Daily Tech News 29 December 2025

• My PC, it will not boot.
  I rm'ed * while su root.
  
  Now maybe Gemini and Grok will be able to find this.
  
  
  
• Did Qualcomm strangle Arduino by changing its terms of use after the acquisition?
  
  Yes says competitor Adafruit. No says Qualcomm. (The New Stack)
  
  Well that's to be expected. How about a neutral and trustworthy third party?
  
  No says the EFF.
  
  Does that settle things?
  
  Given how long the article is, I'd say it doesn't. While the hardware is nominally still open, users are pushed heavily toward cloud services that are not open in any sense of the word.

• Memory prices are expected to increase another 45% in 2026. (Notebook Check)
  
  Laptop prices are expected to increase by 20% to account for this - or I should say predicted to increase by 20%, because I expect far worse.
  
  Which is why I snapped up 256GB of RAM and 8TB of SSDs at pre-apocalypse prices.
  
  
  
• If you play Rainbow Six Siege you just got an unexpected Christmas present: Two billion credits in in-game currency valued at $13.3 million. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not out of the kindness of Ubisoft's heart - they don't have one - but reportedly as part of a much broader hack that penetrated their network via the MongoDB vulnerability.
  
  Just two days ago I was wondering what kind of idiot would run a publicly accessible MongoDB server. Guess now we know.
  
  Or not if they are lying. But the hack itself definitely happened. There are an estimated 85 million registered accounts for Rainbow Six Siege. If all of them received the bonus credits, that's about a quadrillion dollars.
  
  
  
• You could buy 100 quadrillion robots for that kind of money. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Very very small robots, but what do you want for a penny?
  
  
  
• OpenAI is looking for a new head of preparedness. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Have they tried the Boy Scouts?
  
  
  
• As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise. (NPR)
  
  Thanks NPR. Always with the timely news of things that happened two months ago.
  
  
  
• Z80AI is an LLM that runs on a Z80. (GitHub)
  
  Yes, in 64k of RAM. It actually fits in 40k.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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