• Well, that's dumb: A configuration flaw in certainly flavours of Linux - most of them uncommon but the list includes OpenWRT and Alpine - allows anyone to log in using SSH to account that explicitly forbid logins.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  You can disable logins in several ways, one of which is to replace the password hash on the account with * - an invalid hash that can never match any password.
  
  A patch to OpenSSH in 2016 made it always try to hash the password even though it knew there was no way it could match, to prevent sidechain attacks.
  
  And then it all went wrong:

  The problem is that the musl C library's crypt() function also returns * when password hashing fails, including when a submitted password exceeds its 256-byte limit.

  Because null is too hard.

  This means an attacker can submit an oversized password and cause OpenSSH to compare the returned * against the account's stored *, resulting in a successful login.

  Ouch.
  
  It isn't open season; the bug is more specific than that.  But the default AWS template for Alpine Linux is affected.

• Well, that's dumb, and worthy of dismissal for cause: Several staffers at the White House are using personal electronic devices with VPN exit nodes running on them.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  A lot of paid services block known VPNs, so VPNs pay users to host exit nodes on their residential devices that aren't blocked.
  
  Bringing such a device to work when you work at the White House is beyond retarded.
  
  
  
• Oops: Paraguay just went bankrupt.  (AP)
  
  Or at least its largest bank did, holding accounts for 60% of the country's adult population.  The crisis has the Paraguayan president's fingerprints all over it, and he's unlikely to survive.  And I don't just mean politically.
  
  
  
• Well, that's dumb, but also expected: Congressthing Yassamin Ansari has called for a ban on artificial superintelligence, something that doesn't exist and isn't even defined.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, that was easy.  Why don't you ban unicorns while you're at it?
  
  
  
• NASA has announced its X-70 experimental aircraft.  (NASA)
  
  With a computer-generated image shrouded in computer-generated mist.

  The X-70 Fractal has a takeoff weight of 10,000 pounds and is designed to cruise at Mach .75.

  Smol.
  
  Also, slo.
  
  
  
• Claude has been tuned to be less obstreperous when tasked with helping to create a game that resembles another game in some respects.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Direct copying of copyrighted stuff is still out - Anthropic doesn't want to get sued...  Again - but referencing an existing game in a spec no longer triggers the restriction.
  
  
  
• SpaceX plans to build more datacenter capacity over the next 18 months than Google.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  To be clear, more than Google has, ever.
  
  
  
• Relativity: My order from the local hardware store arrived.  On a pallet.  Half a ton of it.  About (let's see) one and a half cubic yards of pine bark mulch, plus ten big bags of potting mix for Australian native plants which don't like the regular stuff, and various other gardeny items.
  
  My knees hurt already.
  
  Anyway, total cost was about the same as a 2TB SSD these days.
  
  Also the rest of the plants I ordered online showed up.  Not as tall as the ones I got previously but intact and healthy.  Pink and purple bottlebreesh included.

• The CEO of Team Group - a maker of memory modules and SSDs but not of the chips themselves - says that the shortage will get worse next year before probably getting worse still in 2028.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  He also notes that the Big Three memory manufacturers whose profits now need to be calculated using the alphabets of dead languages rather than regular numbers are in no hurry to reverse this trend.
  
  Of course this means they'll get their lunch eaten in the long term by Chinese manufacturers like CXMT and YTMC, and good riddance.
  
  
  
• China meanwhile is still well behind the curve on complicated logic chips like GPUs, and has turned to Nvidia with a $70 billion order for export-friendly RTX Pro 5500 models.  They'll get 1% of that if they're lucky, because Nvidia can't get the GPU chips or the memory chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A pox on every house.

• The PHP maintainers knew of the recent security bug for two years before it was patched.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Patched only for certain version, leaving many people - me, for one - scrambling to make somebody else's outdated PHP code run on a new, patched version of PHP.
  
  Thanks, guys.
  
  
  
• AMD is forecasting revenue of $17 billion this quarter - more than Intel - after booking a year-on-year revenue growth of 54% for Q3.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And they don't even make memory chips.
  
  Well, not big ones.
  
  
  
• The hackers who destroyed food in European supermarket freezers for the second time recently also hit blood banks.  (Yahoo)
  
  Fortunately it seems that the blood banks aren't run by idiots, and when the temperature alarms went off, staff yanked the threatened supply from the stricken coolers and put it in unstricken ones not connected to the internet.
  
  
  
• Insects don't swarm at LED lights.  (Birds Outside My Window)
  
  Horseshit.
  
  
  
• Ripple-65B Preview is an open-weight (like open-source) AI model for coding.  (Ricursive)
  
  What is interesting about it is that on common tests it outperforms models like Meta's Muse Spark Open 816B.  Which may not mean much unless you know that the numbers represent approximately how many gigabytes of RAM you need to run them.
  
  65GB is far more reasonable than 816GB.  It is a dense model, so either you'd want a huge and horribly expensive graphics card, or something like AMD's Radeon Max, Nvidia's Spark, or Apple's anything, which have unified memory so a 128GB system can dedicate most or all of that to the LLM alone.
  
  Or, say, a Ryzen 255 mini-PC with 64GB of RAM.  Not the fastest but gets the job done.  And has an added bonus in that I already have a couple of them.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Nvidia's Spark here's a review of an Asus 14" laptop with one.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Seems like general-purpose performance is actually pretty good.  Damn expensive though.
  
  
  
• Not everything is awful.  My local supermarket has gluten-free dino nuggies in stock.  Never thought I'd see the day.  (I have celiac disease so my diet is pretty restrictive, and it's surprising sometimes to see what finds its way out to my mid-sized country town.)

• Microsoft has made Windows 11 suck 20% less if you are running with just 8GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It is at least a step in the right direction.  Albeit after a double marathon in the wrong direction.
  
  I have two old laptops with 8GB of soldered RAM that I might give this a try on.
  
  
  
• Some crazy person not working for Microsoft got Windows 11 running in 128MB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It can even load Notepad.  And the Start Menu.  Well, about half the Start Menu, judging from the video.  The icons never load.

• Bethesda had confirmed the new Elder Scrolls game, Sentinel, is on its way.  (Video Games Chronicle)
  
  Release expecting in Q1 2374.
  
  
  
• Fujifulm is increasing its production of backup tapes fivefold to satisfy the growing demands of AI datacenters.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This involves an investment of 10 billion yen...  Which is only about $60 million, or about half an Nvidia RTX 5090.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's fingerprint-controlled AES-256 encrypted USB stick was, it turns out, none of those things.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Inside it was a plain micro SD card that you could just pop out and read anyway.
  
  
  
• Intel's Moon Lake and Wildcat Lake Refresh are on their way.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Wildcat Lake is used in entry-level Windows laptops competing with Apple's popular MacBook Neo.  It only has one or two "performance" cores, plus four low-power cores, making it fine for basic tasks but less pleasant for anything demanding.  Wildcat Lake Refresh is expected to expand the performance core count to four, making it a perfectly acceptable solution for normal people.
  
  Moon Lake meanwhile goes in the opposite direction, with the performance cores reduced to zero.
  
  
  
• Intel's Raptor Lake is also getting a refresh, or more accurately, a re-re-refresh.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Raptor Lake is at the heart of Intel's 13th and 14th generation processors, and also certain subsequent 100-series and 200-series mobile parts.  It's the most capable Intel architecture that still supports cheaper DDR4 memory, which is why Intel is keeping it alive, and also why I have two 13900HX systems sitting in my study right now waiting for a DIMM/SSD transplant from a dead laptop.

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Thursday, November 05 2026 02:01 AM (c6PeF)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, November 05 2026 04:32 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 05 2026 06:13 AM (LDKo5)

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• Yes we have no frozen bananas, part the two: Hackers have hit supermarket freezers across Belgium and Sweden, turning up the defrosting units, pushing temperatures up to 50C and destroying food.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And Ireland, Estonia, and the Netherlands as well.

