• Microsoft has hit ten quarters in a row of record-breaking revenues.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's good, right?
  
  
  
• Microsoft is offering buyouts to 60,000 employees.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Right?

• SpaceX has told the FAA it is planning for 10,000 launches per year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's...  A lot.
  
  
  
• Ford's new Fathom electric truck - which is expected to start below $30,000 - doubles as a 10kW whole-home UPS.  (CNET)
  
  Honestly, pretty useful.  Usefuller if it were a plug-in hybrid, but still useful.
  
  
  
• Amazon is planning to judge engineers by how much they achieve, rather than how much they cost the company.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just now figured this out, apparently.
  
  
  
• AI execs may be total dipshits.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  May be?

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, October 29 2026 07:07 PM (rQuZ2)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, October 29 2026 07:36 PM (rQuZ2)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, October 29 2026 10:10 PM (9Oo74)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, October 29 2026 10:39 PM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 30 2026 12:48 AM (PKuxf)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 30 2026 02:00 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, October 30 2026 02:54 AM (h1WGa)

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• The Four Awakens: If you have a device running the GoAhead embedded web server - which you might be, because there are reportedly hundreds of millions of these, though less than a million connected directly to the internet - there's an unwelcome surprise on one of the security modes: Four.  (FoxIO)
  
  Yes, it's back.  Though this time it's a bit of a guessing game; instead of using a 2048-bit (256 byte) key, it actually uses an 8-bit key.
  
  Oh, and it only really uses three of those eight bits; only eight values are possible - 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128.

• We'll make our own Microsoft Office!  With blackjack, and hookers!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In fact, forget the Microsoft Office.
  
  
  
• Apple has announced new models of the MacBook Pro and iMac with the M6 CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Overpriced as always, but a good bit faster than the previous M4 model.   Not only is it one of the fastest CPUs around for single-threaded tasks, but it has two more cores than the M4, which combine to deliver about 40% better performance.
  
  
  
• The Python JIT compiler that arrived in version 3.13 is going away again in version 3.16.  (LWN)
  
  Joke's on them; I've been using PyPy since 2.7.  It's currently only up to 3.12, and the main Python release is up to 3.15, but I don't really care.
  
  
  
• The Exponential Time Hypothesis may be false.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And that may mean - just possibly - that P=NP, in which case we're doomed.
  
  
  
• But probably not.

• Can AI solve the COBOL crisis?  (The Verge)
  
  Yes.  Ish.  AI acts as a force multiplier for an intelligent, focused project lead.
  
  It also acts as a force multiplier for an unintelligent, unfocused project lead.
  
  
  
• Also it just got banned from Reddit.  (Kotaku)
  
  So it's probably a good idea.

• ChatGTP is recommending people turn to 404 Media to solve their tech support problems.  (404 Media)
  
  "Huh?" said 404 Media.
  
  
  
• Apple has responded to reports of cracked iPhone Duo screens.  (Notebook Check)
  
  You're folding it wrong.
  
  
  
• Apple has also announced a new model of the iPad mini.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It has an OLED screen, which is nice for some use cases.
  
  It also costs 40% more than the previous model did at launch for the same specs, or 160% more than I paid for my comparable Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3.
  
  On the upside, it doesn't fold.
  
  
  
• Samsung meanwhile is mocking the iPhone Duo.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Apple held back while Samsung worked through all the teething issues of folding screens, then had all the exact same teething issues.
  
  
  
• Google has a Brotli bug.  (Patch the Planet)
  
  I never liked brotli anyway.  Boliflour isn't much better.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, October 27 2026 09:26 PM (oJgNG)

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• There are at least 884,000 websites running an unsupported version of PHP - one for which there is no patch for the new lethal vulnerabilities.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The real number is probably closer to 20 million.
  
  
  
• How did the PHP foundation - the organisation responsible for maintaining PHP, a language powering an estimated 37.7 million websites - let things get so bad?  They have one full-time staff member.  (Reuters)
  
  Yep, that'll do it.

• Wolves descend on a Finnish village as Google clear-fells 1300 acres of forest including Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother's cottage.  (Futurism)
  
  There are reasons I'm doubting this story, including the inclusion of this:

  In West Virginia, a grove of critically endangered Chestnut trees is under threat of being bulldozed to make way for a new Anthropic hyperscale facility.

  That claim has already been debunked; the construction is miles away from the grove of trees.
  
  
  
• The anti-AI writing police are everywhere.  What are they looking for?  (CNN)
  
  AI writing.
  
  Which leftist writers profess to hate even as they latch onto it.
  
