Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in.
I'm just kidding. It's great to see you. Also, that's a weird insult. Microsoft
has apparently patched a popular loophole that allowed users to install
Windows 11 on PCs that don't meet the outlandish hardware requirements. Why
convince people to download your OS when you can just make it harder to upgrade
for those who actually want to? This particular trick allowed anyone to
bypass the TPM 2.0 chip requirement of Windows 11 by tricking the OS's setup
file into thinking your machine was a server, classic, not a host.
That's another computer and restaurant word. Unfortunately, Twitter user
TheBobPony discovered that the most recent Insider build of Windows now also
requires servers to have TPM 2.0 support. This isn't the case in normal
Windows yet, but chances are they'll be rolling out an update soon, and that
could leave you with a non-functional system if you use this workaround to
install Windows 11. There are still other methods to install Windows 11
without having TPM 2.0. For example, open-source utility Rufus apparently has
its own workaround, too. I doubt Microsoft is going to succeed at
patching every method for bypassing the hardware requirements, but I'm happy to
have them try. That means less time for them to program more ads into Windows
11. Just kidding, they'll make time. Procreate, the company behind the
popular art app for iPad, have pledged to never add AI to their products. This
is despite the existence of the 2010 song "Never Say Never" by Justin Bieber.
In a video posted by the company's Twitter account, CEO Jason Koopa said,
"I really hate generative AI." And Procreate's website features a page
dedicated to their anti-AI stance. As a result, the company has received a lot
of love from digital artists who probably are tired of having generative
AI trained on their work without consent. But painters and illustrators
aren't the only ones seemingly becoming tired of the onslaught of AI tools. AI
photo editing and image processing features are starting to raise questions
about when a photo stops being a photo.
Just last week, award-winning iPhone camera app Halide has introduced a new
feature called Process Zero, allowing users to take photos without any AI or
image processing at all. Of course, Halide costs $20 a year, so now
ironically you need to pay a subscription to not use AI. National
Public Data, or NPD for short, has
finally confirmed it had a data breach, though they don't actually seem too
sure. In their official statement, the data aggregator says, "There appears to
have been a data security incident." As if hundreds of millions of people's data
ending up on the dark web was somehow not definitive proof enough. While many
reports claim that 2.7 billion people's data was exposed, that's apparently not
quite true. Web security consultant Troy Hunt investigated and found there were
about 134 million unique email addresses. Yet NPD told the Maine
Attorney General's office that only 1.3 million people were affected, which
would imply that they all have about 100 emails. That's normal non-degenerate
behavior, right? It was also discovered by a company called Atlas Data Privacy
that the leaked data contained 272 million unique social security numbers.
So every person affected by the breach must have also been born roughly 200
times. Now to be fair to NPD, millions of these records are for people who no
longer are alive, so maybe they weren't included in the 1.3 million figure. But
it's hard to cut them slack when the hackers may have gotten all this data
because an NPD sister site published a
file containing admin passwords on its homepage that was only removed today.
Sure, we've been hacked before, but the hackers still had to put in some effort.
But do you know how much effort our sponsor War Thunder had to put into their free-to-play vehicular combat game
to make it so so historically accurate? Neither do I, but it seems like a lot,
especially since the game allows you to pilot 2,000 different vehicles into
combat. We're talking planes, tanks, boats, oh my. Plus, War Thunder's
in-depth customization allows you to fine-tune your vehicles to adapt to any
battle. Because you deserve to have the tank you always wanted. Click the link
below to start playing on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, and you'll get
some extra goodies, too. How do you summon Quick Bits? Easy. You just go
Wait, no, that's cats. Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake S desktop CPU lineup is
expected to arrive in October a little fuller than anticipated, a little
healthier, girthier. A leak, courtesy of
Jaekin on Twitter, lists 14 SKUs with
two previously unseen Core Ultra 5 models, the 235 and 225. Another, more
different tweet from fellow leaker OneRaichu, points to the lineup
including one or more additional Core Ultra 3 models with eight cores, like
the four P-cores and four E-cores. Although, depending on who you're talking to, these aren't real E-cores.
Those have all gone to join hyperthreading in the great outdated
tech glossary in the sky. Raspberry Pi, the company whose entire raison d'être
is hyper-affordable mini PCs, has launched a new, even lighter 2 GB
version of the Pi 5, down from 4 GB.
Beyond the 2 GB drop in memory and a newly optimized SOC, the rest of the Pi
specs remain unchanged. It's also for just 50 bucks, down from 60, for
consumers who would rather buy a box of nice popsicles than double their
available RAM. Yet unclear is whether Raspberry Pi will follow this up with a
1 GB version, or whether they'll follow that with an infinite number of pies,
each with half the memory of the previous model, Zeno's paradox style. As
in total pies. Comment if you're nerdy enough to get that reference. The Zotac
Zone, first revealed at CES, has now gone up for pre-order in select regions,
hoping to entice foolish gamers into buying what looks like a Steam Deck
thanks to its dual touchpads, but is actually an $800 Windows handheld with a
120 Hz OLED screen, Hall effect joysticks, a selfie camera, and a
kickstand. The real kicker, though, is the RGB strip on the back. Valve
wouldn't do this to us. The Zone reportedly officially launches in September, but I don't know who to trust
at this point. According to TechRadar, Google has quietly confirmed that there
will be no more Fitbit smartwatches
produced. I'm shocked. No one was more shocked by the story than Google, as a spokesperson
then told Ars Technica that TechRadar's article was not correct, but did not
elaborate on any potential new Fitbit smartwatch products. This confused us
because last week the senior director of product management for Pixel wearables
told Engadget that moving forward Fitbit will be focusing on trackers, not
smartwatches. So I feel like not even Google knows what Google is doing.
That's fun. And Tesla's hiring workers to train its humanoid robot Optimus
using mocap suits. Candidates must be reasonably fit and between 5'7" and
5'11". No big boys or short kings allowed. Unfortunately, this training
might take millions of hours of data, meaning that the first sign of the robot
apocalypse may be an epidemic of repetitive strain injuries. By contrast,
Chinese company Unitree says it has a $16,000
mass-production-ready bot that can jump, jog, withstand kicks, solder
electronics, and flip pancakes with training. It'll be the perfect
bodyguard/butler for all those average-sized men with debilitating
carpal tunnel. But it would be even more debilitating if you didn't come back on
Wednesday for more tech news. I know when you aren't here, and frankly
it hurts. Almost as bad as MY CARPAL TUNNEL. AH.