What Backblaze’s Q2 2026 drive stats say about buying big hard drives
The quarter in numbers Backblaze published its Q2 2026 Drive Stats report on September 29, and the headline number moved the wrong way. The quarterly annualized failure rate hit 1.73%, up from 1.24% in Q1 and the highest the report has shown in a while. The lifetime figure barely budged, ticking up to 1.41% across […]
NetScaler zero-days: check for compromise before you patch
Two zero-days, already exploited, patch available Citrix NetScaler appliances are under active attack through two critical vulnerabilities that were exploited in the wild before any patch existed. Citrix disclosed eight vulnerabilities on September 27 in bulletin CTX697096. The two headline flaws, CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772, both score 9.5 on the CVSS v4 scale and both lead […]
SQL Server on Azure Local now runs without a cloud connection
SQL Server, no internet required SQL Server on Azure Local is now generally available in disconnected environments, per Microsoft’s September 29 update. The capability extends SQL Server support to Azure Local disconnected operations, where instances run with no connection to the Azure public cloud. Until now, running SQL Server on Azure Local assumed you could […]
Jeff fine-tunes tiny models to make decisions in one forward pass
Most LLM calls in production are not conversations. They are routing decisions: which support queue does this ticket belong in, is this comment abusive, which intent did the user just express. A new open-source project called Jeff targets exactly that workload with fine-tunes of Qwen3.5 (0.8B and 2B) and Gemma 4 E2B that return a […]
Azure SQL Dev Hub opens one front door for building against Azure SQL
Building an app against Azure SQL has always involved a small scavenger hunt: which service tier fits your workload, which connection library your language wants, which quickstart actually applies. Microsoft’s new Azure SQL Dev Hub, announced in public preview, tries to collapse that hunt into a single starting point in the Azure portal. Per the […]
80,000 organizations had AI logins stolen, and session cookies are the real problem
SOCRadar’s AI Identity Exposure Report, covered by BleepingComputer, puts a number on something security teams have been quietly dreading: infostealer logs now contain employee logins for AI platforms at serious scale. More than a million records tied to AI services span over 80,000 corporate domains. The researchers narrowed that set to 482 major enterprises and […]
The lunar terminator paradox, worked out with code
Why the moon points the wrong way at sunset There is an old astronomical puzzle that most people meet while camping: after the sun sets, the lit part of the moon sometimes seems to point up, toward empty sky, instead of down toward where the sun just went. It is called the lunar terminator paradox, […]
Serving a static site over Tor from your own server
A hidden service in ten lines of config The “dark web” sounds exotic, but the mechanics of putting a site on it are closer to a reverse proxy config than anything exotic. David Alvarez Rosa published a walkthrough of self-hosting a personal site as a Tor hidden service, and the whole setup is small enough […]
Microsoft quietly retires the Copilot+ PC brand
The label is gone, the spec stays Two years after launching Copilot+ as the badge of honor for AI-ready Windows hardware, Microsoft has stopped using it. The new Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch announced this month carry no Copilot+ branding at all, even though both comfortably clear the hardware bar the label was […]
Go Concurrency Distilled: A Free Interactive Refresher for Goroutines and Channels
Anton Zhiyanov published Go Concurrency Distilled, a free interactive mini-book covering 17 Go concurrency topics, from goroutines and channels up through atomics and diagnostics. Every example runs in the browser, so you can change the code and rerun it without installing anything. A static PDF version lives in the nalgeon/go-conc-distilled repository if you prefer reading […]
Inside the Intel 8087’s Tangent Algorithm: CORDIC With a Polynomial Twist
Ken Shirriff has published another die-level deep dive, this time reverse-engineering how the Intel 8087 computes tangents. The 8087 was Intel’s 1980 floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 and 8088, the chip you soldered into an empty socket on an IBM PC motherboard to make spreadsheets and CAD stop crawling. It computed a tangent in about […]
Azure Functions Ends Support for Node.js 22: Upgrade to Node.js 24 by April 30, 2027
Microsoft posted a retirement notice on the Azure Updates roadmap on September 22: support for Azure Functions apps running Node.js 22 ends on April 30, 2027. After that date your function apps keep running, but they stop getting security patches, updates, and customer support for the runtime. That is the standard Azure runtime retirement pattern, […]