• AOL is closing its dial-up internet service next month, bringing the Eternal September to an end after thirty-four years.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good.  But a little too late.

• The internet is facing unprecedented levels of censorship around the world from governments and private industry alike.  But The Verge wants to whine about Elon Musk.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Good to see that nothing has changed.
  
  
  
• Security flaws in an unnamed carmaker's website let anyone steal anybody's car from anywhere.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This has reportedly been fixed.

• OpenAI has priced GPT-5 so low it may spark a price war.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Chance would be a fine thing.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's GPT-5 comes with up to 80% fewer hallucinations.  (The Register)
  
  Fewer hallucinations are good, or so the voices tell me.
  
  

• OpenAI's GPT-5 is one hundred percent convinced that "blueberry" is spelled with three b's.  (Kieran Healy)
  
  Oops.

• I have RSV - respiratory syncytial virus - and putting a name to it doesn't help at all to be perfectly honest.
  
  I bought a COVID test because I was starting to suspect this wasn't just a cold, and the particular test also tested influenza A and B - it didn't feel like the flu, but okay - and RSV, which hadn't crossed my mind at all.
  
  Good news: My lifetime 100% COVID-free rating remains untouched.
  
  Bad news: RSV is bloody annoying.
  
  The common symptoms in adults match mine precisely, so I haven't developed an idiosyncratic reaction.

  If present, symptoms are generally isolated to the upper respiratory tract: runny nose, sore throat, fever, and malaise.  In most cases, nasal congestion precedes the development of cough.  Unlike other upper respiratory infections, RSV is more likely to cause new onset wheeze in adults.

  Still annoying.

• HTTP is not a simple protocol.  (Haxx)
  
  It drives everything and is implemented everywhere but it is rarely if ever entirely correct.  The original 1.0 version in 1997 ran to 18,615 words; the later 1.1 version currently runs to 95,740 words, as much as a substantial novel.
  
  
  
• HTTP/2: The sequel is always worse.  (Portswigger)
  
  It just is.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Lens - Window's free text-scanning app - is being replaced with AI.  (Thurrott)
  
  That's "blueberry" with three b's.
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, August 11 2025 06:18 AM (QE7eq)

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• The Framework Desktop is here and it is the perfect machine for a very specific subset of users.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 16 core CPU is as fast as you'd expect, and the 40 core integrated graphics are quite capable of playing your games at 2560x1440.
  
  But where it really excels is when you need 96GB of memory on your GPU.  That would cost you $10,000 or more on a dedicated graphics card, while this entire PC is just $2000.
  
  If you don't need 96GB of memory on your GPU, it's still nice, but you're probably be better off with a system with dedicated graphics.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Silicon Motion offered a sneak peek of is PCIe 6.0 consumer SSD controller.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But Pixy, didn't you say that PCIe 6 wouldn't be coming to the consumer market for at least three years?
  
  Yes.  It won't.  Expected in 2028.
  
  
  
• The Radeon Pro W7400 is AMD's latest graphics card, sort of.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's not super fast, but it's a half-height, half-length, single-slot card with 8GB of RAM four mini-DisplayPort outputs, and it uses on 55W of power so it can draw all its needs from a standard PCIe slot.
  
  
  
• The CWWK X86-P6 NAS is an N355 eight-core mini-PC designed for NAS duties.  (Serve the Home)
  
  With four M.2 slots and...  An external fan.
  
  
  
• The Xyber Hydra is a GMK Nucbox G9 - a tiny four-bay NAS - but with better cooling.  Which is to say, any cooling.  Liliputing)
  
  That being the Achilles heel of the Nucbox.  The Achilles everything, really.
  
  Does it solve the problems?
  
  Mostly, yes.  The Nucbox has serious thermal throttling problems, while this model only shows throttling at the end of a long test, with default fan settings, and the CPU running at 100%.
  
  The current model Hydra offers a four-core Intel N150 and 16GB of RAM.  A model with an eight-core N305 and 32GB of RAM will follow.  The reviewer does offer a word of caution if you hope to run all eight cores at 100% with the current cooling solution though.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 09 2025 12:27 AM (1zWbY)

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• Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, a group monitoring the intrusion of government surveillance into the private internet, has woken up confused from a fifteen-year coma and ready to fight. (Tech Crunch)

  Ahead of his talk, Deibert told TechCrunch that he plans to speak about what he describes as a "descent into a kind of fusion of tech and fascism," and the role that the Big Tech platforms are playing, and "propelling forward a really frightening type of collective insecurity that isn’t typically addressed by this crowd, this community, as a cybersecurity problem."

  You mean like banning the country's oldest newspaper from all social networks over a factually accurate article?

  
  No?

  "I think that there comes a point at which you have to recognize that the landscape is changing around you, and the security problems you set out for yourselves are maybe trivial in light of the broader context and the insecurities that are being propelled forward in the absence of proper checks and balances and oversight, which are deteriorating," said Deibert.

  What?

  Deibert, who this year published his new book

  Oh.  So that's what this is about.

