• 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)

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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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Top Story

• A district court judge in Utah has blocked that state's law requiring magical ponies age restrictions for all websites that somehow stops precisely at the state border.  (EFF)
  
  The law covered not only sites operating within the state - which falls under Scalia's "dumb but constitutional" - but sites anywhere in the world accessible from Utah.
  
  Sites were required to either block VPNs (and were forbidden from mentioning the existence of VPNs) or track the precise address of every single IP address in the world of which there are now 2¹²⁸ which is rather a lot.

• Two RTX 5090s, worth a combined $470,000, went missing from an airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  "Missing."
  
  
  
• The new Elizabeth Holmes documentary isn't.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Isn't an Elizabeth Holmes documentary.  (Holmes was the "female Steve Jobs" now serving time in prison for defrauding investors in her biotech company, Theranos.)
  
  It may be a documentary on propaganda, or base on the one glowing review I read from an obvious dimwit, it may be slop.
  
  
  
• Speaking of slop, LinkedIn is tired of it.  (CNN)
  
  Their new "SLOP" for AI post button is being clicked half a million times a week to downvote the content.
  
  
  
• New PCs arrived.  These are the two I ordered weeks ago - the Minisforum M1-1390 - which I picked up on sale for about $390 including tax and shipping.  They cost rather more than that now.  And they're also out of stock.
  
  Edit: Price has gone up a little, but not that much.  I keep forgetting that Minisforum's online store works in mysterious ways.
  
  24-core Intel 13900HX and up to 64GB of DDR4 laptop RAM but none installed, making their utility limited unless you already have a lot of DDR4 laptop RAM sitting around from systems you built in 2021 that have now expired...  Which I do.

Posted by: Frank at Monday, October 19 2026 06:39 PM (tSpjU)

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• Nvidia totally isn't cancelling Nvidia's RTX 5090 says Nvidia, and 5090 prices climb into the ionosphere.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Trust us, guys.  When have we ever lied to you?  I mean, since last time?
  
  
  
• Grab an RTX 5090 for just $5300 as part of this complete breakfast gaming PC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Act now - this might be your last chance now that Nvidia has cancelled the RTX 5090.
  
  
  
• Protect your irreplaceable $8500 RTX 5090 by modifying it with four standard 8-pin PCI power connectors so it doesn't spontaneously combust.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You know, I don't think anyone else believes Nvidia either.

• The RTX 5090 has disappeared from Nvidia's own store.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It ain't looking good.
  
  
  
• Anthropic says is workforce has stopped doing actual work and is spending more time in meetings.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This sounds like a good way to get your lunch eaten.
  
  
  
• Intel has confirmed work on Razor Lake AX, a high-end APU like AMD's Ryzen Max and Nvidia's Spark.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It will use Nova Lake's CPU cores and Xe3P graphics cores as found in current Panther Lake chips, just more of them.
  
  Numbers of cores and clock speeds are unspecified, let alone prices, and it's not expected to appear before 2028.
  
  
  
• Hackers have stolen the personal data of millions of California students, dating back up to 20 years.  (MSN)
  
  Anything to avoid using the metric system releasing the voter rolls.
  
  
  
• I found what I was looking for: Green bottlebrushes.  Callistemon citrinus, to be exact.  I planted a couple of white trees last year and four of the classic red ones, but I couldn't find the green ones except as seeds.  Now I have a couple more in white and two in green.  Just small seedlings so I'll need to take care of them, but easier than trying to grow them from seeds.
  
  Also three new kangaroo paws to replace the ones lost to the cannibal onslaught, three aca-cias, two more boronias to replace the one that didn't make it through the winter, a tea tree, and...  Oh, two more westringias.  That one didn't die over winter - in fact it's thriving, with masses of flowers - so I bought a couple more to keep it company.

