hand, a few years ago that datacenter had a fire and while the fire didn't cause any damage, the same could not be said for the sprinkler system mandated by local fire codes.  (Yes, a sprinkler system.  In a datacenter.)
  
  On the other hand, not one of these big global outages have affected us.

• It's now been discovered that the popular Mac Classic II model from 1991 - the original compact format with an updated 68030 processor - never actually worked.  (PC Gamer)
  
  A developer working on the MAME emulator found that an emulated Mac Classic II running in 32-bit mode would crash immediately on startup.
  
  100% of the time, despite MAME being a reliable and thoroughly-tested emulator for the 68030 (and many other architectures) and the testing being conducted with a bit-perfect copy of the original firmware.
  
  Testing traced this to a single bad instruction in the Apple ROMs for this hardware.  But the hardware was shipped, and it sold well, and it worked fine.
  
  It wasn't until the developer bought and restored an original Mac Classic II to test the code on the the real hardware that he worked out what was going on: Magic.
  
  
  
• Bitcoin prices have crashed to just $90,000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  After hitting $125,000 in early October.
  
  I told you at the time that you could double your money by investing in DRAM.
  
  Well, I didn't, but imagine if I had.
  
  
  
• If you get an email from Monotype, burn it without reading.  (Insanity Works)
  
  Trust me on this.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is adding an "Agentic AI" features settings to Windows 11 for all the stuff you don't want but that they insist on shoving in.  (Windows Central)
  
  Thanks, I think.
  
  
  
• Talking to your Windows PC quickly reveals how much Windows sucks, and Copilot AI sucks, and the combination is exponential rather than merely additive.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Translation: Don't do that.
  
  
  
• The CEO of LLM marketplace Hugging Face says we're not in an AI bubble, just in an LLM bubble.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is a valid point.
  
  LLMs are generative AI - you tell them to draw a picture of a frog eating a set of deep-fried bagpipes and they pull together petabytes of tagged and shredded images and spit out something that may or may not resemble what you asked for.
  
  That's the bubble.
  
  Discriminative AI is where you point your camera at some weird piece of modern art and it figures out it's supposed to be a frog enjoying a meal of deep-fried bagpipes.  Or more usefully, when your self-driving car swerves the precise amount needed to avoid a black cart darting across an unlit road on a moonless night.
  
  That's getting less than 10% of the attention but represents 99% of the long-term value.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, November 19 2025 07:18 PM (amxkj)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, November 23 2025 06:47 PM (XWgGM)

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• If you gaze too long into CoreWeave, CoreWeave gazes back at you.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Some actually sound reporting from The Verge's usually reliably crazy Elizabeth Lopatto, about deeply dubious datacenter holding company CoreWeave.

  But as I began to look more closely at the company, I began feeling like I’d accidentally stumbled on an eldritch horror. CoreWeave is saddled with massive debt and, except in the absolute best-case scenario of fast AI adoption, has no obvious path toward profitability.  There are some eyebrow-raising accounting choices.  And then, naturally, there are the huge insider sales of CoreWeave stock.

  Yes, naturally there are those.
  
  Wait, what?

  After I unfocused my eyes a little, I realized CoreWeave did make a horrible kind of sense: It’s a tool to hedge other companies' risks and juice their profits.  It's taking on the risk and the costs of building data centers that bigger tech companies can then rent while they build their own data centers which may very well wind up competing with CoreWeave.  What’s more, it’s part of a whole stable of companies that are propping up demand for the behemoth of the AI boom: Nvidia.

  The usual names pop up in the list of investors in CoreWeave.  Nvidia is a major investor and is selling the company billions of dollars worth of GPUs, which CoreWeave then provides access to for customers like OpenAI and Microsoft, which are also major investors.
  
  It also has billions in outstanding loans at variable interest rates.
  
  It's not a bubble.
  
  
  
   
• Meanwhile Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is deeply worried about the power a handful of unelected people like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have to shape the future of AI.  (Business Insider)
  
  Deeply worried, I tell you.  Deeply.

• Why, when AWS was down, we were not.  (Authress)
  
  Just use DNS to switch point to somewhere that isn't down.
  
  Also, don't use AWS US-East-1 (Virginia).  Yes, it's the flagship location, but it's also the least reliable in terms of major incidents in recent years.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Virginia, NetChoice has sued to overturn the state's one-hour limit on social media access for children under the age of 16, on the grounds of, and I quote, "Are you fucking kidding me with this bullshit?".  (The Verge)
  
  Well, paraphrase.
  
