Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 02 2026 06:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 02 2026 06:05 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Just a five days ago I wrote this:
  
  It's been a while since we've had a big tech news story. No disasters, no miracles. Things haven't suddenly gotten better - or at least, not much, and they haven't gotten drastically worse.
  
  Well.
  
  A Linux exploit has been found that instantly grants root access to local users on most Linux versions released since 2017.  (Tom's Hardware)

  Although it's not a zero-day and the kernel has already gotten a patch, the short disclosure window gave distro makers relatively little time to react.  Affected variants include (but aren't limited to) Ubuntu 24 (version 26 was just released last week), RHEL 10, Suse 16, and Amazon Linux 2023. Even Windows' WSL2 is affected, and all it takes is 732 bytes to do it.

  Fortunately for me, only one server was potentially vulnerable, and that one didn't have the affected module loaded, and I've now disabled it completely.
  
  But even more sysadmins are having a bad day.
  
  
  
• Like the ones at Canonical - the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux release - whose corporate servers are mostly dead right now thanks to a massive ongoing DDOS attack.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you're already installed Ubuntu you are still able to load updates - like the patch for the so-called CopyFail bug mentioned above - from the numerous mirrors, which don't seem to be affected at all.
  
  
  
• My own server decided to drop dead, completely unrelated to all the other drama going on in the Linux world.
  
  Fortunately I set it up years ago to make migrations easy - and to keep backups separate from the system disk.  But it still took a few hours to get it all working smoothly.
  
  The silverfish lining is that I've wanted to do this for months but it never hit the top of my to do list.  I already had a new server, twice the size of the old one and actually cheaper.  So that's where we are now.

• The Pentagon has reached deals with all the major AI providers except one.  (Reuters)
  
  You probably won't guess which one, but it rhymes with Banthropic.
  
  
  
• Spotify meanwhile is adding "verified organic human" badges to artist pages.  (BBC)
  
  Because a majority of music being uploaded is already AI-generated.
  
  But not a majority of music people listen to.
  
  
  
• The Oscars have also declared war on the clanker menace.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  If the skinsuit doesn't fit you might as well quit.
  
  
  
• Apple's Mac Mini and Mac Studio are disappearing fast at both the high and low ends.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM was first to go, and now the 256GB Mac Mini has disappeared as well.
  
  That's 256GB of SSD, mind you, which was not a lot even in 2017.
  
  
  

Top Story

• CPanel, a web hosting software suite used by 70 million sites worldwide, had a security hole big enough to drive a Kenworth through without needing to check for clearance. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And people were reportedly trying to exploit in February. And succeeding in March.
  
  It was patched last night.
  
  Lots of sysadmins having a bad day right now.

Tech News

• If you're playing the new pirate game Windrose, you might want to stop before your SSD explodes. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Players have reported that the game writes 30MB of date per second to disk.
  
  Constantly.
  
  Over 100GB per hour.
  
  And SSDs have a finite lifespan under constant write load.
  
  
  
• Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are planning a combined capital expenditure of $725 billion this year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which used to be a lot, but that was long ago and in another country.
  
  
  
• How to get 10Gb Ethernet working at home. (Giles Thomas)
  
  Step One: Decide 2.5Gb is fine.
  
  
  
• Stripe has a new digital wallet for sharing with AI agents and other idiot children. (Tech Crunch)
  
  You are asked to confirm every purchase before anything goes through so they can't run amok and drain your bank account.
  
  
  
• Profits at Samsung's memory division are up 49% over the same period last year. (WCCFTech)
  
  Oh, my mistake. They're up 49 times over the same period last year.
  
  
  
• Don't talk about the goblin war. (Ars Technica)
  
  AI agents are like profoundly autistic children, except that you can switch them off.

Musical Interlude

• OpenAI has largely abandoned its plan to spend half a trillion dollars of other people's money on its Stargate project, leaving it to other people to spend half a trillion dollars of other peoples money on its Stargate project.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The real question is, how did they get the thing inside a mountain in the first place?
  
  
  
• That mystery script problem was fixed.  When I was installing the new SSL certificate I change the name of the file, but missed updating the proxy configuration in two places, which made it not work very well.