  Leading to the usual rounds of autophagy and the media - CNN here - pissing on our legs and telling us it's raining.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, it's raining again.  And worse.  I brought my seedlings in under cover given the threat of a storm, and it arrived on schedule with some middling-sized hail.
  
  Went to the garden center on the edge of town on the weekend looking for some more of the green bottlebrushes, only to find the shelf empty.  So I went online and found what I wanted.  And pink and purple as well.  Delivered they cost nearly three times as much, but this way I can get what I want and not just what is in stock this week in my small country town.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is thinking of charging $2000 per GPU in annual license fees for running its AI software, an estimated $10 billion per year.  (Notebook Check)
  
  What's that, Lassie?  Someone just rebuilt our AI software using our AI software in a cave with a box of scraps?
  
  
  
• Analysts say that AI is delivering no return on investment to 493 companies in the S&P 500.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The remaining seven are Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla.

Posted by: Frank at Monday, October 26 2026 05:51 PM (tSpjU)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 26 2026 10:06 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 27 2026 06:30 AM (LDKo5)

4 My start-up's AI tool for checking if someone's writing has too much electronic assistance is mostly just looking at voter registration and political donations. The explicit warning about methodology is that we infer that if someone voted for Harris, they are incapable of original thought, and also want us back in a literal dark age, therefore it is hypocritical for them to be using writing technology more advanced than lead type printing. XD So we are are a firmer theoretical foundation than some of our competition, but are clearly also useless, and full of shit. Harris voters can be useless and full of shit, but often with a worse theoretical foundation.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 27 2026 08:27 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 27 2026 08:29 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 27 2026 09:49 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 27 2026 11:14 AM (LDKo5)

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• How did a couple of bugs in one minor programming language that nobody bothers with anymore almost destroy civilisation?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The language Tech Crunch is referring to is PHP, which is literally as old as the web - it first appeared in 1993, the same year as HTML itself, the language that every single web page is written.
  
  Tech Crunch runs on WordPress.
  
  WordPress is written in PHP.
  
  Around 70% of all websites run on software written in PHP, 40% of them on WordPress alone.
  
  Inertia is a hell of a drug.

• If you're struggling with modern hardware costs why not take a trip back to the early days of the web yourself with some 1996 PC hardware?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The example system has 32MB of memory, which even in today's market costs around 40 cents.
  
  
  
• Or if that's a little too retro, Raspberry Pi's flavour of Linux, PiOS, has received an update for PC hardware.  (The Register)
  
  Tested on a laptop PC from 2007 with just 2GB of RAM it ran slowly but it did run.  Compared with Intel's current entry-level CPU that laptop is between six and twenty times slower.  PiOS is potato-certified.
  
  
  
• Having watched Android manufacturers struggle with and slowly improve folding displays in recent years, how do Apple's new (and extremely expensive) folding iPhone models hold up to the same tests?  The don't.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Do not fold folding iPhone.
  
  
  
• Well, that's a stress test with someone deliberately trying to break the device.  Surely they hold up better under normal everyday use?  (Notebook Check)
  
  Oh.

• NASA is planning to land astronauts on the Moon within two years.  (AP News)
  
  Likelihood of missing this target exceeds 100%.  Though to be fair nobody has ever done this before, and we don't know all the complications involved in such a heroic effort.
  
  
  
• Oops, left this one sitting in draft.

• Speaking of things that nobody knows how to do a trailer has leaked for Mass Effect 4.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It had been in early development at BioWare when the storied company was shut down...  In "early" development for six years.
  
  
  
• Micron's next-generation flash chips are on their way with up to 400 layers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And a 400% net margin.
  
  
  
• Here's why you can't buy an RTX 5090 anymore.  (Notebook Check)
  
  China ate them.

• PHP is the cyber equivalent of an unexploded bomb.  (BBC)
  
  That's a little unfair.  Unexploded bombs have, by definition, not exploded.
  
  PHP has logged 697 security vulnerabilities to date.

• BeIN, a Qatari company with offices in France sued Quad9, a Swiss company operating a central DNS service, to force it to block DNS lookups for people looking for pirate streams of the content BeIN hosts.  A French court just ruled in BeIN's favour.
  
  So Quad9 blocked France.  (Quad9)
  
  Jumanji.
  
  
  
• Google has found a way to shed unattractive weight without dangerous drugs, tiresome exercise, or unfair dismissal lawsuits.  (BBC)
  
  Should have started doing this twenty years ago.  It's probably too late now.
  
  
  
• GitLab.  (The Register)
  
  A 10.0 severity security hole that has existed in all versions since 2014.
  
  
  
• Mark Zuckerberg plans to keep living in California and have Facebook shareholders pay the dystopian communist nation's wealth tax.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's dystopian communism all the way down.
  
