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would you look at that a stranger stepping in to warm themselves with some

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good old-fashioned tech news and of course some piping hot cocoa

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well i would be happy to oblige that's right in this old speakeasy we're taking

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a look at the biggest tech stories of the year before we ring in yet another

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year probably full of overpriced and impossible to find goods but there'll be

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no sad faces tonight because it's the 2021 techlink christmas special

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you better smile this year started with one of the most

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heartwarming tech stories ever because it was about the people rising up and

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fighting back against the elites on wall street who seemingly evaded any real

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negative outcome from the whole thing but hey we had fun that's right the

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story of game stunks started when members of the r wall street bets

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subreddit inspired by a redditor named keith gill aka

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value managed to collectively drive up gamestop's struggling stock price by 3

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000 from its 52-week low crashing brokerages

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with the strength of their passion but ordinary people aren't supposed to be

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able to manipulate the stock market like this that's wall street's job so it

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didn't look great when the wall street bets subreddit and discord were taken

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down temporarily popular investing app robinhood restricted gamestop stock and

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was even found to have sold user stocks without permission leading to a

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class-action lawsuit against the app and an investigation by congress

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but the meme stock crowd didn't stop at gamestop dogecoin saw a similar surge

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leading robin hood to restrict that too it was the establishment

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however there were plenty of analysts pointing out that while reddit raids on

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certain stocks may be new the risk inherent in trading is not and it's

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likely that just as many or more people ended up worse off than they started but

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the game stunk saga had a lasting impact on the amateur investors scene which

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probably directly fed into another of our main stories

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nfts but before we get to that the first half

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of the year was also dominated by another story epic's epic lawsuit

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against apple over the 30 revenue cut it takes from iOS apps epic continued

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trying to convince legislators that apple should open up its app store

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filing a second lawsuit in the uk and sponsoring a number of state bills

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through its coalition for app fairness none of which actually went anywhere

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but either because of epic's loudness or a general change in the vibes apple and

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other tech giants made a number of changes to their app stores microsoft

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matched the epic game store's 12 revenue cut apple and google reduced their

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standard 30 cut on iOS and Android to 15

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for small developers and apple also settled a separate lawsuit allowing

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developers to email their users about third-party payment options in august

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south korea passed a law requiring mobile app stores to allow third-party

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payment options and apple made one more concession allowing reader apps like

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netflix and spotify to include links to pay for subscriptions on their website

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very big of them in september a ruling was finally issued in the apple v epic

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trial which was described as both a resounding victory for apple and a

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big win for epic which was confusing

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until the actual legal analysts finished their opinion pieces and it became

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apparent that this is not the outcome epic wanted they would have to pay apple

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millions of dollars and sure apple was required to allow developers to include

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buttons linking to third-party payment options within 90 days but they

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successfully won a stay on that order and with both apple and epic appealing

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the result it's unclear what if anything was actually accomplished this year

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other than getting fortnite gamers all riled up there's a lot more to this

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story and in fact i'm almost done my tech longer on it so stay

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tuned for tech longer number two this video is probably already too long but

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the apple vs epic was a canary in the antitrust mine because almost every

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major company was investigated for anti-competitiveness and exploiting

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dominance that uh yay it's not in the christmas spirit at all

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NVIDIA continued trying to buy ARM for over a year a deal that was actively

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opposed by qualcomm google and others who would have to deal with NVIDIA

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gloating about being basically the most important chip maker in the world if it

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went through don't don't want that

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as of this month the ftc has sued NVIDIA to block the acquisition so i wouldn't

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hold your breath if you are a fan a big fan of NVIDIA buying other companies

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this year google threatened to suspend australia's search privileges and

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facebook blocked australian users from sharing news links because the boys down

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there wanted google and facebook to pay news outlets for the privilege of

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linking to australian news articles both companies eventually made big cash deals

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with australian news conglomerates just before australia passed the law that

