• China's Great Firewall turns out not to be watertight: It sprang a leak involving 500GB of code and documentation relating to the firewall itself.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a lot of data to sift through but it spells years of trouble for the maintainers of the firewall, whether in China itself of in it client states Myanmar, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Ethiopia, all of which run versions of the same totalitarian control software.

• Didn't get a lot of time to test the tablets, but they are both set up and working fine.
  
  The two 2560x1600 displays look great.  The "paper-like" screen on the cheaper Idea Tab stands out in particular as a pleasant user experience.  Colours don't pop quite the way they do on my OLED screens, but it's not washed out or muted, just not aggressive about grabbing your attention.  It's listed as covering 72% of the NTSC colourspace, which is the number to look for - it's the equivalent of 100% sRGB.  It doesn't seem to handle DCI-P3, which you'll find on televisions and OLED panels, but it's a perfectly good screen, and considering that it's on a budget tablet it's a very good screen.  And the resolution is as sharp as you could ask for unless you have some very specific needs.
  
  The CPU on the Idea Tab...  Is a budget CPU.
  
  Using the much more expensive Legion Tab (my price A$799), tasks are done before you can start to wait for them.  Using the Idea Tab (my price A$249) it's not slow, exactly, but you can definitely feel the 2018 Arm A76 shouldering the weight of a 2024 version of Android.
  
  Maybe I should have set up the slower model first.
  
  I haven't tested sound extensively but the speakers on both tablets sound just fine at the default settings.
  
  The 11" Idea Tab has a headphone jack and a microSD slot in addition to the USB-C port.  The 8.8" Legion Tab has two USB-C ports, which might be useful, I guess, but I'd much rather they just return the headphone jack and microSD slot.  (Reportedly the coming Legion Tab 4 will restore the microSD slot.)
  
  I also need to test the pen that came with the Idea Tab.  The web site doesn't say this, but according to 9to5Google that pen and only that pen also works with the Legion Tab.  (You can also buy that pen by itself, but general-purpose Android pens aren't supported by the Legion Tab.)
  
  Perfect opportunity to confirm this, or at least the first part.
  
  
  
• Also mowed the lawn.  Last time I did that I noted my cardiovascular health seemed to be shot from the earlier bout of RSV.  It was just two days later that I got my scary blood pressure reading and found new things to worry about.
  
  So: Definitely on the mend, but definitely not fully mended. 
  
  
  
• Are heart attacks contagious?  (TUNI)
  
  I mean, probably not, but nobody believed that stomach ulcers and gastric cancer were largely caused by bacteria until Barry Marshall chugged a beaker of H. pylori in 1984 and landed himself in hospital and in the history books - winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology for an unauthorised experiment on himself.
  
  (He got better.)
  
  
  
• Five years ago KK Park in Myanmar was farmland.  Now it's a bustling town, home to many of the country's 100,000 trafficked slaves working in scam call centers.  (The Guardian)
  
  Null route the entire fucking country.
  
  
  
• We clean up after vibe coding.  Literally.  (404 Media)
  
  Vibe coded your way into disaster?  Know literally nothing and can't find your way out?  Now you can outsource your mess to a Polish tech team which maybe you should have done in the first place.
  
  (I took a moment to look up the location of one of the countries mentioned in the article.  Not the third world.  Potentially a viable solution.)
  
  
  
• "Forever chemicals" have been found in 95% of beer tested in the US.  (Science Daily)
  
  At long last you can buy beer and not just rent it.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, September 15 2025 01:59 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, September 15 2025 06:00 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 16 2025 03:44 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, September 16 2025 11:01 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, September 16 2025 11:05 AM (ZLF73)

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• Intel has announced two new desktop CPUs.  Do not buy them.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The first is the i5 120, a six core part that has the exact same specs as the Core i5 12400 from 2022, mostly because that's what it is.  Admittedly not an awful part, particularly if you didn't run a workload that would make good use of the "efficiency" cores, because it didn't have any of those.
  
  The second is the i5 110, a six core part that has the exact same specs as the Core i5 10400 from 2020, mostly because...  Yeah.  The 10th generation chips didn't even have "efficiency" cores yet, so you're safe there.  But you will need to find a five year old motherboard and DDR4 RAM for it, because none of this modern stuff will work.
  