  
  
• The EU is looking at whether it can subject the major cloud providers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS to the idiotic rigours of the Digital Marketplace Act without them simply pulling the plug on the entire reeking continent and leaving them to calculate the penalties on abacuses.  Abaci?  Holy crap, it actually is abaci.  The more you know.  (Bloomberg)  (archive site)
  
  The leading European cloud provider has a reputation for becoming entirely too cloudy at times.
  
  
  
• Professional bloviator and occasional US Representative from California Ro Khanna is now complaining about the use of AI in video games.  (PC Magazine)
  
  AI has been used in video games since 1951.
  
  Yes, the game in question - the latest game from the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops 7 - is kind of crap, but the culprit there is human laziness and not AI.
  
  
  
• Luminal has raised $5.3 million to develop a better standard framework for code running on GPUs.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is one of the most sensible investment stories I've seen in months.  GPUs simply calculate lots of numbers very quickly, so even without AI distorting the market, better tools for making use of that power are well worth a few million.

Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, November 19 2025 02:54 AM (OZKzj)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 19 2025 05:57 AM (LADmw)

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• The world's first microprocessor wasn't Intel's 4004, but the 20-bit MP944 control system built for the Grumman F-14 Tomcat.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which I already knew, because while it was classified information in 1970 when it first launched - literally - it was declassified in the late 90s.  (And because a while back I was doing a search for computer hardware with unusual word sizes, and 20 bits qualified.)
  
  It's also not true.
  
  
  
• The first true microprocessor was probably the AL1 from Four-Phase Systems.  (Wikipedia)
  
  It was an 8-bit device, but it was what was known as a "bit slice" design: You could simply chain multiple units together to create a larger word size.  The AL1 was never sold by itself, but the company did sell the System IV/70, a video terminal controller, that used three such chips to create a 24-bit CPU.
  
  It was announced and in use two months before the first working samples of the MP944, and a year before Intel's 4004.

• That great sucking sound you just heard was PC makers buying up all the nonexistent memory inventory so you double can't have any.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's just wonderful.
  
  
  
• THEA1200 is an A1200.  (The Register)
  
  Well, it's an Arm-based emulator in a full-sized A1200 case, but that's pretty close.
  
  And it costs about $200.
  
  Plus $30 for shipping if you live in Australia.
  
  That's not too bad, considering.
  
  
  
• The president of Windows announced Microsoft's plans to suck even more in the future and got roasted so hard he had to close replies on Twitter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good.  More of this.
  
  
  
• The latest attack on npm was a tea-farming project that spanned 150,000 fake packages.  (The Register)
  
  If you don't know what any of that means, count your blessings.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Monday, November 17 2025 07:59 PM (amxkj)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 18 2025 06:24 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, November 18 2025 10:10 AM (amxkj)

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• The jury in a federal court case has sided with medical equipment manufacturer Masimo and awarded them $643 million in their lawsuit against Apple over patent infringement in the Apple Watch.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The patent applies to blood oxygen monitoring, which is a little curious since such devices are now everywhere.
  
  Also - according to Apple - this applies to a single very specific patent that expired in 2022.
  
  Of course, Apple would say that.  But it also doesn't mean it's not true.
  
  
  

Tech News

• I was reading through the service manual for the HP 9121 disk drive that I found on Bitsavers - it rained this weekend - and it turns out it did in fact run at 600 rpm, twice as fast as was common for other 3.5" drives.
  
  I then asked Grok to check some details for me, and was swiftly reminded that Grok is less reliable than random half-remembered facts I read in a long out-of-print publication twenty years ago.
  
  I asked if there were any historical 10-bit processor architectures, and it gave me a couple of examples from the late 60s and early 70s.  It even gave me the detailed opcode format of one of the models and a bunch of links for further details.
  
  The machines were real.
  
  They were not 10 bit, though; they were 16 bits, which is hardly a rarity.
  
  The opcode format was entirely fictional, which is actually a little impressive.  Very minimal but it could have worked.
  
  The links were also entirely fictional.
  
  
  
• Some models of Intel's Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs have more cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 250K, which replaces the 245K, and the 270K, which replaces the 265K, both add 4 efficiency cores, taking them from 6 + 8 to 6 + 12 and 8 + 12 to 8 + 16 respectively.
  
  The high-end 290K is basically a 285K but 1.8% faster...  And also just 1.8% faster than the new 270K making it ENTIRELY POINTLESS.
  
  
  
• Copy-and-paste is now the leading cause of corporate data leaks.  (SCWorld)
  
  Because people are copying and pasting data into AI to get it to lie to them.
  
