Welcome to TechLink, the show all the cool kids are watching.
It'd be pretty weird if you didn't watch it, too. The latest Windows 11 update is
causing slow speeds and unstable connections when using public Wi-Fi,
like the kind your cousin uses while he writes the next great American novel.
More specifically, the issue seems to affect devices with certain Qualcomm
Wi-Fi adapters and networks that have the 802.11r fast roaming standard
enabled. That's the feature that allows devices to swap between access points
without having to reauthenticate. This feature is heavily relied upon in places
like universities with sprawling campuses, so it's no surprise many
places of higher education have been affected. Microsoft has yet to
officially acknowledge the issue, leaving many universities to acknowledge
the massive psychic havoc this is wreaking on students' already exhausted
minds. Schools in the US, the UK, and Belgium are recommending that students
should roll back the update so their Wi-Fi connection stress can stop getting
in the way of their massive exam stress. 'Tis the season for a mental breakdown.
It's how you become an adult. Apple is the target of a bipartisan group of US
lawmakers that want the Department of Justice to investigate Apple for trying
to shut down the services of tech company Beeper. If you're unfamiliar,
Beeper created an Android app called Beeper Mini that allows users to send
iMessages. Those are Apple only. The company spent 3 years trying to reverse
engineer the iMessage software before they hit a breakthrough. A high schooler
who already did it sent them a Discord message. Now, after Apple has been
trying to break the competing app, a letter signed by a bipartisan group of
US representatives demands Apple be investigated for potentially
anti-competitive conduct, noting that the Department of Commerce had called
Apple a gatekeeper with a monopoly position in its mobile app ecosystem.
While a group of legislators taking on Apple might seem like a long shot, the
tech giant has been increasingly willing to submit to government pressure. The
company announced it's complying with a sales ban on Apple Watch Series 9 and
Ultra 2 in the US after they lost a patent case, even though technically
Biden has until Christmas to veto that ruling. But in all likelihood, he
doesn't have the time. He needs to wrap a bunch of gifts and take all those
naps. The hottest new TikTok trend is being stripped of your ability to sue
TikTok after the company secretly changed its user terms and conditions.
Taking a hard pivot from binding arbitration, the company's dispute
resolution rules now require legal challenges to be filed in one of two
major Californian courts, which could prevent them from having to pay millions
of dollars in fees for individual arbitration. But they didn't stop there.
The terms now mandate any legal complaints must be filed within 1 year
of the alleged harm. If you don't, you forever waive your right to do so. This
is a pretty bold move from the social media platform, but it isn't surprising
based on its history of litigation. In 2021, the company settled a class action
for $92 million after being accused of collecting personal data from underage users.
Yikers. Is that what the kids say? Not poggers. And while US law protected
TikTok after content recommended by its algorithm led to a child's death last
year, this year a judge ruled that same law couldn't protect TikTok, Meta, and
YouTube from a multi-state child safety lawsuit regarding the harms of social
media use. It's a bad time to be TikTok, but it's a great time to be their
lawyers. Subscribe to their calves. Cha-ching. Now's time for the Quick Bits brought to
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It was here. I just It's magical. Mark Gurman dove into the deep waters of
Apple like a merman and started discerning what Apple finds concerning.
Gurman says the company still doesn't know what the key selling points of the
upcoming Vision Pro are and that some within the company compare it to the
Apple Watch, specifically because it took them four generations to make that
product good. Nothing gives me more faith in Apple's $3,500 headset than
hearing they want three more tries.
In yet more Apple news, sorry, last one, I promise, questions have arisen over
the company's MetalFX upscaling feature after notebookcheck.net
spotted references to AMD's FSR tech in Apple software documentation. Some are
theorizing that this means Apple copied AMD's freely available open-source
homework and slapped a MetalFX sticker on it. On the other hand, many of my
favorite types of people, Redditors, have pointed out that current
implementations of metal depend on the neural engine in Apple silicon chips,
while FSR is hardware agnostic. So, MetalFX may simply be using FSR as a
fallback. Back on the first-handed though, my favorite one, this would not
be the first time that Apple has snatched up open-source code and twisted
it into something proprietary. But I mean,
they left it just lying out there in the street. to clip it on your belt or something.
Google will now let you share your location with contacts similar to
Apple's Share My Location feature. You can now send your location to a friend
from the Google Contacts app, though this only works if a Google account is
present in the contact card. If someone shares their location with you, you can
set a notification for when they get to you so you don't have to call your
always-late friends to find out where they are. Little pro tip, if you decide
to leave before they arrive, you don't have to talk to them at all.
Extroverts hate this. AI startup I Zip, alongside scientists
from MIT and California, those are real words, say that large AI models could be
set up to create and train smaller AI models without human input. This is
parenting. These itty-bitty AIs called tiny machine learning or tinyML models
are cheap, lightweight, and can be integrated into small devices to perform specific tasks, like headphones that
adapt to filter out unwanted noise or shoes that learn and adjust to the
wearer's sexy gait. Though, maybe creating a sophisticated new artificial
thinking algorithm allowing it to have babies and then
walking all over said babies is asking for trouble down the line.
going to like this. Researchers ran a rudimentary AI using a combination of
electric circuits and little balls of human brain cells called brain
organoids. I love them. After being connected to an AI tool, the
biocomputer was able to learn and remember information, as well as perform
rudimentary, that's the second time we said it, speech recognition. The
researchers believe their brain-ball PC could potentially perform computing
tasks without supervision, tasks like enacting the downfall of humanity for
afflicting you with the curse of existence. But the frame rate. My
organoids! No! And you'll be cursed with
newslessness if you don't come back on Wednesday for more TechLink. Also, I
would enjoy the chance to spend more time together before we are destroyed by
a tiny brain ball. It's only a matter of time. What's life
about again?