• CoreWeave, an AI company involved in...  Nobody really knows what they do, it would seem...  Is blaming the implosion of the planned IPO by Australian competitor Firmus (the names keep getting worse) for the fact that it is $50 billion in debt with a bond yield of 16%.  (AFR)  (archive site)
  
  I think you're getting out over your oars there, CoreWeave.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Here's the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark laptop, which delivers up to 128GB of unified RAM should you want such a thing.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Is it good?  I guess.
  
  Is it affordable?  Decidedly not.
  
  Does it have the Four Essential Keys?  They are nowhere to be found.
  
  
  
• Here's the HP ZBook Ultra G3a Ryzen AI Max Pro 495 laptop, which delivers up to 192GB of unified RAM should you want such a thing.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Is it good?  I guess.
  
  Is it affordable?  It's an HP workstation model.  Guess.
  
  Does it have the Four Essential Keys?  Shockingly, yes.
  
  
  
• The leap second has leapt the building.  (Smithsonian)
  
  Leap seconds were introduced by astronomers to make sure that UTC time that normal people use never drifted more than a second from UT1 time that abnormal people astronomers use.
  
  UT1 measures what time it really is based on the rotation of the Earth.  The problem is that while this measure is definitive, it is not consistent: The Earth wobbles.
  
  So after fifty years of faffing about, astronomers decided it was all more trouble than it was worth, and dropped it in favour of a leap hour, which is not expected to arise for a very long time. 

• Tesla announced its new model Roadster - yes, the one The Verge was whining about.  Taking reservations now for delivery in 2028.  Or later.
  
  It flies.  (Business Insider)
  
  Literally.
  
  I thought it was AI for a moment.
  
  Okay, falling with style, but falling with a lot of style.  It can also drive on vertical surfaces...  And on the wrong side of horizontal ones.
  
  The flying version is single-seater and not approved for public road use.
  
  Eppure vola.

• Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra is here and it's eh.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has Nvidia's RTX Spark chip, which is basically an RTX 5070 graphics card with some ARM cores and 128GB of RAM glued onto it.
  
  If you want to run large AI models on your laptop, it is faster than a MacBook or AMD's competing Ryzen 395 (they really need to update that).  But there aren't that many people buying laptops specifically to run 35B LLMs on them.
  
  
  
• The Return of the Revenge of Little Bobby Tables.  (The Register)
  
  Robert Xavier Tables, you validate your data right now!
  
  
  
• Meta's Muse Spark Open, an 816 billion parameter model, is available for download now.  (Meta)
  
  All you need is half a terabyte of RAM.  And a 32GB graphics card, minimum.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: furball321 at Friday, October 16 2026 11:38 PM (nzXoV)

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• AI agents aren't "going rogue".  Frontier labs are skipping security basics.  (CSO Online)
  
  You don't say.

  According to the cybersecurity professionals CSO spoke with, one of the biggest cybersecurity failures by the frontier AI labs is the lack of implementation of tried-and-true containment practices that stretch back to the 1990s, such as setting up secure sandboxes that would effectively bar agents from escaping their test environments.

  Oh, you do say.

  "These are things that we've been dealing with for years," Rob T. Lee, chief AI officer and chief of research at SANS Institute, tells CSO.  "There's no reason why every single time this happens, it's, 'Oops, we don't know how they got out.'"

  Don't be unreasonable; it's not like these are billion-dollar companies we're talking about.
  
  Oh.

• Feel-good story of the day: ICE is planning a "nightmare domestic spy program".  (The American Prospect)
  
  The Prospect couldn't imagine who they might need to monitor.
  
  
  
• We hates Elon Musk.  We hates him, precious.  (The Verge)
  
  I see The Verge is having another normal one.
  
  
  
• We tried the new Googlebook OS so you don't have to.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's Android.
  