  Oh, and it's 14nm.
  
  
  
• Arm has introduced four new CPUs.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The C1 Ultra replaces the X925 (which replaced the X4) as Arm's new flagship mobile core.
  
  The C1 Premium replaces the A725 (latest in the same line as the A78, for example) as a sub-flagship core.
  
  The C1 Pro also replaces the A725 which is a bit confusing, but is optimised for smaller size and lower power.
  
  And the C1 Nano replaces the A520 (latest in the same line as the good old A53) as a core that also exists and powers your budget tablet probably.

• Speaking of budget tablets, I have my Lenovo Idea Tab and Lenovo Legion Tab charging right now ready for testing tomorrow.  (Notebook Check)
  
  And a couple of older models I dug out to see how things have improved over the years.
  
  Couple of things immediately evident:
  
  First, the more expensive Legion Tab boots much faster, which it should do since it has a much faster CPU (Arm X3 vs. A76 cores).
  
  Second, while the Legion Tab has a glossy screen, the Idea Tab is matte.  Very matte.  Lenovo's marketing material describes it as "paper-like" and at first glance that is correct.
  
  
  
• UTF-8 is a brilliant design.  (I Am Vishnu)
  
  A brilliant implementation of a terrible idea.
  
  UTF-8 is the default implementation of Unicode, and Unicode is an attempt to create a single alphabet that can encode every human symbol ever, from all languages including ones we can't read and ones that have syllabaries or pictograms rather than alphabets, and also everything else.
  
  But it's just an alphabet.  There is no embedded context as to what language you are using if the same symbol appears in more than one.  Which happens all the time.
  
  Which makes it impossible to write anything that can be read unambiguously.
  
  
  
• AI-generated medical data can be used without ethical concerns, say exceptionally unethical people.  (Nature)
  
  If you are wondering how the AI learned to generate useful fake medical data, then your most likely guess is precisely correct: It was trained on real human medical data.
  
  The issues here are large enough and obvious enough to provide roosting space for the entire former eastern seaboard population of the passenger pigeon.
  
  
  
• The employee of a DVD manufacturer who leaked the Spider-Man Blu-Ray has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison...  (TorrentFreak)
  
  ... On unrelated firearms charges.
  
  
  
• Samsung is releasing the Galaxy Tab A11 range, consisting of unusable low-resolution garbage.  (Liliputing)
  
  1340x800 on even an 8" screen is unacceptable. Google fixed that in the Nexus 7 in 2013.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 14 2025 04:25 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 14 2025 04:30 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Gopher at Monday, September 15 2025 12:59 AM (h2BK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 15 2025 01:12 AM (1zWbY)

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• AI use in large companies - over 250 staff - is showing a decline, with adoption rate falling from 14% to 12% since June, the largest drop off ever recorded by the survey.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Which is not saying that much since the survey has only existed for two years.
  
  But not good news if your company was planning to burn through $115 billion in the next four years and just signed up for a $300 billion five-year cloud services plan.

• Apple's A19 Pro beats AMD's 9950X3D in Geekbench single-core tests.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though the A19 Pro has two full-speed cores and the 9950X3D has sixteen of them.  Though Geekbench seems to favour Apple, it's still a solid result.
  
  
  
• Nano11 can have Windows 11 installed and working in just 2.8GB of disk space.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Minuscule by today's standards.  I expect it will bloat up quite a bit once Windows Update has had a chance to work its will for a few months.
  
  
  
• Deploy your Rails app on SQLite and relax.  (Arko)
  
  A guide to the possible fireworks and how to avoid them.
  
  
  
• Javascript, Node, and NPM are all plagues.  (43081j)
  
  Burn them.
  
  
  
• "No tax on tips" now applies to vtubers.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  For the first $25,000 of income anyway.  If you're earning less than $150,000 overall.  But that should definitely be welcome to most of the smaller US-based channels that I watch.
  
