This accidentally fell out of her pocket when I bumped into her. Took me four goes.

Tuesday, March 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 March 2026

Mineralogical Edition

Top Story

  • Motorola and GrapheneOS have announced a partnership to produce Motorola phones running GrapheneOS.  (Liliputing)

    Though I'm not sure what else they would announce.

    GrapheneOS is a version of Android without Google's proprietary software.  It currently only runs on, uh, Google's proprietary hardware, which I'm not sure is entirely helpful.

    Having it run on something else as well might be a useful option if you want to steer away from the Apple / Google duopoly for security and privacy reasons but aren't still looking for something officially supported.


Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: I am asleep, though.

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Monday, March 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 March 2026

Solid Snake Drive Edition

Top Story

  • The entry-level PC market - systems priced between $500 and $1000 - is predicted to be wiped out by 2028.  (WCCFTech)

    The leading cause of this mass extinction is everyone's favourite villain, Sam Altman of OpenAI.  CPU and motherboard prices haven't moved, but RAM prices have increased 300 to 500%, with video cards as collateral damage, and storage prices are heading into the stratosphere as well.

    I suspect the video game market will be forced to adjust to lower average specs for the next few years.  Either that or they're going to lose all their remaining customers to indie titles that run fine on ten-year-old hardware.

    Hytale recommends a Radeon 400 series, a range that came out in 2016.  Silksong recommends a Radeon 380 from 2015, but will run on a Radeon 7750 from 2012.  And that means it will run on pretty much any laptop's integrated graphics.

    Custom PC builders are going to be hurting for years, though.

Tech News

  • We've cured cancer in mice.  Again.  (Science Daily)

    The new treatment this time uses a metal-organic framework - iron-based nano-particles - to trigger oxidative stress with the tumour cells while leaving healthy tissue untouched.


  • Lenovo has announced a whole bunch of expensive toys at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the latest Legion Tab.  (Notebook Check)

    The Legion Tab 5 is slightly better and a whole lot more expensive that the Legion Tab 3 I have.  Display resolution is up from the already excellent (for an 8.8" tablet) to 3040x1904, and the CPU has been upgraded from an already fast Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

    The microSD card slot on earlier models has not returned, nor has the headphone jack.  And the MSRP is two and a half times what I paid for mine, making it an easy upgrade to skip.


  • ClawJacked is an attack that lets people break into your local OpenClaw instances by getting you to load a web page.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Because web pages running on your browser are free to access websocket services running on your local PC, which is something OpenClaw does.  OpenClaw is password protected but not rate-limited on its local ports, so code running in your browser can simply keep guessing.

    I won't judge OpenClaw harshly on this one.  Too few developers understand that this is even possible, let alone take any measures to guard against it.


  • I said I was done buying new computer bits.  I lied.

    As I mention on my own blog yesterday, I was wandering around the web looking for specs for something - I've since forgotten what I was looking for - when I noticed that an Aussie online store was selling 4TB SSDs at the 2TB price.

    I was very good.  I wanted to buy eight.  I bought two.  About $290 each including tax and shipping, which is a damn good price for a PCIe 4.0 TLC drive right now.


Musical Interlude

Didn't have anything on my list for today, so here's the opening song for last year's stand-out anime series, Ruri Rocks.  It's the story of Ruri, and rocks.



Yes, the older girl does carry a medieval war hammer on her back.  Gotta carry protection against bears and sudden outcroppings of feldspar.

Bonus: A full-length music video by the vocalist.



Oh, and a trailer for Witch Hat Atelier just popped up.


Despite its looks, this one is not all sweetness and light.  The manga is excellent, though, and I have high hopes for the anime.




Disclaimer: Literally and figuratively.

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Sunday, March 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 March 2026

Preying Mantis Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • Google is building a datacenter in Pine Island, Minnesota, powered by 1.9GW of wind and solar energy and a 300MW battery.  (Interesting Engineering)

    Before you ask, yes, the author of the article does know that the power delivered by a battery is only half the data.  It's designed to deliver 300MW for 100 hours, which makes it possibly the largest single installation in the world.

    Also it's an iron-air battery which I didn't know they had working at scale.  It produces energy by rusting iron, and recharges by unrusting it.  It's heavy, less efficient that common lithium batteries, and requires a source of water and air to keep the cycle going.  And I'm not sure if they've ironed (sorry) out the durability issues.

