This holiday season, you're getting the greatest gift of all, a James hosted
tech news. So, be grateful. And yes, James does refer to himself in the third
person. Good boy. Spotify has had its
entire music library scraped by a pirate activist group and dumped on Anna's
archive, an open- source search engine for shadow libraries, books with black
pages. The scraped data is about 300
terabytes, including metadata, and of course, tens of millions of tracks,
apparently making up 99.6% 6% of Spotify listens. Take a second to appreciate
just how much music that no one cares
about is in these files. >> Now it's all AI. >> Just delete the file. You got it.
Apparently, this hack is a preservation project, but Spotify says it was done by
abusing public access and bypassing protection. Spotify insists no customer
personal info was compromised. Now, this is more about scraped audio and metadata
than some full internal leak. But still, it's a lot of data. It's not a lot in
size, but it's a lot in file count. It's a lot in emotion >> for its part. Spotify isn't going to
take this lying down, promising to defend the rights of the artists on
their platform. Sure. Yeah. When activists scrape someone's data, they
call the lawyers, but nobody bats an eye when data from YouTube, Twitter, or
Reddit gets scraped by AI. The AI doesn't know any better. It's still
learning. Maybe if those platforms own the license to my content, they would
fight for me. Valve has officially discontinued the original Steam Deck
LCD, quietly sunsetting one of the best bang for your buck handheld gaming
devices ever made. Launched in 2022 for $400 US, the LCD model was the most
affordable way to play your Steam library on the go and even helped kick
off the entire handheld PC boom that we're still basking in today. Once
existing stock is gone, she gone for good, leaving the Steam Deck OLED as the
new entry point at $550. Valve hasn't exactly said why they pulled the plug,
but the writing has been on the wall since the OLED model first launched. The
newer version has a better screen, improved internals, and likely
cannibalized sales of its little brother, the Murderer. the cane of
handhelds. >> Still, it stings. With handheld prices
climbing across the board, the Steam Deck LCD was one of the cheapest grade
options. In related Valve news, Steam itself is going fully 64-bit on Windows.
Support for 32-bit installs is entering its final countdown. Will stop receiving
updates in 2026. So, if you are still somehow running 32-bit Windows, don't
worry. Steam isn't mad. It's just moving on. China's tech giants have found a
hilarious workaround to get NVIDIA's banned AI chips. While NVIDIA Blackwell
B200 accelerators are barred from being sold in China, companies like Tencent
are still getting access by renting them from overseas. According to the
Financial Times, Tencent is leasing large amounts of Blackwell compute
through a Japanese Neocloud operator called Data Section, which owns the
hardware and runs data centers in Japan and Australia. They're kind of like the
Blockbuster video for AI. The chips never physically enter China, so the
arrangement stays technically legal under current rules.
>> Block what? >> I guess more like Netflix. >> [laughter]
>> Tensson reportedly has access to thousands of B200 GPUs and even newer
B300 chips under contracts worth billions of dollars, allowing them to
continue training advanced AI models. Analysts say this rental approach may
actually be more attractive than buying approved chips inside China since
overseas Blackwell hardware massively outperforms what's allowed domestically.
That's the whole reason to do it, right? Meanwhile, NVIDIA is still strengthening
its position elsewhere. Recently receiving US antitrust clearance for a
major investment in Intel, quietly expanding its influence across the
industry, vertically integrating, consolidation, owning the world.
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below. Trying to hide Christmas presents from
the quick bits is a nightmare. They just they just zip around until they find
them. Pain in the ass little ingrades. Mozzilla says Firefox will add a
dedicated AI kill switch after community push back. The company's new CEO has
been pitching Firefox as a modern browser with optional AI features to
keep up with competition. And so far, everything that's been added is optional
to use. The new change simply adds a single explicit toggle to disable all AI
features at once instead of making you hunt through settings. One big button to
make the annoying thing go away. I wish I could do this with Christmas and just
at the mall >> enough.
>> I WISH I COULD DO IT WITH ALL AI. >> OH, people YouTube accounts appear to be
showing strangely high CPU usage even when videos are paused or just when
you're on the homepage before you've watched anything. In a chunky post on
the LT subreddit, user Razazzle caught
the issue, surmising that YouTube Premium seems to have a web worker, a
way for a website to run JavaScript in the background called echowworker.js
that sits in a busy weight loop using the CPU for no real reason.
>> Sounds like my my old job, huh? >> Luckily, our boy Ray Zazelle does offer
a fix for Firefox users. So, if you're a member of the dog pack, go check out
that post. If you're a I don't know wrestling
>> pack is Firefox users. >> Yeah, I guess >> it's not a dog. It's a fox.
>> It's a K9. Who is this guy? >> It's not cat.
>> If you're a Chrome user, I guess pick up some more CPU cores while you're downloading more RAM, homeboy, just
you're on your own. Chinese chip designer More Threads has just rolled
out a new set of GPUs, including its next generation Washon AI chip that it
says can compete with NVIDIA's high-end products, helping fuel a stock price
jump, you love to see it, and investor excitement that's still going higher as
China pushes for tech independence. squash on
>> 2026. Riley, >> what I wasn't >> despite all this, the company hasn't
given detailed benchmarks yet, and there's no third party benchmarks,
leaving some questions about how it really stacks up against NVIDIA. More
power to you, more threads. I'm just looking for affordable GPU that can run
Crisis. You know, what is today's crisis? Let me know in the comments.
A big old power outage knocked out traffic lights in San Francisco, causing
Whimo's driverless taxis to get stuck. >> This is fine and normal.
>> With the cars immobilized and adding to the blackout mess, Whimo paused its robo
taxi services for safety, but has since resumed operations as power came back
on. If this story didn't turn you off robo taxis and you live in London, good
news. Uber and Lyft are teaming up with China's BYU to bring Apollo Go robo
taxis to London streets for testing in 2026, putting them on the starting grid
against Whimo, who's already testing cars in the old smoke. Just hope there's
no power outages, Londers, or you'll be back to ching the tube.
>> Wow. And Google has finally pulled the plug on the Sega Dreamcast Planet Web
3.0 browser. >> NO. >> Officially breaking web access on a
console released all the way back in 1999, the last good year on this planet.
The shutdown happened because Google services simply stopped responding to the ancient browser, quietly ending a
25-year run, which is honestly impressive because this might be one of
the longest running services Google didn't intentionally kill. How the heck
am I supposed to get my optimal seaman growth strategies now? Jeff, I need you
to stay strong. I will get you out of that tank eventually. It's a Dreamcast
game, Riley. >> Okay. >> And you'll need to stay strong to make it through these next few days without
any tech news. But don't worry, we'll be back soon enough. Me and my seaman are
going to stay safe and cozy in my house over the break, though. If I hear anyone banging the roof, I'm not going to be
checking out. You're not going to catch me in any of that Tim Allen Santa Claus
[laughter] Got sheep.