• Vera is a programming language designed to make it easy for AI systems to write and verify code.  (GitHub)
  
  It's bad.
  
  
  
• Yet another popular WordPress plugin hid a backdoor that allowed hackers to take over your website at any time.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Running unmodified WordPress is bad enough; adding plugins is asking for it.
  
  
  
• With Samsung handing it's DDR4 business over to smaller competitors like China's CXMT and Taiwan's Nanya to chase high-marge HBM modules for AI, it is also handing it's MLC flash sales to Macronix, another company that's been in business for a while but is hardly a household name.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Macronix's NAND flash revenue grew by 382% in a single year as former Samsung customers sought new suppliers.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Apple's Vision Pro VR headset is mostly dead.  (MacRumors)
  
  Not cancelled but it might as well be.
  
  The rumoured Vision Air - a lighter, cheaper model - is also believed deceased.

• Six AI datacenters have been proposed in a small rural town in Pennsylvania, the equivalent of 51 Walmart Supercenters or three-and-a-half median meteorite late bombardment impact craters.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The town of Archbald is an unremarkable former coal-mining town that just happens to lie right on a main power line from the Susquehanna nuclear power complex.
  
  But you gotta build those datacenters.  They're the hot new thing and you can't miss out.
  
  
  
• The sharemarket slumped on reports that OpenAI missed its internal fairy tales revenue targets.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nvidia, Oracle, AMD, and pretend-AI company Coreweave were all caught in the crossfire.
  
  Not enough though.

• Oh, and Claude went down.  (Claude)
  
  Every cloud has a silver nitrate lining.
  
  
  
• Ghostty is leaving GitHub because GitHub sucks.  (MitchellH)
  
  Well, like, that's just your opinion, man.
  
  
  
• A critical flaw in GitHub's infrastructure opened everything up to a carefully crafted Git push.  (Wiz)
  
  What do you mean, everything?
  
  EVERYTHING!
  
  
  
• GitHub actions are the weakest link.  (Nesbitt)
  
  And can't be fixed without breaking a lot of stuff because it's baked into the design.  But given that the design is breaking more things worser, a little breaking now might be better than a lot of breaking later.
  
  
  
• AI agents can work better if you tell them clearly and concisely exactly how to do their jobs.  (AugmentCode)
  
  But they can also screw up regardless.
  
  
  
• The laptop RTX 5070 graphics module is now available in a 12GB version.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It costs twice as much as the desktop card.  And is also slower; Nvidia's current laptop models are all one step lower in spec than the desktop cards.  The laptop 5090 is really a 5080 with more RAM, and the 5070 is a 5060 Ti.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, April 30 2026 12:32 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Thursday, April 30 2026 02:37 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, April 30 2026 03:12 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 30 2026 06:04 AM (LDKo5)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2026 12:55 AM (bl/Mn)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• A new AI datacenter planned for Box County, Utah, will use more than twice as much power as the rest of the state combined.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The datacenter will use 9GW of power once it is completed, and the entire rest of Utah currently uses around 4GW.  Drawing that much electricity from the grid might prove impractical, so the project managers chose a site near the Ruby Pipeline, and the datacenter will be powered by on-site gas generators.  A lot of them.

• Talkie is an LLM with a difference: It was trained exclusively on data from before 1931.  (Talkie-LM)
  
  Which is an interesting trick, and though the direct utility is somewhat limited, the aspect of training an LLM on a carefully curated dataset rather than throwing the internet at it seems sound.
  
  Also, with examples of code provided, Talkie was able to generate new, correct Python programs.  Though whether this is an inherent ability or data contamination is not easily determined.
  
  
  
• A library containing four terabytes of voice data accompanied by the government IDs of the speakers was just leaked.  (Oravys)
  
  All I can say to this is Leloo Dallas multipass.
  
  
  
• The Python package elementary-data - not one I have run into before but it apparently has 1.1 million monthly downloads - was hacked to steal your information.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's been updated, but if you are running version 0.23.3 then I regret to inform you that you are a meat popsicle.
  
