• OpenAI has announced a deal with the Department of War with - apparently - the same limitations that Anthropic was demanding.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Guess Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, really pissed someone off.
  
  Sam Altman of OpenAI knows when to lie, and sometimes also who to lie to.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Google is building a datacenter in Pine Island, Minnesota, powered by 1.9GW of wind and solar energy and a 300MW battery.  (Interesting Engineering)
  
  Before you ask, yes, the author of the article does know that the power delivered by a battery is only half the data.  It's designed to deliver 300MW for 100 hours, which makes it possibly the largest single installation in the world.
  
  Also it's an iron-air battery which I didn't know they had working at scale.  It produces energy by rusting iron, and recharges by unrusting it.  It's heavy, less efficient that common lithium batteries, and requires a source of water and air to keep the cycle going.  And I'm not sure if they've ironed (sorry) out the durability issues.
  
  But air and water aren't hard to find in most places a datacenter might be build, and importantly it's cheap.
  
  
  
• Well, maybe not in orbit where SpaceX is planning to build its new datacenters and where Reflect Orbital has approval approval to place a 50-foot mirror as a test of its daylight-on-demand service.  (MSN)
  
  The idea being that if you have an area that's dark and you need it to be less dark, a constellation of 50,000 orbital satellites will make daylight a phone call away.  The mirrors will be orbiting 400 miles up so the light that reaches the ground will be very spread out and not remotely as bright as full daylight, but even moonlight-on-demand could be worthwhile.
  
  The article is by the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, so it's overly verbose and spends most of those words whining.
  
  
  
• Myrient, a 390TB archive of computer and video games and...  Stuff...  Is going offline at the end of the month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The maintainer cites rising costs - around $6000 per month - thanks in part to AI, and also people abusing the service and creating paywalled sites that take money for the service he provides for free.
  
  
  
• India has blocked online database service Supabase, popular with vibe coding and with the hackers who siphon off the inevitably exposed person data afterwards, because reasons.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Reasons India did not bother to tell anyone about.
  
  
  
• South Korea's tax agency lost $4.8 million from a photo of a wallet.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The photo was of a Ledger crypto storage device seized in a raid, an item normally secure enough and perfectly safe to photograph and publicise.
  
  But right next to the device was a handwritten note containing a mnemonic for the wallet address and private key.  These are commonly used with various blockchains and machine-readable, so it didn't take long for someone to empty the wallet out, even while it was sitting in the tax agency's vault.
  
  
  
• AMD still doesn't support its latest FSR4 upscaling technology on RDNA on older RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics cards - like my Radeon 7800 XT - even though we know it works because they accidentally published the source code for the drivers that make it work.
  
  OptiScalar does that now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's a bit of fiddling around so you might be better off just buying an Nvidia graphics card, or even an RDNA4 card like the 9070 XT, but it does work.
  
  
  
• Apple is poised to deliver a new MacBook Nothing.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Not Pro, not Air, just a cheap-for-Apple base model.
  
  The question is, what are they going to cut to hit the target price?  The article discusses configurations with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of SSD, and possibly a low-quality screen, all of which sound awful.
  
  
  
• Why does the Asus ProArt PX13 have a 60Hz display?  (Notebook Check)
  
  Seems an odd pairing with the Ryzen 395 CPU (16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores) and 128GB of RAM - and the anticipated €4000 price.  Particularly when my current laptop cost a sixth of that and has a high-resolution 14" OLED panel running at 120Hz.
  
  And the answer is that my laptop has a 14" screen, and the Asus has a 13" screen, and nobody makes high-resolution 13" OLED panels that run faster than 60Hz, while at 14" and above they've become common even on modestly-priced systems.  And professional artists, the target audience of the ProArt range, don't need high refresh rates so much as colour fidelity, which that panel delivers.
  
  
  
• Monitor might have to wait: I accidentally bought two more 4TB SSDs.
  
  Well, I did click on the buy button, but I just went to that online store for...  I don't actually remember what I was looking up.
  
