I know what you're probably thinking right now. Hey, that's the tech news
guy. What's he doing in my house? Well, by clicking the thumbnail, you invited
me in. And it's nice in here, so I'm not
leaving. Sorry. You can now lease a PlayStation 5 in the UK starting at £10
per month because owning things is a quaint little tradition our ancestors
enjoyed. This is much better. The program is called PlayStation Flex and
is essentially just a partnership with Raylo, a gadget leasing business that
has been doing PS5 leases since March of last year. The big change here is that
it's now being advertised directly through the PlayStation Direct
storefront, which basically just sends you to a PlayStation-branded section of
the Raylo website. There's no clear buyout path. You either keep paying or
eventually hand the console back when your term is up unless you contact them
to negotiate. There's no rent-to-own or
financing options are being offered either, like what you might see with
something like Affirm on other digital stores. And this isn't even exclusive to
PlayStation. Raylo will lease you the Nintendo Switch, too, Meta Quest, Xbox
consoles, and even the Lenovo Legion Go. Interestingly, Microsoft offered a
console rent-to-own program called Xbox
All Access before shelving it last year,
presumably because it actually allowed people to save about 20 bucks overall on
the cost of the console and Game Pass combined. [music] That's helping
consumers. We're We're past that. No,
society has progressed to a new, advanced stage where a company take
hardware that people used to be able to purchase and make it a subscription like
HP's laptop program that Linus recently covered on LTT. The problem is hardware
keeps getting more expensive, so cheaper payment plans look okay by comparison,
but these companies don't even have the decency to easily let you buy out the
device at the end. I mean, even car leasing companies at least entertain the
option of a buyout, even if it's usually probably not the
best idea. Hey, I'll tell you what, Sony, I'll charge you 10 pounds a month
for me to give you some better ideas for
what to do with those IP rights to Spider-Man that you somehow still have.
You know what? Let's talk Morbius sequels.
Morbius 2, Morbius.
Amazon security camera subsidiary Ring announced yesterday that it has canceled
its partnership with Flock Safety, the incompetent mass surveillance company
that's recently been under fire for potential misuses of its automated
license plate reader network and the leaking of 2.3 million license plate
searches from its database. That one. The announcement comes after
Ring aired a Super Bowl ad on Sunday for its new AI-powered Search Party feature,
showing dozens of cameras scanning a neighborhood to find a lost dog. Aw,
that's That would be good. But, as pointed out by Senator Ed Markey, this
is kind of clearly a mass surveillance program, prompting people to take a more
critical look at what it might mean for Flock to be able to access Ring's camera
network at will. And what they found was not reassuring. The partnership, which
was announced in October 2025 as part of Ring's community requests program,
allows law enforcement agencies to request video footage from Ring doorbell
owners during active investigations. Under the Flock integration, police
departments using Flock software would have been able to submit those requests
directly through Ring's system. And combined with Ring's recently launched
familiar faces, a facial recognition feature that scans every person who
walks past a camera, and the Search Party feature's ability to track living
things across an entire neighborhood, the whole package starts looking less
like find my lost puppy and more
neighborhood surveillance state.
In its press release, Ring says it's canceling the integration because it
would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. Sure, it
is and the breakup was totally mutual.
Flock was one of two companies approved for the community requests feature. The
other is Axon, the world's largest manufacturer of tasers and body cameras.
So, the only remaining approved handler for your Ring doorbell footage is the
taser guys. If that makes you feel safe, I've got a
very nice bridge to sell you. The China Manned Space Agency on Tuesday
successfully tested its Mengju crew capsule and Long March 10 rocket, which
nailed a propulsive landing on a recovery barge. China is targeting a
manned landing on the moon by 2030, which is also where Jeff Bezos wants to
go. Hours after the test, Bezos, with the energy of the weird kid who ate glue
in elementary school, tweeted a black and white photo of a turtle.
I like turtles. What What can I say?
Bold move when you already look like the turtle club guy from Dana Carvey's 2002
film Master of Disguise. Yes, the cryptic tweet was evidently a reference
to Bezos's own space company Blue Origin, which has a code of arms
featuring two turtles in an apparent attempt to troll Elon Musk. The two have
taken little pot shots at each other since 2015 when Jeff made his infamous
welcome to the club tweet. SpaceX had just landed a Falcon booster and Bezos
pointed out that Blue Origin's New Shepherd had done a suborbital landing
weeks earlier. So, yeah, you're just as cool as us now. You
got to love watching these two weirdos being a decade-long pissing contest over
who gets to colonize space first. Feels like they Feels like they'd drown the
world in piss before either of them won.
