Okay, this is going to sound weird, but I think I'm stuck in a time loop. Like
I'm pretty sure I've done this exact episode before.
But it doesn't matter that I'm trapped in an infinite cycle of delivering tech
news until the heat death of the universe. You need to know about this
computer stuff. >> Important. Microsoft announced on Friday
that Phil Spencer, CEO of their gaming division, and more importantly the guy
you'd think of if someone said the Xbox guy, is retiring. Spencer, who joined
Microsoft in the 1900s and took over Xbox in 2014 after the disastrous Xbox
One launch, is widely credited with turning the brand around and despite
being one of the public faces of an increasingly reviled tech giant,
lighting up the room with his boyish smile. >> Oh, Phil. Xbox president Sarah Bond is
also leaving the company, which according to The Verge's Tom Warren,
many employees are relieved about. Bond had reportedly been pushing the Xbox
everywhere strategy that deemphasized console hardware in favor of mobile and
cloud, gifting us with that most brilliant of marketing slogans, This
isn't an Xbox, which ironically has made it harder than ever to say with
certainty just what an Xbox is. Is this?
That strategy coincided with three consecutive years of declining hardware
revenue. Replacing Spencer is Asha Sharma, now former president of
Microsoft's core AI division, which given the Microslop moniker that Windows
has picked up, is causing concern within the Xbox community. Sharma joined
Microsoft just two years ago in 2024, and before that she was VP of product
and engineering at Meta and chief operating officer at Instacart.
>> This is fine. That corporate pedigree isn't inspiring optimism from Xbox fans
and is causing outright concern for some that her background is a harbinger of
doom for their favorite console. Doom's a game?
>> This is fine. After the announcement, Sharma laid out three commitments: great
games, the return of Xbox, and the future of play, whatever that means. On
AI, she drew a line saying we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our
ecosystem with soulless AI slop. Games are and always will be art crafted by
humans. Okay. Whether Sharma is the savior or executioner of Xbox remains to
be seen. There's also a third option where she sort of just continues keeping
Xbox in a wraith-like neither dead nor
alive undead kind of state. >> think that that's the one probably.
Zbox. Wikipedia has officially blacklisted archive.today, the paywall
bypassing tool often confused with the nonprofit archive.org, not the same.
After editors discovered it was fueling DDoS attacks and tampering with web
snapshots. Following community discussion, English Wikipedia is purging
roughly 695,000 links citing security and reliability
risks. Kind of like what your therapist might suggest to you do with your ex's
texts. The drama centers on the author of a blog called Gyrovag, Yanni
Patokallio, who exposed some alleged aliases used by the archive.today
maintainer, including Deni Petrov and Masha Rabinovich, Rabin Whatever. In
retaliation, archive.today reportedly embedded malicious code in its CAPTCHAs
to funnel DDoS traffic towards Gyrovag. Wikipedia editors also noticed that
archive.today was editing its CAPTCHAs of web pages. A blog post linked in a
Gyrovag article was tampered with to have its author changed from Nora to
Yanni Patokallio, again. Patokallio.
>> Yeah. The double L is messing you up. To top it all off, in an email exchange
telling Patokallio to delete his blog post, the archive.today maintainer made
bizarre threats about posting a OSINT,
an open-source intelligence investigation into Patokallio's Nazi
grandfather and creating a Gyrovag-branded
gay dating app, which is potentially the most terminally online threat ever. Ew,
and we wouldn't want your socially conservative mother to see that, would
we? No. >> [laughter] >> Despite the chaos, the archive.today
person claimed this campaign turned out pretty well and plans to scale down the
DDoS attacks. Hey, we just had a little bit of fun. It was just a little bit of
fun. I'm done now, guys. Security researchers just blew the lid off
Persona, the age verification provider Discord got absolutely flamed for trying
to quietly test on UK users. One of the researchers, named Celeste, found
Persona's entire front-end code base exposed to the open internet on a US
government server. And what was in those files goes way beyond checking your age.
According to the hackers, Persona's software performs 269 not nice
individual verification checks, screening users against watchlists for
terrorism and espionage, comparing selfies to watchlist photos using facial
recognition, and flagging people as suspicious entities based on their face
alone, which explains why all my verification attempts kept returning as
"weird vibes server error" whenever I would wear a beret. Where did you get
that beret? It's none of your artistic business. I like to smoke long
cigarettes sometimes. From Al Qaeda? The internet rumor mill started spinning
when the exposed code had references to a deployment named Onyx, which shares a
name with an AI surveillance platform purchased by ICE for $4.2 million.