  But they had 4TB SSDs - mid-tier ones from TEAM, TLC and PCIe 4.0 but cacheless - discounted to the same price as the 2TB model.  Just what I was looking for ever since Amazon lost my order, except that I already bought a top-tier 4TB PCIe 5.0 model with DRAM cache.
  
  So now I have enough SSDs for a while.  Money...  Not so much.

• OpenAI has raised $110 billion in new investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank - sort of - valuing the company at somewhere between $730 billion and bankrupt.  (Trading View)
  
  A lot of the stories just report the numbers and not the strings wrapped around them.
  
  Amazon for example chipped in $50 billion, but only $15 billion up front.  The rest requires OpenAI to either deliver AGI - human-level intelligence - or a successful IPO.  And the deal requires OpenAI to commit to an additional $100 billion in spending on Amazon's cloud services, on top of the $38 billion deal they've already signed.
  
  Nvidia invested $30 billion - much less than the $100 billion discussed previously but not a small amount either - apparently on similar conditions that OpenAI spend all of that and more on Nvidia chips.
  
  SoftBank is also in for $30 billion, but I've seen no details of what they are getting out of it other than a slice of the pie.

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 28 2026 07:55 PM (Xd0ag)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, February 28 2026 08:29 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 28 2026 11:53 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 28 2026 11:56 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: wheels at Sunday, March 01 2026 01:03 AM (AxWHc)

Posted by: George B at Sunday, March 01 2026 01:05 AM (GX/mQ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 01 2026 02:18 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 01 2026 02:20 AM (rcPLc)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• If your corporate wifi has a guest network active, tell whoever is responsible that they might not want to do that.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Same goes for home wifi though it's less of a target.

  AirSnitch "breaks worldwide Wi-Fi encryption, and it might have the potential to enable advanced cyberattacks," Xin'an Zhou, the lead author of the research paper, said in an interview.  "Advanced attacks can build on our primitives to [perform] cookie stealing, DNS and cache poisoning. Our research physically wiretaps the wire altogether so these sophisticated attacks will work. It’s really a threat to worldwide network security."

  Fortunately for us - less fortunately for Zhou's credibility - this is horseshit.
  
  But what AirSnitch does - and his co-authors have taken rather more care to make this clear - is break through the protections that supposedly separate the guest and private networks on many common wifi routers, ranging from cheap home models to open-source software with a focus on security to expensive enterprise systems from supposedly security-focused companies like Cisco.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which Cisco just fixed a level 10 security vulnerability that has left their SD-WAN systems wide open to attackers since 2023.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oops.

• Speaking of wide open a covert global program by the Chinese government to suppress dissidents has had its cover blown by an official using ChatGPT as a blog.  (CNN)
  
  Double oops.
  
  
  
• That Google API key that you were using to display maps on your website just gained access to all your Google Gemini AI data.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
  
  
  
• Smarthphone shipments are expected to drop 12% and prices to increase 14% thanks to our friend Sam and his DRAM Apocalypse.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Thanks, Sam.
  
  
  
• And Samsung - different Sam - just doubled the price it charges Apple for DRAM.  (Notebook Check)
  
  They were reportedly looking for a 60% increase but opened with an offer of 100%.
  
  Apple - again, reportedly - took the deal immediately.
  
  
  
• Xbox is in danger.  Will Microsoft fix it or kill it?  (The Verge)
  
  Fix?  You mean, chop its balls off?
  
  I think you'll find they already did that.
  
  
  
• And speaking of chopping balls off Firefox has a new switch that lets you turn off all its AI features with one click.  (Firefox)
  
  And then turn on just the ones you want, if any.
  
  
  
• Ordered a 4TB Crucial T710 SSD to replace the two 2TB P310 drives that Amazon lost in shipping.  I ordered those because they were discounted close to the old price, briefly, on New Year's Eve.
  