• In the future all food will be cooked in a microwave and if you can't deal with that then you need to get out of the kitchen. (Colin Cornaby)
  
  Yeah, developers are not welcoming yesterday's comments by the GitHub CEO.
  
  I like this summation over at Reddit:

  As someone who’s been using AI for work it’s been great though.  Before I would look up documentation and figure out how stuff works and it would take me some time.  Now I can ask Claude first, get the wrong answer, then have to find the documentation to get it to work correctly. It’s been great.

  AI assistants are great if you already know the answer.
  
  
  
• One of Google's corporate Salesforce instances got hack.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Using known social engineering techniques.
  
  
  
• Atlassian has redesigned project management tool Trello for the modern audience.  (The Register)
  
  I've used Trello.  It was awful.  It's kind of impressive that everyone agrees that the new version is infinitely worse.

  "People are comparing this to the worst software updates in history," the post says. "One user said, 'This is the worst UI update I’ve ever seen, including Windows 8.' If you’re being measured against Windows 8, that should say something."

  Ouch.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, August 08 2025 03:21 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Frank at Friday, August 08 2025 06:07 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 09 2025 12:29 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 10 2025 01:21 PM (QE7eq)

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• Intel is reportedly struggling with yields on its latest 18A (1.8nm) process.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  Intel has said it plans to use this process for consumer chips, but that could prove difficult if yield really are bad.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the US government has reportedly asked TSMC to buy 49% of Intel in return for tariff relief.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Well, that's one way to fix things, I guess.

• Sandisk has announced a 256TB enterprise QLC SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
  
  
  
• The CEO of GitHub says programmers must eithe embrace AI or quit.  (FinalRound)
  
  How nice that he gives us the option.
  
  
  
• As programmer usage of AI grows, trust across all platforms continues to decline.  (Ars Technica)
  
  As users grow more familiar what it has to offer, satisfaction has slid from 40% last year to 29% now.
  
  
  
• PCI-SIG has announced plans for PCIe 8.0, which will be twice as fast as PCIe 7.0.  (Liliputing)
  
  A full PCIe 8.0 x16 slow will offer 1TB per second of bandwidth, which used to be a lot.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• The Moon is a harsh parking lot.  (Engadget)
  
  NASA's Trailblazer mission ended in disappointment.
  
  After just one day.
  
  When the batteries went flat.
  
  
  
• NASA is planning to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon.  (Politico)
  
  No scrounging though the kitchen drawers for AAA cells on Christmas morning for these guys.

• Details have leaked of AMD's Radeon 9060 non-XT mode, which has the same GPU chip but slightly slower clock speeds and memory.  (WCCFTech)
  
  But -
  
  
  
• AMD has officially announced the Radeon 9060 non-XT only the information above is wrong and you can't buy one.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Strictly for prebuilt systems.
  
  
  
• AMD may be preparing a 9950X4D model with extra cache chips attached to both CPU dies.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The company already does this for server CPUs, but hasn't done it before now on the desktop because the performance gains for typical desktop apps are limited.
  
  
  
• What the Amiga looked like before it got its famous custom chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Big and complicated and likely to fail if a gnat farted nearby.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 05 2025 10:54 PM (/vuXS)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, August 05 2025 11:45 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Rick T at Wednesday, August 06 2025 12:24 AM (xeXUW)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, August 06 2025 12:26 AM (rcPLc)

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• Did Craigslist really kill newspapers?  (Poynter)
  
  Yes.  Sort of.  Maybe.  But also mostly no.
  
  Newspapers had been in slow decline for thirty years when Craigslist launched in 1995.
  
  What the site did certainly do was accelerate a process started by the newspapers themselves.
  
  

• FCC chairman Brendan Carr is Literally Worse Than Hitler.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  His crime?
  
  Nobody watches Stephen Colbert.
  
  Constant outrage must be really tough on brain cells.
  
  
  
• The acquisition of Commodore by Christian "Perifractic" Simpson and his backers has been completed.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I don't have any particular association with the classic 8-bit Commodore machines - I was an Amiga kid - but this is still welcome news.
  
  I wonder if FPGA hardware-emulated Amigas might be in the works in the future through a collaboration with Amiga Inc. and Cloanto, which publishes the software-level emulator Amiga Forever.
  
  
  
• Early versions of Microsoft Recall were pulled from distribution when it was discovered they collected all your most sensitive information in one database where it was convenient for hackers to steal it.  It still does that.  (The Register)
  
  Do not want.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 05 2025 06:03 AM (XUcVo)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 10 2025 01:23 PM (QE7eq)

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• Why Johnny still can't read.  (APM Reports)
  
  Well, the original book examining that question was published in 1955, so one possible reason is that Johnny is now 75 and refuses to wear his glasses.
  
  But another reason is exactly what that book explained: Johnny can't read because teachers aren't teaching phonics - aren't teaching the relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.
  