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would see them find otherwise never try to bluff an aussie they've

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played knifey spoony too many times

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google and apple also made plays that were marketed as privacy wins for

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consumers but which actually solidified their power over their respective ad

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ecosystems google's flock system to replace third-party cookies ended up

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being delayed until 2023 due to industry concerns but apple's tracking

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transparency feature is currently live in iOS 15. although apple also added the

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ability for iOS users to opt out of apple's own tracking in addition to

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third-party advertisers and lastly microsoft got all anti-trustee for a

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second when they made it super difficult to change the default browser in Windows

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11 to anything other than edge but eventually backtracked after they

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realized everyone saw exactly what they're doing it's like

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why are you sneaking why are you sneaking around i just i can see

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oh microsoft but perhaps the story that affected nearly everyone this year is

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the global supply chain issues that made buying electronics harder than the lump

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of coal i'm putting in my son's stocking this year

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why won't he sleep in february it was thought the shortages

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would last maybe until june or later which eventually got amended to mean

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until 2023 small typo while some combination of

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pandemic-inspired dips and spikes in demand are thought to have initially

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caused the shortages for pc gamers things were exacerbated by crypto miners

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and scalpers buying up stock of gpus as soon as it was available leading NVIDIA

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to re-release old models like the gtx 1050 ti now last i checked electronic

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sales are part of the economy so understandably u.s president biden

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stepped in and announced a 37 billion dollar plan to address the chip shortage

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the benefits of which will not be felt for some time in what was ostensibly an

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attempt to discourage miners from buying gaming gpus NVIDIA released gpus

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specifically for crypto mining and added an ethereum mining limiter to its new

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rtx 3060 which the company said was unhackable

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yeah that was that was funny then NVIDIA accidentally leaked a driver that made

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the limiter very much hackable they followed up with special mining limited

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versions of the other cards in the rtx 30 series lineups were

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which were eventually also hacked oh

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well at least gamers could take some comfort in knowing that even scalper

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bots were having a hard time finding units in stock because they would sell

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out immediately Intel announced they were getting back into the foundry

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business and there were times when we thought you know hey

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maybe this will uh maybe this will end soon

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hope on the horizon you know and then other things happened like a giant boat

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blocking the suez canal or a fire at a chip factory or ransomware attacks on

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the colonial pipeline and the world's largest meat supplier where am i going

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to get my meat stock shortages are now just kind of a fact of life in a world

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where you need a 200 membership to buy a ps5 at best buy so maybe we should look

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at the positives we got to witness a dangerous mob of gamers russia micro

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center and a truckload of gpus gets stolen like it's fast and the furious

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out there but hopefully u.s lawmakers pass that bill prohibiting scalping of

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high demand goods because i'd like stories like that to remain fiction

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we've got more top stories of the year coming right up brought to you by secret

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lab makers of chairs engineered to keep you incredibly comfortable for long

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hours at work and play their new titan evo 2022 chair keeps you feeling

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comfortable for longer hours with 4-way lumbar support ultra comfortable seat

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material options and more all chairs come with up to a 5-year

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extended warranty and a 49-day return policy so head to the link in the

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description and check out secret lab today now not mentioning cryptocurrency

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or nfts would be as big of a mistake as not investing in the future of art and

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basically everything and revolutionary things is going to change

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all everything you know in your mind etc so we have to talk about it one could

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argue the current craze was kicked off when legendary digital artist beeple

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sold a collection of his first 5 000 daily creations as an nft for 69 million

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dollars through christie's auction house a development that rankled some true

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crypto art purists which i

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every one of whom i imagine to be dressed like a matrix character at all

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times but it nevertheless led to an nft gold rush that saw twitter founder jack

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dorsey sell his first tweet for nearly three million dollars and countless bots

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sell nfts of stolen art some brands got

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in on the fun charmin sold toilet paper nfts

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atari sold gaming nostalgia nfts and in a more positive story sir tim

