Better than in, I always say. And unfortunately for everyone involved,
that includes today's tech news. That was barely Shrek.
>> That was good. I honestly I heard Shrek, but I also heard a crazy guy would
>> China has quietly made progress on one of the hardest problems in modern chipm,
extreme ultraviolet lithography. According to a Reuters investigation,
researchers at a high security lab in Shenzhen have built a prototype EUV
lithography machine, a device essential for producing advanced semiconductors
and long monopolized by the Dutch company ASML. They love monopolies.
These are massive, delicate, wildly expensive systems, and no company
outside of the Netherlands has successfully built one until now. Kind
of, and maybe not really. China's prototype already generates EUV light
and reportedly fills nearly an entire factory floor, although it has not yet
produced working chips. To make this happen, China recruited former ASML
engineers, many of them Chinese-born and recently retired, offering them massive
signing bonuses and housing incentives. One engineer reportedly arrived on his
first day of work and was handed a fake ID with a new false name on it. And when
he went in the doors, he discovered a bunch of his old co-workers, all with
snazzy new names, too. Bill, it's Jeremy
now. Me, too. We're all Jeremy. Apparently, everyone was instructed to
go by their new aliases and to never acknowledge the project outside of the
compound. To make things even more interesting, it kind of sounds like this
is a skunk works project with China buying up parts from older ASML machines
in used markets to get around all those pesky export controls. Now, this scheme
works out. It would be kind of wild because it's basically the plot of the
Red movies. The retired black ops agents replaced by semiconductor equipment
engineers. The only thing these operatives are assassinating is the US
hegemony. Okay. Yeah, that works. The global RAM shortage being driven largely
by AI companies buying up massive amounts of memory is about to push PC
and smartphone prices higher. and it doesn't look like it's going to stop
anytime soon. An IDC market analysis warns that the crunch could last well
into 2027 and that major PC and phone makers are already preparing further
price increases as the memory supply tightens. Apparently, Apple and Samsung
are a bit insulated from all this because they secure their RAM 12 to 24
months in advance. So, they probably won't increase their prices because they
would have no reason to do that just because every other company in the market is doing that, right? All this
pressure to get RAM is causing some wacky behavior in enthusiast spaces as
older CPUs like AMD's Ryzen 7 5800 X3D
are now selling on eBay for way more than newer chips simply because they let
people use the only slightly cheaper DDR4 memory. Yet, this memory shortage
hasn't stopped NVIDIA from releasing its RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell GPU with a
massive 72 gigabytes of GGDDR7,
targeting AI developers, data scientists, and creative professionals.
On Monday, we covered rumors that NVIDIA was slowing production of its lower to
mid-tier 5000 series gaming GPUs. And we
kind of joked that it was because they were moving the GDDR 7 RAM from those
cards into more expensive products. Well, I guess we now know where all the
RAM went. I'm over here. [clears throat] Can't
catch me. Apple has announced sweeping changes to iOS that are legitimately big
in Japan. As of this week, iPhone users in Japan can officially sideloadad apps,
meaning developers can distribute apps outside the App Store using alternative
marketplaces like Alt Store. This comes as part of Apple's effort to comply with
Japan's new competition rules and is only the latest example of regulators
forcing a crack into Apple's famously locked down ecosystem. That said, this
is still Apple, so the freedom comes with fine print. Apple will continue
collecting fees on third-party in-app payments and even on web purchases tied
to iOS apps. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has of course already criticized the
changes, arguing that Apple is still taxing developers even when it is no
longer providing distribution or payment processing. An accusation Apple is happy
to lean into. The tech giant's updated developer agreement gives the company
new powers to recover unpaid fees owed by devs who had the gall to conduct
their business outside of Apple's holy dominion. I see what you have hidden.
