• As expected from recent leaks, Apple today introduced the new relatively low cost MacBook Neo.  (MacRumors)
  
  It uses the A18 processor found in the iPhone and...  Well, the iPhone 16, basically.
  
  It's available with 8GB of RAM expandable to...  Not expandable at all, even at purchase time, because the A18 only has 8GB of RAM.  And 256GB of 512GB of storage.
  
  I/O consists of one USB3 port and one USB2 port, plus a headphone jack, and that's it.  Screen is a 2408x1506 13" model with sRGB colour, though the specs don't mention what percentage of the sRGB colourspace it covers.  Presumably no more than 100%.
  
  It's...  Fine, probably.  8GB of RAM is truly painful on Windows 11, but Linux runs just fine and I assume MacOS should do okay with lighter tasks.

• Google is ending its 30% cut of everything on the Play Store, reducing it to 20% or less for new purchases and a relatively reasonable 10% for subscriptions.  (Engadget)
  
  Thanks to Epic Games, whose lawsuit forced this upon a very unwilling Google.
  
  
  
• Your car can be tracked everywhere you go by your tire pressure sensors.  (Dark Reading)
  
  Which transmit unique identifiers, unencrypted, readable by anyone withing a 50-meter range.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, a new Android app detects anyone nearby wearing smart glasses.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Assuming the glasses are sending a Bluetooth signal, which is what the app detects.  So in fact it lets you detect any device in range with Bluetooth enabled, and there are a lot more of those than smart glasses wearers.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Qualcomm said the thing.  (Fortune)
  
  Literally:

  "If you actually believe in the AI revolution, 6G will be required. Resistance is futile."

  It may also turn people into animals.

• Micron has announced 256GB SOCAMM2 memory modules, as used in some - a total of two so far, I think - recent laptop models.[/urk]  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For servers, not for you.
  
  
  
• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is in a slap fight with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Again.

• Apple has announced its new MacBook Pro range with update M5 Pro and M5 Max CPUs and faster SSD speeds.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The SSD speeds are simple: They're still Apple's awkward proprietary solution, but the speed has been increased to PCIe 5.0 levels.  I'm not sure how much difference that makes to a laptop, but it's not unwelcome.
  
  The CPU story is a little more complicated.  Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max feature up to 18 cores, though only 6 of those are performance cores, or what Apple has retroactively renamed "Super" cores.  They are the same as the performance cores in the existing M5 chips, which we know because those cores have also been renamed.
  
  But the other 12 cores aren't efficiency cores, they're "Performance" cores, though precisely what that means we don't know.
  
  Also, there's no longer a 512GB option; the price has been increased by $100 but the base model now comes with 1TB of SSD.
  
  Most importantly, the price of memory hasn't increased.  It's not exactly cheap, but it's not much more than the market price for regular DDR5 modules now, and provides a lot more bandwidth.
  
  
  
• There's also a new MacBook Air and, expected tomorrow, the entry-level MacBook Neo.  (Notebook Check)

• Arm's own Cortex X925 core - found here in Nvidia's GB10 AI processor - reaches desktop class performance when provided a desktop class power budget.  (Chips and Cheese)
  
  It's neck-and-neck with AMD's 9900X and Intel's 285K desktop chips.
  
  
  
• Seagate has started shipping 44TB hard drives.  (Tom'ss Hardware)
  
  You can't have one, or at least not yet.  Right now they're only going to one large, unnamed, customer.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced its new Clearwater Forest server CPUs with up to 288 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're all efficiency cores, but that's a valid option when you pack that many onto a chip.
  
  
  
• Drones launched in Iran's attempt to make as many enemies as possible before it expires hit an Amazon datacenter in the UAE, and took out power to another of its datacenters in Bahrain.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Born just in time to have my servers blown up in the sandbox.
  
  
  
• LexisNexis got hacked via a flaw in React.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Stolen data included employee passwords - encrypted, so probably not a problem - and API keys stored in AWS Secrets - not encrypted at all, so definitely a problem but relatively easy to address.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, March 04 2026 07:25 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 05 2026 03:02 AM (rcPLc)

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• 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

• Microsoft did not ban the word "microslop" from its official Copilot Discord forum and then shut the whole thing down when people kept using the offending term, or, well, they did but they say it was due to spam.  (Windows Latest)
  
  Sure, Microsoft.  I believe you.
  
  
  
• Anthropic got declaude.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I was doing server stuff today and didn't notice.  I do use Claude Code to get boilerplate stuff done quickly, like generating test cases, but I didn't miss it.
  
  
  
• The US government is moving to ban memory chips from Chinese companies YTMC, CXMT, and SMIC...  From government devices.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which doesn't really change anything for the rest of us.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum N1 AI is a combination NAS and desktop PC and is not made by Minisforum.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Typo by Notebook Check - the device is made by Morefine.
  
  It has an eight-core Ryzen CPU, four 3.5" bays, three M.2 slots, dual 10Gb Ethernet ports, and an 800W power supply and room for a desktop graphics card.

• 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.

• 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

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 03 2026 01:28 AM (cv9yd)

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• OpenAI has announced a deal with the Department of War with - apparently - the same limitations that Anthropic was demanding.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Guess Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, really pissed someone off.
  
