• Children are hacking their own schools for fun, warns the UK Information Commissioner's Office.  (BBC)
  
  Translation: The British government is run by and staffed with idiots.

  It says more the majority of so-called "insider" cyber attacks and data breaches in education settings - meaning they have been carried out by someone with access to internal systems - originate with students.

  I think they've confused insider with inmate.  An insider attack would be by the staff, not by the students.

  "What starts out as a dare, a challenge, a bit of fun in a school setting can ultimately lead to children taking part in damaging attacks on organisations or critical infrastructure," said Heather Toomey, Principal Cyber Specialist at the ICO.

  Reefer madness, IT edition.

  Since 2022, the ICO has investigated 215 hacks and breaches originating from inside education settings and says 57% were carried out by children.

  Translation: The British government is run by and staffed with idiots.
   

• Why grandma won't buy Betty Crocker cake mixes any more.  (Cubby)
  
  Shrinkflation and ratios.
  
  Specifically, the boxes have shrunk from 18.25 oz to 15.25 oz and now to 13.25 oz.  So if you follow an older recipe specifying a box of cake mix and specific amounts of wet ingredients, you're going to end up with slop rather than cookies.
  
  You can get away with changes like this in cooking generally, but not in baking.
  
  
  
• I checked the benchmarks of the two tablet CPUs on Nanoreview.  The Idea Tab's A76 (in a Mediatek Dimensity 6300) scores 782 on single-threaded Geekbench.
  
  The Legion Tab's X4 core (in a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3) scores 2193 - nearly three times as fast.
  
  The A715 core used in the Idea Tab Plus lands right in the middle with 1398.
  
  For an idea of how far we've come, an A53 core running at 1.3GHz from the beginning of 2016 scored just 141.  So the A76 is a lot faster than older low-end tablets which mostly ran the A53 core, and it's just a little slow compared to modern high-end hardware.
  
  
  
• A look inside the Beelink ME NAS device.  (Liliputing)
  
  The ME is almost a latter-day Cobalt Qube - you can even buy it in blue.  Two network ports, HDMI, and USB ports accompany an Intel N150 CPU, 12GB of RAM, a 64GB boot device, and six M.2 slots (five PCIe 3.0 x1 and one PCIe 3.0 x2).
  
  One interesting point that I hadn't considered: The N150 has nine PCIe lanes but only supports five independent devices.  The ME has the six SSDs and two 2.5Gb Ethernet controllers, and eight is more than five.
  
  So how did Beelink do that?  Apparently they just did it and it worked.
  
  The review goes into benchmarks but they're pretty much as you'd expect - the CPU is not particularly fast, but is more than fast enough to fill both 2.5Gb Ethernet ports simultaneously.
  
  The also tested with a 5Gb USB Ethernet adaptor, and it worked and filled that with data easily, with a top read speed of around 600MBps.
  
  
  
• Vibe coding has turned senior developers into AI babysitters but they say it's worth it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  While blinking rapidly in Morse code.
  
  
  
• Indian tech startup Hike took one.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company abruptly shut down after crowing about how well its US division was doing on Saturday.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 16 2025 12:53 AM (qs+Fu)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, September 16 2025 08:36 AM (rcPLc)

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