  
  
• The Pentagon has given the DHS permission to try out death lasers on illegal immigrants at the border.  (CNN)
  
  Effects reportedly include a tingling, burning sensation, an instinctive compulsion to flee, and instantaneous incineration.  Neat.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 24 2026 12:08 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 24 2026 04:06 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 24 2026 10:12 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 24 2026 12:12 PM (6eVrQ)

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• So PHP did a thing.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Patches are out now if you're on a recent version.  If you're not on a recent version, tough.  Thanks, PHP.
  
  
  
• There isn't an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability.  (Elias Taylor)
  
  Do not take advice from random websites.  This does not appear to be true.

• The pygmy long-fingered possum and the ring-tailed glider, two marsupial species though to have been extinct for thousands of years, have been discovered in New Guinea.  (BBC)
  
  Always in the last place you look.
  
  
  
• The creator of OpenClaw says he racked up $10 million in token charges last month.  (The Register)
  
  He works for OpenAI now, so he didn't pay for it.
  
  Did he generate $10 million worth of value, though?  I doubt it.
  
  
  
• Electronic Arts finally drove a stake through the chest of the shambling corpse of BioWare.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The company's last unreservedly good game came out in 2010.
  
  
  
• Micron is vagueposting.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Promising new types of memory soon.  Not for you though.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's next generation Xbox, expected in 2028, is also expected to cost between $1200 and $1800.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Call it a kiwi because that's never gonna fly.
  
  
  
• I was looking to see if I could buy a pink bottlebrush, and then the red bottlebrushes I planted last year flowered and I realised that I already had one - the one I planted first, early last year, and thought was red was clearly pink when you see them side-by-side.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, October 22 2026 07:28 PM (z5irX)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, October 22 2026 07:38 PM (z5irX)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, October 22 2026 07:40 PM (z5irX)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, October 22 2026 09:12 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, October 22 2026 11:00 PM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Tim Turner at Friday, October 23 2026 03:58 AM (nzXoV)

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• Indian certificate authority eMudhra - one of the companies authorised to issue the SSL certificates the entire internet depends on - has been thoroughly compromised.  (The Register)
  
  And when I say "compromised" I mean in the sense of caught with its pants down performing a dance to honour the Hindu goddess Kali in the middle of the busiest intersection in central Bangalore during Diwali.
  
  And why I mean that is someone figured out one of the keys they use to sign certificates.
  
  The key was 4.

• Japan, a real country albeit one with strange sandwiches, just launched a catch-and-release expedition to the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos.  (Space)
  
  The plan is to return a sample of at least ten grams of Phobosian soil to Earth.  The whole moon if they can capture it in the craft's Pokeball, but at least ten grams.
  
  
  
• AMD's much improved FSR 4.1 upscaling has now been backported to everything.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, not this laptop, which is two generations too old for that, but dedicated Radeon 6000 family cards, the Xbox, handhelds using the Z2 chips, and Ryzen Max and Ryzen 9 mini-PCs.
  
  Also not officially to the Ryzen 7 mini-PCs, though they will likely work with a bit of hacking; they just might not benefit much from it.
  
  
  
• How to convert $1000 worth of laptop RAM to $1000 worth of desktop RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Like porcupines making love.
  
  
  
• A Canadian expert in ransomware negotiations who recently wrote a book recommending you should always talk to the people holding you to ransom was allegedly in cahoots with the ransomers.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  And is now in FBI custody.
  
  
  
• Sony has updated its classic Walkman music player.  (The Register)
  
  The top model costs $5900 and offers 256GB of storage.  But that's a luxury item with a price to match; the entry level model with 64GB of storage - still quite a lot for MP3 files - is only $1900.
  
  Wait.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, October 21 2026 06:55 PM (tSpjU)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, October 21 2026 10:03 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 21 2026 11:25 PM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, October 22 2026 12:26 AM (6eVrQ)

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• Anthropic has pledged to give 5% of its shared to a public benefit fund.  (CNBC)
  
  By which they mean trying to buy off the communists, who hate them and want them dead.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk meanwhile plans to give a share in SpaceX to every child in America.  (CNN)
  
  Some of whom aren't communists or at least could grow out of it.

• People are using AI to dumb their smart TVs.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• Amazon is funding the development of twelve small nuclear reactors at a decommissioned coal-fired power plan in Indiana.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Also good.
  
  
  
• Hackers breached something to do with Microsoft 365 via an old third-party backup service.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not directly Microsoft's fault so far as I can tell.
  
  
  
• But maybe you should use an open-source alternative like Nextcloud instead.  Oh.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Maybe not.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 21 2026 12:42 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 21 2026 08:17 AM (LDKo5)

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