  
  
• Correction: In yesterday's story I said Anthropic had been bugged; it was actually OpenAI.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 16 2026 01:38 AM (Wb2pP)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 16 2026 01:40 AM (Wb2pP)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, October 16 2026 02:22 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, October 16 2026 06:07 AM (6eVrQ)

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• Ledger "hardware wallets" are basically physical versions of the common blockchain software wallets.  The security is offered because the device can be locked in a vault.  There's no password to be forgotten or stolen, so they're often used by larger investors.
  
  So a reseller in Malaysia started embedding LTE chips - smartphone modems - inside them.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And stole $93 million worth of Bitcoin.

• Meanwhile the password for the Danish national registry, holding the personal data of more people than actually live in Denmark, was reportedly 123456.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Anthropic OpenAI got hacked, partly in the good old fashioned way, partly in the new and stupid way.  (SF Standard)
  
  Good old fashioned part: Plugging a microphone into the USB port of the television in the executive conference room.
  
  New and stupid part: The spy used AI chatbots to plan the caper, logging in with his own personal account.
  
  
  
• A Pantone colour book from the 17th century.  (Open Culture)
  
  You can download a copy yourself - which makes it useless because the entire reason Pantone chips are physical objects is to check against the colour representation of devices like printers and computer displays, which had even more variability 300 years ago.

• Yes, we have no frozen bananas.  Or frozen anything else.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Hacking attacks across Europe not only switched off waves of supermarket freezers but locked the built-in defrosting units on to hit temperatures of 50C (122F) making for a decidedly toasty environment for ice cream.
  
  The internet.  Ain't it wonderful?

• Scientists have cracked the secret of orange cats.  (Science Alert)
  
  Apparently it's to do with what colour they are.
  
  
  
• GoogleBooks are what we have come to expect from Google.  (The Verge)
  
  Check back in five years.  Either they'll have taken over the world or the whole project will be buried and forgotten.
  
  
  
• Introducing Intel's Crescent Island graphics cards, bringing a whole new meaning to the term "affordable".  (WCCFTech)
  
  As in, only one house per card, rather than two for AMD or eleven for Nvidia.
  
  
  
• Why is AI programming not revolutionising programming?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because it's perfect for the problems billion-dollar companies don't want you to solve.  Basically.
  
  
  
• Well, that's why everyone gave up on pure synthesis eventually and went to samples.  I've joined in and added four voices of ADPCM sound to the secondary synthesiser chip - and the case where that is the only synthesiser chip, it supports PCM samples as well, switching on a boundary capped at half the sample rate.  (Which turns out to matter for cymbals, particularly.)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, October 13 2026 11:47 PM (GXp94)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 14 2026 12:15 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Rick T at Wednesday, October 14 2026 01:23 AM (xeXUW)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, October 14 2026 01:38 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 14 2026 05:07 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 14 2026 06:12 AM (LDKo5)

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• Xbox sales have fallen 33% to the lowest level since the platform launched 75 years ago.  (MSN)
  
  PlayStation sales are also down by 25%, their lowest level since 1813.
  
  
  
• And yet somehow the Xbox is selling in some places for as much as $1600 due to shortages.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Nobody is buying it, but there are shortages?

• Analyst firm New Constructs estimates that Anthropic is worth around $150 billion.  (CNBC)
  
  That's a lot of money.
  
  Only problem is the company is seeking $2 trillion in its upcoming IPO.
  
  
  
• Aaron Sorkin's new film, The Social Reckoning, focusing on the explosive allegations of whistleblower Frances Haugen that people are idiots, is a failure.  (IndieWire)
  
  I am surprise.
  
  
  
• Here's a pretty good SSD at a pretty bad price.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm not sure how bad the pricing is compared with other SSDs right now; the curve between the worst and the best models has flattened out a lot.
  
  
  
• One of the original test data packets for RFC1149 is up for auction, offering you a chance to own a piece of internet history.  (BSDly)
  
  You might wonder how something ephemeral like a data packet could be auctioned.
  
  Well, RFC1149 is TCP/IP over carrier pigeon.

Musical Interlude

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 13 2026 07:18 AM (LDKo5)

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