Daily Tech News 17 December 2025

• Coupang - South Korea's equivalent to Amazon - got hacked. (WSJ) (archive site)
  
  Initial disclosure indicated that 4500 customers were affected.
  
  This number has since been updated to 34 million.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Midjourney is alemwjsl. (Aadill Pickle)
  
  Me: That's someone typing the local name for Midjourney on a CJKV keyboard with the language accidentally set to English.
  
  Article: Uh... Yes. Korean.

• Is the Commodore 64 Ultimate any good? Yes. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's an FPGA emulator rather than just software, so it's more precise, and it supports existing hardware like ROM cartridges and disk drives if you still have one in working order.
  
  And it includes not a mere 64K of RAM but 128MB. (Of which you can attach 16MB as an expansion cartridge.)
  
  And you can dial the speed up from 1MHz to 64MHz.
  
  And it has modern niceties like HDMI, USB, Ethernet, and wifi.
  
  And it has a high-quality mechanical keyboard.
  
  $299, or $349 for the translucent Starlight edition, but that's about what a second-hand C64 will set you back these days once you get it working.
  
  
  
• The US government has signed a deal with Korea Zinc to build a rare earth processing facility in Tennessee. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The company will be building a $6.6 billion facility to produce 540,000 tons of material per year, including gallium, germanium, and indium, none of which are rare earth elements.
  
  Also, 540,000 tons of these metals would be a lot. Hundreds of times more than current global output. So someone is leaving something out somewhere.
  
  
  
• Canada's postmaster-general or whatever he is Mark Carney has been criticised over his choice of British spellings in official documents as opposed to American ones. (The Guardian)
  
  Canada is not a real country.
  
  
  
• Texas has sued a bevy of TV makers including Sony, LG, Samsung, TCL, and Hisense for taking screenshots of what you are watching without your consent. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Good.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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