  
  
• VMWare looks to lose 35% of its customers over the next three years.  (The Register)
  
  Don't worry, they just need to increase prices by 50% to cover that.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 12 2025 11:01 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 13 2025 07:52 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 13 2025 02:22 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 14 2025 01:43 AM (rcPLc)

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• Oracle's contracted-but-unbilled revenue projections have soared 359% since last year to $455 billion, with share prices up 27% and Larry Ellison poised to retake the title of richest man in the world.  (The Register)
  
  It's not a bubble.
  
  
  
• OpenAI will pay Oracle $300 billion over the next five years in its wild pursuit of scale.  (The Register)
  
  It's not a bubble.
  
  
  

• Bending Spoons (who?) has bought dying video platform Vimeo for $1.38 billion.  (Petapixel)
  
  Bending Spoons bought Filmic - maker of camera app Filmic Pro - in 2022 and subsequently laid off the company's entire staff.
  
  
  
• Intel has confirmed Arrow Lake Refresh chips for Socket 1851 next year, to be followed almost immediately by Nova Lake on Socket 1954.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So while AMD's Socket AM5 will see Zen 4, Zen 5, and Zen 6, plus the in-between APU generations, currently limited to the Ryzen 8000 range.
  
  Where Intel's Socket 1851 will see...  Arrow Lake.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has announced the 12.1" Idea Tab Plus for $270, which seems to slot in between the 11" Idea Tab and the 12.7" Idea Tab Pro.  (Liliputing)
  
  This market segment is getting just a wee bit overcrowded, it seems to me.
  
  My Idea Tab arrived today.  I was looking at buying the pen for it, but it seems to be both expensive and hard to find.  Turns out it comes with a pen.
  
  I'll get it set up this weekend and post a quick review of both it and the Legion Tab.

Not Remotely Tech News

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, September 11 2025 07:34 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 11 2025 09:04 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Walter at Thursday, September 11 2025 10:27 PM (G9j0D)

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 12 2025 01:03 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: collwstrel at Friday, September 12 2025 08:42 AM (fuMh5)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 12 2025 09:07 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Friday, September 12 2025 12:33 PM (ljX0H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 13 2025 07:04 AM (rcPLc)

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• Apple has announced its new phones: The iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, and the iPhone Air.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These start at eight times the price of my Moto G14 from last year, and with the 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max go up to 21 times the price - ranging from very expensive to painfully expensive.
  
  The iPhone 17 and iPhone Air feature the new six-core A19 chip, while the Pro and Pro Max feature the new six-core A19 Pro chip.
  
  Yeah, Apple is really phoning it in with this announcement.
  
  ...
  
  Sorry.

• Microsoft is battling those cheap key resellers in court, arguing that its software licenses can't be resold because they do not license the software.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Specifically that yes they license the software but only the software, not, for example, the user interface that allows you to use the software.
  
  Apparently the key resale market is enabled by European law and Microsoft wants desperately to kill it, but this argument is far worse than the disease itself.
  
  
  
• Claude can now use Excel.  (Anthropic)
  
  Making it so that AI can drive programs that actually work rather than attempting to do everything itself and inevitably getting it wrong is a potentially positive step, though I'm not sure it's worth $115 billion.
  
  
  
• HHS has asked all employees to start using ChatGPT.  (404 Media)
  
  Blergh.
  
  
  
• Intel has fired its CEO of Products.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel had a CEO of Products?
  
  
  
• The US government has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, siding firmly with Cox against the $1 billion decision against it from a jury verdict in the inferior courts, since upheld by the Fourth Circuit.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Pinterest have also sided with Cox.
  
  So have AT&T and Verizon, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Library Association, Re:Create, Public Knowledge, the CCIA, the ACLU, a collection of legal scholars, the Internet Society, and the platform formerly known as Twitter.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Yoga Tab is a smaller, cheaper, and, oddly, higher resolution version of the existing Yoga Tab Plus.  (Liliputing)
  
  Scaled down from 12.7" to 11.1" - making it pretty standard for a full size tablet and almost exactly the same size and weight as the budget Idea Tab I mentioned a couple of days ago - it also boasts a 3200x2000 display, which is so sharp you could cut yourself.
  
  It features a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and 12GB of RAM, the same as my Legion Tab, putting it in pretty serious performance territory too.
  