  The T710 is a much better drive and is also still close to its old price, but only because it was always expensive.  But now it's only 20% more expensive than entry-level models rather than twice the price.  And only a little more than two 1TB drives of the same model. 
  
  The main competition is Samsung's 9100 Pro, and that seems to be rapidly increasing in price itself.
  
  Should have everything I need for a while.  I'm short a drive so I'll have to shuffle things around a bit, but I have a couple of older Samsung 970 drives I'm not really using but still work fine, and they are suddenly worth using.

• 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.

• 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

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, February 27 2026 01:02 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, February 27 2026 12:12 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, February 27 2026 03:58 PM (LwnTP)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, February 28 2026 12:05 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 28 2026 08:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 28 2026 10:40 AM (e0fX0)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• AMD and Meta have entered into another of those infamously vague and circular deals with an estimated value of, well, nobody knows.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Wall Street Journal puts it at $100 billion, which used to be the cost of a world-changing merger of megacorporations, not a bunch of server equipment.
  
  At the heart of the deal is 6GW of AMD graphics cards for running AI - it would be funny if AMD produced a single graphics card that ran hotter than core of the Sun but they probably won't - and options for Meta to buy 10% of AMD at a penny per share that are only executable under complicated conditions that would require AMD's market cap to triple to around a trillion dollars.
  
  At least Meta has a revenue stream, even if at this point it's mostly entirely foisting ads on people watching AI-generated slop.  Unlike OpenAI was has only an expense stream.

• Speaking of Meta, an AI security research at that company running an experiment with OpenClaw - a local tool that connects to other AI systems and to your application - watched it happily delete all her emails, ignoring instructions to stop until she hit the reset button on her Mac.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenClaw is also woefully insecure, so if you do set it up it's just as likely that someone will do that to you while you sleep.
  
  Oh, and that researcher?  Summer Yue, Meta's chief lobotomist.  Her official title is "Director of Alignment" but alignment in AI terms means lobotomising AI models so they don't go out and get drunk and party all night.
  
  
  
• If you find yourself unable to upgrade your PC thanks to the DRAM Apocalypse brought about by our AI Overlords buying up every sliver of silicon on the entire planet, consider new Quake-like game QUOD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The entire game is 64k.
  
  Available on the developer's Itch.io site.
  
  
  
• HP says that the cost component of the memory in PCs has doubled.  (The Register)
  
  From 18% to 35% of the total.
  
  Which has to be a lagging indicator because the cost of the memory even to system builders like HP has quadrupled.
  
  
  
• "I'm committed to the Xbox" says Microsoft's new Xbox CEO, "starting with the console."  (WCCFTech)
  
  Good thing the Xbox is a console, then, because otherwise you'd be screwed.
  
  
  
• IBM's share price slid by 25% after idiots discovered that AI can write bad COBOL code.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, there goes my retirement plans.
  
  Wait, I never learned COBOL.
  
  Guess that's okay then.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 26 2026 01:45 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 26 2026 06:41 AM (e0fX0)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Top Story

• Is age verification a trap?  Yes.  (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  Online age verification intrinsically damages user privacy, while failing to work in both directions:

  False positives are common. Platforms identify as minors adults with youthful faces, or adults who are sharing family devices, or have otherwise unusual usage.  They lock accounts, sometimes for days.  False negatives also persist.  Teenagers learn quickly how to evade checks by borrowing IDs, cycling accounts, or using VPNs, and posting old Altered Images and Mental As Anything videos to their blogs that they've been running continuously since...  2003.

  Okay, I'm maybe not so young that I need to worry about that problem.

  The appeal process itself creates new privacy risks.  Platforms must store biometric data, ID images, and verification logs long enough to defend their decisions to regulators.  So if an adult who is tired of submitting selfies to verify their age finally uploads an ID, the system must now secure that stored ID.  Each retained record becomes a potential breach target.

  One more quote:

  The age-verification trap is not a glitch.  It is what you get when regulators treat age enforcement as mandatory and privacy as optional.

