Tech news is coming in a sec, but first, whale facts. Sperm whales can sleep
vertically. Whale facts. When I was five, I thought a whale lived in the
deep end of the pool at the community center by my house and as a result didn't learn to swim until I was 12.
Whale facts. There's a whale land happening on February 21st and 22nd, so
buy tickets at the link below. It's about gaming, not whales so much, but
NVIDIA reportedly isn't releasing any new RTX gaming GPUs in 2026 with a
rumored RTX 60 series now being potentially delayed until 2028.
According to insiders who spoke to The Information, the problem is supply
constraints on VRAM, if you could believe it.
NVIDIA says demand for GeForce cards is strong, but supply remains tight,
forcing the company to focus on shipping existing models instead of launching new
ones, which is funny because NVIDIA is also reportedly cutting production of
some current GPUs by around 20% and
prioritizing lower VRAM cards to stretch
available memory. Even worse, delaying the refresh would mean that mass
production of the RTX 60 series wouldn't actually start until the tail end of
2027. Now, considering that previous rumors had the RTX 5070 Ti Super
sporting 24 gigs of GDDR7, I guess I can
kind of see where NVIDIA is coming from. I mean, you know, we didn't want new
GPUs anyways. We know those are only for data centers now. Giving gamers GPUs?
>> [laughter] >> That would be funny. There is one small
silver lining here, though. NVIDIA may resurrect older GPUs to help stabilize
supply, so you don't get new GPUs. You don't even get current-gen GPUs. You'll
get an old, crusty GPU we fished out
from behind the kitchen cabinet, if you behave. Apple's lockdown mode is in the
news this week after the security feature successfully kept FBI
investigators from accessing data in a journalist's iPhone 13. After federal
agents raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson as part of
a classified leaks investigation, the FBI forensic unit couldn't extract data
from her iPhone because it was set to lockdown mode, Apple's extreme security
setting built for people more likely to be targeted by digital threats, but
available to anyone who turns it on in settings. It basically breaks a bunch of
features on purpose, blocking unknown connections, limiting attachments,
restricting web connectivity, and preventing access by device management
tools. Essentially, it turns your smartphone into an incredibly paranoid
brick. The FBI filing notes that they could have disabled lockdown mode by
compelling Natanson to unlock it using Face ID because, fun fact, they are
legally allowed to do that. You know, I've always liked PIN codes better
anyway. But, the reporter had Face ID disabled on her iPhone, and the FBI
can't force you to disclose your PIN code until we all have
government-mandated Neuralinks. It'll happen. Unfortunately for Natanson, she
did have Touch ID set up on her Mac, so the authorities were able to access data
from that. It's another reminder that, despite a truly annoying, elitist vibe
and a lot of anti-competitive behavior, Apple has leaned harder into privacy
features than probably any other big tech company. They even have a nifty
shortcut where pressing the power button five times on your iPhone disables
biometric sign-in and requires a PIN to unlock it. Isn't that cool? Just don't
press the power button five times on Android. Most of the time that will
directly call 911, which, you know, is different. The European Commission has
preliminarily found TikTok in breach of the EU's Digital Services Act for its
addictive nature. TikTok's basically in trouble for being too enjoyable. Better
call the fun police. Lame. The Commission says TikTok's
design rewards compulsive scrolling, and that existing safeguards like parental
controls aren't cutting it, especially when the vast majority of people doing
that scrolling now are adults anyway. The commission has ruled that TikTok
needs to disable infinite scroll, implement screen time breaks, and
overhaul its recommendation system. So, basically change everything about the
app. This comes on the heels of a series of US lawsuits taking the big tobacco
approach to social media, arguing these platforms are addictive products causing
personal injury. The EU's investigation has been running since early 2024 and
has already found TikTok guilty of insufficient advertising transparency.