  Price is expected to be $550 when it ships next month.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Top Story

Tech News

• Plex got hacked too, with an unauthorised third party gaining access to email addresses, usernames, and encrypted passwords.  (Nerds)
  
  Time to reset your password.
  
  
  
• Experimenting with LLMs locally on your Mac without spending $115 billion.  (Fatih's Personal Blog)
  
  Including a guide to prebuilt LLMs that can be run on modest hardware.
  
  
  
• Nova Launcher has left the building.  (The Verge)
  
  This was my Android app launcher of choice for many years.
  
  Nova was bought by mobile analytics company Branch in 2022, and since then all the developers including the original creator have left the new company.
  
  
  
• All 54 games written for the original clickwheel iPod have now been recovered.  (Ars Technica)
  
  You just need an iPod to play them.
  
  It's not like saving a long-lost Scopitone film reel, but it's something.
  

Musical Interlude

• Silksong, sequel to successful indie game Hollow Knight, went on sale Friday after six years in development.  (The Guardian)
  
  The pent-up demand crashed Steam.  And the Microsoft Store.  And the Playstation Store.  And Nintendo's eShop.  And Humble Bundle, for what that's worth.
  
  No official sales figures have been released, but half a million people were playing the game on Steam later that same day, so somewhere north of that.
  
  The game was developed by three guys from Adelaide, South Australia, who are now set for life.

• The EU has fined Google $3.5 billion because it preferred its ad network to other ad networks that may or may no exist.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Add it to their tariff bill and keep moving.
  
  
  
• Burger King was hacked - fortunately by ethical hackers who said they were "impressed by the commitment to terrible security practices".  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It was all there from passwords hard-coded into the HTML to signup workflows that allow anyone to join without so much as email verification.
  
  
  
• The SEA-ME-WE-4 and IMEWE cables joining Europe to the Middle East were both cut this weekend in the Red Sea.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not clear how long repairs will take, not least because cable repair boats are sitting ducks for every kind of offensive measure common in the region.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, September 09 2025 04:47 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 09 2025 08:36 AM (PiXy!)

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• Google is facing a $425 million fine, not from Europe for once but from a federal court in California, for continuing to track millions of people for years after they had turned off the tracking feature.  (AP News)
  
  Okay, yeah.
  
  Nail their hides to the wall on this one.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Business Insider retracted forty articles because they were obvious low-grade AI slop.  (MSN)
  
  The freelancer violated the first rule of journalism: Don't be obvious.
  
  
  
• The oldest database transaction in the world is a cuneiform tablet recording the sale of malt and barley groats from around 3100 BC.  (Avi.im)
  
  Meanwhile MySQL cannot even record a date that old.
  
  
  
• Benchmarking Seagate's new 30TB HAMR hard drive.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Spoiler: It's slow even for a hard drive.
  
  
  
• Everything old is new again: Memory expansion cards for PCs are back.  (Gigabyte)
  
  This particular model from Gigabyte lets you add up to 512GB of DDR5 registered memory to a suitable CXL-supporting Threadripper motherboard like the TRX50 AI TOP which already supports 2TB of RAM.
  
  So not immediately useful for most people.
  
  
  
• Is the Lenovo Idea Tab any good?  (Notebook Check)
  
  If you're looking for a budget tablet, rather than a high-end workhorse, then the answer may well be yes.  It's a basic 11" model with a sharp 2560x1600 screen.  The A76 CPU cores are far from the latest but twice as fast as older models that just had something like the A53.
  
  It all depends on what price Lenovo is offering right now - Lenovo runs sales every day of the year and just cycles products around.  Right now in Australia the 4GB/128GB version of this tablet is available for $249 including tax and delivery - around US$150 - making it a very affordable option to keep a second screen handy.
  
  Cheaper in fact than the less capable Lenovo Tab One with half the resolution.
  
  Thinking of picking one up because my current large tablet - also a Lenovo - is one of those older models with just an A53 CPU and a 1920x1200 screen.

Anime Catchup

Musical Interlude

• AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer, says Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Laureate and so-called "Godfather of AI", who coincidentally sold his own AI startup in 2023 for $44 million.  (Financial Times)  (archive site)
  
  Hinton knows where to lay the blame, too: It's all the fault of capitalism.
  
