Real quick, there won't be a tech link this coming Monday because I would much
rather try and fail to cover all the Computex news on Wednesday. What a
thrill that'll be. Apple is up to its old tricks, slapping big red warning
symbols on some iOS apps in the EU like Instacart that don't use App Store
payments, something they've been allowed to do for more than a year. And well,
Apple's used these warnings since then, too. It's just that a bunch of people
notice them now that some apps are actually starting to implement external
payments. It's Apple's typical playbook of technically complying with new
regulations, forcing them to allow third party payments, but doing it angrily
like a nurse that you've offended somehow. Is this the wound? Here's a
band-aid. That attitude can also be seen in Apple telling Patreon that its
external payments link can't open in an inapp browser window. The link has to go
out of the Patreon app to Safari, which might as well be the elephant graveyard.
No, don't go there, Simba. But when it comes to App Store related shenanigans,
Apple isn't the only sketchy player. After resubmitting Fortnite to the US
version of the iOS App Store last week, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced
that Fortnite's next update must drop on
all platforms simultaneously. That's important. He
then went on a little tweet storm directly asking his fellow Tim Cook to
let the kids play as racist Darth Vader. Wait, no, that that's that's for later
in the episode. Sweeney pointed out that Fortnite's not allowed on the App Store,
but a game called Fort Battle Royale Epic Shoot was. When Apple took that
down, Sweeney recommended another knockoff. But Apple neither accepted or
rejected the official Fortnite update, which Sweeney said put the Games Friday
update in jeopardy. Now, this morning, Epic Games claimed Apple blocked its
Fortnite submission. Shocker. And for
some reason, this means Fortnite can't be released to the US App Store or to
the iOS Epic Game Store in the EU where
it was already available. And now, quote, "Sadly, Fortnite on iOS will be
offline worldwide until Apple unblocks it." Now, Fortnite was unavailable to
download for iOS today in the EU, but in statements to Bloomberg, Apple denied
blocking Fortnite on Epic's own store.
It says it just asked Epic's EU developer account to resubmit the app
update without also bundling it with the US App Store submission, which it
doesn't want to allow. So, TLDDR, either Apple's lying or Tim Sweeney took
Fortnite off Epic's own store on purpose to make Apple look bad. Unfortunately,
neither of those are that far-fetched. Like, Tim's trying to open up the App
Store, which is good, but he doesn't really care about who he misleads along
the way. He's like Luan Rail from the best Star Wars thing ever made and/or
season 2 finale streaming now on Disney Plus. Disney sucks, but the show
doesn't. I love Tim Sweeney retweeting an American Fortnite player who's sad
about being this close to playing Fortnite on iOS again only to get
rugpulled. And the only reason he had that hope in the first place is because
Tim Sweeney promised that Apple would approve Fortnite this time. He also
retweeted an AI video saying that elephants evolved from Demetradon. I
think we all know what that says about him. So, you guys like dinosaurs, right?
It's not a dinosaur. Shut up. Now, I spent way too long talking about that,
so I'm going to have to speed through this next stuff. Video cards with a z.com spotted a reference to an Intel
Arcpro B60, whatever that is, on the Mac
Sun website. So, I guess we'll probably at least get to see that at Comp
Computex next week along with maybe a Radeon RX960 XT, which will not look
like the reference design in this tweet from AMD. That's just a mockup that
won't go on sale, but which they nevertheless wanted to show you because
they're proud of the intern that made it. Congrats, Kevin. Listings for eight
and 16 GB versions of the card have already been spotted, so it seems like
this thing might launch next week. We probably won't get to see AMD's rumored
Medusa Point Ryzen APU with 22 cores or
the ARMPowered PC processor cenamed Soundwave that will reportedly take on
NVIDIA's own ARMPowered N1 chip in 2026.
Though, unless Kevin makes a banging mockup for those
two, good luck, dude. OpenAI finally
made its GPT 4.1 models available in chat GPT this week and then announced a
new cloud-based coding agent called Codeex, not to be confused with Codeex
CLI, the open-source agent for terminal
apps that launched last month. Uh, no. If if you'd like to be confused, let me
tell you about how XAI's chatbot Grock suddenly started rambling about white
genocide in South Africa anytime someone tweeted for its opinion on literally
anything that wasn't that. Sometimes it answered the question it was actually
being asked and then went now regarding
South Africa. Other times it completely ignored the prompt and just jumped right
into it. I mean, that's what we're all here for, right? After taking the bot
offline for a bit, XAI brought it back, said they'll be publishing Grock's
system prompts to GitHub going forward, and blamed the issue on an unauthorized
modification made presumably by someone with permissions to do so that also has
strong opinions about South Africa. When asked who it thought the rogue employee
was, new feeling much better now, Grock
said, "Come on, guys. I mean, obviously it wasn't noted CEO of XAI, originally
from South Africa, Elon Musk. He wouldn't risk his company's rep for
that, right? He's never done racially charged things in front of large groups
of people before. And I've never had a worse segue
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now. There's just no time. Spotify has
responded to backlash from podcasters upset over the company's recent update
adding public play counts to every podcast. Spotify's new policy will be to
show public play counts only for podcasts with more than 50,000 plays.
That way, you won't be able to tell how many people are listening to all the
fake podcasts discovered by Business Insider and CNN this week that are only
like 10 seconds long because they're just a front for selling drugs.
Everybody's happy. Reports circulated this week about a massive Steam data
breach that supposedly compromised 89 million accounts. And full disclosure, I
didn't include it on Techlink because something seemed off. And sure enough,
Valve has confirmed that the only thing that was really compromised were a bunch
of one-time login codes that don't work anymore. The company says there's no
real reason to change your password. But do you need a reason? Do it
anyway. Come up with a fun one. Australian startup Gilmore Space was due
to launch the country's first orbital class rocket this week. But during
launch preparations, the rocket's nose cone deployed prematurely. Uh there were
no photos, but it probably looked something like this clip. Uh according
to scientists, in other words, the top fell off, and they should probably build
the next one, so that doesn't happen. Well, some of them are built so the front doesn't fall off at all. And
Fortnite is back one more time because it gave Darth Vader, a boss character in
the game Star Wars mode, an AI version of James Earl Jones's voice that players
can talk to. Vader immediately started
swearing freaking and being a little racist.
Spanish, a useful tongue for smugglers and spice traders. To be fair, he's a
space Nazi super soldier. It's not completely out of left field. Epic Games
pushed a hot fix immediately and pointed out you can report it to them the next
time the guy that literally slaughtered a temple full of younglings says
something a bit edgy. And who knows, maybe I'll say something edgy when you
come back on Wednesday, not Monday, for more tech news. I've got some dark
thoughts in here. You wouldn't think so, but you don't even want to know what I
think about the atomic purple Game Boy Color.
Don't Don't do