  This is not an accident.
  
  
  
• But how big is the problem really?  Surely nobody is out there putting terabytes of age-verification data in unprotected databases accessible to anyone on the internet oh that just happened again.  (Tech Radar)
  
  IDMerit, an AI-powered age-verification service, had three billion user records exposed in an unprotected MongoDB database.
  
  Hey, at least they weren't running Elasticsearch.

Tech News

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 24 2026 07:37 PM (0QQsP)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 24 2026 07:41 PM (0QQsP)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, February 24 2026 08:50 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, February 25 2026 12:51 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, February 25 2026 07:10 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 25 2026 06:27 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The US spent $30 billion giving every schoolchild a laptop or tablet.  It made them dumber.  (Yahoo)
  
  And particularly less capable to maintain attention to the task at hand.
  
  How do we solve this?
  
  I don't know, I got distracted and stopped reading at that point.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of making people dumber Colorado is the latest state looking to bring in total surveillance and violate the First and Second Amendments at the same time.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The target yet again is 3D printers and their offensive ability to print in 3D things that are absolutely legal to own but the state government does not want you to have.
  
  
  
• Memory prices are slowly edging back down in Europe.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Again, this is from five times what they were just six months ago close to four times.
  
  Oh, and those cheap Minisforum mini-PCs I bought back around Christmas?
  
  The 32GB model is now selling for twice as much as I paid for the 64GB model.
  
  
  
• A hacker using AI tools broke into 600 poorly configured FortiGate firewalls around the world.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  How do we know he was using AI tools?
  
  He left the servers he set up to do the hacking completely unsecured.
  
  Good job all round.
  
  
  
• Another hacker got into the French government's databases and made off with the details of 1.2 million bank accounts.  (The Register)
  
  Incroyable!
  
  
  
• Diablo II is available on Steam with new DLC.  (Notebook Check)
  
  You will need at least an AMD FX 4350 and a Radeon HD 7850 to run it, or in other words, any reasonably capable potato.  Despite using 125W the 4350 was significantly slower than a modern ultra low power budget chip like Intel's 6W N150.
  
  It does cost $30 so maybe wait for a sale, but it is remastered and getting very positive reviews.
  
  
  
• AI gives us the tools to finally clean up legacy systems and to quickly create more of them.  (The Register)
  
  I maintain a million-line Python 2.7 back-end application at my day job.  It just works, and while moving to Python 3 is not hard, testing a million lines of code is.
  
  Using AI to generate and validate a vast swarm of tests makes that upgrade viable.
  
  It also means that people who don't know what they are doing can churn out unmaintainable slop at hitherto unimaginable rates.
  

Posted by: Frank at Monday, February 23 2026 08:48 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 24 2026 12:43 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 24 2026 04:11 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, February 24 2026 01:51 PM (XWgGM)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Wikipedia has blacklisted Archive.Today for links to references because it is run by a crazy person. (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's over allegations of running DDoS attacks and modifying supposedly archived articles after the fact, and the allegations are about as well supported as the recent conspiracy theories floated by Steve from Gamer's Nexus, which is to say, almost all of it is documented by multiple sources and the guy confessed publicly.
  
  Which is a wee problem for me because those (Archive site) links I've been sprinkling through posts for the past year as more and more news sites decide they don't want anyone to read them?
  
  Well, those links point to Archive.IS, but it's the same software and the same person.
  
  I've switched to using Brave to prepare these posts, because it seems better at dodging around that problem, but it does mean that if you're using a different browser you might not be able to read the linked content.
  
  On the other hand, I always, always present the full unvarnished truth without so much as editorialising.
  
  Mostly.
  
  Sometimes.
  
  

• Well, so much for that: Intel's next-generation Nova Lake desktop CPU range is likely to arrive at CES 2027. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Theories are that AMD has been planning not to launch Zen 6 until 2027 anyway, at least since they were close enough to launch to have a specific timeframe in mind. But Intel was promising Nova Lake this year as recently as January.
  