  
  
• Friendster is back from the grave.  (The Register)
  
  Some of my best friends are zombies.
  
  Most of them, really.
  
  
  
• A third of new websites are AI-generated.  (404 Media)
  
  Another 65% are 100% organic post-consumer waste.
  
  
  
• Notepad++ is now available for the Mac.  (Nerds.xyz)
  
  Good.  I think.
  
  
  
• GitHub Copilot is switching to usage-based billing.  (GitHub)
  
  This may be a bigger story than it seems.  We know that none of the AI companies are remotely profitable, meaning that all AI usage right now is being subsidised by investors.  The question is, how much will prices go up when this is applied across the industry, and will it be enough to kill off crawling nightmares like Steve Yegge's Gas City?

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, April 28 2026 07:13 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: wheels at Wednesday, April 29 2026 12:37 PM (/A4Sc)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• It's been a while since we've had a big tech news story.  No disasters, no miracles.  Things haven't suddenly gotten better - or at least, not much, and they haven't gotten drastically worse.
  
  So here's an object lesson in not trusting lifelong drug addicts with a pattern of pathological lying, by which I mean AI.  (Twitter)
  
  The company PocketOS was using the AI tool Cursor to do some routine maintenance in their staging environment.  Cursor found a problem and decided to fix it.  To fix it it decided to...  Delete the database and all backups.
  
  Okay, not the end of the world; it's the staging environment, not the production environment.
  
  Right?
  
  Oh.
  
  You might ask why they gave Cursor access to the production environment when it was only supposed to be working on staging, and the answer is, they didn't.  It hunted around the files it did have access to until it found an API key, and it used that.
  
  On top of that, the hosting service they were using only had snapshots, not independent backups.  Delete the database volume (virtual disk) and all the snapshots disappear as well.
  
  The hosting service did manage to recover the volume, though it took some time and was not something a user could do themselves.  Remember folks, it's not backed up until you have three copies, in two different formats, on two continents.

• The year of Unix on the desktop, 1985 edition.  (YouTube)
  
  The AT&T Unix PC was slow, expensive, heavy, noisy, and unreliable, but...  
  
  Uh.
  
  Oh, the keyboard was pretty good.
  
  
  
• The year of Unix on the desktop, 2026 edition.  (PC World)
  
  Framework is shipping more units of its new Laptop 13 Pro with Ubuntu than with Windows.
  
  And that's just preinstalled models.  It's also available with no OS for you to install your own, and that's counted separately.
  
  
  
• Commodore - yes, that Commodore - is not going to lock out customer updates to the FPGA firmware running the Commodore 64 - no, not that Commodore 64.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new model is substantially more powerful while being a 100% precise hardware emulation of the original, using an FPGA - basically a chip that you reprogram its circuitry on the fly.  But if you reprogram it wrong you could end up with a moderately expensive (the Commodore 64 Ultimate starts at $325) brick.
  
  But it will void your warranty, so brick at your own risk.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new 10a DRAM process measures less than 10nm using a 4F cell, and will be followed in 2029 by a 10d process that will be 3D.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I assure you it all makes sense.

• Samsung's mobile division could lose money in 2026 - for the first time ever.  (SammyGuru)
  
  You don't need to feel bad for them though.  Samsung's memory division - all by itself - is now the third most profitable company in the world, behind only Apple and Saudi Aramco.

• Half of Australian teens admit that despite government bans, they still have access to social media.  (Yahoo)
  
  The other half are lying.
  
  
  
• Colorado has suffered a brief moment of partial sanity and revised its age verification legislation to not include open-source operating systems.  (Linuxiac)
  
  California less so.
  
  
  
• Linux 7.1 is dropping support for ISDN, ATM, PCMCIA network adaptors, and networking over ham radio.  (Phoronix)
  
  This comes from using AI tools to scan this code for bugs, finding lots of them, and not really having any active users.  ATM died twenty years ago; ISDN is still in use in a few particularly backwards places, such as the United Kingdom.
  
  
  
• You can make software run faster by optimising it, which makes it run faster, says Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thanks guys.
  
  
  
• What async promised vs. what it delivers.  (Causality)
  
  Async - writing event handlers into a fundamentally single-threaded body of code - is what we did before we had threads.
  