Your every atom cries out for penitence. So, while this is ultimately progress,
it's a little bit more of a sour apple than a sweet one, if you know what I'm
saying. A sweet apple. Well, that would be our
sponsor, UG, Green, and their NAS DH4300
Plus. This bad boy is chunky. With storage space of up to 120 terabytes and
a big old compatibility list for third-party hard drives, what? You don't
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and use the UG Green NAS easily with its step-by-step system guide. You might as
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classify photos of people, places, animals, you name it. [laughter and gasps] When you're done
that, this thing easily connects to Google Drive to upload and download
files fast because it comes equipped with a 2 and 1/2 GB Ethernet port.
However, you best believe that all of your data is stored locally in your own
drives. You're not uploading it to a stinky old cloud. It's all just for you.
So, thanks to UG Green for sponsoring this video. Check them out at the link
below and get 15% off on the DH4300 Plus
and the UG Green NAS series until the 28th. Ores are like onions
and so are the quick bits. They have layers and sometimes they make you want
to cry. [laughter] Uh, Riot Games has discovered a critical motherboard flaw
that lets hardware level cheats slip in and activate before anti-cheat software
even wakes up. The bump in the night was real. The issue affects boards from
ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock, where a security feature called OMMU isn't fully
initializing at boot despite looking like it is. Riot worked with
manufacturers to push BIOS updates and now Valerant players who don't update
their systems will be blocked with a VAN restriction, meaning that your account
will be flagged for using cheater adjacent hardware. Oh yeah, what about
innocent UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY? HUH? SOME LEGAL SYSTEM. SIR, this is a hero
shooter. LG has backed down after TV owners freaked out when a Microsoft
Copilot app suddenly appeared on their home screens and could not be
uninstalled. Well, LG has heard their cries and says it will allow users to
delete Copilot if they want. Although, they also clarified that it was only a
browser shortcut, not a built-in app.
All this fuss over a little shortcut. Don't you feel silly? No, actually.
Turns out quietly injecting an AI chatbot into a device people use to
watch movies was not the vibe. Several popular browser extensions with more
than 8 million installs have been quietly harvesting users full AI
conversations and selling them for marketing purposes. Security researchers
found the extensions inject scripts directly into sites like ChatGpt, Claude
from Anthropic, Gemini, Copilot, and
those other ones and record everything that gets said. Even worse, many of
these extensions were labeled featured in Chrome and Edge stores. So yeah, that
random free VPN you were using for therapy time with your AI girlfriend
might have actually been recording the whole time. Maybe you can ask them to send it to you. You remember the good
times. Amazon caught a North Korean infiltrator working in its IT systems
thanks to something almost invisible. Typing lag. Security teams noticed
keystrokes from a supposedly US-based worker were taking over 110 milliseconds
to reach Seattle. way longer than expected and definitely something that
would show up in their performance review. But really, that tiny delay
suggested the laptop was being controlled from halfway across the
world. Amazon traced the activity, confirmed it was part of a North Korean
remote work scheme, and kicked the contractor out within days. I knew some
companies were tracking their employees, but this is ridiculous.
And a Chinese tech company called Limx
Dynamics just showed off Tron 2, a robot
that appears to consist of a waist torso module thing with two limbs that can be
swapped between having legs or arms depending on the job, but not both. Full
robot bodies are so 2025. The launch video shows the robot lifting stuff and
doing a variety of tasks. But despite its cool and original Tron name, there's
no daft punk or 9-in nails score. Unfortunately, it doesn't even leave a
neon solid light trail behind it wherever it goes, even when the
disembodied robot hips are clearly in its weird doing the splits on
rollerblades light cycle mode. But if none of that has you sold, wait till you
see this halfh humanoid perform some very inhumanoid
uh rollerblade somersaults. Is is this like is this
like it's mating ritual or something? What even? Whatever it is, IT'S WORKING.
HEY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY SWAMP? YOU
CAN'T ROLLERBLADE HERE. That's it for today's tech news. Now get out of here
and we'll see. Oh, I think I was still supposed to be doing the accent there,
but it's