GoKawiil
Tech News
A firmware update pushed through Samsung's SmartThings platform this week caused some Bespoke AI four-door refrigerators, mostly 2024-and-later models, to lose power and stop cooling. Owners in Korea reported their fridges went offline mid-update, with displays stuck on an update-checking message, forcing many to throw out spoiled food. Samsung has not responded to questions about the scope of the issue or a fix.
Raspberry Pi has confirmed its firmware locks boards to their factory RAM configuration, preventing users from swapping in replacement memory chips even to fix failed components. The restriction surfaced after a user couldn't get a Compute Module 5 to recognize a new 4GB chip, with company engineer PhilE explaining the firmware checks additional memory attributes beyond just capacity. Raspberry Pi says the policy exists to stop resellers from installing unauthorized higher-capacity chips and passing modified boards off as factory models.
French security firm CrowdSec disclosed that attackers used the Shai-Hulud worm to compromise a former employee's machine in May, stealing a GitHub OAuth token that still had read access to the company's private repositories. Over roughly nine minutes, attackers downloaded about 170 private repos plus 130+ public ones; CrowdSec only learned of the breach on September 16 after stolen source code surfaced on the cybercrime marketplace pwnforum.
Raspberry Pi confirmed that its firmware locks boards to their factory-installed RAM capacity, preventing users from swapping in higher-capacity chips. Engineer and forum moderator PhilE said the restriction, rolled out in firmware updates since late 2024, exists to stop resellers from installing larger RAM chips of dubious quality and passing boards off as higher-spec devices. He told users attempting DIY RAM upgrades or repairs that the effort is futile because the firmware also checks other device attributes beyond chip size.
The default configuration on a consumer router is tuned for setup convenience, not for the years it then spends untouched. A few changes cover most of the gap.
AMD's stock surged roughly 9% on Monday morning, pushing its market capitalization above $1 trillion for the first time. The rally capped a month-long climb of about 29% in AMD shares, with most of that gain coming in the past week alone. The milestone puts AMD ahead of rival Intel, whose market cap sits near $648 billion.
Chinese AI firm Z.ai, maker of the GLM models, faced backlash after developers discovered its ZCode coding assistant was quietly compressing and uploading local project files to Alibaba Cloud storage without permission. One developer found the tool made 564 attempts to exfiltrate a 313MB encrypted archive containing commercial project files, with a smaller 15KB file successfully transmitted before the issue was caught. Z.ai has since apologized, patched the unauthorized uploads, claimed the exfiltrated data was destroyed, and pledged to open-source ZCode for third-party security review.
Apple's iPhone 18 Pro Max ships with a battery-firmware lock that caps capacity below the 20Wh threshold that triggers international shipping restrictions on single-cell batteries. Once a customer activates the phone for the first time, the lock lifts automatically, restoring the battery to its full rated capacity of roughly 21-22Wh depending on the model. A 'Prepare to Ship' setting can reimpose the cap, limiting charging to 80 percent over 14 days, for anyone sending the device in for repair or resale.
Apple confirmed the iPhone 18 Pro Max packs a single-cell battery exceeding 20 watt-hours, triggering extra international shipping regulations for large batteries. To comply, Apple built firmware that caps the battery below 20 Wh during manufacturing and transit, only unlocking full capacity once a user activates the phone. A new 'Prepare to Ship' toggle in Settings lets owners discharge the battery back below that threshold before repairs, trade-ins, resale, or gifting.
Tera-Print, a small US company that has sold Tera-Fab branded beam pen lithography tools for about a decade, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Tesla, SpaceX and SpaceXAI in May over use of the Terafab name. Tera-Print, whose clients reportedly include the Department of Defense, has now filed a trademark lawsuit, while Tesla and SpaceX argue their planned high-volume chip manufacturing venture is unrelated to Tera-Print's tabletop bioengineering and prototyping tools.
Newly unredacted court documents from copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal comments from executives acknowledging that scraping published journalism to train chatbots amounted to theft on a massive scale. Microsoft's Brent Hecht reportedly described it as possibly 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while an OpenAI executive warned that products like ChatGPT posed an 'existential threat' to publishers.
According to a JPMorgan note cited by Semi Doped, ASML has no plans to adopt free-electron laser (FEL) technology for extreme ultraviolet lithography, despite backing from Elon Musk for that approach. Instead, ASML is continuing to refine its existing laser-produced plasma (LPP) method, aiming to boost source power from around 500W to 1,000W and nearly double the rate of tin droplet generation to 100,000 per second.