Articles of Distraction

[Angrboda]

Today I learned that my Cat7 cable was actually a waste of money

The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) sets the standards for Ethernet equipment. Whenever the IEEE decides on a new Ethernet speed specification, it defines exactly what cabling infrastructure supports it. As an example, when the IEEE set out to define a standard for 10-gigabit home and office networking, it settled on Category 6A, or Cat6A.

But Category 7 (Cat7) was created by a different body entirely. While the ISO/IEC settled on the Cat7 specification in 2002, the IEEE skipped it entirely and settled on Cat8 as the higher-bandwidth option. In fact, the IEEE has never officially adopted Cat7 for mainstream Ethernet use.

Because the IEEE didn't define a Cat7 standard, makers of network switches, routers, and other networking equipment also skipped it. As a result, anyone buying a Cat7 cable for their home network won't get the performance boost they might expect. Their devices simply aren't built to work with those cables.

The Ethernet connector trap

Standards aside, how Cat7 cables are built is a key issue. Cat7 specifications don't natively use the standard RJ45 connector people are used to. That's the connector you'll find on any other Ethernet cable you buy, and it's the connector your devices expect.

Instead, Cat7 relies on specialized connectors known as GG45 or TERA connectors. These connectors are required for the cable to achieve its rated shielding and performance figures. But cable makers know that few people have devices that use those connectors, so they fit their cables with RJ45 connectors instead.

The problem with that approach is obvious, but cable makers ignore it. By ditching Cat7's native connectors in favor of the more ubiquitous RJ45, manufacturers compromise its functionality. Cat7 requires end-to-end grounding with specialized hardware, something your average home router doesn't have. Plugging one of these cables into a home router can even create ground loops and network noise that impact performance.

Furthermore, the lack of a real Cat7 specification means that any two cables may not be alike. Some are simply Cat6 cables with a new label attached. And they come with a price hike.

More importantly, Cat7 doesn't offer any performance improvements for most home networks. Cat6 can handle 10Gbps speeds so long as the cable is less than 55 meters long. Most routers have gigabit Ethernet connections. Some support 2.5Gbps ports. More premium routers and network switches may reach 10Gbps at most, and Cat6 is more than up to the job.

[Angrboda]

What Microsoft actually sank

The cylinder, nicknamed Northern Isles, was not a scrappy proof of concept. It packed 855 servers across 12 racks, held 27.6 petabytes of storage, and drew a total of 240 kW, roughly 20 kW per rack.

Before it went under, the team pumped out all the ordinary air and replaced it with dry nitrogen. No oxygen means no oxidation on the components, no humidity working into the boards, and no human elbow knocking a cable loose, because nobody is allowed inside a sealed tube on the seafloor.

Then the whole thing was bolted to a ballast-filled triangular base and lowered next to the European Marine Energy Centre, one of the rougher patches of water in Europe and exactly why they chose it. The logic was blunt: survive there and you survive anywhere. The site had a second selling point.

Orkney’s grid runs on close to 100% renewable power, fed by wind plus the tidal and wave devices being tested at EMEC. A data center that gets cooled by the sea and powered by the weather above it, with no freshwater bill, is precisely the combination every AI infrastructure planner is currently losing sleep over.

The failure rate that broke the assumption

When the cylinder surfaced in the summer of 2020, one number did the rounds: the servers underwater failed at roughly an eighth the rate of the ones on land. Project Natick lead Ben Cutler put it plainly in Microsoft’s own writeup, saying the team’s “failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land.”

The raw numbers are sharper than the ratio. Microsoft lost six of the 855 servers in the sea. The control group running the same jobs in an ordinary data center on land lost eight, out of just 135. That works out to a 0.7% failure rate underwater against 5.9% on land.

Two things were doing the heavy lifting: the cold North Sea hauling heat away for free, and the nitrogen-plus-no-humans setup killing the slow corrosion and accidental-bump damage that quietly chews through land servers over time. It turns out the healthiest place for a hot rack is a sealed tube nobody is allowed to touch.

https://www.autonocion.com/us/scotland-m...ervers-ai/

[Fake Messiah]

Mel Gibson mocked the ASL interpreter (for deaf people) behind her back at a recent fan expo event in Toronto

[The Valkyrie]

Mel Gibson mocked the ASL interpreter (for deaf people) behind her back at a recent fan expo event in Toronto

Well, we all know that Mel "ultra-christian" Gibson is a piece of shit.

[Angrboda]

Economic warfare

Canada and Greenland are both integral parts of the Western Hemisphere. Both have significant energy and mineral resources the U.S. needs and wants. The constant references to Canada as the 51st state and to the Canada-U.S. border as “artificial” are not bluster. Canada and Greenland are both in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.

The U.S. is fully aware, however, that these ambitions aren’t possible to achieve immediately. Therefore, it’s weaponized tariffs against Canada for the purpose of breaking the country economically in the short term. Canada as the 51st state is the desired option; Canada as a “Venezuela North” is the acceptable second choice. Economic warfare, therefore, is the continuation of American geopolitics by other means.

Concluding a fair trade deal with Canada was never on offer from the U.S. While the 2025 NSS speaks to “fair, reciprocal trade deals,” it makes clear that “our priorities must and will be our own workers, our own industries, and our own national security.”

The goal to “re-shore industrial production” is a national security imperative, not an economic preference.