    But air and water aren't hard to find in most places a datacenter might be build, and importantly it's cheap.


  • Well, maybe not in orbit where SpaceX is planning to build its new datacenters and where Reflect Orbital has approval approval to place a 50-foot mirror as a test of its daylight-on-demand service.  (MSN)

    The idea being that if you have an area that's dark and you need it to be less dark, a constellation of 50,000 orbital satellites will make daylight a phone call away.  The mirrors will be orbiting 400 miles up so the light that reaches the ground will be very spread out and not remotely as bright as full daylight, but even moonlight-on-demand could be worthwhile.

    The article is by the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, so it's overly verbose and spends most of those words whining.


  • Myrient, a 390TB archive of computer and video games and...  Stuff...  Is going offline at the end of the month.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The maintainer cites rising costs - around $6000 per month - thanks in part to AI, and also people abusing the service and creating paywalled sites that take money for the service he provides for free.


  • India has blocked online database service Supabase, popular with vibe coding and with the hackers who siphon off the inevitably exposed person data afterwards, because reasons.  (Tech Crunch)

    Reasons India did not bother to tell anyone about.


  • South Korea's tax agency lost $4.8 million from a photo of a wallet.  (Bleeping Computer)

    The photo was of a Ledger crypto storage device seized in a raid, an item normally secure enough and perfectly safe to photograph and publicise.

    But right next to the device was a handwritten note containing a mnemonic for the wallet address and private key.  These are commonly used with various blockchains and machine-readable, so it didn't take long for someone to empty the wallet out, even while it was sitting in the tax agency's vault.


  • AMD still doesn't support its latest FSR4 upscaling technology on RDNA on older RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics cards - like my Radeon 7800 XT - even though we know it works because they accidentally published the source code for the drivers that make it work.

    OptiScalar does that now.  (WCCFTech)

    It's a bit of fiddling around so you might be better off just buying an Nvidia graphics card, or even an RDNA4 card like the 9070 XT, but it does work.


  • Apple is poised to deliver a new MacBook Nothing.  (Notebook Check)

    Not Pro, not Air, just a cheap-for-Apple base model.

    The question is, what are they going to cut to hit the target price?  The article discusses configurations with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of SSD, and possibly a low-quality screen, all of which sound awful.


  • Why does the Asus ProArt PX13 have a 60Hz display?  (Notebook Check)

    Seems an odd pairing with the Ryzen 395 CPU (16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores) and 128GB of RAM - and the anticipated €4000 price.  Particularly when my current laptop cost a sixth of that and has a high-resolution 14" OLED panel running at 120Hz.

    And the answer is that my laptop has a 14" screen, and the Asus has a 13" screen, and nobody makes high-resolution 13" OLED panels that run faster than 60Hz, while at 14" and above they've become common even on modestly-priced systems.  And professional artists, the target audience of the ProArt range, don't need high refresh rates so much as colour fidelity, which that panel delivers.


  • Monitor might have to wait: I accidentally bought two more 4TB SSDs.

    Well, I did click on the buy button, but I just went to that online store for...  I don't actually remember what I was looking up.

    But they had 4TB SSDs - mid-tier ones from TEAM, TLC and PCIe 4.0 but cacheless - discounted to the same price as the 2TB model.  Just what I was looking for ever since Amazon lost my order, except that I already bought a top-tier 4TB PCIe 5.0 model with DRAM cache.

    So now I have enough SSDs for a while.  Money...  Not so much.


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Sorry, no, we can't get together.

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Post contains 883 words, total size 8 kb.

Saturday, February 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 February 2026

Febrile Edition

Top Story

  • OpenAI has raised $110 billion in new investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank - sort of - valuing the company at somewhere between $730 billion and bankrupt.  (Trading View)

    A lot of the stories just report the numbers and not the strings wrapped around them.

    Amazon for example chipped in $50 billion, but only $15 billion up front.  The rest requires OpenAI to either deliver AGI - human-level intelligence - or a successful IPO.  And the deal requires OpenAI to commit to an additional $100 billion in spending on Amazon's cloud services, on top of the $38 billion deal they've already signed.