  Back in 1955 the trend was to jump too quickly from phonics to sight reading - recognising an entire word and its pronunciation from memory.  If you were already a strong reader you were likely fine with this; if you were at all behind you would be left struggling.
  
  Fast-forward a few decades and we find new generations of children who still can't read because they have been trapped by new - or once new - trendy pedagogies.  Molly Woodworth was a poor reader as a child and came up with tricks to help make it through lessons, though the tricks never worked terribly well.
  
  When she looked at the reading lessons for her daughter Claire, she was horrified to discover that the tricks she created for herself - the same ones that didn't work for her - were being taught as standard practice.

  A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom.  The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use.

  The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled. "There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b." Is it fox or bear?'"

  Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."

  Why are teachers deliberately sabotaging reading skills?
  
  Enter Ken Goodman.

  The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information - or "cues" - to identify words as they are reading.

  The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.

  In the paper, Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words.

  Goodman still believed that when this article was written in 2019 - the author requested and was granted an interview.
  
  The problem is, he was proven wrong fifty years ago:

  So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.

  They couldn't have been more wrong.

  "To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."

  Or to put it another way:

  Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"

  "Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."

  Why did Goodman still believe in his failed ideas after all this time?  (At the time the article was written, he was 91 and had just published a new edition of his book.)
  
  Put as politely as possible, he was a dingbat:

  "Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said.  "I don't teach word recognition.  I teach people to make sense of language.  And learning the words is incidental to that."

  No, he really meant that:

  I pressed him on this.  First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse.  Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p//o//n//y/ says "pony"?  And different letters say "horse"?

  He dismissed my question.

  "The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."

  He tripled down minutes later:

  In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

  "My science is different," Goodman said.

  And why is fashionable nonsense so entrenched in education?
  
  Lots of reasons, one primary reason, it seems to me, is that teachers don't have to live with their mistakes.  You have a child for a year, cause lasting harm, and then get handed a fresh batch of impressionable young minds the next year.

• Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  An article about companies that were hacked, and subsequently went bankrupt.  One paid the demanded ransom; the other did not.  The outcome was the same.
  
  Somewhat galling is that German police captured the criminals behind the first company's demise along with their crypto wallets, but refuse to return the ransom payment.
  
  
  
• Reddit is people, so its search function searches content created by people rather than AI slop, says Reddit.  (The Register)
  
  Two problems here:
  
  First, Reddit is not magically immune to AI slop.
  
  Second, about 80% of Reddit users are insane, climbing quickly to 100% on any of the major "subreddits".
  
  
  
• In a very slow-moving flash of insight, I realised I need a humidifier.
  
  Never needed one all the years I lived in Sydney, but up here in the mountains you're not struggling to keep the air dry and cool, you're struggling to keep it warm and wet.  Warm I have covered, but I completely skipped the wet part, leaving the air very dry indeed.
  
  Ordered a cheap model from Amazon.  Shipped today so I'll have it this week.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, August 03 2025 10:40 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, August 04 2025 03:21 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 04 2025 06:02 AM (1zWbY)

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• UK premium luggage service Airportr, which provided door-to-door service and worked with ten European airlines, was not hacked, exactly.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  Because it had no security at all.  Anyone could look up anyone's personal information, or even log in as an administrator and redirect their luggage.

  The vulnerabilities resulted in complete confidential private information exposure of all airline customers in all countries who used the service of this company, including full control over all the bookings and baggage. Because once you are the super-admin of their most sensitive systems, you have have the ability to do anything.

  It was found by security analysts before anyone took advantage of it.  The CEO of security group Cyber9X is quoted above.

• Three senior executives are retiring from Intel Foundry, Intel's foundry division.  (Tom's Hardware)

  The departures come as Intel implements a major cost-cutting plan, aiming to reduce its global workforce by 15%. The company expects to close the year with approximately 75,000 employees worldwide, which means that the company will have fired 30,000 people in 2025.

  Those numbers don't add up because Intel has already laid off 15,000 staff this year.
  
  
  
• Titan Quest II is out in early access right now, available on Steam at 50% of the planned launch price of $50.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Titan Quest was a great game - linear, yes, but a very long line - but that was all the way back in 2006.
  
  Titan Quest II is reportedly good as well, though the playable content in the early access release so far only lasts about four hours.
  
  
  
• Google has filed an emergency motion in its failed case against Epic, arguing that it needs more time to make the changes ordered.  (Thurrott)
  
  Google has been given only 14 days to deliver, which is not a lot of time, true.
  
  But the lawsuit started five years ago, and Epic won the case - on all counts - twenty months ago.
  
  Time for Google to pull an all-nighter.
  
  
  
• Atlassian - Australia's largest tech company as far as I know - fired 150 of its European staff via prerecorded video.  (Cyberdaily)
  
  I used to kind of like Atlassian because small companies could buy any of their products for $10 and host them on they own servers.  They did get their fangs into you as you grew, of course.
  
  Now it's just loathing all the way down.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 03 2025 12:16 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 03 2025 12:22 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, August 03 2025 04:29 AM (rcPLc)

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