  
  
• Google has filed a sweeping lawsuit against one of those companies that are constantly spamming you with fake SMS messages.  (BGR)

  Google's legal action is comprehensive and is intent on completely dismantling Lighthouse's operations.  The search giant is bringing claims under RICO, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

  I'm not sure yet how it will turn out that this is a bad thing.
  
  
  
• No uncertainty with this one, though: A group of developers has been working tirelessly behind the scenes to restore a lost video game AND IT'S FUCKING CONCORD.  (Aftermath)
  
  Concord came out in August last year and quickly achieved notoriety for two reasons: First, it cost $400 million and took eight years to develop, and second, it made absolutely no money whatsoever because it was so bad Sony shut down the servers and refunded everyone after just two weeks.

  Concord wasn't a bad game

  Yes it was.  Objectively so.  It cost $400 million to make, sold just 25,000 copies in total at $40, and was gone in just two weeks.
  
  Until now.  Until now, you bastards.
  
  
  
• The International Energy Agency now predicts we will reach Peak Oil by 2050 maybe.  (CNBC)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Scientists have confirmed what is inside the Moon.  (Science Alert)
  
  Cheese sauce?

  A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that the inner core of the Moon is, in fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron.

  Ah.  Cheese and garlic sauce.  An important distinction.
  
  Thanks scientists.
  
  
  
• Turkey is stuffed, seasoned, and in the oven.  We'll see how it goes.

Posted by: normal at Monday, November 17 2025 04:20 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, November 17 2025 07:56 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, November 17 2025 07:56 AM (ZLF73)

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• There is no hope.  There are also no socks.  (Apple Insider)
  
  That Apple sock?  The thing they called the "iPhone Pocket" even though it is neither an iPhone nor a pocket.  That thing that costs less than a dollar to make and they are charging $230 for?
  
  You can't buy one.
  
  Because it has already sold out.
  
  
  
• Half of American households still have cable TV.  (Business Inside)
  
  The surprising number is the reverse of what the article thinks it is.
  
  
  

Tech News

• It's always lupus: The autoimmune disease lupus - which despite the memes is a real thing - may be triggered by the Epstein-Barr virus.  (NBC)
  
  Most people have Epstein-Barr in their systems, making it hard to track this down.  It parks in your body and just sits there, menacingly.
  
  The thing is that it infects lymphocytes, and the rate of infected lymphocytes in lupus patients is 25 times higher than in the general population.  That doesn't prove a causal effect but it's a hell of a correlation.
  
  
  
• Reviewing the Ubiquiti Mini Flex, a tiny managed 2.5gb Ethernet switch.  (Serve the Home)
  
  About $40, which is a good price for a 2.5gb switch, and a very good price for a managed switch.  It's Ubiquiti so it's part of their UniFi system and you have to use their software to manage it and not just a web browser, but even without that it's a small, unobtrusive, inexpensive switch that can be powered over PoE or USB-C.
  
  
  
• IBM filed a patent for Euler's continued fraction formula.  (LeetArxiv)
  
  I think Leonhard Euler can probably claim prior art, or could have if he hadn't died in 1783.
  
  IBM didn't claim some specific novel application of Euler's work, either; they claimed the formula itself.

Transcendent Teal Interlude

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, November 16 2025 02:58 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 16 2025 07:43 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: wheels at Sunday, November 16 2025 11:57 AM (H9lUx)

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• The three big memory chip makers - Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix - have two messages for you: First, things are going to get worse before they get better, and second, they never said anything about things getting better.  (Tom's Hadware)
  
  AI server deployments are eating all available memory production sending prices soaring for everyone else, and the big three have already committed to $54 billion in factory expansion.
  
  Despite the supply crunch they are loath to commit more funds right now, because there used to be a lot more memory producers and the reason there are only three survivors is because of the bust that came after the last bubble burst.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Elon Musk's companies are looking to expand their own semiconductor production facilities.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Currently Tesla has a PCB plant in Texas, and is building out an advanced packaging facility - working with bare dies to create tightly integrated modules - to come online next year.
  
  Longer term the group is looking at building its own chipmaking facilities, but that just shifts the bottleneck from TSMC to ASML, the one company in the world that makes leading edge chip fabrication equipment.

• They stuck the landing: On the second launch window, New Glenn sent the Escapade mission on its way to Mars and then successfully landed on Blue Origin's drone ship.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good to see.
  
  
  
• Netflix is now streaming casual party games.  (The Verge)
  
  I've already cancelled my subscription, which makes it hard to show them how I feel about this.
  
