Welcome to the tech news, where every story makes me feel a little bit like Elmo.
A small red creature screaming into the void while the man's hand controls everything I do.
It's like, what are you doing? Google is now using AI to replace news headlines in its search results.
The Verge found multiple instances where headlines they wrote were swapped for AI-generated versions,
sometimes changing the meaning entirely. When contacted for comment, Google claimed that this is part of a small and narrow experiment
to explore the effects of serving headlines that better match the user's profile,
with the personalized titles being based on the user's query, location, and search history.
Critics have been quick to call out that these tailor-made headlines go so far as to be clickbaity,
something that the internet has never had to deal with before. While not great for journalistic integrity, it does explain why my search results have all been clickbait articles
for the Big Shrimp conspiracy that my uncle keeps googling when he comes over.
Dave! Big Shrimp isn't real! You were on a banana boat!
And you hit stroke. It's worth noting that Google said that the insertion of AI headlines into the Discover feed back in July
was also an experiment, but a month later, they made it a permanent feature.
Since then, publishers have seen organic traffic drops of 30 to 60%.
As Google is actively filling search with slop, over on the YouTube side, they're stopping to ask,
hey, how sloppy do you like it? Users have reported seeing polls inquiring whether the videos they're watching feel like AI slop,
which, while annoying that it's necessary, is at least an indication of some level of self-awareness.
Many were quick to call this out, however, as YouTube just crowdsourcing free training data for Google's next slop model,
which sounds like a horrifying reality show.
Still featuring Tyra Banks, though. They come out onto the runway like, hi!
Super Micro co-founder Wally Liao has been arrested by the FBI
for smuggling $2.5 billion worth of servers fitted with NVIDIA GPUs to China.
This is before America was trying to get China to buy them.
Liao, together with his Taiwan-based sales manager Steven Chang,
used a front company in Southeast Asia to order the servers, which were delivered to the front company,
repackaged into unmarked boxes, and forwarded to China.
To fool inspectors, they stocked the front company's warehouse with thousands of dummy servers,
so that when Super Micro's compliance team, or US export officials, came to verify the equipment,
it looked like the already smuggled hardware that was already on the ocean was still sitting right there.
Surveillance footage from the warehouse even caught workers using a hairdryer to peel serial numbers off the real server
and press them onto the fakes. These arrests are part of a broader US government effort to track how restricted AI chips keep reaching China.
They keep slipping over there. They're too slippery.
In a statement to the press, FBI Assistant Director and SpongeBob SquarePads character James C. Barnacle Jr.
That's amazing. Says the FBI will hold accountable anyone who uses American companies to provide export-controlled technology to adversaries.
Super Micro itself is not named as a defendant and says it's cooperating fully with the investigation.
Despite this, Super Micro's stock dropped 25%.
Now, Lia and a Taiwanese middleman have been arrested, but Chang is on the run.
He's probably repacking himself into an unmarked box labeled not NVIDIA GPUs as we speak.
Happy trails, partner. We hope you live. Google is adding a mandatory 24-hour waiting period to sideload apps from unverified developers on Android
because apparently your phone needs to sleep on it.
It's a big decision. Starting in August, the new advanced flow will require users to enable developer mode, confirm they're not being coerced by a scammer,
restart their phone, which conveniently kills any active calls from said scammer, and then just wait a day.
Give it a day. See, I feel. After that, you authenticate with biometrics or a PIN and you can allow unverified installs for seven days or indefinitely.
Okay, so it's not 24 hours per app. It's 24 hours one time and then it's normal sideloading, okay?
Google says sideloaded apps carry malware at 50 times the rate of Play Store apps
and scammers rely on manufactured urgency to pressure victims into installing sketchy APKs.
So developers can skip the drama by verifying their identity and paying a $25 fee
and Google's also offering free limited distribution accounts for students and hobbyists who share apps with up to 20 devices.
Then in September, mandatory verification kicks in for Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand with global enforcement targeting 2027.
