We mean I'm addicted to tech news. I can stop anytime I want. I just don't want to stop,
because it feels good.
Anchor, the parent company of Vufi, the maker of security cameras and robo vacuums that were
found to be, despite their marketing, very much uploading their footage to the cloud,
has admitted that they did that. After the Verge threatened to publish an expose with or without
Anchor's input, the company responded, proving once again that blackmail works. It works people.
Of all the colors of mail, that one gets results. In case you haven't already heard, the security camera company Vufi came under fire months ago
for not adhering to their local-only marketing promise, which is something not just hipsters care
about anymore. In their response, Anchor finally admitted that their cameras were sending unencrypted
video streams to the company's web portal. Apparently, video sent to iOS and Android companion
apps was encrypted, and so was recorded footage sent to the web. But live video streams were not
encrypted, meaning that their customers were completely unaware that they are revealing
more on stream than popular Twitch streamer Amaranth, except without the millions and only
fans revenue. Anchor has pledged to remotely update every Vufi camera to ensure they send
only encrypted footage to their web portal. They won't lie again. They're doing their best.
Can't wait to set up all my cameras again. Samsung showed off new phones and laptops during their one hour unpacked 2023 event. Meanwhile,
Jacob moved over a month ago and still hasn't fully unpacked.
I'm trying! Hello Samsung, can you help me? The new Galaxy S23 phone line-up features optimized GPUs that are
around 41% faster than last generations. Samsung also claims the S23 Ultra will support real-time
ray tracing, so when you go into the toilet at work and launch Candy Crush, get ready for the most
incredible reflections you've ever seen on the surface of a jelly bean.
And Call of Duty and Fortnite look pretty good too. The company also announced
three higher-end models of its Galaxy Book laptops, with the flagship Galaxy Book 3 Ultra
featuring up to 13th gen Intel Core i9 CPU and RTX 4070 GPU, whatever that means in the
mobile market. The laptop is about 2 centimeters thick and weighs fewer than 4 pounds, so it's
unknown how the machine will stay cool. My theory? It doesn't. You just deal with it.
Hot hips! That's what light skins for, baby! But you don't care about that, so let's get to what really matters.
Can Samsung pay Ridley Scott enough money to shoot a film with the S23 Ultra?
I know we've all been wondering this since Unpacked 2022, and I'm happy to say it happened.
Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Oh, you didn't care. Are you not entertained?
And it seems there's an issue with some Samsung SSDs.
Wait, didn't we report on this last week? No, last week never happened, John. Wake up!
Only a week after the issue was discovered with their 99 Pro SSDs, PC Builder Puget Systems
revealed that they've been receiving customer reports of 2TB 980 Pros failing at an alarming rate,
and that they've been investigating with Samsung. That's a quick response on Samsung's part,
if you ignore the months of complaints about this issue. Many users of the SSD in China have been
complaining about drive failures as far back as September. Most commonly, the drive becomes
locked into read-only mode, which means you can't add new data to the drive, which sucks.
Worst case, if the 980 Pro is your boot drive, this would render your PC unbootable until the
drive is replaced. Fortunately, Samsung has a firmware update to prevent these failures in the
future, but the update will not fix any failures that have already occurred. But hey, you can do
lots of things with a useless SSD, like put it on a stack of loose papers, or frame it in one of
those cool little boxes, or just cry while you hold it and think what all of the files you didn't
back up. Not that you'd remember that, John. Wake up, John! Wake up! Meta AI has developed a tool
that generates dynamic 3D scenes from text descriptions, and is appropriately called
Make a Video 3D, or Mav3D for short, if you want to keep it casual. Mav3D is a real Mav3D
makes use of a 4D dynamic neural radiance field, or NERF, without the annoying side effects of
small children shooting you with foam darts. Very impressive work. It's there for nothing.
That's it? That's all we get to know about it? Okay. Discord is suing. So that's a sewing.
Discord is sewing itself, but no one's gonna get this joke. They're causing NVIDIA GPUs to slow
down. I think our audience is smart enough. Apparently a recent update to the social platform
is preventing Team Green's graphics cards from reaching their full memory clock speeds. NVIDIA
has already released a DIY workaround, and is hoping to push that out over the air at some
point in the future, which could be any time. But hopefully it's before they release their
next chonker of a graphics card. But if not, it'll make an excellent paperweight.
The National Labor Relations Board in the US has found that some workplace rules at Apple,
and some statements made by the company's executives violate labor law. This is in response
to five charges brought by two former employees in late 2021. Do you like numbers? Apparently,
the NLRB wants both parties to settle. Ah yes, the key to a healthy relationship.
Researchers in Halifax, Canada, which is far from me, have figured out why your batteries
keep draining even when your device is turned off. We never knew. They said it was impossible.
They found that the tape that holds the electrodes and insulation together
can leak DMT inside the battery. No, not that kind of DMT.
Joe, don't eat the batteries. Put them down. It turns out this chemical causes the battery to self-discharge,
which can be prevented by using a slightly more expensive tape. But if my grandma hasn't updated
her tape since Christmas of 1971, I doubt the device manufacturer will be rushing to the stationary
store anytime soon. And the newest 24-7 Twitch stream to go viral is
a Seinfeld parody almost entirely generated by AI. The show, called Nothing Forever, is written by
OpenAI's GPT-3, performed by Texas Speech Apps and somehow interpreted into grainy low-poly 3D
animations. Accordingly, it sort of makes sense sometimes, but it's also got a laugh track,
so it's basically a modern cable sitcom except it has a visual appeal of a PS1 game that was fried
in a pan and people actually find it funny. At least I assume they do, since thousands of people
tune into the stream, that's right, they're real and they're spectacular.
And our show on Friday will be spectacular too, so why not come back then for more tech news?
Otherwise, no news for you!