    Nvidia invested $30 billion - much less than the $100 billion discussed previously but not a small amount either - apparently on similar conditions that OpenAI spend all of that and more on Nvidia chips.

    SoftBank is also in for $30 billion, but I've seen no details of what they are getting out of it other than a slice of the pie.


Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Get back to Paradise with you!

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Post contains 716 words, total size 6 kb.

Friday, February 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 February 2026

Flying Or Non-Flying Edition

Top Story

  • If your corporate wifi has a guest network active, tell whoever is responsible that they might not want to do that.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Same goes for home wifi though it's less of a target.
    AirSnitch "breaks worldwide Wi-Fi encryption, and it might have the potential to enable advanced cyberattacks," Xin'an Zhou, the lead author of the research paper, said in an interview.  "Advanced attacks can build on our primitives to [perform] cookie stealing, DNS and cache poisoning. Our research physically wiretaps the wire altogether so these sophisticated attacks will work. It’s really a threat to worldwide network security."
    Fortunately for us - less fortunately for Zhou's credibility - this is horseshit.

    But what AirSnitch does - and his co-authors have taken rather more care to make this clear - is break through the protections that supposedly separate the guest and private networks on many common wifi routers, ranging from cheap home models to open-source software with a focus on security to expensive enterprise systems from supposedly security-focused companies like Cisco.


  • Speaking of which Cisco just fixed a level 10 security vulnerability that has left their SD-WAN systems wide open to attackers since 2023.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Oops.


Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Back to front, ana and kata.

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Post contains 568 words, total size 5 kb.

Thursday, February 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 February 2026

Turn Turn Turn Edition

Top Story

  • The first transatlantic fiber-optic cable is being pulled up after nearly forty years.  (Tom's Hardware)

    TAT-8 went into operation in 1988 and then failed in 2002 and was deemed uneconomic to repair.  Which not surprising since it could only carry 280 megabits per second - 40,000 phone calls, and an aggregate speed about half that of my home internet.

    As the name suggests there were seven prior TATs, with TAT-1 being provisioned in 1956 and carrying 35 simultaneous phone calls.  Six subsequent TATs ended with TAT-14 which could handle 9.3 terabits per second - enough bandwidth for everyone in America to be on the phone to someone in Europe simultaneously. 

    Even that was not enough and it was retired in 2020.  Total transatlantic bandwidth today is somewhere in the low petabits.


Tech News

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: And she was on a road to nowhere.

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Wednesday, February 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 February 2026

Spinning Wheel Edition

Top Story

  • AMD and Meta have entered into another of those infamously vague and circular deals with an estimated value of, well, nobody knows.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The Wall Street Journal puts it at $100 billion, which used to be the cost of a world-changing merger of megacorporations, not a bunch of server equipment.

    At the heart of the deal is 6GW of AMD graphics cards for running AI - it would be funny if AMD produced a single graphics card that ran hotter than core of the Sun but they probably won't - and options for Meta to buy 10% of AMD at a penny per share that are only executable under complicated conditions that would require AMD's market cap to triple to around a trillion dollars.

    At least Meta has a revenue stream, even if at this point it's mostly entirely foisting ads on people watching AI-generated slop.  Unlike OpenAI was has only an expense stream.


Tech News


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Absolute garbage.

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Post contains 440 words, total size 4 kb.

Tuesday, February 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 February 2026

Hardly Working Edition

Top Story

  • Is age verification a trap?  Yes.  (IEEE Spectrum)

    Online age verification intrinsically damages user privacy, while failing to work in both directions:
    False positives are common. Platforms identify as minors adults with youthful faces, or adults who are sharing family devices, or have otherwise unusual usage.  They lock accounts, sometimes for days.  False negatives also persist.  Teenagers learn quickly how to evade checks by borrowing IDs, cycling accounts, or using VPNs, and posting old Altered Images and Mental As Anything videos to their blogs that they've been running continuously since...  2003.
    Okay, I'm maybe not so young that I need to worry about that problem.
    The appeal process itself creates new privacy risks.  Platforms must store biometric data, ID images, and verification logs long enough to defend their decisions to regulators.  So if an adult who is tired of submitting selfies to verify their age finally uploads an ID, the system must now secure that stored ID.  Each retained record becomes a potential breach target.
    One more quote:
    The age-verification trap is not a glitch.  It is what you get when regulators treat age enforcement as mandatory and privacy as optional.
    This is not an accident.


