Daily Tech News 14 September 2025

• 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.
  
  Last time I was worn out by the time I had mowed just the area directly in front of the house. This time my back was hurting by the time I had mowed that area and the much larger and much steeper stretch from the retaining wall bounding that first patch and the roadway, but I didn't need to take a break half-way through.
  
  Definitely on the mend, but 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.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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