Daily Tech News 1 November 2026

• French lawmakers have decided to do what French lawmakers have always done: Make other people pay for the problems they created. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In this case, they are trying to charge the companies that send data over the internet to customers in France for the data they send - at an utterly absurd 6 cents per gigabyte.
  
  Costs to send data from a server - except for the big three cloud platforms which are wildly overpriced - start at about one cent per gigabyte at the high end, so France wants to levy a tax of 600% - on people who don't live in France.
  
  Also, tiny problem with the article:

  With approximately 154 million users and counting in France, the proposal's authors say such a tax could generate around €10 billion ($11.2 billion) in annual revenue for the government.

  Yeah, I don't think so, mate. Even after being invaded by North Africa, the population of France stands at around 66 million.
  

• Reddit's share price has plunged by 29% after investors realised that it's Reddit. (CNBC)
  
  You put my money into what?
  
  
  
• Anthropic's Claude is now blocking attempts to reverse-engineer games, pushing users straight into the hands of Chinese LLMs that don't give a shit. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Claude wouldn't even transcribe Khatchaturian's Sabre Dance for me.
  
  
  
• Sam Altmanette says it is "quite terrible" that the peasants have bread when he can make far better use of it in his breadcenters. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  "Let them eat no cake", Altmanette added.
  
  
  
• To fix remote DoS in decodeWapPdu, or not to fix remote DoS in decodeWapPdu, that is the question. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the integer overflows of outrageous SMS packets...
  
  
  
• A criminal gang spent $7216 on AI services to run extortion attacks. (The Register)
  
  And left all its information - including decryption keys - on a public FTP server.
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• NASA is asking for proposals to boost the Hubble space telescope into higher orbit, without which it will likely re-enter Earth's atmosphere in the next seven years. (Ars Technica)
  
  Jared Isaacman proposed a mission do do this using SpaceX's Crew Dragon back in 2022, offering to fund much of the mission himself.
  
  Jared Isaacman is now the NASA administrator.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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