Only the truly intelligent can understand this show, so ask yourself if you're mentally
acute enough to handle all of this... Tetch...
Tetch... Nois? Tetch-nois?
Yeah. Um... Windows 11's AI-powered Recall feature, announced by Microsoft on Monday, has gotten
attention from privacy advocates, including the Information Commissioner's Office, which
is the UK's data protection watchdog. The agency says it's making inquiries into the feature, which takes screenshots every
few seconds, giving Microsoft's co-pilot assistant a literal photographic memory of the last
three months of the user's recent activity by default. According to Microsoft, the feature is optional, and these snapshots are encrypted and stored
locally, meaning only someone with access to the device could access the images.
Further, users can restrict recall from collecting screenshots when certain apps and websites
are open, as well as pause snapshots with the click of a button and delete them at
any time. However, this doesn't mean that the feature couldn't wind up capturing sensitive information
like login credentials or, I don't know, your social security number if you accidentally
forget to pause recall while filing your taxes or participating in a hot TikTok trend involving
showing your social insurance number to the camera. It's the hottest trend.
Minds*****! According to privacy advocates, if a malicious person does access the device, or if Microsoft
changes their mind about storing this information locally, the recall feature could still pose
a serious security risk, even with the guardrails Microsoft has provided.
A user who was temporarily borrowing a device or using a public device might not be aware
that recall is even enabled, accidentally exposing their information.
All in all, it's an incredibly invasive feature just for the benefit of a slightly
more effective AI assistant. A bit like replacing your hand with a machete just to make hiking easier.
I mean, I can never hug my children again, but I'm cutting through these bushes like
butter. Here was my first shot before I realized. The European Council has reached a final set of AI safety rules as part of the AI Act,
which goes into effect next month. These EU rules are significantly stronger and more comprehensive than the United States'
own voluntary compliance approach, with tiers of increasingly strict transparency and reporting
requirements depending on the level of risk posed by a given AI system.
The rules restrict EU governments from using real-time biometric monitoring, such as facial
recognition, except to locate suspects of extremely serious crimes or prevent violent
terrorist attacks. Are there any other kind? They likewise ban law enforcement from using AI for social scoring, predictive policing,
and untargeted scraping of facial images. Meanwhile, in a conference in South Korea, several major companies involved in AI development,
including Amazon, Microsoft, and OpenAI, signed onto a voluntary agreement to publish AI safety
frameworks, outlining how they plan to manage risks posed by their AI models, such as misuse
by malicious actors and automated cyber attacks. These plans will apparently include a kill switch to stop all AI development if the company
is not able to guarantee that red lines like the AI-enabled development of bioweapons cannot
be prevented if only because it's really hard to make money when all your customers
are dead. Of course, it might boost public confidence if these companies made more of an effort to
communicate their respect for safety and boundaries in the here and now, especially
OpenAI, which has seen a lot of high-profile departures from its safety and super alignment
departments in recent months. It's not exactly the most serious issue in the world that OpenAI very clearly based their
sky voice on Scarlett Johansson even after she told them no.
That being said, how should we expect OpenAI to treat everyday people with no lawyers when
this is how they treat a rich, famous person with effectively infinite lawyers?
On Monday, we briefly mentioned Intel it happened to drop a preview of its next-gen
Lunar Lake mobile chips the same day as the Snapdragon Exalite laptop lineup reveal, but
we didn't have time to mention that said preview contained more juice than it seemed.
There's always a little more juice. I learned that in juicing school.
For one, Intel claimed that an unnamed Lunar Lake processor outperformed a Snapdragon Exalite
by 1.4 times in stable diffusion, and that its single core performance will be faster
than the Exalite as well. Intel also says not only will Lunar Lake chips far surpass Microsoft's 40 tops requirement
for AI performance, there will also be the first chips built on Intel's 18a process
with new Lion Co performance cores and Skymont efficiency cores, plus the first iteration
of the company's next-gen battle-mage GPU before it even shows up in gaming graphics
cards. Some of their performance claims Intel relied on benchmarks published by Qualcomm since
those fancy new co-pilot plus PCs won't launch for a month, and Qualcomm hasn't
let anyone review them yet, which is reason enough to stay skeptical that the Windows
on ARM Revolution has actually left those stuffy X806 chips in the dust.
Another reason is AMD's expected reveal of its next-gen Zen 5 architecture at Computex
in a couple of weeks, with possibly more details revealed at hot chips in August, and Zen 5
laptops dropping shortly after that. It looks like with Zen 5, AMD will continue their tradition of improving performance by
stuffing even more cores in there. Because why would they stop?
People love cores. They can't stop talking every day. I just hear, cores, cores, cores, and more cores, like, I'm just like, stop, I'm getting
flashbacks to choosing school. If you thought those stories were thrilling, strap in for the quick bits.
Seriously, you may get injured. A new brain implant is allowing a paralyzed man with only limited use of his vocal cords
to communicate bilingually in English and Spanish through a brain-computer interface.
Previous implants have only allowed for unilingual communication, but this single implant is able
to easily switch between both languages after being trained on how the patient's brain
activates when they imagine saying specific vocabulary words.
That's really cool. Amazingly, the patient, a native Spanish speaker, learned English as an adult after the stroke
that left him paralyzed, possibly because he wanted to make the rest of us look bad.
Basta. Por supuesto. Lo entendemos.
Eres muy inteligente. The Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it will be increasing the number of inspections
of water infrastructure following a heightened number of cyberattacks hitting local water
systems in the United States. According to the EPA, over 70% of the systems they've inspected since September last year
have failed to comply with mandates intended to reduce the risk of these kinds of attacks,
including basic measures like changing default passwords and revoking former employees'
access to these facilities. Look, I don't claim to be a cybersecurity expert, but poisoning the water supply should
be a little harder than guessing password 123.
Put an exclamation mark on that bad boy. It's perfect.
Self-driving cars may not be dominating our streets yet, despite Elon Musk's past lofty
promises, but the development of self-driving trucks seems to be heating up.
Volvo just showed off its first production-ready VNL Autonomous Big Rig, designed in collaboration
with Aurora, a company that you won't be surprised to hear specializes in autonomous vehicles.
It's got one of those fancy names. The duo plans to roll out up to 20 of the semi-trucks by the end of this year.
Those are like cyber trucks, but they're bigger, and they work.
The upcoming DDR6 RAM standard may more than double the speed of current DDR5 memory.
According to leaked slides, DDR6 is expected to reach speeds of 17,600 mtps and even has
the potential to go as high as 21,000.
As a point of comparison, DDR5 currently maxes out at 8,400 mtps and is unlikely to
crack 10,000, at least at a price affordable to mere mortals.
Though no matter how fast DDR6 is, it will never be faster than time.
It marches ever forward as the void calls for all of us.
No matter how many Chrome tabs you can keep open. Anyway, sleep tight.
And Coolermaster has added AI to ThermalPaste, or at least to the marketing.
The company's Chinese site apparently claims their new CryoFuse 5 product is competitive
AI ThermalPaste, but the most notable feature of the product line is that it comes in six
different colors for some reason. That was the one place I was missing RGB.
Even weirder, the product's official name is apparently ThermalPaste AI Sports Lottery.
Your Coolermaster just threw in a bunch of unrelated SEO terms in their product names,
or they created artificial life, trapped it inside multicolored goo, and gave it a gambling
addiction. I don't know which I'm scared of more.
Meanwhile, I just want to give you more tech news.
So come on back on Friday, you little smarty pants. You understood everything I said today, didn't you?
You're a genius, and I love that about you.