  
  
• Want faster networking but have a laptop with only wifi, or at best wired gigabit Ethernet?  Qnap has you covered.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The Qnap QNA-UC25G2SF is a USB4 (or any USB-C port) adapter that offers not one, but two 25Gb Ethernet ports.
  
  No, not 2.5.  Ten times that.
  
  It's kind of chunky and costs a lot more than, say, a dual 40Gb PCIe card (which you can pick up for $40 if you shop around), but if you don't have a PCIe slot you don't have a ton of options.
  
  
  
• Chinese hackers used Anthropic's AI to automate cyberattacks.  (MSN)
  
  Yay.
  
  
  
• Programming the Commodore 64 with Microsoft .Net.  (RetroC64)
  
  No.
  
  Just...  No.
  
  
  
• Bought a turkey.  It's defrosting in the fridge right now, set to become Sunday dinner.  Unless I fail spectacularly somehow, which I probably won't given I've roasted at least a hundred chickens and one duck without such a mishap.

• Valve has followed up on its very popular Steam Deck gaming handheld with a desktop Steam Machine and a wireless Steam Controller.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Like the Steam Deck, the 6" black cube called the Steam Machine is at its heart a PC built on AMD components.  It has a six core Zen 4 CPU, and a 28 core RDNA3 GPU.
  
  It comes with 16GB of RAM in two DDR5 SODIMMs, 8GB of GGDR6 RAM for the graphics card, and 512GB or 2TB of SSD in an M.2 2230 slot.  There's a vacant M.2 2280 slot to add storage of your own.
  
  On the I/O front it has HDMI, DisplayPort, one USB-C port, four USB-A ports, and somewhat disappointingly, gigabit Ethernet.
  
  It also has four built-in antennas for wifi, Bluetooth, and the Steam Controller, and a built-in 300W power supply so you don't need an external brick.  It's cooled by a single 120mm fan.
  
  And most importantly it comes running SteamOS rather than Windows.
  
  Give how determined Microsoft is to drive its own users away, I am looking forward to this little device.  It's literally half the speed of my current desktop (which has a 12 core Zen 4 CPU and an RDNA3 graphics card with twice the graphics cores and RAM) but for something that sits quietly in the living room attached to the TV it looks ideal.
  
  No prices yet.  Shipping "early 2026".

• Trying out the latest Framework 16 laptop with the RTX 5070 graphics option.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a Framework 16 laptop with RTX 5070 graphics - which on this particular laptop are upgradeable.
  
  The one surprise is that the graphics upgrade somehow upgraded the display from 100% sRGB to 100% DCI-P3, which is probably really just a colour profile switch.
  
  
  
• Microsoft really wants you to use their Edge browser.  (PC Magazine)
  
  For something other than downloading Chrome.
  
  
  
• A study commission by Apple says that when Apple cut its commissions charged to developers, the developers mostly kept the savings rather than reducing prices to customers.  (Mac Rumors)
  
  Well, yes.  And?
  
  
  
• Need a faster CPU?  How about 1024 cores at 6GHz, with 24 channels of DDR5-17600 RAM and 128 lanes of PCIe 7.0?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Oh, and it runs both x86 and Arm instructions.
  
  One small problem: It uses 1600W of power.
  
  Oh, and it's not expected to ship before 2027.
  
  They have shipped FPGA-based emulators to developers, so it's not entirely vaporware.  Other than that, wake me in a couple of years.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 14 2025 01:13 AM (d+Z9G)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 14 2025 02:11 AM (d+Z9G)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 14 2025 04:50 PM (PiXy!)

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• Japanese investment group SoftBank has sold its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Do they know something I know?
  
  Apparently not, because they also sold their stake in T-Mobile for $9.17 billion, making a quarterly profit of $16.6 billion, and are planning to use the funds to invest further in OpenAI.
  
  
  
• J. P. Morgan says current plans for AI datacenter buildouts would require revenues of $650 billion per year forever to deliver a 10% return.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's the equivalent of $180 for each and every Netflix subscriber worldwide.
  
  Per month.
  
  Eternally.
  
  It's not a bubble.

• The worst-selling Microsoft product ever.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not the worst product, not by a long shot, but there was no real market for it.
  
  Microsoft used to sell accelerator cards for computers.  They started with the SoftCard for the Apple II, which added a Z80 for running CP/M.  Later they had an 8086 card called the Mach 10 and then an 80286 card called the Mach 20 for IBM PCs and compatibles, which took over from the 4.77MHz 8088 assuming that's what you had.
  
  None of those are the thing.  They all sold...  Fine, basically.
  
  No, the thing was the OS/2 operating system - for the Mach 20 card.  It required a custom version.
  
  Microsoft sold eleven copies.  Eight of them were returned.

  One of my former colleagues spoke with the person who took over from him as the support specialist for OS/2 for Mach 20.  According to that person's memory [...] a total of eleven copies of "OS/2 for Mach 20" were ever sold, and eight of them were returned.  That leaves three customers who purchased a copy and didn’t return it.  And the support specialist had personally spoken with two of them.

  Wait, there was a time when you could return software?
  
  
  
• Apple meanwhile is now selling a sock for $229.95.  (The Verge)
  
  It's called the iPhone Pocket.
  
  It's not an iPhone.
  
  It's not even a pocket.
  
  It's pretty literally a sock.
  
  Yes, we've been down this road before.  But at least both Steve Jobs and his audience knew the idea was ridiculous, and in 2004 you got a six pack of socks in a rainbow of colours for $29.
  
  
  
• AMD has mentioned - not announced, but officially mentioned - Zen 6 and Zen 7 as upcoming products.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No specs or prices or dates but they are officially a thing that might happen some day.
  
  
  
• The Chinese electric vehicle market is imploding.  (The Atlantic)  (archive site)
  
  I saw - just yesterday, I think - a YouTube video reporting that Chinese EV market leader BYD was losing money twice as fast as Tesla is making it - around $10 billion per quarter.

  In China, you can buy a heavily discounted "used" electric car that has never, in fact, been used.  Chinese automakers, desperate to meet their sales targets in a bitterly competitive market, sell cars to dealerships, which register them as "sold", even though no actual customer has bought them.  Dealers, stuck with officially sold cars, then offload them as "used", often at low prices.  The practice has become so prevalent that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stop it.

  Sounds like the same scam we've seen a thousand times before, right before things turn pear-shaped.
  
  Often but not exclusively in nominally communist countries.
  
  
  
• ClickFix may be the biggest security threat your family has never heard of.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I think not.

  ClickFix often starts with an email sent from a hotel that the target has a pending registration with and references the correct registration information. ... Once the mark accesses the malicious site referenced, it presents a CAPTCHA challenge or other pretext requiring user confirmation. The user receives an instruction to copy a string of text, open a terminal window, paste it in, and press Enter.

  There are two kinds of people in my family.  The first kind would say Open a what? and call one of the second kind.  Who is probably in the next room installing BSD 4.4 on an IBM RT they found at Goodwill for $5.
  
  The second kind would laugh and say They're not even trying anymore! before returning to the task at hand.
  
  
  
• The Thunderobot Mix G2 is a mini gaming PC with an Intel 275HX CPU and a mobile RTX 5090.  (Liliputing)
  
  Well, up to one of those.  It starts with a 255HX and a mobile 5070 Ti (remember that Nvidia's mobile model numbers are generally equivalent to the next lower desktop model) for $2105.
  
  
  
• The Olares On is a mini gaming PC with an Intel 275HX CPU and a mobile RTX 5090.  (Liliputing)
  
  Although it claims not to be, those are indeed the specs.  One model only at $2999.
  
  Both of these systems have, for some strange reason, only a single HDMI port.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, November 13 2025 02:45 AM (rcPLc)

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• Micron has pressed pause on its new facilities in upstate New York, but has simultaneously hit fast forward on its work on factories in Idaho.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure exactly why the switch.  I wouldn't want to be building anything located in New York City right now, but it's not.
  
  
  
• Speaking of "you can't build that there" datacenters in California are sitting vacant waiting for the lights to come on.  (Bloomberg / Yahoo)
  
  Some of them have been waiting for six years.
  
  Silicon Valley Power says it is working on upgrades to support its new customers and expects work to be complete on the 6th of Never.
  
  

Tech News

• Nvidia's $4000 AI mini-supercomputer is currently no faster than AMD's $2000 AI mini-supercomputer.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Well.
  
  
  
• If you're running Docker you might want to update it before your worms escape.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Wriggly little buggers.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum MS-R1 12 core Arm mini-workstation is.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Is?

  So where are we on this one? I am not sure. CPU wise, folks just want Arm cores. The Radxa O6 uses the same CIX P1 SoC, and we had such a bad experience with it that we never did a review. The Minisforum MS-R1 uses the same chipset, and it is unquestionably better. It has a ton of features when it comes to ports, internal slots, and networking.

  But the graphics still don't work, so you'll need to add a low-profile video card.
  
  
  
• Wikipedia is urging AI companies to stop scraping its pages and used the paid API.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You can also just download the entire site for free.

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Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 12 2025 01:56 AM (bJkXU)

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