So Riley wanted a day off, which I'm fine with, but try telling that to the
tech news. It never stops. Every other day, it's story after story after story
after story after story after story after story after. It's finally
happening. Android and Chrome OS are merging. But how exactly? Well, I'm not
sure. But Google's Samir Samat, Android ecosystem president extraordinaire, has
confirmed this in an interview with Techraar's Lance Ulanov. Now, it wasn't
the main topic of discussion, and he didn't have much else to say on the
matter, but this statement could confirm the rumor from November of last year
that Chrome OS would be migrating to Android. Man, that would be great to
have all of my apps and experiences just translate perfectly between my devices.
You know, like on Apple, except without the massive price tag on every piece of
hardware and a walled garden ecosystem that forces you to use products from a
single manufacturer. Speaking of expensive hardware, looks like those
price leaks for the Xbox Ally and Ally X
were right. Rei Hueos noticed that
Google search store metadata from ASUS's own website has listed the Xbox Ally X
at €899 and the regular Xbox Ally nonX at €599.
I mean, considering how much an Ally and an Ally X cost right now, those prices
do sound about right. But if you thought the Switch 2 was expensive, welcome to
PC gaming, baby. expensive hardware upfront, but hey, at
least there's cheap games of plenty after the fact. And in all seriousness,
that tax can greatly affect electronics MSRPs in Europe, and we might see some
lower prices on this side of the pond. Just not that much lower. So, for anyone
who was hoping that Xbox and Microsoft would be subsidizing a big chunk of the
price, maybe don't hold your breath. I mean, this is the same Microsoft that
just laid off a ton of developers, developers, developers. Steve Balmer
must be rolling over in his grave. >> He's not dead yet,
>> right? Uh, next topic. It turns out that
Google Gemini for Workspace can be easily manipulated, just like me.
My puppet, I guess. I don't know. It's in the script. Basically, an attacker
can embed invisible size zero white-on-white font instructions within
admin tags, and then if they get summarized by AI, the user will get a
bunch of official looking security warnings that could socially engineer
them into handing over credentials or placing a call to a scam call center.
There's no obvious fishing links, no.exe
files to run, and no requests to wire money to a Nigerian prince. The whole
thing is kind of pretty clever. And it gets worse because this goes beyond just
email and affects just about everything that can be summarized like docs,
slides, and drive search functionality. Marco Figueroa
Marco F, who first published findings of this new scam process a few days ago,
suggests that you remove, neutralize, or
ignore content that is styled to be hidden in the body text or add a
post-processing filter that scans the Gemini output. Guys, I've got it. Let's
just make another AI that summarizes whether the AI summary is a scam. Huh,
it's brilliant. And we could make it modular and lightweight, like the M1
sofa from our sponsor, Rove Lab, who brought it back to our time from a
future furniture utopia, where people don't need to call two friends to help
them haul a giant sofa up a flight of stairs. M1 sofa components come in easy
to carry compact boxes from which they blossom into shape when opened like the
food in Star Wars which technically takes place in the past not the future.
But don't think about that. Think about how M1 sofas don't require any tools or
complicated instructions to set up and are made of premium materials like highdensity foam and durable easy to
clean fabrics. They also come with a lifetime warranty for total peace of
mind. So, take your couch game into the future and unbox comfort at
rovelab.com/techlink where you can get 50% off along with an
exclusive $100 discount for our viewers. But what about the rest? Bring out the
expeditious smidgens quickly now. I can
only do this bit for so long. Ever wonder how quickly you can destroy
evidence in a pinch? Well, now you don't have to because Team Group has created a
self-destructing SSD with intelligent
dual mode data destruction on the new P250 Q-M80. You can choose S/W quick
erase, which will wipe the drive but maintain functionality, or HW quick
erase, which will physically destroy the NAND with high voltage. Okay, that
sounds pretty cool. I 100% want to try this when it launches. As for Grock,
maybe that should get unlaunched. XAI has tried to explain what happened with
the whole Mecca Hitler fiasco. Their
explanation, we discovered a root cause that was an update to a code path
upstream of the at Grock bot. This is independent of the underlying language
model that powers at Grock. Wow. Well, I'm completely relieved. All of the
racist Hitler loving code is just from an upstream code path, guys. Just like
with rivers, it's not our problem if the pollution is coming from upstream. Wait,
yes, it is. But I'm not going to worry about that. Just like I'm not going to
worry about Microsoft Office not getting any more feature updates on Windows 10
because I'm using Windows 11 and also Google Docs. But whether you care about
this or not, it's a really good time to point out that as of June earlier this
year, Windows 10 still had a higher install base. So, um, the transition not
going too great, but that doesn't stop the impending end of life that's coming
in October 2028 when it stops getting security updates. And it doesn't change
that in August there won't be any new features unless you upgrade your OS to
Windows 11 or Linux. You know, sometimes
I wonder why we don't see more human inspired computer technology. Maybe it's
cuz we're gross bags of meat. Maybe. Yeah, I think so. But Korean scientists
are looking to our noses for inspiration around filtering air particles. It's
called PRO, particle removing oil coated filter. And it both removes more
particles while lasting way longer than traditional filters. That's pretty neat.
Excuse me. Sorry. They're still working out the kinks. And last, but yeah,
honestly, this one was definitely least. I mean, the one that came before it was a nose filter, but anyway, it's pretty
cool. We're getting fake CRTs from Japan's Mizuki Co., and I really do mean
fake, because basically, it's just a curved 4x3 LCD panel that's housed in a
CRT-shaped shell. It's going to be about 8 in small and is going to pair with
their mini retro reprint PCs. That is assuming their crowdfunding works.
They're a little under halfway there at the time of writing. And I really don't know what the appeal is going to be of
an 8 in CRT alike. Thanks for joining us
for another episode of TechL. What's going to happen next time? Unlike Dragon
Ball Z, there's no sneak peek. So, your guess honestly is as good as mine. But I
think I'm gonna bet on Goku fighting Mecca Hitler.