Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted some happy-go-lucky,
positive tech news? Yeah, well tech news ain't your friend.
I'm your friend. I'm just trying to protect you, we know each other.
23andMe, the DNA testing company, has filed for bankruptcy nearly 20 years
after pioneering the consumer genetic testing industry
while collecting a valuable hoard of personal data
that would make smog the dragon blush. While the company says it will continue to operate
during the bankruptcy proceedings, during which it will seek to sell its assets,
co-founder and CEO, Ann Wojcicki, announced she's stepping down
so she can be better positioned to bid on the company herself.
Now, 23andMe says customer's genetic data is anonymized,
but no one's sure whether to believe that, and with the eventual fate of their genetic data uncertain,
privacy experts are strongly advising customers
to delete their DNA.
How wouldn't that kill you? Oh, DNA data!
Oh, it looked like, don't do the first thing.
Also, 23andMe say that even if you delete your account,
they'll still retain a ton of data about you and your DNA, assuming you can still restore it
from the recycle bin. Hey, who's ready for some new GPUs?
These ones could be affordable, kind of. I'm talking about the 60-tier cards.
NVIDIA's RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti have had some specs leak,
courtesy of known Twitter hardware leaker, Momomo,
who posted a couple of HP's Omen desktops with an RTX 5060 Ti.
Those models have eight gigabytes of VRAM, but a 16-Gigabyte variant of the Ti
was spotted in a Best Buy listing. According to video cards with a Z.com, fun spelling,
NVIDIA's forcing their board partners to have at least one graphics card model priced at MSRP,
and it has to be available to purchase on the launch date.
I mean, have you ever heard of such a thing? Video cards also purports to know some other specs
of the cards, which are scheduled to launch on April 16th,
according to WXNod on Twitter.
But there were also leaks mentioning AMD's RX 9060XT,
which looks like it's also coming in 8 and 16-Gigabyte
variants, courtesy of yet another Twitter leaker,
Harukaze5719. Do you think they get together on holidays?
Google has confirmed it may have possibly accidentally
deleted some user's data from Timeline,
the Google Maps feature previously known as Location History.
In an email to affected users, the company said the deletion was caused
by a technical issue, but did not elaborate further,
forcing us to assume they were training a robot to deliver coffee in the server room.
You could have done that in the company ball pit, Google. Come on.
Data snafu comes after some users already lost location history data.
After Google announced in December 2023, that it would be moved to on-device storage by default,
and they gave users instructions on how to back it up.
There were lots of articles spreading the word about this, but you can't reach everyone.
And now Google says that if your data was deleted and you don't have a backup, you're hooped, bud.
I mean, guys, Google's got a lot of data to keep track of.
Have you seen your Google Drive? Pulling up Bilbo Baggins over here.
Why shouldn't I keep it? Look, some of these quick bits are gonna be happy, okay?
Happy to see you. Ha ha ha, boop.
Android users are reporting that Google has started rolling out screen and camera sharing
for its Gemini Live AI conversation mode.
They're features that were previously shown off under the name Project Astra,
promising a future where you can carry on a conversation with your AI assistant,
while it looks through your phone camera, as if you're on one of the worst kind of video calls.
And look, there's the sign.
Oh, wow.
An Italian court has ruled that Google must block pirate websites listed
under the country's piracy shield system, replacing their original web addresses
with fake ones on Google's public DNS service,
a tactic known as DNS poisoning. An Italian regulator's post on LinkedIn
celebrated the ruling as a win against piracy,
which seems a little ironic, given that Italy invented the mafia.
NVIDIA's latest GPU drivers have reportedly caused
the black screen issues that affected some RTX 50 series GPUs to spread to the RTX 40 series,
according to multiple Reddit posts from users suffering the same pain.
Apparently rolling back to a previous driver sometimes fixes it,
but then you're prevented from playing new games with up to date drivers.
I don't know, maybe Jensen's just trying to teach us a lesson.
You know, just cause that screen is dark doesn't mean your mind has to be.
Imagine something in those inky depths.
Oh God, it's coming this way. This was a mistake. The Philips Hue brand, which is now owned by Signify,
is mostly made up of RGB enabled smart lights, but a reference to a Philips Hue smart doorbell
was spotted in an app update. Interestingly, it doesn't change colors,
but it does ask visitors, Hue, are you?
And Penn State researchers have developed technology
that can create what they call audible enclaves,
little pockets of physical space inside which audio can be heard and nowhere else.
The scientists say they've achieved this using self-bending ultrasound beams
and non-linear acoustics, which I'm not here to explain to you, I could,
but I'm only here to warn that if this gets widely adopted,
walking around in a city could sound like you're flipping through radio stations.
And if people hear something they like, they could suddenly stop and then you got a sidewalk pile up on your hands.
We must destroy this technology immediately. To hear about more tech abominations
that shouldn't exist, come back on Wednesday.
What, some of it will be happy? Whatever.