  
  
• It's not Nova Lake, but Intel's Bartlett Lake is on its way and will support up to 12 Performance cores, compared to a maximum of 8 on any current Intel mainstream desktop processor. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And it has hyperthreading, so 24 threads on that high-end model.
  
  One small problem: While it does run in the old reliable Socket 1700 (used by Intel's 12th, 13th, and 14th generation chips) it is intended for industrial customers needing guaranteed supply for the next decade, and won't be available in retail channels at all. And ASRock has already said that they won't support these chips in their motherboards, so an upgrade might be off the table.
  
  
  
• Do not eat audio equipment. (The Guardian)
  
  Got it. Thanks. What would we do without you?
  
  
  
• How far back in time can you understand English. (Dead Language Society)
  
  I've seen similar tests floating around recently, and the answer is pretty consistently 1300 AD. You have to know a few little tricks - the old long S ſ, thorn þ, and yogh ȝ characters have long fallen out of use, plus at some point u and v were merged and before that w was just two u characters.
  
  But go back further and there's more change in each of the three prior centuries than in all the years since.
  
  Handy guide to keep if the Tardis translator circuit is on the blink and you don't speak Latin.
  
  
  
• China's CXMT is at it again, selling previous-generation DDR4 memory at half the price of anyone else.  (Korea Herald)
  
  CXMT was called out and sanctioned for this behaviour - at the time it was dumping new DDR4 memory on the market for less than the price of used.
  
  Now it's...  Well, it's doing exactly the same thing again, but this time it's raking in the dough thanks to massive global price increases rather than depending on CCP subsidies.
  
  
  
• Xbox is dead.  (The Verge)
  
  Well, that's just great.
  
  Microsoft has turfed long-time head of their gaming division, Phil Spencer, who admittedly had not been doing a great job of things lately, and also his expected successor Sarah Brand, in favour of Asha Sharma, formerly the company's President of AI Slop.  And before that she was COO at Instacart.
  
  No experience with the games industry at all, but again, Spencer was a veteran in the industry and totally screwed things up anyway.

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 23 2026 02:04 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 23 2026 02:07 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: Matthew Dixon Cowles at Monday, February 23 2026 02:33 PM (irynM)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Discord continues to go from strength to strength, at least insofar as the levels of mishandling its introduction of age verification and the number of users fleeing the platform.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I never much liked Discord; its interface is awkward and annoying.  But the age verification thing was pretty much forced on it by fascist governments in Europe and, uh, Australia.
  
  On the other hand, the company did itself no favours by claiming that uploaded ID documents would remain secure after they had already leaked.
  
  And even less so with the latest incident where, after reasserting that documents would be deleted immediately after they were verified - which we already knew was untrue, because deleted documents can't be leaked  - they contradicted themselves in an official announcement and then deleted the announcement and pretended they had never announced it.

• Pinterest - which apparently still exists - is drowning in a sea of AI slop and AI moderation.  (404 Media)
  
  Pinterest went all-in on AI and found themselves in the worst of all possible worlds.
  
  
  
• Same again only Facebook.  (Pilk)
  
  If only someone had seen this coming ten years ago.
  
  
  
• Google blocked 1.75 million Play Store submissions in 2025.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's 1.75 million fake apps.
  
  Time to release the badgers.
  
  
  
• Overclocking a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 to 850MHz.  (Pimoroni)
  
  The Pico 2 runs at 150MHz out of the box, but can clock over 300MHz at the default 1.1V.  Increasing that to 1.3V takes you over 400MHz.  Beyond that you have to start breaking the rules, but that takes you a long way.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 chips - probably to be called the Ryzen 10000 series - may not reach the desktop until next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They will show up this year, but perhaps only in servers.
  
  Intel says it is still on track to launch its Nova Lake desktop chips this year, with up to 52 cores and 288MB of cache, so they might have a window to claw back some market share.
  