  • But how big is the problem really?  Surely nobody is out there putting terabytes of age-verification data in unprotected databases accessible to anyone on the internet oh that just happened again.  (Tech Radar)

    IDMerit, an AI-powered age-verification service, had three billion user records exposed in an unprotected MongoDB database.

    Hey, at least they weren't running Elasticsearch.


Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: That song is so 80s and so Japanese it makes me want to accidentally blow up a planet.

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Post contains 618 words, total size 6 kb.

Monday, February 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 February 2026

Version Number Edition

Top Story

Tech News


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Viking warriors?  In Egypt?

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Post contains 410 words, total size 4 kb.

Sunday, February 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 February 2026

Gun Tommy Edition

Top Story

  • Wikipedia has blacklisted Archive.Today for links to references because it is run by a crazy person. (Tech Crunch)

    It's over allegations of running DDoS attacks and modifying supposedly archived articles after the fact, and the allegations are about as well supported as the recent conspiracy theories floated by Steve from Gamer's Nexus, which is to say, almost all of it is documented by multiple sources and the guy confessed publicly.

    Which is a wee problem for me because those (Archive site) links I've been sprinkling through posts for the past year as more and more news sites decide they don't want anyone to read them?

    Well, those links point to Archive.IS, but it's the same software and the same person.

    I've switched to using Brave to prepare these posts, because it seems better at dodging around that problem, but it does mean that if you're using a different browser you might not be able to read the linked content.

    On the other hand, I always, always present the full unvarnished truth without so much as editorialising.

    Mostly.

    Sometimes.

Tech News

  • Well, so much for that: Intel's next-generation Nova Lake desktop CPU range is likely to arrive at CES 2027. (Tom's Hardware)

    Theories are that AMD has been planning not to launch Zen 6 until 2027 anyway, at least since they were close enough to launch to have a specific timeframe in mind. But Intel was promising Nova Lake this year as recently as January.


  • It's not Nova Lake, but Intel's Bartlett Lake is on its way and will support up to 12 Performance cores, compared to a maximum of 8 on any current Intel mainstream desktop processor. (Tom's Hardware)

    And it has hyperthreading, so 24 threads on that high-end model.

    One small problem: While it does run in the old reliable Socket 1700 (used by Intel's 12th, 13th, and 14th generation chips) it is intended for industrial customers needing guaranteed supply for the next decade, and won't be available in retail channels at all. And ASRock has already said that they won't support these chips in their motherboards, so an upgrade might be off the table.


  • Do not eat audio equipment. (The Guardian)

    Got it. Thanks. What would we do without you?


  • How far back in time can you understand English. (Dead Language Society)

    I've seen similar tests floating around recently, and the answer is pretty consistently 1300 AD. You have to know a few little tricks - the old long S ſ, thorn þ, and yogh ȝ characters have long fallen out of use, plus at some point u and v were merged and before that w was just two u characters.

    But go back further and there's more change in each of the three prior centuries than in all the years since.

    Handy guide to keep if the Tardis translator circuit is on the blink and you don't speak Latin.


  • China's CXMT is at it again, selling previous-generation DDR4 memory at half the price of anyone else.  (Korea Herald)

    CXMT was called out and sanctioned for this behaviour - at the time it was dumping new DDR4 memory on the market for less than the price of used.

    Now it's...  Well, it's doing exactly the same thing again, but this time it's raking in the dough thanks to massive global price increases rather than depending on CCP subsidies.


  • Xbox is dead.  (The Verge)

    Well, that's just great.

    Microsoft has turfed long-time head of their gaming division, Phil Spencer, who admittedly had not been doing a great job of things lately, and also his expected successor Sarah Brand, in favour of Asha Sharma, formerly the company's President of AI Slop.  And before that she was COO at Instacart.

    No experience with the games industry at all, but again, Spencer was a veteran in the industry and totally screwed things up anyway.

Musical Interlude



Song is Tommy-Gun by Royal Republic. Anime is the one and only Black Lagoon. Accept no substitutes or your attack helicopter may encounter a inconvenient torpedo.




Disclaimer: Okay, so it does work. I thought it did.

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