OK, hey, hey, listen. I'm worried you're not getting enough tech news.
But don't worry, don't worry, I got you, I got you. I got some for you here, all right?
It's perfect. Apple will finally allow the side loading of apps
in the European Union later this spring. And I mean actual side loading, downloading apps directly
from the developers website, not just from an app store that isn't the app store.
You couldn't hear it, but the second app store was capitalized.
Unfortunately, this doesn't quite mean that Apple just went full Android as put by Android police.
In yet another example of malicious compliance with the EU's Digital Markets Act,
Apple is arguably treating dev websites worse
than it's treating alternative app stores. To be eligible to allow users to download your app
from your own website, which is kind of a wild sentence,
you are required to have been enrolled in the Apple Developer Program as an EU organization with good standing
for two years or more. You must submit your apps through Apple's notarization
process, and one of your apps must have already been installed more than one million times on iOS in the EU,
AKA the threshold to be eligible for the core technology
fee, meaning every subsequent install will cost you 50 Euro cents.
So Craig Federighi can afford his daily hair appointments and continue to look exquisite.
Do they really call them Euro cents? Euro cents! Mm, ins, ins, ins.
Devs will have to meet a handful of other requirements, while iPhone users will have to wade through what
seems like three or four scare screens designed
to trigger a fight or flight response before they download an app from a website.
If you're covered in cold sweat by the time the app appears on your home screen, Apple's done their job.
You wouldn't download an app. Not unless I said so.
The European Parliament has voted to adopt the EU AI Act,
which limits law enforcement's use of biometrics and prohibits, among other things,
AI-enabled social scoring, exploitative behavioral
engineering, and emotion recognition systems at work or school.
I'm going to miss those. I just want the FBI to know when I have a bad day.
The Federal Bureau of Intimate Feelings. Hey, it's Agent Smith. How are you feeling?
I heard Kevin just broke up with you. The Act also includes stricter scrutiny and transparency
requirements based on the risk an AI system might pose,
both to society and its users. Some critics within Europe have criticized the Act
for going too far and placing European AI firms at a disadvantage to American rivals
in terms of development, raising capital, and destroying civilization as we know it.
It will be some time before the new law takes full effect with its new provisions rolling out in phases
over the course of the next two years to give companies time to come into compliance.
But we might need regulations sooner. Take opening eyes eerily convincing text
to video generator Sora, which CTO Miran Muradi says
will be available to the public sometime this year, just days after the leader of the Sora team
told Marcus Brownlee that it won't be publicly available
anytime soon. Muradi also said Sora will get the capability
to generate audio and maybe even some amount of nudity.
Not in my kingdom hearts. Hopefully after November's election
for the sake of all our sanity and eyes.
I don't wanna see anything huge, you know what I mean? Meanwhile, a report commissioned by the US government
has been published warning that America must take immediate and decisive action to avert serious
security risks, global destabilization, and perhaps even an extinction level threat
to the human species posed by AI. But maybe instead we could keep arguing
about whether or not American football is ruined now that a pop star kinda likes it.
You kiss your boyfriend behind closed doors. For the past few weeks, users on social media
have been freaking out about the whereabouts of Kate Middleton, a fur that was heightened
into a full blown hella baloo. When a Mother's Day image of her posted to her
and her husband's Instagram and sent to various wire services turned out to have been significantly edited.
Now, if you're unfamiliar with Kate Middleton, she's a lot like Tim Cook except she's a woman,
she's British, and instead of being CEO of Apple, she's the Duchess of Cambridge.
Oh, I thought you said Canada. I love Prince Harry. Duchess of Cambridge Analytica.
It's probably important to note that Middleton's disappearance wasn't sudden or unexpected.
In mid January, the royal family announced that she would be undergoing some kind of
unspecified abdominal surgery and afterwards take some time off to recover in private.
But apparently a month and a half is just a crazy amount of time to take off after getting stabbed
in the gut by a trained professional. Wire services typically allow a small degree
of purely cosmetic edits like cropping and retie removal,
but not the kind of significant edits found in the Mother's Day photo, which included
a disappearing sleeve, and a zipper that splits into two, but not in the normal way,
and also green leaves on the trees in a photo supposedly taken in March.