Blue Origin recently shared plans for an accelerated moon architecture that could
land astronauts before 2030, which may have had something to do with Elon
announcing on Sunday that SpaceX has shifted focus to building a self-growing
city on the moon instead of Mars, claiming that this could be achieved in
less than 10 years. Now, this is the same Elon Musk who in January 2025
tweeted that the moon is a distraction and called NASA's Artemis moon mission a
jobs program. All of this might be moot
though because apparently SpaceX is a train company now. Sort of. We're
referencing a letter written by the National Labor Relations Board to eight
former SpaceX employees who were fired after they wrote an open letter
criticizing Musk as a frequent source of embarrassment. The NLRB under the Biden
administration had filed a complaint seeking those employees reinstatement
and back pay. But, in an effort to get out of it, SpaceX argued it should be
regulated like an airline or railroad
instead, which coincidentally exempts it from the National Labor Relations Act
entirely. When you're a train, they let you do it. The fired employees attorney
called the NLRB's decision to treat SpaceX as a common carrier contrary to
law and public policy. Choo choo, all aboard the space train. You get no
benefits and you'd have to work in Elon Musk's moon colony. Just so you know.
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Oh, sorry. I should have also said the QuickBits are also in your house now.
They may chew on your wires a little bit, but don't worry, they're harmless
as long as you don't try to stop them. Cash App now lets you generate payment
links to drop straight into DMs with the goal of making peer-to-peer payments
feel less formal. The new feature comes after Cash App conducted a Money Matters
report, which found that Gen Z'ers already coordinate transactions over
text a lot of the time, anyways. Convenient? Sure. I mean, here in
Canada, Interac has had similar request money links for years, and that
definitely didn't lead to a tidal wave of fake Canada Revenue Agency e-transfer
scams. What could possibly go wrong? It'll probably work. You guys do it.
It's fine. Spotify co-CEO Gustav
Söderström, it's probably wrong, sorry, bragged
during this week's earnings call that the company's best developers have not
written a single line of code since December thanks to an internal AI coding
system called Honk. The company shipped
more than 50 new features throughout 2025, including AI-powered prompted
playlists and page match for audiobooks.
Given the speed of this development and AI's propensity for creating security
vulnerabilities, we feel it is our responsibility to tell people to not try
and hack Spotify right now, no matter how trivially easy it might be,
especially given that they just hit record profits of 2.2 billion euros for
2025, nearly double the year before, driven largely by subscription price
hikes. Come on. Let's not Just let them enjoy
this. Meta is reportedly working on facial
recognition for its smart glasses, again
potentially letting wearers identify people in real time. They were holding
off on adding this feature after receiving backlash over potential
privacy concerns, but an internal memo showed to the New York Times noted that
we are now in a quote dynamic political
environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us
would have their resources focused on other concerns. In other words, mods are
asleep post-AI slop. Anyway, if someone wearing smart glasses whispers your name
before you introduce yourself, just assume the pre-crime division is hiring.
And just to get ahead of it, no, I am not the Riley who is going to steal your
car later today. Apple's latest iPhone update, iOS 26.3, now includes a
built-in transfer to Android tool that lets you move apps, photos, and even
your phone number over to an Android device just by placing the two phones
next to each other. We actually saw hints of this back in December when code
found in an Android Canary build suggested that Google was working
towards a similar feature in the opposite direction. The good news
doesn't end there. iPhone users in the EU can also now turn on notification
forwarding for third-party smartwatches, meaning that you don't need to wear a
square watch just because you decided to buy an iPhone.
I mean, it's a rounded rounded corner squares. Circles are cool, too, and so
are interoperability rules. Thanks to you. Thanks so much.
And the new robot from WeRobotics, Isaac Zero, won about $10,000 up front or
roughly $450 a month to fold some of your laundry.
It's mostly autonomous. Uh the system runs off a stationary pole you set in
front of a table and plug it into the wall. Uh the robot uses onboard sensors
to identify, grab, and fold common garments on its own, but for more
complex or confusing items, a remote
teller operator can step in and assist.
So, it's not fully human controlled, but it's also not quite Rosie the Robot just
yet. WeRobotics says it's been stress testing Isaac Zero in commercial
laundromats with promising results. Still, I cannot unsee that this is just
Nintendo's ROB with a glow up.
Maybe we should have treated ROB better. He did help us beat Gyromite after all.
I did not play whatever [music] game this is referring to. But, ROB won't be
able to help you predict when I I'll come back next week. I'll give you a
hint. It's Wednesday the 18th, because this Monday is Family Day here in
British Columbia. It's a little problematic because we have one Olive
Garden and it gets real crowded with everyone in there.