Open source advocates like Eftroyd are calling the whole program an existential threat.
But hey, at least you won't have to wait 24 hours for our sponsor.
Time for Quick Bits. Elmo loves Quick Bits.
Elmo also loves Ref referring to himself in the third person, which is a trait shared by exactly two groups,
since we three characters, and tech CEOs under federal investigation.
Meta has reversed its decision to shut down VR support for its VR-centric social platform Horizon Worlds
just two days after confirming the shutdown.
CTO Andrew Bosworth said on an Instagram Q&A they decided to keep it running
after a fan reached out saying they were heartbroken that it would be shut down,
which might be the single most powerful customer complaint in history.
Who is this person? Horizon Worlds will stay on quest for all existing games,
but any new development will be mobile only. Okay, interesting. They're like grandfathering it.
Bosworth previously said the team was having to build everything twice for phones and VR.
Apparently, that includes the decision to kill it too.
It's so nice they decided it twice.
The world's largest coalition of botnets, Aisuru, Kim Wolf, Jack Skid, and Massad?
I think it's unrelated. Different Massad.
Different Massad. Has been taken down in a joint operation between American, German, and Canadian federal police.
Hey, we were there too. That was A-E-H, not A-Y.
Alright. The four botnets compromised over 3 million IoT devices like routers and webcams,
launching DDoS attacks that peaked at a record-breaking 31.4 terabits per second,
enough to knock basically anything offline.
Authorities seized domains, servers, and crypto worth tens of thousands of dollars,
but while two suspected admins were identified, no arrests have been made.
The police are like, we got tired from carrying all the servers and stuff.
We're just going to come back tomorrow. Don't go anywhere.
We're going on a doughnut break. Just stop.
We're trusting you. A North Carolina musician just pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud
for stealing over $10 million in streaming royalties.
Michael Smith, first indicted in 2024, colluded with an unnamed A.I. music company
to generate hundreds of thousands of A.I. tracks.
Smith then used a botnet to stream the massive catalog billions of times,
spreading plays across thousands of fake artists to dodge detection.
Smith faces up to five years in prison and has agreed to forfeit over $8 million.
That's nice of him. We have to keep some of it.
What? In their press release on the case, the DOJ says they're dedicated to prosecuting
A.I. powered theft from real artists, except if you're training an A.I. model.
Then it's, yeah, that's fine. We don't really care what copyright is anymore.
NVIDIA has seemingly confirmed that DLSS5 is basically just a very fast, fancy A.I. image-to-image model.
NVIDIA rep Jacob Freeman told YouTuber Daniel Owen that the tech takes a single 2D frame
plus motion vectors, which is just like saying where things are going to move in the frame,
as input. The model does not have direct awareness of the 3D geometry in the scene,
no depth data, no PBR materials, just what it can see.
It was also revealed that if the A.I. ossifies a game character a bit too much,
devs only have the option to either turn it down, mask out items in the scene entirely,
or tweak color information just a little bit,
which is a far cry from Jensen's claim that DLSS5 critics were completely wrong.
It sounds like they were mostly right. Billions of dollars in R&D, and we got a really expensive Instagram filter.
Some people want it. They shouldn't.
And scientists at Singapore's NTU have built cyborg cockroaches
that pull miniature camera rigs through pipelines to detect leaks.
YAH! Pshh! Like what?
Each roach gets a tiny electronic backpack that steers it via electrical pulses,
and a new process can assemble its little payload in just over a minute.
Project lead Hirotaka Sato already deployed 10 of these bad boys to Myanmar
after last year's earthquake to aid with search and rescue.
And apparently a German startup is working on their own cyborg cockroaches
for military recon and espionage.
Pshh! Sam Fisher wishes he was this good at crawling through tight spaces undetected.
Just like I wish I'll see you on Monday for more tech news.
Or Elmo will find you and not in a tickle me way.
And Elmo has your IP address and Elmo doesn't forget way.
See you next time.