Daily Tech News 18 September 2025

• Chinese AI DeepSeek not only writes insecure code - of course it does, they all do - it selectively writes more insecure code if it thinks you are associated with one of the Chinese Communist Party's long list of enemies. (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Also if you're trying to write code for industrial control systems.
  
  But if you're a citizen of Taiwan or Tibet or a member of the Falun Gong, and you tell it you're writing a monitoring system for a nuclear reactor, it's going to have a field day.
  
  (Go away, Bing. Yes, I did search for an non-paywalled version that WaPo article, but now just go away.)

• Asus gaming laptops have been broken for four years. (GitHub)
  
  Uh. I'm typing this on an Asus laptop less than four years old. Not sure if it's considered a gaming laptop as it has no dedicated GPU. The same bug does affect ROG, TUF, and Zephyrus models, and symptoms were reported starting in 2021.
  
  Anyway, on a regular schedule, every 30, 45, or 60 seconds depending on model, an interrupt fires off a BIOS ACPI call that in turn includes a sleep() call, something that would get a programmer shot, hung, drawn, and quartered back in the day. That makes everything stall for 13 milliseconds or so - not a lot of time, but if you're gaming at 80fps that's one frame just gone.
  
  Oh, and sometimes it makes the entire system blue screen.
  
  
  
• Asus did slightly better with its new prosumer 6k 32" monitor, the ProArt PA32QCV. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At no point during testing did the monitor make the entire system blue screen. I like the warning that's it's not a super-wide gamut monitor, since it "only" covers 100% of DCI-P3.
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 5 digital edition has been upgraded to 825GB of storage from an original 1TB at no extra cost. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No need to thank us.
  
  
  
• The latest NPM attack. (SafeDep)
  
  Not the other one. That was so last week.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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