TikTok now has the chance to defend itself before the investigation
concludes, and a spokesperson for the company told the Financial Times they
will take whatever steps are necessary to keep the app as it is. As addictive
as possible. Clearly unaware of what side of history they're on there. Uh if
TikTok can't make a case for keeping the app the same and doesn't comply with the
EU's requested changes, they face fines of up to 6% of total global revenue. You
know, at a certain point we got to be asking how much are these apps really worth? At least smoking had the benefit
of making you look cool. TikTok just lets your uncle share his big shrimp
conspiracy theory in a medium where all your friends can make fun of him. Dave,
you got to stop posting about big shrimp, and Kathy is worried. We all
are. Even our sponsor. Hey. Hey, man.
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The Quick Bits once spent 3 years aboard a deep-sea vessel in the Pacific in an
obsessive pursuit of a colossal white whale. They were never the same after
that. When they returned, the sense of playfulness that danced in their eyes
had fled.
The Internet Archive just launched a WordPress plugin that automatically
fixes link rot by redirecting dead URLs
to archived versions on the Wayback Machine, which is great because roughly
38% of links from the past decade are already broken. The new plugin scans
posts in the background, creates snapshots when needed, and even restores
links if pages come back online. This is huge because it might finally fix all
those busted Sonic fan fiction redirects on those sketchy forum sites. What does
Sonic sound like? WHOA, I SWEAR that chili dog just disappeared inside me,
Amy. I don't know what happened.
Amy? It's another It's his friend It's Sonic's friend. You clearly haven't read
enough Sonic fiction. Windows 11's latest security update is reportedly
causing dropped frames and artifacting in games, and NVIDIA says the fix right
now is to just uninstall it. You know, the mandatory security patch? Yeah, the
workaround is just not just uninstall that. >> [laughter] >> Some users report major FPS drops and
visual glitches until the games eventually just break. On the bright
side, the latest Windows Insider build added shared Bluetooth audio. So, now
you and a friend can both hear people screaming in CS:GO lobbies about dropped
frames. I mean, you could do that before if you were both if you were playing
together, but you get it. iPhone is going to space, baby. And NASA
administrator Jared Isaacman has announced that astronauts on the Crew 12
and Artemis 2 missions will be allowed to bring smartphones to space for the
first time, replacing the decade-old Nikon DSLRs and GoPros they were stuck
with. Apparently, astronauts are so addicted to TikTok that NASA decided it
would be dangerous to send them up without it. There's way too many movies about people going crazy in space.
Artemis 2 will be the first crewed moon mission since 1972. So, we're about to
get the first smartphone photos from lunar orbit, which is great for the
astronauts. But, if I get told one more time on a commercial flight that I can't
use my phone during takeoff, well, we're letting people use them during space
flights? I'm going to lose it. Substack CEO Chris
Best informed users on Tuesday that they had just discovered a data breach that
occurred in October 2025. The hackers gained access to email addresses, phone
numbers, and internal metadata. Luckily, credit card numbers and passwords were
not compromised. It's unclear how many users were impacted, but Bleeping
Computer reported that someone on Breach Forums leaked a database containing
almost 700,000 records of allegedly stolen Substack data. So, head on over
there if you want to find out which of your friends has a monthly subscription
to the Sonic the Hedgehog versus Minions slash fiction blog. Two Sonic jokes in
one video? A momentous day.
And Senator Elizabeth Warren is pressing Google for answers about Gemini's
upcoming built-in checkout feature, which would let users buy products
directly through the AI chatbot using a new protocol codeveloped with Shopify,
Walmart, and Target. Warren is concerned Google could merge its massive user data
with retailer data to manipulate consumers into spending more, pointing
out Google already admitted the feature will help retailers upsell users on
premium products, which is pretty embarrassing for her. We're supposed to
let tech companies move fast and break things, even society in general, and
then talk about how it's bad, but we can't do anything about it because
everyone's addicted to the bad thing that's melting our brains. Besides,
Google is way smarter than us because they make $400 billion a year. How much
do you make working for the Senate? Probably not even a billion.
Shut up, Elizabeth Warren. Just let me give my credit card info to a chatbot
that will get prompt injected into buying me 10,000 Zorb balls. IT KNOWS
WHAT I WANT. AND WHAT I want is for you to get some tickets to the whale land.
And to come back on Monday for more tech news, of course. One more whale fact,
whale earwax can reveal their age, like trees.
Whales, the trees of the water.