As you can see, it is a new year, one that we can now verify contains some bonkers tech news
right off the bat. So here's some of it. The Nintendo Switch 2's motherboard has leaked in
photos posted on Reddit. And while normally I'd sprinkle in some alleged leads in here,
the sheer quantity of Switch 2 leaks in recent months is making it pretty easy to see which
ones overlap. This motherboard not only has USB-C ports in the right places on the top and
bottom, but it matches up with a previous leak showing the other side of the PCB attached to
what is certainly the Switch 2 panel. And I've never been more sure of anything in my life.
Do we live in a simulation? I don't know, but that's the Switch 2!
One image shows the NVIDIA processor, with text indicating it was built on a slightly older
Samsung 8nm node, leading some to express concerns that the console's graphics won't be able to
render Mario's nipples at the 4K and 60fps they deserve. Others, like YouTuber TheWolften,
aren't as worried. LOL RATION! In fact, Nintendo just filed a patent yesterday,
spotted by Laura Kate Dale on Blue Sky, that describes upscaling techniques. And since NVIDIA's
DLSS is the best in the game, I'm sure the Switch 2 will do justice to whatever nips may slide on
to its display. Sounds painful. So when the heck is Nintendo going to speak up about this console?
Well, they're going to talk about it sometime in the next three months, according to the Game
Awards Twitter account for some reason. Look, Jeff Kealy's just protecting his shy Japanese
mega-corporation friend. See, they're just not ready yet!
That was Jeff Kealy. I haven't worked on it. In other leaks that seem surprisingly legit news,
Half-Life 3. It seems like it's happening. YouTuber and data miner Gabe Follower,
who's been responsible for some reliable info in the past, claims his sources say
Valve has begun friends and family playtesting for the project codenamed HLX,
which is strongly believed to be Half-Life 3. His video goes through many more breadcrumbs,
but speculation was truly set ablaze when Mike Shapiro, the voice actor for Half-Life characters
G-Man and Barney, tweeted a video speaking in a G-Man-esque voice and teasing unexpected
surprises in the new year. Unexpected surprises. The last time Shapiro did something like this
was back in 2020 during the launch of Valve's VR title, Half-Life Alyx. Now, this may be solid proof
that we can soon expect at least another Half-Life game. It may also be a promo for Shapiro's own
music, given that the painting shown in the video is the art from the two-week-old Mike Shapiro
best long dog. If that's the case, I will be disappointed but happy for Mike and his reportedly
very good and lengthy pet. California's ban on what it calls addictive feeds for miners on social
platforms was approved by a federal judge on New Year's Eve in the world's latest attempt to
stop whatever is happening to Gen Alpha. We don't understand it, but we know its aura is
High Key Ohio, which is not goals at all. Did you understand that?
High Key Ohio? Yes. Why Ohio?
Just gotta look it up. The ruling means companies like Meta, Snap, and Bite Dance will be forced to make significant
changes to their social apps to prevent miners from accessing algorithmic feeds fed by their
personal data. Why don't those companies sue to stop this? Well, they did.
After Bill SB976 was signed into law in September, industry group NetChoice sued to block it from
taking effect. And indeed, Judge Edward J. De Villa did block many of the Bill's key elements,
but upheld the ban on addictive feeds. Social platforms will also not be able to send miners
notifications from 8am to 3pm and from midnight to 6am. Go to sleep kids, you can have brain rot
for breakfast. Oh, turns out there are quick bits in the New Year too, which I honestly wasn't
expecting, but okay. Honey, the scam posing as a coupon finding service has been hit by a class
action lawsuit filed by a group of lawyers and YouTubers, including Wendover Productions and
Legal Eagle, aka Devin Stone, who says after watching YouTuber Megalag's recently posted
expose, he was furious, presumably because he found out about Honey stealing influencers
affiliate link commissions and not because he couldn't understand Megalag's Kiwi accent.
What? I understood him fine. I just thought, isn't it cool that people talk differently?
Pornhub parent company ILO has blocked access to its network of adults websites in Florida
and South Carolina, who just joined a list of 16 other US states who have passed age verification
laws to prevent miners from accessing adult content. It was 17 other states, but a judge
blocked the law in Tennessee, and an investigative redditor from the state confirmed they can still
access the site. Doing the hard work so you don't have to, or in case you can, that was a pun.
A map from 404 Media shows that ILO sites are now blocked across nearly half the country,
if you're going by landmass. Which, I don't know why you would.
The US Treasury Department says that Chinese hackers broke into several workstations and
accessed classified documents in what the agency called a major cybersecurity incident,
as opposed to the normal ones that happen every Tuesday. The breach comes as US government officials
are still trying to get hackers out of the country's telecoms networks, which is hard when they can
squeeze through gaps the width of a pencil or the length of a human hair or something.
They squish their bones flat or something. I don't get it. And a software engineer helping to maintain the diaspora, Federated Social Network, said that
while investigating load spikes in the project's infrastructure, he discovered that around 70%
of requests received by those websites are sent by bots collecting data to train large language
models. Bots from OpenAI, Amazon, and Anthropic apparently come back to crawl the same webpage
every six hours and manage to evade every attempt to block them, unlike the crawlers from Google
and Bing, which still remember how to behave decently. These younger bots, though, they're
skibbity-rizzing all over the place. I never did that.
But I did ask you to come back for tech news, and so I shall again.
Friday is when there will be more, so see you then.
What? Why are you still looking at me?
Well, well, this is awkward.