Daily Tech News 25 January 2026

• Bitlocker: The encryption technology where everyone has access to your data except you. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Microsoft's Bitlocker is infamous for suddenly enabling itself without you explicitly going through the setup process so that neither you nor anybody else has any idea what the encryption key is, and you data is simply gone.
  
  But if you do go through the setup process, it automatically shares your key with Microsoft so the government can ask for and receive your keys.
  
  Which government?
  
  All of them.

• Charge me $3000 for a box of rocks once, shame on you. Charge me $3000 for a box of rocks four times... (WCCFTech)
  
  A Reddit user ordered a "resale" unit of an Nvidia RTX 5090 from Amazon - that is, a unit that had been return during the 30 day window - and received a box containing a towel and a bunch of rocks.
  
  Well, scams happen. Not your fault.
  
  Except this was the fourth time. It's Amazon's fault for not checking returns, yes, but it's also his fault for still believing that they do.
  
  
  
• Of course you could order your 5090 directly from a card maker like Zotac instead of Amazon and avoid this issue and instead they'll abruptly raise prices by 20% and cancel your order at the old price while blaming a system error. (WCCFTech)
  
  You could also just play Hytale which runs smoothly on Vega 8 laptop graphics from 2021 even at 2880x1620. Albeit on low settings, but low settings are almost identical to "epic" settings - the only visible difference is render distance.
  
  
  
• Lemonade plans to half Tesla insurance rates for miles driven using the FSD - Full Self-Driving - mode, because it has fewer accidents than humans. (Reuters) (archive site)
  
  Which, yes, means that your insurance company knows exactly when and how and how much you are driving.
  
  It's also not quite clear what the actual reduction in your insurance rates from this would be. Half cost... But what component of the cost is directly attributable to the number of hours (or miles) driven?
  
  
  
• I built more in two months with agents than in the previous year. I used almost none of it. (Mahdi Yusuf)
  
  This guy gets it. AI coding assistants aren't useless; they range from super helpful for churning through boring repetitive tasks, to actively dangerous.

  Point an agent at a vague goal - "build me a tool that helps with X" - and you'll get something that looks impressive and rots in a folder. Point an agent at a specific task - "rewrite these 200 API calls to use the new authentication pattern" - and you'll save a week.

  I had to perform a task with a particular piece of unfamiliar software with painfully poor design and documentation. I used ChatGPT and after a couple of days of trial and error I got something that was slow but worked - and it would have taken me at least a week to perform the same task myself.
  
  The it turned out that the tool I needed to interpret the results was offline, possibly permanently dead. I found an alternative, which my company already had a subscription to... And found that this alternative solved the entire problem and the two days had been completely wasted.

  One is generative theatre. The other is actual leverage.
  
  The difference is tactical versus strategic deployment.

  Where, in this case, tactical deployment is solving a problem that you actually have, and strategic deployment is solving a problem that nobody has.
  
  
  
• cURL no longer offers bug bounties. (Ars Technica)
  
  Because the project is being overwhelmed with AI-generate fake bug reports.
  
  
  
• Microsoft 360 went down again. (CRN)
  
  I had a typo there. Almost left it in.
  
  
  
• A new test for AI labs: Are you even trying to make money? (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good question. Dumb article, but good question.

  Think of it in these terms:
  
  

  • Level 5: We are already making millions of dollars every day, thank you very much.
  • Level 4:We have a detailed multi-stage plan to become the richest human beings on Earth.
  • Level 3:We have many promising product ideas, which will be revealed inthe fullness of time.
  • Level 2:We have the outlines of a concept of a plan.
  • Level 1:True wealth is when you love yourself.

  Fine so far. At the top, actually making money. At the bottom, idiot dreamers or possibly communists.

  The big names are all at Level 5: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and so on.

  Hold up.
  
  OpenAI lost $8 billion last year, is expected to lose $14 billion this year, $40 billion next year, and as much as $74 billion in 2028 even if they meet revenue goals.
  
  Did an AI write that article?
  
  
  
• AI luminaries at Davos clash over how close human-level intelligence really is. (Yahoo Finance)
  
  What a useful word, "luminaries". It covers equally objects that shine of their own right, and masses of stone and dust that merely reflect the brilliance of others.
  
  On the one hand, Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, formerly of Meta, and genuine Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis of Google, who both say that current AI systems are nowhere near human levels and - at least in the case of LeCun - that current approaches can never get there and entirely new methods are needed.
  
  On the other hand Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI who say that their tools are approaching the level of Nobel Prize winners and you'll all be out of work by next week.
  
  I think I'm going to go with the guys who didn't trash the global electronic supply chain only so they could burn a hundred billion dollars of investor money.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments