The tech news is a microscopic life form
that resides in all technological objects. They continually speak to us,
telling us the wheel of computers. I know it was Qui-Gon, but you can't do a
Qui-Gon impress. Ah, Leon Niss, it doesn't work. Google is walking back
their plan to lock down sideloading on Android. In August, the company
announced that starting next year, Android users would only be able to
install apps made by verified developers, even for apps not listed on
the Play Store, which critics said would seriously hinder indie devs, emulator
projects, and that one guy on GitHub who ports Doom to everything. What about
that guy? Who's going to verify him?
Now, Google says that experienced users
will still be able to install apps from wherever they want, even from unverified
developers. Although, it'll take a few extra steps, a handful of warnings, and
swearing you're not going to blame Google when your phone mysteriously
starts speaking in tongues.
>> I don't think anyone's going to understand that at all. >> It's Latin.
>> It's like a alternate universe where the Holy Spirit is malware.
>> Yeah. [laughter] According to Google's blog post, the idea is to curb malware without
completely shutting the door on Android's openness, which has always
been one of its defining features. The change is a response to heavy push back
from developers, industry groups, and everyday users who didn't love Google
deciding for them what trusted means. So
yeah, sideloading is back, baby, just with training wheels. And when those
come off, I guess that's when we really learned about malware. It feels like
like a concrete skin burn. Skin burn.
What do you call >> road rash? >> Road rash. That's how I learned not to
longboard down hills with no protective equipment. Vine, the 67 67
video app. Oh man, we have to leave that
in. Vine, the 6-second video app shut
down by Twitter in 2017, is back at it
again at Crispy Cream in the form of a new app called Divine, complete with a
sizable chunk of the original video library. The app was created by former
Twitter employee Evan Henshaw Pla aka
Rabbel while working for Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's notfor-profit
and other stuff. He didn't work for Jack Dorsey's not for-p profofit and also for
other stuff. The not forprofit's called and other stuff. Okay. [laughter]
Using data previously stored by archive team which is again a separate entity
not the same as the archive.org team. Okay. Rabbel was able to restore 150 to
200,000 original vines from 60,000
creators who can contact him if they want to take control of their
reconstructed accounts. Wow. And it seems like he's hoping that they will.
Divine breaks from its short form video brethren like Tik Tok by banning AI
generated content. It'll use tech from the human rights nonprofit The Guardian
Project to confirm that a clip was truly captured on a smartphone. If Divine
spots AI slop, it'll yell, "Is that a
weed?" and call the police, not on a
microwave. So with Divine, when you say, "Look at all those chickens," be assured
that while you might not actually be pointing at chickens, you certainly
won't be pointing at AI chickens. And that's all we want at the end of the
day. Anthropic is in the spotlight after alleging that Chinese state- linked
hackers used their clawed chatbot to try
and hack into 30 of what Anthropic calls
critical organizations. [music] And some of those intrusions actually succeeded
supposedly. According to Anthropic, attackers fed Claude detailed prompts,
giving it tasks like finding vulnerabilities on selected targets,
exploiting them, and even harvesting data. Claude was apparently able to
oblige them, but it also hallucinated
portions of its results, meaning that the world's first AI orchestrated cyber
espionage campaign included completely fictional cyber security threats. It's
like staging a heist with that one overconfident guy who points at every
wall and says, "There's a safe behind that." And uh there isn't. Anthropic
claimed the attack was up to 90% autonomous, a figure that a ton of other
researchers immediately questioned, arguing that white hat hackers haven't
been able to coax Claude into doing anything close to what's described here.
So, it's unlikely the spy ring actually
reached near full autonomy. Still, the fact that an LLM could meaningfully
assist at all is probably raising the blood pressure of IT admins across the
world, especially given how friendly these chatbots seem to be when you talk
to them. But at least for now, this is less like Claude the Black Hat and more
like Claude the Duncap.
>> Get him, Riley. >> Oh
man, that was a burn that's almost as sick as our sponsor Microenter. Hey
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entire month of November. Now, if the long bits, which we just did, are the
original trilogy, then the quick bits are the prequels, there's a lot more
stuff jammed in there, and they're harder to understand. Firefox is
building what it calls an AI window, which is like an AI browser mode that is
kept separate from your normal tabs, kind of like a private/inccognito
window. In it, you'll be able to chat with an AI assistant and get help while
you browse, but only if you want because
you can totally ignore this feature. and not use it if you're prejudiced against
clankers. Mosilla is asking their community to help shape this feature by
signing up to test it and then give feedback. Seems like Mozilla is trying
to keep up with all the trending AI browsers while still protecting their
users privacy like me in the shallow end at a pool party. I'm present. I'm there,
but I don't want to drown. I'm sorry. There's a lot of kids over there and
they can all grab your face at any one time. Microsoft has fixed an issue where
some Windows 10 users couldn't enroll for extended security updates to get an
extra year of free updates. But wait,
don't you have to be enrolled in that program to get more updates in the first
place? Is Microsoft trapping users in liinal space where they're both getting
updates and blocked from getting updates at the same time? No. Thankfully, this
isn't a catch22 situation, and every Windows 10 user can get this new fix,
which will allow them to use the ESU
enrollment wizard and collapse the quantum uncertainty. And we're back in
our home dimension. Very good. Good job, Microsoft. So kind of you to allow
people to do the thing you said they could do. Tesla is recalling over 10,000 of its
Power Wall 2 home battery units in the US because a third-party battery cell
defect can lead to overheating, smoke, or even fires. The company says it has
remotely discharged nearly all affected units to make them safe and will replace
them free of charge with certified installers reaching out to customers.
Oh, hello, certified installer. Is it getting hot in here? Or is that just me?
What? Uh, my house is battery's on fire. Chat GPT is rolling out group
chats in select countries, letting users invite contacts to join their chat GBT
session. So, you can use chat GPT to
actually chat with another human now, as
long as an AI is there to supervise. This is great news, especially if you
want someone to mediate your dysfunctional family arguments about what to get for dinner tonight. Yeah,
this is the what to do. Meanwhile, WhatsApp is launching third-party chat
integration across Europe, allowing fully encrypted conversations with
people on other messaging platforms as part of the new requirements laid out by
the digital markets act. It doesn't look like chat GBT is one of those now
interoperable chat apps. So, at least it won't butt in and offer to write some
erotica or something, which is always it always does this. So annoying. Open chat
GBD. Good morning. Want some erotica? Stop. Stop asking. And a heal. A heal. A
new smart bandage uses an AI powered
camera to take pictures of a wound every couple of hours, figure out how it's
healing, and then either zap it with
tiny pulses of electricity or release drugs to help speed the healing up,
which seems better, more useful to me.
In How's that healing? Oh, it's all right. Ah, what do you trust me? I'm a
doctor. In tests on pigs, the bandage doubled the growth of new skin and cut
inflammation. However, the effects are still modest, and there's more work to
do before it's ready for people. Animal testing can be a touchy subject, but
that pig looks comfortable enough and cool in their little healing vest, so
totally worth it. So, any animal testing is actually fine as long as they look
cool while they're doing it. >> Yeah. pretend. [laughter]
That's actually how we found out cigarettes are fine because the animals
look like bad asses.
>> Those are the coolest monkeys I've ever seen. And I bet whoever's hosting on
Monday will look cool, too. How could they not? So, make sure to come back.
I'm going to take the weekend to look into the Tech News sequels. I haven't
seen them yet, but I I bet they have to be meticulously plotted. What else would
you do with a giant important franch? No. No way they'll leave me disappointed
in questioning my lifelong love for tech news. This will be fine.