Daily Tech News 10 April 2026

Top Story

• A hacker has reportedly broken into the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, and made off with... Carry the twelve... Ten petabytes of data. (CNN)
  
  That's the equivalent of 70 billion Apple II floppy disks, or the total data in all the DNA strands of six and a half dromedaries.*

  CNN cannot verify the origins of the alleged dataset and the claims made by FlamingChina, but spoke with multiple experts whose initial assessment of the leak indicated it was genuine.
  
  The alleged sample data appeared to include documents marked "secret" in Chinese, along with technical files, animated simulations and renderings of defense equipment including bombs and missiles.

  Oops.

  Hofer, who reviewed the sample of the leak, said he was able to contact on Telegram a person who claimed they had carried out the hack. The attacker claimed to have gained access to the Tianjin supercomputer through a compromised VPN domain.
  
  Once inside, the attacker told Hofer they deployed a "botnet" - a network of automated programs that were able enter the NSCC's system and then extract, download and store the data. The extraction of 10 petabytes of data took around six months.

  One question arises: Where did the hacker get 70 billion Apple II floppies?**
  
  * Content may settle in shipping.
  ** Or six and a half dromedaries, for that matter.***
  ***Grok tells me that dromedaries are far too big and half far too much DNA, but if I substitute honeybees the statement is accurate to within 15%. I don't necessarily recommend this if you're planning a barbecue.

Tech News

• Negative views of Broadcom are driving thousands of customers to abandon VMWare for literally anything else. (Ars Technica)
  
  "Negative views" here meaning "They increased our bill by 3000%".

  Western Union exec says there were "challenges" working with Broadcom.

  "Challenges" here meaning "When we asked for a discount they laughed at me and burned my house down".
  
  
  
• Kill it, gut it, and wear its skin as a suit. (EFF)
  
  La EFF est mort.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has lost an appeal in its attempt to stop the Pentagon from blacklisting it for being a bunch of - and I quote, or something like that - "treacherous idiot commie weasels who smell bad". (CNBC)
  
  I'm not sure what Anthropic expects to achieve here. If you factually are treacherous idiot commie weasels who smell bad, and a government department chooses not to work with you, even if you win in the court system you are still treacherous idiot commie weasels who smell bad.
  
  
  
• If you bought Intel at the bottom a year ago, congratulations, you've had a return of 250% on your investment. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Huh.
  
  
  
• The Korean government is taking action over soaring DRAM costs/ (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Since two of the Big Three memory manufacturers are based in Korea, the action consists largely of monitoring the situation and watching number go up.
  
  
  
• The picoZ80 is a drop-in replacement for the very venerable Z80 processor. (engineers@work)
  
  It drops straight into the classic 40-pin DIP socket and works just like the original.
  
  Except that it's actually emulated on a dual-core Arm chip running at up to 300MHz with hardware assist to drive all the pins at the precise timing in the specs. And it has 8MB of RAM, with half of that addressed as 64 banks of 64k. And an MMU that allows 512 byte pages to be remapped arbitrarily. Oh, and 16MB of flash storage. And wifi and Bluetooth and a microSD card - yes, all of that fits within the 40 pin package.
  
  And there's a pico6502 model.
  
  And yes, they've tested both in classic hardware and they really work.
  
  
  
• BunnyCDN has been silently losing our production files for 15 months. (Reddit)
  
  I looked at BunnyCDN, mostly because it's one of the cheapest CDNs around - if you stick to the volume network (which doesn't cover Australia) it's one twentieth the cost of AWS Cloudfront.
  
  It's also been promoted recently as a European alternative to American solutions that actually work.
  
  Because, apparently...
  
  
  
• With TSMC's new 2nm node, phone processors are set to approach 5GHz. (WCCFTech)
  
  Not you, China.
  
  Interestingly, the original Z80 50 years ago had transistors two thousand times larger - 4 microns - and two thousand times slower - 2.5MHz.