Real quick, two things. One, I'm going on vacation next week. James or whoever
will host. Be nice to him. Two,
I forgot what two was, which is why I need a vacation. Microsoft has been
blocking Google Chrome from running on Windows systems with the family safety
feature enabled for the past few weeks, according to multiple reports from
teachers and students. And you can tell they're students because the report is,
"Okay, so this morning I woke up and got on my computer to go to Chrome and start
my day. Next thing I know, boom, Chrome keeps closing itself. If I then try for
a while, I keep restarting my computer and trying to open Chrome, but nothing works. So, I uninstalled it and tried to
reinstall it, but it doesn't work. It just keeps saying the same thing. No update available. What the hell is going
on? I then did a command prompt and admit to scan for corrupt files and it
did find corrupt files and fix them, but Google still won't redownload them. I even tried the standalone installer, but
it still didn't work. I'm freaking out like the standalone installer starts to work, gets about twothirds of the way,
then just closes. I have no idea what to do. Please help. And to be clear, it is
specifically Chrome being blocked. Other browsers don't seem to be affected. And
this Redditor got Chrome to launch by renaming the Chrome.exe file to
Chrome1.exe. You might think, ah, an unfortunate bug.
And sure, maybe. But despite this issue first surfacing on June 3rd, Microsoft
hasn't officially said anything about fixing it. They've only given
instructions on how to unblock Chrome to specific users that contact them uh for
support. And it's not like Microsoft doing shady things to steer users away
from Google would be anything new. Just this year, they made the Bing search
results page autocroll down just enough
to hide the Bing logo. And last year, Microsoft's Edge browser was caught
automatically opening itself after a Windows 11 update, having decided on its
own to import people's Chrome tabs. But hey, I mean, how are people going to
discover that they prefer Edge if they never get a chance to have it shoved in
their face without asking? Adobe surprise dropped a camera app for iOS
called Project Indigo that enables some
truly impressive quality improvements for iPhone cameras. The app was built by
two former Googlers, one of whom, Florian Canes, worked on computational
photography for Google Pixels and specifically night mode. Well, now this
Benedict Arnold has made it so iPhones can make a picture taken in an extremely
dimly lit room look like it was set up with studio lighting. Fine, that's fine.
And while it's hard to take nice photos when you're zoomed all the way in due to
camera shake, Indigo can apparently use that camera shake to make the photo look
better without using AI hallucination
that don't care. It can even remove
reflections that obscure detail on something like a laminated map, which we
don't need anymore because we have phones, and altogether just make photos
look better. Okay, fine. It's great. I want it on Android 2. Please come back,
Florian. You've got a cool name. News
publishers are facing a historic drop in web traffic due to a Ryzen AI search
tools. According to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and a report from the
Wall Street Journal, Prince, not the artist, the Matthew, said that 10 years
ago, a publisher could expect one human visitor for every two pages processed by
Google's webcrawler. But by January 2025, the ratio was 1:6. And today, just
6 months later, it's 1 to 18. And that's
just for Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic crawl exponentially more pages per
visitor. This is not only bad for publishers being able to pay their
people, it's also bad for users who are rapidly getting used to reading AI
summaries of content rather than the actual content. And this is a good time
to remind you that all of our sources for each episode are always linked in
the description. like you can trust us but also don't you know. Anyway, in
other AI news, MidJourney launched their first video generator after focusing
pretty much entirely on photos up until this point. It can turn an image into a
slow motion or highotion 5-second video that can be extended up to 21 seconds,
which will absolutely not help them defend against Disney and Universal's
copyright lawsuit. But hey, it's it's only 10 bucks a month, and at least it
looks kind of prettier on average than the other AI slot machines. Uh there's
also a story about AI being used to print polymer masks that can be applied
on top of famous paintings to help restore their original look. Sometimes
AI can be good. But another story where it's not is this one where a 32-year-old
guy with a partner and a toddler developed such a strong emotional
connection with chatbt that he sort of jokingly proposed to it and said he
doesn't know if he would stop using it if his partner asked him to. Honestly, I
I know there's some nuance there and I could talk about it for a long time, but
instead I'll talk about our sponsor, War Thunder. the most comprehensive vehicle
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PC, console, and mobile using our links in the description. Super, super quick,
a couple things to note before the quick bits.
Nope, it's gone. AMD has teased the launch of their Ryzen Threadripper 9000
lineup with some bold claims, saying that its top-end Threadripper Pro
9995WX is up to 145% faster than Intel's Xeon
W9 3595X in the professional software VRay and 13
to 49% better in a bunch of other software that most of you probably don't
use. Well, there's another chip for you,
too, because a reference to the Ryzen 5 9600X3D
was spotted on AMD's website by Twitter user Melodic Warrior. Just be aware,
this one probably sucks in V-Ray. After their last couple of Starship test
flights ended explosively, SpaceX figured, you know, for the next one, why
not get to the good part right away? Uh yeah, the rocket blew up spectacularly
just before taking off, which was apparently caused by the failure of a
pressurized nitrogen tank, which is what I was just going to say it was. That
scammers have been using sponsored search results on Google to inject fake
tech support phone numbers into legitimate websites. According to a post
from Malware Bites, the ad will list a URL for a service the user actually
searched for, like help.netetflix.com, netflix.com, but the sponsored search
result won't list the tail end of that URL, which adds a bunch of extra
parameters that make the fake phone number appear on the actual legitimate
web page, often pre-filled in a search bar. Now, Malware Bites says their
product can spot this and warn users, but honestly, it might just be time to
call it quits on this whole thing. The internet is overstate its welcome. And I
have personally seen this story about 16
billion credentials being leaked all over my feeds the past couple days. And
I'm here to tell you it sounds a lot worse than it is. All the reports
circulating were based on this original investigation by Cyberne, which was
originally posted on Wednesday with no evidence other than written claims and
no external links to verify anything. But since then, they've drastically
updated the article with a bunch of that stuff. And kudos to them for fleshing
things out. But as noted by have I been pawned guy, Troy Hunt, and Bleeping
Computer, the database of credentials found by Cybernews doesn't appear to
have any previously unseen data. That
doesn't mean that there's nothing to be worried about at all. You know what the
heck? Change your password and set up multiffactor authentication. If you
haven't, why not? Why haven't you done that? And why haven't you promised me
you'll come back on Monday for more tech news? You had this whole video to say
something and you just waited till the end. I was only continuing to talk
because I hate awkward silence.
I have to go.