Daily Tech News 26 February 2026

• The first transatlantic fiber-optic cable is being pulled up after nearly forty years. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  TAT-8 went into operation in 1988 and then failed in 2002 and was deemed uneconomic to repair. Which not surprising since it could only carry 280 megabits per second - 40,000 phone calls, and an aggregate speed about half that of my home internet.
  
  As the name suggests there were seven prior TATs, with TAT-1 being provisioned in 1956 and carrying 35 simultaneous phone calls. Six subsequent TATs ended with TAT-14 which could handle 9.3 terabits per second - enough bandwidth for everyone in America to be on the phone to someone in Europe simultaneously.
  
  Even that was not enough and it was retired in 2020. Total transatlantic bandwidth today is somewhere in the low petabits.

• DVD sales are seeing a recovery - or at least slowing their decline - as Gen Z discovers that waiting for your favourite show or movie to come back on TV sucks. (Yahoo)
  
  The Criterion Collection in particular has seen sales increase thanks to the streaming services colluding to piss off absolutely everyone.
  
  
  
• OpenClaw's creator tells AI builders to be more playful and sprinkle chaos everywhere. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The disasters you leave in your wake aren't your fault.
  
  The people they happen to fucked up.
  
  They trusted you.
  
  
  
• A hacker used a "jail break" on the Claude AI service to steal 150 gigabytes of data from Mexican government agencies. (Yahoo)
  
  He (probably a he) made off with 195 million tax records and an unknown number of voter records but probably all of them.
  
  That jail break?
  
  He asked it twice.
  
  
  
• Anthropic, the company behind Claude promised in 2023 that it wouldn't train an AI that it couldn't demonstrate was safe and refuse to do... Uh, exactly what it just did.
  
  They just scratched off that "don't be evil" promise. (Time)
  
  Well, that's alright then.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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