Thursday, February 26
Daily News Stuff 26 February 2026
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- The first transatlantic fiber-optic cable is being pulled up after nearly forty years. (Tom's Hardware)
TAT-8 went into operation in 1988 and then failed in 2002 and was deemed uneconomic to repair. Which not surprising since it could only carry 280 megabits per second - 40,000 phone calls, and an aggregate speed about half that of my home internet.
As the name suggests there were seven prior TATs, with TAT-1 being provisioned in 1956 and carrying 35 simultaneous phone calls. Six subsequent TATs ended with TAT-14 which could handle 9.3 terabits per second - enough bandwidth for everyone in America to be on the phone to someone in Europe simultaneously.
Even that was not enough and it was retired in 2020. Total transatlantic bandwidth today is somewhere in the low petabits.
Tech News
- DVD sales are seeing a recovery - or at least slowing their decline - as Gen Z discovers that waiting for your favourite show or movie to come back on TV sucks. (Yahoo)
The Criterion Collection in particular has seen sales increase thanks to the streaming services colluding to piss off absolutely everyone.
- OpenClaw's creator tells AI builders to be more playful and sprinkle chaos everywhere. (Tech Crunch)
The disasters you leave in your wake aren't your fault.
The people they happen to fucked up.
They trusted you.
- A hacker used a "jail break" on the Claude AI service to steal 150 gigabyte of data from Mexican government agencies. (Yahoo)
He (probably a he) made off with 195 million tax records and an unknown number of voter records but probably all of them.
That jail break?
He asked it twice.
- Anthropic, the company behind Claude promised in 2023 that it wouldn't train an AI that it couldn't demonstrate was safe and refuse to do... Uh, exactly what it just did.
They just scratched off that "don't be evil" promise. (Time)
Well, that's alright then.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: And she was on a road to nowhere.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:43 PM
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1
I'm not angry at the streaming services, but that may be down to being too boomer to have gotten into them. (I'm not literally a boomer.)
Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, February 27 2026 01:02 AM (rcPLc)
2
I am one of those who still collect physical media. However, I am running into the issue that, at least if I want to watch it on my laptop, and not lug around yet another accessory, I am either looking for old hardware...Or go buy from Japan.
At least with desktops, if you are willing to pay the premium for a built from scratch service like what Micro Center offers, you can still get a desktop with an optical drive. But even that is a rare specimen these days.
At least with desktops, if you are willing to pay the premium for a built from scratch service like what Micro Center offers, you can still get a desktop with an optical drive. But even that is a rare specimen these days.
Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, February 27 2026 12:12 PM (ZLF73)
3
There's also the option of an external DVD drive connected by USB. When my in-laws came to visit us last year, they left us DVDs of a Korean drama they enjoyed (minus the last DVD which they had not yet watched, we'll get that from them next visit). I plugged in an external DVD drive via USB-C, converted the episodes to .mp4 format using Handbrake, and can now watch them on my laptop anytime I want. (Though I'm planning to wait until I have the last DVD before I get into it, otherwise I'd be waiting months to find out the resolution of the show's plot).
Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, February 27 2026 03:58 PM (LwnTP)
4
External optical drive = another accessory to lug around with your laptop. Not to mention another thing occupying limited and valuable number of USB ports.
Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, February 28 2026 12:05 AM (ZLF73)
5
You can get external optical drives with built-in USB docks. Addresses one of those issues, at least.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 28 2026 08:48 AM (PiXy!)
6
If they'd only figure out a way to install a DVD-player into a portable computing device.
Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 28 2026 10:40 AM (e0fX0)
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