Daily Tech News 21 February 2026

• Discord continues to go from strength to strength, at least insofar as the levels of mishandling its introduction of age verification and the number of users fleeing the platform. (Ars Technica)
  
  I never much liked Discord; its interface is awkward and annoying. But the age verification thing was pretty much forced on it by fascist governments in Europe and, uh, Australia.
  
  On the other hand, the company did itself no favours by claiming that uploaded ID documents would remain secure after they had already leaked.
  
  And even less so with the latest incident where, after reasserting that documents would be deleted immediately after they were verified - which we already knew was untrue, because deleted documents can't be leaked - they contradicted themselves in an official announcement and then deleted the announcement and pretended they had never announced it.

• Pinterest - which apparently still exists - is drowning in a sea of AI slop and AI moderation. (404 Media)
  
  Pinterest went all-in on AI and found themselves in the worst of all possible worlds.
  
  
  
• Same again only Facebook. (Pilk)
  
  If only someone had seen this coming ten years ago.
  
  
  
• Google blocked 1.75 million Play Store submissions in 2025. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's 1.75 million fake apps.
  
  Time to release the badgers.
  
  
  
• Overclocking a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 to 850MHz. (Pimoroni)
  
  The Pico 2 runs at 150MHz out of the box, but can clock over 300MHz at the default 1.1V. Increasing that to 1.3V takes you over 400MHz. Beyond that you have to start breaking the rules, but that takes you a long way.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 chips - probably to be called the Ryzen 10000 series - may not reach the desktop until next year. (WCCFTech)
  
  They will show up this year, but perhaps only in servers.
  
  Intel says it is still on track to launch its Nova Lake desktop chips this year, with up to 52 cores and 288MB of cache, so they might have a window to claw back some market share.
  
  
  
• Meta and other tech firms are banning OpenClaw, formerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot, because it is hopelessly insecure in every possible way. (Wired) (archive site)
  
  A coworker set up an OpenClaw instance in a secure sandbox to try it out. While it couldn't do anything too awful from inside its padded cell, it took me literally 30 seconds to find a major vulnerability.
  
  
  
• OpenAI - which now employs the creator of OpenClaw - may be doomed. (Ben Evans)
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway.
  
  Not AI companies generally, just OpenAI specifically.
  
  Still it's something to look forward to.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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