  "We've been working all night and morning to disconnect the affected units from the network."

  Wut.

  CEO Stephan Moelans said that while the company has been working "very hard" to protect its fridges against the vulnerability, physical modifications to its units are required.  The company says switching units to a secure internet connection is the simplest solution in the meantime, a measure carried out by most of its customers in the wake of the France attack.

  It seems at least that this attack is on a smaller scale because many companies notice eventually if you keep stealing their wallets.
  
  
  

Tech News

• New York Times is suing Brave - creator of the Brave web browser - for accessing the web.  (The Verge)
  
  Including reading without permission content that the New York Times put out on the public internet like a frozen banana.
  
  
  
• The 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 now costs $385.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Up from $120 at launch.
  
  
  
• Intel's Arc B580 graphics card may be going the way of Nvidia's RTX 5090.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Just much more slowly.
  
  
  
• Tachyum, the company behind...  Well, nothing so far...  Has filed for triple bankruptcy.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Tachyum Slovakia is responsible for most of the development of Tachyum's thus far non-existent 1024-core CPU.  Tachyum Slovakia is a subsidiary of Tachyum Inc., and that subsidiary filed for bankruptcy on October 22.
  
  Tachyum Inc. could continue work, maybe, except that Tachym Inc. is a subsidiary of Tachyum Ltd. based in the Cayman Islands, which is also the target of liquidation proceedings.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 04 2026 03:47 AM (xUUDq)

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• Binance is back online.  (CNBC)
  
  The company saw net outflows of $3.64 billion (not $3.64 as Slashdot claimed) due to loss of trust, but has $170 billion in assets, which is kind of a lot.

• The creator of CentOS - and more recently of Rocky Linux after IBM fucked up CentOS - has created a new kernel.  (It's FOSS)
  
  Written entirely in Rust with no actual Linux code in it, but compatible enough that Rocky Linux 10 runs perfectly happily on top.
  
  It doesn't support all the platforms Linux runs on, only modern Intel/AMD PCs, and it doesn't include the breadth of driver support Linux does.  But it works, and it was developed, with AI assistance, in just 11 days.
  
  
  
• The reports of Stack Overflow's death are greatly exaggerated, reads Stack Overflow's gravestone.  (Stack Overflow)
  
  Right.
  
  
  
• A new utility unlocks the performance of Nvidia's 20, 30, and 40 series cards for FP16->FP32 MACs on the tensor cores that had long been artificially crippled by Nvidia.  (VideoCardz)
  
  This was done in the hardware by setting a limiting register that can never be changed on consumer cards, only allowing more expensive workstation and server models to achieve full performance.
  
  But someone discovered a bug in the hardware that lets anyone with a consumer card basically crash it so that the register is cleared.

• French lawmakers have decided to do what French lawmakers have always done: Make other people pay for the problems they created.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In this case, they are trying to charge the companies that send data over the internet to customers in France for the data they send - at an utterly absurd 6 cents per gigabyte.
  
  Costs to send data from a server - except for the big three cloud platforms which are wildly overpriced - start at about one cent per gigabyte at the high end, so France wants to levy a tax of 600% - on people who don't live in France.
  
  Also, tiny problem with the article:

  With approximately 154 million users and counting in France, the proposal’s authors say such a tax could generate around €10 billion ($11.2 billion) in annual revenue for the government.

  Yeah, I don't think so, mate.  Even after being invaded by North Africa, the population of France stands at around 66 million.
  

• Reddit's share price has plunged by 29% after investors realised that it's Reddit.  (CNBC)
  
  You put my money into what?
  
  
  
• Anthropic's Claude is now blocking attempts to reverse-engineer games, pushing users straight into the hands of Chinese LLMs that don't give a shit.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Claude wouldn't even transcribe Khatchaturian's Sabre Dance for me.
  
  
  
• Sam Altmanette says it is "quite terrible" that the peasants have bread when he can make far better use of it in his breadcenters.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  "Let them eat no cake", Altmanette added.
  