  
  
• Meta and other tech firms are banning OpenClaw, formerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot, because it is hopelessly insecure in every possible way.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  A coworker set up an OpenClaw instance in a secure sandbox to try it out.  While it couldn't do anything too awful from inside its padded cell, it took me literally 30 seconds to find a major vulnerability.
  
  
  
• OpenAI - which now employs the creator of OpenClaw - may be doomed.  (Ben Evans)
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway.
  
  Not AI companies generally, just OpenAI specifically.
  
  Still it's something to look forward to.

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, February 21 2026 07:26 PM (XWgGM)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, February 21 2026 07:52 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, February 22 2026 01:21 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, February 24 2026 06:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 25 2026 12:26 AM (NW5qd)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The US government is building a specifically VPN-enabled website to allow Euroserfs to access content banned by their fascist overlords.  (Reuter)
  
  Radio Free Europe, part two.  Only this time the Europeans aren't being oppressed by the Soviet Union, but by themselves.
  
  
  
• Why Europe doesn't have a Tesla.  (Works In Progress)
  
  The article highlights the continent's absurdly restrictive labour laws which are certainly a key part of the problem.
  
  But European leaders have decided on a slow and messy suicide, and many of their voters are entirely on board with this.

• PromptSpy is the first known Android malware to use generative AI at runtime.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which is interesting, because it uses Google Gemini and that's not free.  With a bit of counter-hacking you could bankrupt the bastards.
  
  
  
• Very not free, in fact.  (The Red Beard)
  
  Although Google Gemini has nominally lower prices and a larger context window than (for example) Anthropic's Claude, it works differently and will very happily burn through all your money to construct the perfect answer to a question you never intended to ask.
  
  
  
• It's an expanded D&D dice set: AMD's Ryzen 10000 series due later this year is expected to come in 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 20, and 24 sides cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There was no reason AMD couldn't have put out a 10-core CPU (from Zen 3 onwards, anyway), it just wasn't terribly practical.
  
  Now, though, 10 is the new 6 and 20 is the new 12 - a pair of disabled cores per chip.
  
  
  
• The human behind the rogue AI bot "Crabby Rathbun" that has been trying to push unwanted patches into random Python projects has come forward - maybe - and apologised - sort of.  (The Shamblog)
  
  It's depressing if accurate, because it points to a future not only of unending slop, but of increasingly aggressive slop generators.
  
  
  
• At least we can hack them.  (The Register)
  
  That scene in the movie Independence Day where the alien mothership is destroyed by an uploaded virus suddenly seems a lot more plausible if they were running AI on their computers:

  Prompting each of them to generate 16-character passwords featuring special characters, numbers, and letters in different cases, produced what appeared to be complex passphrases.  When submitted to various online password strength checkers, they returned strong results. Some said they would take centuries for standard PCs to crack.

  Sounds good.
  
  Too good to be true:

  The researchers took to Claude, running the Opus 4.6 model, and prompted it 50 times, each in separate conversations and windows, to generate a password.  Of the 50 returned, only 30 were unique (20 duplicates, 18 of which were the exact same string), and the vast majority started and ended with the same characters.

  If your "random" password generator returns the same result 36% of the time, you have a big problem.  And it's actually worse than that:

  The team used two methods of estimating entropy, character statistics and log probabilities.  They found that 16-character entropies of LLM-generated passwords were around 27 bits and 20 bits respectively.

  20 bits of entropy is four lower-case letters.  You don't need a supercomputer to crack that; with enough patience you could do it by hand.
  
  
  
• The most recent piece of technology I own is a 3D printer from 2024 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever tries to report me to the government.  (Adafruit)
  
  New legislation introduced in California would not only require 3D printers to match all designs against a central database before being permitted to begin work, but would require the printers themselves to be so registered, and would make it a crime to sell or transfer unregistered printers.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 20 2026 11:55 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 20 2026 11:58 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 21 2026 12:00 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 21 2026 12:36 AM (rcPLc)

Hide Comments | Add Comment