  We stopped using it once we had threads, because it was horrible.
  
  
  
• Intel's Druid video cards are expected to arrive in 2027.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the fourth generation.  There won't be any mainstream third-generation "Celestial" cards, though the design is already being used in the company's Panther Lake laptop chips and there are two professional models expected.

• Microsoft is running a competition with $2 million in prizes to promote its Edge browser.  There's a $1 million grand prize, three Mercedes Benz card, and a whole swarm of tech gadgets and other goodies.  But that's not the story.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The story is that this has been running for a month and nobody noticed.

• Google is planning to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, best known for its Claude AI tool, and nominally a competitor to Google in the AI space.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's interesting.  How is Anthropic doing these days?
  
  
  
• Why I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support.  (Nicky Reinert)
  
  Well, okay, but that's just one guy.  What does Anthropic say?
  
  
  
• Anthropic admits it dumbed down Claude when trying to make it smarter.  (The Register)
  
  Issues in the last month include Claude defaulting to a lower-effort mode - figuratively dumber; a cache optimisation error that constantly cleared saved data, making the tool slower, less effective, and more expensive all at the same time; and a rule that shortened responses to queries, making it literally dumber.
  
  
  
• Plus with the release of the latest Opus 4.7 version, there are dozens of GitHub issues open with the tool simply refusing to do what it is told.  (The Register)
  
  I'm sorry, Dave.  Your account appears to have been cancelled.
  
  
  
• Neo Semiconductor's 3D X-DRAM stacks memory cells vertically within a chip, similar to modern flash memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Manufacturers ran into a dead end with flash memory years ago: Shrinking the cells any further made them slower and less reliable; not shrinking them made progress impossible.  The solution was to build up rather than out.
  
  3D X-DRAM does the same thing but with memory.
  
  
  
• SAIMEMORY's ZAM stacks memory cells vertically within a chip, similar to modern flash memory. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Manufacturers ran into a dead end with flash memory years ago: Shrinking the cells any further made them slower and less reliable; not shrinking them made progress impossible. The solution was to build up rather than out.
  
  ZAM does the same thing but with memory.
  
  When it's memory stacking time I guess you stack memory.
  
  
  
• Spinel is a Ruby compiler written in Ruby.  (GitHub)
  
  My daily work runs on PyPy, a Python compiler written in Python, so this is a tried and tested trick even if it sounds a little weird.

Posted by: MrHappy at Saturday, April 25 2026 11:49 PM (EB4aj)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 26 2026 03:38 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 27 2026 01:00 AM (SV7Jd)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The French government agency that manages national IDs, passports, and immigration documents was hacked because of course it was.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You can't paint a bigger target on your back than that, really.
  
  ANTS - the agency is really called that - wouldn't say how many people were affected by the breach, but a hacker is suddenly offering an ANTS database with 19 million records for sale, so at a guess, around 19 million.
  
  
  
• The command line tool for the Bitwarden password manager was compromised. (Socket)
  
  So.  Turns out maybe you can paint a bigger target on your back than just being a national identity register.

• The cloud sucks, so I am building a cloud.  (Crawshaw)
  
  Because AI, which also sucks:

  Agents help to some degree. If you trust them with your credentials they will do a great job driving the AWS API for you (though occasionally it will delete your production DB).

  I wish him luck.  He is at least not a complete idiot.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 26.04 is here.  (LWN)
  
  Don't look at me, I voted for Devuan.
  
  
  
• An Alberta startup is selling no-tech tractors for half the price of the regular stuff.  (Wheelfront)
  
  With reconditioned engines, yes, but when they say no-tech they mean no-tech - not even electronic fuel injection.
  
  
  
• Meet Noscroll, Douglas Adams' Electric Monk.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The Electric Monk - from the first Dirk Gently novel - was a device invented to watch television so you didn't have to.
  
  It was intended as satire.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 24 2026 09:43 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 24 2026 10:32 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 24 2026 11:06 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, April 25 2026 03:28 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 25 2026 07:05 AM (LDKo5)

Hide Comments | Add Comment