This is why Trump is weaponizing tariffs. It’s the tactic of choice to kill the auto industry and wound other key sectors in the Canadian economy. The geopolitical goal is clear.

Those who place hope in the November mid-term elections or a future Democratic presidency will be disappointed. Let’s not forget the Joe Biden administration actually doubled the Trump tariff rate for Canadian softwood lumber.

Trump’s geopolitical aims, not economics, are behind his trade hostility towards Canada

[Angrboda]

The Linux kernel is approaching a staggering 2,000 CVEs fixed per release, up from roughly 500 through much of the Linux 6.x era, as AI and large language models increasingly scour the operating system’s enormous codebase for vulnerabilities. According to an August 28 Phoronix report, Linux stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman revealed the trend in a slide teasing an upcoming presentation at Kernel Recipes 2026, showing CVE counts jumping above 1,000 with Linux 7.0 and exceeding 1,500 with Linux 7.2. If the current trajectory continues, Linux 7.3 could push the figure beyond 2,000.

Rather than a change in Linux’s security or a rise in vulnerabilities, the spike is mainly due to “detectives” using AI tools to scour the Linux kernel source tree, which has grown to over 40 million lines over 35 years of Linux’s existence. These tools can examine countless obscure sections humans may rarely revisit, occasionally finding genuine defects; Linux CVE records this year already explicitly credit AI-assisted static analysis with finding vulnerabilities subsequently confirmed by Intel Product Security. However, many of the findings have been low-priority vulnerabilities — often within obscure driver code — questionable patches, and outright hallucinations, leaving human maintainers to separate useful work from noise.

This problem already constitutes a nuisance for kernel teams that have to fix these issues. In the Linux 7.3 networking pull request, maintainer Jakub Kicinski estimated that between one-third and one-half of the 648 net-next patches handled during the cycle appeared to be low-priority fixes, clean-ups, or clarifications driven by AI. "We are completely overwhelmed,” Kicinski wrote.

The issue has also led Linux maintainers to question whether decades-old drivers are worth keeping alive. In April, developer Andrew Lunn proposed removing nearly 28,000 lines of legacy networking code covering old ISA and PCMCIA-era hardware. While these drivers historically required little attention because they barely had any users, the AI and fuzzing tools started finding defects that maintainers were obligated to investigate and fix, regardless of whether anyone actually runs the hardware.

Linux 7.3 is removing old SGI and IBM driver code, while other ancient components have also been retired as maintainers reassess whether their compatibility value justifies their new maintenance cost. The FreeVxFS filesystem driver, for example, was removed after its maintainer said the decades-old compatibility code now largely served as fodder for automated bug checkers.

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/li...verwhelmed

[Mister Agenda]

Trump’s geopolitical aims, not economics, are behind his trade hostility towards Canada

I think the president has woefully underestimated Canada's power to inflict economic pain on us. I hate to root for recession, but maybe that's what it will take for his party to make him sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.

[Fake Messiah]

Now that right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos got deported to the UK, he suddenly regrets his support for Trump.

In his first interview since being detained by ICE and deported, far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos said he is "very ashamed" to have ever supported President Donald Trump.

Yiannopoulos joined Piers Morgan on Piers Morgan Uncensored this week to discuss his detention by ICE agents in Louisiana on Thursday. Yiannopoulos has since been deported back to the United Kingdom.

The right-wing provocateur told Morgan:

To think that the promise and hope and joy and the anticipation of Trump 2016 could, sort of, over the course of 10 years, collapse into this ugly, warmongering, whole mentally ill heap of crazy – with some of the most unstable and lunatic people, seemingly directing the President's actions! If I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible, I would never have got involved in supporting Trump in the first place and I'm very ashamed that I did.

Yiannopoulos admitted to cheering on ICE actions in the past, but he argued they should be focused on violent criminals and drug dealers.

"I was put from a detention facility to a correctional facility; every three hours, they were sort of trying to keep ahead of my lawyers… no one would tell me anything. I mean, I know it's designed to be like that, but it was humiliating, and it was disorientating all the rest of it, it was physically degrading. It was frightening," he said.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/cele...35250.html

[Ravenshire]

Trump’s geopolitical aims, not economics, are behind his trade hostility towards Canada

I think the president has woefully underestimated Canada's power to inflict economic pain on us. I hate to root for recession, but maybe that's what it will take for his party to make him sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.

I don't think there's anything that can be done or said to the Tangerine Toddler to make him sit down and shut up. He's impervious to criticism, immune to shame, and fully convinced that he, and he alone has any answers.

[Angrboda]

EU struggles to find an effective response after Germany blames Russia for a foiled drone attack

The European Union on Wednesday weighed how best to respond to an attempted drone attack at a German airport blamed on Russia but struggled to find new ways to meet the challenge without resorting to military means.

The German government said Tuesday that Russia was responsible for the failed attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport on Aug. 4 using a drone laden with explosives and announced it would shut down a Russian consulate among other measures.

The nature of the incident and its attribution to Russia set a new benchmark. The drone was found near a Ukrainian cargo plane and the device was defused. The airport is a major international freight hub used for providing support to Ukraine.

“It is clear that it has all the hallmarks of state sponsored terrorism. The question is: what do we do about this,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told reporters before chairing a meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers in Ireland.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said France summoned Russia’s envoy to “protest strongly” and wants to impose sanctions on more of the Kremlin’s shadow fleet ships.