This led to the photo being retracted and to some excited social media sleuths
claiming that the photo was entirely AI fabricated
or that the princess's face was photoshopped over a stand-in by somebody talented enough
to perfectly match the lighting of her face to the scene. But not good enough not to accidentally
delete part of her daughter's sweater? All right. It's a post-truth world.
Where were you at Sweatergate? According to Tom Warren of The Verge,
the photo's metadata indicates that it was shot on a Canon 5D Mark IV and edited using
a 2022 version of Photoshop from before AI features
were added, possibly because the royal family doesn't want to pay $23 a month for the updates.
They're not made of money, just mostly. A tweet apparently directly from the princess
has claimed fault for the bad Photoshop job. So I mean, either she's dead or she just had major surgery
and was hoping that a quick Photoshop job on an old photo would make you guys leave her alone.
I was trying to make my butt look bigger. By not showing it at all.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to eat appetizers after your entree?
My guy. Let me introduce you to the quick bits. NVIDIA absolutely dominates the accelerator market,
but there have been a couple recent developments and alternatives.
Infamous hardware hacker George Hotz's company, The Tiny Corp, is building The Tiny Box,
a $15,000 AI server powered by RX 7900 XTX GPUs.
The Hot Box. The Hot Tiny Box. Or it will be if Tiny can convince AMD
to fix their basic shit in their AI acceleration toolkit
or open source the firmware and let old Geohot fix it himself.
But if that doesn't work out, legendary chip designer Jim Keller's company, TENS Torrent,
launched DevKit's for its risk five based gray skull AI accelerator cards
right after partnering with multiple Japanese chip companies.
Because it's time to reduce the chip market's reliance on island nations that have a tense relationship to China.
Oh no. Hello, Japan. Wait, what?
According to Mark Gurman, who I write slam poetry about, Apple's now canceled electric vehicle project
was not a flashy sports car, but a mini van. Oh God.
Presumably it would have allowed Tim Cook to say, buy your mom an car.
Gurman also said the Apple Silicon team was heavily involved in the Apple car,
designing an AI brain that was as powerful as four M2 Ultra chips combined.
Oh my God. The chip was apparently nearly finished
when the car was scrapped. Maybe Tim can use it to give life to an Android,
the likes of which hasn't been birthed by mortals since the assembly of, well, Mark Zuckerberg.
It'll be very expensive. But it might be very good at BJJ. Drivers have found their insurance has increased
because their cars are tracking them. Some car manufacturers like GM, Honda, Kia and Hyundai
offer optional features in their connected car apps that track and rate your driving.
What they don't say is that they sell that driving data to entities like Data Brokerage
and former adult film star Lexus Nexus, who then sell the information to insurance companies.
Apparently some GM drivers were still tracked without enabling the tracking feature,
leading to increased insurance premiums. Now that adult film star thing was a joke,
but apparently Lexus Nexus has screwed lots of people.
Airbnb will start banning the use of indoor security cameras inside rentals
starting April 30th. The previous policy tried to restrict the use of cameras,
but was vague enough that abuse has occurred in the past. In their policy update, the company said the change
shouldn't be a big deal to host since most of Airbnb's listings
do not report having a security camera. Now I know that's meant to be careful legal speak,
but it sounds like Airbnb knows there are some people covertly capturing buttholes in 4K.
Those cameras are already in. And researchers from the University of Chicago
have claimed that virtual reality headsets like the Quest and Vision Pro
might leave users vulnerable to inception attacks.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Where a hacker connected to the same Wi-Fi network
can control the user's VR environment and manipulate interactions with other users.
It's just like the Christopher Nolan movie, except that you can just take the headset off,
just take it off. This might become a more serious risk
as these headsets get used in more professional applications.
The Vision Pro, for instance, was recently used during neurosurgery,
where it was definitely not hacked and used to trick the surgeon
into implanting a small rubber duck next to the patient's medulla.
Every time you breathe, you quack. And it's not a trick when I tell you
to come back on Friday for more tech news. It's friendship.
Seriously, man, like you need to get more tech news. I'm worried about your levels.