  Sam Altman of OpenAI knows when to lie, and sometimes also who to lie to.
  
  
  

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.

• 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.

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 28 2026 07:55 PM (Xd0ag)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, February 28 2026 08:29 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 28 2026 11:53 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 28 2026 11:56 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: wheels at Sunday, March 01 2026 01:03 AM (AxWHc)

Posted by: George B at Sunday, March 01 2026 01:05 AM (GX/mQ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 01 2026 02:18 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 01 2026 02:20 AM (rcPLc)

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• 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.

• Speaking of wide open a covert global program by the Chinese government to suppress dissidents has had its cover blown by an official using ChatGPT as a blog.  (CNN)
  
  Double oops.
  
  
  
• That Google API key that you were using to display maps on your website just gained access to all your Google Gemini AI data.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
  
  
  
• Smarthphone shipments are expected to drop 12% and prices to increase 14% thanks to our friend Sam and his DRAM Apocalypse.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Thanks, Sam.
  
  
  
• And Samsung - different Sam - just doubled the price it charges Apple for DRAM.  (Notebook Check)
  
  They were reportedly looking for a 60% increase but opened with an offer of 100%.
  
  Apple - again, reportedly - took the deal immediately.
  
  
  
• Xbox is in danger.  Will Microsoft fix it or kill it?  (The Verge)
  
  Fix?  You mean, chop its balls off?
  
  I think you'll find they already did that.
  
  
  
• And speaking of chopping balls off Firefox has a new switch that lets you turn off all its AI features with one click.  (Firefox)
  
  And then turn on just the ones you want, if any.
  
  
  
• Ordered a 4TB Crucial T710 SSD to replace the two 2TB P310 drives that Amazon lost in shipping.  I ordered those because they were discounted close to the old price, briefly, on New Year's Eve.
  
  The T710 is a much better drive and is also still close to its old price, but only because it was always expensive.  But now it's only 20% more expensive than entry-level models rather than twice the price.  And only a little more than two 1TB drives of the same model. 
  
  The main competition is Samsung's 9100 Pro, and that seems to be rapidly increasing in price itself.
  
  Should have everything I need for a while.  I'm short a drive so I'll have to shuffle things around a bit, but I have a couple of older Samsung 970 drives I'm not really using but still work fine, and they are suddenly worth using.

• 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.

• DVD sales are seeing a recovery - or at least slowing their decline - as Gen Z discovers that waiting for your favourite show or movie to come back on TV sucks.  (Yahoo)
  
  The Criterion Collection in particular has seen sales increase thanks to the streaming services colluding to piss off absolutely everyone.
  
  
  
• OpenClaw's creator tells AI builders to be more playful and sprinkle chaos everywhere.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The disasters you leave in your wake aren't your fault.
  
  The people they happen to fucked up.
  
  They trusted you.
  
  
  
• A hacker used a "jail break" on the Claude AI service to steal 150 gigabyte of data from Mexican government agencies.  (Yahoo)
  
  He (probably a he) made off with 195 million tax records and an unknown number of voter records but probably all of them.
  
  That jail break?
  
  He asked it twice.
  
  
  
• Anthropic, the company behind Claude promised in 2023 that it wouldn't train an AI that it couldn't demonstrate was safe and refuse to do...  Uh, exactly what it just did.
  
  They just scratched off that "don't be evil" promise.  (Time)
  
  Well, that's alright then.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, February 27 2026 01:02 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, February 27 2026 12:12 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, February 27 2026 03:58 PM (LwnTP)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, February 28 2026 12:05 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 28 2026 08:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 28 2026 10:40 AM (e0fX0)

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• 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.

• Speaking of Meta, an AI security research at that company running an experiment with OpenClaw - a local tool that connects to other AI systems and to your application - watched it happily delete all her emails, ignoring instructions to stop until she hit the reset button on her Mac.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenClaw is also woefully insecure, so if you do set it up it's just as likely that someone will do that to you while you sleep.
  
  Oh, and that researcher?  Summer Yue, Meta's chief lobotomist.  Her official title is "Director of Alignment" but alignment in AI terms means lobotomising AI models so they don't go out and get drunk and party all night.
  
  
  
• If you find yourself unable to upgrade your PC thanks to the DRAM Apocalypse brought about by our AI Overlords buying up every sliver of silicon on the entire planet, consider new Quake-like game QUOD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The entire game is 64k.
  
  Available on the developer's Itch.io site.
  
  
  
• HP says that the cost component of the memory in PCs has doubled.  (The Register)
  
  From 18% to 35% of the total.
  
  Which has to be a lagging indicator because the cost of the memory even to system builders like HP has quadrupled.
  
  
  
• "I'm committed to the Xbox" says Microsoft's new Xbox CEO, "starting with the console."  (WCCFTech)
  
  Good thing the Xbox is a console, then, because otherwise you'd be screwed.
  
  
  
• IBM's share price slid by 25% after idiots discovered that AI can write bad COBOL code.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, there goes my retirement plans.
  
  Wait, I never learned COBOL.
  
  Guess that's okay then.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 26 2026 01:45 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 26 2026 06:41 AM (e0fX0)

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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

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Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 24 2026 07:37 PM (0QQsP)

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