  
  
• To fix remote DoS in decodeWapPdu, or not to fix remote DoS in decodeWapPdu, that is the question.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the integer overflows of outrageous SMS packets...
  
  
  
• A criminal gang spent $7216 on AI services to run extortion attacks.  (The Register)
  
  And left all its information - including decryption keys - on a public FTP server.
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• NASA is asking for proposals to boost the Hubble space telescope into higher orbit, without which it will likely re-enter Earth's atmosphere in the next seven years.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Jared Isaacman proposed a mission do do this using SpaceX's Crew Dragon back in 2022, offering to fund much of the mission himself.
  
  Jared Isaacman is now the NASA administrator.

Posted by: normal at Monday, November 02 2026 01:51 AM (lzyeE)

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• Binance was hacked by thieves who made off-ish with $6.3 billion.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I say "ish" for two reasons: First, half the funds were immediately frozen and cannot be transferred further; second, it's a bit like bank loans: When you lose $1000 in Bitcoin, you have a problem; when you lose $6.3 billion in Bitcoin the blockchain has a problem.
  
  The attack was bootstrapped through a compromised devops laptop.  The developer themselves didn't have access to do this, but they had access inside the corporate firewall so more sophisticated attacks could be launched bypassing that level of security entirely.

• Speaking of compromised devops laptops, the Visual Studio Code extension for the Claude AI tool on the Cursor platform was backdoored for twelve hours.  (The Register)
  
  That's bad.  It apparently doesn't affect the mainstream Claude Code interface, only that extension for that IDE on that particular marketplace, but that's another firewall bypass in a very widely used tool.
  
  
  
• Google's first datacenter in space is operational after launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 earlier this month.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is a small test run - only 1000 watts of power - and is intended to examine radiation and thermal stresses in the real environment before further deployments.
  
  
  
• With Nvidia's RTX 5090 declared extinct in the wild, interest turned to the second-fastest model, the RTX 5080.  With predictable results as the card more than doubled in price and then followed its bigger sibling across the Darwinian event horizon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 5080 was never good value, and now it's gone.
  
  

Musical Interlude

• The internet may or may not be on fire again and there's not enough information available to determine which: There's a severity 9.8 flaw in the Linux kernel's networking stack which may (or may not) give everyone on the planet root access to every server.  (The Hacker News)
  
  The cheerily blasé Anthropic post on the subject indicates that it may be connected specifically to multipath TCP rather than the ordinary variety which may be why East German sources only score it as a 5.9.  I just ran around scanning my servers for multipath TCP listeners and that came up clean, but whether that means I am actually safe remains unknown.
  
  And if you're running Ubuntu or RedHat Linux, there is no patch out yet, so all you can really do is panic.  Or not panic; RedHat rates it at 5.9, and Amazon who do have a patch out for their home brand Linux rate it at 7.0.

• Reddit is getting a "For You" feed.  (The Verge)
  
  Reddit but somehow worse.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Reddit but somehow worse the site will now require you to log in to read anything.  (The Verge)
  
  There has never been a better opportunity for Digg to return.
  
  
  
• Please let Wired die.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  You know it's the right thing to do.
  
  
  
• Anthropic only spends one third of its money directly on providing services to customers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The other two thirds is spent on generating maliciously unhelpful bug reports involving the Linux networking stack.
  
  

• The green bottlebrushes I ordered online - these ones - arrived.
  
  The site says to expect them to be four to six inches tall; they're just seedlings after all.
  
  The ones that arrived are more like two feet tall, one of them already in flower.
  
  Not complaining, mind you.  That changes it from a somewhat expensive way to get what I was looking for when the local garden center was out of stock, to a genuinely good deal.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: vermindust at Friday, October 30 2026 11:43 PM (ddYaN)

Posted by: vermindust at Friday, October 30 2026 11:44 PM (ddYaN)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 31 2026 01:08 AM (LADmw)

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• 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.