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berners-lee sold part of the original source code for the web as an nft

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donating the proceeds to charity see

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they can be okay but not everyone is boarding the crypto hype train india is

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considering banning or regulating cryptocurrency while china has gone for

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the nuclear option metaphorically the ccp banned crypto

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mining in the summer then banned all cryptocurrency transactions in september

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going so far as to cut off power to certain regions which affected unrelated

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factories supplying components to apple Intel and others meanwhile el salvador

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became the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender and the

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experiment is not going super well with the crypto

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industry being shaken by numerous heists hacks and pump and dump schemes you know

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about the squid game one and you should have saw it coming while

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many game developers and digital platforms have announced and then

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canceled nft plans including steam which banned all nft based games other

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companies and people are forging ahead like peter molyneux his game legacy sold

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54 million dollars in land tokens and

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ubisoft refuses to acknowledge that their quartz nft system for ghost recon

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is kind of flopping love them or hate them nfts are probably

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here to stay at least until each revolutionary one-of-a-kind eight-based

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pyramid scheme in which they exist

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collapses speaking of collapsing it seemed like something like that was in

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the cards for facebook this fall after the company was rocked by numerous

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whistles being blown about its inner workings after sustaining criticism for

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stopping researchers from finding out how the facebook social platform

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operates the wall street journal published internal research showing the

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company knew that instagram can be bad for kids mental health particularly

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teenage girls facebook halted development of its kids-focused

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instagram app to avoid some of the scrutiny only to be hit with a

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coordinated barrage of articles from multiple publications about the facebook

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papers a series of internal documents showing facebook's suppressed moderation

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teams worked to undermine apple's efforts to protect user privacy and

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generally made social media more toxic than it already was

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fortunately soon after that facebook rebranded itself as meta and effectively

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started a publicity cycle about the metaverse a super connected super social

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next version of the internet to recap facebook made everyone forget about

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their horrendous internal workings by announcing they were making basically

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the entire internet a virtual reality social platform what is this year did

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you know microsoft released a new operating system this year no no not

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Windows 10 x that died a horrible death in secret i'm talking about Windows 11.

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while there were some reasons to be excited like the new microsoft store's

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excellent revenue sharing scheme and support for Android apps the hype pretty

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quickly died down because of the hardware requirement for a trusted

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platform module or tpm and when Windows 11 officially launched on october 5th it

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was plagued with a host of bugs which took many weeks to fix as of now

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adoption is estimated to be anywhere from two to nine percent of Windows

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users who can't really see a good reason to upgrade just to make the number go up

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by one although that is fun chin up microsoft maybe people just need

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some time to get used to Windows 11. it's like nfts you know

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they'll get there hey let's end on a positive note this year the right to

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repair movement transformed from a few people whining about not being able to

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use their fancy screwdrivers more to a national topic of interest

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lewis rossman deserves much of the credit for starting a gofundme in march

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to campaign for right to repair legislation and a few months later joe

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biden issued an executive order directing the ftc to establish new

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regulations now do i want to make the claim that those two things are directly

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related i mean this is kind of a jokey low

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effort video so you know what yeah yeah i do louis rossman is the president of the

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united states microsoft committed to making its

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surface devices more repairable and later announced a partnership with

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ifixit valve posted a repair guide for the steam deck while also telling people

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they probably shouldn't actually try this fair enough and even apple

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announced a self-service repair program that will let people repair their

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iphones without voiding their warranty walled gardens are opening up our

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screwdrivers have things to do again you know what maybe 2021 wasn't so bad a

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year after all even cyberpunk steam ratings got to a mostly positive now

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obviously there are way too many stories that we didn't get to cover in this

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episode but i think that's plenty of tech news for one yuletide eve so from

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my tech news to yours merry christmas time to count some sugar

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plums these are all new ultra rare sugar plums

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that are going to be triple their worth a year from now you

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just trust me tata