Critics online connected that to Peter Thiel's Founders Fund being a major
Persona investor, and then connected that to Thiel's co-founding of the
surveillance firm Palantir, jumping to the conclusion that Persona had to be
funneling biometric data to federal agencies. What other explanation could
there be with so much circumstantial evidence? Well, here's what the
researchers actually found. Zero direct references to ICE, Palantir, or
immigration enforcement in the source files. Celeste publicly asserted this,
noting that a lot of misinformation was spreading about their findings and
wanting to set the record straight. The surveillance capabilities in the code
are real, but the government conspiracy angle was not confirmed. To his credit,
Persona CEO Rick Song didn't send lawyers. He emailed Celeste directly,
acknowledged the exposed code was an oversight, and explained that the Onyx
name actually came from a co-worker's favorite Pokémon. It's a rock snake, you
guys. >> I did not just think of that just now. Celeste asked Song to answer a number of
questions in writing, and Song agreed. He then posted the full email exchange
on X in the interest of transparency. Celeste credited Persona for fixing the
issue quickly and acknowledged some of the flag security concerns were not severe. Reading through the emails, this
exchange was constructive, civil, dare I say flirty? And to summarize, the
surveillance tools baked into Persona's code are real, so we'll keep our guard
up for now, but whether they were ever pointed at Discord users is unknown. And
I'm shipping Celeste and Song hard right now. Almost as hard as I'm shipping our
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squarespace.com/techlinked. >> them on I see them. The quick bits are
immune to the time loop thing because they move too fast for the fabric of
space-time to catch them. They're frictionless.
Must be nice. OpenAI CEO and walking snow patrol song Sam Altman attempted to
justify AI's energy consumption at the AI Impact Summit by saying, "It also
takes a lot of energy to train a human." So You know. Yeah. The pizza pops, the
water. >> Think about it. He went on to drive home his lack of understanding of basic
humanity by stating that it takes like 20 years of life and all the food you
eat during that time before you get smart. I'm so sorry, Sam. I never
considered that by living life so inefficiently I might be taking power
and water away from hard-working AIs that would make better use of it than I
ever could. I'm pooping half of this away. At this point, Altman seems like
the kind of guy who, when presented with the trolley problem, advocates for the
trolley. You're just going to switch the tracks it's on? It's got places to be.
AMD has allegedly stopped updating Windows drivers for the Ryzen Z1
Extreme, a chip notably used in many popular gaming handhelds. According to
post on the creative forum DC Inside, where a Lenovo support agent reportedly
said there are no more plans for further updates. Similar claims have surfaced in
Lenovo community threads and on Reddit. Notably, neither an Asus nor Lenovo have
released a new Z1 Extreme driver update in roughly 6 months, which adds some
credence to the theory. AMD hasn't publicly confirmed any end of support
and the systems this chip is featured in are only 2 years old, but the Z2 is
still getting regular updates. So, what the heck, AMD? Where are the other ones?
Maybe they just forgot about half the user base. You guys are still using
those? Ew. >> Ew. >> [laughter]
>> Rumors suggest Intel's next mainstream desktop platform, code named Nova Lake
S, the S meaning standard desktop, may
not arrive until CES 2027. These leaks come from posts on Twitter and Weibo and
were later echoed by BenchLife's post claiming AMD Zen 6 Olympic Ridge desktop
chips are also being delayed with the same time frame. By the same time frame.
Who by the same time frame. None of this is confirmed yet. However, it would be
nice to get a CES with some proper good old fashioned gaming CPUs for once, you
know? Go to Vegas for a reason. I mean, the sooner is always better, but still.
Researchers at MIT have developed a multi-material 3D printer capable of
producing a fully functional linear electric motor in a single print. Why
should you care? This system uses four extrusion methods to deposit five
different materials including the conductive ones needed for, you know,
electric motors. Vroom vroom. Wait, no. What if you printed an electric motor
gun? The only thing needed to be done after printing was to actually magnetize the
motor's coil for it to work. Even more impressively, the total bill of
materials only came to about 50 cents potentially marking a huge breakthrough
in electric motor manufacturing. I wonder if they sell things in their dorms with it. Maybe something rubbery.
Electric? I think this is a sex toy joke. And Kohler just unveiled the
Anthem Evo cycle, a smart shower system that recirculates and filters your water
in real time so you can stay clean while using less of it. It's like the bath of
showers, you know? You're in your own filth. After putting cameras in toilets,
they've now moved on to creating a way for you to spray yourself with hot
filtered piss. It's even gold colored for obvious reasons. And it also has
other available smart accessories so you can listen to Jerry Jeff Walker's song
Pissing in the Wind except now it's about showering while you clean out all
those pesky jellyfish stings. That's not advice, by the way. That actually makes
it way, way worse and whoever told our culture that that's a thing is perfectly
wrong. David Schwimmer. And that's the show. Now I have to go
fall in love with Andie MacDowell to break the loop or else I'm doing this
again tomorrow. Do you get the reference?
Groundhog Day. It's Groundhog Day. I never saw that one. I'll put that You know what? I'm going to put that on my
movie list. I'm going to put it.