  Yeah.  He's an idiot.
  
  
  
• Anthropic just made a lot of people richer and itself poorer.  (CNN)
  
  The company has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over its use of copyrighted material in AI training for $1.5 billion.
  
  The use of copyrighted material in AI training in general was ruled fair use, a blow for authors and a win for AI companies but as far as I can tell an accurate reading of copyright law.
  
  Where Anthropic came unstuck is that it downloaded around seven million books without paying for them.  It is now paying around $200 each.

• Of all the AMD Strix Halo mini-PCs that have been announced recently the Minisforum MS-S1 Max looks to be the most compelling.  (Liliputing)
  
  Well perhaps looks isn't the right term since it is an unremarkable small form-factor workstation you might find in any office, right until you check the specs.
  
  It has four USB-C ports (two USB4v2 at 80Gbps, and two USB4 at 40Gbps), five USB-A ports, HDMI, two audio jacks at front and rear, and two 10Gb Ethernet ports - RJ-45 too, so no fiddling about here.  Plus it has a PCIe slot, albeit limited to half-height half-length cards, though my QNAP 4-slot M.2 adaptor should fit.  And and internal 320W power supply so you don't need to worry about a chunky external brick.
  
  M.2 storage not mentioned in the article but presumably present.  Memory is the standard quad-channel LPDDR5X providing up to 128GB of soldered RAM at 8000MHz.
  
  As a reminder, this chip has 16 Zen 5 CPU cores paired with 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU  cores, giving it a very fast CPU and the fastest integrated GPU of any PC.
  
  
  
• Speaking of QNAP and 10GBase-T QNAP has a new 10Gb Ethernet switch - 16 ports, available on Amazon for $599.  (Serve the Home)
  
  8 10GBase-T ports and 8 SFP+ ports, and it supports 2.5Gb and 5Gb speeds.  It's managed or you can save $50 and buy the unmanaged version though I don't really know why you would do that.  Except probably not even QNAP can load a security flaw into an unmanaged switch.
  
  
  
• Warner Bros has filed suit against AI image generation company Midjourney after discovering to its shock that artists - including AI "artists" - can draw pictures of things they have seen.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In this case, of Warner Bros characters.
  
  But that is legal.
  
  You can learn how to draw Superman.
  
  You can draw Superman.
  
  What you cannot legally do is distribute your artwork of Superman.
  
  Which Midjourney didn't do.
  
  Hoping this case reaches a sensible conclusion.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, September 07 2025 03:06 AM (KOtXO)

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• Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring.  (The Verge) 
  
  Except it's not.
  
  We could better write this headline as Wikipedia is resilient only to the extent that it is boring because the moment something catches the attention of the politically motivated* they will burn it to the ground in a self-righteous frenzy.
  
  The article goes on at length not to discuss resilience but dysfunction at every level of the organisation.
  
  But it all comes down to one thing: At Wikipedia, Truth is controlled by the True Believers, and the safest bet for factual accuracy is political irrelevance.
  
  * And yes, I mean communists.
  
  
  
• Tech Note: Due to the archive sites I was using for sites that block adblockers instituting a "human identification" layer, I'm switching to recommending Brave in its place.  It so far seems to cut neatly through the crap.

• Stripe is building a blockchain.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Fuck, not another one.
  
  
  
• One garbage collector to rule them all.  (Fil-C)
  
  This actually looks good if you are in need of a C/C++-oriented garbage collector which I am.
  
  
  
• Vibe coding our way to disaster.  (The Bug in Our Code)
  
  Another warning on the painfully obvious pitfalls of the disastrously bad idea of "vibe coding".
  
  
  
• Type checking is a symptom, not a solution.  (Programming Simplicity)
  
  Not only is that not true, but everything in the entire article is wrong.
  
  
  
• Lenovo launched a whole lot of new products all at once, but none of them are particularly interesting.
  
  
  
• Browsing your phone on the toilet can increase the risk of hemorrhoids.  (Popular Science)
  
  You're holding it wrong.

Posted by: Doug O. at Saturday, September 06 2025 02:32 AM (4xrjO)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, September 06 2025 03:30 AM (KOtXO)

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